The basement hummed a low, steady sound; the kind of background noise that faded if you weren't listening, but Zedd always was. The ventilation hissed softly, a chemical processor cycling in the background. The soft, intermittent whir of drones rearranging inventory. The muted crackle of a charge coil stabilizing. Noise of a living machine, of constant motion.

  Didn't matter. He wasn't paying attention to any of it.

  The magnification lens cast everything in sharp relief, the V-Jump module blown up a hundred times under his scope. Gloves tight, micromanipulators wrapped snug around his fingers, he worked with the kind of precision that most engineers considered neurotic, the kind of obsessive tolerances that sat a hair's width between functional and perfect. Tiny movements. Absolute control. The wrong alignment meant instability at higher speeds, oscillation where there shouldn't be oscillation.

  And yet—

  The stabilizer matrix twitched. Vibrated. A fraction of a fraction of a millimeter, but it might as well have been a goddamn earthquake.

  Zedd exhaled through his nose, slow. He Let his jaw tighten, just for a second. He adjusted pressure, rotated the module three degrees. Again. Again.

  Still vibrating.

  "Boss, current yield rate is 47%."

  ADAM's voice cut through the lab's layered hum, too smooth, too detached. Information with no concern attached.

  Zedd's left eye twitched. "Not good enough."

  "The failing units all exhibit the same issue. Field harmonics in the Mark Seven batch are off by 0.3 microns."

  His hand froze. The adjustment gloves locked for a half-second before he flicked them off, fingers curling stiff as he straightened.

  0.3 microns.

  That wasn't a defect. More a rounding error than anything else, as a simple breeze could throw something off by more than that. Hell, the humidity could. And yet, somehow, 0.3 microns was enough to destabilize propulsion at higher speeds. Enough to make half a batch effectively unusable.

  Bullshit.

  Zedd exhaled through his teeth, pulled his gloves off with a sharp hiss of released pressure, rolling his shoulders out as he stood. Shake it off. Keep moving. He could feel the tension bleeding through, that tight coil in his chest, somewhere between irritation and something sharper. Doesn't matter. Keep going.

  "Scrap them," he said finally, jaw tight, barely a half-seconds worth of pause between the thought and the words. "Salvage what's usable. Ones that passed go into controlled testing."

  There was a hesitation. A pause that shouldn't have been there.

  Zedd's head snapped up.

  ADAM hesitating meant one thing and Zedd knew he wasn't going to like what came next. "At this rate, production will remain below efficiency targets."

  Zedd's temper spiked, fast and hot, sharp like a wire shorting out. He hadn't even turned yet, but his muscles tensed, jaw locked, teeth set against the sudden rush of irritation crawling under his skin. His fingers flexed against the lab bench.

  "I don't give a shit about efficiency, ADAM," he snapped, sharp, clipped, too fast. The words cut through the air, hit like a knife against steel. His breath came in too steady, too controlled, like he was forcing it to be. "If it's not working, we're not shipping."

  His hands were moving before the thought had even caught up, yanking the gloves off and tossing them onto the workstation. They hit the surface, skidding across scattered tools before coming to a stop next to a half-disassembled propulsion unit—another unfinished attempt at making the process work at scale. He didn't get it, honestly. The ones he worked on seemed to come out perfectly, with barely even an issue to note and twice as responsive.

  But the ones he tried to automate…

  The dark-skinned young man let out a scoff. Even at their best, they couldn't hold a candle to what he considered average. Doesn't make sense though, he mused to himself.

  His gaze snapped to the automated assembly line in his workshop, rows of fresh V-Glide boards stacked in perfect order. Manufactured with absolute precision, seamless down to the micron, yet the ones assembled by hand still outperformed them. 0.3 microns off. A measurement so small it was borderline theoretical to anything organic, but somehow enough to separate functional from perfect, stability from failure.

  It pissed him off.

  This entire operation was supposed to be scalable. He hadn't built Victory Innovations on the idea that he was the bottleneck. It had been a full month since the announcement show and orders kept fuckin' coming in.

  If he wanted to keep moving forward—if he wanted to keep building, keep creating—automation had to work. But no matter how many hours he threw into fine-tuning the process, no matter how many optimizations he fed into the drones—

  47%.

  Not enough.

  His fingers drummed against the workstation as he pulled up the diagnostics. His mind ran the numbers on autopilot—failure rates, deviation patterns, harmonic stability checks. There was a fix in there somewhere. A single point in the equation he hadn't seen yet, buried beneath the noise, the margins, the bullshit.

  He just had to find it before it pissed him off enough to scrap the whole damn batch.

  "Would you like me to adjust the drone programming?"

  Zedd's head snapped up. "You?" He'd already attempted to improve the complexity of ADAM's coding to help with the drone construction and that was before the failure rate of 47%.

  ADAM's projection flickered into the air, blue light outlining the vague suggestion of a humanoid presence. Too smooth. Too composed.

  "You seem… irritable, boss. Perhaps a break would b-"

  Zedd's laugh came sharp, humorless. "A break." He gestured at the stacked boards, at that ever-so-pristine 47% failure rate. "ADAM, I love you but you see that? You see that shit?"

