“It’s fine,” Wendell said.
Jaylen sat carefully anyway, holding the grocery bag in his lap like it contained something breakable.
The ride was quiet at first. The SUV floated over the rutted dirt road with a softness that felt almost insulting against the harshness outside.
Wendell glanced over. Jaylen was staring at the dashboard, not with envy, but curiosity.
“You really built a company?” Jaylen asked.
“I did.”
“What kind?”
“Renewable energy. Solar storage, grid management, battery systems.”
Jaylen’s eyes sharpened.
“Batteries that talk to each other?”
Wendell looked over.
“That’s one way to say it.”
“If one battery cell fails, the whole pack shouldn’t go down,” Jaylen said. “It should reroute. Like ants.”
Wendell’s hands tightened on the steering wheel.
“Like ants?”
Jaylen nodded. “Ants don’t need a boss telling each one where to go. They leave signals. The group figures it out.”
Wendell stared at the road ahead.
Hayes Renewables had spent nearly eighteen months trying to solve a stability problem in its rural microgrid systems. The batteries worked beautifully in cities and controlled environments. But in heat, humidity, dust, bad maintenance, and poor connectivity, their systems sometimes failed in clusters. One sensor lied, one connection misread, one control unit panicked, and the network shut itself down to prevent damage.
