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On stage, Ethan tugged uncomfortably at the collar of his suit.
He genuinely regretted the parking structure incident. The shoulder-check had been satisfying, and the demonstration had served a real strategic purpose, but the cost of the moment had been one ruined dress shirt, and the replacement suit he had been hastily fitted into before the ceremony did not fit him correctly. The collar was a half-size wrong. The shoulders pulled. He had spent the last several minutes on stage in a state of low-grade physical irritation.
Ethan disliked wearing suits. He had made peace with this. It was simply a fact of his life.
His personal distaste for suits did not, however, extend to a distaste for looking at them.
Beside him at the lectern stood Yvette Caldwell, in a tailored beige-gray business suit, her dark hair pinned up at the back of her head, her face touched with the kind of light, precise makeup that produced an effect of mature, composed authority. She looked, by any reasonable assessment, exactly like what she was: a senior executive at the top of her profession.
Ethan, who had been mid-thought about his collar, found his attention drifting toward his CEO and lingering there for a moment too long.
Yvette caught him doing it.
She gave him a look that, while remaining entirely professional from the audience's perspective, communicated to Ethan with considerable clarity: Mercer. We are on a stage. In front of the cabinet. You are zoning out. This is the single most disrespectful thing a person can do to an audience of this caliber. Please reconnect with reality immediately.
She cleared her throat. Twice. Lightly.
The coughs pulled Ethan's attention back to the room.
He stepped forward to the lectern.
"I believe most of you already have some sense of what New Future Technology Energy is. And I see a number of familiar faces in the press section, so we're not strangers."
He glanced across the hall.
"In the interest of not wasting the time of an audience this distinguished, I'm going to run this opening ceremony in the most efficient format I can think of. I'm going to skip the lengthy corporate introduction and the inspirational founding narrative. Instead, I'm going to open the floor directly. If you have questions, ask them."
Beside him, Yvette very nearly lost her composure.
An opening ceremony with no opening address. Run entirely on audience questions. In her ten years of attending, organizing, and headlining corporate events, she had never once seen a major company inaugurate itself by simply declining to give a presentation and asking the room what it wanted to know.
The audience, similarly, was thrown.
The reporters and executives in the hall had arrived expecting the standard format. A founder's address. A corporate-mission segment. A presentation of the company's project portfolio. A reveal of the energy sectors the firm intended to enter. The reporters, in particular, were professionally accustomed to the standard structure, and they had pre-written questions calibrated to it.
Ethan had skipped the entire structure and handed them an open floor before they had been given anything to ask about.
For a moment, the reception hall was silent.
"No questions?" Ethan looked across the hall with an expression of mild surprise. "If nobody has anything to ask, I suppose we can move directly to the next segment of the..."
"I have a question."
A figure in the press section stood up.
He was a prominent independent media commentator, the kind of figure whose audience numbered in the millions and whose questions tended to be sharper than those of the traditional press, because his livelihood depended on producing the moments that the traditional press would not.
"Mr. Mercer. As you are aware, the energy industry is a sector with notoriously high barriers to entry. The single largest barrier is capital. The required capital reserves are the reason that the overwhelming majority of would-be entrants never enter at all. So my question is direct. How much capital has New Future Technology Energy actually secured?"
It was a sharp opening question, and the hall leaned in to hear the answer.
Ethan did not hesitate.
"The specific figure is a matter of corporate confidentiality, so I won't give you a precise number."
He paused.
"What I will tell you is that New Future Technology Energy's capital reserves are not less than ten billion marks."
The hall reacted.
Ten billion marks in starting capital placed New Future Technology Energy, on day one, ahead of the substantial majority of established energy firms in the Republic. And the figure was a floor, not a ceiling. Ethan had said not less than. The audience, doing the mental arithmetic, also factored in the obvious: a company founded by Ethan Mercer, with Ethan Mercer's technology base, would have no difficulty raising additional capital whenever it chose to.
Whatever else was uncertain about New Future Technology Energy, the audience concluded, the company was not going to fail for lack of money.
The independent commentator's question broke the room's hesitation. The reporters, reoriented, came alive, and a forest of raised hands rose across the press section.
Ethan could not answer everyone. He picked selectively, favoring the recognizable senior correspondents of the major outlets.
"Mr. Mercer. What category of energy does New Future intend to research and produce? Are you entering fossil fuels, coal and the like? Or clean energy, wind and solar?"
Ethan smiled slightly.
"Neither."
He let the word sit for a beat.
"The energy sector New Future Technology Energy is built around is nuclear energy."
The hall went still.
It was not, on its face, an absurd answer. Ethan Mercer's foundational breakthrough, the achievement that had made his name, was the miniaturized nuclear fusion reactor. A nuclear-focused energy company was, in that light, the logical extension of his work.
But the stillness in the hall was not confusion about the logic. It was something sharper.
Because in the Republic of Valoria, private enterprises were not permitted to operate in nuclear energy. The relevant law was old, firm, and absolute. Nuclear energy applications were the exclusive domain of the state. No private firm, regardless of its capital or its technology or the brilliance of its founder, was permitted to develop, deploy, or commercially operate nuclear energy infrastructure.
It was one of the bedrock regulatory rules of the national energy sector.
And Ethan Mercer had just stood on a stage, in front of the cabinet and the national press, and announced that his private company was a nuclear energy firm.
The only way that announcement was possible was if the rule had been changed.
For New Future Technology Energy specifically.
In the third row, Liam Rouse's expression had curdled into something dark and sour.
