Extortion

  The next day, Zhu Tiejun and his party left the Petrochemical Machinery Factory and returned to the Hanhua Mechanical Factory by Liberation truck. Lin Zhenhua followed Wei Dongqi to the precision machining workshop and began to work as an interpreter for the foreign expert Fort.

  Forte is the after-sales service manager of Spichler Company in the Asian region. Although he is only 25 or 26 years old, he has already become a senior engineer in the company. In previous years, he was responsible for the installation, debugging and technical training of the company's products in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other places. This time is his first time to work on the Chinese mainland.

  Ford crossed the border from Hong Kong into Guangdong's Baoan, and was immediately invited onto a large bus, which bumped along for several hours until they reached Guangzhou. From there, he took a train to Jiangsu Province, then transferred to another vehicle that brought him to Shi Huashi. Throughout the journey, the vehicles he rode in all had their curtains drawn, and the Chinese accompanying him tactfully suggested that he not open them to look at the scenery outside. Out of reverence for mysterious China, he accepted this suggestion, arriving at Shi Huashi in a daze.

  After entering the petrified machine, he gained the freedom to move around in the factory area, but leaving the factory was still discouraged. He knew that the masters here did not want him to see the poor side of society, and some American journalists who had been to China had already revealed this point. In fact, there were many rumors about Red China in the United States, such as someone thinking that there were many intelligence personnel in China, they would monitor foreigners in any situation, and also tap their phones. Out of concern for these things, Ford was very aware not to discuss any confidential matters on the phone.

  Ford didn't have any complaints about the restrictions he faced, and he thought that the Chinese way of doing things was understandable. He was a very straightforward American who saw China as a land with a lot of human touch. When he walked around the residential area of the petrochemical plant, he chose to ignore the simplicity of the workers' living conditions, but he greatly appreciated the harmonious relationships between people. He thought that this kind of harmony between people was something that developed industrial countries lacked. He even felt a bit puzzled - why didn't this country just preserve this idyllic life where people rose with the sun and rested with the sunset, instead of trying to modernize?

  The Jiangnan Provincial Light Industry Bureau attaches great importance to this foreign guest, and the petrochemical company has arranged the best accommodation and food for him. However, the accommodation did not meet Ford's expectations, at least he hoped that his room would have a bathroom and shower facilities, but even the best guest rooms of the petrochemical company could not meet this requirement.

  As for the food, it made Ford praise without stopping. Chinese cuisine is originally more exquisite than Western cuisine, and the meat and vegetables used are also free of any hormones and chemical fertilizers, which gave Ford's taste buds a great enjoyment. Sometimes, Ford would think that China is actually a truly developed country, while the United States is more like a developing country, because Chinese people can eat this kind of green and harmless vegetables every day, while Americans have to endure the life brought by high technology that tastes like wax.

  In the days of the Stone Age, the only thing that Ford could not bear was the poor English of the translators sent by the Chinese side. The female teacher who had been arranged before had no problem with daily conversations, but when she spoke English, it always carried a hint of the Nandu dialect. In order to translate mechanical professional English, the Chinese allegedly invited an expert named He from a neighboring province. This Mr. He had only studied English in college over a decade ago and often had to stop and nervously flip through a dictionary while translating for Ford, who had to wait, feeling like listening to a stuck record, which was excruciatingly painful.

  Suddenly, a young man with the surname Lin appeared. He spoke fluent American English and was familiar with obscure mechanical terminology. With his help, Ford's work efficiency improved greatly, and the training effect was significantly enhanced. Moreover, Ford found that Mr. Lin seemed to have had contact with the MK800 model before, and his demonstrations on the machine were sometimes even more skilled than Ford himself.

  "Lin, thank you so much for your work. With your help, I feel that the job has become a very pleasant thing." After a day of training, Ford expressed his gratitude to Lin Zhenhua in an American way. Chinese people usually speak more implicitly, while Americans are very straightforward, even to the point of being exaggerated. For example, he simply wanted to say that Lin Zhenhua's translation was good, but when the words came out of his mouth, it made people feel that Lin Zhenhua was great to the extreme.

  They were walking on the tree-lined path of the petrochemical plant, with workers coming and going on both sides, but no one dared to approach them, only watching from a distance and whispering. This situation occurred every time Fort appeared, except that in the past everyone was discussing Fort, now the focus of discussion was increasingly concentrated on Lin Zhenhua. Many people in the petrochemical plant knew that Hanhua Factory had a very capable young man who could serve as an interpreter for American experts, with a level even higher than that of a director from the Light Industry Department of Hunan Province.

