SYL Chao opens his silver briefcase and lays it on the table. He deftly puts on white gloves and begins to unwrap white cloths from three rectangular devices in front of him. It's like being in a Marvel movie: This is the scene where the bad guy reveals his grand plan for world/universal domination/destruction. Chao cuts a perfect genius-supervillian figure, too: expertly tailored blue suit, thick dark glasses, perfectly coiffed brunette hair, and a mad-scientist vibe. He's the CEO of Turing Robotic Industries, which sounds like a place Tony Stark interned. And the device Chao is unwrapping, the three colors of the Turing Phone, are big, blocky, and sharply designed, unlike anything else. It looks like it could sprout arms and antennae and begin wreaking havoc.

As he unwraps it, Chao explains his vision. "Not everyone wants to drive a Volkswagen," he says. "There are people who like Aston Martins, Lamborghinis, and Ferraris. Right now, most phones are Volkswagens." The phone in Chao's hand is the supercar.

The Turing Phone is a 5.5-inch smartphone, running Android 5.1, but it's like nothing you've seen before. It has a sharply curved, multi-colored shell, and a patterned back, borrowed from spaceship designs and the result of "thousands, literally thousands" of sketches. (The spaceship "Endurance" from Interstellar was particularly inspirational.) It comes in three models: Pharaoh, Cardinal, and Beowulf. Each one takes color and texture cues from the source material, like the scales from Grendel's Mother in Beowulf. It's actually a little under-specced, with an older Snapdragon processor and only 16GB of storage in the entry-level model, though it does have a 13-megapixel rear camera and an 8-megapixel model on the front.

The phone has no USB port, and no headphone jack. There's just a single, proprietary jack that looks a little like the MacBook's MagSafe, and Bluetooth.

Its software is completely, entirely customized; all Chao had to show in a demo were a few homescreens, but he's supremely confident it's going to be "a masterpiece." He promises a total overhaul of Android, a giant improvement on Google's vision across the board. He imagines the phone is for designers—Chao is an architect both by disposition and training—as well as anyone who wants something a little different from the black rectangles that blanket the world's carrier stores.

Liquidmorphium is stronger than steel or aluminum, more efficient to use in manufacturing, and apparently the next big thing in phones.

Turing won't market the phone this way, but the phone is designed with security very much in mind. End-to-end encryption is built into most of the core apps on the phone. It even has a "Turing coin" inside, a cryptocurrency Chao hopes will catch on—if he does, he laughs, your phone could literally appreciate in value after you buy it. It's all activated through a fingerprint reader on the side of the phone, and is made to keep servers and third parties out of your business as much as possible (the company is working on an API to let other people access all these features). In short: The Turing Phone is meant to be completely and utterly unhackable.

Unbreakable, too. It's made of a material called liquidmorphium. (I'm telling you, this is a Marvel comic waiting to happen.) Liquidmorphium is stronger than steel or aluminum, more efficient to use in manufacturing, and apparently the next big thing in phones. Apple uses it a bit, Chao says, but only in the SIM card slot on the iPhone—though he says the iPhone 7 could make much more use of the material.

The phone is also extraordinarily waterproof, thanks to a nano-coating on the internals. There's no rubber, though, and everything is accessible and open, SYL Chao says (SYL are his initials—he goes by Steve). If you put the Turing Phone in the water, it's not designed to be sealed, and water will get in. Just pull it out, shake it off, and go about your business.

Remember these three features, Chao says: privacy keys, liquid metal, nano-coating. "These features are like the GPS, Wi-Fi, and camera of the early days of smartphones. People were like, 'Why do I need that?' But then they were standardized. In the future, if you don't have liquid metal, nano-coating, and a privacy key, you'll be phased out right away." Oh, and just in case you didn't believe him: "I can assure you," he says, "the three things I'm talking about are the same things Apple is considering right now."

The phone is available for pre-order starting July 31, beginning at $610 for a 16GB model. It'll be available unlocked, though Chao says Turing is working with carriers to make it available more widely.

Whether he's right or not, Chao isn't shy about what he thinks about the new device—or of every other phone on the planet. But this isn't the endgame of Turing Robotics Industries. It's just the very beginning. Chao and his team are working on battery technology, which he says they'll be ready to show in eight months and is going to "change the world." The ultimate plan is to build a robot butler, "that will serve your day-to-day needs." To do so, Chao says, "we are working on our own artificial consciousness machine. Not artificial intelligence, artificial consciousness."

Iron Man would be proud.