  "The failure ra-"

  "Is unacceptable."

  "You are working within unprecedented tolerance-"

  "Don't care."

  "Yield rates are still higher tha-"

  "Don't care."

  ADAM hesitated, and Zedd's jaw locked.

  That pause.

  That fucking pause.

  A fraction of a second longer than normal, but Zedd felt it. Heard it. Which meant he wasn't going to like what came next.

  "Would you like me to rephrase my previous suggestion?"

  Zedd exhaled hard, turning away before the irritation had anywhere else to go. His fingers flicked through the holographic display, scrolling past reports, recalculating failure clusters, scanning for something—anything—that would tell him where the breakdown was happening.

  ADAM wasn't wrong, and that pissed him off too.

  Zedd muttered, half to himself, "Dumbass robot thinks I need a break."

  ADAM, of course, heard him.

  "This dumbass robot is the only being in this room not suffering from sleep deprivation."

  Fuck, that's funny. Zedd let out a harsh snort despite himself, scrubbing a hand down his face as he tried to keep the rest of his laughter internal. "Yeah, well, statistically speaking, I'm a fucking idiot for brute-forcing this." His hand dropped. His eyes stayed locked on the diagnostic screen. "But statistically speaking... I always fix it anyway."

  ADAM didn't respond for just long enough for Zedd to notice. "That is an accurate statement."

  Zedd smirked. "Damn right it is."

  His focus shifted back to the V-Jump module in front of him. The design still felt… disgustingly incomplete. There was more to pull from this; more potential that he hadn't tapped into yet.

  Thrusters, maybe?

  "ADAM…"

  "Boss?"

  "...start up the holotable."

  – o – o – o – o – o – o – o –?

  A month and a half since launch, and Victory Innovations wasn't just an idea anymore. It wasn't some side project, some experiment, some proof-of-concept to see how far he could push physics before something broke. It was real, tangible, in people's hands, everywhere. The kind of shift that bled into daily life before anyone really noticed it had happened.

  Zedd didn't have to watch it unfold, considering he already knew.

  The data feeds told him enough. One screen tracked drone assembly numbers, another ran financial reports he only skimmed, a third traced live market impact across the colony. He wasn't out there watching people adjust to his tech, but he didn't need to be. He could already see the patterns shifting. The way things moved. The way people moved.

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  A courier in New Abraham's business district weaved between traffic on a V-Glide, slicing commute times in half. Not walking, not driving, just cutting straight through the inefficiencies of daily life, moving before anyone could stop him. Across the street, a handful of executives watched from a cafe patio, murmuring behind their coffee, noticing.

  On the news, David Shen-Abraham stood in front of a fresh shipment of V-Lifts, smiling like he'd personally welded them together in his spare time.

  "New Abraham has always been a beacon of innovation," the governor said, smooth as ever, eyes gleaming with the kind of political satisfaction that came from wrapping himself in someone else's success. "And thanks to Victory Innovations, we continue to push the frontier forward."

  Zedd rolled his eyes at the playback. He could already hear the press requests stacking up, asking him to appear at some "New Frontier Prosperity Initiative" fundraiser or whatever name they'd slapped on it this time.

  Didn't matter. The numbers were telling him more than any scripted speech could.

  Providence had already started integrating V-Jumps into high-altitude hydroponic farms for crop maintenance, a use case he hadn't even thought about until some farmer shot him a message saying good job, kid with a video of someone using the boots. Not what he designed them for, but they worked, so whatever. Meanwhile, rich kids were racing hoverboards outside city limits because of course they were.

  Ironwood had been one of the biggest early adopters. The West Quarter city's mining crews, industrial worker; anyone dealing with heavy loads and worse ergonomics had started using V-Lifts, making life easier, making accidents less fatal.

  More interesting? Emergency response teams had already geared up with V-Jumps for rapid deployment in hazardous areas.

  And there was already one confirmed case, at least one guy alive because of it.

  Zedd's fingers hovered over the display. A second too long.

  Yeah.

  He liked that.

  – o – o – o – o – o – o – o –?

  Through the hijacked camera feeds — courtesy of ADAM — Zedd watched the research teams at New Abraham University up north in Whitefall flounder, arms crossed, one eyebrow creeping up in something between amusement and secondhand embarrassment.

  It was almost funny.

  They had his prototypes laid out like evidence at a crime scene, each component carefully disassembled, every microcircuit cataloged, scanned, and mapped with textbook precision.

  And yet, they were still spinning their wheels. Dead in the water.

  One of the analysts, a frazzled-looking woman with cropped hair and the weary expression of someone who had probably been awake too long to be making good decisions, exhaled sharply, pressing her palms into her eyes. "We're looking at five years to even attempt a prototype."

  At the end of the conference table, Governor Shen-Abraham, looking about two degrees away from throwing something expensive, let out a sharp breath, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Why am I not surprised?"

  Zedd smirked just a little. Come on, Davey. I know you didn't think it'd be that easy. He wasn't even mad at the governor, honestly. More than that, it's not like he was trying to be difficult. But they didn't get it.

