For 40 advance/early chapters : p atreon.com/AutumnXd
Holbrook's experiment report suffered no great delay. It was soon in Patricia's hands, and passed upward, level by level, from hers.
The report drew enormous attention, and before long it was being read in every quarter that mattered.
Vastar Industries.
A conference room that had sat unused for a very long time was opened up once more.
Experts from every specialty gathered under one roof, there to discuss the experiment report Holbrook had written.
The room was hushed. Every attendee held a tablet, reading through the report.
Only when everyone had skimmed it end to end did anyone speak.
One elder laughed out loud. "Tsk. Nearly a year since this meeting last convened, and one look at the report brings back exactly the old familiar feeling."
The others heard him and smiled slightly, in tacit understanding.
With Ryan buried in Crimson Typhoon all this while, no other research projects had opened, and this crowd hadn't gathered in a long time either.
Another elder needled him. "If anything, the boy's slowed down. This project ran a whole three months and more before producing results. In the old days, two or three months and the entire project would have closed out."
One of the experts offered a line in Ryan's defense.
"This project isn't in the same class as the earlier ones. It's exactly as the report says. This is a project with the weight to touch all of humanity. Running a little longer is only natural."
"Let's get to the matter proper and open the discussion." At the head seat of the conference table, an elder with a kindly face spoke up.
The others promptly packed away their smiles, and their faces turned serious.
"By the report's account, the photoacoustic scanner already holds preliminary use value. Perhaps we should be considering production, and the matter of setting up lines," one expert said.
Under the earlier cooperation agreement between Prism and Vastar, questions of production fell to Vastar to solve.
Another man, wearing glasses, shook his head.
"I'd say we shouldn't run too optimistic. So far, all that's been measured is a blood glucose value. We don't yet know whether the other signal-parsing algorithms can be completed smoothly."
"If the other parsing algorithms can't be worked out, then this photoacoustic scanner is one oversized blood glucose meter."
"Besides, the scanner is still in the middle of research. Going by the design drawings Ryan has supplied, its hardware will see further changes ahead."
"So even preparations for production ought to wait until the current model settles."
The expert who'd spoken first knitted his brow. "From Ryan's record so far, and from the writing of this glucose algorithm, completing the remaining algorithms is no difficult matter for him."
The bespectacled expert had more to say, but the others cut him off at once.
"Enough, enough. We'll simply have someone take this up with Prism directly."
"The question we ought to weigh far more is what impact an instrument like this will have on the world once it appears."
As the chair raised the topic, everyone at the table nodded gravely.
"If this scanner truly can replace the bulk of today's medical imaging equipment the way the conception says, then General Electric and Siemens and the rest of those foreign device houses are going to detonate on the spot." The man said it with no small helping of schadenfreude.
Someone chimed in immediately, laughing along. "Imported equipment runs to seventy or eighty percent of the domestic medical imaging market right now, foreign goods nearly all of it. The scanner taking even a casual bite of that market means a scale in the tens of billions. The foreign brands will blow up whether they care to or not."
Medical imaging equipment covered, in the main, X-ray machines, MRI systems, ultrasound imaging, and the rest.
The domestic market's annual demand for such equipment approached a hundred billion.
And yet these devices were, in essence, monopolized by three foreign firms: General Electric, Siemens, and Philips, known jointly by the abbreviation GPS, their grip locked over more than eighty percent of the domestic medical imaging market.
That was before counting other medical equipment, where they held healthy shares of the domestic mid-to-high-end besides.
"Three great mountains squatting across the road ahead. Spreading the scanner is going to be no easy errand!" someone sighed.
"Right. The interests tangled through all of it run deep and crooked. Changing that will hardly come easy."
"That part is not ours to worry over. If the photoacoustic scanner is genuinely good, then its spread at home will meet no true obstacle when the day comes."
The chair of the meeting chuckled, and with that, laid Ryan's idea of the intelligent scanning centers out on the table.
Exactly like Holbrook before them, these people were touching the idea for the first time, and hearing it through left them stunned.
"Treat the photoacoustic scanner as a public amenity, like a park, for the citizens to walk in and use?"
"Is he serious about this?"
"I think the idea is rather a good one..."
"If the intelligent scanning centers were truly built, what effect do you all believe they would have on the public?" the presiding elder said.
The minds around the table went to work, and in short order the centers' benefits had been analyzed from every angle there was.
Only one expert, a man who had cross-trained in sociology, sat rubbing his chin. "My view is that once the intelligent scanning centers stand, they will, in the short term, lay a crushing burden across the domestic medical system."
The moment the words left him, the entire hall went quiet, and every eye in the room turned his way.
More than a few of them, sparked by the remark, sank straight into thought.
"What sort of burden do you have in mind?" the presiding elder asked him, with genuine interest.
He answered at once. "Consider it. If the photoacoustic scanner truly reaches the market, scanning one person every two seconds, with artificial intelligence running the diagnosis behind it, then a great many diseases that once lay hidden inside the human body are going to be found."
"And once a person discovers their own body carries an illness, what does a human being do?"
"Naturally, they go to a hospital and seek treatment. That is the human instinct for survival."
"That instinctive behavior, multiplied by the scanner's enormous diagnostic volume, is certain to send enormous numbers of people toward the hospitals inside a very short window."
"If we cannot solve that problem, then the day the photoacoustic scanner formally enters service is the day the hospitals are crushed at the doors."
The room sat in a stretch of silence.
The words had come down like a basin of cold water across every face in the room, and the reminder ran deep.
The presiding elder said, "This is indeed a hidden danger. We will take it seriously."
His thin, dry fingers tapped at the table, and he added, following the same thread, "A sudden mass increase in patients is certain to pull medicines and similar medical resources tight. On that front, our arrangements must be laid in advance."
To that, everyone present nodded their agreement.
---
EXTRA CHAPTER FOR EVERY 500 POWERSTONES.