Chapter 22

March indeed got busy as my email inbox started filling up in the days after the robot and AI papers were published to the world. Requests for interviews from various technical journals were at the forefront but then institutions and companies started requesting licencing information or even robots and copies of the AI program as if I would just hand either of them over. Base logged every one of them into a spreadsheet that he shared to me and then I shared to my parents. He was kind enough to categorize them by type of request and then by credibility and importance to us. Furthermore, he infiltrated all the companies to monitor their intent and what they thought the robots and AI were worth versus what they were prepared to offer for either purchase of robots or licencing fees. From that, Base and I established a minimum cost for each prototype and an estimate for a production robot.

One of the companies from the US was preparing to infiltrate us to steal our secrets, starting with hacking and then physically stealing prototypes and computers, as necessary. Another dozen companies or governments from around the world were preparing similar actions, sending spies to penetrate our corporation while they tried to hack our website and corporate servers. Base and I had a laugh at imagining various Asian or Middle East spies working to blend into the population of Dryden with a predominately Western European heritage while trying to locate our corporate headquarters. We did drastically upgrade our security around the property, setting up cameras, motion sensors and drones to monitor the skies, water (or ice), and the woods surrounding us. The garage got cameras and an alarm system that was much more sophisticated than any on earth so it couldn’t be hacked or disabled. M3V1 was now on twenty-four-hour surveillance, even while charging. Base built a couple more half-size security robots to stand guard in the nearby woods, camouflaged to fit into the browns of the trees and the foliage.

M4V1, the first service robot, came inside after being upgraded with the same security programming M3V1 had. During the day, he helped with the cooking, cleaning, laundry and even with the last couple snow shovelings of the season and then went on guard while we were sleeping. We prepared a laptop with a bunch of outdated tech and code that would lead them in circles while infecting their systems if they downloaded it and left it on my desk just in case they got that far. My working laptop was stored in a cubby cut out of the bricks of the fireplace but lined to protect it from the heat while also hiding it from any scans.

Base had the robots cut out a large room out of the bedrock downstairs and fortify it while my parents were at work. The door was hidden behind the blocks that made the normal basement wall and the seams were invisible until it opened, which only could be done via a signal from Base. The safe room was hidden from any scan known to man as ground penetrating radar would just see the bedrock that the basement was cut from. We put M5V1, the space robot, and M4V2, the child service robot prototype, inside and it had enough space for my parents and I to hide comfortably, should we be attacked. Base and I stocked it with water, food and three comfortable cots he ordered online.

Base, using the same technology that had been used to make the tunnels in their base, continued to cut an escape tunnel from the safe room out into the woods with the exit only opening from inside. Unbeknownst to me, he also started constructing another tunnel from the garage all the way to his base, deep underneath the ground to avoid any chance of discovery. It took him a month but then all the unique supplies and components we needed from the base were delivered via the tunnel by his robots and arrived overnight. My parents, not knowing anything about the espionage or the preparations we had going on, met with me on the weekend and we tentatively picked a few companies to meet with. There were two Canadian firms, three from the US and a couple from Europe chosen, all for the robotics and AI.

As the other papers were published, five companies from Canada and the US were chosen to meet about the scrubbers and another five companies for the batteries. NASA and DARPA, as well as the Canadian Space Agency, the European Space agency and several private space agencies wanted to meet on the M5V1 prototype and my space station and space craft designs once the papers were out in the world.

Along with the requests for more information and meetings, came requests for samples of the batteries, scrubbers and robots. Patents had finally come for everything so we were covered against blatant rip-offs of our IP and our designs. No one else knew how to produce any of them yet but from the patents they could get started. We planned to beat them all to the punch and get them made quickly, either by ourselves or at a partnering company.

The plan was to make prototypes and samples here in Dryden for businesses and universities or agencies and then contract with companies for the higher volume manufacturing. With the money some of the companies were proposing, we felt we had enough potential income to rent a building in town with some surprisingly modern offices attached as well as sufficient room in the main manufacturing building to set up lines for building robots, scrubbers and batteries.

