Spring break was approaching. The boys and Elsa were again planning to go to the house in Mexico. Scott’s dad was already there preparing for his first voyage. The Dark Siren was nearly complete, and they were already loading it for the first delivery. The group decided to meet up at Wedge Pizza. Scott was secretly hoping he would not have to eat here much longer. If the mining company made any money, he was going to ask Melinda for a small salary so he could eat somewhere fancy where they had actual waiters.
After the party, Melinda had hired bodyguards for all four of them. Their bodyguards were all late twenties or early thirties and would even sit in class with them. The professors didn’t pay them much attention, assuming they were probably students who just didn’t show up much. Scott’s bodyguard was an ex-marine named Brad Robles. He would usually sit near the back of class when Scott bothered to attend. Scott idly wondered what Mr. Robles was writing on the test he had been handed, and what the professor would think of it. Their bodyguards were sitting at a couple other tables, pretending to eat. Scott assumed they were paid well enough to eat somewhere better when they weren’t on duty.
“Hey Scott, haven’t seen you much since… well you know.” Matt said awkwardly.
“Yeah, I’ve been training and working on a project for Melinda.” Scott said, “I’m struggling to get it all working and we’re running out of time. Melinda insisted I come meet with you guys or else I’d still be trying to get it done.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. I’ve been pretty busy too. There is a lot going on in Mexico right now.” Matt replied.
“On the plus side, with all this work my Junior Programmer ranking is up to about 74 thousand,” Scott said with a bit of pride.
“Nice work!” Matt said, but he was smirking a bit.
“Oh, let me guess, your rank is higher. What is yours?” Scott asked.
“I’m six. Phillip and Rafael are both higher and a few guys in Japan.” Matt said with a big grin.
“You’re freaking kidding me! Now I feel dumb too. Where is Barry?” Scott said with a groan.
“Speak of the devil.” Matt said, waving to Barry as he joined them at the table.
“And he will appear, “Barry added with a big grin. “What’s up, losers?”
“Matt was just explaining how he was the #6 robotics expert in the freaking world.” Scott said feeling bitter.
“Nice!” said Barry. “I’m only ranked 37. Professor Springer is in the top ten. That dude is legit!”
“Oh come on!” Scott whined. “Apparently, I’m the slow one in the group. No wonder I can’t figure out this project.”
“Hey, don’t beat yourself up. We all underestimated the risks. We’ve been focused on all the great things we could build and the money we were going to make. Even now I think we need to keep trying to make it all work. Think about all we’ve built so far with almost no resources. These kidnappers have no idea what they are up against” Barry said, serious for once.
“Thanks Barry.” Scott said. “Anyway, I’m stuck, and Melinda said she needs this by tomorrow at the latest. She arranged an initial meeting with the kidnappers. She’s giving them about half of what they asked in exchange for letting us see Adriana is unharmed.”
“Maybe you should get some help. I’m sure Melinda will agree to pay for it.” Matt suggested
“Hey guys!” Elsa announced, last to arrive. She had spent some effort on her appearance, unlike the boys.
“We were just embarrassing Scott with our ranking scores in Glitch_HR.” Barry prompted helpfully, reverting back to his normal personality.
“Oh, I think I was 92 but I don’t really look at it. I’ve been spending more time working on projects than looking through the training system.“ Elsa said. “Trying to keep busy so I’m not worrying about things.”
“I think I’m going to try to get help on my project. I don’t want my lack of skill to put Adriana at risk.” Scott said.
“That’s really mature of you Scott,” Elsa encouraged.
“Hey, your bodyguard is kind of hot!” Barry said, staring at the dark-haired woman who had followed Elsa inside, “want to trade?” Elsa punched him hard in the arm.
“Unlike this dope who can’t filter what comes out of his mouth.” Elsa glared at Barry.
“Um sorry! She’s not as pretty as you!” Barry gulped, sinking into his seat.
“So Elsa, what have you been working on lately?” Matt interrupted. Elsa loved her work and maybe it would distract her from killing his dumb friend Barry.
“Oh yeah, we’ve been working on some new chip versions to synthesize RNA and DNA strands. The DNA stuff is not working because strands are so long. We won’t be making any chimeras or de-extincting dinosaurs anytime soon.” Elsa said.
“Too bad, I’d like to see those kidnappers get chomped by a T-Rex.” Matt said.
“Yeah, but we’re still doing some amazing work. We’ve mapped out several hundred previously undefined developmental proteins and finished something a bit more practical too.” Elsa grinned. Without hesitation she pulled out a syringe and stuck it in Scott’s arm.
“Ouch! What the heck was that?” Scott whined, scampering away from the table. His useless bodyguard just looked over and rolled his eyes.
“Oh, just a test. Remember when we were studying muscle development with you and Marta?” Elsa said.
“Um yeah, I was sore for like 3 days after that.”
“Well, you’ll probably want to eat more protein than usual in the next few days. I figured I’d do the first test on you. Marta has been working out a lot and has too much subcutaneous fat. It will be easier to see the effects on your skinny arms.” Elsa was pulling out a cloth tape measure.
