For decades, free-electron lasers have belonged to a small circle of wealthy institutions, their extraordinary light available only to those with the geography, funding, and connections to reach them. Researchers have now developed more efficient electron acceleration techniques that could shrink these machines from the scale of national facilities to something a university or regional institute might actually house. The shift is not merely technical — it is a question of who gets to ask the hardest questions in science, and whether the tools of discovery will remain concentrated or begin to s