Smoke curled slow and steady, catching in the pale blue glow of the feeds, twisting in the recycled air. The room was quiet. No noise but the low, steady hum of machines, the flicker of shifting data. Harper took a slow drag from his cigarette, the ember pulsing, fading.

  "TEEN TECH PRODIGY OPENS NEW VENTURE"

  "VICTORY INNOVATIONS: NEW BLOOD IN COLONIAL TECH"

  "SHEN-ABRAHAM BACKS MYSTERY STARTUP"

  "RISING STAR OF THE TERMINUS: WHO IS ZEDD VICTORS?"

  Again. Third time in three months. First, the New Abraham raid. Then, the clifftop property Shen-Abraham had transferred out of his name. And now this.

  He exhaled smoke through his nose, studying the New Abraham Convention Center feed with the patience of a man accustomed to waiting. The stage setup caught his eye first; clean, sharp, colonial efficiency dressed up as innovation. White and blue, modern without being desperate. The logo was more interesting. Stylized VI in electric blue, the letters overlapping just enough to suggest AI from the right angle. Intentional? Maybe. A little too clever to be accidental. Either way, worth noting.

  Then the music hit. Pre-war Earth, threaded through synthetic percussion. A deliberate choice—familiar enough to evoke nostalgia, modern enough to stay relevant. Interesting. A child choosing music older than he was… that wasn't simply a choice to cut costs. It can't be.

  And then, Victors stepped onto the stage.

  Eighteen, barely.

  The blue synth-leather coat caught the lights just enough to look expensive without looking like he cared. But it was the way he carried himself that stood out. Shoulders loose, stride clean, that sharp-eyed awareness of someone who knew exactly how much space he occupied. And the smile. Not wide, not overplayed. Just enough to say: I know what I'm doing. Do you? Harper had seen that expression before. Men twice the kid's age wore it before they burned too bright, too fast.

  "You know what the funny thing about progress is?"

  The voice filled the space, clean and even, untouched by the flat inflection of galactic translating speech filters. Pure Earth. The accent hadn't faded. That said something.

  "Everyone thinks it has to be complicated."

  His hands slid into his pockets, effortless. The holo-display shifted behind him, mass effect cores, eezo drives, kinetic barriers; all technology Harper could deconstruct in his sleep. Standard fare, except the way the kid framed it.

  "Take element zero. Backbone of civilization, right? No FTL without it. No artificial gravity. Half the things that make colonial life possible." A pause, carefully weighted. "And that's the problem."

  The visuals flipped. Supply chain breakdowns, cost analyses, shipping manifests. Every image chosen, every statistic placed.

  "Element zero is more than expensive. We’re looking at a bottleneck. Every gram has to be mined, refined, shipped across systems that make the old Silk Road look like a corner store run." A flicker of a smirk, too quick to be arrogance. "And out here on the frontier? Prices are so high for enough of the stuff, especially when you factor in hazard pay and security."

  Harper exhaled slowly, tapping a command to flag the segment. The rhetoric was effective. Not defiant, not yet, but pushing right up to the line. A young entrepreneur playing the margins, shaping the conversation before someone shaped it for him.

  Then the floor panels slid open.

  The board rose into view, sleek, polished. Energy rippled along its edges, bright white-blue arcs of contained power, shifting like trapped lightning. Harper leaned forward slightly. That wasn't a mass effect field. The shimmer was different.

  Victors stepped onto the board, and the energy reacted, stabilizing beneath his weight.

  "No element zero. No mass effect fields."

  His movements were precise, controlled, the kind that only came from confidence in the tech beneath him. Small adjustments, subtle shifts in balance, showing just enough to imply mastery without making a show of it.

  "Just pure physics and some clever human engineering."

  The arcs of energy trailed behind him as he moved, curling and dissipating into nothing, like static discharge without the burn. Harper tapped another command, logging the footage for deeper analysis. The feed alone wouldn't tell him enough.

  "Safe enough for kids, tough enough for adults, and most importantly?"

