For 30 advance/early chapters : p atreon.com/AutumnXd
This was as much as the artificial intelligence could do for now. Anything more was beyond it.
Patricia left Ryan's dorm feeling that she still understood far too little about artificial intelligence. Maybe she'd have to carve out a little time to learn about the current state of AI development. But that would have to wait until she'd sorted out the mountain of work on her desk first.
And so, the interview she'd mentioned arrived soon enough.
The reporter who came to conduct it was Erik Donovan, who had attended the Triton-1 launch.
They were driven in from outside and dropped off at the old radar station. The moment they entered, they saw Dome Base.
"There's already a base here?" Erik felt a chill of recognition. A quick mental estimate told him this base wasn't built for Crimson Typhoon. It probably didn't even come up to Crimson Typhoon's waist, let alone have room to assemble it inside.
"Are we allowed to film here?" the cameraman who'd come with him, Lou Camden, asked the staff member leading the way.
The administrative escort nodded. "Here, you can film."
The whole facility used a loose-on-the-outside, tight-on-the-inside security approach. The base had been built so tall, and there was a hundred-meter-plus base still to come behind it, that there was no hiding it. Satellites overhead and high-performance cameras at a distance could both capture the base's structure.
Since that was the case, there was no need to conceal the surface details. They only needed to keep the technology inside secure.
With approval granted, Lou stopped on the path and excitedly filmed the base's exterior. Everyone else stood to the side and waited.
Only when he'd finished did the group move again, entering the radar station, now in use as dormitories, and the interview room arranged beforehand.
Lou set up the cameras and audio equipment in place, while Erik helped out where he could.
Given the special nature of this interview, only the two of them had come.
Following the administrative staff's instructions, Erik waited in the room, adjusting his composure. This was Ryan's first sit-down interview. He couldn't afford to drop the ball.
When Ryan walked in from outside, what he saw was Erik sitting in a chair, holding his breath in concentration. Ryan greeted him first.
"Hello."
Erik's eyes snapped open. He stood, walked over to Ryan, and extended his hand.
"Hello, hello. I'm Erik Donovan, the reporter handling the interview."
Ryan thought back. "You were at the Triton-1 launch."
Erik was surprised. "How did you know that?"
"I looked at the guest invitation list back then." Ryan had been bored at the time and had read through the list.
A chill went through Erik. This prodigy clearly didn't just have research ability. His memory had to be extraordinary too.
"We can begin," Ryan said, sitting down where Erik directed.
For the interview, the room had been redecorated to look like a study, surrounded by books and a fair number of Scrapper posters.
Erik looked toward Lou. The cameraman flashed an okay sign. He'd set up all the cameras himself. As long as the two of them stayed seated and talked, the filming would go smoothly.
Erik understood. He turned back to Ryan and began his questions, his expression serious.
"We all know you invented the world's first mech, Scrapper, which stands twelve meters tall. The mech you're now preparing to build is seventy-six meters, more than six times its height, and the gap in weight is even larger. A leap of this magnitude has left a lot of the public lacking confidence. Do you have sufficient confidence in it?"
"Of course I do." Ryan had been exercising lately and his energy was consistently good. A simple, light nod was enough to put his confidence fully on display.
"While Crimson Typhoon, the mech we're about to build, isn't in the same weight class as Scrapper, this project has powerful industrial strength behind it. The construction won't be much of a problem."
The country's industrial manufacturing capability had a few weak points, but those weak points didn't negate its strength.
"And in terms of the mech's design, are you confident?"
Ryan glanced at him with a touch of surprise. "The design obviously won't be a problem. Crimson Typhoon's arm has already been built. You saw it, didn't you?"
Looking at Ryan's expression, Erik suddenly felt he was being regarded as an idiot.
So he quickly skipped that question and moved to the next one on the prepared script.
"For a heavy mech like Crimson Typhoon, the public's biggest concern, aside from whether it can be built, is whether something this large and heavy can really be used for deep-sea exploration."
"We've actually said this before. Its main purposes are twofold." Ryan held up two fingers. "To test the various technologies it incorporates and to conduct a review of the country's industrial system, which makes it easier to make targeted adjustments later. And to seek new directions for deep-sea exploration. It can carry a large quantity of measurement equipment, and it can provide researchers with a more comfortable working environment and experience."
Ryan then proceeded, as though writing a school essay, to give the public a primer on the importance of deep-sea exploration.
"The deep sea holds abundant resources. Building a large mech that can carry more and richer equipment will help us survey and extract higher-quality oil, gas, and mineral resources."
That passage wasn't his own. It was entirely what Patricia's side had told him to recite. As for why he had to say it, presumably it was because the country had been making some fairly large moves in the oil market lately.
At the end, he even cracked a joke. "And to take ten thousand steps back, even if it's ultimately proven unsuitable for deep-sea exploration, it can have other uses."
"Maybe one day a wormhole gets opened at the bottom of the Pacific, and aliens send a bunch of enormous monsters, the kind whose blood severely poisons the environment when they die, to invade Earth."
"In that case, maybe we'll need a heavy mech to go up against them, fight the monsters with an iron fist, and beat them until they die of internal bleeding." Ryan laughed as he said it.
Beside them, Erik didn't know whether to laugh or cry. He hadn't expected Ryan to improvise a stretch of nonsense like that on the spot.
He shook his head and asked some other questions. After getting his answers, near the end of the interview, he brought up some gossip the public was more interested in.
"We all know that in last year's national college entrance examination, you achieved an unprecedented score of seven hundred and forty-nine. Everyone is very curious. Which subject, exactly, did you lose that single point on, missing what would have been the first perfect score in the country's history?"
Ryan was about to answer when Erik stopped him. "Let me guess first. Was it English?"
Everyone present looked over. They clearly thought the same thing. A genius like Ryan, the single point he'd lose would surely be in the subjective essay-writing of a language-arts exam.
Ryan shook his head and gave the answer.
"It was Spanish, actually."
"Uh."