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Deploying a nuclear reactor on the seafloor.
It was, on its face, an absurd proposition.
Every person in the reception hall was a senior figure in the energy industry. Every one of them understood the basic physical conditions a nuclear reaction required. Sustained reactions needed precise containment, controlled thermal environments, and engineered systems that managed pressure, coolant flow, and the structural integrity of the core. Those conditions were difficult enough to maintain inside a purpose-built facility on dry land.
And Ethan Mercer was proposing to run one fifteen hundred meters underwater, on the open seabed, surrounded by crushing pressure and corrosive seawater.
It was not engineering. To the assembled experts, it was fantasy.
The correspondent from the Meridian Commonwealth Broadcasting Service, the one who had earlier raised the safety question, lifted his hand with visible difficulty.
"Mr. Mercer. Is this, in fact, your answer to my earlier question?"
Ethan nodded, his expression entirely serious.
"It is. You asked me how New Future Technology Energy intends to guarantee the safety of nuclear fusion. This is the answer. We build the reactors on the uninhabited deep seafloor. If a reactor ever fails, the failure occurs fifteen hundred meters underwater, in a location with no human population, no infrastructure, and no surface impact. The safety guarantee is not a containment system. The safety guarantee is fifteen hundred meters of ocean."
The correspondent held his composure for approximately two seconds.
Then he laughed.
It was not a small laugh. It escaped him in a single involuntary burst, and once it had escaped, it gave permission to the entire reception hall, and the laughter spread across the room like a dropped tray.
"I'm going to injure myself laughing."
"He's serious. He is genuinely serious. He wants to build nuclear reactors on the bottom of the ocean."
"Has the great scientist perhaps been working a little too hard lately?"
"Working too hard would be the generous interpretation. The man has forgotten the most elementary principles of his own field."
"I came here this morning expecting an opening ceremony. I appear to have walked into a comedy revue."
Liam Rouse was laughing so hard he could not close his mouth.
"Mr. Harris," he managed, turning to his patron, "did you hear that? He wants to build reactors on the seafloor. The seafloor. You traveled all this way for nothing. An opponent like this poses no threat to anyone. He's going to bankrupt himself inside a year through sheer delusion."
But Pieter Harris was not laughing.
Harris had not laughed once since the warships appeared on the screen.
He did not know what Ethan Mercer was doing. He could not, with four decades of energy-industry experience, construct a mechanism by which a seafloor reactor could function. But Harris had built his long career on a discipline that the laughing executives around him had abandoned the moment the joke became available: he paid attention to what the evidence actually showed, rather than what his assumptions told him it should show.
And the evidence showed three warships of the Valorian Navy, on station, in open water, assisting Ethan Mercer with his project.
The Republic of Valoria did not deploy naval assets as a courtesy. The Republic did not lend warships to support a publicity stunt. If three warships were on that water, then whatever was happening on that seabed was real, sanctioned, and important.
Harris did not laugh, because Harris had already concluded that the joke was on the room.
On the stage, Yvette Caldwell stood in silence, watching the hall ridicule her Chairman.
She knew Ethan well enough by now to understand a specific thing about him. He was casual. He was flippant. He gave, on a daily basis, the impression of a young man who did not take very much seriously.
But on the things that genuinely mattered, in the three months she had worked beside him, Ethan Mercer had not once failed to deliver.
Still. This. A nuclear reaction, sustained, on the open seabed. The number of engineering obstacles between that claim and physical reality was not small. It was vast.
Junior Brother, she thought, watching him at the center of the laughing room, I genuinely want to see how you intend to make a nuclear reaction occur on the bottom of the sea.
At the center of the storm, Ethan looked out at the ridicule and let a small, tired smile touch the corner of his mouth.
How many times does this have to happen, he thought, before this particular crowd develops a memory of being wrong? A functioning brain is a genuine asset. I wish more people in this room would consult theirs.
He stopped paying attention to the laughter.
He spoke instead to the air, to the relay link, to J.A.R.V.I.S.
"Commence deployment."
"Yes, sir."
On the display screen, the fifty-ton device resting on the seabed came to life.
The reactor began its deployment sequence. Panels articulated. Internal assemblies rotated into position. Structural arms extended and anchored the unit to the seafloor. The process had the smooth, purposeful precision of complex machinery executing a well-rehearsed procedure.
The laughter in the reception hall faltered.
The deployment was being rendered, on the screen, with far too much physical realism for the audience's comfort. Fabricated promotional video did not generally include this level of mechanical detail, because fabricating that level of detail was nearly as expensive as building the real thing.
The deployment sequence completed.
And then, exactly as the miniaturized fusion reactor at the press conference had once done, exactly as the first seabed unit had done, the Number Two Seabed Reactor began to emit a deep, steady blue glow.
The reception hall went silent.
Several hundred senior people stared at the blue light on the screen, and the laughter died entirely.
"No. No, that, that cannot be real."
"I don't know how it can be real either. But the man standing on that stage is Ethan Mercer. Make a list of the things he has already turned from impossible into real. It is not a short list."
"But conducting a nuclear reaction on the seabed should be physically impossible. The conditions cannot be maintained."
