In early September in Huizhou, a slight chill already laced the evening air.
A black Santana pulled up to the steps of the School of Physics building. The back door opened, and Alchemist stepped out.
He wore a somewhat wrinkled white shirt, his tie pulled loose and hanging askew around his neck. He carried a black briefcase, and his steps were heavy.
The security guard in the lobby saw him and quickly stood up to greet him.
"Dean Fang, just back from your trip?"
Alchemist nodded without a word and walked straight toward the stairs.
Alchemist reached his office, unlocked the door, and went inside. He didn’t turn on the overhead lights, flicking on only the lamp on his desk.
He tossed his briefcase onto the desk, picked up the receiver of his landline, and dialed a number.
"Zhang Yuan, come to my office. Bring Lin Fang."
After hanging up, Alchemist leaned back in his chair, pulled a pack of cigarettes from a drawer, and lit one.
Less than five minutes later, the sound of hurried footsteps echoed from the hallway.
Zhang Yuan pushed the door open and walked in with Lin Fang right behind him. He was still holding a half-eaten steamed bun.
"Professor, you’re back from the Capital City?"
Zhang Yuan casually set the bun on a nearby coffee table, pulled over two chairs, and sat down with Lin Fang.
Alchemist didn’t say anything. He took a long drag from his cigarette, then crushed the butt out in the ashtray.
He reached over, unzipped the black briefcase, and pulled out a thick document. The cover was printed in a foreign language and stamped with the red seal of the Ministry of Railways.
Alchemist tossed the document onto the table in front of Zhang Yuan.
"Take a look."
Alchemist’s voice was heavy.
Zhang Yuan picked up the document and flipped through a few pages. His brow immediately furrowed.
"German? A Simen Zi technical manual?"
"To be precise, it was a single page they ’accidentally’ let us see at the negotiating table this morning."
Alchemist scoffed.
Lin Fang leaned over for a look. It was a diagram showing a high-speed train next to several parabolic pressure-wave graphs.
"At the preliminary meeting this morning, representatives from both Simen Zi and Kawasaki were present."
Alchemist leaned back in his chair, watching the two of them.
"The representative from the German Side pulled out this diagram and asked us the standard cross-sectional area of our domestic railway tunnels."
Zhang Yuan looked up.
"Around one hundred square meters. That’s standard."
"Right. One hundred square meters."
Alchemist nodded.
"Then they smiled. They told our negotiating team that the aerodynamic profile of their ICE3 train was designed based on the tunnel cross-sections in their own country. They said if we didn’t buy their complete aerodynamic software package and just slapped together a nose cone on our own, the instant it entered a tunnel at speeds over 250 kilometers per hour, the resulting micro-pressure wave would shatter every window on the train."
The office fell silent.
The color drained from Zhang Yuan’s face.
"That’s a threat. We can just run our own wind tunnel tests to modify the nose cone design."
"And how would we do that?" Alchemist looked at him. "Do we have any full-scale transonic data?"
Zhang Yuan opened his mouth, but no words came out.
They didn’t.
The country’s current high-speed wind tunnels couldn’t generate high-precision data under such extreme conditions.
And as for computer simulations, their computational power was hopelessly bottlenecked by traditional fluid dynamics equations.
"I told them we could calculate the data ourselves."
Alchemist’s voice suddenly rose.
"And do you know what they said?"
Zhang Yuan and Lin Fang looked at Alchemist.
"Their expert said, right to all of our faces, that given China’s current level of fluid dynamics algorithms and computer hardware, we wouldn’t be able to calculate a full-scale 3D aerodynamic model for transonic conditions in the next ten years."
Alchemist gestured toward the document on the table.
"That’s why, for the source code license for this single set of aerodynamic data, they have the gall to demand two hundred million euros. And it’s a black-box license—we get the results, not the methodology."
Zhang Yuan shot to his feet.
"Two hundred million euros? For a black box? That’s daylight robbery!"
Zhang Yuan’s chest heaved.
"It is daylight robbery."
Alchemist tilted his head back, his gaze fixed on the ceiling.
"Because they’ve found our weak spot and they’re pressing it. We can’t produce our own data, which means we can’t prove we can build a safe train without their license. If we don’t pay up, the negotiations are dead in the water."
Lin Fang’s expression was grim.
"What’s the Ministry’s position?"
"The Ministry is stalling for time. I was in back-to-back meetings the entire time I was in the Capital City."
Alchemist sat up straight, lacing his fingers together on the desk.
"The second round of core negotiations is early next month. The Ministry is under enormous pressure. If we can’t show up with some theoretical foundation of our own, we might just have to bite the bullet and pay the two hundred million euros."
Alchemist looked at Zhang Yuan and Lin Fang.
"The other Jiaoda universities are all running their wind tunnels nonstop, working themselves to the bone on physical models. The task assigned to us at Keda is to simulate the underlying fluid dynamics algorithms."
Alchemist paused.
"I spent three days in the Capital City, calling in every favor I had, and managed to secure forty-eight hours of shared-grid computing time on the nodes at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Supercomputing Center."
Zhang Yuan’s eyes lit up.
"Supercomputer time? When do we get it?"
"It gets allocated to us at dawn, twenty days from now," Alchemist said.
"But the supercomputer isn’t for trial and error."
Alchemist stared at Zhang Yuan.
"In the coming days, you need to get a stable, error-free sandbox version of the 3D model’s underlying algorithm running on our four local servers. If your code causes a memory overflow here, it’ll just be useless junk that crashes the supercomputer too. We cannot waste the machine time the nation has allocated to us like that."

Comments

Loading...