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On the night of New Year's Eve.
Crimson Typhoon's first nighttime training went ahead as scheduled, and like the very first test, it was carried live from start to finish across the internet and on television, with a mid-broadcast link-up to the New Year's Eve gala thrown in.
Ryan's family watched the internet stream at home, and from the moment the transport platform pushed Crimson Typhoon out into the night, the comment stream never once stopped. It had to be confined to a corner of the screen before anyone could watch at all.
On the television.
A pitch-black expanse of sea, with only a few helicopters flying escort alongside, their searchlights carving out a field of view for the cameras.
Below them stood Crimson Typhoon. Across the giant mech's body, red indicator lights matched to its paint blinked in ordered sequence over the water, announcing the machine's running state.
And amid the excitement of the comment stream and the people in front of their televisions, the crimson mech strode out, legs parting the sea, and walked into the black ocean like a warrior.
At that same moment, in his own home, watching the broadcast with his wife and children, Brian White received a call from Gordon Keane.
"What? You're saying they put the translation machines in the airport and sold them to foreigners?"
Hearing that the Hermes machines were a roaring success among foreign visitors, even White went blank for a moment despite himself.
Selling translation machines to foreigners?
What sort of play was that?
For a little while, White found his own thinking boxed in.
But once he'd calmed down and run the analysis again, he decided it was, in fact, an entirely reasonable move.
First, the Hermes machines' exterior design was saturated with mech elements, which hooked them to the mechs from birth.
That quietly attached a souvenir attribute to them. Own one, and it was as if you had been to Redcliff and seen the mech.
Second was the Prism brand itself. Everyone alive knew the intimacy between that company and Ryan, the father of the mechs.
And then there was the mech travel guide built into the machine, optimized specifically for foreign tourists, which seized precisely on their two pain points: a language they couldn't speak, and a place they didn't know.
When one object gathered every attribute above into itself, it was no longer merely a translation machine.
White settled fully back into calm. He simply hadn't expected Prism to go straight for the foreign-tourist market.
"How are their sales?" he asked Keane.
Keane looked down at the figures in his hand and answered, "By rough count, from the surge in foreign tourists to today, in this short a window they've sold at least ten thousand machines and more, and the interpretation earbuds are beyond counting. Plenty of the foreigners in the streets are wearing them."
"That volume... it's been what, a few days!" White was genuinely startled now.
He was silent a moment, turning it over in his mind, and then said, "Our next-generation machine changes product strategy. Since Prism has opened a road here, we walk out along the same road. We sell our machines abroad!"
"Starting today, we optimize the inbound translation models as well, and we build a proper Redcliff tourism adaptation. We bind ourselves tight to Redcliff tourism!"
As he spoke, White watched Crimson Typhoon advancing through the darkness on the screen, and sighed inwardly in spite of everything.
How many people's fates had this thing they called an industrial miracle already rewritten?
"Understood!" Keane answered down the line.
And while White and Keane were talking, much the same scene was playing out inside the other translation-machine brands. Everyone, together, had decided to turn their eyes overseas.
In Ryan's family home.
His father had received the glad news from the marketing department as well.
"At the Redcliff airport, our direct-run store has now sold fifteen thousand translation machines and over thirty thousand pairs of Hermes earbuds. We project the current stock clears out entirely over the New Year period." The marketing chief reported it evenly.
"Arrange some publicity," Ryan's father said, understated.
For him and for the Prism of today, numbers like these were worth being pleased about, but not worth being astonished by.
Their larger meaning was proof to the watching world that this product had not failed, and that no Waterloo had ever existed.
"Understood." The marketing chief said, and had it arranged in short order.
For a great many people in the country, this New Year held nothing particularly special beyond the two extra days of mech-training broadcasts at the start of it.
At most, they'd snacked on a piece of Prism drama before the New Year, and watched it flip itself over after.
But for a great many foreigners, this was their first time in the country, their first New Year spent here, their first taste of its traditional culture.
