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"Over here!" Lisa waved from inside a bubble tea shop.
The town near the research facility wasn't much. A handful of streets, a few restaurants, a convenience store, and this tea shop with four tables and a counter. It was the kind of place where the owner knew every customer by name, and the arrival of three strangers was the most exciting thing that had happened all week.
Ryan sat down. A drink was already waiting for him. He took a sip and got straight to the point.
"I thought you two were traveling for at least another month. What happened?"
Lisa rolled her eyes. "Ask your father. He got restless after three weeks. Said he couldn't stand doing nothing."
Tom bristled. "You were the one who said you were tired of hotels and wanted to go home."
"I want to go home to rest. You want to go home to start another business. Those are very different things."
Ryan nearly choked on his tea. "Another business? Dad, you've got ten million in the bank. You could retire."
Lisa made a noise of agreement. "That's what I said. Ten million dollars, a genius son, and he wants to go back to working sixteen-hour days. The man is allergic to relaxation."
"I'm forty years old," Tom said, tapping the table. "Am I supposed to spend the next forty years sitting on a porch, turning into furniture?"
The story came out in pieces. Tom had been visiting old industry contacts during the trip. Friends from his years of attending trade shows and networking events across the country. The same network that had helped him source obscure components for Scrapper back in the garage days.
One friend had pitched a ranch investment. Tom had passed. Another had proposed a specialty alloy manufacturing venture, which had potential. A third had introduced him to a team developing affordable myoelectric prosthetics, aiming to cut the market price in half.
There were others. Agricultural machinery. Drone technology. A construction outfit. Tom had filtered through them all and kept the ones that didn't sound like money bonfires.
"So which one do you think is worth it?" Tom asked, looking at Ryan with the expression of a man who wanted his son's engineering brain applied to a business problem.
Ryan thought about it for a long time.
"The prosthetics team."
"Prosthetics?" Tom hadn't expected that.
Lisa shot Tom a look that said see what happens when you ask?
"Not myoelectric prosthetics, though," Ryan said. "The technology is too limited. Myoelectric systems read surface muscle signals, which means the control resolution is low and the functionality is basic. We can do better."
He couldn't say more in a public tea shop. But the implication was clear. The neural link technology sitting inside his head could revolutionize prosthetic limbs the same way it had revolutionized mech control. Direct neural interfaces for artificial limbs, without surgical implants, with the same signal fidelity that let a person pilot a forty-foot robot with their thoughts.
Tom understood. "But I don't know anything about prosthetics. Or neural engineering. Or medical devices."
"You don't need to. You run the company. Handle operations, logistics, finances, personnel. The technical side, I can support. And you'd have the prosthetics team for the medical domain expertise."
Lisa, who had been opposed to every business idea Tom had mentioned, was oddly quiet.
"It's a good cause," she said finally. "Helping people who've lost limbs. That's worth doing."
Tom looked at his wife. Looked at his son. The fight went out of him, replaced by something that looked suspiciously like excitement.
"I'll call the team leader when we get home. Set up a meeting."
"Have him come here," Ryan said. "I want to talk to him directly."
"Deal."
They spent the rest of the afternoon in the tea shop, catching up on a month of separation. Lisa's opinions on national park bathrooms. Tom's review of every diner he'd eaten at, ranked by chicken fried steak quality. Small talk. Family talk. The kind of conversation that had nothing to do with mechs or reactors or neural connections and everything to do with being a family.
Behind the counter, the shop owner cleaned tables after they left.
"Three hours," he muttered. "Three bubble teas. And the kid was talking about ten million dollars and prosthetic research like it was grocery shopping."
He shook his head.
"Big talkers, small orders."