Dr. Holloway didn't waste time.
Her team had spent twenty minutes circling Scrapper, examining joints, tapping welds, photographing cable runs, and muttering to each other in the shorthand of people who'd spent decades in adjacent fields. Now she stood in front of Ryan with the directness of someone who'd flown a thousand miles to see one thing and intended to see it immediately.
"We'd like to start the test. Can you power up?"
"Absolutely." Ryan turned to the seven volunteers lined up against the wall. He pointed at the second man from the left — early twenties, medium build, steady eyes. No particular reason for the choice. They all looked capable. "You. What's your name?"
"Garrett."
"Garrett. Have a seat."
Ryan gestured to a chair positioned in front of Scrapper — the same chair Tom had found him sitting in the night he'd run the first neural link test. A lifetime ago. The chair faced the mech at ground level, well clear of the feet.
Garrett sat. Back straight, hands on his knees. The posture of someone who'd been trained to be ready for anything and was currently applying that training to sitting in a folding chair in a garage in Texas.
"Relax," Ryan said. "This part isn't dangerous."
He handed Garrett the sensor gloves, then fitted the headband — a thin strip of sensor-studded fabric that sat across the forehead and temples. It looked like a sweatband from a discount sporting goods store. It did not look like the kind of device that connected a human nervous system to a forty-foot mech.
The MIT team watched every step with the intensity of surgeons observing an unfamiliar procedure.
Holloway leaned toward one of her colleagues — a younger researcher with a tablet — and spoke quietly. "Non-invasive contact sensors. No implanted electrodes, no subdural arrays. The signal acquisition method is... I don't recognize it. The closest analogue would be high-density EEG, but that can't achieve this kind of motor resolution without—"
She stopped herself. No point theorizing before the data came in.
Ryan walked the group through the safety protocols. He spoke clearly, without rushing, addressing both Garrett and the professors simultaneously.
"When I say go, press the button on the right glove. The neural link will activate. You'll feel pressure — all-over, like being underwater. It's the neural load of the connection. If it becomes unbearable, pull off either glove. The safety system will kill the link immediately."
He paused. Made eye contact with Garrett. "This is a preliminary test only. I've activated Scrapper in test mode — the neural link and the right arm are live. Everything else is locked out. You won't be controlling the legs, the torso, or anything else. Just the right hand. Understood?"
"Understood."
"Good." Ryan walked to the generator and started it. The diesel rumbled to life, and Scrapper's indicator lights began their climb — but only partially. A subset of the usual constellation lit up, tracing the right arm and the cockpit systems. The rest stayed dark.
Test mode. Contained. Safe.
Ryan returned to Garrett's side. "Ready?"
"Ready."
"Go."
Garrett pressed the button.
For a second, nothing visible happened. Then Garrett inhaled sharply — a sudden, involuntary breath, the kind a person takes when they step into cold water. His shoulders tensed. His jaw tightened.
"Talk to me," Ryan said.
"Pressure." Garrett's voice was steady but quieter than before. "Like you said. All over. Bearable."
Holloway was already in motion. She crouched beside Garrett, fingers on his wrist, eyes on her watch. Two of the other volunteers had produced portable monitoring equipment — a pulse oximeter, a blood pressure cuff, a handheld EEG reader — and were attaching sensors to Garrett's free hand and temples with practiced efficiency.
The readings came fast. Heart rate elevated — seventy-two to eighty-nine. Blood pressure up. Cortisol markers consistent with moderate physiological stress. The EEG readout showed activity patterns that Holloway had never seen before — not pathological, not normal, just different. Unfamiliar waveforms in the motor cortex and prefrontal regions.
She looked at the data. Looked at Garrett. Looked at Ryan.
Said nothing. Kept watching.
"Alright, Garrett," Ryan said. "Make a fist with your right hand."
Garrett clenched his fist.
Above them, thirty feet up, Scrapper's right hand answered.
The three-pronged claw closed into a fist with a grinding shriek of steel on steel. Twenty feet of articulated arm, responding to a thought from a man sitting in a folding chair on the ground, connected by nothing more than a pair of gloves and a headband.
The workshop went silent.
Garrett stared up at the claw. His mouth was slightly open. He was a man who'd been trained not to show surprise, and he was showing surprise.
"Again," Ryan said. "Three times."
Garrett opened and closed his fist. One. Two. Three. Each time, Scrapper's claw responded in perfect sync — open, close, open, close — the delay invisible, the tracking precise.
