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The offices of NeuraPath Technologies were not designed to hold this many people.
On a normal day, the company's open-plan workspace held eighteen employees: engineers, researchers, administrative staff, and the founder's golden retriever, who slept under the conference table. Today, the golden retriever had been relocated to a storage closet, and the conference table was surrounded by eleven investors in tailored suits, all of whom had arrived within the same two-hour window, all of whom wanted the same thing.
"Has this ever happened before?" a junior engineer whispered to the office manager.
"We usually get maybe one investor visit a quarter. And they always leave without writing a check."
"There are eleven of them in there right now."
"I can count."
The founder, Dr. James Alcott, was conducting his fourth tour of the day. Harvard-trained neuroscientist, former researcher at one of the university's two dedicated BCI laboratories, and founder of a company that had burned through three million dollars of seed funding over four years to produce a single working prototype of a brain-controlled prosthetic arm.
The prototype was impressive, in a laboratory sense. A volunteer with a forearm amputation wore a ring-shaped signal acquisition band on her residual limb. Several feet away, a prosthetic hand opened and closed, rotated its wrist, flexed its elbow, all controlled by neural signals routed through surgically relocated nerve pathways.
The technique was called targeted muscle reinnervation: transplanting nerves from the amputated limb to intact muscle groups, where they could generate detectable electrical signals when the patient thought about moving the missing hand. The prosthetic's onboard computer read those signals and translated them into mechanical action.
It worked. It was real. It was also prohibitively expensive, surgically invasive, and years away from consumer viability.
None of which mattered to the investors standing in the room today.
"If Ryan Mercer enters this market," one of them asked, "can you compete with him?"
Alcott straightened. "Our technology follows the same research pathway as every major institution in the field. The approach is proven, peer-reviewed, and globally recognized."
The investors nodded. They didn't fully understand the technology. They understood the market. And the market had just been validated by the most credible person alive.
"What level of investment are you seeking?"
Alcott smiled. Three hours ago, he'd been wondering whether the company would survive the quarter. Now investors were asking him to name his price.
"Our R&D burn rate is significant. The current prototype alone cost over a million dollars in materials and fabrication. We'll need substantial capital to reach production scale."
The investors exchanged glances. Numbers were discussed. Business cards were produced. Follow-up meetings were scheduled.
After the last visitor left, the office exhaled.
"Did that just happen?" someone asked.
"I've been trying to get a single investor meeting for six months," the office manager said. "Eleven showed up today without appointments."
"We should send Ryan Mercer a fruit basket."
"We should build a shrine."
The same scene was playing out at BCI companies across the country. Small labs that had been struggling for grants found their inboxes full. Mid-stage startups that had been turned down by every VC on the coast were fielding calls from firms they'd never heard of. A company in Austin had so many visitors that they'd started a waitlist.
The entire neural prosthetics sector, which had been a quiet backwater of the medical device industry for decades, was suddenly the hottest investment category in the country.
All because a teenager had posted eight words on Twitter.
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While the investment world scrambled to throw money at brain-computer interfaces, the teenager in question was staring at a metal disc the size of a truck tire.
The plasma generation chamber had arrived.
It sat on the firing platform in the test corridor, bolted to the base that Ryan had designed weeks before the cannon team even arrived. A circular assembly, both faces taller than a person, packed with laser excitation arrays and gas containment systems. When activated, it would heat xenon gas to a plasma state and feed the superheated material into the transmission bore.
It was the first physical component of the i-22 plasma cannon to exist in reality.
Thornton stood behind Ryan, flanked by his core team. They'd spent the last week studying the technical outline, running calculations, verifying equations, and gradually converting from skeptics to believers. The focusing lens math checked out. The amplifier theory was consistent. The plasma generation specifications aligned with their own decade-old experimental data.
Now the hardware was here, and the theoretical had become tangible.
"With this installed, we can begin preliminary plasma generation tests," Thornton said. His voice carried a controlled excitement that his team recognized from the old days, before the program had failed, back when they'd still believed they were going to change the world.
The technicians finished bolting the generation chamber to the platform. The recoil dampeners were locked. The rail system was tested. The seaward doors were confirmed operational.
The test corridor was ready. The generation chamber was ready. The team was ready.
Ryan stood up from his observation chair and faced the room.
"The plasma cannon project is officially active."
The corridor filled with applause. Thornton's veterans, the men and women who'd spent years on a program that had ended in silence, were clapping harder than anyone.
They'd been given a second chance. And this time, they had a focusing lens, an amplifier, and a fourteen-year-old who'd never been wrong.
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