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Aegis Industrial. A conference room.
Reports of varying thickness were stacked on the conference table. In the center, the documents had accumulated into a small mountain.
The man at the head of the table spoke.
"These are the feasibility reports collected over the past period regarding Crimson Typhoon. Nothing leaves this room. We'll divide the reports and review them today, then tally the results. We have new faces in the room. If you have questions, ask the person next to you. Time is short. We won't be discussing this at length."
He distributed the mountain of documents around the table, took the first report from his own pile, and began reading.
When Aegis had received Ryan's complete Jaeger blueprints, the company had distributed the subsystem documentation to domain specialists for confidential feasibility review. Every subsystem outside the original panel's expertise had been routed to the appropriate experts. The reports on the table now were the returned assessments.
Compared to the original Jaeger Program review, the conference table had several unfamiliar faces. The new arrivals looked at the document mountain with visible confusion.
"What are these reports?"
The new members picked up documents and quickly discovered something. The reports spanned an enormous range of disciplines. Mechanical engineering. Electronics. Computer science. Materials science. The breadth was bewildering.
And some of the reports were assessments the new arrivals had personally authored. That was, in fact, why they'd been invited to this secretive company as technical consultants in the first place.
"What exactly are we reviewing?" a young new hire asked the veteran Aegis employee seated beside him.
The veteran smiled faintly and handed him a particular document.
"Take a look."
The new hire opened it. A rendering of Crimson Typhoon appeared on the first page, accompanied by performance specifications. He set aside the dizzying spec sheet and kept reading.
The following pages contained a long technical manifest. The items on the manifest appeared to correspond to the reports he'd just been skimming.
He flipped back to the first page and looked at the performance specifications again.
A two-hundred-and-fifty-foot, seventeen-hundred-ton humanoid combat mech.
The new hire blinked.
"These reports are the technical design for this mech? It can actually be built?"
The veteran seemed to enjoy the younger man's bewilderment. "You're holding its feasibility report. The reports will tell us whether it can be built."
The new hire processed this. Then another question surfaced.
"This isn't connected to that teenager, is it?"
In the current environment, anyone who heard the word "mech" thought of Ryan Mercer first.
The veteran answered with the calm of someone who'd been here a while. "Nobody else on the planet could design a mech right now. Our daily job here is receiving and reviewing his technical deliverables. The rest of our time, we do our own research."
The new hire noticed a further implication. He looked at the long list of technologies on his document and swallowed.
"These aren't all... one person's work, are they?"
"You guessed right. That's exactly why we're here to vet it. You'll get used to it. Some people's brains simply work differently from everyone else's."
The veteran was unbothered. He patted the young man's shoulder. Looking at the new hire, he saw a version of his own younger self, the version that had not yet adjusted to the existence of Ryan Mercer.
If you hadn't seen it with your own eyes, who could believe a person like that existed?
"Item one hundred thirty-five. Gyroscopic stabilizer design. No issues."
The veteran checked the result on his current report and placidly marked a checkmark next to item one hundred thirty-five.
The review continued from morning into the late night. When the conference room's lights finally went dark, security personnel collected every report and incinerated them on-site. Nothing remained but ash.
"The feasibility study passes," the man at the head of the table said, taking a sip of strong tea to keep himself alert. "I'll report the result to headquarters. Thank you all for your work today."
Nobody was surprised by the outcome.
The results in the reports had been close to ideal. There wasn't a single low-feasibility conclusion anywhere in the stack. Every assessment came back rated high feasibility.
"I wish my grandson had that kind of ability," someone said wistfully.
The others laughed. The sentiment was widely shared.
Ryan was staring blankly at the project progress in his system.
The development progress had reached five percent.
He hadn't done anything recently to generate Summon Points, and the progress had still climbed fairly quickly. That probably meant the new project wasn't an especially difficult one.
The past stretch of time had been a rare period of rest for him. The new system project had not yet produced any results to study. Every research project at Dome Base was progressing smoothly. The teams could complete their work without him. Mason's group was studying lower-limb prosthetics and the associated neural systems, with no new development assignments pending.
For the first time in a long time, Ryan was contending with an unfamiliar sensation: he was bored. He had nothing pressing to do, and he was looking for something to fill the time.
"Mhm. I'll watch it. Bye."
He finished a phone call with Chloe and pulled up the television series she'd recommended. He propped his chin on his hand and watched for a while, then concluded it wasn't very interesting.
He logged into his social media. His feed was full of comments from the usual community of internet goofballs. Several people were asking whether he'd be returning to school to take exams.
A number of people had been visiting MIT to take photos with the giant footprint Scrapper had left during its livestreamed run across the campus.
Ryan only now learned that the road surface Scrapper had crushed during the test had never been repaired. It had been preserved and cordoned off behind a decorative railing.
He wondered whether President Calloway had taken his original suggestion.
The cracked road had effectively become a minor tourist attraction with global recognition. It was described online as a pilgrimage site for mech enthusiasts and engineering fans. The people photographing themselves there came from all over the world. Beyond domestic tourists, there were foreign dignitaries who visited while traveling for diplomatic purposes.
The cracked road had, somehow, acquired a modest diplomatic function.
Ryan also noticed that many of the people photographing themselves at the site had Triton-1 prosthetics. The foreign visitors especially. They had presumably traveled to Rivermont for the prosthetic and stopped at the MIT site for sightseeing.
He searched the internet. As expected, on the foreign platforms, beneath the prosthetic installation guide Tom's people had written, someone had now appended a tourism guide.
Patricia found him there.
She walked into his quarters, wiped a thin film of sweat from her forehead, caught her breath, and noticed the television series playing on Ryan's computer.
"You watch television?"
She'd assumed Ryan's life consisted entirely of family, research, and sleep. She'd previously considered asking the base's psychologist to check in on him.
Ryan yawned. "Someone recommended it. It's not very good. What's going on?"
"Your earlier project has a new result." Patricia remembered her reason for coming. "The company's feasibility study has passed."
Ryan sat up.
He was suddenly very awake.