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Yvette had, in fact, underestimated the durability of her Chairman's peace of mind.
To Ethan, a power-supply operation whose outcome was, from his own engineering perspective, a foregone conclusion held considerably less appeal than the Transformer chassis taking shape in his laboratory. And with J.A.R.V.I.S. monitoring every node of the Ashford grid in real time, Ethan would be alerted to any genuine problem the instant it appeared. He did not need to sit in the command room watching numbers climb. The numbers were J.A.R.V.I.S.'s job.
He had spent the previous two nights working through the small hours in the underground laboratory on the Megatron build, and even with the super-soldier serum sustaining him, the accumulated fatigue had finally caught up. Having earned a break, Ethan was, at this moment, asleep on a couch in the headquarters building's executive lounge, catching up on the rest his body had been quietly demanding.
The sky outside darkened. Across Ashford City, the lights came on, household by household, as the population returned home.
In the command room, the staff watched the consumption figures climb on the main display, and a fine sheen of sweat appeared across more than one brow.
The tension was understandable. The New Future Technology Energy opening ceremony had been an enormous public spectacle. Director Holt of the National Energy Ministry had personally attended to lend the state's credibility. The entire Republic was watching. If the first pilot deployment of the Hidden Dragon program failed, on this first night, the consequences would be more than anyone in the room could bear.
Minute by minute, the consumption figure climbed toward its expected evening peak.
And then it stabilized.
The number settled into the projected peak range and held there, steady. The seabed reactor feed absorbed the load without the slightest strain. The transmission lines held their temperatures within normal range. The grid carried the entire evening demand of Ashford City, and it carried it cleanly.
The command room exhaled, all at once.
The relief gave way, for several of the staff, to something stronger. A few of them had tears standing in their eyes.
The command room held not only New Future employees but a contingent of senior technical personnel that Director Graves had transferred in from across the Republic, several of them drawn from the West-East Power Corridor program. Those men and women had spent years of their lives stationed in the remote western interior of the country, far from their homes and families, doing difficult, often anonymous work in service of the Republic's energy infrastructure. They had not complained. The work had mattered, and they had done it.
But years away from home wore on a person. The homesickness accumulated, season after season, no matter how willingly the sacrifice had been made.
And now, the success of the Hidden Dragon program's first pilot meant something specific and personal to them. The Corridor was being retired. Their long exile in the western interior was ending. The success they were watching on the display meant they would never again have to leave their families to keep the Republic's lights on. It meant they could go home. It meant they could be present fathers, present sons, present husbands.
How could they not be moved?
Far away in the capital, Nathan Graves and Chief Councilor Marcus Holloway watched the same results come through, and both of them let out a long breath.
"I didn't expect the kid to actually pull it off," Graves said. "He's finally done something genuinely good for the country."
Beside him, Holloway nodded at the affection underneath his subordinate's gruff phrasing.
"This is not an ordinary good deed," Holloway said. "If we can genuinely shed the burden of the West-East Power Corridor, the Republic's development across every sector will accelerate. The Corridor was a magnificent achievement in its time. But it was always, in honest terms, a workaround for a shortage we could not otherwise solve. The kid has solved the shortage. That changes the underlying equation for the entire national economy."
The Chief of Staff, standing nearby, listened to the two senior men and was privately struck by the weight of their assessment.
The Chief of Staff understood the economics, once he turned his mind to them. The eastern coastal cities had developed enormously over the decades of national reform. But that development had reached a bottleneck, and the bottleneck was, at its root, technological. Energy.
It was like five starving people sitting in front of a single bowl of rice. A well-designed system could ensure the bowl was distributed equally, so that no one starved. But no system, however well-designed, could conjure additional rice from an empty pot. The eastern energy shortage was exactly that empty pot. The Republic's institutions had distributed the scarce energy as fairly and efficiently as institutions could, but they could not create energy that did not exist. How many high-consumption industries had been forced to throttle their production or shut down early to protect residential supply? How many opportunities for national advancement had been deferred because there was simply not enough power to go around?
The Hidden Dragon program did not distribute the rice more cleverly.
It filled the pot.
"I find myself wondering," Holloway said, "whether it is time to award the kid the title of Academician."
Graves turned, genuinely startled.
"Academician? He earns it, no question. But the selections are held every two years. The next cycle isn't for some time yet."
Holloway shook his head.
