Danny Price wasn't special. He was one of millions.
Chloe had done exactly what Ryan asked — simultaneous upload, noon sharp, every platform. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter. Same video, same thumbnail, same title. She'd been rehearsing this deployment for months, long before Scrapper could move, back when Ryan first told her that one day they'd need to hit every platform at the same time like a carpet bombing.
She'd thought he was being dramatic. Turns out he'd just been planning.
Within two hours, the combined view count crossed fifteen million. YouTube alone was at six million and climbing so fast that every refresh added another fifty thousand. TikTok had fragmented the video into a dozen clips — the arm raise, the flip, the first step — each one spinning off its own ecosystem of reactions, duets, and stitches. Twitter was doing what Twitter always did: arguing.
And underneath all of it — underneath the views and the shares and the comment wars — people were saying his name.
Not "The Welding Kid." Not "that mech guy." Ryan Mercer. Because it was on the channel name. Because he said it at the start of the video. Because when you share a link and tell your friend "you have to watch this," you say the creator's name. When a news anchor picks up a viral story, they say the name. When two coworkers argue about whether it's real or fake at the water cooler, they say the name.
Ryan sat at the kitchen table with his phone face-down and watched the system counter climb.
It had been stuck in the same range for years. A trickle. Background noise from a modest subscriber base who occasionally mentioned him in comments that nobody read aloud. Now the trickle was a river. The number ticked upward in bursts — ten, twenty, fifty points at a time — as the video rippled outward through the internet and into the real world, into conversations and podcasts and group chats and living rooms.
The second project's progress bar, frozen at nine percent for months, began to move.
Nine point two. Nine point five. Nine point eight.
Ten percent.
Project unlocked. Details now available.
Ryan's phone rang before he could check.
Chloe's name on the screen. He picked up and pulled the phone six inches from his ear, which turned out to be the right call.
"RYAN." She was yelling over what sounded like a blender, or possibly just her own excitement. "Fifteen million. Fifteen MILLION views in two hours. Across all platforms. And it's not slowing down — every time I refresh it jumps. At this rate we could hit a hundred million by tonight."
"Nice work."
"Nice — are you — okay, we're going to have a conversation later about your emotional range, but first: your subscriber count. You were at around eight hundred thousand yesterday. You're at three million right now. Three million, Ryan. And it's still going up."
Ryan leaned back in his chair. Three million. Eight hundred thousand to three million in a morning. Every one of those new subscribers had, at some point, said or heard his name. And a chunk of them would keep saying it — to friends, to family, to strangers on the internet.
This was the flywheel he'd been building for two years. And it was finally spinning.
"You earned those drumsticks," he said.
"Damn right I did. But listen — we've got a problem. The comments are split. A ton of people think it's CGI. Like, a lot of people. We need to figure out how to handle it."
"What do you think?"
Chloe went quiet for a second, and when she came back her voice had shifted from manic to calculating. This was the version of Chloe that Ryan actually relied on — not the screaming fangirl, but the girl who'd grown up managing her parents' small business social media and had a better instinct for audience behavior than most marketing professionals.
"Two options," she said. "Option one: we respond now. Put out a statement, deny the CGI accusations, maybe post some behind-the-scenes footage. It'll settle things down fast, but the story dies in a few days."
"Option two?"
"We say nothing. Let the debate rage. Let the believers and the skeptics scream at each other for a couple days — that keeps us trending, keeps the views climbing, keeps your name in people's mouths. Then, once the hype is at maximum, we announce a live demonstration. Real time, no cuts, no edits, streamed to the world. Impossible to fake."
"The live demo — would it expose anything sensitive on Scrapper?"
"I was about to ask you that."
"Everything that needs to stay hidden is already sealed and shielded. From the outside, the cockpit just looks like a standard control rig. Nobody's going to reverse-engineer the neural link from a livestream."
"Then option two?"
"Option two."
They hung up. Ryan set the phone down and turned his attention to the thing he'd been waiting fourteen years for.
System. Show me Project Two.
The data arrived like a dam breaking. Schematics, materials lists, structural specifications, performance parameters, engineering tolerances — a flood of technical information that poured into his mind and arranged itself into a coherent picture.
Ryan stared at the ceiling for a long time.
The project was — there was no other word for it — magnificent. The kind of thing that would stop the world in its tracks. The kind of thing people would talk about for a century. Visually stunning. Technologically unprecedented. A statement of ambition so massive it bordered on insanity.
It was also completely, hopelessly impractical.
The construction cost alone would run north of four billion dollars. The materials required industrial infrastructure that didn't exist in the private sector. The scale demanded a workforce and a logistical chain that no startup, no corporation, no billionaire's vanity project could provide.
And the commercial applications were... limited. This wasn't a product. You couldn't sell it. You couldn't franchise it. It was a monument — breathtaking, world-shaking, and profoundly useless as a business proposition.
Ryan let out a long, slow breath through his nose.
Cool. Great. Glad I waited fourteen years for a four-billion-dollar art project.
