Ryan and Chloe stepped out of the workshop and walked straight into a wall of cameras.
There were at least a dozen of them — reporters, photographers, a couple of two-person crews with shoulder-mounted video rigs — scattered across the yard and the street beyond it like an occupying force. Some had lawn chairs. One had a cooler. They'd clearly been there for a while.
The second Ryan's face cleared the workshop door, the whole group surged forward.
"Mr. Mercer! Can you confirm—"
"Ryan, just a few questions—"
"Is it true that Marlin Technologies—"
Ryan retreated so fast he nearly knocked Chloe back through the doorway. They scrambled inside the house and locked the front door, breathing hard, listening to the muffled sound of reporters regrouping on the lawn.
Chloe peered through the blinds. "There's a guy out there eating a sandwich and staring at our front door. Like, directly at it. With eye contact."
"Entertainment press," Ryan said. "Has to be."
"How can you tell?"
"The stakeout commitment. News reporters go home after an hour. Entertainment people will camp outside your house until you die or become boring."
They were stuck. Ryan could handle it — it was his house — but Chloe couldn't exactly push through a crowd of cameras without becoming the story herself. She parked on the couch and resigned herself to an afternoon of captivity, scrolling her phone and providing running commentary on the internet's ongoing meltdown.
By evening, the press contingent had thinned but not disappeared. A few diehards lingered under the streetlight, eating takeout and watching the house with the patient intensity of birdwatchers.
Chloe's parents picked her up at seven. Her mom's minivan pulled into the driveway, and Chloe made a break for it — head down, bag clutched to her chest, moving with the speed and determination of someone who'd watched too many paparazzi chase scenes. Two reporters tried to intercept her. She didn't slow down. The minivan door slid shut and they were gone.
Tom and Lisa got home twenty minutes later and had to park on the street because a news van was blocking the driveway.
"Interesting day?" Lisa said, stepping over a discarded coffee cup on the front walk.
"They've been here since noon."
"Wonderful. I hope they enjoyed the view of our dead lawn."
Dinner. The four o'clock news was on, and none of them could resist.
The anchor led with a package that had clearly been assembled in a hurry — stock footage of robots, a few seconds of Ryan's test video (watermarked, pulled from YouTube), and a graphic that read TEEN MECH BUILDER: REAL OR FAKE?
"A video posted online earlier this week by fourteen-year-old Ryan Mercer of Crestfield, Texas, has sparked a national debate. Mercer claims to have built a functioning mech — a large, piloted robot — in his family's workshop."
The segment cut to Scrapper's concept art, then to a still from the test video.
"The mech, which Mercer calls Scrapper, stands approximately forty feet tall. In the video, Mercer appears to control the machine using some kind of manual interface, directing it to stand and walk. The video has been viewed over fifty million times across multiple platforms."
Cut to the studio. A man in a sport coat — introduced by the chyron as a robotics consultant — sat across from the anchor with the easy confidence of someone about to explain why everything you just saw was impossible.
"Look, the physics here just don't work. That much mass, that kind of articulation, powered by what appears to be a single diesel generator? The power density alone would need to be orders of magnitude beyond anything in the current literature. And the control system — this kid claims he's operating a forty-foot machine with hand gestures? Without visible actuator arrays, without hydraulic lines, without any of the infrastructure you'd need for a system this size? I'm sorry, but no."
The anchor nodded in the way anchors do when they've already decided the narrative. "So in your assessment, the video is most likely fabricated?"
"I'd say the probability of this being genuine is extremely low."
Tom muted the TV.
"Well," he said. "That was fun."
"Saturday," Ryan said. "Noon. That'll settle it."
Lisa was already somewhere else mentally. "If this thing is real — and I know it's real, Ryan, I saw it move — then we need to talk about security. That workshop has a padlock and sheet metal walls. If Scrapper is worth what Marlin offered—"
"The only thing on Scrapper worth stealing is the neural link, and that's sealed inside the chest housing. Nobody's cracking it open without power tools and about six hours. And the rest of the mech weighs twenty tons. It's not going anywhere."
