A few weeks passed.
Ryan didn't organize the meeting. He didn't even know it was happening until he heard raised voices through the wall of his office, where he was deep in the mathematics of liquid neural connection theory, filling page after page with equations and burning through pens at a rate that would concern a stationery supplier.
The fifteen researchers had started holding weekly group sessions on their own. No one told them to. No one needed to. These were people who'd been selected for self-direction, and when they hit a wall, they did what smart people do: they found other people hitting the same wall and compared notes.
The wall, as it turned out, was enormous.
Kyle spoke first. He'd been elected the neural interface team's unofficial spokesperson, partly because he was the most enthusiastic and partly because nobody else wanted to be the one to say "we're stuck" out loud.
"I've spent the last three weeks doing nothing but studying the neural link documentation," he said. "I understand the basic principles now. The signal acquisition methodology, the decoding framework, the transmission architecture. I can follow the logic from input to output."
He paused.
"And then it stops. Because the next layer down requires an understanding of mechanical engineering that I don't have. And electrical systems theory. And control software architecture. And applied mathematics at a level that I haven't touched since my qualifying exams."
The rest of the neural team nodded. Same story. The neural link wasn't a standalone technology. It was a web of interconnected disciplines, each one dependent on the others. You couldn't understand signal transmission without understanding the mechanical systems receiving the signals. You couldn't understand the decoding framework without understanding the software processing the decoded commands. Every step forward in one discipline required a step forward in three others.
For Ryan, this hadn't been a problem. His brain absorbed knowledge from every field simultaneously, cross-referencing, integrating, synthesizing. For normal researchers, specialists trained in one discipline, it was like being asked to read a book where every other chapter was written in a different language.
The software team went next. Their spokesperson was a man whose hairline was retreating at a rate that suggested his stress levels had been clinically elevated for approximately three weeks straight.
"You think you have it bad?" He ran his fingers through what remained of his hair. "At least you can understand the principles. We're staring at source code that references neural parameters we've never seen, mechanical constants we can't look up, and balance algorithms that appear to violate several things I was taught in graduate school."
He held up a printed section of code, dense with annotations in three different colors of ink. "We've been going line by line through the operating system. Line. By. Line. And half of it might as well be written in ancient Greek."
The energy team reported similar difficulties, though theirs were less about incomprehension and more about scope. The power systems made sense individually, but understanding how they integrated with the neural link and the control software required knowledge of both, which required knowledge of the mechanical systems, which required...
Everyone was stuck in the same loop.
Kyle looked around the room. "So here's what I'm proposing. Cross-discipline study groups. Neural team teaches the software team what we know about signal processing. Software team teaches us the basics of the OS architecture. Energy team walks everyone through the power systems. Nobody becomes an expert in everything, but everyone gets enough of a foundation to keep moving forward."
Agreement was immediate. They'd all independently reached the same conclusion. The only way through was together.
After the session broke up, Kyle lingered in the meeting room. He was thinking about something he'd seen in Ryan's office the previous week.
He'd gone to ask about a concept he didn't understand. Ryan had been working on the liquid neural connection equations, hunched over his desk, surrounded by crumpled paper. Kyle had waited while Ryan finished a derivation.
He'd watched Ryan stare at an equation that filled an entire sheet of paper. The kind of equation that would normally require a computing cluster to solve. Ryan had picked up a pen, pressed it against a blank page, and started drawing circles on the paper. Tight, rapid circles, one on top of another, as if the motion helped him think.
Less than sixty seconds later, Ryan wrote the answer on the page and turned to help Kyle with his question.
Sixty seconds. No calculator. No computer. A full-page equation solved in his head while drawing circles with a pen.
Kyle had mentioned this to the group during the meeting. The room had gone very quiet.
"His brain doesn't work like ours," Kyle said. "I don't mean that as a compliment or an insult. I mean it literally. Whatever's happening inside his head operates on different hardware."
Nobody disagreed.
The door to Ryan's office opened without a knock.
Patricia walked in with a look on her face that Ryan had never seen before. She was smiling, but it was the kind of smile that had twenty phone calls and a security briefing behind it.
"Let me guess," Ryan said, not looking up from his equations. "The plasma reactor verification came back positive."
Patricia stopped mid-stride. "How did you know?"
"The theory was sound. The math was clean. If it failed, that would have been a problem on their end, not mine." He was still writing, one hand on the equation, the other drawing circles on a blank sheet of paper beside it. His habit. It helped him think.
A moment later, he finished the derivation, checked it against the system's data in his head, confirmed the match, and set down the pen.
"So," he said, giving Patricia his full attention. "When can I get a working unit delivered? Scrapper needs it."
Plz Throw Powerstones.