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Ever since the day she'd pitched Ryan her movie idea, the one that was Pacific Rim in everything but name, Chloe had spent every day brimming with excitement, refining her film's setting.
Ryan, off to the side, would occasionally offer up a few ideas from his previous life, and every one of them struck Chloe as buried treasure.
Truth be told, Ryan had come to find the whole business rather interesting himself these days.
A mech movie with Crimson Typhoon at the center of the frame. How could that not sound interesting?
If the director were anyone other than Chloe, Ryan would have been full of enthusiasm for the project.
But with Chloe behind the camera...
Better not.
So. Let's go study some artificial intelligence instead.
Under Hargrove's leadership, the AI's development was extremely rapid.
All that could be said was that he was worthy of being a true professional. Not only were his technical skills rock-solid, his abilities in team structure and leadership weren't the slightest bit weaker.
Under his direction, the research center's AI team had begun training the algorithm across every aspect. The voice recognition and synthesis work that Ryan had skipped earlier as too much hassle was now advancing in orderly fashion as well.
Originally, the research center's manpower wasn't anywhere near enough to complete these tasks.
But after the demonstration at the launch event, Hargrove once again brought his formidable industry connections to bear, prying several elite teams whole out of the country's other big firms.
At present, the team's total headcount had reached one hundred and fifty, and the new arrivals were elite-grade talent in the AI field to a person, the kind the open market would crack skulls fighting over.
With the added manpower, Argus's visual image training was pushed forward at speed.
The object-recognition precision that had already reached 98 percent was rapidly driven up to 99, and the precision now ran all the way to the third decimal place.
Ryan, however, still wasn't entirely satisfied with that figure.
Because calculated at this precision, out of sixteen million images, there would still be hundreds or even thousands identified wrongly.
Even if that result already outstripped the recognition of most human beings, artificial intelligence could do better still in a field like this one.
Toward this requirement of Ryan's, all Hargrove could do was keep pushing the algorithm model's training onward.
At the same time, he'd also dug deep into the day-to-day working needs of many famous comic artists at home and abroad, along with a great many graphic designers, and was adjusting Argus's function modules accordingly.
The way he envisioned it, the soon-to-launch Argus-1 would be an artificial intelligence with powerful assistive capabilities in the illustration and graphic design fields.
In illustration, it could pull off automatic coloring.
This wasn't a matter of handing a line draft to the AI and letting the AI choose colors and slather them on by itself. Instead, the user uploaded full-angle color art of the model that needed coloring, after which the AI would run image detection on every draft fed in from then on. Upon discovering the coloring model, it would automatically match and apply colors according to the earlier reference.
To give an example: a user who wanted to color character A only needed to upload A's full-angle color art, then feed their drafts into the AI. The AI would automatically check whether the coloring model existed anywhere in the piece.
If it found the model, the AI would read the scene's lighting and brightness, and color the model automatically.
This coloring wasn't a stiff pouring-in of pigment. It took light angle, brightness, and many other dimensions besides into account.
And if the colored result wasn't satisfying, the user could direct the AI's revisions straight through text.
The AI could even color objects outside the reference models. Say a drawn cloud needed color: the artist only had to tag "cloud" inside the cloud's outline on the draft, and the AI would color it automatically according to the situation.
Of course, coloring of that kind lacked a model to go on, and the results weren't ideal.
But the AI would learn and record every individual artist's habits and style, and as the colorings accumulated, its guesses would grow more and more precise, forming numbered style profiles for each artist. The next time a cloud needed painting, tagging it "cloud 34" would be enough. The AI would understand, and color the cloud according to style number thirty-four.
For other AIs, that learning and recording process might take a year, half a year, or longer still. For Argus, Hargrove was fully confident he could compress the time to within a single month.
And that was only the illustration field.
In graphic design, it held even more powerful abilities.
Cutouts, color grading, whatever it happened to be, every last function inside Photoshop could be achieved directly.
Other people's Photoshop was, at best, a cracked copy. With Argus in hand, it was the outright cheat-code edition.
Argus's current functions looked extraordinarily dazzling even to Ryan.
And Hargrove was leading the others in developing Argus's applications in still more fields, pushing hard to find more paths forward.
---
Soon enough, the calendar arrived at November 21.
This day was Ryan's birthday.
Two days beforehand, the base had already been decked out like it was New Year's.
Everyone felt it was necessary to throw Ryan a grand birthday party, and so they'd organized one entirely of their own accord.
Ryan could see there was no stopping it, and with Chloe throwing in with the organizers on top of that, he simply let them have their way.
"Wonder Boy, hurry up and come out! It's time for your birthday party!" Chloe's crisp voice rang out below the window.
"Coming." Ryan walked out with a long-suffering look on his face.
Sure enough, the moment he stepped outside, countless party poppers went off, and confetti came drifting down from overhead like a canopy unfurling across the sky.
"Happy birthday!"
"Woohoo!"
"Happy sixteenth, Boss!"
The corridor outside the dorm was packed with people, every face flushed with excitement, spent poppers still raised in their hands, and someone was recording the whole thing on a camera.
Ryan broke into a light sweat at the sight. They'd actually brought in a journalist to film this...
Amid the commotion, the crowd merrily escorted Ryan off to the cafeteria.
That place had already become the dedicated venue for his birthday parties.
Inside, an even greater crowd was packed into the hall. Aside from the essential posts, the base's ten-thousand-plus people were all present, and the moment they saw Ryan come through the doors, another perfectly synchronized "Happy birthday!" went up.
The hall filled in an instant with the cheering of over ten thousand voices, the joyous atmosphere like an ocean closing around everyone in it.
Then, an enormous cake was slowly wheeled out.
It was a creative cake modeled on the shape of Crimson Typhoon itself!
It stood a full 7.6 meters tall, its red armor rendered in strawberry jam, with a thin layer of chocolate laid beneath the jam. At first glance, you might actually take it for the real mech.
A one-tenth-scale Crimson Typhoon. Someone had genuinely done the math.
Chloe, off to one side, was already drooling herself halfway to tears. "One look and you can tell how good that's going to taste!"
Ryan's father and mother stepped out from the crowd as well, their faces nothing but doting smiles. "Son, what do you think of this giant mech cake?"
"This gift is incredible!" Ryan tipped his head back at the towering Crimson Typhoon cake, and had to admit that this gift really was wonderful.
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