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Graves stared at the coordinates on his screen with the expression of a man reading his own obituary.
"Kid, don't mess with me. I know that sea area. Minimum depth is fifteen hundred meters. In the deeper trenches it gets closer to two thousand. You cannot conduct underwater operations at that depth, let alone build a functional reactor."
Ethan sighed.
Some people accepted things because they were told. Graves was not one of those people. He'd accepted fusion because he'd watched five helicopter engines run off a palm-sized device for an hour. He'd accepted the armor because he'd seen Ethan fly to Mach 6 in front of his eyes. Every conviction the man held had been beaten into him by direct evidence, and apparently this one was going to require the same treatment.
"J.A.R.V.I.S. Send Director Graves the deployment footage."
"Right away, sir."
The entire mission archive, compressed and encrypted, hit Graves's inbox in the time it took him to blink. Several gigabytes of sensor logs, helmet cam footage, Signal Bee feed, and post-deployment telemetry data, packaged and transmitted with casual efficiency.
Graves clicked play, half-believing, half-braced for disappointment.
Then the Mark Five deployed from a briefcase.
Graves's eyebrows climbed.
Then Ethan dove two thousand meters.
Graves's eyebrows kept climbing.
Then a ten-meter helicopter-form Transformer arrived carrying a sixty-ton reactor slung beneath its rotor assembly, landed on a research vessel, transformed into a mechanical warrior, and knelt before Ethan.
Graves leaned back in his chair and pinched the bridge of his nose.
Then the footage showed the undersea deployment. Blackout tearing through bedrock. The reactor's foundation anchoring into the seabed. The Stark-Element core stabilizing into its deep-blue glow. The steady output curves climbing into nominal operating parameters.
By the time the footage ended, Graves had crossed both arms on his desk and put his forehead down on them.
One month.
One month this kid was out of my direct supervision. I let him take a breather. And in that one month, he deployed a fusion reactor on the seabed using technology he invented, a transport vehicle he invented, and a support asset he invented.
And he's eighteen.
The line was quiet. Ethan was patient. He'd been on the receiving end of Graves's existential crises before.
"All right," the Director said, his voice muffled by the desk. "I accept that it works. Now explain to me why you built it this far offshore and this deep."
"Safety. The reactor is well beyond the continental shelf and sitting two thousand meters down. Even if we had a catastrophic containment breach — which we won't, because the Stark-Element fusion profile doesn't generate the same failure modes as fission — any energy release would be dissipated by ocean volume before it could reach the mainland."
"That's the first thing you've said today that sounds responsible."
"I do occasionally think about consequences."
"Rarely."
"Occasionally."
Ethan let the jab land, then pivoted.
"Director, I've been reviewing the geography. The Southern Sea and Eastern Sea have dozens of suitable deep-water sites within the Republic's maritime zone. If we build ten reactors at this scale along the southern and eastern coasts, distributed across appropriate depths…"
He paused.
"…the West-East Power Corridor becomes obsolete."
The silence on the other end of the line lasted several seconds.
"Repeat that."
"Ten reactors, Director. We can retire the West-East Power Corridor."
For readers unfamiliar with Valorian infrastructure politics: the West-East Power Corridor was the single largest public-works project in the Republic's modern history. It moved electricity from the western provinces — where thermal and hydroelectric plants were geographically concentrated — to the industrial and population centers in the east. Trillions of marks invested over two decades. The grid serviced more than seventy percent of the national population. The project was considered untouchable because canceling it would cripple the eastern economy overnight.
And Ethan Mercer had just proposed replacing it with ten undersea reactors.
"Kid." Graves's voice went flat. "Do you have any idea what you're saying?"
"I have a fair idea, yes."
"The central and eastern regions account for more than seventy percent of the national population. Residential consumption alone is enormous. Industrial consumption is catastrophically enormous. You cannot support that kind of load with ten fusion reactors. Even fifty-ton-class reactors. The math doesn't work."
"With conventional uranium-based fission, you're right. It doesn't."
A pause.
"But what if I told you there's an element whose radiation yield is hundreds of times that of uranium?"
Graves started to respond. He didn't get the chance.
"IMPOSSIBLE."
Dr. Calder, who'd been listening on the shared line from the research vessel, had apparently reached the end of his reserves.
"Among every known element on the periodic table, there is nothing — not one isotope, not one synthetic actinide, not one engineered radioactive compound — that produces radiation yields at the magnitude you're describing. It is physically impossible!"
Ethan was getting used to this pattern. He answered with the same patience he'd used every other time.
"Dr. Calder. You're correct that no known element does this."
"So—"
"What if I created a new one?"
The line went quiet again.
Calder's voice, when it came back, had the specific register of a man speaking from inside a very small box.
"You're serious."
"I'm always serious, Dr. Calder."
"You are manufacturing elements."
"I am."
On the other end of the line, Graves was listening to this exchange with the weary acceptance of a man who'd stopped trying to draw limits around what Ethan could or couldn't do. Because every time he drew a limit, Ethan stepped over it.
