Zero-Point Prop: Junction

A fusion reactor. A stasis pod. A star drive. Three impossible technologies sit on a bench in Canton, Georgia. Built by a family, funded by a billionaire, iterated by a dead AI whose silicon is the only part that survived.

Now Reed Aldric wants to build the ship.

To do it, he needs the largest private launch company in America — and its eccentric founder, a man who tests people by trying to break them.

Joseph has to prove the technology works without revealing how it was made. Models, not slide decks. Engineering, not miracles.

But going public means going institutional. A hundred people inside the secret. Engineers who want to document Joseph's gift. Scientists who want to replicate it. And a question no one in the family will say out loud: what happens if Joseph Wright gets hit by a bus?

Two answers get tried. One of them requires a human brain.

Joseph hid behind an excuse for years — first a movie, then a partnership, then a secret. Now the excuse is gone, the work is bigger than him, and the hardest thing he's ever had to sign is a piece of paper that says so.