The enthusiasm was real. The experience was not.
Even with the team running on adrenaline, Scrapper's limbs refused to go together quickly. The technicians knew the theory. They'd studied the assembly documentation for two days. But there was a gap between reading about how a twenty-foot mechanical arm fit onto a forty-foot torso and actually doing it, and that gap was measured in hours of fumbling, rechecking, and starting over.
They worked through the evening and into the next day. The gantry crane lifted each limb into position while the technicians bolted, welded, and torqued their way through the connections. Ryan supervised every joint, calling out alignment corrections, verifying tolerances, occasionally climbing up to check a mounting bracket by hand.
"Left arm complete."
"Right arm complete."
"Left leg complete."
"Right leg complete."
"All limbs installed. Assembly finished."
The last piece locked into place as the afternoon light faded outside the workshop windows.
Under the white overhead lights, Scrapper lay on the reinforced floor in full armor for the first time.
Black. All of it. Matte black plating covering every surface, every joint housing, every cable run. The skeleton that had been naked and exposed for its entire existence was gone, buried under eighty tons of armor steel. What remained was something that looked less like a prototype and more like a weapon.
The team stood around the mech in a loose ring, heads tilted back, phones forgotten.
"Incredible," Kyle said. He was looking up at Scrapper the way some people look at cathedrals.
Even the women on the research team, who'd maintained a professional composure throughout the assembly process, were staring with unconcealed fascination.
It was one thing to watch Scrapper on a screen. It was another to stand next to it, close enough to touch the armor, close enough to feel the sheer physical mass of the thing pressing down on the floor beneath your feet. The world's only mech. Lying ten feet away. Real.
Every pair of eyes in the room turned to Ryan.
He found Kyle. "Camera."
Kyle had already anticipated the request. He held up the video camera Ryan had given him that morning, lens cap off, red light on.
"Rolling," Kyle said.
Ryan walked to Scrapper. Someone had already connected the power cable to the ankle coupling without being asked. Ryan climbed the ladder, triggered the cockpit hatch, and stepped inside.
The cockpit was different now.
With the armor installed, the open-air cage he'd piloted in Crestfield had become an enclosed space. Walls on all sides. No wind, no direct line of sight to the ground below. The only external view came from camera feeds mounted at Scrapper's joints, displayed on the touchscreen in segmented panels. It was claustrophobic and secure at the same time.
Ryan strapped in. Vest. Pedals. Gloves. Headband. Hit the switch.
Outside, Scrapper's flat head lit up. Two red lights, one on each side, blazing to life like eyes opening. The cockpit hatch sealed shut behind Ryan with a mechanical hiss.
The display screen filled with data. All green. Two words in the center:
SYSTEMS NOMINAL
Below, Kyle narrated in a half-whisper, camera trained upward. "Ryan's inside the cockpit. The red lights on the head mean all systems are running normally..."
Patricia turned to Ward, who was standing beside her with his arms crossed. "Professor, do you think Scrapper can handle the extra weight? Eighty tons of armor on top of the original frame is significant."
Ward thought about it. "Under normal circumstances, adding half again the original mass to a mechanical system and expecting it to function identically would be optimistic at best."
He paused.
"But nothing about this kid is normal circumstances."
"So you think it works?"
Ward nodded. "The frame was designed with massive structural margins. Ryan told me as much during our first visit. There's performance headroom built into every major system. Whether eighty tons exceeds that headroom is the question, but if I had to bet, I'd bet on the kid."
The research team had clustered around Ward. He was the only senior academic on the project, and in the absence of Ryan, they defaulted to him for reassurance.
"You seem very confident in Scrapper, Professor," one of them said.
Ward allowed himself a small smile. "You're all new here. You don't know Ryan yet. Let me put it this way." He looked around the group. "Right now, you might be thinking that a mech has no practical purpose. It can't fight. It can't compete commercially with existing technology. It's a curiosity."
He gestured at Scrapper. "But look at it now versus the skeleton you saw in the videos. Armor plating that can shrug off standard ordnance. A neural interface that no other lab on Earth can replicate. And this is version one. Every iteration will be better. Every upgrade will open new applications that don't exist yet."
He let that settle.
"You are the first mech engineering team in human history. The technology's future depends on the work you do here. Don't underestimate what that means."
Fifteen young researchers stood a little straighter.
Ward wiped his forehead. Ryan's management style with the junior staff was essentially "here's some documents, figure it out." Which meant Ward, the sixty-three-year-old materials scientist who'd come to Texas for a quiet academic exchange, was now giving motivational speeches to twentysomethings in a prefab workshop.
Life had taken some turns.
Inside the cockpit, Ryan had finished establishing the neural link.
The pressure was worse than before.
Eighty tons of additional mass meant more data flowing through the control system, which meant more load on the neural interface, which meant more strain on his nervous system. The connection felt heavier, thicker, like wading through water that had gotten deeper since the last time he'd been in. Maintaining the link alone, without moving, already required concentration.
But it was bearable.
Ryan rolled Scrapper onto its front.
No warning. No countdown. He just did it.
The mech's right arm and right leg drove sideways. Three hundred tons of armored steel rotated on the workshop floor like a massive animal rolling in its sleep. The reinforced floor plates groaned and buckled under the shifting load. The sound was enormous, a grinding metallic thunder that filled the workshop and made everyone flinch.
The roll took three seconds. Face-down. Complete.
"That was aggressive!" someone shouted.
"Slightly aggressive!" someone else agreed.
"Definitely aggressive!"
Ward grabbed the walkie-talkie linked to the cockpit. "Ryan, watch your feet. The power cable got tangled in the roll. Hold position while we sort it out."
"Copy." Ryan's voice came through the speaker, calm and slightly strained.
Without external sensors or holographic imaging, the armored cockpit was effectively blind except for the joint cameras. Ryan could see fragments of the workshop through segmented feeds, but it was like looking through a dozen keyholes at once. Functional, not ideal.
He made a mental note: scanning radar and holographic displays were no longer luxury upgrades. They were necessities.
The crew untangled the cable from Scrapper's ankle assembly. Ward radioed the all-clear.
Ryan stood the mech up.
Slowly. Deliberately. Scrapper's arms pressed flat against the floor. The torso lifted. One knee came forward, then the other. The frame rose, joint by joint, section by section, three hundred tons of black steel climbing toward the ceiling with grinding, mechanical determination.
Standing at full height, Scrapper's head nearly touched the workshop ceiling. But this time, unlike the cramped garage in Crestfield, there was room. The workshop was built for this. Sixty feet of vertical clearance, a hundred feet of floor space. Scrapper stood in the center with room to spare on all sides.
Ward exhaled. The engineering was sound. The armor hadn't compromised the frame's ability to bear its own weight and move.
"All systems nominal," Ryan said through the speaker. The cheap speaker from Crestfield was gone, replaced by a proper PA unit integrated into the chest armor. His voice came through clear and steady. "Proceeding with walk test."
Scrapper walked.
The footsteps were heavier now. Deeper. Each one a concussive impact that you felt in your teeth. The floor plates held, but they complained loudly about it. The armor segments vibrated with each stride, and through the gaps between the plates, you could catch glimpses of light from the internal systems running underneath.
The sound of the generator at full power mixed with the rhythm of the footsteps. A mechanical heartbeat. A pulse of something new.
Ryan reached the far wall. Stopped. Reversed. Walked back to the starting position.
Killed the engine. Cut the link. Opened the hatch. Climbed down.
The team was waiting at the bottom. Every face was lit up.
Ryan looked at Kyle. Kyle was already holding out the camera.
"Got everything."