  Lin Zhenhua ignored the surrounding gaze and was not swayed by Ford's exaggerated words, smiling and replied: "Mr. Ford, this is what I should do."

  "Mr. Lin, our training efficiency has been very high these days. I think that with three more days, my work will be completed and I can return to Hong Kong," Ford said.

  Lin Zhenhua feigned surprise and said, "Really? What a pity, Mr. Ford! These days I've been busy doing translation work for you, and there were some questions I wanted to ask you that I haven't had a chance to yet."

  "What? What's wrong?"

  "Of course it's about some operational issues with the MK800."

  "Didn't we already discuss the operational method during training? You're the translator, is there something you don't understand?" Ford asked curiously.

  Lin Zhenhua's face showed a harmless smile, he took out a piece of paper and handed it to Forte, saying: "It's like this, actually my problem is very small, when I use MK800 to process 27-tooth gears with this set of parameters, I find that the distribution of each tooth is not uniform. Can you tell me where my operation went wrong?"

  Ford was still smiling at first, but when he heard Lin Zhenhua mention the 27 teeth, his smile froze. He took over the parameters handed over by Lin Zhenhua and looked at them, and couldn't help but ask in a trembling voice: "Mr. Lin, how did you know that MK800 had this defect?"

  Lin Zhenhua secretly smiled to himself, for as soon as he heard that the CNC machine purchased by Shi Hua was an MK800, he knew his chance had come. The control chip of the MK800 was the renowned Z80, a chip that could be considered a milestone in industrial control chips, with many CNC machines using this chip. However, when Spieser Company released the MK800, several serious bugs were found in the control program written by the programming personnel. When certain special values were set as parameters, the program would produce errors, resulting in deviations in the dimensions of the processed parts. The processing of 27-tooth gears under specific parameters was one such error situation.

  Due to the special combination of this set of parameters, many companies may not necessarily encounter such a situation, so the hidden BUG of MK800 has been ignored for a long time. Some companies, even if they encountered errors, often attributed them to operational mistakes, and rarely thought it was a defect in the machine itself. After several years, someone finally discovered this problem and exposed it in Mechanical Engineering Magazine, causing a huge stir. The Spiescher company had to spend a huge amount of money to recall a large batch of MK800s, and also suffered huge losses in reputation.

  As an engineer within Spiegel, Ford was aware that the machine had a defect because it had occurred in one accidental internal test. The company treated this as a core secret and prohibited those who knew about it from leaking it out, while secretly organizing personnel to study the cause of the error, trying to solve the problem internally before it was exposed, and then replacing the program chip on the MK800 machine that had been sold under the guise of a system upgrade, thereby avoiding a scandal.

  Ford had no idea that this young man, who was always joking with him, actually possessed such confidential information and brought it up in such a way. He certainly wouldn't believe that Lin Zhenhua had accidentally discovered the secret, as the parameter settings on the paper were exactly the same as those set during Spieser's internal testing - what kind of coincidence was this? Moreover, from Lin Zhenhua's face, he couldn't see any intention to ask for advice, but rather a look of schadenfreude.

  "Mr. Lin, have you revealed this matter to anyone?" Ford asked nervously.

  "Mr. Ford, we are friends, how could I possibly tell others about such a thing first?" Lin Zhenhua acted with great righteousness.

  Ford let out a sigh of relief: "Oh, that's good, I don't want more people to know about this."

  "But...," Lin Zhenhua continued, "I heard that the International Machine Tool Society has a publication called 'Numerical Control Machine Tools'. If I write a paper discussing the design flaws of the MK800 and provide detailed data, do you think they would be interested?"

  "No way! You can't do this!" Ford blurted out, attracting the attention of several passing workers who couldn't help but stare at the foreigner and the young man from another factory, wondering what kind of dispute had arisen between them. Only after shouting did Ford realize he had been too rash, and quickly lowered his voice to say: "Mr. Lin, you should know that if this article is published in the magazine, our company will suffer what kind of losses."

  "I think the loss isn't that great, right?" Lin Zhenhua pretended to be foolish and said, "I remember you saying that up until now, MK800 has only sold less than 1,000 units, which is around $13 million. Your company can recall all of them, it should be bearable, right?"

  "Is 13 million not a big deal?" Ford said with a bitter face, "Moreover, this is not just an issue of recalling the MK800, all our company's products will be questioned, and the loss to our brand will far exceed 13 million."