Sterling Energy had applied for nuclear energy development licensing on multiple occasions over the years. Every application had been rejected. The rejections had been absolute, and they had been delivered with the standard explanation that the sector was reserved for the state. Rouse had eventually stopped applying, having concluded that the rule was simply immovable.
The rule, it now appeared, was not immovable.
It had moved. For a company that had existed for approximately a single morning.
The unfairness of it sat in Rouse's chest like a swallowed stone.
Beside him, Pieter Harris was performing a different and more sophisticated analysis.
Harris understood the Republic of Valoria better than most foreign executives. He understood, in particular, that the Republic's relationship with its own laws and rules was different from the relationship most Western states maintained. In the Republic, rules were not negotiating positions. Rules were the load-bearing structure of the entire system. A political figure or a business magnate who violated the bedrock rules was not managed, or fined, or quietly accommodated. They were removed. The rule's authority was considered more important than any individual's power.
For the Republic to have changed one of its bedrock energy regulations, specifically and deliberately, to permit a single private company to enter the nuclear sector, was therefore not a minor administrative accommodation.
It was a signal.
It meant that New Future Technology Energy possessed something the Republic of Valoria valued so highly that the state had been willing to bend one of its own foundational rules to accommodate it.
Harris did not yet know what that something was.
But he had revised, again, his estimate of how seriously Maha Energy needed to take the young man on the stage.
"Mr. Mercer. I represent the Meridian Commonwealth Broadcasting Service."
The correspondent who had risen was from one of the most prominent international news organizations in the Western world, a Meridian Commonwealth outlet with a global audience.
"You've stated that your company's approved sector is nuclear energy. I have two questions. First, how does New Future intend to operate, specifically, in a domain that has until now been exclusively state-controlled? And second, and I think this concern is shared widely, how does a private company intend to guarantee the safety of nuclear infrastructure? Nuclear accidents are not corporate setbacks. They are regional catastrophes."
Around the hall, a number of reporters nodded. The safety question was, clearly, a concern shared well beyond the single correspondent who had voiced it.
Ethan smiled.
"Those are good questions. Genuinely good questions, and I'm not going to dismiss them."
He paused.
"But I'm going to ask you to be patient. Both of your questions, the operational question and the safety question, will be fully answered later in this ceremony. I'd rather show you the answers than describe them. I promise you that by the time you leave this building, neither question will be outstanding."
The Meridian correspondent, recognizing a deferral delivered with enough confidence to be credible, sat back down.
Ethan gestured to another raised hand.
"Mr. Mercer. I'd like to ask about something more fundamental. What was your original motivation for founding this company? And, related, what commitment, what responsibility, does New Future Technology Energy understand itself to have toward the nation and toward society?"
It was the kind of question that, at a corporate opening ceremony, was generally answered with a smooth, prepared paragraph about vision and stewardship and the betterment of the national future.
Ethan folded his arms and answered it differently.
"My original motivation? That one's simple. I wanted to make money."
A ripple of surprise moved through the hall.
"I grew up without much. One of the genuine, recurring dreams of my childhood was, simply, to have money. To give you a specific example, I have always wanted to reach a point in my life where, when I go out for breakfast, I do not have to stand at the counter performing arithmetic about whether I can afford the custard or the soy milk. I would like to be able to order both. That was, honestly, the dream. New Future Technology Energy is, in part, a vehicle for getting there."
A wave of laughter rolled across the hall.
The honesty was disarming. A founder, at a high-stakes corporate inauguration, declining to deliver the expected pieties about vision and stewardship and instead admitting, plainly, that he had grown up poor and wanted to be rich. Even Yvette, beside him on the stage, was caught off guard into a small, genuine smile.
"As for the responsibility you asked about," Ethan continued, "the responsibility toward the nation and toward society. That one is also simple."
His tone shifted.
The easy, joking warmth of the breakfast anecdote did not entirely disappear, but underneath it, something firmer moved into place.
"New Future Technology Energy intends, within three months of today, to completely resolve the Republic of Valoria's energy shortage."
The reception hall went absolutely silent.
It was the silence of several hundred senior people simultaneously confirming, internally, that they had heard the sentence correctly.
Then the silence broke, and the hall erupted.
"Did he, did he just say what I think he said?"
"Resolve the national energy shortage. He said the national energy shortage."
"Within three months. He committed to a timeline. He said three months."
"That is, with respect, insane. That is an insane thing to say."
"Those technology breakthroughs have clearly gone to the young man's head. The national energy supply is maintained by the combined output of multiple state-owned giants and hundreds of private firms operating at full capacity. The scale of national energy demand is staggering. And a company that has existed for one morning is going to resolve it? In a quarter?"
"It's not ambition. It's delusion. The production volume required is not something that can be conjured. It is physical infrastructure. You cannot build it with confidence and a press conference."
The hall churned with open disbelief.
On the stage, Ethan Mercer stood with his arms folded and waited, calmly, for the noise to subside.
He had made the claim deliberately. He had made it in front of the cabinet, the industry, and the national press, with full knowledge of how it would land.
He had ten reactors anchored to the floor of the Southern Sea and the Eastern Sea, each one quietly producing industrial-scale clean power, and not one person in this hall outside his own narrow circle knew they existed.
The disbelief washing over him was, he reflected, entirely reasonable given the information the audience had.
It was about to become a great deal less reasonable.
He let the noise crest, and then he raised one hand for quiet.
"I understand the reaction," he said. "I'd react the same way, if I were sitting where you're sitting and I didn't have the information I have."
He smiled.
"So let me give you the information."