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The man who had walked out from behind the stage was Xavier Holt, Director of the National Energy Ministry.
"Well, kid," Holt said, low enough that the words were mostly for Ethan, "you've certainly made a mess this time. No Energy Ministry Director in the history of this office has ever involved himself with a private firm the way I am about to."
Ethan, who was getting exactly the outcome he had wanted, grinned at him.
"Director Holt, you shouldn't put it that way. The state holds equity in New Future Technology Energy. That makes us, in a manner of speaking, family. And family supports family."
He paused, and the grin widened.
"Besides. You're the one who pointed out that we both come from the same regional district. If you won't put your weight behind a fellow countryman, whose corner are you going to stand in?"
Holt could only produce a small, helpless smile at the young man's relentless ease.
Then he turned to face the reception hall, and his expression became formal, and his voice, when he spoke, carried to every corner of the room without strain.
"Distinguished guests. I am aware that there is significant doubt in this room. I want to address it directly."
The hall went quiet.
"I will be honest with you. When I first received the briefing on Director Mercer's seabed reactor program, I was as skeptical as any of you are now. The concept ran against everything my own understanding of the field told me was possible."
He let that admission land. It was a deliberate choice. By conceding that he had not believed it either, Holt was establishing that he was not a credulous official being managed by a charismatic young inventor. He was a skeptic who had been convinced by evidence.
"But the reality is this. Several months ago, the Number One Seabed Reactor was deployed on the floor of the Southern Sea. Since that deployment, it has been examined, monitored, and verified by a large team of the Republic's most senior nuclear and energy researchers. I am standing here, in my official capacity, to tell you what those researchers have confirmed."
He paused.
"The reactor is operating. It has been operating stably for months. And its output capacity is several hundred times that of a conventional reactor of comparable footprint."
The reception hall erupted again.
Several hundred times. It was not a believable figure. The reactor on the screen, after deployment, occupied a footprint roughly half the size of a sporting field. It was a fraction of the size of a conventional nuclear plant. A unit that small could not, by any understanding the room possessed, generate several hundred times the output of a full-scale facility. Even granting fusion, even granting every favorable assumption, the physics did not close.
Holt watched the disbelief move through the room and was not offended by it.
"I am not an engineer," he said, once the noise had crested. "I am an administrator. I am not the right person to explain to you how this is possible. So I am going to step aside, and I am going to let the man who designed it explain it to you himself."
He turned, and he gestured to Ethan.
Ethan stepped forward to the front of the stage.
"J.A.R.V.I.S. Would you bring the hall lights down, please."
"My pleasure, sir."
The lights of the reception hall dimmed.
From several points around the room, projector units that had been quietly installed during the building's renovation activated, and beams of faint blue light converged in the air above the stage.
A nuclear reactor assembled itself out of the light.
It was a full-scale, three-dimensional holographic rendering of the seabed reactor, rotating slowly in the air above the audience, every external structural element rendered in crisp, glowing detail. The image hung in the dark, glassless and free-standing, viewable from every seat in the hall.
The audience, several hundred of the Republic's most senior figures, stared at it.
"That's the holographic projection. The one from the Hartwell lecture."
"Mercer is genuinely a prodigy. Genuinely. To reach this level of achievement across this many separate fields."
"The rest of us cannot fully master a single industry, and this young man has mastered several of them at once."
"It is infuriating to be in the same room as him. I have spent three decades on my career, and standing here, I feel as though I wasted every one of them."
Ethan ignored the murmuring.
He began to explain the seabed reactor.
He walked the audience through the external structure of the unit, section by section, using the rotating hologram as his reference. He explained the deployment mechanism, the seabed anchoring system, the conduit interface, the energy storage architecture. He explained it clearly and methodically, in the manner of a man who understood his subject completely.
He also, with practiced care, omitted everything that needed to remain confidential. The System-derived components, the true core architecture, the elements of the design that no competitor could be allowed to reverse-engineer, all of it was simply absent from the explanation, edited out so smoothly that the audience did not notice the gaps.
The audience listened, and the audience marveled, because even the carefully incomplete version of the design was extraordinary.
On the stage, Yvette Caldwell watched her Chairman explain his work with complete seriousness and focus, and felt a small, unexpected ripple of something move through her.
Who would have guessed, she thought. The flippant, unreliable Junior Brother who climbs through windows and parks cars with his shoulder. When he is being serious, there is genuine substance underneath all of it.
After roughly half an hour, Ethan finished his walkthrough of the reactor's external structure.
"That covers the structure," he said. "Now I'm going to answer the two questions that I know everyone in this room actually came here to have answered."
