"Your meaning being?" Tom asked.
Ryan's answer came iron-hard. "The other side has doubtless readied both of their choices, one hand on each. But for us, there is only one choice. We fight them a round!"
"In the AI center's current projects, isn't there the re-search engine?"
At that, Ryan laughed despite himself. "The inspiration for the re-search engine came off Gaentech in the first place. And now, sure enough, it goes right back onto them."
"If I remember it right, of Gaentech's revenue sources, advertising holds steady at roughly ninety percent."
As he spoke, the lines of thought that had sat hazy in Tom's mind lit up all at once.
"You mean we take the re-search engine and strike their search business directly, and through it, their advertising business!"
The elder Mercer came fully awake.
What advertising prizes is promotional effect, and the good or bad of promotional effect rests, above everything, on exposure.
In essence, the old logic of casting the net wide, gathering many fish, and keeping the best of the catch.
Gaentech's advertising business leaned, to a very great degree, on its search engine.
People abroad who used its search engine had to browse its pages in volume, and it was exactly that which drew the advertisers in to place their ads, and so produced the revenue.
This was Gaentech's foundation. However hard Gaentech had labored across the years to shake its dependence on advertising, every attempt had proven wasted labor, and by now they had given up on the cure entirely.
And what the re-search engine moved against was precisely that foundation.
Plenty of people knew the experience. To understand one single matter, you had no choice but to run searches, and along the way you sieved out useless information, dodged advertisements, and kept your guard up against phishing and virus sites.
The more niche the information you were after, the more the useless results multiplied, and the ads, and the poisoned sites with them.
But what if the situation changed?
What if people could learn whatever they wished to know without ever touching the search engines directly, and gather it at an efficiency higher than before?
That was the re-search engine Ryan had raised before!
The user need only state the information they wanted. It would query the search engines and the rest of the network's software automatically, filter out the invalid, keep the valid, and present it to the user organized and summarized.
Through that entire process, every scrap of the re-search engine's information came from the AI's own searches across the traditional engines. It produced nothing itself, stored nothing itself. It was only a porter of information.
If a re-search engine of that kind ever spread, it was, beyond question, one more revolution in the world of search.
Once it matured, people would no longer burn their hours in meaningless hunting and sieving. State the requirement to the AI, and it opened automatic search mode.
Enormous, precious time returned to every searcher!
And in the same stroke, Gaentech and the traditional engines would take a grievous wound!
Because although the engines would still be in use, the one using them would, in truth, have become the re-search engine's AI.
The traditional search engine reduced to the re-search engine's hired hand.
An AI does not feel its heart stir at the advertisements on a page and click through to place an order, and it would never summarize the ads into its results.
And so the search engines' customer base would, in effect, have turned from the living into ghosts.
Surely no one honestly believed advertising to the underworld would be effective?
The elder Mercer grew more stirred the longer he thought.
The re-search engine sitting in their development pipeline was, for Gaentech, an outright weapon of slaughter. It might not sever their family line at a stroke, but hacking off hands and feet, and keeping them scrambling to cope, posed no problem whatsoever.
"I'll have the AI center accelerate the re-search engine's development at once!"
The call ended, and Warner promptly received the military order handed down from Tom.
Within one week, the re-search engine was to produce, at minimum, a presentable primary version.
The order came down, and the programmers of the AI center pumped their drive full and charged.
Working inside Prism Sciences, hardship was unavoidable, with projects numbering what they did. But wages and overtime had always been paid in full. This was absolutely not the conscienceless 996 regime.
Add to that a company whose technology led the world, the sight of their own products knocking the glasses off the public and the industry one after another, and a share of their own labor living inside every such product, and everyone came by a pride and a sense of belonging that answered the spirit's needs at work in full.
At times they even caught sight of Ryan himself appearing in the company, and that idol effect handed many of them a boundless anticipation. Everyone hoped to build something of their own inside this company.
Under an atmosphere like that, the fighting strength of Prism Sciences' employees had never once been a thing to underestimate.
And while the center's staff ran at full power, the hour of the talks arrived.
The executives of Prism headquarters assembled in Tom's office, every eye on the telephone sitting on the desk.
When the appointed time came, the phone rang exactly on the hour.
Tom picked it up.
"Mr. Mercer, hello." Sandoval's voice carried down the line, sounding delighted and warm, as though he faced an old friend too long unseen.
Tom returned the courtesy in the local language. "Hello, Mr. Sandoval. A pleasure to speak with you."
The other side had plainly engaged simultaneous interpretation; Tom could hear the interpreter's voice trailing his.
Sandoval went on. "The pleasure is mine. I've always carried an interest in your culture. Over the New Year I even went to Redcliff and watched Crimson Typhoon's training up close. In that moment, I felt my entire understanding of the world overturned..."
Tom laughed along and shot the breeze right back at him, even promising that someday, given the chance, the two of them would watch the mech training at Redcliff together.
Only near the twenty-minute mark, judging the moment ripe, did Sandoval probe toward his purpose.
"I have always held the deepest admiration for your company's technology. The brain-controlled prosthetics, the artificial intelligence. In all of it, I believe you already walk at the front of the world."
"But I've noticed one thing as well. You hold advanced technology, and yet your capital falls short of sufficient. So I have long carried a thought. If we could only reach a cooperation, it would certainly drive your technology forward at great speed."
"We hold vast resources in our hands, technology and cash alike. There is a great deal of cooperation we could reach."
"And in that way, perhaps more of the technologies that will decide humanity's future would be born out of your hands..."
