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After the award ceremony, Ryan had originally meant to head back to the base and finish the newest photoacoustic imaging experiment.
But it was already early January, with less than three weeks left before the New Year, so he simply pushed the experiment's schedule back.
He went straight into vacation mode, following his parents home to the old family place in Riverton, and spent every day relaxing over a fishing rod with Chloe at the small lake behind the house.
Patricia supported the decision completely. Before this he had stayed shut inside the base doing research every single day, and she had genuinely worried that Ryan was on his way to becoming an eccentric. Letting him unwind a while longer was all to the good.
Not that things went quite the way she hoped. Even now, he hadn't managed to relax entirely.
On his very first day back home, a courier arrived from Castellano's side, and inside the package sat the translation machine prototype whose design had just been completed.
Speed like that could fairly be called flying.
Ryan opened the parcel, and several exquisitely made packaging boxes emerged from inside.
The squared boxes were sealed tight, and looked for all the world like phone packaging.
"What's this thing?" Chloe grabbed one from beside him.
"A translation machine."
"A translation machine? It translates foreign languages?"
"Or is it one of those that translates Martian?"
Ryan rolled his eyes at her, opened one of the packages, and took out the translation machine inside.
It was a bar-style translation machine, the same general form as a television remote.
But unlike the soft, rounded styling the market's designers usually reached for, this machine's design was strikingly hard-edged.
Its whole body ran in straight lines, full of force. The face was a single touchscreen, the back carried diamond-like cut facets, and mech elements were worked across the surfaces of the body, so that it looked not merely styled for technology, but as though it carried an industrial, mechanical strength of its own.
"This one's actually quite pretty!" Chloe was holding a crimson translation machine, and one look at it called Crimson Typhoon straight to mind.
"Is this licensed from Crimson Typhoon?"
"Of course. And the black one is the Scrapper edition."
Ryan handed over the black translation machine in his own hand.
The two machines differed in appearance and color, but their functions were identical.
The machine's functions weren't complicated. It carried a 3.5-inch touchscreen, a 2,500 mAh battery, a built-in thirty-megapixel camera, a four-microphone array fitted with the system's noise-reduction algorithm, and multi-speaker playback.
Stuff a configuration like that into a phone and it would be, at best, the champion of the bottom shelf. But this was a translation machine, and for a translation machine, it was already plenty.
Beneath the touchscreen sat two buttons, with the volume and power keys along the edge of the body.
Of the two buttons under the screen, one was the Home key and one the language-mode key. Either one would do: press it three times in a row, speak the language's name plus the word "mode" at the machine, and the AI recognized it automatically and set the language mode. From then on, every voice the machine heard would be translated into that language on its own.
Tell the machine "English mode," for instance, and afterward, no matter what language came in, the machine would recognize it and translate it into English.
At present the machine supported online translation across forty-seven languages, and offline translation across ten, covering the major languages of Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
It also carried photo translation, maps, travel guides, emergency assistance, and other functions besides.
As for the other product, the translation earbuds, they were far purer. None of the assorted extra functions. Take them out, wear them, set the language mode, and they translated every language they received.
In form they resembled the wireless earbuds common on the market, in the usual in-ear, half-in-ear, and ear-hook styles.
Battery life ran from three hours up to ten and more.
The most noteworthy thing about the two products was the noise-reduction algorithm they carried.
That particular algorithm had come out of the AI center. Ryan had put the corresponding line of thinking to the center, and the programmers inside had restored it into working code.
The algorithm was simple and efficient, excluding very nearly one hundred percent of all noise that wasn't a human voice, and paired with Argus Translate's precision, the result was all but unbeatable.
To Chloe, neither product held the slightest attraction. Her English was perfectly solid, and she had no need of either machine's help. After a couple of glances she went back to the little lakeside pavilion, carried on drawing the mech's design sketches in Argus Image, and kept one eye on her fishing rod while she was at it.
Ryan inspected both products carefully, found no flaw worth speaking of, and was well satisfied.
The modules the two products used were the best and most suitable to be found anywhere on the market, and every variety of test had already been run. As long as the adaptation work was done properly, problems basically would not arise.
He set the two products aside. If his father had no objections after coming home that evening, they could go straight into production.
They might even make it to market before the New Year.
...
Swiftvox headquarters.
Brian White, CEO of the Swiftvox Group, looked at the message his subordinates had just passed up the line, and his mood clouded straight over.
"According to confidential information, several of the manufacturers we've cooperated with before have recently taken on a batch of urgent orders for a new translation machine. In all likelihood, it's Prism's translation machine." Gordon Keane, head of the market department, stood before the office desk as he reported it.
"So this time the tiger has truly come!" White's heart tightened, his mind spinning at speed through possible counters.
The other side's move was aimed, transparently, at the New Year market.
Translation machine sales were bound tightly to the holidays, because only in those days did people travel abroad at any scale, and only then did translation demand truly appear.
Otherwise, under ordinary circumstances, who used a translation machine at home?
In years past, they had been the sales kings of exactly this window. Domestically, only their own brand and a bare couple of companies had ever been able to reach that position.
But this time was different.
Ever since Prism had entered machine translation, and the translation-machine field in particular, he had watched Prism with one hundred and twenty percent of his attention.
With that man standing behind them as technical support, Prism's products, in every contest so far, had always arrived leading everyone else by a full generation. And on top of that, the product's price would land a notch below the competitors' besides!
Better technology than everyone else, and a lower price than everyone else. It was simply outrageous!
This time would probably be no exception...
He drew a deep breath and said to Keane, "Invite the people from the other manufacturers out for a meal. We'll all sit down and talk it over together."
His voice had barely fallen when Keane's phone suddenly rang.
"Excuse me." Keane apologized and took the phone out to silence it, but at the sight of the name on the screen, he abruptly went still.
"Mr. White. It's the head of translation machines over at Splitone." Keane looked up and said it.
Splitone was another player in the translation-machine industry, and beyond their own company, the best-selling brand in it.
White understood in an instant. So it wasn't only they who had felt the pressure. Prism, this tank of a war engine, its brutal charge had left the industry's other brands feeling the same enormous weight.
They were rallying their people too!
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