"Special circumstances permit special handling. The kid's earlier inventions, the armor, the Transformers, were unquestionably at the level of the academy. But they did not make a substantial, direct contribution to the lives of ordinary people. They were spectacular, but they were remote. This is different. The Hidden Dragon program touches every household in the Republic. That is more than sufficient justification to open a side door in the normal process for him."
Graves studied his superior with open surprise.
In all his years of working under Holloway, he had never known the man to be one who bent the rules. Holloway's respect for the structure of the system was, if anything, the defining feature of his career.
Holloway caught the look and smiled, shaking his head.
"Don't look at me that way. Let me put it plainly. If the kid's contribution to this country is large enough, then opening a side door for an academician title is the least of what I would be willing to do. If his contribution were large enough, I would step down from this chair and hand it to him myself. The rules exist to serve the country. When a man serves the country at the kid's scale, the rules can be made to serve him."
By seven or eight in the evening, most households had finished cooking. The evening consumption peak passed. The figures on the command room display began a slight, healthy decline.
The line temperatures remained within normal range throughout.
The hearts of everyone in the command room finally settled fully back into place. The first day was, by every measure on every display, a complete success.
Sensing the mood, Marcus Reyes chose the moment to speak up.
"Seafood, tonight. The best in the city. My treat."
The command room lit up. Cheers went up. Someone shouted a mock toast to Manager Reyes. Someone whistled.
The celebratory mood lasted approximately fifteen seconds.
Then the alarms went off.
The consumption figure, which had just begun its healthy evening decline, reversed and began to climb. Not gradually. The number surged upward at a rate that the display's trend-lines could barely render, the line jerking nearly vertical.
As the load surged, the voltage climbed with it, and as the voltage climbed, the temperatures of the conventional transmission lines began to rise, fast, the readings sprinting toward and then past their rated safe operating thresholds.
The command room stared at the display in stunned disbelief.
It was not possible. Ashford City did not have a consumption profile that could produce a surge of this magnitude. The city was light-industry. There was no load in the entire municipality capable of demanding this much power this suddenly. The numbers on the screen described a draw that simply should not have been able to exist.
Before anyone could organize a response, the command room door swung open.
Yvette Caldwell strode in.
"What is happening."
Her voice cut through the rising panic. The command room staff, caught between alarm and confusion, struggled to answer.
It was one of the senior technicians transferred in from the western Corridor program who recovered first.
"President Caldwell. We've studied Ashford's consumption profile thoroughly during the conversion planning. The city cannot organically produce a draw at this level. It is not physically possible under normal conditions. Someone is doing this deliberately. Someone has brought an enormous artificial load online to overload the grid."
Yvette did not waste a second on the diagnosis.
"I don't want the cause right now. I want the solution. You're the engineers. Tell me how we get out of this, immediately."
The technicians conferred in a tight, urgent huddle for a few seconds, then the senior man turned back.
"President Caldwell. The priority is to switch the lines. We divert the load off the conventional transmission grid and onto the new high-capacity lines that Chairman Mercer developed. The seabed reactors can supply the power without difficulty. The reactors are not the problem. The problem is the conventional lines. They will not survive this voltage. The new lines were designed exactly for loads like this. We switch the load to them, and the crisis is contained. There will be no problem with the reactor supply. We just need to switch the lines."
The command room door opened again.
Ethan came through it at a near-run. J.A.R.V.I.S. had woken him the instant the surge began, and he had crossed the building in well under a minute.
He took in the display in a single glance, registered the surge, registered the line-temperature readings, and registered the technician's recommendation.
"Switch to the new lines," he said. "Do it now."
The senior staff member at the line-control station did not move.
A look of acute difficulty crossed his face.
Ethan saw the hesitation, and his expression sharpened.
"What's the matter."
The staff member, recognizing that the problem could not be concealed and that concealing it for even a few more seconds would make everything worse, braced himself and stepped forward.
"Chairman Mercer. I'm sorry. There's a problem with the new lines. The deployment was rushed. During installation, the high-voltage circuit breakers for the new line system were found to be damaged, and the replacements have not yet arrived. The new lines are physically in place, but without functioning high-voltage breakers, we cannot safely energize them. If we switch the load onto them in their current state, and a fault occurs, there is no breaker to interrupt it. We would not be containing the crisis. We would be moving it onto an unprotected system."
The command room went silent.
The conventional lines were climbing toward failure. The contingency that was supposed to save them could not be safely energized.
Ethan stood in the center of the command room, the surging figures climbing on the display in front of him, and for one long second, the entire weight of the first night of the Hidden Dragon program rested on what he decided to do next.