  A flicker of a smirk, just the edge of teeth before it faded.

  "Cheap enough for everyone."

  Then came the miners.

  Boots laced with the same energy signature, their steps leaving behind faint, crackling trails as they moved. The demonstration was not just a product pitch. Harper realized he was being fed a problem-solution hook, tailored for colonial audiences.

  Harper exhaled, fingers tightening around the cigarette.

  "The V-Jump system," Victors explained, gesturing to the miners without breaking stride. "Know what the number one cause of mining accidents in low-grav environments is? Mobility issues. Regular jump-jets are expensive, maintenance-heavy, and just not worth it half the time."

  The kid wrapped up with a smile that had just enough curve to suggest something unspoken, something calculated.

  "Today, I bring you hoverboards and jump-boots. Tomorrow?" The hands spread, open-palmed, but the ease was rehearsed. That kind of confidence only came from knowing exactly how much of the truth you were holding back. "Well, that's what makes the frontier interesting, isn't it?"

  Harper took a slow drag from his cigarette, exhaling through his nose as he gestured to the VI. The feed reset, rewinding in increments, isolating specific segments. The tech itself was impressive, yes. But tech was always impressive. That wasn't the point. The real interest was in how it was presented—how every sentence, every demonstration had been shaped. No wasted words. No excess flourish. A masterwork of control, of misdirection.

  The question was: from what?

  He let the thought sit as the glow of the cigarette flared against the dark. The New Abraham combat footage pulled up on another screen, timestamp barely a month old. Security feed, raw and unpolished, the same boy, but stripped of all the corporate gloss. No stage lights, no carefully selected wardrobe.

  Just brutal efficiency in movement.

  Harper watched, fingers tapping against the console, isolating key moments. Victors grabbed what was on hand —farm tools, mining gear— but it wasn't what he used. It was how. A soil aerator repurposed into a projectile weapon in minutes. Laser arrays bypassing their safeties, pushed past designed limits.

  Smart.

  Too smart.

  He traced the motion forward, highlighting another sequence of instinctive modification. A man trained in engineering would have paused, calculated, checked his work. The boy's hands didn't hesitate. His body moved before the thought was finished, like he knew the end result before he'd even started.

  This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

  That wasn't just intelligence.

  The medical data fed in from another window. Bloodwork, bio-analysis. Readouts that shouldn't have been possible. Chemical compounds that should have shut his nervous system down entirely, should have reduced him to a twitching, overstimulated mess. The kind of stimulant load that would have given a krogan pause, let alone allowed for coherent thought.

  Yet the footage showed Victors calm. Moving with precision. Rewiring complex equipment while his hands should have been shaking too hard to hold a screwdriver.

  That wasn't normal.

  Harper took another drag, shifting the feed.

  "Replay sequence delta-seven."

  The frame jumped, isolating a particular moment in the fight. Victors had taken a standard mineral extractor and overclocked its electromagnetic fields. Just brute-force ingenuity with whatever tools were at hand. The raiders hadn't stood a chance.

  The feed shifted again. Power consumption data from the clifftop property filled the screen. Strange. Regular surges. No known pattern. Supply manifests stacked alongside them—nothing unusual. Standard deliveries. Mining tools, basic industrial gear. The kind of equipment that didn't turn heads.

  But mapped against known usage patterns?

  It didn't add up.

  Harper exhaled, tapping out the cigarette.

  A mind like that… raw, hungry, reaching for every available variable, shaping the unknown into something new, that wasn't common outside of Salarians.

  The timestamp ticked forward. Victors, post-battle, moving through the wreckage. His body language was steady, too steady for what should have been coursing through his system. But the real thing, the thing that stood out most, was his eyes.

  The same look he'd worn on stage, but stripped bare. No polish, no practiced angles. Less performance. More confirmation. A man who had just proven a theory in the most efficient, most irrefutable way possible.

