Chapter 627: Pushing Liam Into The Wild
Chapter 627: Pushing Liam Into The Wild
With Liam’s presence, the party took on a whole new color and became even more lively.
The guests kept glancing in his group’s direction, subtly monitoring how Liam interacted with his friends. When they saw him laughing alongside them — and the unknown lady in the gold dress, and Lucy, chatting with the group with ease — they found it surreal.
It was especially so because of Lucy’s identity as an AGI. They had expected awkwardness, some uncanny quality that would mark her as different. Instead she laughed at the right moments and listened when others spoke and contributed to the conversation with the ease, as if she had been in rooms like this before.
As for the group, they continued their interaction without paying attention to the gazes directed at them.
While they talked, Kristopher moved through the venue greeting guests, because he was the host and that was what hosts did. The guests greeted him more warmly than they would have greeted another host in the same room, and everyone understood why.
When the time came for the toast, he climbed to the small podium and struck his glass gently with a fork. The room settled.
"Thank you all for accepting my invitation and gracing me tonight. I appreciate it. I know everyone wants to get to the party, so I won’t waste your time." He paused and looked across the room — at the crowd, at Liam, and the smile that arrived on his face was that of someone who had been looking forward to this moment for days. "We are here tonight to celebrate someone dear to me and my friends. Someone you’re all familiar with."
The room already knew. The murmur that ran through it said so.
"Ladies and gentlemen — please join me in celebrating Liam Scott’s birthday, one week early."
The venue rose into cheers, glasses lifted in Liam’s direction, and Liam sat with the surprise of it for exactly one second before he stood and accepted the toast with a smile that was entirely genuine and slightly reluctant at the same time.
"Thank you," he said, and his voice carried through the room without effort.
The crowd toasted again. Liam sat back down and turned to Lucy with an expression that required no words.
Lucy smiled and mouthed, *enjoy it, Master.*
He shook his head and turned to his friends, who were giggling, as they had known something for several days and had managed to keep it.
"I see now," he said.
The laughter that followed was loud enough to draw more eyes from the surrounding crowd.
Kristopher returned to the group with the satisfaction of someone who had executed a plan correctly, a small trail of guests following at a polite distance behind him.
"How do you like it?" he asked.
"I like it so much that I’m going to put you through a full minute of training to show my appreciation," Liam said.
"That shy to say how you really feel?" Kristopher said, the mocking smile fully present.
Liam said nothing, because Kristopher had correctly identified that this was not an exchange he could win.
"I know you’re not a fan of the niceties," Kristopher said, dropping his voice slightly and gesturing toward the guests behind him. "But can you please interact with them? Just for a bit."
Liam looked at the crowd. Then at Kristopher. Then at Lucy and Yanxia and the rest of his friends, all of whom were wearing identical expressions of warm, unhelpful encouragement.
"I will get back at all of you," he muttered, and stood.
The group clapped. He gave them a look that communicated his feelings on the matter, then walked toward the crowd.
"Nice," Matt said to Kristopher, who had taken his vacated seat.
"He needs it," Kristopher said.
Everyone nodded.
***
The first person who reached Liam extended their hand with the energy of someone who had been deciding whether to do this for the past twenty minutes and had finally committed.
Liam shook it.
"Liam Scott," the man said, as though confirming something he already knew. He was in his late twenties, well dressed, having about him the manner of someone who was accustomed to being the most interesting person in a room and was adjusting, in real time, to not being that. "I have to say — I watched the livestream. The three principles you gave the research community. I’m a neuroscience PhD candidate and the second principle alone—"
"The template sourcing," Liam said.
"Yes." The man’s eyes sharpened with the recognition of someone hearing their exact thought reflected back. "The idea that the repair blueprint is already present in adjacent healthy tissue. I’ve been working on a related problem for two years from entirely the wrong direction."
"What direction were you coming from?"
"External scaffolding. Introducing the template rather than reading it locally." He shook his head. "Four minutes of a livestream and two years of framing collapsed."
