Chapter 23: A New Perspective

“Woah…” Celia breathed out as she admired the enormous structure in front of her.

The iDIVE exhibit was an enormous 3 story tall building that was three times and long, and was designed to look like the upper half of a modern submarine. The main color of the building was white, with tall, dark blue, glass windows and a set of black letters outlined in gold that read “TOKYOSAKA IDIVE EXHIBIT” across the top of the building.

The three of them look up from the bottom of the steps as Hikaru pulls out his phone to take a picture of them along with their support drones.

“We’ve seen a lot of pictures of this place, but it’s still a lot cooler to see it person,” Hikaru said as snaps a photo, “apparently, this exhibit is even bigger on the inside since most of it is built underground. They have a lot of exhibits here including a history exhibit of the submarines they built over the years, an indoor ocean cave, and multiple aquariums including a live ocean aquarium where people can look out the window to see the ocean since the exhibit is built right next to the sea.”

All three of them turn to look behind them at the nearby coastlines of Tokyosaka watching the waves ebb and flow along the beach. From here, they could just barely see the tallest buildings of Shanghaijing across the sea if they squinted hard enough… or were just delusional like Celia.

“What are you doing?” Alto asked, watching Celia squint her eyes.

“I’m trying to see if I can see Shanghaijing from here,” she replied, continuing to squint harder.

“That would be impossible due to the curvature of the Earth,” Alto pointed out, “the Earth curves at approximately 8 inches per mile and given the distance from Shanghaijing’s capital sector to here —”

“Ok, ok that’s enough,” Hikaru interrupted him, “I’m not here on vacation just to listen to you talk about some random facts. Let’s stop wasting time out here and go have some fun at the exhibit.”

Alto nodded in agreement and begins to head inside as Hikaru had to drag Celia up the stairs while she kept trying to squint, making hand binoculars in front of her eyes.

When they finally make it into the building, they take a look around the place, admiring the ambient, warm lightning reflecting off the black marble surfaces of the building.

“This place feels oddly comforting; like we’re inside of a giant cave underneath the ocean,” Celia remarked as she looked around at the ceiling lights and the marine animal sculptures made out of fiberglass.

Hikaru nodded in agreement, looking around at the warm lights blooming from behind the small crevices of the walls in corners.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it was intentional,” he said, “other than New Genesis, iDIVE is the biggest company in the world right now. They would definitely have the funding to pull this off.”

“Well then, what are we waiting for? I want to check out the ocean cave exhibit first!” Celia enthusiastically said.

Without another word, Celia runs off and the two of them quickly follow behind her, until they reach an enormous indoor room that was built to look like an underwater cave. The walls were made out of real stone collected from the deep ocean caves, and the room was mostly illuminated by artificial models of ores and gemstones that were found in such caves. 

Advancements in submersible technology by iDIVE had allowed humanity to harvest new types of ores and gemstones to form many new types of alloys, and as such, iDIVE had their accomplishments displayed in their exhibits.

“Coral Obsidian…” Celia read on a plaque in front of a pitch black glass-like piece of coral, “Discovered in 2172. A type of coral formed inside of a deep underwater cave that hosted a subspecies of coral polyps. The calcium carbonate they secreted molded together with the rapidly cooling lava from a nearby underwater volcano, forming a special type of jeweled glass known as Coral Obsidian… woah…”

“It is amazing how far humanity can go when they put their focus onto something,” Alto says, staring at the lustrous surface of the coral, “it’s a shame that we had to give up something else entirely to achieve this though. It would’ve been nice to have both.”

Celia solemnly nodded.

“Are you guys done yet?” Hikaru calls over from across the room, “there’s lots more exhibits I want to visit and we don’t have all day!”

Celia looks at Alto and shrugs and decides to follow Hikaru to the next exhibit.

