"Put the file down and let me take a look. You can go now." Adam was, after all, Adam—calmly wiping his hands, he waved Morsey away. After Morsey dashed off in a hurry, Adam picked up the file, but instead of looking pleased, his expression grew clouded and uncertain.
Just when Adam should be celebrating, his reaction was so strange that Parker couldn’t help but ask, "Boss, what’s bothering you?"
"I’ve got two things on my mind," Adam said, raising a finger. "First, now that we have Sophia, Tiberius Laboratory is basically an endless treasure trove. But I’ve realized this Manchester Team just can’t keep up with Sophia’s pace. Last time she handed us her results, it took our whole team—over two hundred people—a month just to understand her conclusions!"
"Plus, I know her—she writes her technical reports in her own logic, never nitpicking over every penny, which is why we set up the Manchester Team to handle the finances. Their job is to split, splice, and dig for gold in her work. Thirty projects isn’t the limit—dig deeper and there’s bound to be more treasure, but that takes time. Yet, in just a month, with barely any decent equipment, she’s already produced more results. Sure, the team’s still new and not running smoothly, but it’s obvious—we’re falling way behind her pace."
Parker Peterson immediately started calculating. "I get it—we’re too slow turning results into cash. That’s easy to fix. I’ll step up recruitment, get more tech staff, and set up a dedicated operations department for production, management, and profit."
"Yeah, but it’s fine if we can’t cash in right away. Building up our tech base gives us leverage against any competitors. Handle the hiring as you see fit—we’re in this for the big leagues, so don’t sweat the costs. Let’s set the recruitment goal at...two thousand people. Two thousand should be enough to keep up."
"Alright," Peterson replied. "So, what’s the second thing that’s bothering you?"
"The second thing is competition. I’m not worried about having competitors—there’s only one Sophia in the whole world. As long as she’s with us, nobody can beat us in R&D. What I’m worried about is how to keep the competition alive. Even if we’re rivals on paper, I need them to survive." Adam pulled out a tube of toothpaste. "Take this processor, for example—something this monstrous can’t just be released all at once. It’s like this toothpaste: you can’t squeeze it all out in one go. The world shouldn’t be seeing tech this crazy at this point in time."
"I get it," Peterson said, catching on quick. "We need to water down the tech, split a leap into ten or a hundred upgrades. We can even break it up into different models and series—like 3 Series, 5 Series, 7 Series, 9 Series—and throw in a few strategic downgrades. That way, we can milk this tech for thirty years straight."
"Well said, but thirty years is too fast—we need to stretch it to fifty." Adam nodded, deep in thought. "But the real question is, what excuse do we use to control the pace of tech competition...?"
"I've got an idea." Peterson, ever the resourceful right-hand man, immediately came up with a wicked scheme: "There was this engineer at Fairchild Semiconductor named Gordon Moore. He wrote an article about how integrated circuits double over time. Let's hype him up, make his theory famous, and pin all the responsibility on him. Let him carry the weight."
"Perfect. I've heard of him too. Let's do it. We'll call the hype... Moore's Law. From now on, anything about the pace of semiconductor development gets dumped on him. And didn't he start a company called... Intel? We'll buy that too, use it as a springboard. Remember, semiconductors are the future of the world. I want our flag flying over that company in three months. No failures allowed. If anyone tries to block the acquisition..." Adam's face darkened. "You know what to do."
"Yes, sir!" Parker Peterson clearly knew his way around shady deals, and instantly got the message.
With a weight lifted off his shoulders and everything thriving, Adam could finally enjoy brushing his teeth in front of the mirror: "Series 3, Series 5, Series 7? Not bad. Oh, and I need to acquire some manufacturers to boost production. If we're talking industrial standards, maybe a German car plant? That's worth considering. And with this much processing power, it'd be a shame not to use it for something bigger—like making movies and cartoons to stir up some buzz. I'll call it... the Cybertron Series."
Swish, swish—Adam brushed his teeth, happily plotting the future: "For the Cybertron Series, I want three main storylines. Number one: super-smart machines replace humans, kick off a nuclear war, and wipe out civilization. Number two: super-smart machines enslave humans, build a virtual network to farm our minds and harvest our creativity. Number three: the machines fully evolve into independent lifeforms and build the mechanical planet Cybertron—now that's a killer idea, the more I think about it, the more I love it. I'm investing in this for sure! Government, private sector, concepts, products, animation, toys—I'm starting a new era of tech and entertainment synergy!"
