Ryan woke up the next morning, scrolled through the overnight comment sections, and got angry.
Not at Marlin Technologies. He'd deal with them later. And not at the skeptics — skeptics were fine, skeptics said his name when they argued about him, and that was the whole point.
No, Ryan was angry at the lazy haters. The ones who trashed him in comments without ever using his actual name.
"This kid is so full of it."
"Imagine faking a mech video for clout lmao."
"Somebody lock this fraud up."
Which kid? Which fraud? Say my name, you useless people. How is anyone reading your comment supposed to know who you're talking about?
It was maddening. An entire army of people dedicated to tearing him apart, and they couldn't even be professional about it. If the system allowed it, Ryan would've created a dozen burner accounts and roasted himself — every post carefully structured to include his full legal name.
"Ryan Mercer is a fraud and here's why—"
"I can't believe Ryan Mercer thought he could fool us—"
"Ryan Mercer should be ashamed of himself—"
Beautiful. Efficient. Each one worth a Summon Point. But the system's rules were absolute, and so Ryan was stuck relying on the general public to be competent haters.
They were not.
As for Marlin Technologies — Ryan wished them well. Sincerely. The harder they swung now, the worse the whiplash when the truth came out. Every article, every PR stunt, every smug blog post was a receipt they'd eventually have to eat in public.
He almost felt sorry for them. Almost.
Breakfast wasn't even finished when Ryan's phone started buzzing.
Text after text. Some from classmates. Some from teachers. A few from people he hadn't spoken to in years. All of them reporting the same thing: someone had contacted them for interviews.
The media had found his school.
It made sense — the video had blown up too fast for journalists to pin him down personally. But reporters were resourceful, and a fourteen-year-old prodigy who'd finished high school early wasn't exactly invisible. His school records, his teachers, his classmates — they were all public-adjacent, and they were all talking.
Ryan sent the same reply to everyone: "Go ahead and talk to them. Answer honestly. Just don't give out my home address or phone number. And take the interview money — they're offering, you might as well."
Then he called Chloe.
She picked up sounding like she'd been asleep for approximately forty-five seconds. Which she had.
"Wha—"
"The media's been calling you, right?"
A long pause. The sound of blankets shifting. "Oh. Yeah. My phone was going nuts at like two in the morning. People wanting interviews, access, all that. I figured we were still doing the cold-treatment thing, so I put it on airplane mode and went back to sleep."
"Perfect. Keep ignoring them for now."
"Cool. Can I go back to sleep?"
"Drumsticks tonight."
"...I'm listening."
"That's the whole sentence. Drumsticks tonight. Go back to sleep."
She hung up without saying goodbye, which Ryan took as a positive sign.
By noon, the story had shifted.
Ryan pulled up the trending topics and watched the battlefield rearrange itself in real time. Yesterday's narrative — kid fakes a mech video, gets exposed by Marlin Technologies — was cracking at the seams.
The interviews had done it. Dozens of articles, blog posts, and news segments had dropped throughout the morning, all built on the same raw material: firsthand accounts from Ryan's teachers and classmates. And the picture they painted didn't match the "rich kid with a VFX budget" story at all.
"Ryan Mercer completed his high school curriculum at age fourteen. He has been the top-ranked student at his school every year since enrollment."
"According to his physics teacher, Mercer routinely scored near-perfect marks on exams that most seniors struggled with."
"Former classmates describe him as 'scary smart' and 'not normal in a good way.'"
The framing was devastating — not because it proved Scrapper was real, but because it destroyed the comfortable assumption that Ryan was ordinary. Ordinary kids didn't skip four grades. Ordinary kids didn't ace high school at fourteen. The skeptics' entire argument rested on the premise that a teenager couldn't build a working mech, and that premise looked a lot weaker when the teenager in question turned out to be a genuine, documented prodigy.
The comment sections had turned into war zones. Believers armed with the new interviews clashing with skeptics who'd dug in too deep to retreat:
"Everyone saying it's fake — go look at this kid's actual academic record. He finished high school at fourteen. Valedictorian. This isn't some random rich kid, this is an actual genius."
"Oh please, being smart in school doesn't mean you can build a forty-foot robot in your garage. Einstein couldn't have built a mech either."
"Einstein also wasn't building one, so that's not really the flex you think it is."
"For everyone calling it fake — ask yourself what YOU were doing at fourteen. Were you top of your school? Were you designing anything more complex than a paper airplane?"
Ryan scrolled through the carnage with a warm feeling in his chest. Both sides were furious. Both sides were engaged. And both sides were saying his name — linking articles, tagging posts, shouting into the void with "Ryan Mercer" on their lips.
This was what he'd been building toward. Not the video itself — the argument. The controversy. The kind of story that people couldn't stop talking about, couldn't stop debating, couldn't stop bringing up at lunch and in group chats and on podcasts.
Haters, Ryan decided, were the true engine of productivity. Forget innovation. Forget hard work. Give him a thousand people who despised him and couldn't shut up about it, and he'd have enough Summon Points to fast-track a project in weeks.
The second project's progress bar was climbing visibly now. Every hour brought a new tick upward.
I love haters, Ryan thought, with the sincerity of a man who had found religion. Haters are the real first productivity.
Across town, at Marlin Technologies, the mood was less festive.
The PR manager — the same man who'd made the original phone call, written the blog post, and orchestrated the previous night's media blitz — was staring at his screen with the expression of someone watching a building he'd just insured catch fire.
"He's actually a genius?" The manager scrolled through the morning's coverage. "Fourteen years old. Finished high school. Top of his class. How did we not know this?"
He'd been so sure. The whole play was built on the assumption that Ryan Mercer was a rich kid with a camera and a dream — easy to discredit, easy to bury. The blog post, the audio recording, the carefully implied accusation of fraud — it was all predicated on the target being ordinary.
The target was not ordinary.
The manager went to his boss's office. Explained the situation. Requested an increase in the PR budget to counter the new narrative.
The boss listened, nodded, and doubled the budget without argument.
"Handle it," he said. Then, after the manager left, he leaned back in his chair and smiled.
Two investor calls this morning. Two. Before the Scrapper stunt, Marlin Technologies had been a mid-tier robotics firm that nobody outside the industry had heard of. Now their name was trending alongside the biggest viral story of the year.
Controversy is currency, the boss thought. And business was booming.
As for whether the mech was real — he wasn't worried. He considered himself a man of science, and science was clear: a fourteen-year-old could not build a functioning mech. Period. The laws of physics didn't make exceptions for prodigies.
This was a fight he was going to win.
He was sure of it.