The Bureau agents on the Meridian Wave — the same ones who'd spent the morning watching Calder dig his own credibility grave — piled on their favorite researcher.
"Dr. Calder, respectfully, at what point are you going to stop arguing with Professor Mercer about what's possible?"
"You're literally standing on a boat ten meters from a working underwater fusion reactor that he built last month."
"Read the room."
Calder made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a quiet, dignified mental collapse.
Graves, for his part, was running a different calculation entirely.
Ten reactors. Replacing the West-East Corridor.
The West-East Power Corridor was an ongoing drain of something like a hundred billion marks per year in maintenance, infrastructure upgrades, and operational costs. Eliminate the corridor, and that capital could be redirected into education, healthcare, defense, scientific research. The knock-on effects on national finances would be transformative.
And nobody — not the Chancellor, not the Finance Ministry, not any of the provincial governors — had dared suggest canceling the corridor. Because the alternative had never existed.
Until today.
"Ethan."
"Yeah?"
"I need to call the Chancellor."
"I figured."
"If this project actually runs as specified — and I am saying if, because we will verify every number and stress-test every assumption — the Republic will not forget what you've done for it. Do you understand me?"
Ethan grinned into the phone.
"Then I hope the Director will go easy on my new energy company when the registration paperwork hits his desk."
Graves sighed — the long-suffering sigh of a man who'd just recognized he was being quietly robbed and was choosing to let it happen.
"Send me the incorporation documents. I'll make sure the Commerce Bureau moves them to the front of the queue."
"You're a good man, Director."
"I'm a tired man. There's a difference."
He hung up.
-----
Project approval came back within the week.
Chancellor Thayer, it turned out, was even more eager to move than Ethan had anticipated. Every day the West-East Power Corridor continued to operate was hundreds of millions of marks flowing out of a treasury that had other priorities. The Finance Ministry had been quietly trying to reduce the corridor's budget allocation for years without success, because no credible alternative existed. Now one did.
The paperwork pipeline, which normally ground through the national bureaucracy at the speed of a glacier, accelerated to something closer to a rocket sled. Ethan's proposal hit the Chancellor's desk on a Monday. Authorization signed by Wednesday. Funding allocations approved by Friday. A dedicated interagency task force stood up by the following Monday.
Ethan came home from the Meridian Wave and went straight to work on the corporate paperwork. He pulled an all-nighter. Drafted articles of incorporation. Prepared founding documents. Filed patent claims on seventeen different subcomponents of the reactor assembly. Drafted employment contracts, equity structures, and a preliminary organizational chart.
By dawn, the materials were ready.
-----
Six AM. Ashford City.
Ethan left the house before anyone else was awake, walked six blocks to a breakfast shop that had just opened for the morning rush, and sat down at the counter.
The owner, an older woman who'd been running this place since Ethan was a kid, took one look at him and pulled out her biggest bowl.
Thirty minutes later, Ethan walked out of the shop having consumed three bowls of jellied custard and twenty-plus fried dough sticks, to the wide-eyed astonishment of the owner and every other customer who'd witnessed the spectacle.
The serum was wonderful, Ethan reflected, but its caloric requirements were occasionally inconvenient.
-----
The Ashford City Commerce Bureau was a gray concrete building with gray concrete floors and the specific ambient atmosphere of a place where dreams went to be processed into paperwork.
Ethan walked in expecting chaos.
He'd been on national television approximately forty times in the past year. His face had been broadcast to hundreds of millions of viewers. He'd been photographed, interviewed, mocked, slandered, and vindicated in roughly equal measure. On any given day, in any given public space, he could generally count on at least a handful of people recognizing him and making a small scene.
He had, in fact, mentally prepared for this scenario. He'd taken off his cap. He was holding his head high. He was, metaphorically speaking, one step short of shouting his own name into a megaphone.
Nobody noticed.
The Commerce Bureau waiting area was full of tired business owners, overworked civil servants, and weary citizens dealing with licensing paperwork, and not a single one of them looked up when Ethan Mercer — globally renowned physicist, inventor of nuclear fusion, slayer of Aurelian operatives, owner of a five-meter sentient robot named Bumblebee — walked through the door.
Ethan stood in the foyer for approximately ten seconds, adjusting to the anticlimax.
Right. So my face is apparently forgettable.
With no fanfare available, he took a ticket like a regular person and sat in the waiting area. An hour passed. His number was called.
He approached the service window and laid his documents on the counter.
The civil servant on the other side of the glass — a middle-aged woman with tired eyes and the specific posture of a person who'd been processing paperwork for nine hours — glanced up at Ethan and stopped.
She squinted.
Her gaze sharpened.
"Have we… have we met? You look incredibly familiar."
Ethan shifted his weight and tried not to laugh.
"Possibly. I'd like to register a company."
He slid the documents across the counter.
"These are the founding papers."