The words made the back of Elias’s neck go rigid. He looked at Dev and saw, not fear, not even disgust, but calculation. Risk exposure. Insurance pathways. Asset contamination. It was almost easier to bear than pity.

Jonas set down his glass. “Elias, if you want this room with you, don’t make us drag every sentence through that wall. Say what you’ve built. Say what it does. Then we can talk about whether you should be allowed within ten meters of it.”

A pulse of laughter moved around the table, thin and strained. Even Elias almost smiled. Almost. He pushed back his chair.

“Good,” he said. “Come and see it, then.”

They rose in a rustle of fabric and doubt. Plates and candles stayed behind while the room shifted toward the lab side. Under the hanging arc light, the prototype table woke beneath Elias’s palm as he swept it over the control strip. Blue lines spread under the surface. Field curves climbed into the air as pale projections, thin as drawn wire. For the first time that evening, steadiness settled into him. A visible problem was still a problem he could work.

“This is the revised model,” he said. “Not the board version, not the public version. The board version assumed time offset as a stress condition on matter. That was wrong. It’s position. Not stress. Not flow. Position.”

He called up a layered grid. A clean block of space appeared above the table, then deepened into a stack of transparent planes. He took a glass marker from the tray and drew through the air. The system caught the line and fixed it in light.