Reborn in Tokyo: From Heiress to Global Tycoon

Chapter 324 Leader

The two drank another round.

Satsuki's cheeks were starting to flush, and Waver's gaze was no longer as tense as before.

The conversation naturally veered from "reflections" to "reality".

Weber put down his cup and leaned forward unconsciously. His speech quickened noticeably.

"Unification is a good thing. But the downside of this good thing is that Treuhandanstalt is about to start making changes."

"The Trust Management Bureau," Satsuki added.

"Yes," Weber nodded. "Their task was to dispose of all East German state-owned assets. To break up, sell, and shut down more than 8,000 state-owned enterprises."

"There's only one standard—the figures on paper. Keep the ones that make money, cut the ones that don't."

His fingers tapped unconsciously on his knee.

"But how can we judge the value of those things just by looking at the books?" Weber's voice tightened. "The magnetron sputtering equipment on the third floor of Building B at the Zeiss Jena—the one I mentioned in my report last month—is a ZSM-2200. East Germany only built three of them. Its cathode target holder is hand-ground and assembled, with tolerances controlled within plus or minus two micrometers. If this equipment could be transported here, the purity problem of the target material for Mo/Si multilayer films could be solved on the spot."

He took a deep breath and continued.

"And then there's the Zeiss Jena coating workshop. Fifty years. From the 1940s to now, that's half a century of accumulated vacuum optical coating technology. All that experience is in the hands and minds of the technicians—most of it isn't even fully documented in internal files. If the workshop closes down and the people disperse, all of this will be lost forever."

"What about the Jena Glass Factory?" Satsuki asked.

Weber's eyes lit up.

"Miss, you know Schott Glass, right? Schott's 'predecessor' was in Jena—founded in Jena in 1884 by Abbe and Schott. After World War II, it split into two companies, East and West. Schott in the west moved to Mainz, while the Jena Glass Factory remained in the east."

He stretched out his hand and counted on his fingers.

"After reunification, West Germany's Schott plant will likely merge with the Jena plant. But a merger usually means—moving the useful parts and shutting down the redundant ones. The Jena plant's special optical glass melting furnaces and formula files..."

Weber's hand paused in mid-air.

"Those formulas with ultra-low expansion coefficients—zero-expansion glass. The handwritten experimental notebooks contain decades of data! They're now locked in the materials department's filing cabinet and haven't been digitized."

"What if it gets lost in the chaos of property rights consolidation—"

He didn't finish speaking.

Satsuki held her cup, her gaze quietly fixed on Weber's face.

Weber added another sentence.

"We also have things in Dresden. The VEB Microelectronics consortium's cleanroom—the manufacturing process is indeed lagging behind the West, but the vacuum evaporation equipment and some testing instruments inside can be used directly. I remember all the models and specifications..."

Then he started talking about people.

His speech quickened, and his breathing became rapid.

"I have a long-time partner at Zeiss. His name is Hans Gruber. He specializes in ultra-precision grinding of aspherical surfaces and has been in the industry for 23 years."

"Out of the 27,000 people in the entire Zeiss Jena, there are no more than five who can achieve his level of precision."

"Then there was a materials chemist at the Jena Glass Factory named Peter Lange. He specialized in ultra-low coefficient of thermal expansion glass. He made the glass substrate for the East German military sniper scope."

"The Dresden Microelectronics Institute also has a cleanroom engineering manager, Markus Hoffmann. He was in charge of environmental control for East Germany's most advanced 64K DRAM pilot production line—Class 100 level. He has ten years of management experience."

Weber's voice suddenly lowered as he finished speaking.

"After reunification, all these people and things will benefit West Germans." He pursed his lips. "West German corporations will come and choose—Schott will choose, Siemens will choose, West German Zeiss will choose. But they won't take it all; what's left over..."

He put down the cup. The sound was louder than he expected.

"The trusteeship will sell the equipment at scrap metal prices and lay off technicians under the pretext of 'redundant staff.' I heard that Zeiss Jena has 27,000 employees—"

His Adam's apple bobbed.

"In the end, maybe only three thousand will remain."

There was a two-second silence.

"I worked at Zeiss for fifteen years." Weber looked into Satsuki's eyes. "Those people... weren't just colleagues."

The room quieted down again.

Satsuki put down her wine cup.

She looked into Weber's eyes, her tone calm.

"What if I could get them to come to Japan?"

Weber's breath hitched.

He leaned forward, his eyes brightening—the first time Satsuki had seen such an expression on his face since arriving in Japan over a year ago.

Unlike the excitement over scientific data, it is a more primal joy that concerns "humanity".

"Boss, are you serious? How? Through what channels? What about the visa—"

"Shh-"

Satsuki squinted and raised a finger.

The index finger is placed between the two people.

"Only those who are valuable are worth my effort to save."

Weber's excitement froze for a moment. Then he slowly leaned back in his chair.

Yeah, why would a boss save a bunch of people who have nothing to do with him and have no value to him?

So this is a transaction.

But—at least, it's an opportunity.

Weber took a deep breath and sat up straight.

Fortunately, his friends are all very outstanding people.

