The broadcast director, listening through an earpiece, told the main camera operator to stay on the scene. The live-stream comments began scrolling faster, divided between people mocking the interruption and people demanding that Russell be heard. Someone typed LET HIM TRY. A few hundred viewers repeated it; then a few thousand did. Within minutes the phrase appeared in messages arriving from people who had not even been watching the engineering competition before a clip of the confrontation reached their feeds.
Inside the VIP tent, Preston Cole set his glass down. He had spent the morning growing increasingly irritated by the way Thornton narrated the failed attempts as evidence of the machine's sophistication rather than a sign that the information being provided was incomplete. Now he watched a young man being treated as a nuisance for asking a question. Something about the boy's posture, the way he stood still while two guards crowded him, brought back a memory Cole had thought little about for decades.
At nineteen, Preston had walked into a marine machine shop in Galveston with a borrowed wrench and a set of handwritten notes. His shoes were secondhand, and the shop owner had looked at him skeptically before asking what kind of work he wanted. Preston had spent the night rehearsing an explanation about money and opportunity. In the end he had said only, "Give me an engine that nobody wants to fool with. If I can't help, you don't owe me anything."
The shop owner had laughed, too. Then he had stepped aside and let Preston inspect a generator everyone else had given up on. The generator had not turned Preston into a rich man that afternoon. It had given him his first job, which was almost the same thing in the life he had been living. He still remembered the feeling of being allowed through a door that another person could have kept shut without ever understanding what was lost.
Cole left the tent. His assistant, a meticulous woman named Naomi Chen, rose at once and tried to tell him that the board of sponsors was expecting an appearance in fifteen minutes. "They can expect it later," he replied. He walked down the white ramp with two security staff following at a respectful distance, and people moved out of his way before he asked them to.
"Gerald," he said when he reached the platform.
Thornton turned so quickly his expression had no time to settle. "Mr. Cole. We're about to begin a final diagnostic round. The Naval Academy team has a promising avenue."
"Stop the demonstration a moment," Cole said.
The request carried more weight than anything Thornton had said all morning. Technicians paused at the controls, and the competition director signaled the judges to suspend the timer. The public fell quiet in uneven waves. Russell stood just beyond the rope, staring at the teak deck beneath Cole's shoes.
"Five teams have made serious attempts today," Cole said into the microphone. "They deserve credit for showing their reasoning and respecting the safety controls, even without a successful result. Our own engineers have had seventy-two hours. The problem remains. I think it is time to consider whether we have been overlooking a source of knowledge that does not arrive with a familiar badge."