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Bonus Chapter
The foreign news clip spread fast.
The interview was a simple format. A reporter named Bob, blonde hair, easy smile, sitting across from a Professor Osman, white beard, the confident posture of a man who'd been giving expert opinions on television for decades.
Bob opened with a summary: a fourteen-year-old in the United States had built a giant controllable robot. People were calling him a genius. What did the professor think?
Osman was generous, initially. Yes, the boy was clearly talented. Yes, the machine was visually impressive. At fourteen, most teenagers were asking girls to football games, not building bipedal robots. Credit where credit was due.
Then Bob asked the real question: was the technology itself significant?
Osman's tone shifted. "We haven't been given access to any technical details. Their security around the project has been very tight. But I think there's a reason for that. If the technology were truly groundbreaking, revealing it wouldn't help competitors, because it would be too advanced to replicate easily. The fact that they're keeping it secret suggests the opposite. That the underlying engineering might be simpler than it appears, and that disclosure would allow others to reproduce it quickly."
Bob nodded along. "That's an interesting point. When you think about it, what kind of advanced technology can a fourteen-year-old realistically invent?"
"Exactly."
"So what about applications? Could this thing fight? Could it be deployed as a weapon, like a super-tank?"
Osman was blunt. "Modern military firepower can destroy a target like this from beyond visual range. If the purpose is to launch missiles, we already have aircraft and missile vehicles that do it better. And the robot in the video can't even disconnect from its power cable. That cable is an umbilical cord. Without it, the machine is a statue."
Bob smiled. "You're making it sound fairly useless."
"Every technology has some unique quality. But the question is whether that quality translates into practical value. Consider intercontinental missiles. Their technology isn't just military. It feeds directly into space launch systems. The engineering has dual-use applications across multiple domains. Now look at this giant robot. What does it do? Nobody can answer that question. And when a technology has no clear application, its novelty becomes irrelevant."
He paused for effect.
"It's like developing a method to cook gourmet food from human waste. The technique might be extraordinary. But nobody wants to eat the result."
Bob laughed. "Fair point."
End of clip.
The video detonated a debate that burned across the internet for days.
Three factions formed immediately, each one convinced the others were idiots.
The military faction argued that mechs were in their infancy. Give them ten years of development, better materials, proper weapons systems, and an untethered power source, and they'd be devastating on the battlefield. Every new weapons platform in history had been dismissed by experts before it proved itself. Tanks were called useless in 1916. Aircraft carriers were considered floating targets before Pearl Harbor.
The skeptic faction aligned with Osman. Mechs had no practical application. They were too large for urban combat, too slow for open-field engagement, too dependent on power infrastructure. The money being spent on Ryan's project would be better allocated to proven technologies with established use cases.
The third faction, smaller but growing, argued that the military framing was the wrong lens entirely. Mechs didn't need to be weapons. They needed to find civilian applications. Disaster response. Deep-sea construction. Hazardous environment operations. Space-based assembly. The technology was valuable not because of what Scrapper could do today, but because of what the neural link and the engineering principles behind it could enable in domains nobody had considered yet.
Ryan watched none of this.
He had two priorities, and neither of them involved internet arguments.
Priority one: completing the theoretical framework for liquid neural connection technology. The equations were dense, the calculations were long, and even his brain needed time to work through the more complex derivations. Pages of handwritten math covered his desk, his floor, and part of his bed. The pen-and-circles habit had intensified. He was going through ballpoint pens at a rate of three per day.
Priority two: the plasma reactor.
Patricia had become his most frequent phone call. She'd gone from handling his requests with professional efficiency to actively avoiding his calls, because every conversation was the same.
"When does the reactor arrive?"
"It's still in fabrication."
"When does it arrive?"
"They said one week."
"It's been four days."
"Which means there are three days left."
"Can we make it two?"
After she escalated the request to Aegis leadership, the timeline was confirmed: delivery within seven days. Ryan accepted this with the grace of a man who knew he'd pushed as hard as he could push and would have to wait for the machinery to catch up with his impatience.
The third item on his agenda was money.
He found President Calloway in his office on a Tuesday morning. Calloway saw him coming through the glass door and briefly considered pretending not to be there.
"Your project budget is barely touched," Calloway said before Ryan could open his mouth. "You haven't spent a fraction of the initial allocation. Why do you need more?"
Ryan sat down uninvited. "The neural link hardware alone costs over a million per set. Routine testing and maintenance burns through consumables at a rate of several hundred thousand per month. The crew salaries are ongoing. And the energy system overhaul, when the reactor arrives, is going to require custom fabrication work that I can't estimate until I have the unit in hand."
He spread his hands. The gesture was cheerful and completely unapologetic.
"Better to have the funds available and not need them than to need them and wait three weeks for an approval cycle."
Calloway looked at him. Fourteen years old. Sitting in the president's office. Asking for supplementary research funding with the casual confidence of a tenured professor who'd been doing this for thirty years.
"I'll see what I can do," Calloway said.
Ryan stood, thanked him, and left.
Calloway stared at the closed door for a long time. Then he picked up the phone and called the dean of engineering to discuss something he never thought he'd have to discuss: how to establish a discretionary funding mechanism for a freshman who hadn't technically enrolled yet.
Plz Throw Powerstones.