“Hold still, I need your initial measurement.”
“I never agreed to this!” Scott complained.
“Actually, you did when we started testing you at the gym. You signed a waiver that agreed to a series of tests.” Elsa said. “Besides, you aren’t going to sue your own company. OK, your bicep is 9.5 inches. Roughly average for a 10 year-old girl.”
Barry had been sipping his soda right at that moment to disastrous effect. Matt was now covered in bright green liquid but laughing so hard he didn’t really care.
“Oh come on!” Scott said. “Why do I even hang out with you guys?”
“So, is he going to have one big bicep, and the other side will still be a little girl arm?” Matt asked, still chuckling.
“Well, we think the effect will recede after a couple months.” Elsa said. “We don’t want to do more in case it rips some of his ligaments. I actually have a couple injections that should help with that, but we wanted to just test one thing this time.”
“So, is anyone else working on something fun?” Elsa asked politely. Playing mad scientist had clearly helped her get over her annoyance at Barry.
“Oh yeah!” Barry said. “Melinda wasn’t happy that we were dumping so much magnesium from our mine. So, Rudolph and I have been working on a variation of the protein guided crystal growth.”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“She mentioned something like growing tooth enamel and bone with that.” Elsa said.
“Exactly!” Barry continued, excited. “So instead of calcium, we are using magnesium and we get this stuff that looks like a white metal, but it is much more resistant to corrosion than metallic magnesium.”
“I thought you were already getting good results with your graphite treated steel?” Scott said.
“Yeah, but this stuff is really great. We build a base layer of a porous material with one type of protein, and a surface layer is the solid enamel. Unlike teeth, it is flexible like metal.” Barry continued. “The best part is, if you damage the surface layer this fluid comes out from the lower layer and heals the damage! You just have to keep the fluid topped off and the material maintains itself.”
“That sounds neat. Are we going to sell it or use it for internal projects?”
“Melinda says this isn’t going to upset the balance of military power, so we can sell it. It only repairs minor chips and scratches so it’s not like it can repair damage from a military attack. We’re also going to use it in the underwater habitat. They are designing a factory now, and also one to make transparent aluminum.”
“Did you guys invent that too?” Scott asked.
“No, AlON has been around since the eighties I think, “Barry said. “It’s actually stupidly easy to produce under the high-pressure conditions we have 600 meters below sea level. Harder to sell because people usually want custom shapes and sizes, and we would probably have to pay royalties.”
“Have they found anything interesting in the mine yet?” Scott asked.
“I’ve been focused on building some automated defenses, but the guys I work with mentioned something, “Matt said. “Rafael seemed excited about something they found a couple days ago. I pressed him on it, but he said he had to wait until the geologist finished his tests. I’m sure they are done, but no one decided to tell me anything. I guess they don’t want to distract us.”
“Let’s call Melinda.” Scott said. “We’re owners of the company, I think she needs to tell us if they found anything!”
The friends agreed and dialed her number on speaker phone.
“Hello my dears!” Melinda said cheerfully. She hadn’t been in a good mood since the party, so this was a pleasant surprise.
“First of all, I’m planning to hire some help finishing my project.” Scott said.
“That’s great Scott. Try to get that Theofanis Zervou guy - he’s still #1. You are authorized to spend up to $20k if he can help you get a working version by the end of day tomorrow.”
“Ugh, the Algerian job stealer gets $20k for one day of work. I can barely afford the $20 buffet after working for months.” Scott grumbled.
“Don’t be a grump, Scott.” Melinda chastised. “I think your financial situation might soon take a turn for the better!” she cackled a bit.
“Yeah, about that…” Matt interrupted. “What did you guys find in the mine?”
“Well, we found a shard which might be from the original meteor. Mostly iron and carbides, but it has silver, iridium, palladium, osmium and some platinum. The rare metals all together are less than 1% by weight, but we’ve started refining the ore today.”
“Less than 1% doesn’t sound like that much.” Scott said
“Hah, you don’t get it. We pulled out 30 tons of this ore yesterday. The geologist said we can expect 168 pounds of silver, 66 pounds of iridium, 72 pounds of osmium, 78 pounds palladium and 36 pounds of platinum. We have a nice video of him dancing around after his first test on the samples.”
“Ok, that sounds like a lot more when you put it that way. What is that worth?”
“Well, at current market prices it would be a little over $7million. Plus, we have a full load of steel ready to go. About 8000 tons, which is worth roughly $14 million for our first delivery when the Dark Siren is ready to go. They are loading it now and leaving tomorrow for the first shipment.”
The group was a bit stunned.
“So, I was thinking I need a raise.” Scott said.
“Sure. We can vote on a dividend and some bonuses over spring break. “Melinda said. “Now I just need you all to work really hard on the tasks I assigned so we can try to rescue Adriana.”
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Scott had contacted Theofanis. The guy was pretty nice but said he was too busy to take any jobs in the next few weeks. Scott had asked him what his normal rate was and asked how much more they would need to pay to get him to work on their project first.
