SoV-9

=Scars of Victoria=
==Chapter 9 - Tabula Rasa==
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===Facing Mounting Frustation===
The Victoria Institute of Technology - Victoria, Capellan Confederation - 10/13/3048
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Angry hip hop burst from the lab where Minoru boxed his shadow cast by the light of a single desktop lamp and his noteputer screen. He paused panting from his excursions as he let out a muted grunt before turning to see Riva Allard’s underlit face and tight drawn hair in the dim light. She jumped forward as he readied a startled roundhouse only to have her catch it and drove her fist deep into his thigh. Lightning pain arced up his numbing leg, he only avoided smashing his chin on the desk edge at the cost of bruised forearms.
Riva dropped out of a fighting stance and reached out to him, “Doctor Allard, how did you?”“It’s not the first time someone has attempted to attack me in a lab.If you knew my father, you would understand.”“I didn’t…”“No worries, Minoru, I should have said something first. Especially on a Friday the Thirteenth in October no less. Damn, if I had gotten kicked it would be my own fault.”
Feeling unfortunately returned to his leg as Riva helped Minoru ease himself into the chair as he attempted to combat the hollow aches. She triggered the room lights and saw a baseball bat shattered by a blow across the gray coated SILVERBACK. “You seem frustrated. Care to talk about it?”
His head leaned forward guarded by his upraised arms which displaced print outs of telemetry from his latest tests, ;;“I can’t get it to work, Riva.”“You’ve only been working at it for a few months here, not even full time, and it’s only the five of you with some outside help. You’re bright but, well, you are still a student, and this is your first project.You can’t expect a breakthrough without putting in the time. That is the nature of research.”“It’s been more than two years since Uncle Isoroku was almost killed by one of these and I’ve worked on it at some level since then.”
“These things,” Riva carefully lifted up the broken baseball bat and swung it slowly in his direction, “This unit right here?”“No, we’ve gone through three prototypes already.”“Thus, you must have made changes between generations. So, it’s not the same type of machine.”“Well, no, this one was made by Cosby.”“The Mech Engineers?”“Yes, what are you getting at, Doctor Allard?”
“Something we should talk about tomorrow.” She dropped the bat in the trash can and gently placed her hand on his shoulders, “Right now you need to get some sleep young man. The present is almost tomorrow. I’ll walk you out.”
Minoru walked beside her as they walked through the darkened halls of V.I.T.A.L. where chirping cleaning robots engaged in their endless task. “Who taught you martial arts, Doctor Allard?”“Some Rabid Foxes. I could tell you their names, but then I’d have to kill you…losing all your grant money in the process.Since I prefer to remain a working academic, I’d rather not do that.”
In the morning Minoru arrived at one of the unsecured meeting rooms which smelled of French press coffee and fresh croissants. Riva daintily cut into the croissant in front of her loaded down with jam and butter. “Your eyes look terrible, Minoru; have you been sleeping? Or drinking?”
He drank the coffee almost as fast from his mug as one could have from the press itself. “I haven’t been sleeping or drinking lately. There’s just to much work to do.”
“Young man, you need to learn how to delegate tasks or ask the right questions to the person that already knows the answer.”
“I don’t understand.”, Riva told him.
“You’re not supposed to understand it,” Riva tapped her head, “here. You must experience it. There just hasn’t been enough opportunity for you to have done so yet.I don’t presume to speak for your father but, if he is anything like my father then he is full of secret wisdom and diverse experiences but sparse with words. Like a private collection of books and artifacts of great interest hidden behind ferro-steel doors.He can’t have the experiences for you, so he sent you out on this project where you will learn something more important than anything I can teach you and if it turns out good that’s great, but he would be uncomfortable with failure.You are here on Victoria to learn,Leadershipand Resilience.”
“I haven’t had enough coffee for a deep philosophical discussion, Riva.”
“Well tough.The way I see it, you perceive that your brother Hohiro possesses a great number of traits that you value but don’t see within yourself.I had a similar experience with my brothers. They were in the military, so they commanded soldiers and overcame many difficult challenges on their own and with their units.I didn’t get a chance to experience that until I led my first research group which consisted of, like you, four colleagues who I still consider close friends. After that I led a larger one of ten, those four plus six more that I didn’t know as well. Both of those projects took a few years and lots of hard work and difficult communication to complete.Now, more than thirty years later I have a commercially viable research lab of three hundred dedicated scientists, their postdocs and techs, VIT graduate students, and fellow professors while remaining in communication with almost a thousand people that I have at least exchanged correspondence with or socialized with at a symposium over the years, which now includes two Princes.”
Minoru’s eyes went wide with an epiphany, “That’s what you think he wanted me to do!”
Riva ate a morsel of her breakfast her head angled slightly as she started at him, “I just spent five minutes explaining it to you." 
She sighed, "You teenagers are all the same, not listening to your elders. Well I will not repeat myself.”
“But the project…”
“Maskirovka, this is your government issued Grand Tour of Duty, Minoru. The objective of which is to teach you how to be a Prince. Anything beyond that is extra to Luthien and Capella.”