  Harper let the feed loop again, slower this time, watching the flicker of raw security footage side by side with the sleek, corporate glow of Victory Innovations. The same hands that had presented cutting-edge hover tech to a crowd of potential investors had, months prior, torn through a battlefield with nothing but ingenuity, adaptability, and the cold efficiency of someone who didn't waste movement on uncertainty. A man backed into a corner, making do with whatever he could grab. And yet, never scrambling.

  Not once.

  He worked with the mess around him like it was just another workshop, another puzzle to solve.

  He stood, the hum of the ship's systems filling the quiet. The cityscape of Bekenstein stretched out below, a grid of golden lights, static and contained, comfortable in its wealth. A long way from the fractured edges of the Terminus, where ideas were forced to evolve or die. His reflection watched back in the viewport, the glow of his eyes hovering like static over the dark.

  Two images, two sides of the same concept. He tapped the tumbler against the reinforced glass, barely registering the sound.

  Victory Innovations was threading the line well. Terminus and Traverse markets, away from Citadel oversight, Alliance bureaucracy. Low-cost, high-functioning, appealing to the colonies most likely to buy without asking too many questions. A quiet expansion, wrapped in harmless commercial branding. No red flags, no overt challenges to the existing order. Just ingenuity, practicality, momentum.

  But Harper wasn't watching the company. He was watching the boy.

  The combat footage flickered, shifting angles. He keyed in manually, isolating the moment Victors grabbed the soil aerator, hesitated for less than a second, then moved. A decision made in the breath between chaos, not out of desperation, but precision. You could see it—the shift in his stance, the moment his brain slotted the missing piece into place. No panic, no second-guessing. Just execution.

  Harper exhaled, slow, considering. The kind of mind that made something from nothing. That didn't wait for permission, for ideal circumstances, for the right tools. That saw problems as configurations to be rearranged, optimized.

  Useful.

  Potentially dangerous; but that was always the same thing, in the end.

  The medical data pulled in from another feed. Blood chemistry outside normal human limits. Chemical loads that should have fried his nervous system, left him a twitching wreck, not standing upright, adjusting the angle of a modified laser cutter mid-fight. Even through the blue-tinted grain of the security footage, you could see the way his pupils adjusted, his gaze snapping to data points in the environment that most men wouldn't clock at all.

  It wasn't just problem-solving. It was a mind searching for stressors. Seeing how much further it could push itself before something broke.

  Harper ran a fingertip along the rim of the tumbler, then turned back to his desk. The feeds adjusted at a flick of his hand. Financial records. Supply chains. Power grids. Small, seemingly unrelated data points. No direct surveillance. Just pressure points that could be monitored, mapped, tested.

  The boy was too visible now. Too public, too much momentum behind his name. But New Abraham had proven he was unstable. Prone to escalation, excessive force. But that same incident also proved something else; what he could do with minimal resources, under maximum pressure. That was what mattered.

  Harper shifted the files, mapping patterns; power fluctuations from the clifftop property, minor supply requests for common, unremarkable tools, adjustments to shipping manifests that, on their own, meant nothing.

  Stacked together, though? There was a blueprint forming in the negative space.

  He exhaled, reaching for the cigarette still burning in the tray.

  No direct intervention. Not yet.

  Let the boy think he was operating in the dark, free of oversight, testing his theories, building his little empire. No interference, no hand guiding the path. Not until the foundation was stable enough to build something real on top of it.

  He took a slow sip of whiskey, letting the burn sit.

  The ember of his cigarette flared as he authorized the protocols.

  Sometimes, the best pieces were the ones that didn't yet know they were part of the board.

  Harper watched the security footage one last time. The blue-tinted image of a battlefield stripped bare. The wreckage of improvised weapons, bodies laid out in patterns that weren't patterns until you really looked. And at the center—Victors, standing amidst the aftermath, that sharp-edged smile still on his lips.

  The smile of someone who had just discovered the edge of their own capability—and knew exactly what to do with it.

  The kind of smile that could change the galaxy.