They continue exploring the rest of the iDIVE exhibit, walking through the indoor aquariums and looking at the colorful creatures that inhabited them, staring at the enormous glass window of the live aquarium that gave them a view of the mostly empty ocean just outside the exhibit, eating at small restaurants around the place that mainly served seafood, and finally, reaching the submarine exhibit.

“The Hindelburg Submarine of 2138,” Hikaru reads a sign in front of life-sized model submarine behind a set of security railings that caught his eye, “one of the first submarines improvised from a rocket back when iDIVE was first founded. While rockets and submarines shared a lot of similarities, this submarine did not last for long because they’re ultimately built for two different extreme environments.”

Hikaru thinks for a moment before he mutters to himself, “...I guess it wasn’t too good of an idea to consider submarines for the design of a rocket… not that I was actually going to do it but I never gave it enough thought until now… at least I didn’t tell my idea to Celia...”

Meanwhile, not too far away, Celia was more focused on another submarine.

“OMS Wombat,” she reads, “an unexpected breakthrough in underwater submersible technology. Created by a small no-name team from Australia in 2147, this submarine which was created mostly from scrap to reduce the cost of production, became the first manned submarine to last in the Hadalpelagic Zone for longer than a day. By combining and alloying different pieces of scrap metal together, they accidentally created a new type of durable metal made to withstand the pressure level of the deep ocean.”

Celia takes note of its simple scrappy design, admiring how in its imperfection, it was still the greatest submarine to ever exist at some point in time.

I wonder if our rocket will turn out to look something like this, she thinks. What if one of our test rockets actually ends up working somehow just like this submarine, and it flies off into space without Alto in it? That would be so ridiculous I wouldn’t even know if I would laugh or cry...

“Hey that submarine looks a lot like the insides of Alto’s frame” Hikaru suddenly interrupts her thoughts as he approaches her.

“What do you mean?” Celia asked.

“Yeah what do you mean?” Alto questioned in a slightly offended tone walking up to the two of them.

Hikaru looks at Alto and points at Celia and asks, “I mean surely you agree too right, Celia? You saw the inside of his frame when you repaired his memory drives too didn’t you?”

Celia thinks for a moment before nodding.

“Now that you mention yeah” she says with a grin, trying to see if she can gauge a reaction out of Alto, but he just looks away.

“Aw, we didn’t mean to offend you, you were just a product of your time,” Hikaru said giving him a pat on the back, “if you were created a decade or two later when humanity had most of their new metals figured out, your frame wouldn’t look like a weird amalgamation of tungsten steel and a titanium-chromium alloy.”

“Yeah,” Celia agreed, “that combination was used about a decade later to create a more uniform type of metal called ter.. ra…steel…”

Celia froze.

Wait… terrasteel? she realized, that’s the base combination of metals for terrasteel right? It’s made out of tungsten steel AND a titanium-chromium alloy which means part of it’s made out of titanium… and titanium is what the industrial grade metal synthesizers are made out of which means that the company secretly has a titanium supply that they didn’t know about. The creation of terrasteel had been so standardized that they must’ve forgotten the roots of it.

“What’s wrong?” Alto asked, noticing her sudden pause.

“I… I know how to complete the commission now,” she said as she began explaining to them her idea.

“That might actually work…” Hikaru said, “instead of sending the metal synthesizers back to the company for repairs, they can recycle the overworked metal synthesizers and use the titanium from it to create terrasteel. That way every time they’re buying metal synthesizers, they’re also buying supplies to create terrasteel, which should lower the cost of production of terrasteel… Celia you’re a genius!”

Celia grinned.

“Hehe, I probably wouldn’t have come up with the idea without you mentioning that this submarine looked like Alto’s insides.” Celia pointed out, trying not to let the sudden onset of ego overwhelm her.

“I… I’ll forgive your insults just for today,” Alto said as two of them snickered.

“Well then, the only thing left to do now is turn in the proposal and get our massive paycheck,” Celia said, “our next stop is Gran Andes.”