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The first thing Ryan did after his fifteenth birthday was change his usernames.
The handle "RyanMercer14" had served its purpose. It was time to retire it.
The decision wasn't sentimental. It was strategic.
Early in his public visibility, Ryan had wanted his age front and center. The narrative of "fourteen-year-old genius builds a working mech" was vastly more powerful than "teenage engineer builds a working mech." The age detail amplified the spectacle. It gave the press an irresistible angle. It turned each accomplishment into a viral moment because the implicit comparison with what a fourteen-year-old should be doing made every result feel impossible.
That was the design.
But the design had outlived its usefulness.
Now that Ryan was internationally famous, his age was no longer an asset. It was becoming an obstacle. Humans, across cultures and throughout history, had been wired to trust elders over youth. Experience, wisdom, judgment, all of these were associated with grey hair and weathered hands. A teenager, no matter how brilliant, triggered a deep-seated bias that whispered: he's still a kid. The work might be impressive, but trusting him with serious resources would be reckless.
This bias was rational on average. Most fifteen-year-olds shouldn't be trusted with billion-dollar budgets. The bias just happened to be wrong about Ryan, and being right on the average wasn't going to help him.
He'd seen the bias play out in the chairman's response to the Crimson Typhoon proposal. If a sixty-year-old MIT professor with a long publication record had pitched the same project, twenty billion dollars probably would have been approved without much argument. Even knowing the project couldn't actually deliver Crimson Typhoon for that budget, the professor's institutional standing would have provided the cover for the gamble. The investment community would have rationalized the risk. Faculty colleagues would have written supportive letters. The professor's track record would have absorbed the doubt.
Ryan didn't have a track record. He had Scrapper, and Scrapper, while undeniably impressive, was still a single project, not a body of work.
The bias was also why Helios's smear campaign had landed at all. Whitfield's beard and decades of credentials were optically reassuring in a way Ryan's youth couldn't match. To a casual observer, the comparison seemed obvious: a respected senior researcher versus an unproven prodigy. The fact that the technology comparison favored Ryan didn't matter, because most viewers weren't equipped to evaluate technology. They evaluated trustworthiness, and trustworthiness was correlated with age.
The solution wasn't to wait twenty years for grey hair. The solution was to stop reminding everyone how young he was.
Ryan stared at the username change form for a long time, then typed:
*The Mech Expert | Ryan Mercer*
He paused, considering. Then he hit submit.
The handle had a layered purpose. "Mech Expert" centered the conversation on his most visible accomplishments rather than his demographics. It implicitly claimed authority based on demonstrated work, not credentials. And it was specific enough to avoid being generic while broad enough to encompass his future projects in adjacent fields.
It was, he reflected as he changed the handle across all his accounts, a more mature approach to image management. The old Ryan Mercer would have used something more dramatic. The new Ryan Mercer was beginning to think strategically about the long game.
The handle change went viral within minutes.
"Best username change of the year. He's just declaring himself the world authority on mechs. Bold."
"I smell something different about this name. Like sunshine. Anyone else?"
"I knew it. 'Ryan Mercer 15' was already taken."
"Did you know your old handle has been registered through age 108? Yours sincerely, Ryan Mercer 108."
"The above commenter is just teleporting in place at this point."
Ryan didn't bother reading the responses. He'd predicted the trend; the only question was the magnitude.
He went back to studying the Crimson Typhoon damper system.
-----
A month passed.
The post-launch development of the prosthetic continued. Mason's team built the left-arm version using the right-arm prototype as a mirror template. The neural fabrication contract with Aegis was finalized. Standard prosthetic factories were vetted for the mechanical components. Patricia's lawyers filed patents in fifteen jurisdictions. Tom set up the first fitting center in a leased space downtown, choosing a location with high foot traffic on a major commercial street.
The countdown to the simultaneous launch with Helios reached the four-week mark.
Ryan's days settled into a rhythm. Mornings on Crimson Typhoon's damper system, deconstructing the architecture layer by layer. Afternoons on drift training oversight, watching the triplets push their three-person sync durations from twenty minutes to thirty. Evenings reviewing test arm fabrication progress, tracking the seventy-ton component as it took shape in the manufacturing facility.
Then, one morning, Patricia walked into his quarters with news.
"The new research center is finished. Operational starting today."
Ryan looked up from his laptop. He'd been so absorbed in the damper architecture that he'd lost track of the construction timeline.
"Already? Let's go see it."
"I'll bring the team leads. They should familiarize themselves with the new layout."
Reeves, Cross, Thornton, and Marsh assembled outside Ryan's quarters. Together they walked the half-mile path to the new facility.
The building was visible long before they reached it.
Steel-framed, predominantly glass, the structure rose thirty meters at its standard height and thirty-five at its highest point. From the air, it formed a crescent moon. From the ground, the rolling profile of its roof line resembled an ocean wave caught mid-curl. The polished steel reflected the morning sunlight in long bright sheets, giving the building a futuristic, almost cinematic appearance against the flat coastal landscape.
The structure contained six mech bays, each twenty meters tall, twenty meters deep, and thirty meters wide, with a hangar door opening on the building's convex face. Behind the mech bays sat one larger experimental chamber, fifty meters wide, designed specifically for the Crimson Typhoon arm test. The chamber existed because Ryan had insisted on it during the initial design review, and Patricia had pushed it through the budget approvals.
Beyond these large-format spaces, seventy-seven mid-sized and small laboratories supported various research groups. A fully integrated facility for an entire research ecosystem.
The locals from the nearby town had been watching the construction for weeks. They couldn't enter the controlled zone, but the building's distinctive shape was visible from the surrounding hills. The townspeople had been speculating endlessly about what it was, with theories ranging from "satellite ground station" to "movie set" to "advanced fish processing plant." Nobody had guessed correctly.
Ryan and the team approached the main entrance. The walls of the building rose into clean architectural curves above them, the design more elegant than utilitarian. The aesthetic ambition of the structure was unmistakable. Whoever had designed it had wanted the building to be remembered as much as used.
"Anyone else feel like we just walked out of a science fiction movie?" Cross said.
The heavy doors slid open with a hydraulic hiss. The first thing that greeted them was the experimental chamber, twenty meters tall, fifty meters wide. Suspended steel cables hung from the ceiling. Heavy machinery was arranged along the walls. The empty floor space dominated the eye, vast and silent.
This was where the Crimson Typhoon test arm would live. Where it would be assembled, calibrated, and connected to the drift system. Where the first Jaeger-scale neural link experiment would be conducted.
The team stood at the threshold, briefly speechless.
"This is not a research center," Reeves said finally. "This is a missile silo."
"It does feel that way," Marsh agreed.
"It feels imposing. In a good way."
Patricia turned to Ryan. "The facility doesn't have a name yet."
The hint was unsubtle. The new building was Ryan's. He should name it.
He looked up at the curve of the roof, the way the structure swept overhead like a frozen wave. He thought about what kind of work would happen inside these walls. Mech construction. Drift research. Weapons development. A facility that would, in the months and years ahead, produce technologies that would reshape multiple industries.
The standard nomenclature ("Coastal Research Facility B" or similar) didn't fit. The building's character demanded something better. Something that captured what it was meant to become.
He thought for a moment.
"Everyone seems to feel this place is more like a base than a research center. So let's not call it a research center."
"What should we call it?"
Ryan looked at the curving overhead structure, the way the walls rose to enclose a space that felt protected and ambitious at the same time.
"Dome Base."
Patricia nodded. The name fit. It was simple. It was evocative. It implied permanence and scale. It would look good on the official letterhead.
"Dome Base it is."
The team filed inside.
-----