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The team listened to Ryan's plan with the focused intensity of people who'd been given a second chance at life and didn't intend to waste it.
Tasks were assigned in under ten minutes.
"The neural control system will be ready in about a week. I'll handle it personally. When it's done, I'll come back for integration testing. In the meantime, your job is to modify the existing prototype to accept neural input instead of myoelectric signals. I'll send you the interface specifications tonight."
Viv raised her hand. "What about the control algorithms? The current codebase is built around muscle signal processing."
"I'll send you the modified architecture. Follow the spec exactly. No improvisation until the first test is complete."
"Do we need a test subject for the integration?" Mason asked. "A volunteer with limb loss?"
"Find someone local. One person is enough for the initial trial."
"Anything else?"
Heads shook around the room.
"Good. One week."
Ryan said his goodbyes and got back in the SUV. Mason's team filed outside to watch him leave. The vehicle pulled away with the quiet authority of a machine that belonged to people who didn't explain where they were going.
"That's definitely a military vehicle," the team's car enthusiast said.
"Definitely not something you can buy at a dealership."
Everyone exchanged glances and silently agreed not to discuss it further.
-----
On the ride back, Ryan realized he'd been neglecting something important.
Not the plasma cannon. Not the drift experiments. Not the firefighting mech.
The internet.
He checked the system. Project Two: fifty-eight percent. The progress had slowed. Summon Points came from people saying his name, and people said his name most when he was in the news. He hadn't been in the news since the untethered test, weeks ago. The initial explosion of attention had settled into a steady background hum, but the growth rate had plateaued.
Time to give the audience something to talk about.
He opened Twitter and composed a post:
*Been busy with a few things lately. Taking some time to develop my first consumer product. Something different from what you've seen before. More soon.*
He posted it and put his phone away.
Within thirty minutes, "Ryan Mercer" was the top trending topic in the country.
The replies cascaded:
"CONSUMER PRODUCT?? Is he selling mechs?? I'll take two."
"please don't be a mech I literally cannot afford a mech"
"HE'S BEEN QUIET FOR WEEKS AND JUST DROPS THIS?? NO DETAILS?? THIS MAN IS A MENACE"
"what kind of consumer product does a mech builder make? a robot vacuum that can bench press a car?"
Tom saw the trending topic within the hour. He'd just finished hiring Prism Sciences' first administrative employee, and now he had them set up the company's official social media accounts on an emergency basis.
By evening, the Prism Sciences Twitter account was live and riding the tail end of Ryan's wave:
*Founded at his direction. Our first product will change what's possible. Stay tuned. @RyanMercer*
Ryan liked the post. The engagement metrics detonated.
"Is this Ryan's company?? It's REAL??"
"what do they make?? somebody look up the registration"
"already did. Prism Sciences. Business scope: prosthetic limbs, orthotic devices, assistive mobility equipment, and medical device manufacturing."
"PROSTHETICS?"
"HE'S MAKING PROSTHETICS"
"Ryan Mercer. Builder of giant robots. Is making artificial limbs. For people."
The connection was immediate and obvious. If Scrapper was controlled by a neural interface, and Ryan was now building prosthetics, then Prism Sciences' product wasn't going to be a myoelectric arm. It was going to be a brain-controlled limb. The same technology that let a teenager pilot a forty-foot mech was going to be miniaturized and put into a prosthetic hand.
The internet figured this out in approximately eleven minutes.
"so we can all stop debating how scrapper is controlled now, right? if he's making neural prosthetics, the mech obviously uses the same tech."
"I just googled neural prosthetics. did you know there are 85 million disabled people in this country alone? globally it's over a billion?"
"i've been following this guy because he built a cool robot. turns out he's about to change millions of lives. i did NOT expect to feel emotions about a twitter post today."
Meridian Motors, the electric vehicle company that had once offered Ryan a hundred million dollars for Scrapper and been publicly refused, posted a reply to the Prism Sciences announcement. It was a single image: a cartoon figure putting on a green hat with the caption "outbid again."
The meme went viral within an hour.
The media cycle spun up overnight. Tech blogs, medical journals, disability advocacy organizations, mainstream news outlets. Every publication that covered technology, medicine, or human interest had the same story: the teenage mech builder was entering the prosthetics industry, and if his track record was any indication, the existing players in the market were about to be obsolete.
The investment community moved even faster.
Neural prosthetics had always been a niche field. Promising in theory, slow in practice, difficult to monetize, and dominated by academic labs with no commercial ambitions. Investors had historically avoided it. Too much risk, too little return, too long a timeline to profitability.
Ryan Mercer's involvement changed the equation overnight.
If the kid who'd built a plasma reactor in a university workshop and piloted a mech with his mind was now applying that same technology to prosthetics, the timeline just collapsed from "decades" to "soon." And "soon," in investment terms, meant "get in now or get left behind."
Within forty-eight hours of Ryan's tweet, venture capital firms were cold-calling every neural prosthetics researcher in the country. Funding offers flooded into university labs that had been struggling for grants for years. Startup accelerators launched prosthetics-specific programs. Three publicly traded medical device companies saw their stock prices jump on speculation about potential partnerships or acquisitions.
A new gold rush had begun. And all it had taken was one tweet from a fourteen-year-old.
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