Wendell reached for the cardboard.
“May I?”
Jaylen nodded.
Wendell read the diagram.
Then he read it again.
His pulse changed.
This was rough. Crude. Incomplete.
But the idea beneath it was extraordinary.
Not because it was complicated.
Because it was simple.
Hayes Renewables had tried to solve their rural grid failures with central intelligence, expensive sensors, cloud oversight, and predictive software. Jaylen’s system did the opposite. It assumed failure. It expected bad connections. It let each unit make tiny local decisions with almost no data.
A network that did not panic when part of it went blind.
A system designed by someone who had never been allowed to assume anything would work perfectly.
Wendell looked at Jaylen.
“Who helped you with this?”
“Nobody.”
“Where did you learn distributed control?”
Jaylen frowned.
“I don’t know what that means.”
Wendell laughed once, softly, not at the boy but at the absurdity of the world.
“It means you reinvented something my engineers have been overcomplicating for a year.”
Jaylen’s face went still.
“Is that good?”
“It might be very good.”
A floorboard creaked behind them.
Wendell turned.
Mrs. Tate stood in the doorway of the shed, one hand pressed to the frame. She looked pale, angry, and frightened all at once.