But even as the disappointment settled, the strategic part of his brain was already running calculations. The project didn't need to be commercial. It needed to be visible. If he could build it — if he could find someone with four billion dollars and a reason to spend it — the fame alone would generate enough Summon Points to accelerate Project Three into completion in months instead of decades.
And there was only one entity on Earth that spent four billion dollars on things that weren't commercially viable.
Ryan filed that thought away for later.
Lisa came home early that evening, grocery bag in hand, grinning in a way that made Ryan immediately suspicious. She'd seen the video. She followed his channel — never watched the welding content, but she'd seen the test video, and more importantly, she'd read the comments. Lisa Mercer had no interest in engineering, but she could read a room, and the room was losing its collective mind.
"I'm proud of you," she said, setting the bag on the counter. "Also, I bought drumsticks. A lot of drumsticks."
Chloe showed up at six with a bag of oranges and parked herself at the kitchen door, watching Lisa cook with the laser focus of a golden retriever tracking a tennis ball.
Tom was last. He'd heard about the video from three different customers at the shop, each one more excited than the last, and he walked through the door wearing the dazed expression of a man whose reality had shifted between breakfast and dinner.
The four of them sat down to eat, and for once, the table felt different. Lighter. Like the weight of two years and two hundred thousand dollars had lifted by a few ounces.
"Look at this," Chloe said, pulling up her phone with her free hand, drumstick in the other. "Six million on YouTube alone, and the meme accounts have already gotten hold of it. Someone cut together every single one of your welding videos into a ten-minute supercut called 'Two Years of Pain.' It's got a million views already."
She turned the phone toward Ryan. He pushed it back without looking.
"Not watching it."
"There's another one where somebody auto-tuned your servo actuator explanation into a lo-fi beat and it actually kind of slaps—"
"Not watching it."
"You have zero appreciation for—"
Chloe's phone rang. She glanced at the screen — unknown number — and picked up.
She listened for about thirty seconds. The drumstick stopped moving. Her eyes went wide and stayed that way.
She lowered the phone, hit mute, and looked at Ryan.
"There's a company called Marlin Technologies on the line. They want to buy Scrapper." She swallowed. "They're offering five hundred thousand dollars."
The table went dead silent.
Tom's hand was wrapped around a glass of sweet tea. It had developed a fine tremor. Five hundred thousand dollars. He'd been a machinist for twenty-three years. He'd co-owned a shop, paid a mortgage, kept the lights on through two recessions. The most money he'd ever had in one place at one time was the day he'd closed on the house, and that had been the bank's money, not his. Everything he'd put into Scrapper — every dollar scraped and borrowed and pulled from the business — added up to around two hundred thousand.
And now someone was offering to more than double it back in a single phone call.
He almost said sell it. The word was right there, sitting on his tongue, ready to go. Twenty-three years of blue-collar instinct screaming at him to take the money.
But he didn't. He looked at Ryan.
Lisa looked at Ryan.
Chloe looked at Ryan.
From the muted phone, the tinny voice of the Marlin Technologies representative was still talking — something about the price being negotiable, about wanting to arrange an in-person evaluation, about being flexible.
Ryan didn't hesitate. Not for one second.
"Tell them no."
Chloe relayed it. The voice on the other end started to push back — they were very interested, they could discuss terms, perhaps a meeting—
Ryan gave a short nod. Chloe hung up.
The silence after the click was very loud.
Tom set down his tea. "Well," he said, with the careful tone of a man choosing his words. "That just happened."
Lisa had already jumped ahead: "If that machine is worth half a million dollars, is it safe in a sheet-metal building with a padlock on it? Anybody with a pair of bolt cutters—"
"The sensitive stuff is already secured," Ryan said. "And the rest of it weighs twenty tons. Nobody's walking off with it."
Tom wasn't letting it go. "What's the play here, bud? Someone just offered you five hundred grand and you didn't blink. That's more money than I've made in the last ten years combined. I'm not saying you're wrong — I'm saying I'd like to understand."
"I've got a plan, Dad."
"Care to share?"
"Not yet. But selling Scrapper would be the worst move I could make right now. Trust me."
Tom studied his son across the dinner table. The kid was fourteen, and he'd just turned down half a million dollars without a flicker of doubt. That was either genius or insanity, and Tom still couldn't tell which.
He picked his tea back up. "Alright," he said. "Your call."
What Ryan couldn't explain — not without revealing the system, the points, the whole impossible truth — was that selling Scrapper was a dead end. The money was good, but money wasn't the bottleneck. Attention was the bottleneck. He needed his name on people's lips, not a check in his pocket.
Selling the mech meant the story was over. Kid builds robot, kid sells robot, kid disappears. A footnote.
Keeping it meant the story was just beginning. Live demonstrations. Media coverage. Scientific papers. Government interest. Each one a new wave of people saying his name, each wave pushing the next project closer to completion.
And the next project — the magnificent, impractical, four-billion-dollar behemoth sitting at ten percent in his head — needed something no private buyer could offer. It needed the kind of backing that came with a flag on it.
Ryan ate his drumstick and thought about who, exactly, had four billion dollars and a reason to spend it on something that didn't turn a profit.
It was a short list.