A False Alarm

Lin Qi, back at the institute, sat in the conference room and listened to the researchers discuss the aircraft's characteristics.

That was the boss's prerogative. When he had called it an "aircraft," the Chief Engineer and the others could do nothing but praise the name as "very apt—a machine that can fly. It's perfect."

"I already know the specific parameters. So who can tell me how much we can keep the cost down to if we produce it on an assembly line?"

Most of these researchers were people Lin Qi had poached from major heavy-industry companies—unappreciated, but genuinely talented.

This sort of thing happened often in research institutions. Some people had never even touched the projects their institutes were working on, yet whenever results emerged, their names were always listed at the top.

Meanwhile, the people who had advanced the research and truly contributed to it were placed at the bottom.

Was that fair? Perhaps some people thought it wasn't, but it was also very fair.

Many researchers' lives followed the same path: from school to research institute. They remained in a research environment their entire lives and never came into contact with society.

They would never know that the week before, they had accidentally ruined an experiment that should never have gone wrong, leaving the institute director—already balding, aggressive within the institute yet obsequious outside it—heartbroken for half a day.

Researchers never had to consider how much money they had destroyed. They cared only about how far their research had advanced. Yet what they overlooked was the very foundation supporting their research—funding.

Lin Qi had found an engine engineer who was relatively less "naive" to serve as Chief Engineer. Aside from design work, his main responsibility was management and coordination.

He knew what the true core of a research