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While Ryan was still celebrating his birthday at the base, over in the Prism research center tower, Hargrove was in the middle of a major undertaking of his own.
"Ready?" Hargrove checked the time on his watch.
Beside him, his plaid-shirted assistant nodded while fighting down a yawn. "The servers are all prepped, and the network security hardening is done. Going live now won't be a problem at all."
He hadn't slept properly in days. Sheer willpower was the only thing keeping him from falling asleep on the spot.
"Mm. Fifteen minutes to noon. Then we go live at noon sharp." Hargrove caught the yawn from him.
"Copy that."
Hargrove looked at the distinctive program icon on the programmer's screen, emotions churning through him.
The icon was a snow-white little peacock, plump and downy, its tail fanned out behind it like a soft crown, every feather carrying a tiny eye-spot, the whole thing topped off with an approachable, almost human smile that gave the icon no end of charm.
This was Argus's program icon.
In the old myths, Argus was a giant whose body bore a hundred eyes, and after his death, the goddess had set those hundred eyes into the tail of the peacock.
So the design department had taken that as their inspiration, dropped the intimidating hundred-eyed giant entirely, made the peacock that inherited his eyes the core element, and produced this icon brimming with friendliness.
This icon, along with the program code behind it, was the greatest achievement their entire programming team had fought for, sleepless, over this whole stretch.
A user only needed to install the software, register, and log in online, and they'd be connected to the Argus AI on the center's servers, able to call on Argus's resources to process all kinds of images.
In the early rounds of testing, the abilities Argus displayed had staggered even the designers and comic artists brought in to assist.
And at the coming noon, Argus would begin its first public test.
The timing of this test was no accident. Hargrove had gotten the idea the moment he heard about Ryan's birthday. The results of this test would be the birthday gift he gave to Ryan.
"The first test releases sixteen thousand accounts. Once we hit that, no more go out. We watch these users' feedback first, then decide our next move," Hargrove told his assistant.
"Understood." The assistant quickly set the parameters on the computer, capping the number of test-eligible accounts at sixteen thousand.
Soon, the moment noon struck, the assistant uploaded the software installer to the internet, posting it on their official Prism AI Research Center account for anyone to download.
This official account had been created after the center's founding, and its following wasn't large, only a hundred-some thousand, most of them funneled over from Prism Sciences. Its follower count fell far, far short of parent accounts like Ryan's and Prism's.
Ryan's own account following, on Twitter alone, had already reached eighty million, and his trending heat sat parked in the number one position year-round. Attention on that scale didn't look like a scientist's at all. It looked like a superstar's.
Even if all he posted was a one-line gripe about his messaging app refusing to log in, it could top the trending charts at any hour of the day.
So although Prism AI itself didn't draw much attention, any news connected to Ryan and Prism had people watching around the clock, and someone spotted the announcement immediately.
"Holy hell, what am I looking at? Argus already has something to show?"
"It hasn't even been a month and Argus has a beta out? Are these people even human!?"
"Argus turns out to be a peacock logo. The internet really is a zoo. So should we be calling you guys the aviary from now on?"
"Saw the line about the first test being capped at sixteen thousand accounts and quietly hit download before finishing the sentence..."
In the backend, Hargrove's team kept watch as the registrations climbed.
The first account registered three minutes after the announcement went out. Then came the second, the tenth, and then it was like a dam bursting, the registration count swelling at an exponential rate.
In under an hour, this test that had run no advance marketing whatsoever had hit its full allotment of sixteen thousand accounts.
And in the backend, they could see those registered users already calling on Argus's resources to process images for them.
Argus's response speed was fast. How quickly a job finished depended only on the user's computer performance and network speed.
So far, Argus had executed more than seventy-nine thousand commands. Negative reviews reported in the backend: zero. Error count: also zero.
Without question...
"We did it!"
In the research center, Hargrove and the team crushed together in an ecstatic group hug.
All their effort over this stretch hadn't been wasted. Every drop of sweat they'd shed was converting, in this moment, into their users' astonishment.
The first batch of users experiencing the Argus AI were, at this very moment, deep in disbelief.
They watched their screens as Argus processed images exactly to their instructions, and the feeling in their chests refused to settle for a long, long time.
Too stunning!
Using this software, it felt like the entire graphic design industry was about to be rendered obsolete.
Performance like this only stoked the users' curiosity higher.
Because Argus could auto-color drafts too!
All it took was uploading a model or tagging the objects, and the function was live.
Many of the country's comic authors grabbed their own drafts the first chance they got and put the function to the test.
Moments later, looking at the results coming up on screen, plenty of them were stunned.
Argus's first-pass coloring hadn't reached the industry's top tier, and it sometimes stumbled on style handling. But judged purely on coloring quality, it already beat a good number of the industry's seat-filling coloring assistants.
"This effect is way too astonishing!"
"I'm pretty sure we can throw out our team's coloring assistant!"
"Coloring assistants are trembling as we speak..."
"So are the colorists..."
"I never saw this coming. AI hasn't replaced the assembly-line workers yet, and instead it's coming to replace us colorists first! sobbing"
"The assembly-line workers report feeling extremely attacked."
The people shocked by Argus's strength flooded back to the Prism AI account to sound off, one after another.
Over on Quora, a topic sprang up just as fast: How do you view the astonishing intelligence displayed by Prism's first AI product?
Some of those who'd taken part in the internal testing posted their own takes as well.
A famous lead comic artist by the name of Shane Rockwell answered:
"Thanks for the A2A. Writing from home. I had the luck of taking part in Argus's first testing round. A lot of people online right now are saying Argus's intelligence is powerful, but I have to tell you, you're completely wrong."
"It isn't powerful. It isn't ordinary-powerful either. It's that, that kind of very, very powerful."
"Do you all think the Argus you're using right now is its final form?"
"AI learns. And Argus's learning ability is far more terrifying than an ordinary AI's. Right now, you and Argus are only in the break-in period. Once the AI has felt out your habits, that's when you'll truly come to understand where its power lies."
"One last line. Our team's colorist has already been let go. Hoping the colorist is okay."
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