Seeing the dagger appear at the scroll's end, Tom stopped veiling his own mind.
He shook his head. "Thank you for the kindness, Mr. Sandoval."
"If you've come to watch mech training with me, then we can enjoy it together from a cruise ship. But if you wish to invest in our company, I can only say the idea is not a fitting one."
Sandoval came back fast. "If you won't accept investment, we can pursue other cooperation. Our artificial intelligence leads the world as well. Together, we could bring about many unthinkable results!"
Tom kept shaking his head. "Our company's cooperation projects are already plentiful. In the short term, we don't intend to accept invitations from other companies."
Sandoval still refused to let go, pressing his case on down the line, and Tom dissolved every attempt of it with a light hand.
And Sandoval's tone sank lower and lower.
"The international situation of late is not stable. If a cooperation stood between us, I believe it could effectively protect your business inside our country." He said it at last in a lowered voice, and the warmth and friendliness of the call's opening could no longer be heard anywhere in it.
Tom only smiled, mild as ever.
"I hold full confidence in our products."
"Sometimes, advanced is not the same as good..."
Tom cut straight across whatever was coming next. "I believe today's conversation can end here."
"And lastly, one friendly reminder. Our company's recently released Hermes interpretation earbuds are fully equal to the simultaneous interpretation between the two of us. Put them on and they simply work. Very convenient. You might give them a try."
On the call's far side, in the conference room of Gaentech headquarters, night had fallen, and yet Gaentech's senior leadership stood assembled all the same.
Sandoval, face rigid, said stiffly, "Thank you for the reminder."
The two sides hung up. Sandoval swept one big hand, and the simultaneous interpreter left the conference room.
And he opened a meeting with the executives on the spot.
"Events have run to the worst result. They refused every one of our requests. Let's discuss." Sandoval said.
A Black woman spoke first. "Is their technology honestly as advanced as all that? They are still nothing but a backward developing country!"
The man beside her wore a mocking smile. "Ms. Maggie, you might consider updating your files. Their country may hold plenty of problems yet, but by now, no one alive considers a nation that can build mechs a backward one."
Maggie gave a cold snort. "And what use is that kind of giant robot?"
The CTO in charge of technology, John, braced both hands on the conference table and spread them open like a helpless flower. "Whether we care to admit it or not, the reality is this: what they can presently do, we cannot. Beyond technological backwardness, I can find no other explanation."
"Their Argus Image and their Argus Translate are, for us, a generational crushing. Nothing less."
Maggie spoke up again. "I hear their AI translation team's chief is a man called, I believe, Owen Castellano?"
She looked to John, and he nodded.
"Since he was our own company's employee before, is it possible they have used our technology?"
At that, John lost any wish to engage the foolish woman further, and looked up toward Sandoval, the company's boss.
Sandoval raised a hand and stilled the table. "What countermeasures does everyone believe we take against Prism Sciences next?"
"Since they refuse to cooperate, then we must destroy them, and quickly!" said a woman named Anna, seated at Sandoval's side.
The middle-aged woman's face stayed perfectly level. "With their technology running this far past ours, the only defense left to us is attack."
"The prosthetics are their largest core business at present, and overseas revenue makes up more than sixty percent of it. Move on that front, and their capital chain feels enormous pressure immediately!"
She and Sandoval, or rather she and most of the room, had arrived at the same place.
Prism's greatest weakness at present was a single core business, while its research projects ran many, and the funding pressure on that research ran heavy.
"Break their capital chain and we wound them gravely. In the short term, their threat needs no more considering. There may even be the chance to destroy them entirely..."
Listening to Anna, Sandoval's fingers tapped lightly against the table, his mind turning at speed.
Truth be told, he had not wanted to walk to this step.
Destroying Prism did not, for him or for the company, reach the maximum of benefit.
The maximum as he had envisioned it was to finish reaping the leeks in the stock market, and then take Prism's technology to feed back into their own.
But matters as they now stood left no room for so much. If the other side truly broke through into their ground, their own ending would not be pretty to look at.
He endorsed Anna's view. "Execute our plan."
Anna nodded at once.
And on the other side of the ocean.
Prism Sciences headquarters.
Tom was arraying troops of his own.
"Public relations publishes today's result first. State it plainly: we will not agree to their acquisition, and we will pursue no cooperation hereafter. Let's not leave the other side room to float another friendly-talks rumor."
The room agreed to a person. This whole stretch of Gaentech's methods had sickened them through.
"Second, the technology department minds our network security closely these days. Give them no crack to worm in through. Product coordinates with the AI center. The other side will not simply let this rest, so the grand gift package we've prepared for them ships early, and public relations readies the publicity to follow it."
"That's the whole of it. Go execute!"
Exactly as Tom predicted, rumors of friendly talks between Gaentech and Prism surfaced online in short order, drawing eyes everywhere.
Only Prism's swift response, an official statement published fast, ended them before they could catch fire.
In the statement, Prism Sciences drew its border with Gaentech complete. The wording looked courteous, and it was not one shade indirect.
It even stated outright that the possibility of any future cooperation between the two sides was zero.
Resolve that final startled a great many people.
Prism had published statements often enough before, but always as rumor-rebuttals, never once with finality like this.
And in the wake of the statement, the shares and market value Gaentech had ridden upward began a diver's plunge.
After that, no more bundled Gaentech-and-Prism stories appeared anywhere on the market.
It seemed Gaentech had entered a sage's tranquility, all interest in Prism gone.
But a great many people caught a different scent inside that calm.
Wind and rain were coming!
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