Once the housekeeper left his office, Timothy sat down in his seat and couldn't believe what just happened.

"Shit… it worked," he muttered.

He leaned back, staring at the ceiling for a moment as the weight of it settled in.

He had reconstructed futuristic products before—the nootropic pill inspired by Limitless, advanced batteries far beyond anything on the market, prototype drive units that shouldn't exist for another decade.

But this was different.

This wasn't just a tool.

This was control.

"It means I can pull anything out of fiction," he said quietly. "Anything, as long as the concept is sound."

His gaze shifted back to the neuralyzer.

It lay in his palm like an expensive pen—silent, unassuming, almost harmless-looking.

But now he knew better.

With a flash, he could erase questions.

With a flash, he could rewrite scenes.

With a flash, he could clean up any slip about the Reconstruction System.

Dangerous.

Useful.

Both.

He closed his fingers around it.

"I'm not a villain," he reminded himself under his breath. "This is a tool. Not a hobby."

He wasn't going to run around wiping memories for fun. He wasn't going to alter people on a whim. That kind of thinking was how people with power lost themselves.

He would use it for one thing: protecting the System, and by extension, the empire he was building.

And right now, the next big step in that empire was nuclear.

Reyes.

The man still thought his SMR design was bound by real-world regulatory shackles and incremental upgrades. He didn't know how far Timothy could push it. He didn't know Timothy could skip entire generations of engineering limitations in one jump.

But Timothy also knew something else:

If he ever had to reveal too much to Reyes to get him on board…

He now had a way to selectively clean things up.

Backup plan only, he thought. Worst-case scenario.

He slid the neuralyzer into the right-hand drawer of his desk, beside a neatly arranged row of fountain pens and a small stack of encrypted data chips. The device fit almost too well—like it belonged there.

He closed the drawer.

Out of sight.

Not out of mind.

Timothy tapped the intercom button.

"Hana, please inform Mr. Reyes that I want to meet him. I need him here in ten minutes."

There was a brief rustle of keys on her end before she responded.

"Yes, sir. Dr. Reyes is on the 31st floor, in the energy systems integration lab. I'll patch through to his assistant and have him sent up immediately."

"Good," Timothy said. "Book the meeting here. My office."

"Yes, sir."

The line clicked off.

Timothy checked the time on his watch.

Ten minutes.

Enough to flip his brain back into full strategy mode.

He stood and walked toward the floor-to-ceiling windows again. BGC sprawled below—orderly, compressed, almost small from this height. Somewhere out there, people were eating breakfast, stuck in traffic, rushing to work, scrolling through social media with no idea that one man in one office had just created a functional memory-wiping device because he got an idea from a sci-fi movie.

He almost laughed at the absurdity of it.

"Reconstruction System, Neuralyzer, SMRs, election endorsements," he murmured. "All in one quarter."

His reflection stared back at him in the glass—calm, controlled, but with that familiar intensity in his eyes.

He turned away and moved to his desk, waking up his main monitor. A schematic of a modular nuclear plant appeared—a hybrid overlay of NuScale's original design and the alternate concept Reyes had hinted at during their dinner in High Street.

Smaller core.

Variable coolant loops.

Higher thermal efficiency.

Timothy's fingers flew across the surface, dragging virtual annotations, creating branches, marking areas where Reconstruction shortcuts could bypass materials problems, flow constraints, or manufacturing limitations.

"Your wagon," he murmured, thinking of the way Reyes had described the approved design. "My rocket."

"Sir," Hana's voice came through, composed as always. "Dr. Reyes is outside. Shall I send him in?"

"Bring him," Timothy replied.

He locked the screen with a single tap, leaving only the TG logo glowing faintly. No need to overwhelm Reyes the moment he walked in.

Two knocks sounded.

"Come in," Timothy said.

The door opened.

Reyes stepped inside, still in his usual semi-formal attire—collared shirt, no tie, light jacket, the look of a man who cared about practicality more than corporate appearances.

"I see you've upgraded since our last dinner," Reyes remarked.

Timothy allowed a faint smirk. "Temporary workspace. The real work starts once we fire up your reactors."

Hana followed behind Reyes, tablet in hand. She closed the door quietly and moved to her usual position near the side of the desk, ready to take notes.

"Please, sit," Timothy said, gesturing to the two chairs facing his desk.

Reyes sank into one of them, exhaling. "I have to admit, the elevator ride up here felt like going to see a head of state, not a car company owner."

"Technically, we're also an energy and semiconductor company," Timothy replied. "The cars are just the front line."

Reyes chuckled. "I stand corrected."

Timothy sat as well, folding his hands on the desk.

"How are the temporary labs?" he asked. "Velasquez said the integration wing was finished ahead of schedule."

"Impressive," Reyes admitted. "The shielding, the simulation rooms, the data infrastructure—it's better than most government-funded research facilities I've seen. If I were twenty years younger, I'd sleep there."

"Good," Timothy said. "You'll be needing that space. What I'm about to ask you to design won't fit inside any existing box."

Reyes's expression shifted, curiosity sharpening his features.

"I thought you wanted to start with improving the existing SMR," he said. "Incremental upgrade. Tweak the passive safety, refine the scaling. That was what we discussed."

"That was step one," Timothy replied. "I've realized we don't have time for step one anymore."

Reyes frowned slightly. "Explain."

Timothy leaned back, eyes steady.

"Americans, Europeans, Chinese—they're all converging on the same general SMR architecture. If we stay close to that, we'll always be compared to them. 'Better NuScale.' 'Cheaper NuScale.' 'Slightly safer NuScale.'"

He waved a hand slightly.

"I'm not interested in being a footnote in someone else's race."

Reyes watched him carefully. "So what are you interested in?"

"A design that makes every other SMR look obsolete the moment we reveal it," Timothy said plainly. "Not five percent better. Not ten. Orders of magnitude."

Reyes let out a slow breath, half impressed, half wary. "You're asking for a generational leap. That usually takes… well, a generation."

"Not for us," Timothy said.

For a split second, his mind flicked to the drawer where the neuralyzer rested. To the invisible system that let him cheat the timeline. To the fact that, if necessary, he could show Reyes glimpses of technology that shouldn't exist yet—and then quietly trim away the parts Reyes shouldn't remember.

He'll go for it. Time for some technological talking.

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.