WeTried Translations
Translator: [IncomeElastic]
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◈ I Became a Genius Engineer That Mega Corporations Are Obsessed With ◈
Chapter 53
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Who the Hell at Synix Is It?
"There's nothing wrong with the prosthetic? So you're saying I'm the one who's broken?"
Something in my chest dropped at that. Her bearing and attitude hadn't changed at all, and still a chill of fear rolled over me.
"That's not what I mean. I mean the arm itself is fine. In cases like this, sometimes a problem in a different prosthetic, not the arm, ends up affecting the arm too. Do you have any other prosthetics?"
"Legs, a cyberbrain, and I swapped out my ears."
"Would you mind if I looked at the rest as well?"
A moment of silence.
The woman stared straight at me. Those eyes were measuring me, weighing whether this engineer could be trusted or whether it ended here.
Then she tilted her chin.
"Look."
I pulled my safety goggles back down.
[Spellbreaker's Magic Eye] lit up the inside of her white suit.
Legs first. Both of them were prosthetics too. Thick anchoring mounts were driven into every ankle and knee. They looked like they were meant to work as anchors, pinning her body to the floor whenever she used the wires.
The customer was small in build, so the legs got staked into the ground first.
'So she doesn't move at all. She handles every attack and defense with the wires alone. Impressive.'
And surprisingly, the legs looked like Gordon's work as well.
'Gordon's skill really is something else. I learn a lot from it.'
No major problem showed up in the legs either, for now.
'The cyberbrain's complicated, though.'
The cyberbrain wasn't one of Gordon's pieces. It was a lower-end Synix product. Of course, even a lower-end Synix cyberbrain cost an astronomical sum.
The cyberbrain looked fine on the surface too.
Just in case, I stepped closer for a more detailed look.
'Hmmm... I thought if there was a problem, it'd be the cyberbrain...'
For now, nothing seemed off there either.
Still, cyberbrains were prosthetics packed with so many convoluted bugs that they were worth a second look.
First, though, I checked behind the ear.
Under the short hair, deep inside the ear, a small device was embedded.
"...Now I'll look at the ears."
I started peering into the ear.
'The ears are Gordon's work too.'
Only after examining the ear did I come to understand the thinking behind this build.
Thin wires were hard to track with the eyes, so he'd made her confirm them by sound. So she could hear the vibration the wire picked up and know what it was doing.
Not even the Fupunkalypse community, where people made every kind of build under the sun, had ever turned up a build like this.
'As expected of the old man... his ideas are on another level.'
But if that was the case, where on earth was the problem?
Arms, legs, all fine. And as far as the Magic Eye could tell, nothing was broken in the device inside the ear either.
If I couldn't tell by looking, I'd have to listen.
[Mana Listening].
A detection spell I'd picked up on reaching 2nd tier. If the Magic Eye saw structures at rest, Mana Listening heard the flow of mana in motion. It demanded concentration, so you had to stand still to use it, but despite that drawback it was a good skill, used quite often even in major builds.
"Could you draw out the wires? Then pluck them one at a time, slowly."
Without a word, the woman spread her fingers.
Shhhk-
Threads finer than hair slid out of the rings and hung in the air. Without the lights catching on them, I'd never have known they were there.
I closed my eyes.
The sounds of the world drew back a layer, and beneath them, the sound of flowing mana rose up.
Twang-
The first string rang. A low, clear note passed through the ring, ran up the arm, crossed the shoulder and neck, and flowed into the ear. The device inside the ear took that vibration and turned it into a single tone.
Twang-
The second string. A slightly higher note. It went in properly and came out properly.
Third, fourth, fifth. Each string had its own note, rising one step at a time like climbing stairs.
Then the sixth string and the seventh.
The vibrations coming up the arm were clearly different. The sixth was one step lower, the seventh one step higher. But the notes coming out past the ear device were identical.
Two strings were being heard as one tone.
The higher the strings went, the more overlapping notes there were.
The wires were producing their own notes just fine. What had gone out of true was the ear, which received those notes and sorted them into slots.
Two strings that sounded the same. Try to move one and it wouldn't be strange if the other moved instead.
So that was the secret behind the wires flying off to the wrong place.
I opened my eyes.
"So it was the ear that was broken."
The woman's eyebrow twitched.
"You asked earlier if you were the one who's broken. You're not. The wires are fine too."
I pointed behind her ear.
"Right now, every wire is still producing its note exactly. But the ear device that receives those sounds and sorts them is broken. So several different strings sound like the same note to your ear."
"......"
"That ear is something that has to be retuned from time to time. When was the last time you had it tuned?"
The woman said nothing for a while.
"Before Gordon took down the sign."
Then, fiddling with her ear, she went on.
"The reason... why... I didn't... Gordon never told me I had to."
A proper engineer wouldn't have let that happen. He must have told her. Gordon, of all people, surely would have. Instead of saying so, I just listened.
"...What you did earlier."
The woman said it while reeling in the wires hanging in the air.
"Plucking the strings one at a time. Gordon did exactly that. Once a month I'd sit at Gordon's workbench and pluck the strings one by one, and Gordon would listen for a long while without saying anything."
She stared straight at me. It was a little different from the eyes that had been measuring me before.
"You. What's your name?"
"Dex."
The woman looked up at my black hair for a moment.
"...Life can't have been easy for you."
It was what the old man had said to me the moment he heard my name, the first day I met him.
"Those were the first words Gordon ever said to me."
"To me too."
The woman looked down at the prosthetic hand on the workbench.