“But it’s a failure! I can’t get SILVERBACK to work like it is right now.”“No, I don’t think you can.” Riva put her cutlery down and put her hands parallel to one another before squishing them together, “unless you find a really small pilotSILVERBACK is a perfectly adequate teleoperated drone. If you removed the complicated legs and internal volume that Cosby reserved for an inhumanly small pilot it would be even better.It has applications elsewhere, but it will never be a suit that can be worn in its present configuration.Your mech engineers built it like a mech not a suit of armor. Something it was never meant to be.”
“Two years wasted,” Minoru cradled his head in his hands, “so much time.”
Riva laughed inappropriately loud enough that Minoru’s eyes narrowed with displeasure, “Sorry, its just that if you ever did a defense contract before you’d realize that’s actually a very short time to realize that the tender won’t work, and procurement doesn’t really understand what they need.Some of my previous projects took five years and three reboots, only to fail in the final qualification for something small that we overlooked.You’ll get used to it.”
“So, what can we do now?”“Sidney, please open a new white sheet for Minoru and I. Filename – New Project.”
The honeyed tones of Sidney’s male voice responded, <<“As you wish, Doctor.”>>
A projected blank sheet appeared behind her, “Minoru, have you ever heard the term Tabula Rasa?”
“I haven’t.”“Well, you are going to hear all about it after I finish my breakfast."
She pointed her fork at the bowl of pastries, "Dig in before they get cold. You and I are going to have a long discussion, 
So I hope you don’t have any other plans for today.”
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Meal Hall A of the Victoria Institute of Technology paused in silence after Ryuun and Dereck stood and shouted something in Japanese to Minoru. Kuan-Yin looked in either direction food tray in hand unsure of what to do as her friends gestured menacingly toward each other around the table. She meekly slid in as they settled down although the stress was palpable between them as they righted and returned to their seats. “Did I miss something?”
Aria and William were both uncharacteristically animated, “Minoru says we have to start over on the project. Completely scrapping a year’s worth of work and more since Hachiman.”
Minoru’s eyes tensed under the withering stares of his compatriots, “We are starting a new project, Aria. We can’t take this one any further toward our objective. 
SILVERBACK is a tele-operatable humanoid drone, it can’t be a suit, we’ve tried.So that project is finished and now a new one begins.”
Dereck spoke next firmly pressing his finger into the worn Draconis Combine sticker on the tabletop. “Doctor Allard was just supposed to provide finishing touches to our control system, not oversee a complete rework. She just wants more of our budget to be spent on this planet. We don’t have enough right now after Crosby built the latest prototypes.”“Dereck, I am a Prince of the Draconis Combine, if I want a larger budget, I can get it and spend it on whatever planet I desire.She made a very convincing case to me that Shengli and other suppliers on Victoria can get us an eighty percent prototype from available commercial systems. The other twenty percent will have to be custom made by VIT or some other specialist. It won’t be bespoke but it should work adequately enough that we can pass it to more experienced teams to finalize.As for the control system it needs to be built from the ground up and integrated into the machine from the beginning. So that’s our first challenge, Riva says that she can get an invitation to Shengli for Dereck and I.”
The other three leaned forward, “Hey what about us!”
“Sugawara, you can’t get in due to your priors.”“Those were only accusations and even then, I only stole from and/or killed bad people… ‘allegedly.’”
“Yoshimara, you can’t get in due to your priors.”“It was only two million Ryu.”“William, it was the twenty you defrauded from Focke-Achgelis. Remember, this is your work release.”
He looked shyly to the side, “There were just so many I get them confused sometimes.”
“Aria, you can’t get in due to trade secret restrictions.”“I am going to register formal protests to the Charge de’affairs on behalf of the Azami Caliphate and my father!”“Ogawa-sama would dismiss them on principle.”“I feel attacked.I wanted to see the robot factory.”“Well, sorry but presently they won’t let you.”
She sat back, huffed, and folded her arms indignantly.
Kuan-Yin sat in silence as her friends ate lunch in silence, “William, you stole twenty million Ryu from an auto company. You?”“Yes, me.I’m brilliant but got greedy, was doing good for a while. They caught me with the twenty mil but I had amassed almost a hundred before then. I had to give it all back after I cut a deal with the ISF.”
“How?”“My program perfectly mimicked Combine bureaucracy except that it was efficient. Secure mailers and all, even had COMSTAR confused for a while. Phi Branch eventually audited me and told the ISF.”
“What happened to the program?”“It disappeared mysteriously, and I got,” William winked at her, “absolutely nothing from it.”
Minoru produced a hardcopy of potential suppliers on Victoria and passed it over to Aria and William. “Dereck and I need to talk with Shengli and see which of their suppliers might have what need. Can you two, and Kuan-Yin, establish contact with them and negotiate terms?”
The other couple looked toward him and then her, “Wait, Kuan-Yin?”
She sat ultra-straight and gripped her utensils tight enough that her knuckles went white, “Yeah, what do you mean, Kuan-Yin?”“Well, we aren’t from here or speak the languages. We can communicate in standard, but we are outsiders whereas you are from here. I’m certain we could convince the college of business that you are interning with us for credit.”
It was all that she could manage to not collapse in under their stares, “Yeah, that is exactly what I’m doing. I can’t wait to get started.”
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