We took immediate possession of the building in the third week of March, including the office furniture so mom just had the offices professionally cleaned and ordered in all the office and kitchen supplies we would need. Dad helped me move the robots to the plant and Base and I had them cleaning and organizing the plant. Mom decided to keep her accounting business going until the end of April as it was the end of financial year for most companies as well as tax deadline for Canada. She would then come aboard full time at Addler Enterprises Inc. in May. Dad would stay at the airport until he was needed full time, after enough money came in to justify them both getting a salary from the company. My parents surprised me with a sign for the front with Addler Enterprises Inc. in big letters as well as cards for each of us. Mom got CFO, dad got CEO and I was President of the company, with each getting an office with our names on the door.

I worked with Base and the robots, except for the M5V1 and M4V2, to build lines for each of the three products, starting with a line for industrial robots so we could build more to help in production. The line was simply steel tables with conveyors between each station to move the components onward. A robot manned each table to make or install physical components such as the spine, limbs, skin, electronics and the final table put it all together. A separate area at the end added the AI programming and then tested the robots. Mom ordered enough components to make twenty robots, but we made only ten to start, perfecting the flow of the line and leaving enough stock on hand to show potential clients the production method.

The ten robots we made were put to work on the second line for scrubbers and the third line for batteries. Mom had contracted a mold maker in Winnipeg to create the molds for the cartridges and the battery casings for the robots, car batteries and for AA batteries. The mold would make several of the casings at once and it took a mold press about half a minute for each cycle to inject the heated plastic resin, hold it tight while it flowed to every part of the mold, cool it down and eject the part or parts from the mold. There were a couple plastic mold shops also in Winnipeg that would run the molds for us. We had to provide the special material that made the battery casings unique and they had to sign an NDA to never reveal the chemistry. Extra quality and quantity controls were needed to ensure no product was lost or stolen, whether in it’s component form or completed battery casings. The material for the scrubber cartridges was high heat resistant but that was a common demand for plastic and readily available. We contracted for thousand battery casings of each type and then two thousand of the scrubber cartridges.

A metal fabricator made the clamps required for the exhaust pipes and we purchased mesh cloth in large rolls from a company in Toronto. Base and I had the robots construct a separate room inside the building to infuse the cloth with the chemicals needed to trap the pollution. It had to be enclosed and vented so the chemicals wouldn’t harm anyone. Of course, we put our own triple filters on the vent pipes to eliminate any of the chemicals getting out into the main building or into the atmosphere.

By early April, we had robots ready to build robots, robots ready to assemble scrubbers and robots ready to fill battery casings. All my papers were out in the world, all our patents were approved and our headquarters was ready to host companies and agencies. Mom hired a receptionist to handle the front door visitors and the growing phone calls we were receiving. There was also a shipper/receiver hired to handle all the incoming shipments of components and put them in their proper storage area, though the robots helped once the trucks were unloaded.

While all this was going on, Base and I worked hard on the new space exploration game. We had hundreds of planets created, dozens of species developed and close to a thousand player types to chose from. Single player offline campaigns that came with every game were done and most of the online scenarios were being tested by beta testers we invited to try the game out. We left a few scenarios to be developed based on their feedback and a couple were held back as a surprise. As a player, you could join an existing instance of a scenario or start a new one and invite people to play with you. So far, the feedback had been enthusiastic to say the least, with only a few issues that were quickly fixed or upgraded.

We made a deal with server farms in Toronto, New York and Los Angeles in North America as well as in London, France, Italy, Tokyo, Kenya, and Rio to host separate scenarios in each region and in different languages. Everything was ready to go by the end of the month, with initial costs to join at sixty dollars per person, plus monthly subscription fees of fifteen dollars as well as in-game purchases. Advertising and reviews from gaming magazines were already out and there was an exiting buzz for the game. We knew we had a winner as our website tracked traffic checking out the site and we also started pre-booking players. We had half a million hits in the last month alone and twenty thousand players already paying the initial sixty dollars to help with our cash crunch. Some of that went to rent the servers but we had merchandising ideas for caps, shirts, sweaters, hoodies and even action dolls and toy spaceships if it really took off. The game went live on the fifteenth of April and was an instant hit. The initial twenty thousand users climbed to a hundred thousand world wide and each server bank quickly found itself busy with user connections.

