On the night he loses his job, twenty-four-year-old Ethan Reyes receives something he cannot explain. A system. A catalog. A voice in the dark of his Detroit apartment that offers, in exchange for nothing he can name, the complete architectural knowledge of technologies that do not yet exist in the world he inhabits — on one condition: he must build everything himself. What follows is not a story about a shortcut. It is the story of seventeen years. Beginning in 2013 with a single cybersecurity tool and $312 in his checking account, Ethan builds quietly and without announcement — first finding vulnerabilities in the networks of top companies that their own teams cannot find, then building a company, then a quantum computing research program, then a propulsion system that will change the human relationship to the solar system forever.