  "What should we do then?" Lin Zhenhua asked with a naive and innocent expression.

  Mr. Ford said: "Mr. Lin, can you sell me the paper you're going to write? Then pretend that this thing never happened before. As for the price, you can name it."

  Lin Zhenhua asked: "What, you mean to say that your Spiegel company is going to pay me to shut up?"

  "This... isn't what we meant, of course," Ford said. "We just hope you can give us some time; we're getting people organized to fix this problem right now, and I'm sure that in the meantime it won't cause any loss to your country's industry. And as for keeping you quiet about this, we feel terrible about it, so I can offer you a very substantial compensation fee from the company - say, two thousand dollars."

  $2,000 was a huge sum of money at that time. On the black market, US dollars were being sold at a ratio of 1:10, so if Lin Zhenhua got his hands on the $2,000, he could exchange it for 20,000 yuan on the black market and instantly become a double-digit millionaire. Ford was well aware of the income level of Chinese workers and believed that such a large sum of money would definitely tempt Lin Zhenhua.

  Unfortunately, Ford encountered a time-traveler. By 2011, $2,000 was no longer a temptation for a Chinese white-collar worker. Moreover, Lin Zhenhua knew that the secret he possessed was worth far more than $2,000. If he sold it for just $2,000, wouldn't he be a fool?

  "Mr. Ford, I am a man of principle, and taking money to cover up is something I would never do." Lin Zhenhua said with great righteousness.

  "I know... but..." Ford was at a loss for words, and apart from spending money, he really couldn't think of any other way to silence Lin Zhenhua. As for killing someone to shut them up, Ford had never done such a thing before, nor did he dare to think in that direction. In his impression, all Chinese people were kung fu masters, and the idea of killing someone in China... was simply unthinkable?

  Lin Zhenhua waved his hand: "For the friendship between the Chinese and American people, and also out of respect for your company, I have decided to charge nothing and temporarily not publish my paper."

  "This is great!" Ford couldn't help but want to hug Lin Zhenhua and give him a kiss on the cheek. "Mr. Lin, we won't use money to humiliate your character, however, for our friendship, I can ask the company to provide some living subsidies for you and your family."

  "I haven't finished yet." Lin Zhenhua interrupted Fort's words and continued, "In fact, I not only discovered that there are defects in your company's products, but also conducted in-depth research on the reasons for these defects and achieved some results. I rewrote a program for your control system, which perfectly solves all the problems found so far. I'd like to know if your company is interested in purchasing the program I wrote?"

  "Are you saying that you've found a bug in the program and provided a patch to fix it?" Ford asked incredulously, shaking his head immediately afterwards. "This is impossible, our source code has never been released, you can't possibly know what kind of problems exist in the code."

  Lin Zhenhua took out another piece of paper and handed it to Forte, saying: "Mr. Forte, don't be too subjective. This is a BUG I found and the patch I designed. You can send it to your software programmers to take a look. If they think my point of view is correct and my patch is effective, then we can discuss the transaction issue again."

  Ford took the paper and asked hesitantly: "Mr. Lin, are you so at ease with handing over your results to me? Aren't you afraid I'll betray your trust?"

  Lin Zhenhua said: "I know Americans are the most trustworthy, doing business with Americans, what else can I be worried about?"

  Ford smiled reassuringly and said, "Yes, yes, of course we are men of our word."

  Lin Zhenhua's tone suddenly changed: "Of course, it's necessary to be cautious and I won't take risks myself. In fact, in the control program of MK800 produced by your company, I found four bugs involving four different parameter settings. What I'm submitting to you now is only one of them. The other three will be submitted after we sign a contract. Of course, you can also refuse to cooperate with me. I think the editors of International CNC Machine Tool Magazine are interested in cooperating with me."

  "No, no, Mr. Lin, this situation will not arise." Although it was January weather, Ford felt sweaty and the young man in front of him was simply too terrifying, this was outright blackmail. No matter what, his own weakness had been grasped by others, they could blackmail him as they pleased, he had no choice but to admit defeat.

  "I'll give your company three days," said Lin Zhenhua. "I think testing a program patch shouldn't take that long, should it?"

  "Thank you, Mr. Lin! I'll send this content back to the company right away! Before that..."

  "Don't worry, Mr. Ford, we are friends, I won't let a friend be in trouble." Lin Zhenhua said with a warm smile.

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  Three watches have been completed, 12,000 words, can everyone give some encouragement?