The internet could fight all it wanted. Ryan had work to do.
He sat in Scrapper's cockpit with a bubble tea Chloe had brought over, staring at a screen full of numbers that were making his day progressively worse.
The cockpit's touchscreen doubled as a programming terminal — pop open a panel beneath the display, and there was a secondary interface for running diagnostics and tweaking Scrapper's control software. Ryan had pulled the full data log from the test two days ago and was running it against the self-diagnostic suite, line by line, while Chloe lounged in a camp chair thirty feet below, scrolling her phone.
The good news came first. Performance data from the test was solid. Movement responsiveness, load-bearing capacity, joint articulation — all within expected parameters. Scrapper hadn't come close to its structural limits during the walk. The four steps, the roll, the stand-up — all of it had been well inside the safe operating envelope. The frame could handle significantly more stress before anything critical gave out.
That was the good news.
The diagnostic report was the bad news.
Ryan scrolled through it with the slow, methodical calm of a doctor reading a scan that was about to ruin someone's afternoon. Multiple component flags. Degradation warnings across a dozen subsystems. Stress fractures forming in joint housings. Micro-failures in cable insulation. Thermal damage in three separate actuator mounts.
The root cause was the same in every case: materials.
Scrapper was built from ordinary structural steel. Good steel — the best Tom's machining shop could source — but still just steel. In the original Pacific Rim universe, even the first-generation Jaegers used titanium-core frames with titanium alloy armor plating. Crimson Typhoon was seventeen hundred tons of exotic metallurgy. Striker Eureka's chassis alone cost more than most countries' annual defense budgets.
Ryan's version was built from the same stuff they made highway guardrails out of.
And the movie version of Scrapper — Amara's junkyard mech — was actually better than his, materials-wise. She'd scavenged parts from decommissioned Jaegers. Her actuators were pulled from a Mark III. Her neural relay housing came from a Mark II. Salvaged military hardware, all of it. Ryan didn't have a Jaeger graveyard to pick through. He had a machining shop and a depleted savings account.
The worst flag in the report made his stomach drop.
The neural link circuitry — the one genuinely advanced system on the entire mech, the component that represented three years of painstaking fabrication — was degrading fast. The conductive pathways were rated for maybe ten more activations before the signal quality dropped below usable thresholds. After that, the whole system would need to be rebuilt from scratch.
Ten uses. That was it.
The neural link was also the most expensive component on Scrapper by a factor of twenty. Rebuilding it would cost more than everything else on the mech combined, and Ryan didn't have the money.
He sat in the cockpit for a long moment, thirty feet up, bubble tea going warm in his hand.
Ten uses.
Mecha is a rich man's hobby, he thought bitterly. And I am not a rich man.
His phone rang. Tom.
"Hey, bud — I've got reporters showing up at the shop now. Somebody figured out where I work. They want interviews, they want to see Scrapper, one of them asked if I'd do a ride-along in the mech. What do I tell these people?"
"Talk to them if you want," Ryan said. "Just don't mention the livestream yet. I'm planning to go live on Saturday — noon — and I want the announcement to drop on our terms, not theirs."
"Saturday. Got it. Anything else?"
"Yeah — if any of them offer you money for an interview, take it."
Tom laughed. It was the laugh of a man who'd spent twenty-three years turning down overtime pay and was now being told to accept cash for talking. "Will do."
Ryan hung up and climbed down from the cockpit. Chloe was still in the camp chair, phone propped on her knee, wearing the particular expression she got when the internet was being stupid in an entertaining way.
"New development," she said without looking up. "Marlin put out another article."
"What's the angle this time?"
"You're not going to believe this." She turned the phone around so he could read the headline.
