At Melinda’s request, the boys and girls took a break from building their corporate empires and joined their fellow classmates cramming for finals. The week before finals, Scott’s Logic professor called him into his office.
“Scott, I have some concerns. You have been missing a lot of my classes. When you show up and take tests, your grades have been nearly perfect. The exception was one test where you didn’t show up for class, but you did well enough on a make-up test to keep your grade average high enough to pass. At the beginning of the year, you showed up most days and your grades were mediocre.”
“Uh, yeah. I can see how that looks strange. I’ve been studying a lot at home and working on some projects outside of school.” Scott explained.
“That is plausible. I’m concerned that you might have bought the answers to my tests and are skipping class because you plan to cheat and don’t need to waste your time learning.”
“Oh! No, I’m not cheating. I learned a few tricks that made figuring out most of your problems easier, but I haven’t seen any of the questions in advance. I could prove it if you gave me some problems to solve.”
“OK. I’m going to give you the final early so there is no way you can cheat.” Dr. Weng expected to see Scott looking panicked. Instead, he relaxed and smiled.
“Oh, that would be great! That means I don’t have any tests scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.”
“Hrmm… well here is the test. You have 2 hours. I’m going to work on some other projects while you work.”
Scott finished after about half an hour. “Uh, here you go. All done.”
Dr. Weng looked over the test. The work Scott showed was definitely not the techniques he had shared in class - they had a lot less steps and some symbols he didn’t recognize.
“Your answers are all correct. Sorry for accusing you of cheating, but can you explain what these symbols are?” Dr. Weng asked, puzzled.
“Oh sure. Like I said I learned a few tricks online. If I can have my phone back I’ll send you a couple links.”
After Scott left, Dr. Weng started reading. This couldn’t be right… Surely this method was oversimplifying things! He looked up the author and sent him an email asking for clarification. The response detailed referred him to several extensive mathematical proofs supporting the original article. It had boiled something extremely complicated down to a few simple operations. It was kind of genius - how lucky for Scott to have stumbled on something like this! Sometimes dumb luck beat hard work, but he left Scott’s grade as an A.
The second link was a similarly brilliant insight from a different mathematician. Once was dumb luck, but how did lightning strike twice in one place?
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Lata Dhar worked at a small-scale chip fabrication plant near Hyderabad. She enjoyed designing chips, but the equipment at her plant was several generations outdated. Even with the pittance the employees were paid they couldn’t compete with modern facilities that could print chips that were many times more powerful. Poor management had tried to squeeze out more profit by overworking and underpaying employees instead of upgrading the equipment. Recently, their facility had been purchased by an American company. Presumably they had bought it cheap, but she wondered what they could want with this outdated equipment.
Her new boss had a strange manner of talking - Lata assumed it was just a slow connection. She had described a fairly simple design. Multiple strings 100 um in length with code that would convert 6-bit codes into 20 configurations of positive and negative charge. The remaining codes were confusingly labeled as “bound” and she was supposed to just release the charges. The feature positions were carefully specified, but it basically just repeated 2500 times down the string.
It was supposed to take instructions from a more traditional CPU architecture to specify timing. Overall, this was not a difficult design, and she had a working plan after about a week.
Puzzled, she called her new boss.
“We have your chip ready to produce next week if you want.”
“Excellent - now the hard part. When you print it, you will not add the final insulating layer. Instead, you will find a way to keep the wafer in clean room conditions and deliver it to a warehouse I am renting 3 miles away. The final layers of the chips will be printed there using some specialized equipment.”
Lata thought that sounded tedious and risky, but also very interesting.
“Do you mind if I ask what you are planning at the other facility?”
“No problem, dear. I was planning to hand it over to you to manage after the contractors are finished with assembly. We are going to deposit a single layer and run an x-ray laser lithography for the final etched layer. The feature size will be 1 nm which is well beyond what any available equipment can handle. Since we are doing a single layer, it will only take one pulse after we deposit a layer of conductive material. I expect there will be a lot of defects initially and the architecture is not easy to test electronically. We are going to do a few hundred runs over the next couple weeks and send them to a specialized facility in the United States for testing.”
