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The master control room.
The window directly ahead faced Crimson Typhoon's head, where a small army of professional mech technicians, working from gantries and suspended lines, was carrying out maintenance.
The armor around the mech's exterior had been stripped away entirely, baring the tightly fitted structural components underneath.
Ryan sat at his own station, reading through the latest data reports.
When he finished, he spoke to the engineer beside him.
"The mech's liquid neural connection channels have started to age. Keep a close watch on that in maintenance. Also, those several bugs found earlier in the mech's operating system. Update the system during this maintenance round and get them repaired."
"Understood."
The engineer beside him nodded, writing the items into his memo book as he answered.
"Yawn~" The moment Ryan finished speaking, a yawn escaped him.
He had no idea, now that the photoacoustic scanner's report had gone up the chain, how many people were bent over that report in study and commentary. All he knew was that his own hours had loosened considerably.
The scanner's hardware could now see preliminary use, and there was no need to chase too hard after the advanced version sitting in the system.
So he had drawn out his spare hours to study the newly released parsing algorithms in the system with care, and had also picked the Crimson Typhoon project's work back up, reviewing the data reports each test produced.
But there was still one important thing left to do.
"Patricia, help me arrange a car. I need to make a trip to the research center." Ryan said it with the call barely connected.
The other end agreed at once. "Five minutes. Board at the base's gate."
"Fine."
Ryan hung up, took the elevator straight down, and the car arrived in short order.
Only, this time, two cars came.
"Things outside haven't been very peaceful lately, so we're adding vigilance."
That was the guard's answer to Ryan's question.
"But we've already moved on it. No need for the Great One to worry himself too much." The guard smiled as he offered the reassurance.
Ryan nodded, smiling back. With these people around him, he was genuinely at ease.
A scientist of his particular sort, unlike those working the foundations, naturally drew a heavier share of envy and hatred.
The car rolled smoothly into the research building's parking structure, and Ryan walked into the AI center.
He had barely entered before he saw the center had transformed.
The staff had visibly multiplied, and even the floor layout had changed. Plainly, a full round of expansion hiring had swept through.
And now Miles Warner came out to receive him.
"Long time no see, Chief Designer." Warner raised a hand in greeting. "Come on. We'll talk properly in my office."
Ryan fell in behind him. "Has the center taken on this many new people?"
Warner nodded. "The AI center opened a fresh expansion round right after the New Year. Headcount now stands above one thousand five hundred, and we're occupying nearly ten floors of the research center."
"And even so, hands are still short. We're still hiring."
"How many projects are running now?" Ryan asked.
Warner scratched at his hair. "The center's projects mainly concentrate on what we do best. Computer vision, natural language processing, and AI translation."
"The older projects and the cooperation projects, medical image recognition and the like, we're keeping resourced, and we've opened up a good few new projects besides."
Warner pushed open his office door, picked a folder up off his desk, and handed it across to Ryan.
He went on explaining from the side. "Among what we're running now, there's the re-search engine built on natural language understanding, and there's also the English Conversation Genie, which combines natural language with AI translation. Mm... it's an AI program that can hold a conversation in English and the local language both."
"Shaw tells me these all came from inspirations you passed to the president." Warner smiled.
Shaw was the product department's manager, responsible for interfacing product requirements with him.
Ryan leafed carefully through the folder in his hands.
"You're running rather more projects than those."
The projects he was seeing in the folder went well beyond the two Warner had named aloud.
Warner laughed. "Those two are the ones closing on completion. The rest still have a good stretch of road between them and success."
From the folder in his hands, Ryan was reading project after project that would be branded black technology the instant it leaked.
There was, for instance, a Guardian AI. Installed on a smartwatch, it could recognize the sounds and conversations arising around a child and judge the child's state of safety from them, and could also, from satellite positioning together with captured water-noise and crying, determine whether a child had fallen into water.
And the judgments, once made, would sync in real time to the parents' hands, or to the police.
"That project came out of an idea from Shaw's side. We judged it achievable." Warner said from beside him.
There was also an auto-programming AI, able to carry out complex programming automatically to a programmer's requirements, and to scan programs for bugs and repair them at high efficiency.
Warner saw Ryan reach that page and laughed despite himself. "That one is the project our colleagues in the center demanded most fiercely."
"What they want more than anything alive is an AI that will write their code for them."
Ryan's own interest caught on that one too. "AIs along these lines appeared fairly early. How are you positioning this project?"
He wasn't wrong. Programs of a similar kind had shown up on the market long ago.
If he remembered right, Edium abroad had once released AI software along these lines. It had been called, he believed, GTA3.
State a requirement, and the AI would automatically write program code to meet its conditions.
Of course, the requirement couldn't run too complex, and the code the AI produced never did reach a standard any client would sign off on.
Warner said, "For this project, we intend a human-machine combination. The programming AI takes the shape of an assistant. Whatever work is foundational, or short on creativity, gets handed to the AI in full: automated bug hunting, the writing of the code itself. The human supplies the line of thought and makes the decisions, which programming language to use and so on..."
"In short, our first-stage goal is that a programmer finishes writing a program by moving nothing but his mouth."
Warner's thinking ran very clear. He knew that at AI's present level of development, an AI that wrote perfect programs off human requirements was simply not achievable.
Human requirements are extravagantly complex. Programmers, human beings themselves, cannot satisfy them. What hope has an AI?
Perhaps on the day an AI could write an AI program more advanced than itself, all of that might finally come within reach.
So he had positioned the AI squarely as an assistant. The AI was a car, and the human being was the driver in its seat.
Ryan agreed with the framing entirely, and kept turning pages. Plenty of interesting projects followed.
Intelligent modeling and intelligent frame-interpolation software for animation production, for one.
