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Watching the livestream camera turn to Ryan's slightly raised arm, Warren Sadler lost his calm entirely. From his drawer he took out a box of cigarettes that hadn't been opened in ages, drew out a pristine one, and held it between his lips.
"Starting today, another round of reshuffling begins." He sighed.
He'd already quit smoking. There wasn't a lighter to be found on him, so all he could do was hold the thing unlit to settle his nerves.
As the head of the computer vision division at Apex Commerce's artificial intelligence laboratory, the field he was responsible for happened to be exactly the image domain that Argus currently excelled at.
Knock, knock.
The office door opened, and his assistant Miles Grady walked in.
"Mr. Sadler, did you see the demonstration at the launch event just now?" Grady asked in a rush.
"Obviously. Would I have a cigarette in my mouth if I hadn't?"
Only then did Grady notice the cigarette between Sadler's lips. The man had quit for years. Only under extreme agitation would he take that pack back out of the drawer.
He pressed on urgently. "If the Argus Algorithm Prism described really is that miraculous, then from now on they're going to stand alone at the top of the computer vision field."
Although Hargrove had said the Argus Algorithm was just as effective in natural language understanding, Grady didn't quite dare believe that part.
An algorithm already this powerful in the visual domain, if it could hold the same performance in other fields too, wouldn't that be outright defying the heavens?
Sadler bit down on the cigarette in his mouth and didn't answer Grady right away, watching Hargrove continue his presentation in the livestream. Only after a long while did he speak. "Gather some intelligence first. Put our connections in the industry to work and ask whether this is true or false. It might just be a smokescreen they've thrown out."
"Understood." Grady nodded his agreement and walked out of the office to pass the task down.
In no time at all, their employees had activated their webs of relationships, reaching out to engineers at Prism's AI research center to learn what they could.
This kind of inquiry wasn't about prying into any algorithm secrets. They only wanted to find out whether the matter was true or false.
Besides, even if they'd wanted to fish for secrets, those people had no capacity to leak them.
Those newly arrived engineers had neither the ability nor any possibility of touching the complete algorithm. They were just screws in the vast machine of an artificial intelligence project, and what they could see would only ever be what they were permitted to see.
Apex Commerce was an overlord of the country's AI field, with that many engineers and programmers under its roof. Merely asking around for a piece of news was naturally no hard task. In under half an hour, the replies had come back.
Except the answer wasn't the one Grady wanted.
It was true.
The algorithm engineers Prism had newly hired had seen it with their own eyes.
The Argus Algorithm really was frightening.
Damn it. This time the wolf really had come.
Grady ran back to Sadler's office, only to find him still watching the livestream.
Up on the screen, Hargrove was still holding forth in full flow, as if intent on rebutting all of the public's earlier doubt, point by point, right there from the podium.
"Our future planning won't be limited to the image domain. We'll also be establishing dedicated research departments and, when the timing is right, entering other fields. Autonomous driving, machine translation, industrial manufacturing."
"In our vision, the Argus of the future will appear in your work and your lives as a platform of many talents. It can help you speed through your work while also looking after the children at home, drive for you when you get off work, and give you a timely reminder when you've headed out the door without an umbrella."
"Lastly, the Argus you've all just seen may release a beta version online within this very month. In the meantime, we'll be adding further image-processing functions, and when it arrives, every user will be able to experience the convenience it brings for themselves."
The launch event ended amid a screenful of well-wishing comments. Sadler let out a sigh and looked at his assistant.
"That long face of yours. Their algorithm is real?" he said.
Grady nodded. "Mr. Sadler, the word has come back. Everyone says the results of Prism's algorithm are genuinely astonishing. They've never once seen an algorithm this formidable before."
"Then this has become a hard problem." Sadler clenched his teeth again, very nearly biting the cigarette in his mouth clean in two.
---
The livestream had barely ended when the news announced at Prism's launch event rapidly turned into article after article appearing before everyone, bombarding their eyes.
"Prism's Two Research Centers Founded, Aiming to Fully Unravel the Mysteries of the Brain!"
"All-Around Genius! New AI Algorithm, the Argus Algorithm, Shakes the World!"
"Freshly Founded and Already a Hundredfold Past the World: This AI Declares Painters a Thing of the Past"
The online news headlines were each more exaggerated than the last, and the foreign ones were more exaggerated still.
In the eyes of many teenagers over there, especially the ones fitted with a Triton-1, Ryan was well on his way to becoming a godlike existence.
"After watching this launch event, I believe he is humanity's hope. He will lead us into a new era!"
"Without question, everything happening inside Prism, everything they are doing, is one great step forward for all of mankind!"
"Prism will become the greatest company in history, and Ryan will become the greatest scientist!"
The worked-up teenagers posted their opinions freely across the internet, leaving the adults thoroughly bewildered for a while.
Hadn't they just established two departments?
Wasn't it just a brain-machine research center?
Wasn't it just an artificial intelligence research center?
The research results weren't even out yet. How had this become humanity's hope?
Their own countries had both of these things too, and plenty of them!
What on earth was wrong with young people these days?
---
While home and abroad alike were busy discussing Ryan, Ryan himself had already returned to the base, reading through the data reports generated by Crimson Typhoon's latest test and rapidly marking down his review comments.
Now that he had these real data reports in hand, some of his earlier points of confusion about Crimson Typhoon were gradually resolving as well.
Some technology was simply like that. Without data from physical testing, it was very hard to understand it completely.
Why did this spot use this particular structure? Why did that spot use this particular material?
Those were things you only knew once you'd genuinely tried them.
For problems of this type, Ryan had set up a large number of control experiments, fabricating parts from different materials and swapping them onto the mech to test the results.
The results so far all proved one thing. The answers the system gave were the optimal solution.
Meanwhile, his parents still hadn't left. They'd temporarily moved into the research center tower, handling the company's affairs through remote work.
The main reason they'd arranged things this way was that his birthday was only half a month off.
And this would be his sixteenth birthday. He was finally brushing up against the doorstep of adulthood.
The two of them talked it over and simply decided not to leave for the time being, staying right here to see their precious son through his birthday first.
---