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At the offices of Marlin Technologies, the last man standing was having a bad day.
The CEO sat in his chair, phone pressed to his ear, pitching a potential investor with the desperate enthusiasm of someone who'd been making this call sixteen times a day for two weeks.
"Look, we've got strong brand recognition, solid technical foundations, and right now we're offering five percent equity for just three hundred thousand. That's a steal. You won't find a better entry point in the robotics space."
The voice on the other end was blunt. "Brand recognition? What brand recognition? Your one product is a warehouse drone that's been in beta for three years. Your only claim to fame is picking a fight with a teenager and losing. Nobody remembers your name."
Click.
The CEO stared at the dead phone. Grabbed a fistful of his own hair.
The trajectory from "we're going to ride this controversy to glory" to "nobody will return our calls" had taken approximately eleven days. Eleven days from the blog post with the phone recording to total irrelevance.
The rise had been intoxicating. The Scrapper debunking campaign had put Marlin on every feed, every platform, every conversation. Investment inquiries flooded in. The CEO, drunk on momentum, had turned them all down. Wait for the peak, he'd told himself. Let the hype build. Accept the best offer later.
The peak never came. The livestream came instead.
Thirty minutes of a forty-foot mech walking on live camera, filmed from twenty-three angles simultaneously, witnessed by two million concurrent viewers. Every argument Marlin had constructed, every carefully worded implication, every anonymous "VFX insider" claim, crushed under the weight of reality.
The aftermath was surgical. The internet turned on Marlin with the same energy it had originally directed at Ryan. Their social media accounts became war zones. The PR manager who'd orchestrated the entire campaign had been fired. Actually, he'd quit first, which the CEO chose to remember as firing. The accounts were eventually banned by the platforms themselves, not because Marlin requested it, but because the volume of hostile traffic was crashing the comment servers.
Every recovery attempt had been steamrolled by the next chapter of Ryan's story. Marlin planted rumors about a secret research team behind Ryan? The bidding war drowned it out. They tried to question Ryan's credentials? MIT showed up. They went quiet and hoped to outlast the news cycle? Ryan posted a new video of Scrapper in full armor, walking in a university lab, and broke every view record on the internet.
And now. 749 on the SATs.
The CEO opened Twitter. Saw the trending topic. Saw the number.
Seven hundred and forty-nine.
He closed Twitter.
Opened the TV. Maybe there was something else on. Anything else.
The evening news anchor was mid-sentence.
"...and in education news, this year's SAT results have produced what many are calling a historic performance. Ryan Mercer, the fourteen-year-old who gained international attention for building a functioning mech in his family's garage, scored 749 out of a possible 750."
The screen cut to file footage of Scrapper's armored form, standing in the MIT workshop, red lights glowing.
"Mercer, who has already established a research partnership with MIT to further develop his mech technology, is widely expected to enroll at the university this fall. His SAT score is believed to be the highest ever recorded by a fourteen-year-old test-taker."
The second anchor picked up. "It's remarkable. This is a young man who has already achieved breakthroughs in neural interface technology, secured institutional funding for his research, and attracted interest from major defense and industrial players. And now he's posted a near-perfect standardized test score on top of everything else."
"A true generational talent. We wish him every success."
The CEO turned off the TV.
He sat in the dark office for a long time.
Then he opened his phone, went to Twitter out of habit, and saw a tweet from a stranger that stopped him cold.
"Honest question: I get that Ryan Mercer is impressive. But what is a mech actually useful for? It can't fight. It can't deploy without a power cable. It's too big for urban environments and too slow for open-field combat. What's the real-world application here?"
The tweet had a video link attached. A foreign news segment.
The CEO clicked play, more out of reflex than interest.
An interviewer and a professor sat across from each other in a studio. The professor was making a calm, reasonable argument that Ryan's mech had no viable military or industrial application. That the technology, however impressive, served no clear purpose. That the international engineering community saw it as a curiosity, not a breakthrough.
The interviewer asked whether the technology had any value at all.
The professor compared it to developing a method for cooking gourmet meals from sewage. Technically impressive. Practically useless.
The CEO read the comments under the tweet.
People were arguing. Three camps: military optimists who believed mechs could eventually be weaponized, skeptics who agreed with the professor, and a third group that argued mechs needed to find a non-military niche.
For the first time in weeks, the CEO felt something other than despair.
He liked the tweet.
Then he closed his phone, turned off the lights, and went home.
PLz throw Powerstones.