Until, at the very end, he came to the Global Inter-translation Plan.
Studied closely, it was exactly the worldwide inter-translation of languages he had once laid out for his father, made into a plan.
Warner spoke from the side. "We've now launched language-model training for three pairings. English-German, English-French, German-French. Languages of other nations are in planning behind them."
"The new hires you saw outside were brought in to serve this plan."
"Also, the Argus Translate software is preparing to go on the market overseas."
Only on hearing Warner through did Ryan grasp the scale of Prism AI's movements over this stretch.
Plainly, his father's ambitions did not run small.
But that was a good thing, and it sat inside his expectations.
After all, if his father had carried no ambition at all, he'd have retired alongside his mother after selling the processing plant, into whole days of touring mountains and rivers.
Ryan set down the folder in his hands and raised the true business of the day with Warner.
"I have a medical project in hand. I need your side to write the corresponding algorithms and programs to my requirements. Can you still squeeze out the manpower?"
Warner was caught off guard. "A medical project?"
He truly had not imagined Ryan's research ranged that far afield.
"Roughly how large a workload?" he asked.
Ryan considered it. "The algorithm problems and program problems this project needs solved are very many. And once the programs are written, they'll need long-term maintenance afterward. Hands will have to be kept on it permanently."
"My estimate is five hundred people at minimum."
"Five hundred and up?" Warner's voice jumped. "Then I expect we'll be expanding all over again."
A five-hundred-person hole was one they genuinely could not tear open right now.
Ryan patted his shoulder. "Then prepare the expansion. Now let me walk you through the project's requirements on the algorithms and programs."
And Ryan laid out for Warner, in detail, the algorithm and program requirements standing behind the photoacoustic scanner.
Warner's brow knotted, and he spoke with some difficulty. "Algorithms that parse one special class of signal... a requirement like that, I'm afraid we can't meet. Our programmers have no background in acoustics, optics, or medicine. They simply don't know the parsing laws and methods of photoacoustic signals..."
Ryan had naturally considered exactly that. "Rest easy. The concrete lines of thought, I'll be providing. Your side only needs to build to my requirements."
Only at that did Warner nod.
"Then let me clear it with the president." He picked up the phone, glancing at Ryan.
"Mm." Ryan nodded.
The call connected quickly.
Warner relayed the result the two of them had just settled on, and on the other end, Ryan's father did not hesitate for a second.
"Then keep expanding."
"Oh, and one more thing. The Argus Translate software still hasn't cleared the other side's review. Their new comments have come through. Revise it once more to their requirements."
At that, a puzzled look crossed Warner's face despite himself.
"How is it still failing review? Last time we revised it exactly to their requirements. This makes the fourth revision."
"The concrete reason, I'm having looked into on my end. For now, revise it as they ask."
Ryan, listening to the two of them, asked, "What's going on?"
His father said, "Argus Translate has been meaning to enter the other side's market lately, and out of nowhere it's under review. There's a problem here, a nonconformity there. The other side is picking at our faults like a lunatic!"
Ryan could hear it plainly. His father's mood was foul.
A man who showed the world mildness at all times did not call people lunatics outright, even on a call only three people would ever know of.
Warner sighed as well. "Every other country requires nothing but the platform's own review, and we've passed all of those. Only the other side claims we fail their regulations, as if they mean to choke us to death on purpose, demanding revision after revision."
Ryan found it as inexplicable as they did. "Could it be tied to the broader climate lately?"
"It shouldn't come to that. Ours is hardly software in some sensitive domain, and its user count is destined to be small. If it weren't for testing the models, we wouldn't be putting it abroad at all." Warner said.
Argus Translate's chief use abroad was testing the freshly trained language models. Even English divided into several systems, British, American, Indian and the rest, and only local speakers' feedback carried real value, and truly surfaced the problems living inside a translation.
His father said, "My suspicion is that Gaentech's involved. Edium is a suspect as well. Those two are the only companies over there we've ever had disputes with."
Ryan turned it over, and thought the possibility real.
"Complete this round of revisions first. If even this round can't pass, then we go at it by other roads."
His father set down the phone and went straight to his friends on the other side, asking them to help sound the matter out.
Two years of Prism's rise had won him friends across the world, and channels of his own for news on the other side. Sounding out one matter was no great labor.
And at exactly this moment.
Gaentech's CEO, Sandoval, was at his own villa.
In the villa's back garden, under the lights, he and another paunchy middle-aged man lay stretched on loungers at the edge of the pool.
Cocktails stood on the small table between them.
Sandoval lifted his glass, drained it together with the middle-aged man, and then spoke. "Is Prism Sciences still trying hard?"
The middle-aged man said, "Of course. They haven't seen reality clearly yet. It appears giving up hasn't crossed their minds."
"This afternoon I rejected their third application. They ought to be tearing their hair out right about now."
The middle-aged man's name was Anthony, and his influence was not small.
"Sorry for all the trouble, Mr. Anthony." Sandoval smiled, refilling both their glasses as he said it.
Anthony smiled back. "Though I'd say these moves of yours are useless against them. You need to bring out a heavier strike."
"For instance... aim at their prosthetics business. That is the pillar of their entire company, the way the search engine is the pillar of yours. That is the place they truly cannot afford to be hit."
Sandoval said, "I don't intend to tear the last pretenses with them yet. I believe we still have our chance, and we're still working toward it."
The middle-aged man didn't share the view, and shook his head. "No, no, no. You will never have that chance. They will never permit a foreign company to put investment into them."
"Better to listen to me early. While they still haven't reacted, break them in a single stroke. Only then might you people come away with a sliver of opportunity..."
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EXTRA CHAPTER FOR EVERY 500 POWERSTONES.