Lisa didn't look entirely satisfied, but she let it go. For now.
The next morning, Chloe posted the announcement.
She'd drafted it overnight — clean, punchy, no unnecessary words. Ryan had approved it over text at six a.m.
LIVE DEMONSTRATION — SATURDAY, 12:00 PM CT
Scrapper will undergo a full operational test, streamed live with no cuts and no edits. All credentialed media are invited to attend in person and operate their own cameras. Details below.
The internet, which had spent the last three days screaming into the void waiting for Ryan to say something, received this like a match hitting gasoline.
Within minutes, comments were pouring in:
"Holy shit he's actually doing a live test?? How confident IS this kid?"
"Calling it now — something will 'go wrong' right before the test. A fire, a power failure, some convenient excuse."
"The TV expert literally said it's fake last night and this dude just announces a livestream? Lmao the balls on this kid."
"Still chasing that special admissions spot huh?"
Chloe read through the first wave, shrugged, tossed her phone onto her pillow, and went back to sleep.
They were insulting Ryan, not her. His problem.
Four hundred miles away, in a borrowed office at UT Austin, Professor Douglas Ward was watching the same video for the eleventh time.
Ward was a materials scientist from MIT — one of the department's senior researchers, with two decades of work in advanced alloys and composite structures. He was in Austin for a week-long academic exchange, sharing a temporary office with his colleague James Hartley, who specialized in aerospace propulsion systems.
Ward wasn't watching the video because he thought it was fake. He also wasn't watching it because he thought it was real. He was watching it because the math didn't add up, and that bothered him.
The mech — Scrapper, the kid called it — was clearly built from ordinary steel. Ward could tell from the color, the surface texture, the way it caught light. Plain carbon steel, maybe some low-alloy structural grade. Heavy stuff. At that scale, the frame alone would mass somewhere north of twenty tons, probably closer to thirty with the actuators and internal systems included.
And it was moving on a single power cable connected to a diesel generator.
That was the part Ward kept rewinding. One cable. One generator. Moving thirty-plus tons of steel through complex articulated motions — standing, walking, maintaining balance. The energy requirements for that were enormous. The power density implied by a single cable feed was... not consistent with any existing technology he was aware of.
If the video was CGI, it was the best he'd ever seen. If it wasn't CGI, then the power and drive systems inside that mech were something genuinely new.
Either way, it was worth a closer look.
He pulled up the livestream announcement. Saturday. Noon. Crestfield, Texas.
He was already in Texas. Crestfield was — he checked — about three hours by car.
"Jim." He turned to Hartley, who was eating a sandwich at the adjacent desk. "You see this mech kid?"
Hartley glanced over. "The fourteen-year-old? Please. It's obviously—"
"Look at the power feed."
Hartley looked. Chewed. Looked again.
"...Huh."
"One cable. Diesel genny. Moving thirty tons."
"Could be hidden cables. Off-screen power source."
"Watch the wide shot. Camerawoman backs all the way outside. You can see the full footprint. One cable."
Hartley set down his sandwich. Watched the wide shot. Rewound it. Watched it again.
"That's... not nothing," he admitted.
"I want to go see it in person. Before the livestream. The kid's address shouldn't be hard to find — half the media in Texas is camped outside his house."
"Doug, it's a fourteen-year-old in a garage."
"A fourteen-year-old who finished high school at fourteen and is somehow pushing thirty tons on a single power feed. I've sat through worse faculty presentations."
Hartley considered this. It was, unfortunately, true.
"Fine. But if this turns out to be a science fair project with a good camera angle, you're buying dinner."
Ward made some calls. A contact at UT Austin's engineering department had already been fielding media requests about the Scrapper story and had a home address on file. Ward called Tom Mercer directly, introduced himself, explained his credentials, and asked if he and his colleague could visit the following day.
Tom called Ryan. Ryan said yes immediately.
Two MIT professors with defense-adjacent research portfolios wanted to inspect Scrapper in person. That was exactly the kind of attention the second project needed.
The pieces were starting to move.