“1nm! That’s just a few atoms wide. It’s impossible to print a transistor that small. Even with x-rays your error rate would be unacceptable” Lata objected.
“Yes, that is true if you were printing transistors. Note that I said features and not transistors. Basically, we are etching space for insulators between small regions of slightly positive and negative charge. The charges will be at very low voltage to minimize bleed.”
“Anyway, the interesting thing about this design is we are using the charged regions to catalyze a certain type of chemical reaction. The process should be quite error tolerant - it was designed by someone far smarter than me.” Melinda figured either God or billions of years of evolution definitely qualified as smarter than her!
Lata thought her boss was being purposely opaque about what they were building.
“Is there a reason you aren’t telling me more about what this is for?” Lata asked.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“Indeed. Before you tour the other facility, I have some rather strict confidentiality agreements,” Ms. White admitted. Then she added, “If you accept the terms, I would like to reward you with some equity in this venture. This depends on if you can meet my rather strict production targets.”
Lata was too curious to back out now. She signed the agreements and entered the facility.
A series of cylindrical machines made up a line about 30 meters long. At the end was a rather heavy steel chamber with what looked like vacuum pumps attached and some equipment that looked like vapor deposition machinery she was more familiar with.
The contractor giving her tour seemed rather excited.
“We have 15 high powered klystrons in series. They move through a rather expensive array of magnets. It took us about hundreds of man hours to assemble the sections offsite.”
“I don’t know what that is.” Lata admitted.
“Oh, it accelerates electrons through a series of linear accelerators. As it passes through the magnet array you create an x-ray beam. It’s awesome, but you need to get behind the lead shielding when it is running, or you will get cancer.” The contractor laughed.
“Sure, that sounds impressive.”
“Yeah, then it goes through a series of lead plate templates and solid diffraction crystals. Finally, it hits a standard 8-inch wafer in the deposition chamber.”
Lata was impressed but had some more questions.
“Oh, we have an operations manual for when you take over this place. Everything except how to get your wafer in there in clean condition, which I assume you have handled. Oh, I forgot the best part!”
They walked around behind the huge machine to a device about as big as a filing cabinet with some large tubes going in and big cables coming out. There was a logo that said Genysis Power on the side.
“I have no idea how this works, but it powers the whole building including the laser! You're not even on the power grid. The boss lady said that there were some tamper proof electronics inside. If you try to open it to look inside the whole thing will melt into scrap. The important thing is it needs water flowing through it to keep cool. There is an 8-pound canister they said has fuel and some instructions for swapping it out. There was a crate with a few dozen locked up back.”
“Is it safe to handle?”
“There are some warnings about acceptable heat ranges - nothing too difficult. I thought for sure this was some kind of nuclear battery, but it must be some kind of advanced fuel cell. One of my guys was nosy and said he thinks there is hydrogen in the canister. No idea how long it lasts - there wasn’t really a battery gauge or anything that we saw. There were some LED lights that should turn on when it needs replacement.”
“Who are these people?”
“I have no idea. We tested the laser 3 times. The generator still hasn’t registered low power. We all thought it would run out after one shot. Anyway, we all signed some crazy confidentiality contracts, so you are the last person I’m allowed to talk to. Good luck, and here is my info if you have any questions or need any adjustments to the machinery.”
A few days later, Lata received a call from an American named Elsa Pittman. Elsa explained the rather ambitious goal of this project. Lata mentioned she was supposed to produce a set of chips for testing. Elsa admitted she didn’t know about that plan, but she promised she would talk to Melinda to get details. Elsa also casually mentioned that Melinda had mentioned they were both part owners of a company called Genysis Biotech along with a couple other people.
“Wait, Genysis was the name on that strange device that powered the x-ray laser. Genysis Energy I think?” Lata said. “And you’re saying I’m a part owner of this company?!”
