Tech Giants: Starting from Bankrupt Companies

382: Chapter 382 Technological ExplosionLate one night in February, at the headquarters of Xingchen Technology in Nanshan District, Shenzhen.

In the entire building, only the lights on the thirty-eighth floor were still on. Su Chen sat in his office, and on the virtual screen before him, a line of familiar text slowly emerged—it was the interface of the Hyper-Dimensional System. On a deep blue background, silver characters flickered like stars. In the bottom right corner, a number was ticking: 600,000,000,000.

Six hundred billion.

This was the total amount of cashback generated through the Hyper-Dimensional System by the two major groups, Spark and Xingchen, in 2020. Su Chen stared at this number for a long time, until the Shenzhen Bay outside his window transitioned from being brilliantly lit to having only a few scattered points of light. He knew that this money wasn’t for buying buildings, paying dividends, or saving in a bank. This money was for buying the future.

He took a deep breath and thought to himself, ”Exchange all.”

The system’s response came almost instantly, as calm as if it were confirming a trivial matter:

”Confirmed. Exchanging for technology thirty years ahead of the current era. Ten major fields, two hundred and thirty-seven core technologies. Data transmission in progress.”

Su Chen closed his eyes. In his consciousness, data surged like a flood—not as text or images, but as complete knowledge maps. The lattice structures of materials unfolded in his mind like steel flowers; energy reaction equations burned in his consciousness like miniature suns; chip architecture diagrams extended like three-dimensional cities.

At four o’clock in the morning, the transmission ended.

Su Chen opened his eyes, a single tear at the corner of his eye. It wasn’t sadness; it was awe. He saw the path of humanity for the next thirty years—from Earth to the Moon, from the Moon to Mars, and from Mars to the entire solar system. This path was now held in his hands.

He picked up the phone and dialed the number of Zhou Yuanshan, the Dean of the Xingchen Academy of Sciences.

The phone rang twice before being picked up. The sixty-five-year-old scientist wasn’t asleep yet at this hour.

”Professor Zhou, come to my office for a moment,” Su Chen’s voice was slightly raspy. ”I have some things to show you.”

Twenty minutes later, Zhou Yuanshan pushed open the door to the thirty-eighth floor. He was wearing a sweater, his hair was a mess, and there were coffee stains on his glasses. But when he saw the content on the electronic screen in front of Su Chen, he froze at the doorway.

”This... what is this?” His voice was trembling.

Su Chen turned around, his gaze calm yet burning: ”The future.”

February 15th, Xingchen Academy of Sciences, Lecture Hall No. 1.

The lecture hall, which could hold five hundred people, was packed. In the front row were the Academicians of the Xingchen Academy of Sciences; white-haired senior scientists sat alongside young researchers in their early thirties. In the middle were the technical heads of various business departments. Chu Tianming sat in the first row, next to the head of the chip department. The back rows were crowded with engineers who had rushed over upon hearing the news; some were standing, others were sitting on the floor.

Zhou Yuanshan stood on the podium before a blank projection screen. He didn’t use a PPT or any presentation slides. He simply typed ten words onto the screen:

Materials, Energy, chips, Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Robotics, Biomedicine, Interstellar Communication, National Defense and Military Industry, New Energy Vehicles, Intelligent Manufacturing.

”Ten days ago, President Su gave me a batch of information,” Zhou Yuanshan’s voice was hoarse, but every word felt like a nail being driven into the air. ”I thought it was just ordinary technical data. I was wrong.”

He pressed the remote, and a three-dimensional diagram of a lattice structure appeared on the screen—it wasn’t any known material. The lattice looked like an infinite fractal snowflake, unfolding, folding, and unfolding again in three-dimensional space.

”Quantum State Controlled Materials. Ten times the strength of carbon nanotubes, one-tenth the weight of aluminum. Room-temperature superconductivity. Programmable electromagnetic properties. This isn’t a material; this is magic.”

Someone in the audience gasped.

Next slide. A miniature sphere with a plasma vortex inside, looking like a sealed star.

”Miniature Fusion Unit. A sphere the size of a fist with a power output equivalent to a small nuclear power plant. No radiation, no nuclear waste—only helium and heat.”

Next slide. The architecture diagram of a chip, not flat, but three-dimensional—like a miniature city where photons travel at the speed of light and qubits are superimposed at every node.

”Optical Quantum Heterogeneous Computing Architecture. Computing power ten thousand times that of the current strongest chip, with only one percent of the power consumption. With this, Strong AI is no longer a theory; it’s an engineering problem.”

Zhou Yuanshan flipped through the slides one by one. Liquid metal bionic robots, gene reprogramming technology, quantum entanglement communication networks, energy shields, L5 full autonomous driving, and nano-scale additive manufacturing. Every term was like a bomb exploding in the lecture hall.

Finally, he stopped on one image. It was a tower rising from the ground, extending all the way above the clouds. At the top of the tower was a blue sphere of light, like a man-made star.

”Space Elevator,” Zhou Yuanshan’s voice was so low it was almost inaudible. ”Miniature Fusion Units provide the energy, Quantum State Controlled Materials provide the cables, and vacuum zero-point energy extraction provides redundant backup. With these three, the Space Elevator isn’t science fiction; it’s a construction blueprint.”

In the lecture hall, among the five hundred people, no one spoke.