"Then explain the blue glow. Explain it. That is the exact light signature of the fusion reactor he demonstrated at the press conference. I watched that demonstration. That is the same light."
The room's certainty was visibly eroding, and Liam Rouse could feel it eroding, and Rouse could not sit still while it happened.
He stood up.
"This is a false proposition from beginning to end. All of you, do not be deceived. Look closely at the screen. Look at the color. That is not the correct color of nuclear fusion. Fusion does not glow that shade."
The audience, prompted, looked more carefully.
"Now that President Rouse mentions it. It does seem off."
"He's right. It's darker than the fusion signature should be."
"Mr. Mercer, would you care to explain the discrepancy?"
"My read is that the young man is simply manufacturing a spectacle to capture the room's attention."
Rouse felt the small warm satisfaction of a man who had successfully reintroduced doubt.
On the stage, Ethan did not bother to argue about the color of the light.
He spoke to the relay link instead.
"Blackout. Begin laying the transfer conduits. Route the reactor output into the energy storage unit."
On the screen, fifteen hundred meters down, the ten-meter Transformer began to work. Blackout moved between the reactor and a second large device on the seabed, the energy storage unit, running heavy transfer conduit between the two with the unhurried efficiency of a machine performing a task it had performed before.
The work took roughly half an hour.
When Blackout connected the final conduit, the digital readout on the exterior of the energy storage unit, the display that recorded the unit's accumulated internal charge, began to climb.
It did not climb gently.
The number on the readout began to rise at a rate that the watching audience could see in real time. Digit after digit. The accumulated-energy figure was not ticking upward. It was surging.
The reception hall watched the number climb, and the watching was, for many of them, the moment their disbelief broke.
A reactor that was not operating could not feed an energy storage unit. An energy storage unit that was not receiving power did not surge. The number on that readout was either real, or it was the most elaborate and pointless fabrication in the history of corporate theater.
And nobody fabricated a thirty-minute live conduit-laying sequence for a number that climbed.
Liam Rouse, watching the readout surge, felt his earlier fear of Ethan Mercer overridden by something larger. He felt, with sudden and total clarity, a premonition: this newborn company, New Future Technology Energy, was not a joke, was not a delusion, and was going to become the single greatest threat Sterling Energy had ever faced.
The premonition drove him back to his feet.
"It's impossible. Mr. Mercer, we are not obligated to believe whatever you choose to show us. You have put a large screen in a room and played a video. A video. You are asking the most senior people in this industry to accept, on the basis of a video of entirely unverifiable origin, that a functioning nuclear reactor exists on the seabed. Who in this room, other than your own New Future personnel, has personally witnessed this technology? Who can independently vouch that any of it is real?"
A number of people in the audience nodded.
It was, beneath the rudeness, a fair challenge. A live video feed was not independent verification. In an industry as competitive as energy, a sufficiently motivated firm could absolutely stage a convincing fabrication to inflate its public profile.
And asking the room to believe in a functioning seabed reactor on the strength of a screen was asking a great deal.
The audience settled, waiting to see how Ethan Mercer would answer the challenge.
The answer came from backstage.
It was a deep, resonant, unhurried voice, and it carried across the entire reception hall with no need for a microphone.
"I wonder," the voice said, "whether my testimony would carry sufficient weight."
Every head in the hall turned toward the source.
A middle-aged man walked out from behind the stage.
And when the assembled guests saw his face, the reception hall produced a single collective intake of breath.
The presence of this particular man, at the opening ceremony of a private energy company, was not merely surprising. It was, by the unwritten conventions that governed these things, very nearly a scandal.
Even Yvette Caldwell, standing on the stage, was visibly stunned.
A municipal official attending a local company's opening was normal. A provincial-level official was, for a company of unusual importance, the realistic ceiling. That was simply how the protocol worked.
The man walking onto the stage was neither. By rank, he was at the vice-ministerial level of the national government.
And he was not merely a senior official in the abstract. He was the senior official whose ministry directly oversaw the national energy sector. For a figure of his exact portfolio to appear, in person, at the opening of a private firm in his own regulated industry, was a degree of involvement that the conventions of his office were specifically designed to forbid. An official in his position was supposed to maintain a visible distance from individual private firms, precisely to avoid the appearance of favoritism.
He had walked onto the stage anyway.
The implication of that, for everyone in the hall capable of reading it, was enormous.
Liam Rouse, who had been on his feet and full of confident objection a moment earlier, sat down very quickly. He pulled his neck in, the way a mouse pulls itself small at the entrance of a cat, and he did not voice another word.
The vice-minister crossed the stage with an unhurried stride.
Ethan turned to greet him with an easy, genuine smile.
"Director Holt. I appreciate you making the trip. Thank you for the trouble."
Xavier Holt, Director of the National Energy Ministry, returned the smile and came to a stop at the front of the stage, in full view of several hundred of the most powerful people in the Republic of Valoria.
He had come, it was now obvious, to lend the personal credibility of the Valorian state to every claim Ethan Mercer had made that morning.
The room understood it all at once.
The seabed reactor was real.
The state had known. The state had helped. And the state had just sent the single most relevant official it possessed to stand on this stage and say so.