"Hans Gruber. Fifty-one years old. Aspherical ultra-precision grinding." His voice was flat and fast. "His manual shaping precision can reach λ/50—λ is 632.8 nanometers. Converted to absolute values, that's a surface shape error within 12.6 nanometers. What does this number mean? —There are only a handful of people in all of Japan who can achieve this level of precision. If we put him on our EUV mirror processing line, conservatively speaking, the yield rate could be increased by three to five percentage points."

He raised his second finger.

"Peter Lange. Forty-seven years old. Materials chemistry. The formulation and firing process of zero-expansion glass are currently mastered by only Corning and Zeiss worldwide. Lange has the entire East German version of the formula in his mind—completely different from the route taken by West Germany's Schott, using a variant of the lithium aluminum silicate system. Its performance indicators are even superior to Schott Group's microcrystalline glass in some infrared bands. If we are to make the substrate material for EUV mirrors ourselves—he is the key."

The third one.

"Marcus Hoffman. Forty-three years old. Cleanroom engineering management. Class 100, and has been managing for over ten years. Miss, if we're going to expand this underground lab—from air circulation to micro-vibration control to electrostatic protection—he's the most suitable person I can think of."

Weber lowered his hand. His fingers loosened and then clenched again.

"Regarding equipment, the ZSM-2200 magnetron sputtering equipment is located on the third floor of Building B at Zeiss Jena, against the north wall, at room B-312. The archives of special formulas from the Jena Glass Factory are stored in a gray metal cabinet on the second floor of the Materials Department—a cabinet with three locks. There are about thirty notebooks, all handwritten, dating from the early 1970s until last year."

He paused for a moment.

"There is also a batch of design drawings—the assembly drawings of East German military optical systems. They are no longer of military significance, but the optical path design ideas of multi-reflector systems... are of reference value for our EUV optical path architecture."

Weber finished speaking.

Place your hands on your knees.

He looked at Satsuki quietly, waiting for her to speak.

Satsuki listened attentively the whole time.

At least that's how it appears.

She sat upright, her gaze following Weber's narration, and occasionally nodding slightly.

After Weber finished speaking, she remained silent for two seconds.

"Yes, very good."

She paused for a moment.

Then he began to speak in a very serious manner.

"I don't remember any of it."

Weber: "..."

He was stunned for a full three seconds.

Then he saw Satsuki's face clearly.

Her cheeks were red. The redness ran from her cheeks all the way to her ears.

Her gaze... though still directed in his direction, had clearly drifted off-focus.

A slight curve, somewhere between a smile and a dazed expression, hung at the corner of his mouth.

She didn't drink more than three cups of Rotkäppchen in total.

Three glasses of sparkling wine. And the alcohol content is only 11%.

I got drunk just like that.

"...Boss?" Waver cautiously observed Satsuki's condition.

She looked somewhat unsteady, but Weber didn't dare to reach out and support her—in some ways, she was more terrifying than the Stasi.

Then Satsuki suddenly stood up.

The movement was more stable than Weber had expected—at least there was no swaying. But the moment she stood up, she closed her eyes briefly, as if waiting for the dizziness to subside.

After all, Satsuki had shown him immense kindness, and Waver was prepared to support her with a do-or-die attitude.

"Smack."

Satsuki stomped her shoes hard on the ground, regaining her balance.

She propped herself up and reached for the half-empty bottle of Rotkäppchen on the table.

He gripped the bottleneck directly and turned to walk towards the door.

He walked along, speaking in a muffled voice.

"Go find Endo."

"Repeat everything I just said—the personnel list, the equipment list, the locations of the design drawings—word for word..."

She walked to the door and rested one hand on the doorframe. She didn't turn around.

"If Endo deems it feasible after his assessment—"

She paused for a moment.

"We will do our best to save the Saionji family."

Done.

She raised the bottle in her hand, tilted her head back, and brought the bottle up to her lips—gulping down a large mouthful.

A little golden liquid spilled from between the bottle opening and her lips, sliding down her chin and dripping onto the collar of her cream-colored cashmere cardigan.

She didn't wipe it.

I stepped into the corridor.

The footsteps faded into the distance.

"Tap-tap-tap-" The sound of little leather shoes stepping on the cement floor echoed for a long time in the empty underground corridor.

Then it disappeared.

……

Weber was left alone in the lab again.

On the television screen, the footage of the Berlin celebrations had somehow been cut off. NHK began broadcasting the closing segment of its international news program, with the anchor calmly reporting on the situation in the Middle East.

Weber looked down at the cup in his hand.

The bubbles in the sparkling wine had almost dissipated. The surface of the liquid was still, and the golden liquid reflected the image of the fluorescent tube.

He shook his head with a wry smile.

"What a strange boss..."

He clearly has a terrible alcohol tolerance. He gets flushed and tipsy after just three drinks.

Yet he still made a special trip to the laboratory twelve meters underground—carrying a bottle of liquor that only East Germans recognized—to sit in front of the television with a defector and watch the funeral of a country that no longer existed.

Weber held the cup up to his eyes and swirled it around.

The last sip of wine left a thin layer of gold clinging to the glass.

"but--"

His voice was very soft. So soft that only he could hear it.

"She is truly an excellent leader."

He drank the wine in his glass in one gulp.

The aroma of yeast lingered on the back of my tongue for a long time, like the warmth of a fireplace in Jena on a winter's day.

It's warm and reassuring.