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"Oh, right. Help me arrange a car. I want to take a trip to the research center." Just as Patricia was about to leave, Ryan suddenly remembered.
"Sure." Patricia agreed. "Wait at the main gate for a bit."
Ryan waited a few minutes beneath the base's main gate, and the military Humvee he'd always ridden in soon drove up, the same two familiar faces in it as before.
After getting in and exchanging greetings, the car drove smoothly toward the prosthetics research center.
Beyond the base's high walls, the scenery along the way had changed quite a bit. The roadside woods had been sawed down, and there were no obstacles to be seen anywhere around, the land as flat as grassland. You could spot a rabbit running across the road.
The research center had changed no small amount too. Aegis Security, funded by Aegis Industrial, had taken over the security work here, and the whole center looked loose on the outside but tight on the inside.
Mason came out to receive him as always, introducing the recent changes along the way.
"We recently acquired one of the top-ranked prosthetics companies in the country and brought on a batch of researchers. These people are extremely experienced in leg prosthetic research."
"With their rich experience, plus the damper design you sent over earlier, our work on the structural design and the drive-system optimization is now completely finished. All that's left now is the operating system."
The moment work came up, Mason turned visibly excited, tugging Ryan's arm and hurrying him inside.
The instant he entered the work room, the headcount had indeed grown. The small team of a dozen-some people from before had become more than eighty, with various functional departments established. They'd taken the path of a proper regular army.
Mason's old team members still greeted him calmly. It was the newly hired researchers who couldn't stay composed.
Before they'd started working at the research center, they'd heard from the veteran employees that Ryan occasionally came to inspect. They hadn't expected him to actually show up.
When Ryan greeted them, many of them still had blank heads, and the quicker-witted ones were already asking for autographs and photos.
Ryan took photos with everyone, then listened to them describe the current progress.
What they were researching now was the above-knee prosthetic, and they already had preliminary results. And just like with Triton-1, they'd adapted a below-knee prosthetic from this prosthetic as well.
At present they'd produced two samples, one above-knee prosthetic and one below-knee prosthetic.
The above-knee prosthetic was considerably more complex than the arm prosthetic, requiring deeper research in fields like computer science, bionics, mechanics, and machinery. But everyone present came from the elite teams of the country's prosthetics industry, so the difficult problems in these fields naturally couldn't stump them.
Mason and the others led Ryan to look at the samples.
Per Ryan's requirements, the prosthetic hadn't been made to look like the industry's common, deeply jarring style. That style, with a rod on the foot plate and then another rod and a socket up at the knee joint, was genuinely unattractive.
Instead, it had been designed following the form of a human leg, with sturdy titanium frames designed around the outside of both the calf and the thigh, simulating the shape of the body's muscles.
The thigh, though, was slightly thinner than a normal one, in order to avoid friction with the body.
"Our prosthetic follows the mainstream setup of the world, installing a microprocessor and a controllable hydraulic cylinder at the knee joint. The wearer can control it directly through our brain-control device, and it can accommodate multiple walking speeds at once," Mason introduced with great enthusiasm.
"At the same time, we also did a unique split design on the foot plate." Mason set the prosthetic down and displayed its foot plate.
This foot plate was designed in imitation of human foot bones, its various parts roughly divided into upper, middle, and lower sections, corresponding to the foot plate's toes through to its heel, just like a human foot. This design not only met Ryan's requirements but could also provide extra cushioning while walking, with strong terrain adaptability as well.
Ryan nodded in satisfaction, took another look, and suddenly noticed that the prosthetic no longer had the data cable connecting to the sensor cap.
"You converted the brain-control device to a wireless connection?" he asked.
Mason chuckled. "We figured the above-knee prosthetic is different from the hand prosthetic. Dragging around a wired sensor cap, with the cable running all the way from the head down to the thigh, would definitely affect usage and daily life. So we gave it a try, and we didn't expect it to actually work."
"Mm, this change is genuinely good," Ryan praised.
Fitting the brain-control device with a wireless transmission module wasn't an especially difficult thing. In essence, it was all just data transmission. What he valued was the serious, responsible heart that Mason and his team had.
Mason and the others dug up the earlier test videos to show Ryan as well.
Ryan watched them carefully. In the videos, the prosthetic changed bit by bit, slowly improving until it reached its current form.
By the time it had reached this current form, the volunteer testing the prosthetic walked on flat ground with a posture that looked no different from an ordinary person's. If he put on a pair of long trousers, there'd be no telling at all that he was a person with a leg disability.
On the market right now, even the most advanced smart bionic legs, after long training, still showed some unnaturalness when walking on flat ground.
Ryan was very satisfied with this.
"Now it's Q&A time. Whatever questions you have, hurry up and ask."
Whenever he came, he'd resolve Mason's team's confusions, and this time was naturally no exception.
The moment these words left his mouth, Mason's team stopped standing on ceremony, ushering Ryan over in front of a computer and immediately starting in on their questions.
Everyone surrounded Ryan in the center like stars cradling the moon, forming wall after wall of people. Others would have a hard time even squeezing in.
The new employees stood outside, staring blankly at the scene before them.
"Is it always like this when The Mech Expert comes here?" a bespectacled new employee asked.
"Of course." An employee who'd been squeezed out said it on tiptoe. "Once you ask a question, in under half an hour it saves you several months of trouble. In your place, would you ask?"
The new employee felt at his own hair volume and promptly joined the wall of people.
The Q&A lasted until the afternoon before Ryan finished answering all the questions everyone had raised.
Those new employees were completely won over. The problems they'd had piling up unsolved for over a month, once they reached Ryan's hands, got answers in under two minutes. Efficiency like that simply wasn't human.
And at this moment, the human-yet-not-quite-human Ryan was assigning Mason a new task.
"After you finish this current project, you've got a next one."
Mason said, "What task?"
"Research a brain-controlled exoskeleton."
"Ahem." Mason frowned. "A brain-controlled exoskeleton?"
He looked at Ryan in surprise, confirming that he wasn't joking.
Ryan shook his head and told him about Aaron Holt's commission from earlier.
"This thing uses Triton-1 and the new above-knee prosthetic as a foundation, plus a support skeleton, and that's it. It won't be much of a problem."
Ryan's tone was placid. But in Mason's eyes, this was a one-way ticket to going bald.
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