Fueled by ambition, Adam threw himself into the grind—one day schmoozing with Pentagon brass, the next recruiting talent and building his company. Despite having zero diplomas, Adam, thanks to his elite upbringing, was a business natural. Give him some capital and he'd make it rain; give him a shot and he'd whip a two-thousand-strong enterprise into shape.
In America, with unemployment sky-high, finding workers was a breeze.
Unity, urgency, discipline—Adam quickly built his own company culture. The whole place ran like clockwork; even the office clerks jogged everywhere. Reports, calls, meetings—keep it short and sweet. The Tiberius sales company ran like a military camp, and forget about nine-to-five—nobody even dreamed of it.
But top to bottom, the whole company radiated energy and growth. Every employee felt like their work pushed the company forward—and fattened their own wallets. So even with tons of overtime, complaints were rare.
The big project—with the Pentagon—finally got nailed down in mid-May. This was Adam Zade's first deal with the U.S. military, and it was a slam dunk. The Pentagon paid up fast, the network rollout kept hitting milestones, tech tests were a hit, and the cash just kept rolling in.
All through 1981, the Zade Family was neck-deep in construction—borrowing, expanding, building, launching projects, hiring, bulking up fast. Like some kind of super-monster, slowly stretching out its limbs.
Spring turned to summer, summer to fall. In September, the Tiberius Laboratory finally sprang up at lightning speed on the old warehouse site in Wisconsin. Well, the interior was still under renovation, but the main building and piping were done.
That day, Sophia and Adam actually walked side by side—a rarity since the lab project started. Both had been swamped, barely finding time to take a stroll together. Months had passed, and while Adam's reputation kept growing, to Sophia he was still the same Adam. But to Adam, Sophia was no longer the girl he remembered.
During this time, Sophia personally recruited a dozen lead scientists—mostly young geniuses in math, logic, semiconductors, and materials science. Add in over a hundred assistants, and the lab was no longer just an empty shell.
Walking down the lab corridors, busy assistants zipped by. Don't underestimate them—each had serious skills, some were mechanical engineering or industrial design prodigies, the kind of talent NASA would drool over for their spacecraft projects. But Adam could see it: every one of these whiz kids looked at Sophia with a mix of fear and awe.
He glanced at the girl beside him; she seemed oblivious to all the admiration. Adam couldn't help but smile—Sophia was still Sophia, always a bit scatterbrained. He mused, "Group Four's up to two thousand people, Groups Three and Two have their own leads, and the lab's almost done—just about ready for launch."
Adam looked around, feeling all kinds of emotions.
This really was a lab with massive investment. Luckily, no matter how much went in, the returns would be hundreds or thousands of times more. Staring at the sprawling buildings, Adam felt a swell of pride. He'd sold the farm to build this huge, gorgeous, one-of-a-kind lab—nothing else like it on Earth.
But Sophia clearly saw things differently.
"Finished? What are you talking about? This is just the beginning." Sophia said matter-of-factly. "We're not even at one-thousandth of our progress yet."
Adam shivered all over, then forced a laugh: "S-Sophia, if you're talking about the Moon Project, the difficulty is just..."
"I'm not talking about the Moon Tide Project. Just the lab itself—this is only the start." Sophia whipped out a blueprint and slapped it on a table that appeared out of nowhere: "Look, I just drew this up. The Tiberius Laboratory should be built like this."
Adam squinted at it. He didn't get most of it, but the very first number made his eyes pop.
"Eighteen thousand four hundred twenty-five meters? Eighteen kilometers? That's huge! Wait—hold on, this number's for height?! Am I seeing this right? Eighteen thousand meters tall?"
"The numbers are fine, and your eyes are fine." Sophia nodded calmly. "That's exactly how tall it is."
Adam jabbed at the number like he was having a finger spasm, his face a picture of comic disbelief: "Eighteen thousand meters tall? That's like two Mount Everests! Even if you built it from the bottom of the Pacific, you'd poke straight into the stratosphere!"
"Now that's what I call—" Sophia raised a finger, dead serious, "the Tiberius Laboratory."