  They were looking for something familiar, something that slotted neatly into pre-existing systems, something that obeyed the rules they already knew.

  His designs weren't conventional. Because he wasn't conventional. Because his mind didn't work in a straight line. Everything he built reflected that considering half the systems weren't linear, most of the logic was iterative, based on feedback loops that didn't exist in their rigid, pre-defined models.

  But even if they cracked his logic, they still wouldn't get it.

  Because they didn't know the math.

  Eezo was the constant of galactic civilization. The foundation of physics, engineering, problem-solving itself. Every major advancement — FTL travel, kinetic barriers, artificial gravity, mass accelerators — all of it traced back to a single, exotic material that let them cheat inertia, mass, and energy distribution.

  Their entire approach to physics wasn't physics; it was all just applied element zero theory.

  And they didn't even realize it, very much fish trying to understand what "dry" is.

  His smirk deepened.

  Then there was Redoubt.

  Zedd flicked through feeds, switching to the Southern Quarter, where security forces and military reps were playing soldier in the dust.

  Nothing was official. Yet.

  Didn't have to be.

  They were testing V-CATCH systems—his controlled landing harness belts. Training exercises, combat simulations, the kind that didn't happen unless someone was thinking ahead.

  And a few Alliance Military reps had started showing up.

  Not announcing themselves. Not asking directly. Not even requesting a meeting with him. But circling. Lingering at product demonstrations. Watching. Feigning disinterest while their questions just happened to hover around tactical deployment.

  No one was saying the words "defense contracts."

  They didn't have to.

  Zedd could already see where this was going as his eyes narrowed. "These people needed to learn already."

  – o – o – o – o – o – o – o –?

  Hours later, he was in the zone.

  Which is exactly why he didn't notice when Nina showed up.

  Not at first.

  She didn't say anything as she just stood there, arms crossed, and waiting. The kind of waiting that meant she was about to make herself his problem.

  Realization hit too late as her voice cut through the haze like a surgical strike. "When's the last time you ate?"

  Zedd blinked as his brain skidded to a halt, gears grinding, mid-thought unraveling into useless static. "...ADAM, what day is it?"

  ADAM's response was dry, the exact tone of a machine that knew it was about to be ignored. "It is currently the fourth rotation of the current week."

  Zedd blinked over at the holotable, lips pressed into a flat line as he turned back to Nina. "Well, that doesn't help at all."

  She didn't blink. "You missed dinner."

  He winced. "Okay, but—"

  "Priorities, Zee."

  And there it was; the tone.

  No anger, and not even frustration. Worse.

  It was the tone. The I care about you and I am about to make that your problem tone.

  And Nina? Never. Let. Things. Go.

  Zedd exhaled, rubbing at his eyes. "Look, I was in the middle of something—"

  "Yeah, in the middle of your seventh consecutive hour of forgetting you have organs."

  "Technically," ADAM supplied, "it has been nine hours."

  Zedd groaned. "Not helping, ADAM."

  "Not trying to, boss."

  Before Zedd could even process a response to that, another voice cut in.

  "Y'know," Dev drawled, leaning against the workbench with his usual lazy, shit-eating grin, "I'm not sayin' she's right, but also, she's right."

  Zeke shot him a glare. "Not. Helping."

  Nina jabbed a finger at him. "That means you need to eat something. Now."

  Zedd sighed, raking a hand through his hair. "Fine. If I eat something, will you leave me alone so I can actually get work done?"

  Nina squinted at him. "Depends. Are you actually going to eat, or are you gonna do that thing where you take two bites and then get distracted by a new crisis?"

  Zedd opened his mouth.

  Paused.

  Closed his mouth.

  Nina's eyebrow arched.

  Dev let out a low whistle. "Man, she's got you down to a science."

  His gaze darted between the two of them. "Both of you, shut up."

  Kira, who had been silent this whole time, finally leaned against the far wall, arms crossed. "I'm just here to watch."

  Zedd pointed at her. "Traitor."

  Kira shrugged. "I mean, I was gonna back you up, but you kinda walked into this one, Zee."

  Nina tilted her head. "So. Food?"

  Zedd sighed. Deeply. "Fine."

  Dev grinned. "Look at that. Progress."

  "I hate you all."

  "Love you too, buddy."

  Nina grabbed his wrist, firm loving hand not all that gentle right now. "Come on. Kitchen. Now."

  Zedd let himself get dragged off, already regretting every decision that led him to this moment.

  "Can we not do rice and chicken again? I'm getting tired of that."

  5k words (100 FP)

  ROLL: Do One Thing At A Time (300 FP) [Dinotopia] {Quality - Efficiency}: "When you commit fully to a single task, your skill and efficiency surge to superhuman levels. Precision sharpens, mastery condenses—what once took an hour now takes thirty minutes, and the result is twice as refined. Materials remain unchanged, but your execution is flawless, nearly artistic. The catch? Multitasking is your bane—try splitting focus, and the boon vanishes. Mastery through singular focus, a craftsman's dream."

  Forge Points: 100