The audience straightened.
"Question one. How is it possible to sustain a nuclear reaction underwater. Question two. Why is the energy output efficiency of this reaction so extraordinarily high."
These were precisely the two impossibilities the room could not resolve. Every person in the hall leaned forward.
Ethan looked out at the assembled senior figures of the Republic's energy industry, all of them sitting in the dark like attentive schoolchildren, waiting for him to explain, and a small, honest flicker of pride moved through him.
"The answer," he said, "is actually very simple."
"Both of those problems, the underwater problem and the efficiency problem, have the same root cause. The limitation has never been the reactor design. The limitation has always been the raw material. The atom."
He spread his hands.
"So. If the atom is the limitation. We change the atom. And the problem is solved."
A well-known executive in the audience stood up immediately to object.
"That is not possible. Decades ago, the entire field exhausted this avenue. Every known element has been evaluated for nuclear reaction suitability. Among all of them, nothing has ever been found that performs better than palladium. The search is finished. It concluded a generation ago."
Ethan gave the man a small, mysterious smile.
"If none of the known elements will do the job," he said, "then why don't we simply make one that will."
Before the audience could fully process the sentence, Ethan moved his hand.
The holographic reactor dissolved.
Every image in the hall vanished, the rendered reactor breaking apart into motes of blue light and fading, until only one thing remained suspended in the darkness above the stage.
A single, enormous sphere.
The audience stared at it, uncertain what they were looking at.
In the third row, Pieter Harris stood up.
He did it abruptly, and with such force that the old Meridian gentleman nearly lost his balance and fell. He caught himself on the seat in front of him, and he did not sit back down, and his hands, gripping the seatback, were visibly trembling.
Harris's reaction was not theatrical. It was the involuntary response of a man who had just understood something before the rest of the room.
Pieter Harris had not reached the position of Asian Regional Director of Maha Energy on management ability alone. Maha was, above all else, a nuclear and energy conglomerate, and a man did not run its largest regional directorate without genuine technical depth. In the field of nuclear energy, Pieter Harris was, by any fair measure, an expert.
And an expert did not need a label to recognize what was hanging in the air above the stage.
The enormous sphere was an atom. A magnified rendering of a single atomic structure.
An ordinary atomic structure would not have moved Harris from his seat. But Harris had, in the few seconds since the sphere appeared, run the structure against the 118 known elements of the periodic table, every one of them, the entire catalog of confirmed matter.
The atom above the stage matched none of them.
Which left exactly two possibilities. Either Pieter Harris's expert memory of his own field had failed him completely.
Or the structure above the stage was an element that did not appear on the periodic table, because it had not existed until New Future Technology Energy made it.
It was the second possibility that had Harris on his feet with trembling hands. Because if it were true, then the company whose opening ceremony he had attended as a gesture of casual intimidation was going to become, within a very few years, the single most dangerous competitor Maha Energy had ever faced.
Ethan watched the room's confusion, and Harris's reaction, and continued.
"As all of you know," he said, "radioactive atoms are the essential raw material for nuclear fission, and for fusion. Everything begins with the atom. And the problem the field has lived with for generations is the one the gentleman just stated. None of the 118 known elements can sustain a nuclear reaction in a seawater environment. Not one."
The audience nodded slowly. This was settled science. This was the wall the entire industry had accepted as permanent.
"So let me ask the room a question," Ethan said.
"What if I told you that New Future Technology Energy has discovered a brand-new atom. A one hundred nineteenth element. One that does not appear on any periodic table in any classroom in the world, because until recently it did not exist."
He gestured at the slowly rotating sphere above the stage.
"Would a reactor on the seabed still seem so impossible to you now?"
The reception hall went absolutely silent.
It was the silence of several hundred senior people simultaneously refusing, and then failing to refuse, the same thought.
A new element.
The deep-blue atom rotating above the stage was a form of matter that had never existed in the entire history of the human species.
The audience knew, every one of them knew, what that claim meant. They knew how many nations had poured national-scale resources into the synthesis of new stable elements. They knew how many corporate research institutes, how many state laboratories, how many of the most brilliant physicists of multiple generations, had spent their careers and their funding on exactly this problem, and had returned, every time, with nothing.
The creation of a genuinely new, stable, useful element was one of the great unclaimed prizes of the physical sciences. It was something humanity dreamed about and could not reach.
And the teenager on the stage had just gestured at one, rotating in the air, and asked the room whether it changed their minds.
Nobody in the reception hall could speak.
It was, for several hundred of the most powerful people in the Republic of Valoria, the precise sensation of standing inside a dream and being unable to wake up.