After the lab tour, Calloway and Ward left to handle their own schedules. Ryan spent the rest of the morning wandering campus with his parents.
Nobody recognized him.
It was a strange feeling. For the past two weeks, his name had been on every platform, in every comment section, trending on every feed. But a name and a face were different things. He wasn't a movie star. People knew "Ryan Mercer" the way they knew a headline. They didn't know what he looked like walking past them in a hoodie and sneakers, looking like any other teenager visiting campus with his parents.
They ate lunch in the dining hall. Lisa remarked that the salad bar was better than she'd expected. Tom said the coffee was terrible but free, which made it acceptable. Ryan ate a burger and thought about gantry cranes.
The university had put him in faculty housing. A single room, nothing fancy, but private. Technically he was still a student, not a professor, but the logistics of putting a fourteen-year-old celebrity in a freshman dormitory were obviously unworkable. He'd be a permanent tourist attraction. Every meal, every hallway walk, every trip to the bathroom would become content for someone's social media.
Faculty housing it was.
They rested until mid-afternoon, when Ward called.
"Scrapper's here. Get to the workshop. You remember the way?"
"Professor, I have an eidetic memory. I remember the way to everywhere I've ever been."
"Right. Forgot. Get down here, the crew is waiting."
Ryan could hear noise in the background. A lot of noise. More than a truck crew would make.
He figured out why before he reached the workshop.
The path that had been empty that morning was now packed with students. Dozens of them, maybe a hundred, flowing in the same direction, phones out, talking fast. The convoy of flatbed trucks carrying Scrapper's components had apparently driven straight through the middle of campus, and the sight of twelve trucks loaded with crated mech parts had done exactly what you'd expect it to do at a university full of engineering students.
It had caused a riot. A polite, academic riot, but a riot nonetheless.
By the time Ryan reached the workshop perimeter, the crowd was three deep around the fence.
"Is that Scrapper in those crates?"
"Can we see it? Just open one!"
"Professor, I don't need to go home for summer break. I can help. How do I apply?"
"I want to help too! I'll work for free!"
Students clutched textbooks in one hand and phones in the other, filming the crates, filming each other, filming the fence. Ward was at the gate trying to maintain order, which was like trying to hold back a river with a clipboard.
"There's nothing to see yet. It's all in boxes. Go study, exams are tomorrow. Don't fail your finals because you were staring at wooden crates."
Ryan pushed through the crowd. Ward spotted him and pulled him through the gate before anyone could react.
Too late.
"That's him! That's Ryan Mercer!"
"He's so young! He really is fourteen!"
"I think I saw him in the dining hall at lunch. I thought he was a professor's kid!"
"He's cute!"
Ryan did not look back. Behind him, the sound of a hundred phone cameras clicking simultaneously was like a swarm of mechanical insects.
Inside the fence, the workshop floor was covered with numbered wooden crates. Dozens of them, each containing a tagged section of Scrapper, arranged roughly by the order they'd been loaded in Crestfield.
"Where do you want everything?" Ward asked.
Ryan surveyed the crates, reading the labels, mapping the reassembly sequence in his head. The eidetic memory wasn't just for textbooks. He could see Scrapper's complete anatomy in his mind, every joint and junction, every cable run, every structural member in its correct position.
"Head components, far wall. Left arm assembly, left side. Right arm, right side. Torso sections center, directly under the gantry crane. Leg assemblies near the main door for easy access during the early phases."
He directed the technical crew like a conductor, pointing, calling out crate numbers, correcting placements. The crew moved fast. Within two hours, every crate was in position and the unpacking had begun.
While the crew worked, a woman in business attire approached.
"Mr. Mercer? I'm Patricia Holt, assigned by Aegis Industrial as the project's financial controller. I'll be managing the budget, handling procurement, and assisting with administrative tasks."
She looked at him with the particular curiosity of someone whose employer had created an entire shell company and allocated eight figures of funding for a teenager she'd never heard of until last week.
Ryan shook her hand. His first question was immediate.
"Ms. Holt, the technical crew Aegis assigned. Twenty people. That's too many."
Patricia blinked. "Too many?"
"I need five. Cut the rest."
The crew had just finished unpacking. They'd spent the afternoon carefully positioning crate after crate, following Ryan's precise instructions, sweating through the work with the quiet efficiency of professionals.
And now they were being told that seventy-five percent of them were going home.
Ryan had seen their salary figures. Four digits per week, per person. Twenty of them. The math made his eye twitch. Five competent technicians could handle the physical work. Fifteen extra bodies were fifteen extra line items bleeding his project budget dry.
Patricia recovered quickly. "Aegis doesn't have much experience staffing mech research projects, so the team size may have been... generous. I'll process the reduction. Which five would you like to keep?"
Ryan pointed to the five who'd worked fastest, asked the fewest unnecessary questions, and hadn't needed to be told twice where to put things.
The other fifteen took the news with professional grace. They weren't being fired. They were being reassigned back to Aegis. Still, the speed of it was remarkable. They'd arrived that morning, unpacked a mech, and been downsized before dinner.
Ryan made a mental note to feel slightly guilty about it later. He didn't have time right now.
Once the crates were open and the components laid out across the workshop floor, Ryan ran diagnostics. Each major section got a power-up test, a visual inspection, and a comparison against the pre-transport baseline data he'd recorded in Crestfield. Nothing damaged. Nothing shifted. The transport crew had been careful.
Ward wandered over, hands in his pockets, looking at the disassembled mech the way a kid looks at a model kit on Christmas morning.
"When do you start reassembly? Going to wait until the full research team is staffed?"
Ryan looked at him. "You're here. That's a start."
Ward smiled. "I applied to join the project formally. Materials science liaison. You need something fabricated, sourced, or tested, that's my department."
"And your salary?"
"Comes from my existing MIT appointment. Not your budget. I know how you feel about expenses, you little miser."
Ryan felt a weight lift that he hadn't realized he'd been carrying.
"One more thing," he said. "The materials from my parts list. When do they arrive?"
The upgraded components, the custom fabrications, the defense-grade signal processors. Everything that would transform Scrapper from a fragile prototype into something that could survive more than ten activations.
Ward pointed across the workshop to where Patricia was setting up a temporary desk. "That's her department now. I'm done being your logistics coordinator. I barely survived the experience."
Ryan looked at Patricia. Patricia looked at Ryan. She was already pulling up procurement timelines on her laptop.
This was going to work.