For 40 advance/early chapters : p atreon.com/AutumnXd
A few days later.
A coach bus drove into Mech Town, packed full of people, with three large trucks following behind it.
For many people, the Dome Base was a place both unfamiliar and familiar. Everyone could catch sight of it from time to time on the televised livestreams of the mech tests, and could see its silhouette in mech-related news too.
But to date, not a single outsider had been able to walk into the Dome Base, to walk into this city of mechs.
Everyone could only see its exterior from television or the internet.
As for what it looked like inside this base, countless people were curious.
Nathaniel Holbrook was no exception.
He and more than forty colleagues had come here by coach bus from the research institute's original address.
"Director Holbrook, do you think the office space and lab they've arranged for us here will be inside the base where Crimson Typhoon is?"
They'd barely gotten off the bus when Julian Prosser, a research assistant from the institute, sidled over to ask.
Holbrook shook his head. "Rather than thinking about that, you'd do better to give more thought to whether the lab mice you're running experiments on have died yet. You've already fallen behind on that synchronized optical imaging detection of in vivo neural activity project..."
Julian Prosser shrugged. "If the mice are gone, you can swap in another one. But if the mech is gone, then there's nothing at all."
"Enough clowning around here. Hurry up and grab your things, let's go." Holbrook gave Prosser a pat and looked off to the other side.
Coming along with them was the equipment from their former laboratory, the titanium sapphire femtosecond laser bench, high-power nanosecond lasers, and various high-end optical imaging devices. This equipment was loaded piecemeal into three large trucks, and dedicated personnel were handling the unloading at the moment, so they didn't have to worry about it.
Ryan was still out at this time, so Patricia came out personally to receive them.
"Ryan isn't at the base at the moment. I'm Patricia, the base's administrative director."
"I'm Nathaniel Holbrook, director of the Optics and Molecular Imaging research lab." Holbrook politely shook Patricia's hand.
After some simple introductions, they followed Patricia toward their dormitories.
"I was rather surprised to be transferred over this time. Does the Chief Designer research photoacoustic imaging ordinarily as well?" Taking advantage of Ryan's absence, Holbrook seized the chance to sound out some information.
At this question of his, the research lab members around him all pricked up their ears.
It wasn't only Holbrook. Even they had their doubts about being transferred here for no apparent reason.
Patricia said with complete composure, "He tends to have a great many flights of fancy, and his research fields are always a hammer blow to the west and a mallet blow to the east. Today he's working on mechs and brain-machine interfaces, and the day after tomorrow he's off to artificial intelligence. You'll all get used to it later."
Not the slightest abnormality could be seen on Patricia's face.
She naturally wasn't going to tell Holbrook and the others that Ryan had only just taught himself photoacoustic imaging shortly before finding them, and that before that he'd been a complete layman who knew nothing about it.
That would probably shatter Holbrook's team's state of mind.
Since nothing out of the ordinary could be seen on Patricia's face, Holbrook could only let the matter drop.
Not long after Holbrook and the others had settled in at the base, Ryan hurried back from outside.
He went directly to meet Holbrook and his team members.
His first impression was that this was a very young team. Holbrook, the oldest, was only in his early forties, and the others were basically around thirty.
And as for Ryan, Holbrook and the others' first impression was likewise young. He looked far too young.
Yet it was for exactly this sort of teenager that the state had built an entire base. Thinking about it carefully was genuinely a bit frightening.
Ryan made simple introductions with Holbrook and the others, having already learned about the main core members from their files.
Holbrook had obtained his doctorate in biomedical engineering from a prestigious university overseas only ten years ago, and was a nationally recognized outstanding young scholar besides, having published more than forty papers in indexed journals.
The other members of the team all had beautiful academic résumés too, either graduates of prestigious domestic universities or returnees from study abroad.
At this first meeting, once the pleasantries were done, Ryan pulled everyone straight into the conference room for a meeting.
"Chief Designer, I hear the project we're opening now is to develop a new type of photoacoustic imaging scanner?" Holbrook said.
Ryan sat in the head seat and opened the meeting's projection.
"What's on the projection is the project overview. Some parts you're not familiar with yet, you can take a look at first."
"On the whole, what we're going to research next is a brand-new photoacoustic imaging scanner. Its principles are similar to current photoacoustic imaging scanners, but in application it's far more convenient."
"Its form is small, its scanning fast..."
Ryan was still speaking over here, while over there Holbrook and the others had already been struck dumb.
What was this thing?
Before coming, they'd only heard they'd be researching a new type of photoacoustic imaging scanner. Nobody had told them it would be something this outrageous.
A two-second scan, acquiring the majority of the human body's physical information?
Was that genuinely possible?
A sense of absurdity rose in Holbrook's heart. His first reaction was even to suspect Ryan had picked up the wrong materials.
But the words coming from Ryan's mouth told him the materials hadn't been picked up wrong.
It wasn't only him. The people in the conference room were already murmuring among themselves below, heads together in whispers.
If the other research groups at the base had seen their current posture, they'd certainly have laughed at them for making a fuss over nothing.
Only Holbrook's group weren't people of the base. He raised his hand to speak. "Judging by the current level of technology, I'm afraid I find this equipment a bit surreal."
He'd stopped just short of saying outright that this thing couldn't be realized.
Ryan paused. "From a theoretical standpoint, this equipment can be realized. The project hasn't begun yet, and there's no need for any of you to be too discouraged."
The people below looked at one another, none of them knowing what to say.
Holbrook thought for a moment, picked up his water glass, and took a sip. "I'd like to ask, how much is the funding for this project of ours?"
Ryan thought about it. "Roughly five hundred million."
Cough, cough. The water Holbrook had just drunk into his mouth nearly came right back out.
Five hundred million...
Since their research lab's founding, they'd had only a hundred and twenty million in funding, of which eighty million was research funding and forty million was equipment funding.
And here, the moment the man opened his mouth, it was five hundred million.
Could it be that his own eloquence had been holding back the research lab's development all this time?
The others, hearing it, had reactions much the same as Holbrook's.
Holbrook swallowed the water in his mouth. "I feel we can try to carry out some exploration in this direction."
Ryan added a line at just the right moment. "Oh, right. That's five hundred million US dollars."
That five hundred million dollars was the money from selling models and from global licensing.
...
Silence.
Holbrook, on the contrary, calmed down somewhat at this point. He composedly set his water glass back on the conference table. "I have ample confidence that our team will achieve results in this research direction."
I didn't want to put it this way, but the funding they're giving is simply too much.
---