The article — another polished, lawyer-approved piece from Marlin's PR department — laid out a theory so elaborate it bordered on fan fiction. According to Marlin Technologies, Ryan Mercer's entire life had been a long-term scheme to secure a special admissions slot at a top university. The timeline, as they presented it: skip several grades to establish "prodigy" credentials. Start a YouTube channel documenting a fake mech build. Cultivate a "genius teenager" persona over several years. Then, when no university came calling on its own, manufacture a viral moment with a CGI test video to force their hand.
The article concluded that Ryan's stunt had simply gotten out of control — the public attention had exceeded what he'd planned for, and now his carefully constructed persona was on the verge of collapse.
Ryan read it twice.
"These people," he said slowly, "have incredible imaginations. Truly. It's almost a shame they're wasting it on PR instead of writing novels."
"Right? Like, why couldn't they just imagine the mech being real?"
"Because that would require them to be smart."
Chloe cackled and went back to scrolling. The article had already hit trending — which meant more people reading it, more people arguing about it, more people saying his name. Ryan almost wanted to send Marlin's PR manager a thank-you card.
He glanced at the article's comment section. It was a bloodbath, as expected. But mixed in with the usual noise was a thread that caught his eye — someone had done a deep dive into Marlin Technologies' actual product line and discovered that their flagship "advanced robotics platform" was a glorified warehouse drone that had been in beta for three years.
The replies were merciless.
Ryan bookmarked it. Might come in handy later.
"Alright," he said, turning to Chloe. "Here's the plan. Tomorrow morning, post the announcement: livestream test, Saturday at noon, right here. Open invitation to media — anyone who shows up can stream simultaneously from their own cameras."
"And we want them using your name in their stream titles?"
"Obviously."
Chloe grinned. She understood the game even if she didn't know the mechanics behind it. More streams with his name attached meant more visibility, more shares, more people talking.
"One more thing," she said. "Saturday — can I try piloting Scrapper?"
Ryan looked at her.
"What? I've been filming this thing for two years. I think I've earned a turn."
"No."
"Come on—"
"Chloe. Piloting a mech isn't like driving a car. Even with the neural link handling the signal translation, you still need balance, coordination, spatial awareness — your brain has to manage a body that's sixty times your size. An untrained pilot would lose their balance in the first three seconds and faceplant a forty-foot robot into the ground."
"I have great balance."
"You tripped over your own tripod two days ago."
"That was a tactical stumble."
"The answer is no. When Scrapper's more stable and I've built some safety protocols, maybe. Not now."
Chloe huffed. Then brightened. "When you say 'maybe'—"
"I said maybe."
"I'm hearing 'yes eventually.'"
"You're hearing what you want to hear. Go home, write the announcement, and get some sleep. Tomorrow's going to be loud."
She grabbed her bag and headed for the door, already typing on her phone. At the threshold she turned back with a look Ryan recognized — the one that meant she was about to say something she'd been thinking about for a while.
"You know," she said, "once the livestream proves Scrapper is real — the universities are going to come knocking. Like, MIT, Caltech, all of them."
"Probably."
"And you'll end up at one of them. Doing your genius thing."
"Probably."
She shrugged, going for casual and not quite making it. "I'm applying to USC. The directing program. So, you know. Different worlds."
Ryan looked at her. Chloe Parker: the girl who'd been filming his welding videos since before anyone cared, who ate drumsticks like they were going extinct, whose brain ran on Dr Pepper and an unshakeable belief that everything would work out. She wasn't a genius. She wasn't even a particularly good student. Her parents had steered her toward the arts early because academics weren't going to be her path, and she'd landed on filmmaking because it was the one thing she did that felt like more than a hobby.
She was also the only person who'd stuck with him through two years of "Day 47 of Welding Scrapper" content without once asking for anything more than drumsticks and soda.
"Different worlds," Ryan agreed. "But I'm still going to need a camera crew."
Chloe's face split into a grin. "Damn right you are."
She left. Ryan stood in the workshop, alone with Scrapper and the diagnostic report and the knowledge that his most critical component had ten uses left before it turned into expensive scrap.
Ten chances to change everything.
Better make them count.