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A week after the video went live, the government broke its silence.
The announcement was terse and official: in five days, a public verification session would be held at the Ashford City Military Compound, led by Dr. Edmund Hargrove, to determine the authenticity of the technology shown in the viral footage.
The internet lost its mind.
"Finally! The authorities are stepping in. This clown is done."
"Good. Should've shut this down a week ago. Ban him from every platform."
"Wait, Dr. Hargrove is going PERSONALLY? For a high school dropout's science project? That man is a national treasure. He shouldn't have to waste his time on this."
"Say what you want about Mercer, but getting Dr. Hargrove to show up in person? That's a bigger achievement than anything he'll do for the rest of his life."
At the Holloway house, Ethan received an email from the Valorian Ministry of Science and Technology. It ran several pages and was written in the dense, careful language of government officials who wanted to sound welcoming while making it very clear this was not optional.
The gist: bring your research results to the Ashford City Military Compound in five days. Field testing. Full verification. Government oversight.
Ethan read it twice, set his phone down, and exhaled.
Although the results hadn't been announced yet, the trajectory was clear. The government wouldn't mobilize Dr. Edmund Hargrove for a debunking. They wouldn't book a military facility for a hoax. The fact that they were doing this at all meant someone at the top had already looked at the evidence and decided there was a real chance it was legitimate.
And with Hargrove overseeing the verification, there wouldn't be any political interference or bureaucratic sabotage. The man's reputation was beyond reproach. Whatever he concluded, the world would accept.
Linda, who'd been eavesdropping from the kitchen doorway, burst in with the energy of a woman who'd been holding her breath for a month.
"Big shots! Government officials! Military compound! You're going to be in a room full of people who could have you arrested or promoted with a phone call!"
She grabbed his shoulders and shook him once for emphasis.
"Don't you dare get nervous and mess this up!"
"Aunt Linda, relax. I still owe you and Uncle Frank a new house. I'm not going to fumble this."
Linda's eyes narrowed. "One house? Try two. You think borrowing money doesn't come with interest?"
From the living room, Frank shook his head. Even now, with the biggest moment of the kid's life five days away, his wife was negotiating real estate terms.
The five days evaporated.
On the morning of the verification, the street outside the Holloway house looked like a celebrity had moved in overnight. Reporters with cameras, neighbors craning their necks over fences, random onlookers who'd driven across town for a glimpse of the "fusion kid." The crowd was three deep at the curb and growing.
Ethan stood in the front hallway with his equipment bag over one shoulder, peering through the curtains, trying to figure out how to get from the door to the street without being swallowed alive.
Then a sedan pulled up.
It was unremarkable. Dark paint, standard model, the kind of car you'd walk past in a parking lot without a second glance. But its license plate carried a prefix that made every reporter on the sidewalk go quiet and every onlooker take a step back.
Government. High clearance. Very high.
The crowd parted without being asked. The chatter died. The car rolled to a stop directly in front of the Holloway house.
Inside, Frank and Linda reacted like teenagers at a concert.
"He came to pick you up PERSONALLY?!" Frank's voice cracked. "Dr. Edmund Hargrove is sitting in that car RIGHT NOW and he drove here to collect YOU?!"
"Get out there! Move! Don't keep him waiting!"
Linda was already pushing Ethan toward the door. "If you disappoint that man, I will break both your legs when you get home. And your arms."
She paused.
"Also, do you think you could get his autograph?"
"He's not a pop star, Linda!"
"I KNOW that! I just thought — never mind, GO!"
Ethan shouldered his bag, took a breath, and walked out the door.
The crowd pressed in immediately. Voices, cameras, microphones. He ducked his head, moved fast, and slid into the back seat of the sedan before anyone could shove a recording device in his face.
The door closed. The noise cut off like someone had flipped a switch.
And Ethan found himself sitting next to Dr. Edmund Hargrove.
The old man was smaller than Ethan had expected.
Ninety-one years old, but he didn't look it. His posture was upright, his eyes were clear, and the hand resting on his knee was steady. Decades of discipline — physical and intellectual — had preserved him well past the point where most people started to fade.
But it was the presence that caught Ethan off guard. Hargrove had spent a lifetime in rooms where the fate of nations was decided. He'd briefed presidents, testified before parliaments, and stared down military officials twice his size without blinking. That kind of history left a mark. Sitting next to him felt like sitting next to a mountain — quiet, immovable, and much larger than it appeared.
"So." Hargrove studied him with the unhurried attention of a man who'd long since stopped being impressed by anything. "You haven't had an easy time of it lately."
Ethan met his gaze. Didn't flinch. Didn't perform humility.
"It's been fine. True gold doesn't fear the furnace."
A pause. Then, quieter:
"Besides, the people who actually understand the work are a minority. I've never seen much point in worrying about the opinions of the majority."
Hargrove's eyes sharpened.
