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"Good morning, listeners, and welcome to the traffic channel. This is Today's Focus, bringing you the day's top stories right on schedule."
"Yesterday, television aired the first public interview with Ryan Mercer, chief designer of the Crimson Typhoon project. In the interview, Ryan addressed several of the public's questions about the project head-on, and at the very end he even cracked a joke, saying the heavy mech was for fighting monsters. Let's start by listening to the original audio."
Inside the car, Vance switched the channel. He'd seen that interview footage the moment it came out. If not for that video, he wouldn't have been dispatched here.
"In ten kilometers, exit the highway, then continue along Route 911," the navigation prompted at the right moment.
Vance glanced at the display. He was about fifty kilometers from his destination.
Off the highway, the car raced along the road. The farther he drove, the fewer vehicles there were. This region was a little too remote.
A vague unease stirred in his chest. This operation probably wasn't going to go smoothly.
An hour later, he reached his marked waypoint. But his destination wasn't here. This was only near it.
He pulled over, took out a map, confirmed the route once more, and drove toward his target.
Soon he arrived at a new location.
This was Prism Sciences' prosthetics research center.
Vance drove slowly past the center's entrance. Even in that short stretch, he noticed cameras installed in every corner, watching everything outside with no blind spots.
The guards at the entrance were clearly hired from among military veterans, their uniforms reading "Aegis Security." A guard watched his car pass, tracking it until it had moved well away from the center.
And that was only the security he could see. There was probably more he couldn't.
The place felt like an iron bucket. Not a single opening.
Not daring to circle back around in the car, he decided to try somewhere else and navigated toward a nearby town center. Most of the surrounding region was undeveloped. The only place he could go was the town.
But the closer the car got to the town, the more his unease welled up.
When the car finally reached the seaside town, that unease peaked.
In a town whose population had been bleeding away for years, an unfamiliar face with out-of-region plates stuck out badly. In the eyes of anyone paying attention, he was a spotlight in the dark.
He'd prepared for this, but he still wasn't used to the feeling. If he'd had any other choice, he absolutely wouldn't have come.
He parked on an empty street, pulled out a mask and put it on, and casually bought a few pounds of oranges from a roadside stall. Then, beneath the mask, his expression suddenly shifted.
Even this town at the edge of the controlled zone had cameras packed into every inconspicuous corner of its streets.
Someone else might have marveled that the national surveillance grid had been laid down even in a small town like this. But Vance wasn't someone else. He quickly caught a whiff of something off in the concealed way the cameras had been installed, and decided not to linger.
He walked briskly back toward the street where he'd parked. But the moment he stepped into the alley, he saw a traffic officer standing beside his car, head down, apparently writing a ticket.
"This your car?" the officer suddenly said, looking up. "These are cloned plates."
Before he could react, several people materialized behind him and pinned him down.
Ryan had no idea how many drivers with cloned plates the town's traffic police had caught lately, and there was no reason he'd care.
He'd been getting busier and busier recently, and someone on the project had even been transferred away.
"Dr. Cross has been transferred out?"
Ryan only heard about it that day when he went to the drift lab.
Reeves said, "His research direction in the sync field was different from ours, so he was transferred a while back."
Research direction.
Ryan thought about it. Cross's research direction in the sync field had been memory acquisition, if he remembered right.
He shook his head. The transfer was a good thing. Cross's direction was too far from the project's.
Leaving the drift lab, Ryan headed to Patricia's office and held a meeting in the secure conference room.
The meeting was primarily about the design of the mech transport platform.
There were no Jumphawk helicopters like the ones in the film, able to airlift a mech straight out of the base. And a seventeen-hundred-ton mech couldn't simply walk out of the base on its own, because every time it went out, the base's ground would have to be repaired. The logistics and maintenance crews would lose their minds sooner or later.
So Ryan had recalled the mech transport platform from the film in his previous life, similar to the mobile launch platform used for space rocket launches.
After he'd submitted the idea, a response came back quickly.
The country's largest mobile rocket launch platform had an effective static load capacity of around a thousand tons. It couldn't bear Crimson Typhoon's weight.
But while the thing didn't exist yet, it could be modified based on existing technology and reserves. Perhaps the transport platform's technology could later be applied back to space launches.
This meeting was a kickoff, to let the engineering design team understand the functions the transport platform needed so they could design it accordingly.
"For this transport platform, the function I have in mind is that it can lock with the mech's feet, providing a degree of fixation. And its transport track needs to run straight to the seaside, a distance of about three hundred meters," Ryan said into the meeting's camera.
"Only the fixation function? Nothing else?" The engineering design team on the other end of the video asked for confirmation.
Ryan said firmly, "Correct. Only the fixation function."
"Then will the mech sway when it moves?"
"It won't. When the mech deploys, there'll be a pilot on board controlling it."
"Understood. Then the next question."
By the time the transport platform design meeting ended, it was six in the evening. Dinnertime again.
Eating his meal, Ryan opened his phone and found the news in his feed rather interesting.
"Recently, several foreign survey companies have announced expeditions to the Pacific to conduct seabed exploration. Some of the companies have stated that they've secured substantial defense funding."
"This expedition is not in search of treasure. It is purely to understand the geological changes that have occurred on the Pacific seabed in recent years, a seabed geological and geomorphological survey."
The news left Ryan torn between laughter and exasperation.
That day, he'd just cracked a casual joke in the interview. No one at home had taken it seriously.
Who could have guessed that once it spread to the foreign internet, plenty of his more fanatical fans had taken it for real.
For a while, Ryan's "theory" that alien monsters were hidden beneath the Pacific seabed became the hottest piece of gossip. Mech fans and alien enthusiasts achieved a dream collaboration in the comments under the news.
And the various agencies guessing at Crimson Typhoon's true purpose were half-convinced too. They quietly allocated funding to their own domestic seabed survey companies and teams, sending them down to dig around and see whether there really was any trace of something on the seabed.
The credibility of alien monsters was low, sure. But what if it was real?
After all, hadn't they built a mech this big?