218: Chapter 219 The FBI monitored the site in a junkyard for three years! The "vanishing" behind the mind-blowing chip

"What's wrong? Chief Harris, whose architecture is this?" An expert beside him quickly steadied him and asked urgently.

"Can't you see it?! This is a madman's architecture that completely abandons traditional Lithography Machine paths and achieves a dimensional leap directly at the underlying physical structure!"

Harris pointed at the screen, his finger trembling as if electrified: "In this world, only two people could write this!"

He turned his head, looking at a group of colleagues who were equally horrified. Gritting his teeth, he spat out two names that had long been buried in the dust of history: "The Chief Architect of 'Flat Earth', Arthur Pendleton!" "The Chief Scientist of 'Prometheus Fire', Victor Zima!"

As soon as these two names were uttered, they struck like two thunderclaps, exploding directly throughout the top-secret laboratory.

Five minutes later. An analysis report stamped with a bright red "Top Secret" seal bypassed all standard procedures and was rushed by special aircraft to Washington.

It was slammed heavily onto the mahogany desk of the U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

The Secretary of Commerce looked at the two red-marked names on the report, feeling a bone-chilling cold shoot straight from his tailbone to his forehead. He knew the weight of these two names all too well.

These two men, along with their core technical team, had long been on the FBI's top-priority list for top-secret surveillance. Their passports had long been revoked. All their movements were supposed to be under a tight surveillance net, making it impossible for them to step even half a step outside the borders of the United States.

But now, physical chips bearing their core technical fingerprints had not only been created in China, but had even achieved terrifying large-scale mass production!

"Get the FBI Director over here!" The Secretary of Commerce slammed his fist onto the desk, his roar almost blowing the roof off: "Immediately! Right now!"

Two black Chevrolet Suburbans screeched to a halt in an upscale community in Virginia. Miller, the captain of the FBI Special Operations Team, waved his hand. Fully armed agents, like a black tide, instantly surrounded the shiny, detached villas. These were the address files for Arthur Pendleton and Victor Zima.

"Breach! Move fast!" Miller ordered. "Bang!" With a dull thud, a special battering ram shattered the heavy solid wood door of Arthur's home.

The agents filed in, the bright beams of their tactical flashlights scanning wildly through the dim living room. There was no precision laboratory as expected, no supercomputer terminals in operation. And certainly no sign of the heavily monitored "Flat Earth" Chief Architect.

"Clear!" "Clear!" "Clear!" The agents' reports echoed one after another, but carried an unmistakable note of shock.

Miller strode into the living room. A stale, musty odor rushed to meet him, mixed with the rotting stench of some unknown animal. In what used to be Arthur's study, the floor was covered in miscellaneous trash and broken cardboard. Several ragged homeless people were startled awake by the sudden bright lights, cowering in the corner and trembling.

"Who let you in?!" Miller grabbed one of the homeless men and roared: "Where is the owner of this place?! Where is Arthur Pendleton?!"

The homeless man, unable to open his eyes due to the bright light, spat out a breath of alcohol and shouted incoherently: "Get lost! This damn place... nobody has lived in this damn place for a long time! I've been living here for three years! There are only rats and wind here, there's no such thing as Arthur!"

Miller pushed him away, turned sharply, and rushed to Victor's residence, only to find the same result. The moment he pushed open the door, he felt a bone-chilling cold shoot from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. These houses. These residences, which had been listed as "top-priority surveillance targets," had not "escaped" right under their noses. They had vanished long ago. Even their families, their personal belongings, and every trace that could prove they had existed had been completely erased from this country years ago.

And the so-called "surveillance network," the so-called "regular reports," and the so-called "tight security" established by their intelligence agency had, for the long years past, been nothing more than watching empty, desolate houses and a meaningless shell of a project.

"Sir..." His deputy, with trembling hands, picked up a weather-beaten newspaper from a pile of junk; the date showed it was from three years ago.

Miller took a deep breath and spoke into the walkie-talkie, his voice as dry as if he had swallowed a handful of gravel: "Headquarters, this is the operations team. The targets are missing. They didn't just escape; rather..."

He paused for a moment, the cruel truth pressing down on him so hard he could barely breathe. "They have vanished into thin air for at least three years. The surveillance we thought we had was, from beginning to end, a complete and utter joke."

Washington, a top-secret conference room deep within the Pentagon. "Bang!" The field investigation report from the FBI stating "Target vanished for three years" was slammed hard onto the center of the circular conference table by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

Sitting around the table, besides high-ranking officials from the military and intelligence agencies, were several core interest representatives for Wall Street and top-tier conglomerates in Silicon Valley. At this moment, these big shots who could normally shake global stock markets with a single word were all pale, like birds startled by the mere twang of a bowstring.

"Three years! Three whole years!" The corner of the Secretary of Commerce's eye twitched violently, his hands pressing hard against the table like a beast cornered: "Our intelligence network, which costs billions every year, has been tightly guarding a garbage dump filled with homeless people for three years!"

A silver-haired conglomerate representative tremblingly took off his gold-rimmed glasses, his voice filled with an irrepressible panic: "Gentlemen, the point right now is not about assigning blame. If the 'Cold Etching Machine' has truly achieved full-scale mass production on that land in China, you all sitting here should know better than I do what that means!"

He stood up abruptly, his knuckles turning white from the force: "Why did we join forces back then to bury them, even resorting to all sorts of shady means to suppress Arthur and Victor's team? It was because our extreme ultraviolet Lithography Machine industrial chain had already taken shape! It is tightly bound to over a dozen Western countries, hundreds of core supply chains, and trillions of U.S. dollars in upfront investment poured in by major conglomerates!"

"Once that 'Cold Etching' technology—which requires no masks, doesn't rely on ultra-pure water, and has costs so low they are appalling—sweeps the globe, all of our semiconductor hegemony built on traditional lithography barriers, along with those trillions in sunk costs, will be wiped out overnight!"

The old man's roar echoed in the top-secret conference room, and everyone's breathing became heavy. Facing this fatal threat that was about to uproot them and completely flip the table, the mask of technological hypocrisy that the U.S. leadership had maintained all along was torn to shreds at this moment.

"Investigate!" The Secretary of Commerce slammed his fist onto the solid wood conference table, shaking the glass water cup in front of him violently. A desperate madness and ferocity erupted in his eyes. "Issue the highest directive to all global allies, overseas bases, and intelligence branches immediately! Issue an international top-level wanted notice immediately!"

He roared, gritting his teeth, spittle flying: "I don't care how they escaped across the border back then, and I don't care which bunker they are hiding in in China now! Use every means available, spare no cost, you must dig these traitors out and bring them back!"