"I was a half-blood brat rolling around Ground Zero. I had no name. Everyone called me whatever they felt like."
Weakling. Cripple. Asian bastard. Yellow monkey.
The names left in Seol Gye-hyeon's head came back to me. Even the memory of the day he was kicked out of the orphanage the moment he came of age, without so much as a bag.
"Gordon picked me up and gave me a name. Nina. Apparently it just means 'girl.' Lazy, right?"
Rita had once said Gordon liked kids, deep down.
"Dex is a name the old man gave me too."
"Figured. Gordon never spends more than three seconds on a name."
Nina lifted the prosthetic hand. The rings fitted at every joint glinted under the lights.
"After he took down the sign, why didn't you go looking for him?"
"That's none of your business."
Ah, yes. Sorry. Shouldn't have asked.
Maybe that question had crossed a line.
Feeling sheepish for no good reason, I scratched my head.
"You're not mixed. You're a pureblood. So why are you at the bottom?"
"...I don't know."
I really didn't.
In Seol Gye-hyeon's memories there wasn't even a parent's face. His memory started in an orphanage. He'd been moved between facilities a few times, then put out on the street the moment he came of age. That was all there was.
"My memory starts at the orphanage. I don't even know my parents' faces. Pureblood or not, there I was just an Asian bastard."
Why was a pureblood at the bottom?
Honestly, I'd been wondering the same thing since the day I came into this body.
"You don't know? You were abandoned?"
"...Probably, I'd guess?"
"Then we're the same."
Nina rolled one ring between her fingertips.
"Gordon's workshop always had mountains of junk in the corners. When I asked where he'd picked it all up, he said it had been thrown away so he took it. Said it was still usable."
At that, I found myself looking around the garage.
A street stall that picked up other people's junk, fixed it, and sold it. And the old man who'd picked up someone like that, and handed over this building and the old sign.
So I was one of the scraps that old man had picked up too.
"Then I guess you and I were both still usable."
Nina looked at me. And for the first time, she smiled, just a little.
"Rex comes here often, right? You're the one who saved Rex."
"He comes in for regular checkups. Anything beyond that is customer confidentiality."
"Right. I won't ask beyond that."
Nina looked down at the prosthetic hand on the workbench.
"That kid's left arm, I gave him the first one."
The left hand is the more meaningful prosthetic. Let's do the left.
I remembered Rex's voice, insisting on the left arm when we installed the module, even though the right was the more expensive one.
I didn't say it out loud. That was customer confidentiality too.
"Don't tell Rex about today."
"I keep Rex's business secret from you, boss, so how am I supposed to tell Rex your secrets?"
"That kid."
She wasn't listening to me.
"I can't be broken."
Running a garage in the game, I'd run into cases like this. Boss-class NPCs of some organization, especially, had often been like this.
I slid in to sit beside Nina.
"Why?"
"It happens when I see the way that kid looks at me. I can't be broken. Because he trusts me and follows me that much."
"What kind of subordinate is Rex to you, Nina?"
"I felt it when we first met. That he was like me. His eyes were the kind that never wanted to lose. That's why I liked him."
"Have you ever told him you liked him?"
"No. I can't."
"Why can't you?"
"When he looks at me with those eyes, everything I meant to say flies out of my head."
Ah. So this was that kind of boss worry.
"Do you remember the day you first met?"
"That kid, in a completely hoarse voice, saying 'I'll do it.'"
What on earth was that about?
"...I told him I don't remember."
"Why?"
"That's none of your business either."
The tips of Nina's ears had turned red as she said it.
"Yep."
A customer who was hard to find the line with. Better not to drag the conversation out.
"I'd love to keep talking, but from here I'll start work on the ear. Don't be alarmed if you can't hear anything."
* * *
Upper tiers, Arcana Tech headquarters.
"...The 301 series."
Klaus, the head of the design office, pressed a finger to one line of the lawsuit materials.
Silver Aether Wing Mk-3. Arcana's steady seller, and a product whose design he had personally overseen.
The official opinion from the upper-tier repair shop that the plaintiff had submitted was accurate. Almost too accurate.
A minute difference in the specifications of the mana insulation contact, present only in the early production 301 series. A play that was fine under normal conditions and opened up only at the moment high-density mana gathered at the wrist.
It was a defect that even headquarters' monthly precision scans hadn't caught. In fact, until this opinion arrived, no one in the design office had known.
"You'd never find it by opening up a single unit."
No matter how long you looked at one 301 unit, the figures were within spec. The difference only showed once you set it beside other production batches and compared every contact point. For that, you'd have to open up at least a few dozen units. And a single unit was no small price.
"Chief. Additional report on the plaintiff's situation."
A subordinate held out a tablet.
"The plaintiff recently replaced a prosthetic hand. It's a Synix Cardia Basic."
Klaus's finger stopped.
"Didn't that doctor have substantial debts?"
"Yes. We understand there's still a long way to go on the startup loan repayment."
And a person like that, in the middle of a lawsuit, had brought in a new prosthetic hand, and a Synix one at that.
A lab that could open up and compare dozens of units. Money enough to carry the suit to the end. And the new prosthetic hand on the plaintiff's arm.
There was only one answer.
"...So Synix put them up to it."
Klaus closed the materials.
"Keep dragging the trial out. Meanwhile, dig into Synix's lab. Find out how many Silver Aethers they've bought up."
"Understood."
After the subordinate withdrew, Klaus opened the closed materials again.
Someone had found the flaw in what he'd made before he had.
"Who the hell at Synix found it?"
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