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Patricia was waiting at her desk.
"Congratulations," she said. "Your proposal has been approved." She held up two fingers, pinched close together. "A little bit."
"How little?"
"A hundred million as initial operating capital. Same structure as before. When you need more, we apply for the next tranche. You don't have to worry about running out."
Ryan processed this. A hundred million was a fraction of twenty billion. But it was also a hundred million dollars, which was enough to build infrastructure, hire personnel, and begin the first phase of core technology research. The rest would come when the results demanded it.
"Additionally," Patricia continued, "if you need test subjects for the neural link research, they'll be provided. And you can request personnel support at any level below senior fellowship. Within reason."
"What counts as 'within reason'?"
"That's deliberately vague, and you should take advantage of it."
Ryan smiled. Then he brought up the thing he'd been thinking about for weeks.
"I need a new facility. The campus isn't viable anymore. Scrapper can't do outdoor tests without destroying university property, and the next project is going to require space and infrastructure that a prefab workshop can't provide."
Patricia nodded. "That's already being discussed. There's a proposal to build you a dedicated research center. They want to know if you have location preferences."
"Near the coast. And the site needs room to expand. A lot of room."
"The coast?" Patricia's eyebrows rose. "Most facilities like this go inland. Remote. Secure."
Ryan didn't explain. The Jaeger Program's endgame was a mech designed for oceanic deployment. Crimson Typhoon's operating environment was the Pacific Ocean. Testing a machine built for deep-water combat required proximity to deep water. But he wasn't going to lay that out for Patricia until the project was further along.
"The coast," he repeated. "With expansion capacity."
"I'll pass it along."
After Patricia left, Ryan returned to his office and the equations waiting on his desk.
The liquid neural connection work was nearly complete. A few more derivation chains and he'd have the full theoretical framework locked down. Then it was a matter of experimental verification, fabrication, and integration testing.
He opened the system panel. Project Two: fifty percent.
The latest unlock had been significant. At the fifty percent threshold, the system had released detailed specifications for the i-22 plasma cannon.
Ryan had spent an hour studying the data the night it appeared. The weapon's operating principle was elegant: heat xenon gas to a plasma state using laser excitation, then accelerate the plasma bolt using superconducting electromagnetic coils. Effective range: ten thousand feet. Plasma temperature at muzzle: approximately 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit. Recharge time between shots: 6.7 seconds. Maximum sustained fire duration: 5 seconds per burst.
These were modest numbers by science fiction standards. In the Pacific Rim universe, the i-22 had struggled against heavily armored Kaiju. But in the real world, a directed-energy weapon that could deliver 3,600-degree plasma at three thousand meters was something that no military on Earth possessed or had seriously attempted to build.
The plasma cannon was Ryan's ace. The multi-pilot neural link would intrigue the committee. The liquid neural connection technology would impress them. But the plasma cannon would make them write checks.
Because a working plasma weapon wasn't just a mech component. It was a paradigm shift in directed-energy weaponry. Every branch of the military would want it. Every defense contractor would bid for production rights. The revenue potential alone would dwarf the Jaeger Program's construction costs.
That was the real logic behind the twenty-billion-dollar ask. Ryan wasn't just proposing to build a giant robot. He was proposing to develop an entire ecosystem of technologies, each one independently valuable, that happened to converge inside a single platform. The mech was the delivery vehicle. The technologies were the product.
But he couldn't develop those technologies in isolation. That was the trap that most people fell into when they looked at advanced systems and tried to extract individual components.
Ryan thought of it as the First Principles problem.
The system gave him blueprints. Complete, functional, verified blueprints for technologies that worked inside a specific machine. But the blueprints didn't explain why they worked. They didn't provide the underlying design philosophy, the engineering trade-offs, the failure mode analysis, the iterative testing data that had shaped each component into its final form.
Without that understanding, you couldn't modify the technology. You couldn't adapt it for different applications. You couldn't improve it. You were stuck with an exact copy, and the moment you changed one variable, the whole system could collapse in ways you couldn't diagnose.
The only way to truly understand a technology was to build the complete system it belonged to, test it under real-world conditions, observe the interactions between components, and reverse-engineer the design logic from the ground up.
That meant building Crimson Typhoon. Not because the world needed a 250-foot combat mech. But because the world needed the technologies inside it, and the only way to access those technologies was to assemble the machine they were designed for and learn from it.
First build. Then understand. Then adapt.
Everything else was guesswork.