Holloway stood up slowly. She was holding the EEG readout and looking at it the way a geologist looks at a rock that shouldn't exist in the stratum where they found it.
"The motor signal isn't going through a conventional pathway," she said, half to herself. "There's no processing delay consistent with surface-level electrode acquisition. The signal is... it's as if the gloves are reading the motor intent directly, pre-motor cortex, before the signal even reaches the hand muscles."
She looked at Ryan. "How?"
"That's the neural link."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I'm giving right now."
Holloway's jaw tightened. But she nodded. The data was the data, and the data said this was real.
The ground test took fifteen minutes. Three rounds of fist-clenching, two rounds of individual finger articulation, a wrist rotation sequence. Every command tracked. Every response was clean. Garrett reported the neural pressure as "manageable — like a bad headache that doesn't get worse."
Ryan disconnected him, moved the sensor equipment back up to the cockpit, and turned to the group.
"Ready for the full test?"
Nobody said no.
Garrett climbed the ladder. Ryan climbed behind him, walking him through the cockpit setup — vest, pedals, straps, gloves, headband. The full rig. No test mode this time. Everything live.
"The legs work on the foot pedals," Ryan explained. "Sliding motion on the rails. Don't go too fast — Scrapper's balance system is rudimentary, and the frame can't handle high-speed locomotion. Think of it like walking on ice. Slow, deliberate steps."
"And if I lose balance?"
"Red button above your forehead. Emergency stabilization and shutdown. Hit it and Scrapper locks its joints and powers down. You'll feel the link cut immediately."
Garrett nodded. Strapped in. Pulled on the gloves.
Ryan climbed back down and cleared the floor. The professors retreated to the walls. Cameras — the team had brought their own recording equipment — were positioned at four angles.
"All clear," Ryan called up. "Whenever you're ready."
Garrett activated the link.
The full neural load hit him like a wave — deeper, heavier, more encompassing than the chair test. His vision narrowed for a moment before stabilizing. The touchscreen in front of him flooded with data. Green across the board.
He raised both arms.
Scrapper's arms rose with him.
Below, the MIT team watched in absolute silence. Holloway had her EEG reader connected to a wireless feed from the cockpit sensors, monitoring Garrett's neural activity in real time. The readings were extraordinary — motor cortex activity synchronized with the mech's movements at a latency she couldn't measure with her equipment. Either it was below one millisecond, or the signal pathway was something her instruments weren't designed to detect.
Garrett stepped.
BOOM.
Concrete shattered. The floor shuddered. Several professors grabbed the wall.
BOOM.
Second step. Garrett was moving carefully, feeling his way, the way you'd walk through a dark room — each foot placed deliberately, weight committed only after he was sure of the balance.
BOOM. BOOM.
Third and fourth steps. Wall.
He reversed. Four steps back. Slow, controlled, the mech swaying slightly on each transition but never tipping, the balance system fighting for equilibrium with every stride.
Garrett brought Scrapper to a halt at the starting position. Killed the link. Sat in the cockpit for a long moment, breathing hard, hands trembling.
Then he looked down at the cluster of professors staring up at him.
"That," he said, "was the most insane thing I've ever done. And I've jumped out of helicopters."
Ryan met the professors at the base of the ladder as Garrett climbed down.
Ward was the first to speak. The skepticism was gone. What replaced it wasn't belief, exactly — it was the stunned, recalibrating expression of a man whose model of reality had just been revised.
"How did you build this?" he asked. Not the polite version of the question he'd asked before. The real one. "You're fourteen years old. You haven't attended a single day of university. The technology in that cockpit doesn't correspond to any existing research program on Earth. How?"
Ryan looked at him steadily. "I told you the truth from the beginning, Professor. The neural link is real. I built it. I understand if that's hard to accept, but the data your team just collected should make the point better than anything I can say."
Ward turned to Holloway. "Margaret?"
Holloway was holding her tablet like a shield. Her face had the particular blankness of someone processing too much information to express any of it.
"The readings are consistent with a genuine neural-mechanical interface operating at a fidelity level that I would have said was impossible forty-eight hours ago." She paused. "I need to study the device itself. The sensor array, the signal processing, the transmission pathway — all of it. This isn't something I can evaluate from external data alone."
"That can be arranged," Ryan said. "Once we have an agreement."
Ward and Holloway exchanged a look. The kind of look that said: this kid just negotiated us into a corner, and he's not even old enough to drive.
Ward turned back to Ryan. "You'll have your agreement."