Chapter 3: Unbolting the Future
The heavy garage door groaned as Thomas pulled the manual release cord, letting in a flood of cool evening air and the distant hum of suburban traffic. Inside, the atmosphere felt thick with the residue of confrontation. Sarah carefully unstrapped the Velcro closures of the right brace, setting the heavy aluminum and carbon-fiber assembly onto the workbench with a dull thud. Leo sat on an old vinyl stool, his bare legs looking astonishingly thin and vulnerable without the bulky mechanical armor that had defined his silhouette for months.
"You realize what returning the prototype means," Sarah said softly, packing her diagnostic tools into a battered canvas bag. "The VA trials are federally funded. If Commander Vance pulls Leo out of the program voluntarily, the bureaucracy won't look kindly on it. They might classify it as non-compliance."
Thomas leaned against the workbench, arms crossed tightly over his chest. "Let them classify it however they want. My son is not a test subject for experimental hardware that overheats and locks up when he tries to cross a room. I've seen faulty equipment get men killed in the field, Sarah. I refuse to watch it happen to my own boy in our own garage."
Leo looked down at his legs, flexing his toes with cautious curiosity. Without the weight of the motors, his limbs felt impossibly light, yet terrifyingly weak. The muscles had atrophied significantly during the months of reliance on the external skeleton. "Will I ever walk without them?" he asked, his voice barely audible above the hum of the refrigerator inside the house.
Sarah walked over and placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. "It’s going to be much harder now, Leo. The braces were doing eighty percent of the heavy lifting. Now you're going to have to rebuild your core strength from the absolute ground up. It will hurt, and it will take a very long time. But yes, with proper physical therapy and hydro-conditioning, your nervous system can relearn the pathways."
Thomas pushed off the workbench and walked toward the small kitchenette connecting the garage to the house. "We’re starting tomorrow," he said, turning back with a look of fierce determination. "No more waiting for corporate engineers to fix their software bugs. We do this the hard way. Human way."
The sun finally dipped below the horizon, painting the sky in bruised shades of purple and orange. Sarah gathered her things and headed toward her sedan parked in the driveway. Before getting in, she turned back to Thomas, who stood in the open doorway watching the streetlights flicker on.
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"Be careful, Commander," she warned quietly. "The military taught you how to fight wars against enemies you can see. The war Leo is fighting is inside his own nervous system. You can't issue orders to a damaged spinal cord."
"I know," Thomas replied, his voice softening as he looked back inside where Leo was struggling to stand up using only a pair of standard wooden arm crutches, his legs shaking violently under his own unaided weight. "That's why I'm going to fight it right beside him."