Carried by the Hermes line, they moved through a foreign land unimpeded. They took in Redcliff's New Year scenery and its old customs, and lived them firsthand, and sailed out onto the water to watch the training of the machine people called an industrial miracle.
For many of them, it was the first time they had come to know the holiday this deeply.
The fierce vitality that burst out where modern technology met an ancient civilization left them thoroughly intoxicated.
And amid the wonderment of these foreign guests, the New Year drifted slowly toward its end.
Ryan's holiday ended with it.
He parted with his family and with Chloe, left the award certificate at home, and set out alone on the road back to the base.
He boarded the high-speed rail, then the dedicated car the base had sent, and who should be sitting in the car but Patricia.
"Patricia? What are you doing here?" Ryan was a little surprised.
Patricia said, "My train got in just half an hour ahead of yours, so I figured I'd simply wait and ride back together."
She added, "I took leave and went home for the New Year this year too. Otherwise my own child was going to stop recognizing me."
"That's genuinely hard on you." Ryan felt a pang of feeling. This was the first time he'd ever heard Patricia mention her own family.
But there was no way around it. For these two years the base had to be kept sealed to the highest degree, and aside from special cases like himself, no one else came and went so freely.
A great many people were making their choice between family and work.
So the only thing Ryan could do was compensate on the money side, and that was, outside of research itself, the single matter he had ever reached in and interfered with at the base.
For the people inside the base, wages and allowances ran one and a half to three times the usual. Over the past year, the base's personnel costs alone had exceeded six billion, and the lowest annual salary came to two hundred thousand.
The canteen packing ladies and the like, of course, weren't part of that statistic.
The car threaded through Mech Town.
Mech Town hadn't changed much. Only, with everyone home for the holiday, it held far more young people than usual, and far more bustle.
For the people of the town, the most visible change of the past year hadn't been the new mech base by the sea. It was that public order had improved to the point of doors left unbolted at night, and dropped valuables left lying where they fell.
Transportation had improved a great deal as well. Bus routes had multiplied, and both the high-speed rail station and the expressway had been rushed through planning at speed, with the station projected to finish and open within two years.
The road was long and idle, and Ryan and Patricia fell to talking about the town's future.
Patricia watched out the car window and let slip the inside information. "Going forward, we intend to use the Dome Base's influence to move several universities here, and build this town into a science city that folds tourism and technology into one."
"Then the Dome Base won't stay sealed by then?" Ryan asked.
"By then it'll most likely still be sealed. Only, once we've transferred the sensitive technologies out, it won't be anywhere near as strict as now. We might even let people in to tour the base."
"But that's a long-range plan. It might well take over a decade to see it realized."
Ryan shook his head.
That was simply how planning worked here. The unit of time was five years, or longer.
Amid the two of them chatting, the car soon rolled back into the base.
The base was still on holiday, and the research side had all but come to a stop.
Being unable to leave the base did not mean the New Year came without leave.
And precisely because of that, every corner of the base was lively. The park held its pairs of young couples, the internet cafe served as the gathering ground of the bachelors, and the middle-aged men soaked in the wellness hall, getting massages and trading idle talk.
Ryan stowed the luggage he'd brought from home, glanced at the time, and found it only one in the afternoon. No point sitting in the dorm.
He opened the Dome Base's doors, walked into the laboratory, and his eyes went straight to the photoacoustic scanner mounted on the mechanical arm.
The scanner now was very different from before. Around the central laser emitter, four new photoacoustic sensors had been added, and the whole device had grown a size larger.
Before the New Year he had thrown himself entirely at these sensors, climbing from one to five, and at five the overlapping of the photoacoustic signals still refused to be solved.
And now he had decided to raise the count straight to ten, with each sensor responsible for the signal of a specific time segment, after which all the sensors' collected signals would be synthesized and cross-compared, and once confirmed correct, split back out by time into ten clean segments.
But adding sensors was not merely a matter of connecting wires. The entire system's control program had to be rewritten, to guarantee that every sensor woke in exactly its own window and collected exactly its own signal.