"The framing wasn’t wasted," Liam said. "You know exactly why the external approach doesn’t work. That’s useful."
The man looked at him for a moment. "That’s a generous interpretation."
"It’s an accurate one."
The man smiled, shook his hand again, and stepped back. Someone else moved forward immediately, and then someone after that, and the next twenty minutes moved in a rhythm that Liam settled into without enjoying it — brief exchanges, genuine where they were genuine, politely abbreviated where they were not.
A woman in her thirties introduced herself as a materials engineer and asked, with the directness of someone who had decided that the situation warranted it, and her question was whether the electromagnetic signature principle applied to fatigue stress in composite materials.
"In principle," Liam said. "The physics is the same. Detection before visible damage means calibration toward frequencies your current instruments aren’t looking at."
"We build aircraft components," she said. "If we could detect metal fatigue at the electromagnetic signature stage—"
"That’s the application."
She pulled out her phone, looked at it, looked at him.
"Can I—"
"No interviews," Liam said pleasantly. "But the principle is public. Your team can work from it."
She accepted this with better grace than he had expected.
The crowd had arranged itself around him in a loose orbit, people cycling in and out, some brief and some less so. He handled each one with the same even attention — present, unhurried, giving nothing he hadn’t chosen to give.
He noticed, at some point, that the orbit had thinned, and looked across the room to find the reason.
Yanxia had begun talking to people.
She stood near the edge of the main floor with a small group gathered around her — four people, then six, drawn by the combination of the gold dress and whatever she had said to the first person who approached her, which had apparently been interesting enough to spread. She held a glass she hadn’t touched and spoke with the ease of someone who found humans genuinely interesting, which she did.
Lucy was beside her, and the two of them together had created a secondary focal point in the room that had quietly relieved the pressure from his direction.
He felt a small and specific gratitude for this.
He extracted himself from the orbit with the efficiency of someone who had learned, in the past months, exactly how to close a conversation without it feeling closed. A look, a slight shift in posture, a final sentence that was complete in itself. Most people accepted it without knowing they’d been guided toward it.
He crossed back toward his group and found Matt already watching the Yanxia situation with undisguised fascination.
"She’s been talking to those same people for fifteen minutes," Matt said.
"Is that surprising?"
"A little. I keep expecting her to do something that reminds me what she is and instead she’s just—" He gestured at the scene. "Talking."
"What did you expect?"
"I don’t know," Matt said honestly. "Something more." He thought about it. "Though she did tell the guy in the blue jacket something that made him go very still for a few seconds."
"What did she say?"
"No idea. But he laughed afterwards, so." Matt shrugged. "Probably fine."
Liam looked at the man in the blue jacket, who did indeed appear entirely fine, and decided it was not a situation requiring his attention.
Kristopher appeared beside him with a drink.
"You actually did it," Kristopher said, handing it over.
"I said I would."
"You said you’d get back at us first."
"I will," Liam said. "But not tonight."
Kristopher looked at him. "Is that because you’re having a good time?"
Liam took a drink. "Don’t push it."
Kristopher smiled and said nothing, which was the correct response. He had known Liam long enough to read the shape of an answer that wasn’t going to come in words.
The music had shifted into something with more momentum and the floor had filled in the way party floors filled when the room had warmed past a certain point. The earlier stiffness that Liam’s arrival had introduced — the careful watching, the orbit, the particular self-consciousness of a room that had suddenly become aware of who was in it — had loosened into something closer to an actual party.
He stood at the edge of it for a moment, drink in hand, watching Yanxia finish her conversation and turn toward Lucy with a bright expression, watching his friends occupying the space they had claimed and defending it cheerfully, watching the room do what rooms did when left to their own purpose.
Then Harper appeared beside him with the easy presence of someone who had crossed a room without needing a reason.
"Good birthday?" Harper asked.
"It’s not my birthday yet," Liam said.
"Good early birthday, then."
Liam looked at the room for a moment longer.
"Yeah," he said. "It is."
Harper nodded and they stood there together for a moment, not saying anything else, which was its own kind of answer.