Chapter 10 - The Billion-Dollar CollapseThe market reacted before sunrise.
Hayes Renewables shares plunged.
News outlets reported an internal investigation.
Investors demanded answers.
Banks called.
Partners withdrew.
Wendell watched the numbers fall.
Three billion dollars in value.
Gone in hours.
But money was no longer what frightened him.
Jaylen was.
Richard had arranged everything so that Wendell would eventually have only one choice.
Hand over the boy.
Wendell refused.
Instead, he called every trusted engineer he had left.
“We are building a new Orion system.”
One engineer stared.
“We don't have the prototype.”
“We have Jaylen.”
Jaylen looked at him.
“I can rebuild it.”
The room went silent.
Wendell nodded.
“Then we start now.”
For fourteen hours, they worked.
Jaylen explained concepts that senior engineers struggled to understand.
He drew diagrams on glass.
Destroyed assumptions.
Redesigned circuits.
He didn't speak like a child.
He spoke like someone who had already traveled ten years into the future and was trying to explain the road.
At 2:17 a.m., the first new prototype powered on.
It failed.
At 2:42, another.
Failed.
At 3:19, Jaylen stopped.
He stared at the circuit.
“Something's wrong.”
“What?”
He pointed to the thermal recovery loop.
“My dad's equations are wrong.”
Wendell stared.
“Your father developed this.”
“He was close.”
Jaylen grabbed a marker.
“What if the system isn't supposed to recover heat after the loss?”
He erased half the diagram.
“What if the energy gets redirected before the loss?”
The engineers stared.
One whispered:
“That would change the whole control model.”
Jaylen nodded.
“Exactly.”
Three hours later, they had a working system.
The output held.
Stable.
Clean.
No overheating.
Wendell stared at the monitor.
“What's the efficiency?”
Jaylen looked.
“Seventy-nine percent.”
The room erupted.
But Jaylen wasn't celebrating.
He was staring at one line.
SYSTEM SIGNATURE MATCH: 94%
“What?”
He pointed.
“Someone else has already built this.”
Wendell stepped closer.
“Richard.”
Jaylen nodded.
“But his version isn't stable.”
“How do you know?”
“Because ours shouldn't be either.”
He looked terrified.
“Unless he has my father's missing data.”
Wendell understood.
Richard had spent years reconstructing Orion.
He had been waiting for Jaylen to finish it.
Then a technician rushed into the room.
“Mr. Hayes!”
“What?”
“We detected an unauthorized transmission from our internal network.”
“To where?”
The technician swallowed.
“Three facilities.”
Wendell frowned.
“Which facilities?”
The technician read the list.
All three were Hayes Renewables' largest solar-storage plants.
Richard wasn't just trying to steal the company.
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He was preparing to shut down its infrastructure.
And the first plant had already gone offline.
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