Chu Tianming sat in the first row, hands crossed over his knees, his fingers trembling slightly. Beside him, Zhang Ziqiang, the head of the chip department, took off his glasses, wiped them repeatedly, put them back on, and took them off again.

After a long silence, someone in the back row stood up. It was a young engineer, about twenty-five or twenty-six years old, with a burning light in his eyes.

”Dean Zhou,” his voice was shaking, ”when can these things be built?”

Zhou Yuanshan looked at him, remained silent for three seconds, and then smiled: ”This is what President Su asked me to tell you—these things are not theories, not papers, but engineering blueprints. Every blueprint is precise down to the atomic level. We don’t need to invent them; we only need to manufacture them.”

He paused, his voice rising: ”Three years. Three years to turn these blueprints into products. Five years to turn them into an industry. Ten years—”

He didn’t continue. But everyone knew what he was going to say.

In ten years, humanity will no longer be the humanity of today.

After the meeting, Su Chen stood in the corridor outside the lecture hall, watching the scientists leave in small groups. There was a common expression on their faces—not excitement, but solemnity. It was as if they had just been entrusted with a mission, one that would define the rest of their lives.

Zhou Yuanshan walked up to him, holding a stack of printed blueprints.

”President Su, these things are too advanced,” the old scientist’s voice held a complex emotion. ”Quantum State Controlled Materials, Miniature Fusion Units, consciousness interface chips... any one of these alone is a Nobel Prize-level breakthrough. With all of them piled together, I’m afraid the team won’t be able to digest it.”

Su Chen nodded: ”That’s why I’m not in a hurry. Three years to realize, five years for mass production. We’ll take it slow. Ensure confidentiality; the information cannot be made public all at once. It must be released in batches. No technical data can leave the laboratory, and those in contact with the data will have 24-hour protection from Golden Shield security.”

Zhou Yuanshan shook his head: ”It’s not a matter of being slow. It’s that if these things come out simultaneously, the world will fall into chaos. Have you thought about it? Once Atomic-level 3D Printing is mass-produced, the value of oil, minerals, and rare metals—all resources—will drop to zero. What will happen to countries that rely on resources to survive? When energy becomes free, power grids, oil companies, and coal enterprises—industries worth trillions—will vanish overnight. Once consciousness upload technology matures, will humans still be humans?”

Su Chen remained silent for a long time.

Outside the window, the morning mist over Shenzhen Bay was dissipating. In the distance, a cargo ship slowly passed by on the sea, the sound of its horn faintly drifting over.

”Professor Zhou,” he finally spoke, ”these problems aren’t caused by us. It’s the logic of technology itself. Once it reaches this point, it will explode. What we can do is not suppress it, but guide it.”

He turned to face Zhou Yuanshan: ”So I want you to make a plan. Which technologies to release first, which later, which to keep internal, and which to open-source to the world. The sequence, the rhythm, the discretion—that is your task.”

Zhou Yuanshan looked at him with a complex mix of emotions—admiration, worry, and a deep sense of exhaustion.

”President Su, do you know? The things you just said were also said by physicists a hundred years ago. They discovered nuclear fission and then said, ’What we can do is not suppress it, but guide it.’ And then came Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

Su Chen did not avoid his gaze: ”Professor Zhou, nuclear fission is different from these technologies. Nuclear fission is destructive. But these technologies—free energy, material abundance, the disappearance of diseases, extended lifespans—they are not weapons; they are the future.”

”The future?” Zhou Yuanshan gave a bitter smile. ”How do we deal with it?”

Su Chen looked out the window. On the distant sea, the sun was rising, casting golden light across the shimmering water.

”Whether humanity can leave Earth and become an interplanetary civilization depends on these technologies.”

Zhou Yuanshan was silent for a long time. Then he stuffed the blueprints into his briefcase and turned toward the elevator.

Reaching the elevator, he stopped without turning back: ”President Su, give me three years. In three years, I will give you an answer.”

Su Chen watched his back and said softly, ”It’s not giving me an answer. It’s giving one to humanity.”

The elevator doors closed.

Su Chen stood alone in the corridor, looking out at Shenzhen Bay. The morning light had completely illuminated the sea, and the Hong Kong skyline in the distance was faintly visible through the mist. A speedboat carved a white wake across the water, looking like a silver ribbon.

He recalled the scene he saw when the system was transmitting the data—not blueprints or data, but a complete future. In that future, humans had built cities on the Moon, planted vegetation on Mars, and opened mines in the asteroid belt. In the solar system, spaceships shuttled back and forth like weaving threads, and quantum communication networks connected every human settlement.

And in some corner of that future, a young engineer was debugging an atomic-level 3D printer. He printed a cup of coffee, took a sip, and then looked up at the starry sky.

Below that star was Earth. It was the home he could never return to.

Su Chen closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, there was an unprecedented determination in his gaze.

”Three years,” he said softly. ”In three years, let the world see what the true future looks like.”

He turned and walked back to his office. On the desk, the stack of blueprints left by Zhou Yuanshan was still there. The top sheet was the construction blueprint for the Space Elevator—a tower rising from the ground, passing through the clouds, through the atmosphere, and extending all the way to geostationary orbit.

At the top of the tower was a blue sphere of light.

Like a man-made star.

Like the future of humanity.