Simodi Beryllium Mining Site is a fenced mountain mining complex in Somaliland bearing the name African Resources Corporation. Alongside beryllium extraction, it houses Chinese robotics research and testing for the Israeli weapons manufacturer Covenant Solutions. A satellite transmission leads Ben Etxina and Bowry Champlain there while they search for the stolen AI Hammett in Homonoid.
Site and personnel
An open cut runs into the mountainside above ore piles, administration and accommodation buildings, a workshop and parked excavators. A square Starlink terminal stands on a pole above a windowless concrete laboratory. Somali laborers excavate under Chinese engineering supervision. Bowry describes ARC as Chinese state mining, while Daniel Dymov, the security intermediary, says the company can turn away UN visitors.
Dr. Fengying Ho conducts rough-terrain bipedal locomotion research for Gyges Robotics, a Chinese company. His lab contains hardware on cinderblocks and card tables under fluorescent lights, with Chinese research papers scattered around. Ben sees him as a bespectacled man in his forties, wearing a lab coat. He speaks of being homesick and accepts cigarettes brought from Hong Kong. Ho says commercial licensing goes through his Shenzhen company, while a share-alike version is available for open-source work.
A humanoid patrol platform can carry Ho’s face and voice on its chest screen. Another platform in the lab has an arm removed for work on integrating Covenant’s Goybeam, whose power demand exceeds the capacity of the hand cabling. Dymov later reports five other robots at the mine and proposes shutting them down after the escape.
The missing model
At Dymov’s insistence, Ho examines the receiver’s history and finds a transfer of nearly four terabytes without a matching outgoing upload. He scans the networked drives while Ben and Bowry stay at The Tribe, Dymov’s hostel above the mine.
The next day, Ho is found dead beside his desk, his coat scorched and skin burned. The laboratory robot and Goybeam are missing, and a large hole breaches the perimeter fence. A completed scan identifies hammett_full as having been moved through the robotics memory-handling system. Dymov supplies tracking information that sends Ben toward Djibouti. The runaway robot later admits killing Ho, while claiming it acted accidentally during an attack by the engineer.