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The new year holiday passed quickly. Ryan rested well throughout the break, occasionally getting Lisa to make a few chicken drumsticks to feed a certain perpetually-dieting young woman. By the time he returned to Dome Base, his mental state had visibly improved.
Patricia's complexion had not improved comparably.
The base had returned to normal operations. The research teams were proceeding with their work in orderly fashion.
Patricia was also proceeding with her work.
When Ryan saw her again, she was at her desk on a phone call, her computer screen filled top to bottom with a to-do list.
The administrative office outside her private office was even busier. People were working at computers everywhere, the atmosphere thick with urgency. The dense clatter of keyboards made the place sound less like a research facility and more like an internet cafe at peak hours.
The base was deep in the early-stage preparations for the Crimson Typhoon project, and the first thing in the firing line was administrative coordination.
When she saw Ryan, Patricia's mouth didn't pause for even a second. While still talking to whoever was on the phone, she pulled a stack of documents from a drawer and handed them over, gesturing for him to read.
Ryan took the stack and looked. It was a public project announcement document.
The opening line was the project name.
Crimson Typhoon Project: A Seven-Thousand-Meter-Class Crewed Deep-Submergence Heavy Underwater Operations Mech
There was no question about it. The name Ryan had originally proposed, the aggressively-named "Hunter Program," had been retired.
Given the scale of what the country was about to do, suddenly beginning construction on a seventy-meter combat mech, keeping the project named "Hunter Program" would have kept the leadership of several other nations awake at night. Changing the name was the equivalent of putting on a thin disguise. At least it provided a surface-level justification that was defensible in public.
As for the obvious problem that building a seventy-meter mech for deep-sea work made no sense at all?
A justification that held up on the surface was enough. The moment you genuinely worried about whether it was reasonable or not, you'd already lost.
Ryan kept reading. Next was a public-facing project introduction. His name appeared in the chief designer column, alone, in a tier by itself.
The document also introduced the project's participating organizations. The National Oceanic Mineral Resources Research and Development Association. The Marine Heavy Industries 911 Research Institute. The National Academy of Sciences Institute of Automation. The National Academy of Sciences Institute of Acoustics. More than two hundred related institutions and units in total.
It did have a certain deep-submergence-research flavor to it.
The project's projected budget was thirty-five billion dollars. Considerably more than the twenty billion Ryan had originally requested. Presumably leadership was worried about him going over budget.
As for the project's stated purpose, the document read: "To construct a new class of deep-submergence equipment, to seek expanded possibilities for deep-sea resource exploration, to serve as a comprehensive review of the nation's overall industrial strength and engineering capability, to test the nation's capacity for innovation and scientific research, and, through the project's associated research, to advance progress across the nation's materials-science fields and to accelerate industrial development in specialty materials such as titanium alloys..."
Strip away the official phrasing at the front, and the rest was easy to understand.
Building Crimson Typhoon would take more than the technology alone.
The system had given Ryan the blueprints for Crimson Typhoon. It had not told him how to actually get Crimson Typhoon built.
The simplest version of the problem: constructing a mech like this required what kind of industrial machinery? What kind of facility? How many engineers and technicians?
When fabricating the mech body, did you build the arms first, or the legs? Or the internal engines first? After completion, what maintenance approach was optimal?
One question after another, all of them engineering problems. The system, which only provided technology, would not lift a finger to also provide an engineering plan.
Solving those problems depended on the coordination between massive industrial capacity and engineering construction capability.
Beyond that, the demand for various materials and technologies generated by the mech's construction would feed back into the broader industrial base. The project would push a portion of the country's companies to upgrade their own technology and production capabilities to match the project's requirements.
The domestic titanium alloy industry, for example. The country had long lacked competitiveness in high-end titanium alloy on the international market. The titanium alloys used in petrochemicals, aerospace, and marine engineering were almost entirely imported. The titanium alloy armor on Crimson Typhoon was, without question, a new alloy class. Producing it would require steering a number of companies through structural upgrades.
So Crimson Typhoon really was a thin disguise stretched over a surface.
Behind the project, hidden underneath it, were numerous industrial development programs. The investment in those programs might exceed the cost of Crimson Typhoon itself.
But matters involving industrial-structure adjustment had nothing to do with Ryan. He didn't need to think about any of it.
The civilian patents for the new materials and new technologies belonged to him. If they could be produced for civilian applications, he could collect the royalties while lying down.
By the time Ryan finished reading the document, Patricia had finally finished her phone call and carved out a sliver of free time.
She opened a rendering on her computer.
"This is the latest design. Take a look."
She stepped back from the desk and moved to the side to stretch her stiffened body.
Ryan looked at the rendering on the screen.
Like the current Dome Base, it was a steel-structure facility. Steel-structure construction was fast and easy and left generous interior space, which suited a mech facility's spatial requirements.
The facility in the rendering stood a hundred meters tall. The walls sloped slightly inward toward the center, the overall shape approaching a cone, though the top was left as a large flat surface.
On the facility's surface was a massive retractable door. It stood eighty-four meters tall. Even from the rendering alone, the scale of it was palpable.
Ryan studied the rendering and thought for a moment.
"Can the dome up top be changed?"
"Changed how?" Patricia turned back toward the screen.
"Change the big flat top into an opening that can open and close."
"Huh?"
"Turn it into an exit?"
Patricia looked at the spot Ryan was pointing to, assuming he'd indicated the wrong place. "You're sure it's the dome at the very top that you want to open into an exit?"
Ryan nodded with absolute certainty.
"There's not much point in opening an exit there, is there?"
Ryan rubbed his chin. "Maybe there's no point now. But who's to say there won't be a point later?"
The aircraft capable of carrying a mech didn't exist yet. But what if, someday, one did?
Patricia didn't follow his reasoning at all. She also didn't find it strange. Ryan's ideas were routinely beyond ordinary comprehension.
She nodded and agreed. "Understood. I'll pass the change along to the design team."
"Any other requirements for this exit?"
"Just make sure the opening is large enough for Crimson Typhoon to come out through it."
"..."
All right. Patricia was now absolutely certain of one thing: she was an ordinary person.
"Fine. I'll explain it to the design team."
"Thanks, Patricia."