Money started pouring in and we found ourselves needing accounting and legal help. I was introduced to our new paralegal, Mrs. Rachel Owens, and found out that she was the mother of Reece and Riley Owens from school. Mom got an accounting clerk to handle the accounts receivables and payables so that mom could concentrate on the meetings with the companies. Base and I spend our remaining time developing new propulsion techniques for atmosphere to space vehicles and for pure space ships. The Telan originally used nuclear reactors to power their early spaceships as we now did with our water surface ships and below water submarines. They created hot fusion centuries before for their surface to space craft and their short-distance travel using space craft in their solar system. Earth was developing hot fusion rockets but no one was there yet.

The Telans had moved on from fusion for their long-distance travel and developed close to light speed capability using ion propulsion engines powered by electromagnetic fields to create and accelerate a charged propellant or ions and then propel them out of the ion rocket. Earth used them as well in satellites but couldn’t fit a small enough power supply to provide ions for more than a small thruster. The Telan solved that issue by creating a power engine which generated power via a mineral found in crystal form only in their galaxy. The mineral wasn’t even on our periodic table and wasn’t pronounceable in our language so we just called it Telanium.

Base and I discussed what was close to it in our solar system and eventually had to mix several minerals into a solid that we called Addlerium. Using the properties of our new chemical to produce the electricity to power the ion rockets, we modified the propulsion system from the Telan ship into one that created enough thrust to launch vehicles or to brake a vehicle to allow it to enter an orbit around a planet or moon. That meant several ion thrusters were needed of various sizes around the space ship to produce thrust to change course, escape the gravity of a planet and to slow a space ship down. There wasn’t such a thing as a brake on a ship in space so we decided to put a thruster in the front as well as the back, rather than flip the space ship to slow down as Earth space ships currently did.

I took over a section of the new building, put up walls to screen the work from everyone and built the prototype of the new engine while also making the power source chemical. An ion thruster, bigger than normal went at the end and it was ready for testing. I wasn’t going to test it in the building or in the forest anywhere around the town so we would have to partner with a space company or agency to test the propulsion engine and then build my space ship. We left that to the last portion of our visits, until we had all the other products sold and being produced.

Finally, we were ready to meet the robotics companies from the U.S. and Canada, the scrubber companies, the battery companies as well as the agencies that wanted to see the space robot and ship designs. We started on bringing them in on Monday, April twenty-second after everything was ready to demonstrate. Two-a-day meetings were held the entire week and more the next week. We had a presentation to show and then a demonstration catered to each product. Photography was not permitted but we provided them with a video that showed most of what we were doing. To say that everyone was impressed was an understatement and companies came with a presentation of their own to convince us to partner with them. After the presentations, we got down to the nitty gritty with each, listening to their proposals and how they planned to make, test, market and control the robots from being used for nefarious means. As we had decided to keep the AI programming in our hands, there had to be changes in their proposal for the robots.

After all the meetings and updated proposals were in, we sat down and made some decisions. The easiest to decide on was the pollution scrubbers. A Canadian company, that also had an American division, called International Environmental Solutions Inc., had the best proposal and had current contacts in the governments of both countries to get the new scrubbers passed quickly. They also had labs to test the scrubbers to ensure they passed the stringent safety protocols and that the scrubbers actually did what we said they did. Their proposal was to pay thirty percent of all gross sales to us and all we had to do was provide them with the prototypes and the approval to licence the technology. As part of the deal, a million-dollar initial payment was also agreed to in order for them to be the only company we would licence to in North America. They wanted to sell each one for cars at forty dollars U.S. and we agreed on an estimated production cost of fourteen dollars when everything was at full speed. We had our paralegal look over the deal and then signed it later that day.