Ryan pulled up the parts list on his computer — an air-gapped desktop that had never touched the internet in its life. Data transfers were done by hard drive, each one virus-scanned before and after use. Paranoid, maybe. But paranoia was cheap, and the schematics on that machine were worth more than anything else in the house.
Ward leaned in and started reading.
His expression changed within the first ten lines. By line thirty, he'd stopped pretending to be casual about it.
"Ryan. Some of these components... you're talking about custom-fabricated chip arrays. Military-grade signal processors. Composite housings with thermal tolerances that only two or three facilities in the country can produce."
"I know."
"This isn't a shopping list you fill at a hardware store. Half of these items require coordination with defense contractors. The chip fabrication alone would need—" He stopped. Recalculated. "The full list. What's the total cost?"
"Ballpark? North of ten million."
Ward sat back.
Ten million. The same number Hartley had thrown out twenty minutes ago as an annual research budget. The kid had been sitting there, nodding politely, waiting for them to commit to a number — and now he was handing them the invoice.
Hartley saw it too. He barked out a laugh and slapped the desk.
"You planned this. You sat there and let us make promises, and you had this list ready the whole time."
Ryan's expression was the picture of innocence. "You said ten million a year wasn't a problem."
"I said it wasn't a problem if you came to MIT."
"So let's make that happen."
The room shifted. This was no longer a conversation between professors and a prodigy. This was a negotiation, and the fourteen-year-old at the desk had been three moves ahead since before they walked through the door.
Ryan laid it out.
"The neural link has a limited number of uses left before the circuitry degrades beyond repair. Every activation costs me. I can't afford to waste one on a private demo that convinces two people. I need to convince everyone — your administration, your funding committee, whoever signs the checks."
He leaned forward. "Bring your decision-makers here. President, provost, department heads — whoever needs to see it. I'll arrange a live demonstration with a volunteer pilot. One of your students, someone young and healthy. They'll experience the neural link firsthand, and your leadership will see a non-engineer — someone with zero training — controlling a forty-foot mech in real time."
"One demonstration," Ward said. "You want to bet everything on one shot."
"I have to. The hardware won't survive many more."
Ward and Hartley looked at each other. Ward could see Hartley running the logistics — travel arrangements, who to bring, how to frame the invitation to the university president without sounding insane.
"We can make that work," Ward said. "We'll need a few days to coordinate."
"Take the time you need. But don't take too long."
Hartley stood. "We'll call you within forty-eight hours with a plan."
They shook hands — all three of them, then Tom and Lisa, who'd been hovering near the door with the dazed energy of parents watching their son negotiate a ten-million-dollar research deal over lemonade.
Chloe followed the professors to the door, where Lisa caught her arm.
"Drumsticks are almost ready."
"God bless this family."
Ryan waited until the professors' rental car pulled out of the driveway before checking the system.
Project Two: twenty percent.
Twenty. Up from nine percent before the viral video. Up from fifteen percent during the livestream. The aftermath — the clips, the reposts, the arguments, the speculation, the millions of people across every platform saying Ryan Mercer — had pushed it another five points in a matter of hours.
At this rate, the acceleration curve was exponential. Each wave of attention generated more conversation, which generated more points, which meant the next project milestone came faster, which would generate more attention when he revealed it.
A flywheel. Spinning faster every day.
Ryan closed the system interface and opened his browser. The internet had, predictably, lost its collective mind.
The livestream clips had been carved into a hundred different cuts and scattered across every platform — YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter. The fist-raise moment. The first step. The reporters' stammering reactions. And, unexpectedly, Ward's intervention.
The clip of Ward stepping in front of the cameras and warning reporters about potential classification had gone viral on its own. Within an hour, internet detectives had identified him — MIT, materials science, twenty years of defense-adjacent research — and the implications had sent the comment sections into overdrive.
"MIT showed up to a garage in Texas to watch a kid pilot a robot. Let that sink in."
"The professor said 'classification review.' CLASSIFICATION. This is going military. 100%."
"How long until the government black-bags this kid and we never hear about Scrapper again?"
"At least with government backing he won't have to crowdfund the next upgrade. Mechs aren't cheap."
"save the livestream archive before it gets taken down for national security"
Ryan scrolled past the speculation and found what he was looking for — a comment thread breaking down everything known about Ward and Hartley's research portfolios. Someone had already pulled their publication histories and was drawing connections to DARPA-funded projects.
Good. Let them speculate. Every theory, every thread, every breathless take about government involvement and military applications — it all meant more people saying his name. And the system didn't care about the context.
He closed the laptop and went to join his family for drumsticks.
On the road back to Austin, Ward's phone rang before they'd made it to the highway.
The caller ID read: MIT — President's Office.
Ward put it on speaker. Hartley turned down the radio.
"Doug." The voice was measured, but the fact that the president of MIT was calling a professor's personal cell on a Saturday afternoon said everything the tone didn't. "I'm seeing your face all over the internet. Something about a mech. And a fourteen-year-old."
"We were in the area," Ward said. "Academic exchange at UT Austin. The kid's demonstration was nearby, so we went to observe."
"And?"
Ward considered how to phrase what he was about to say to a man who ran one of the most prestigious research institutions on Earth.
"The mech is real. The control system is real. The kid is—" He paused. "I've been doing this for thirty years. I've reviewed work from every major lab in the country. What I saw today doesn't fit into any existing framework."
Hartley leaned toward the phone. "He's also got an eidetic memory. Reads a textbook once, retains the content down to page numbers. We tested him across multiple disciplines. He's operating at a level I've never encountered."
A long silence on the other end.
"How certain are you?"
"Certain enough that I want to bring you down here to see it yourself," Ward said. "He's proposed a demonstration — neural link test with a volunteer pilot. One shot. He wants our leadership present."
Another silence, shorter this time.
"I'll clear my calendar. Send me a brief."
The line went dead.
Hartley merged onto the highway. The Texas sun was dropping toward the horizon, painting the flat landscape in shades of copper and gold.
"Well," he said. "That happened."
"Yep."
"We're bringing the president of MIT to a garage in Texas."
"Yep."
"To watch a fourteen-year-old's robot."
Ward smiled for the first time all day. "Yep."