Phasebound

For the longest time, Yabusa Robotics Company sat in the shadow of the giant Hideki Corp in every possible metric--sales, customer satisfaction, technology leadership, innovation. Every year, the engineers and scientists at Hideki Tech and Hideki Labs seemed to steal the hearts and minds of the public with their latest innovations, gaming consoles, phones, and other technology--so much so that even their more wild inventions, like headsets that allowed people to control other people remotely, was maybe the third most interesting thing they had to offer in a given year.

And every year, Yabusa made their own strides in robotics and their own technology efforts. Their designs were adequate, their execution was fine, their processors and artificial intelligence and control tech was nothing to write home about and often prone to bugs and other errors. Yabusa was known for its sleek and polished form factors for their designs, but there's only so many articles tech journalists could write about how nice a robot looked if it didn't live up to any other expectations. Nothing stole the show at all the tech conferences until some seemingly average engineer one day had an incredible idea: Phase Binding.

The engineer in question, Gordon Grisham, is very secretive about how he developed the technology, or how even conceived of the device and the materials within. But, at every tech conference that he could manage to fit into his schedule, he would describe at length the concept and benefits of what it meant for two originally unique objects or beings to be phasebound together.

"So we'll keep it simple," Gordon said in his last recorded stage lecture at a university's school of robotics and engineering, pacing the empty space as he talked into his headset, a large slideshow playing behind him to hundreds of awestruck engineering students. "Everything in here is in standard phase, meaning it can interact with other objects normally, you can see them, you can touch them, you certainly can't have two of those normal objects share the same three-dimensional space. An object in an opposing phase, however, is completely invisible, untouchable, to anything in standard phase. Things in opposite phases can exist in the same space, and then they can be pretty easily represented by a Venn diagram, as seen above."

Gordon pointed to the screen behind him, showing a diagram of overlapping circles, where the overlapped portion is labeled quite obviously "part of diagram that overlaps". The graphic got a slight chuckle out of the students, before he moved on. "Okay, so, we're using these out of phase objects to solve problems, say for example you could have a motor out of phase with a car, and the motor could actually exist basically where the driver sits, and they won't ever interact. Well, one problem... we need motors to interact with cars, right? So, now we have to take into account a little extra math and engineering, where if we can gradually alter the phase of an object, it can slowly become more solid, more tangible, able to interact slightly with objects closer to standard phase, and the more we alter the phase toward the standard phase, the more interaction we get. When we do this with two objects in a complimentary way, we can have those objects basically operate as if combined with each other in standard phase, but with some really fantastic features of doing things like making compact cars that are actually compact."

Another graphic on the screen shows this interaction, with semi-transparent car parts showing the newer Yabusa designs thanks to the Phase Binding concept.

"Let's take it further, then. With a little extra engineering, we can use Phase Binding to essentially combine living, organic beings and machines or electronics! I'm sure you all saw the design earlier of my daughter Lucy, it was all over the news. She's the robot-centaur girl everyone's been talking about, right?" Gordon motions to something off-stage, and out trots a girl with short brown hair, a rather boyish face but voluptuous feminine curves down to her waist, before she simply seems to become a mechanical quadruped from the waist down. The crowd cheered, excited for the chance to see the sexy cyborg girl in person, as the girl blushed and waved cutely. "Hello again, Lucy, go ahead and turn around so they can see everything. You'll all notice that Lucy here is not just sticking her legs inside the quad-frame or anything, her lower half is fully out of phase, until about the waist where she starts to gradually phase in, as a coupler on the machine phases out and into her for a strong connection between organic and mechanical. Along with careful support structures both to strengthen her in-phase resiliency with basically metal reinforcement to her bones that are phased in at key locations, along with phased electronic nodes in her spinal column and brain, she has a strong connection to the robotic body, able to get all kinds of tactile feedback to operate it like her own limbs."

Gordon pat the robotic flank of the quadrupedal machine as a demonstration, and Lucy jumped in surprise with a yelp. The students laughed, and she glared back at her father--it was hard to know if that was all part of the presentation or not. "Now, I know what you're all thinking, the last question we're often asked is, are her legs just hanging out in empty opposite-phase space somewhere? The answer to that is no, we do have systems engineered for her legs to exist within, also out of phase with the rest of the machine so you can't see them. But her entire body is still intact, in the strictest sense, and still functions normally like a full human would. And because it comes up at every school we visit since kids aren't afraid to ask the tough questions that embarrass the adults... All of Yabusa's machines that envelop bodies include out-of-phase modules for organic waste disposal, since Lucy still eats normal food instead of relying on the electronic power source that needs to be charged separately for her lower half. Those disposal units are handled alongside the charging platforms, so no need to redesign bathrooms for centaur-bots, not yet at least." More laughter.

The demonstrations continued after Gordon's talk, showing the finesse over the control of her mechanical side that Lucy possessed, able to leap impressive distances, or walk a thin platform with robotic guidance, to lifting heavy loads. Lucy's design was just one of many of Yabusa's designs intended to phase-bind people, as other phasebound cyborgs demonstrated their abilities throughout the day. By using people in place of the original artificial intelligence modules, Yabusa Robotics also solved the problems of the AI being unable to keep up with the complexities needed to operate machines that seemed to come almost naturally to a phasebound person after minimal training. Suddenly new avenues for construction, transportation, logistics, and many other developments opened up for Yabusa's business, able to outperform competitors simply by creating cyborgs that married the best of their robotics achievements to the natural abilities of people!

Not all was well, however. Yabusa Robotics had only developed one working Phase Binder, which for this media whirlwind was always present for trade shows and tech talks. They used all the phase-binding compound that they had been able to develop for just the one model, and had to wait until the end of all the tech conferences before they could get back to figuring out how to replicate the mystery compounds beyond what Mr. Grisham had provided them. Needless to say, Yabusa engineers were nervous, and for good reason: just about every rival was itching for a way to wrest control of the Phase Binder away from Yabusa, in one way or another.

Hideki Labs, Shaw Biosciences, and King Enterprises, among others, felt they had some sort of right to the Phase Binder tech, and each planned to orchestrate a means of acquisition, using methods of varying legality...