From below, the cockpit looked like a cage bolted to the chest of a giant.
Ryan settled into the seat and started strapping in. Sensor vest first — buckled across the chest, pulled tight. Foot pedals locked. Shoulder harness clipped. Then the gloves, one at a time, flexing his fingers to check the fit.
Twenty-three cameras watched him do it.
The reporters had expected something impressive. A holographic interface, maybe. A helmet with a heads-up display. Mechanical arms that mirrored his movements. Something that looked like the future.
What they got was a vest, a pair of gloves, and a headband.
"That's it?" one of the TV reporters muttered to her cameraman, just barely off-mic. "That's the control system?"
"I don't even see buttons."
"This is the part where it falls apart. The frame is impressive, sure. But that setup is controlling a forty-foot robot? No way."
In the livestream chats, the reaction was the same:
"what is he putting on lmao"
"bro thats a halloween costume"
"ok I was a believer but that 'control system' looks like something from a high school play"
"the whole mech is incredible and then the cockpit looks like he bought it at goodwill"
Ward and Hartley, standing against the back wall, exchanged a look. They knew what the gear was — Ryan had explained it yesterday. The neural link. The technology that sounded like science fiction and looked like a garage sale.
If anything, the cheapness of the equipment made Ward more curious, not less. A real neural interface wouldn't need to look impressive. It would need to work. And the gap between Scrapper's engineering sophistication and the cockpit's apparent simplicity was exactly the kind of contradiction that meant something interesting was happening underneath.
At Marlin Technologies headquarters, the boss and the PR manager were watching the livestream on a wall-mounted projector.
The boss swirled a glass of red wine. The PR manager had one too, though he hadn't drunk from it — his hand was steady but his eyes were doing too much work, scanning the feed, reading the chat, tracking viewer counts.
"He's really going through with it," the boss said, amused. "Got to admire the commitment."
"It doesn't matter. The second he tries to move that thing live, with twenty cameras on him, the illusion breaks. CGI doesn't work in real time." The PR manager took a sip. "Unless he's got some kind of mechanical rig hidden inside that we're not seeing."
"And if he does?"
"Then it's an impressive puppet show, not a mech. Either way, he loses."
The boss raised his glass. "To the end of the Welding Kid."
They clinked.
The boss had every reason to celebrate. In the two days since the Scrapper controversy had begun, Marlin Technologies had received three investor inquiries and one firm offer of ten million dollars. Ten million. For a company that had been invisible a week ago. The Scrapper story had put Marlin's name in front of millions of people, and the PR manager's "debunking" campaign had positioned them as the serious, credible adult in the room.
Whether the mech was real or not, the controversy had already paid for itself a hundred times over.
In the cockpit, Ryan closed his eyes for one second.
He checked the system. Summon Points were climbing at a rate he'd never seen — a vertical line on what had been a flat graph for fourteen years. Project Two's progress bar had pushed past fifteen percent. Fifteen. Up from nine just days ago. The livestream hadn't even started yet, and the sheer volume of people saying his name across every platform was generating points faster than he could track.
A thought flickered through his mind — absurd, theatrical, the kind of thing a novelist would write.
What if I failed on purpose? Let the mech sit there like a statue. Let the world call me a fraud. Let Marlin have their victory, the skeptics have their vindication. Sink to the absolute bottom. And then, weeks later, when everyone's moved on — come back. A live demonstration. No warning. The ultimate comeback arc.
The drama of it was almost irresistible. The Summon Points from a redemption story would be astronomical.
He shook it off.
No. That's main-character syndrome. I'm an engineer, not a protagonist. Do the job.
Ryan pressed the activation switch on his right glove.
Click.
The cockpit indicators lit up. The touchscreen flooded with data — green across the board. The neural link engaged, and the familiar pressure settled behind his eyes, down his spine, into his fingertips.
"Starting now," Ryan said. His voice came through the newly installed speaker bolted to Scrapper's chest plate — a fifteen-dollar unit from an electronics surplus store, and it sounded like it. "Watch closely."
He raised his left hand.
Below, twenty-three cameras caught the same thing at the same instant.
Scrapper's left arm moved.
Not a twitch. Not a shudder. A smooth, deliberate lift — twenty feet of steel rising from Scrapper's side in perfect sync with Ryan's hand, visible in the inset camera feed on Chloe's stream. The arm went up, fingers spreading, the three-pronged claw opening wide against the ceiling lights.
The workshop went silent.
Then it went loud.
"It's — oh my God, it's actually — are you seeing this?" The self-media reporter's voice cracked on air. His eyes were blank, mouth working on autopilot. "Scrapper just moved. It just — his hand went up and the arm went up and I don't — I can't—"
His colleague wasn't doing better: "Ladies and gentlemen, we can confirm — Ryan Mercer has moved, and Scrapper has moved with him. It moved. It's real. Is it real? Am I dreaming? Somebody tell me I'm not dreaming."
"This is unprecedented. This is absolutely unprecedented. A fourteen-year-old just moved a forty-foot mech with his hand—"
Tom had his arm around Lisa. Neither of them spoke. They'd known — intellectually, logically — that Scrapper worked. They'd seen the aftermath of the first test, the cracked concrete, the video. But watching their son sit inside a machine the size of a building and make it obey his thoughts, live, in front of millions of people—
That was different. That was the kind of thing you couldn't prepare for no matter how many times someone told you it was coming.
Against the back wall, Ward had his notebook open but hadn't written anything. His pen was frozen an inch above the page. Beside him, Hartley had one hand pressed flat against his own chest, as if checking that his heart was still beating.
"Doug," Hartley said quietly.
"I see it."
"How?"
"I don't know."
Ryan raised his right hand. Scrapper's right arm — the one ending in the excavator bucket — rose to match. He brought both arms up, then down. Rotated the wrists. Opened and closed the claw. Every movement tracked, every gesture answered, the delay so small it was invisible to the naked eye.
For a split second, Ryan considered the classic Jaeger pose — both fists meeting at the chest, the salute from the movies. But Scrapper's hands were a three-fingered claw and a steel bucket. The image of those two mismatched appendages bumping together like a confused handshake was enough to kill the impulse.
Instead, he raised the right arm — the claw — and closed it into a fist at chest height. A simpler gesture. Cleaner.
"Scrapper," he said through the speaker. "All systems nominal."
The cheap speaker made his voice buzz and echo off the sheet metal walls. It sounded like a transmission from somewhere far away.
Below him, the workshop erupted. Applause, shouting, Chloe's voice cutting through the noise. The reporters had given up on professionalism entirely — several were clapping, one was wiping her eyes, and the podcast guy with four hundred subscribers was just standing there with his mouth open, holding a microphone that wasn't plugged into anything.
In the livestream chats, language had broken down:
"I AM ON THE FLOOR"
"my mom just asked why im crying at my laptop"
"someone built a MECH. a real MECH. in a GARAGE."
"we are watching history. actual literal history. save this stream."
"Ryan Mercer you absolute psychopath I love you"
"the welding kid actually did it. THE WELDING KID ACTUALLY DID IT."