“Oh, Genysis Energy is run by my friend Barry. Not sure how much I can say about it, but that is really cool they are using it to power your lab!” She added, “Oh yeah, I’m surprised Melinda didn’t tell you this. Sometimes I think she forgets she can talk to people! Yeah, I’ll remind her to send the details, but you own 150,000 shares. The investors valued the company at $15 per share for the initial funding round. It’s kind of unbelievable. Sure, it’s a great idea, but I have no idea how Melinda convinces people to give her all that money.”
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Phillp Schuman was controlling a lightly armored but nimble robot. His opponent had gone for the more traditional wedge-shaped style with an armature intended to flip over an opponent. Philip was amused that people still tried designs like that. It had been a fairly dominant style ten years earlier, but modern robots were hardly in danger of losing their balance.
His robot consisted of 5 limbs and a central core. The limbs could be used either for mobility or attack. The central core of his had the batteries and motors safely behind some tough composite armor. All the limbs had cables that transmitted the force needed to move. He was pretty proud of the AI controllers that helped keep balance and transformed his control input into various actions.
He couldn’t take credit for the latest controller code. Some college student named Matt Stanton had helped him in exchange for helping Matt work on a very interesting project.
Anyway, he had let his thoughts drift and the wedge robot had driven under his robot. He was currently using a four-leg configuration which gave good stability while leaving an arm to attack. Even without him paying attention, his robot had scampered up on top of the larger wedge and was holding on as it tried ineffectively to use its flipper arm to pummel him.
Looking at a screen on his controller, he targeted the servo on the flipper. Waiting until it was extended, the one free arm lashed out with a quick stab. There were some sparks and his opponent’s limb was disabled in one hit.
With a quick flex, his robot leaned far to one side. It planted the free arm and flipped the wedge upside down. He was going to climb onto its underside and start dismantling it, but his opponent conceded.
Watching a few other fights, Phillip felt pretty confident he was going to win this regional tournament. He had come 3rd in nationals last year, but his robot last year ended up so beat up he couldn’t participate in the big invitational league in Japan. That was worth real money, but honestly his robot last year would have been crushed. This year, he thought his chances were pretty good, but he might miss out on nationals.
The project Matt was working on had some similarities to the battle robot he was currently playing with. It had 6 arms, but they were much bigger than his creation extending to about 8 feet. The arms could be used to hold objects of various sizes at any orientation. Large heavy objects would be held by multiple arms, while smaller objects could be picked up by a single arm. The arms could switch out attachments on their ends for various tools or gripping devices weighing up to around 10 pounds.
What really excited Phillip was that this device was designed to assemble other robots. He thought about all the hours he had spent putting together his designs. It always seemed like he could use an extra hand to grab the tool he needed while keeping various parts in place. His latest robot had been particularly challenging to assemble. You needed to hold several cables at the right tension while lining up parts and tightening screws in multiple locations. Matt had used his battle robot design as a test and his machine assembled the whole thing in about 25 minutes.
He had driven to a small workshop near Spring Vale after corresponding with Matt and a woman who he claimed was his boss. They had spent most of a weekend assembling and testing Matt’s project. Melinda has paid him $5k which was an awesome bonus on top of getting to work on a really exciting project!
Now, Melinda had invited him to spend 3 weeks working on some project in Mexico. She had made him sign some pretty serious looking confidentiality agreements, but Phillip was excited to see what Melinda and Matt were up to.
He was disappointed that he would miss the national fighting robot championship. From what he had seen on YouVid, there was only one other robot that he thought would cause him problems. It was a real beast made by some guy called Rafael Sarkisyan. Rafael’s robot didn’t have the elegance of Phillip’s robot, but it made up for it in overpowering weaponry. It was basically a ball of robot death covered in layers of vibrating blades and spikes. He had seen this beast cut through almost any armor or robot limb that it could touch.
Anyway, he was getting paid $20k plus expenses for a 3-week trip to work on a secret robotics project. How could he turn that down?!