The disassembly took all day.
Ryan supervised every step, tagging components as they came apart, directing the crew on which joints to disconnect first, which cable bundles to coil separately, which structural members could be stacked and which needed individual crating. Scrapper didn't come apart easy. Forty feet of steel skeleton, built over two years in a workshop that was never designed for extraction, had to be reduced to a few dozen labeled sections small enough to fit on flatbed trucks.
By late afternoon, the last piece was loaded. Twelve trucks lined the street outside the Mercer house, each one carrying a numbered fragment of what had been, until this morning, the only functioning mech on Earth.
A camera crew from a national news network had been filming the entire process. Ward mentioned something about documentary footage, possible future use. Ryan let them shoot. More cameras meant more coverage. More coverage meant more people saying his name.
MIT's official account posted a single statement:
"MIT is pleased to announce a research partnership with Ryan Mercer to establish a dedicated project for the study and advancement of single-pilot mech technology. The prototype mech, Scrapper, is being relocated to university facilities. We look forward to the work ahead."
Simple. Clean. The internet did the rest.
"SCRAPPER IS GOING TO MIT. THIS IS NOT A DRILL."
"Years of welding videos. Years of people calling him a fraud. And now he's got an MIT research lab. Unreal."
"Interesting that it's a university project and not military. Means we'll actually get to see updates instead of it disappearing into a black site."
"Go back and watch his old welding videos. Day 1 through Day 100+. Nobody believed in him. The comments are all jokes and mockery. And he just kept going. That's what a genius looks like."
One comment stood out from the rest. Meridian Motors' official Twitter account had posted a single word and an image:
"Liars." [crying emoji]
The replies were merciless. The internet had zero sympathy for a company that had publicly committed a hundred million dollars and gotten played by a fourteen-year-old's ambiguous tweet.
Dinner that night was quiet in a way the Mercer house hadn't been in weeks.
No reporters outside. No soldiers in the living room. No phone buzzing with interview requests or corporate buyout offers. Just the three of them at the kitchen table, eating Lisa's pot roast, talking about what came next.
Lisa ran through her checklist. Be polite. Don't antagonize the professors. Remember that being smart doesn't mean you're always right. Call home at least twice a week. Eat something green occasionally.
Tom kept it shorter. "Don't get too big for your britches. Don't look down on anybody. And don't forget where you started."
Ryan listened. Nodded. Meant it.
He'd be flying out tomorrow. First time leaving Crestfield in fourteen years of this life. First time leaving Texas, period. Everything he'd built so far, he'd built within a fifty-foot radius of this kitchen table. Now the radius was about to expand dramatically.
Ryan landed at Logan International the next morning, hours ahead of the truck convoy carrying Scrapper. Ward met him at the airport with a university car and a schedule that started immediately.
First stop: the dormitory. A standard single room, nothing special. Ryan dropped his bag on the bed and didn't linger.
Second stop: the lab.
Ward and President Calloway walked Ryan across campus, past the main quad, down a tree-lined path that curved behind the engineering complex, to a cleared area at the base of a wooded hill. What had apparently been an open field was now surrounded by corrugated metal fencing. Behind the fence, two prefabricated buildings sat side by side, freshly assembled and smelling like new paint and industrial adhesive.
The larger building was enormous. Nearly sixty feet tall, a hundred feet wide, close to ten thousand square feet of interior space. A workshop on a completely different scale from the sheet-metal garage in Crestfield. This was where Scrapper would be reassembled and where all physical testing would take place.
The smaller building, three stories, housed offices, a theory lab, and break rooms.
Ryan looked at the two blue-and-white prefab structures. They looked like construction site trailers that had been scaled up by a factor of ten. Not a single element of the design could be described as "cutting-edge" or "futuristic" or even "moderately attractive."
"President Calloway," Ryan said. "With all due respect, if someone didn't know what we were doing here, they'd think this was a temporary housing project for a highway construction crew."
Lisa, standing behind him, quietly swatted his arm.
Calloway laughed. "We built these in eleven days. You wanted the project to start immediately, and this is what 'immediately' looks like. The equipment inside is what matters, and some of it was pulled from active research programs on forty-eight hours' notice."
He paused. "Of course, if you'd prefer a purpose-built facility, we can commission one. The cost would come out of the project budget."
Ryan's expression shifted instantly. "The prefabs are perfect. Excellent work. Very... utilitarian. I admire the efficiency."
Free lab: good. Lab paid for with project money: bad. Ryan had learned this math early and intended to apply it consistently.
He pushed through the smaller door cut into the workshop's main gate and stepped inside.
The first thing he saw was the gantry crane.
Two massive steel frames, one on each side of the workshop, connected by a horizontal beam that spanned the full width of the building. A motorized hoist unit sat on the beam, capable of lifting and positioning multi-ton components anywhere in the workspace. The kind of equipment that turned a two-day assembly job into a two-hour one.
Ryan stared at it for a long, appreciative moment.
Back in Crestfield, every time he'd needed to move a heavy component, he'd had to hire an external crane, wait for scheduling, and burn half a day on logistics. The gantry crane alone was worth the move.
Beyond the crane, the workshop floor was covered with equipment. Machining stations, welding rigs, diagnostic terminals, materials testing setups. Ryan walked through them quickly, cataloging. The basics were all here. Nothing flashy, but functional across every discipline he'd need.
Calloway followed behind him. "Most of the heavy equipment was provided by Aegis Industrial. They've also assigned a twenty-person technical crew to support you. Fabrication, assembly, testing. You handle the theory and design. They handle the physical work."
Ryan's face lit up. A full support crew. No more solo assembly sessions at three in the morning, wrestling forty-pound actuator housings into place with nothing but a ratchet and spite.
"Their salaries," Calloway added, "come out of the project budget."
Ryan's face dimmed slightly.
Free crew: good. Crew funded by project money: less good. But acceptable. Twenty skilled technicians meant work that would have taken him months alone could be done in weeks.
He stood in the center of the workshop, looked up at the gantry crane, looked around at the equipment, and thought about the truck convoy currently crossing state lines with forty feet of disassembled mech strapped to its beds.
In Crestfield, he'd built a dream out of steel and stubbornness and his father's savings account.
Here, he was going to build the future.