And once collection finished, the synthesis and comparison of the signals would be a problem of its own.
For today's collection experiment, though, all he needed was to revise the scanner's control program so it could wake each sensor at the proper time.
The new control program he had already written, in stolen hours, while fishing at home.
He drew the flash drive from his pocket, opened the computer, and swapped the new control program in over the old.
Then he went back into the lab proper, dug out the sensors that had arrived before the holiday, and mounted every one of them onto the mechanical arm with easy familiarity.
When the installation was done, the photoacoustic scanner looked like nothing so much as a great platter studded with loudspeaker horns. At the arm's forward end sat the laser emitter, and the signal sensors were fixed beside it along a bracket that spiraled like a mosquito coil, crude in the extreme, but sturdy.
Going by looks alone, there was not one trace of high technology about it.
And yet who would ever guess that this thing was black tech?
Ryan pulled on gloves, caught a lab mouse, fixed it in the observation box, and taped its mouth shut.
He came to the control computer and started the scanner.
A soft whir.
The mechanical arm inside aimed the laser scanner at the mouse of its own accord, and the scan completed without sound or sensation.
Invisible photoacoustic signals bloomed inside the mouse's body, and the newly installed control program woke each photoacoustic sensor in its own appointed window, recording a clean signal for every segment of time.
Soon, the results fed back onto the oscilloscope and the screen.
Ryan decoded the signals directly on the computer and flew through the data inside.
"Not bad. The signals collected this time look quite clean."
After the preliminary check, Ryan closed out the converted data pages and transferred the whole experiment's records into storage.
Only then did he glance at his phone, and found that inside the fully sealed lab, without his noticing, the time had reached six in the evening.
He walked out of the laboratory, meaning to go eat, and looked up to find Nathaniel Holbrook coming down from the offices upstairs.
Only now did he realize anyone else was here at all.
"Chief Designer? What are you doing here as well?" Holbrook came over in surprise.
Ryan pointed a thumb back at the lab behind him, and at the drive in his hand. "I came to run an experiment I'd been meaning to do since before the New Year. What are you still doing here?"
Personnel unconnected to the Crimson Typhoon project were free to go home for the holiday, and research assistants like Julian Prosser had all gone.
Holbrook smiled. "I'm already back from home. The leave this time ran longer than usual, and too much rest leaves me restless."
The two of them fell in together toward the canteen by unspoken agreement, and on the way Ryan asked after the project.
"Our photoacoustic scanner. Can it be shrunk any further from here?"
The scanner in use now was the one Holbrook and the other experts had researched and pieced together.
Set against the technology in the system it was far more primitive, and although the two ran close in performance, in size and power draw the gap between them was enormous.
At the question, Holbrook produced a bitter smile. "Our current system has been pushed to its limit. To shrink it further, we'd have to build along those technical designs you gave me. But we're still studying those materials even now. You designed the system in there far too finely. Actually building it will be no easy thing."
"My estimate is that without two or three years, there's no real hope of it."
Ryan had given Holbrook a copy of the scanner's design drawings and technical concepts, and it was by leaning on the ideas inside that they had managed to piece together the scanner they had.
"Then it seems this stretch will have to be carried by the scanner we've got." Ryan shook his head and sighed.
Holbrook went on smiling bitterly, and in the end could not keep from reminding him. "Honestly, the scanner our project has right now is already very strong."
Very strong hardly covered it. The photoacoustic scanner they had built, folded through with the ideas from Ryan's drawings, was already outright black technology as far as the rest of the world was concerned. He doubted the photoacoustic imaging researchers of other countries had ever imagined a technology like this could exist at all.
And they could already use the instrument to raise photoacoustic signals inside a living body, and receive those specific signals back. By any measure it was a solid stride forward.
Anywhere else, a result on this level could walk into any foreign journal it pleased.
He genuinely could not understand how Ryan was still unsatisfied.
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EXTRA CHAPTER FOR EVERY 500 POWERSTONES.