The monster rig sat in the center of the Hub like a sleeping dragon-cables neatly zip-tied, fans silent, the Frankenstein motherboard glowing faintly with borrowed RGB.

  Cody hovered over the power button. "Moment of truth."

  Brody wiped sweaty palms on his jeans. "If it smokes, we blame Riley."

  Riley, perched on a bean bag with a slice of cold pizza, saluted. "I accept full responsibility. For the memes."

  Mia leaned in. "Just press it already!"

  James had his phone ready to record. "For the highlight reel... or the funeral montage."

  Sam counted down quietly. "Three... two... one..."

  Cody pressed the button.

  A soft click.

  Then a low hum. Fans spun up slowly. Lights flickered to life-RGB pulsing in perfect sync across both old boards. The screen flickered once... twice...

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  And POSTed.

  The BIOS splash screen appeared. Clean. Fast. Faster than either rig had ever been.

  The room erupted.

  Riley jumped up, pizza flying. "IT LIVES!"

  Mia tackled Cody in a hug. "You absolute mad lads!"

  James fist-pumped so hard he knocked over an energy drink tower. Cans rolled everywhere.

  Sam smiled-small but real. "7.2 GHz effective clock on the fused cores. That's... not normal."

  Lincoln Ranandel, who had stayed way past his "just checking in" excuse, stared at the POST screen in awe.

  "You children just built something that shouldn't exist. I'm both terrified and proud."

  Cody and Brody high-fived so hard it echoed.

  Brody whispered, "NOVEX."

  Cody nodded. "That's its name."

  They booted into a fresh OS install-clean slate, no bloat. The system recognized the hybrid hardware like it was born that way. Benchmarks screamed: scores that would make high-end gaming rigs jealous.

  Riley whistled. "This thing could run Crysis... twice."

  Mia grinned. "Or run our game engine."

  The words hung in the air.

  James leaned forward. "So... what now?"

  Cody looked at Brody. Twin thing again.

  Brody spoke first. "We don't just need power for Unreal mods. We need something smarter than us."

  Cody finished: "We build an AI."

  Silence. Then Riley choked on pizza. "An AI? Like... ChatGPT but in our garage?"

  Mia's eyes sparkled. "Why stop at ChatGPT? We make it game-aware. Engine-aware."

  Sam sketched furiously. "Neural net for procedural generation.

  Reinforcement learning for balancing. It could... design levels itself."

  Lincoln rubbed his chin. "You're talking about system-level AI. That's grad-school stuff."

  Cody grinned. "Then we'll learn grad-school stuff."

  The Hub felt smaller suddenly. The glowing rig hummed like it was listening.

  Outside, D.C. slept under a blanket of stars.

  Inside, six kids and one teacher stared at a computer that had just woken up.

  And they were about to give it a brain.

  The real game was starting.