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Ryan went back to his room and opened the boxes.
Thornton's team had brought everything. Several large cardboard crates, stacked on the floor, packed with binders, folders, spiral-bound reports, and hard drives. Ten years of experimental data from the defunct plasma weapons program, preserved with the careful archival habits of researchers who'd always hoped their work would matter someday.
Ryan pulled out the first binder and started reading at his desk.
The data was exactly what Thornton had described: pre-discharge measurements covering every phase of plasma weapon development up to the point of failure. Ionization rates. Energy curves. Thermal profiles. Containment field stability. Plasma density measurements at various stages of the generation and acceleration process.
Every dataset ended at the same wall. The moment the plasma left the barrel, the data stopped being useful, because the plasma stopped being plasma and became an expensive firework.
For Thornton, these records were the monument to a career-defining failure.
For Ryan, they were the missing piece.
The system's blueprints told him what the cannon should look like. They told him the specifications, the tolerances, the performance parameters. But they didn't tell him why the design was shaped the way it was. They didn't explain the reasoning behind each decision. To understand the design logic, Ryan needed to know how plasma actually behaved under real experimental conditions, and that was exactly what Thornton's data provided.
It was like being given the recipe for bread but never having touched flour. Now he had the flour. He could feel its texture, understand its properties, and work backward from the final product to the reasoning that shaped each step of the process.
Ryan read until his eyes burned, then kept reading.
In Thornton's quarters, the scene was different but equally intense.
Thornton had Ryan's technical outline open on his laptop. A cigarette burned between his fingers, untouched, the ash growing long and precarious. His glasses had fallen off his face at some point and lay on the floor beside his chair. He didn't notice. His head was inches from the screen, squinting, scribbling calculations on scrap paper, cross-referencing numbers against the equations on the display.
He hadn't turned a page in fifteen minutes. Not because he was stuck. Because every line demanded verification.
"This is the approach?" he muttered. Then, louder: "This is actually the approach."
He grabbed the structural diagram Ryan had given him and laid it beside the laptop. Compared the outline's theoretical framework against the physical design, point by point. The focusing lens geometry. The amplifier specifications. The energy injection timing at the muzzle. Every element of the diagram corresponded to a specific section of the outline, and every section's math checked against his own calculations.
His glasses were still on the floor. He couldn't care less.
He called his core team. Four researchers, the inner circle, the survivors of the failed program.
They walked in and found their boss hunched over a laptop like a college student pulling an all-nighter, glasses on the floor, a smoldering cigarette beside them, scrap paper everywhere.
"Are you okay?"
Thornton waved them over without looking up. "Sit down. Look at this."
He scrolled back to page one. Five heads crowded around one screen.
"He's proposing to use the focusing lens to simultaneously concentrate and energize the plasma at discharge?" One of the researchers pointed at a section. "Are these supporting calculations verified?"
Thornton held up his scrap paper. "I ran the numbers. They hold. His mathematical ability is reportedly exceptional. I'm inclined to trust the arithmetic."
"I want to check it myself." Someone pulled out a pen and started calculating on the spot.
They worked through the outline page by page, stopping at every question, every uncertainty, every point where the theory intersected with their years of practical experience. Each pause generated a discussion. Each discussion produced either confirmation or a new question that needed further analysis.
By evening, they hadn't finished the first section.
"I need to stop," one of the researchers said, rotating his neck. Every turn produced an audible crack. "My spine is filing a formal complaint."
"Same." Another researcher was doing shoulder rolls. "We've been staring at one screen for six hours."
The room sounded like a chiropractic clinic. Popping joints, groaning backs, the collective physical protests of middle-aged scientists who'd forgotten they had bodies.
Thornton conceded. "I'll get a projector for tomorrow. This laptop situation is going to cripple us before the project even starts."
They settled into chairs around the room, decompressing.
"That outline is really from the kid?" the youngest researcher asked. The same one who'd been skeptical that morning. His tone was different now.
Thornton nodded. "Directly from him. And from what I've heard, the plasma cannon isn't even his primary field. He's made breakthroughs in other domains that are apparently even more significant."
"More significant than a working plasma weapon?"
"Apparently."
"Then what are we dealing with? Someone who's crossed three, four different disciplines at the highest level?"
Thornton didn't answer. He was thinking about the outline. About the elegance of the focusing lens solution. About how cleanly it addressed the exact problem that had defeated his team for four years.
He was also thinking about what it meant if the outline was correct. If a fourteen-year-old had solved his life's unsolvable problem by approaching it from a direction he'd never considered.
That wasn't humbling. That was a geological event. The kind that rearranges the landscape and leaves everyone standing in a different place than where they started.
Over the following days, both sides dug in.
Thornton set up the projector and led daily sessions with his core team, working through the technical outline section by section. Problems that needed experimental verification were parceled out to team members with the relevant expertise.
Ryan, in his own quarters, worked through Thornton's decade of data with the same methodical intensity. The records were rich, thorough, and exactly what he needed to bridge the gap between the system's blueprints and real-world plasma physics.
The two of them were reading each other's homework. And both were finding that the other's work made their own make more sense.
Ryan was deep in a binder of thermal stability measurements when his phone rang.
Tom.
"The prosthetics team is confirmed. Their lead researcher can be at your town tomorrow. Are you free?"
Ryan ran through his mental schedule. The neural drift experiments were running on autopilot now, Reeves and Cross managing the daily sessions. The plasma cannon was still in the study phase. The firefighting mech design was progressing under the professors' guidance. Patricia was handling logistics for all of it.
Tomorrow was clear.
"Tomorrow works. Set it up."