“Well, I have about 6 jobs this week. None of them are that interesting, but I think it’s about 80 hours of work. I bid the jobs for $60 per hour, so I’ll get about $4800 when I finish on time.
“OK, how about I pay you $12,000 to help me for one day. You can probably still finish most of your other projects and make more than twice as much money in one day.”
“Not finishing on time hurts my reputation. If you can find someone else to finish a couple of my jobs and pay me $15,000, I will do it. But I’m not even going to start until you have someone reputable working on those jobs.”
Scott couldn’t believe he was going to pay someone so much money for one day, but it sounded like they were about to have plenty of money.
“OK, I think I can handle that. Send me the info on those jobs, and I’ll call you back.” Scott pulled up Glitch_HR and found a couple other top programmers. He got them to agree to finish one of the jobs within a week for $2000 each.”
Melinda sent payment and Theofanis agreed to get working on the project.
“So, this is obviously important to us. I can’t tell you all the details, but we need this facial recognition code to help us with a hostage situation. That’s why it needs to work as well as possible with masks, sunglasses, hats or other possible disguises.”
“Sounds fun, “Theofanis said. “Not sure I believe you of course. With that kind of money, you probably work for the government and are trying to oppress someone. Still, it sounds fun, and you pay really well!”
“Do you think it’s possible?”
“Yeah, you actually have a pretty good code base here. Your programming team is better than what I usually see. Anyway, I think we’ll need to train the machine to not only recognize facial structure but how the people move and their posture. Ideally, we would get data in some other frequencies besides visible light. For the timeframe we have, that won’t work because you would need to collect a lot of broad-spectrum footage on crowds to train the program.”
“Maybe we can hire you to help us with that later, but time is critical for this project.”
“Sure. There will be a fair amount of uncertainty and a lot of holes in the data. I’m not even going to ask how you have a database of 7 billion people to match this to. I did some work on a project like that before and I’m pretty sure it was a government spy agency.”
“Well, I can’t tell you all those details. This is personally very important to me. Is there anything I can do to help? I’m not a bad coder myself even if I’m not at your level.” Scott could hear Theofanis typing rapidly as they were talking.
“Umm, if you want good results in a hurry, we are going to need a lot of cloud computing resources. That’s not included in my fee.”
“How much are we talking about?” Scott asked nervously.
“Probably a few thousand of top tier servers for about 8 hours.”
“A few thousand?!”
“Don’t worry, it costs a lot less than it did five years ago. Probably another $6000 dollars. If we use cheaper servers, I don’t think we can finish on your absurd timeline.”
“I’ll call my boss.” Scott said with a sigh.
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“Hey dad, I heard you are about to go on your first trip on that new ship.” Scott had called his dad.
Melinda had approved his spending requests without complaint. Now that he realized how much money the mine was going to make, he figured they could afford it.
“Yeah, it’s really exciting here. I’m not supposed to talk about some of this stuff, but I guess you’ve already been here.”
“Yes dad. I’m going to be there next week over Spring break. I probably know more about the company than you do.”
“Right, so they have this submarine thing that comes in the bottom of the ship. Then they have robots unloading all these steel ingots. I thought we would just be hauling ore, but steel is way more valuable! I get to split 1% of the value with four other crew members,” his dad said, obviously excited.
“Yeah, did you see them loading anything else?” Scott asked.
“I didn’t, but they installed a big safe in one of the slots I thought would be crew quarters. Not sure what they are going to use it for. Do you know if there is something other than iron they are getting from this mine?” Mr. Henderson asked, curiously.
“Melinda told us there are small quantities of some more valuable metals. I don’t know if they are going in your shipment, but it might add a bit more to your bonus. I can ask her about it if you want.”
“No need son, I don’t want to sound greedy. The captain said he’d let us see the bill of lading and was going to show us the accounting once the cargo was delivered. He gets a full 1% so he’s even more excited than the rest of the crew about this first run.”
“That’s a nice deal. Work hard so you can be captain of our next ship.”
“Hah. Well, they really rushed finishing this ship from what I heard. From our inspections, the work crews did a better job than I would have expected given how many people they had working at once.”
“Well, I heard we’re shipping out tomorrow. The navigator said it was only a two-day trip there. Unloading will take a few days, then two days back. This ship is a bit faster than the big cargo ships. If things go well, we’ll be back while you are there!”
“Awesome dad! I’m really excited this seems to be working out for you.”
“I’ll feel a lot better when I see that first bonus check, but I’d like to help pay off the student loans you took this year.”
“Thanks dad. I know you’ve been doing the best you can. I think I’m going to get a bonus of my own once your ship makes the first delivery, so you probably don’t need to worry about helping me out anymore.”
“That’s great! You said you did some IT work for the company. It’s nice that they are showing appreciation for the workers. Most companies, the owners and management keep all the money for themselves.” his dad said.
“Right, well, I guess I should have told you before, I’m one of those owners.”