The old physicist had carried a rifle before he'd ever picked up a pencil. In the early years of the republic, before Valoria had stabilized, he'd fought in a war and watched friends die before pivoting to the laboratory that would define his legacy. He'd spent seventy years surrounded by powerful people — generals, ministers, heads of state — and he could read a person's spine in the first thirty seconds of conversation.
The Ministry official who'd briefed him two days ago had been trembling. A grown man, decades of government service, barely able to hold eye contact.
This kid hadn't blinked.
Interesting.
But confidence was cheap. Talent was what mattered. And Dr. Edmund Hargrove had a two-hour car ride to determine whether the boy sitting next to him had any.
He steered the conversation toward physics.
The military compound was on the far edge of the province. Even at highway speed, the drive took nearly two hours.
When the car finally stopped and the driver stepped out to open Dr. Hargrove's door, he paused for a moment on the pavement and lit a cigarette with hands that weren't entirely steady.
He'd been Hargrove's personal driver for eleven years. In that time, he'd chauffeured the old man to meetings with presidents, to classified research facilities, to international summits where the future of energy policy was negotiated over coffee and handshakes. He'd sat in the front seat while Nobel laureates, military commanders, and foreign dignitaries occupied the back, and he'd developed a tolerance for greatness that bordered on immunity.
Today, a seventeen-year-old had rattled him.
He'd heard the entire conversation through the partition. Two hours of physics. At first, it had sounded like what he'd expected: Hargrove asking questions, the kid answering. A test. An evaluation.
But somewhere around the forty-five minute mark, the dynamic had shifted. The questions got more complex. The answers got longer. And then — gradually, unmistakably — the direction reversed. Hargrove was no longer testing. He was asking. Genuinely asking. The way a student asks a teacher when they've hit a wall they can't get past alone.
By the end of the drive, the ninety-one-year-old legend of Valorian physics had been taking notes on a napkin.
The driver took a long drag on his cigarette and stared at the cloudless sky.
Either I'm losing my mind, or that kid just taught Dr. Edmund Hargrove something new about physics.
Hargrove walked beside Ethan toward the compound gates in silence.
He was processing. Reorganizing. Doing the thing that great scientists do when the ground shifts beneath their feet — not panicking, not denying, but methodically rebuilding their model of reality to accommodate new information.
In two hours, he'd tested this boy on every level he could think of. Foundational mechanics. Quantum theory. Nuclear physics. Energy conversion. Thermodynamic limits. He'd thrown problems at the kid that had stumped doctoral candidates and watched him dismantle them with the casual ease of someone solving arithmetic.
And then, toward the end, Ethan had begun explaining concepts that Hargrove had never encountered. Frameworks for energy containment at the subatomic level. Theoretical approaches to sustained fusion that bypassed every bottleneck the global physics community had spent decades crashing into.
Not hypothetical. Not speculative. Complete. Fully derived, internally consistent, ready to be tested.
Hargrove had spent seventy years in physics. He'd pushed the boundaries of human knowledge further than almost anyone alive. And in a two-hour car ride, a teenager had shown him that the boundaries were much, much further out than he'd thought.
The anticipation in his chest was no longer cautious. It was blazing.
The fusion technology might actually be real.
Meanwhile, Ethan was having an entirely different experience.
He'd never been inside a military compound before, and his head was on a swivel. Guard towers. Armored vehicles parked in neat rows. Soldiers in full gear conducting drills on a field that stretched to the horizon. A helicopter sitting on a pad with its rotors tied down.
He was staring at a row of tanks with undisguised fascination when a soldier on patrol duty cleared his throat pointedly.
"Sir. Eyes forward. This is a restricted area."
Ethan snapped his gaze back to the path ahead, feeling distinctly like a kid who'd been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
The soldier glanced at Hargrove, who was walking beside this gawking teenager with the serene calm of a man escorting a visiting dignitary.
Who IS this kid?
At the gates of the verification facility, a delegation of senior military officers was already assembled. Provincial commanders. Defense liaisons. Officials from the Ministry of Science and Technology. They'd come to welcome Dr. Hargrove personally — partly out of respect, partly out of obligation, and partly because they wanted to see the old man put this viral nonsense to rest so everyone could go home.
"Dr. Hargrove." The ranking officer stepped forward with an outstretched hand. "An honor, as always."
Behind him, the rest of the delegation greeted the physicist one by one. Handshakes, respectful nods, the choreographed warmth of people addressing a living legend.
Not one of them looked at Ethan.
In their eyes, this boy was the reason a ninety-one-year-old national treasure had been dragged across the country to debunk a teenager's publicity stunt. He was a nuisance. An embarrassment. A waste of Dr. Hargrove's remaining years.
Ethan noticed the cold shoulder. Hard not to — he was standing right there, invisible, while a dozen uniformed officials fawned over the man beside him.
He shrugged, shifted his equipment bag to his other shoulder, and followed Hargrove through the gates.
That's fine. They'll all be looking at me soon enough.