The Forge Division's cadet training section was technically a separate track from Vanguard, but Theo Bancroft had a gift for being somewhere he technically wasn't supposed to be in a way that was so enthusiastic and transparent that no one ever quite got around to throwing him out.
He had been in the Vanguard training bay four out of the seven days since Ray had met him.
He was also, objectively, extraordinarily useful. The custom grenades in his backpack during the Threshold Test had turned out to be a series of personal projects in void-null alloy fragmentation technology that Forge Division senior engineers had spent three days examining and described in their formal report as 'preliminary but conceptually significant.' Theo's reaction to reading this had been to immediately disappear into the Forge lab for forty-eight hours and emerge with a follow-up prototype that the same senior engineers described as 'alarming in the best possible way.'
On day seven, he found Ray in the empty training bay at 05:30 hours and sat down next to him on the floor with his legs crossed and his hands moving over something small and complicated in his lap.
"I've been thinking about the Genesis Suit."
"How do you know about the Genesis Suit?"
"I asked the bonding technician what happened with the anomalous unit registration and he looked at me like I'd asked him to hand me his soul, which in my experience means 'yes, something interesting happened and I am not supposed to tell you.' So I looked at the suit bonding logs myself."
"Those logs are restricted."
"There was a gap in the access protocol. It was built before the current security classifications."
A pause.
"You just quoted me to me."
"It was a good observation. Anyway. The suit. Your Aphelion Signature reading I found that too. I want to talk about what it means from an engineering perspective."
Ray looked at him. At this seventeen-year-old with his restless hands and his absolute unself-conscious certainty that every interesting piece of information should be examined rather than contained.
"You're going to get me in trouble."
"Almost certainly. But I also might be able to tell you something about what's happening to you that the medical techs can't, because I've been looking at this from a materials science angle and I think the Void Resonance in your body is interacting with the suit's alloy at the molecular level, which means"
"Theo."
"Yeah?"
"If you're going to figure out how I work, do it quietly."
Theo smiled. It was an enormous smile. The kind of smile that either makes everything better or causes a series of events that eventually makes everything better through considerable difficulty.
"I am exclusively a quiet person."
Ray thought about pointing out that Theo had been anything but quiet for every moment of the past seven days. He decided that this was not the fight worth having.
What Theo found, over the next week, working in the Forge lab at hours when no one senior was watching, was this: the Genesis Suit's alloy was not reacting to Ray the way a combat suit alloy should react to any operator.
Combat suit bonding was well-understood technology. The suit read the operator's biological output nerve signals, energy production, muscle-response speed and calibrated its amplification systems to match and multiply that output. The suit was the tool. The operator was the input. This was how it had always worked.
The Genesis Suit was doing something different. It was not amplifying Ray's output. It was responding to it matching it, as Theo said, 'the way a conversation matches a conversation rather than the way a machine processes an input.' The suit wasn't calculating Ray's energy and scaling it. It was receiving it. Listening to it. And then generating a complementary output that didn't amplify what he was putting in it resonated with it. The two signals Ray's body and the suit's systems were producing something between them that was neither.
Theo explained all of this at 0200 hours in the Forge lab with three empty coffee cups around him and a model on his datapad that he'd been building for nine days.
"The practical implication is that your suit's power ceiling isn't fixed the way every other suit's is. Every other suit has a maximum output because the suit has a maximum capacity. Your suit's maximum output is theoretically whatever the upper limit of the resonance field between you and the suit can sustain. Which means"
"The ceiling rises as the resonance grows."
"As you grow. As you get stronger, or more experienced, or more exposed to Aphelion energy the suit grows with you. They're the same thing. You're the same thing."
Ray was quiet for a moment.
"That's either very good or very bad."
"Probably both. Most things that are interesting are both."