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The facility tour turned out to be disappointing.
Most of the buildings were classified. Ryan couldn't take Chloe through the drift lab, the weapons facility, or the hangar where Scrapper was stored. Even getting her onto the radar station's residential grounds had required Patricia's signoff. Ryan understood the difference between the things he could be bold about and the things he couldn't.
This didn't bother Chloe in the slightest.
The cafeteria had fried chicken.
She'd ordered two drumsticks. Then a third. Then a fourth. She was on her fifth now, braised in soy sauce, eating with the serene focus of someone who had prioritized her life correctly.
"So much for training," Ryan observed.
"I'll run twice tomorrow."
Ryan had arranged a guest room in the residential block next to his own quarters. After dinner, Chloe showered and came over with her laptop, settling onto Ryan's bed to edit the day's footage.
Ryan was at his desk, deep in the Crimson Typhoon damper system research. His work area was covered in handwritten sheets: equations, diagrams, stress calculations, mechanical flow derivations. His laptop displayed a rotating selection of published papers on vibration damping, magnetorheological fluid dynamics, and aerospace shock isolation. Patricia's office had pulled the materials for him, pre-sorted and categorized.
"Yeah, I definitely can't read any of this," Chloe said, leaning over his shoulder. Her hair fell forward, smelling like whatever shampoo she'd used in the shower.
Ryan didn't look up from his page. "You've never been able to read anything I read."
"Rude."
"Accurate."
"I'm going to edit your video so you look ugly."
"I'm not in the video."
"I'll edit you in. And then make you look ugly."
She flopped onto the bed and started working. Ryan went back to his derivation.
The room settled into quiet. Keys clicking on her laptop. Ryan's pen moving across paper. Occasionally the sound of Ryan making a small annotation or Chloe muttering at a difficult cut.
On the page, equations and numbers. In Ryan's mind, a fully three-dimensional simulation of the Crimson Typhoon damper system in operation. Every joint, every valve, every pressure response. The mech running in his imagination, each footfall generating a shock wave, each shock wave absorbed, redistributed, and dissipated through the layered damping architecture. He could see it like a high-speed camera recording. Every movement. Every internal reaction. Every detail.
Someday, the system's data on this technology would be public. The industries it would transform would reshape engineering, aerospace, earthquake mitigation, precision manufacturing. People would win lifetime-achievement awards understanding a fraction of what Ryan was studying tonight. For now, he was its only reader.
An hour later, Chloe finished her edit.
Her version of the test video was clean, professional, and unmistakably hers. Multiple angles cut together with deliberate pacing. The moment of first finger movement isolated, centered, given room to breathe. Grant's reactions captured without intrusion. The technology showcased without narration, letting the images carry the message.
She titled it:
*A Few Minor Improvements to the Prosthetic*
Upload. Post. Done.
She lay back on Ryan's bed and started scrolling through the news feed on her phone while the upload processed.
*"Angel Will Save Humanity? Helios Group Announces Prosthetic Launch."*
*"Domestic Sci-Fi Film 'Metro Cannon' Delivers Strong Performances."*
Neither caught her attention. She scrolled to Ryan's account to check the comments section, hoping for fresh troll activity she could enjoy with a drumstick.
But the trolls were gone.
The coordinated negativity that had dominated Ryan's comments for weeks had evaporated overnight. Chloe scrolled down, confused. Were the troll farms on break?
Instead, the comments were back to their usual mixture of fan enthusiasm and cinematic commentary:
"Based on the first frame of this video, I can confirm that one cameraman has officially gained employment in this country."
"This is actively training high-skill creative labor. You don't understand economics like I do."
"The previous cameraman has been fired. Thrown in a pot with squid. Tastes great."
"Stir-fried squid, three bucks a pop, three for ten!"
"Hope the previous cameraman is okay. Hand over candle for remembrance."
"How do we know the old cameraman was fired? Maybe they just went back to their network job."
Chloe laughed out loud. Ryan glanced over his shoulder, confused, then went back to his equations.
Further down, past the cameraman jokes, the actual technology discussion:
"'A few minor improvements' is putting it mildly. I can't find a single part that looks the same as the first prototype."
"Confident language. Drop the 'I can't find.' Nothing is the same."
"This looks comparable to the international benchmark now. Too bad Ryan never narrates, so we're all just guessing."
"Looked at the hand. No sensors on the palm, so probably no tactile feedback. But everything else is elite."
The video climbed the trending list at the same exponential rate as all of Ryan's previous uploads. Within an hour, it was the top trend on three major platforms.
-----
Three thousand miles away, Dr. James Alcott was preparing for bed when his phone lit up.
His assistant, calling late. Never a good sign.
"He posted another video."
"Ryan Mercer?"
"Another test. It looks significantly more advanced than the first one."
Alcott groaned. He'd been hoping to get a full night's sleep. "I'll look at it now."
He pulled up the video on his tablet. Started watching.
Grant's face. Danny beside him. The new prosthetic on its stand.
And then Alcott's attention locked on something that shouldn't have been there.
The sensor cap.
He paused the video and zoomed in. The device on Grant's head was clearly an active neural interface, connected by cables to the signal converter and then to the prosthetic. It was reading brain activity directly.
That wasn't how Alcott's technology worked.
NeuraPath's prosthetics, like Whitfield's at Harvard, used targeted muscle reinnervation. A surgical procedure that transplanted nerves from the amputated limb to intact muscle tissue in the residual limb. The transplanted nerves produced clear electrical signals at the skin surface, which a ring-shaped sensor on the residual limb could read reliably.
That was the entire industry standard. Surgery, then a localized sensor on the remaining limb. Clean signals because the nerves had been strategically positioned to generate them.
But Ryan Mercer's setup put the sensor on the user's head.
Directly on the scalp.
Reading signals from the cerebral cortex without surgical intervention.
That was… impossible. Or should have been.
Non-invasive cortical signal acquisition was the holy grail of BCI research. Every major institution had been working on it for decades. Every one of them had hit the same wall: the signals from outside the skull were too noisy, too diffuse, and too low-resolution to support reliable motor control. You could read intention at a coarse level. You couldn't decode individual finger movements.
And yet, on the video Alcott was watching, Grant was controlling individual finger movements.
Through a sensor cap. No surgery. No surface electrodes on the limb. No targeted muscle reinnervation.
Alcott paused the video and tried to find a shot of Grant's residual limb to confirm there wasn't some additional sensor he'd missed. Grant was wearing a long-sleeved shirt. The empty sleeve hung at his side.
No visible sensor on the limb.
No visible sensor anywhere except the cap on his head.
Alcott felt a cold feeling settle into his stomach.
"This might be a problem," he said aloud.
His assistant, still on the phone, waited.
"This might be a very big problem."
-----