I cracked my neck. I had been driving for several hours uninterrupted at this point, trying to make it out of the NYC metro area as fast as possible. I wanted to be gone. As I had been driving through NYC I had almost felt that everyone was watching me. I had been paranoid. Every car backfire, a rifle shot, every person I locked eyes with at a red light a potential informant. That sense of paranoia dropped off the further away I got from NYC. With the probability that the world's angriest veteran was going to introduce something very round and fast to my head dropping with every mile on the odometer, I began to relax.
Pulling over at a gas station, I grabbed a paper map. It was a funny anachronism, but more of a reminder of how ...dislocated I was temporally. I traced out my route. I was close to I-80. I-80 had been finished, which was odd. Then again, the butterfly effect could have birthed many things. Checking my watch, I had some daylight left. I'd probably stop for a rest, then push on.
Three days later, I was in Nebraska. Three country stations on the dial, fields, and a very empty landscape. It was more boring highway driving. Once I got to California, I'd be happy if I never had to take an incredibly boring cross country drive again. I vaguely recalled something about bigger white supremacist militias in the 616 (thanks HYDRA!) so my head had been on a swivel for my first few hours in the midwest. The soporific effect of the empty land, mostly empty highway, and the flat gray sameness of it all had eroded that early vigilance.
My thoughts drifted towards a topic that I had been studiously avoiding for the past few days. My own mental state. I missed my family deeply. While the pain had receded, it hadn't left me. Nebraska held no special significance for me, but I'd crossed it once with family. Being here was a reminder.
I thought back to my sojourn in 616's NYC. I hadn't been making the best decisions, I had more so been reacting and improvising, not planning. Part of that was the nature of the beast, but I hadn't been using my metaknowledge to the greatest extent possible. Sure, I was doing my level best to avoid making too many ripples, but as I had thought when I grabbed the set of power armor currently sitting in the back of the van, just sitting on my knowledge wasn't going to help me.
Not to mention the time I had wasted in a blue funk in the bunker. "Not emotionally compromised" my ass. I should have had a more granular plan instead of constant react, react, react. I also needed to get my head on straight. Once I was in CA, I'd probably have to start seeing a therapist. Claim my family had died in an accident, which wasn't too far from the truth, and figure out how to sort my emotional state before it boomeranged back to bite me again.
I had never been the best at handling emotions, and had generally tried to suppress them, but that wasn't healthy or viable long-term.
The sun was getting low. The light had gone amber and the shadows had stretched out long across the countryside. I pulled over onto the shoulder and got out, hand resting on the gyrojet pistol out of habit. Nothing out there but flat land in every direction, visibility for roughly half a mile. Anyone up to no good would be a visible problem long before they became an actual one. I allowed myself to relax and enjoy the view.
The whole horizon had caught fire, orange bleeding into red bleeding into a purple that climbed halfway up the sky before it darkened into blue. There was nothing to interrupt it. No buildings, no hills, just the highway cutting west into all that burning light.
I stood there with my hands in my pockets.
A memory surfaced, unbidden. Sunday afternoons. My mother's stew chicken, the smell of it coming down the hall before you even opened the door. Scotch bonnet and browning and something that was just hers, that I never could identify. My brother stealing a piece before dinner was ready and catching a smack for it every single time. My father at the kitchen table with his paper, pretending not to notice.
I was never going to sit at that table again.
I stood there until the stars came out. Then I got back in the van and started the engine.
I had been driving for ten minutes before I noticed the tears on my face.
Late the next morning, I walked into a diner in Cheyenne. The kind of place that had been making the same breakfast since 1962 and saw no reason to change. Formica countertop, a pie case with three options, coffee that had probably been sitting since six AM. I slid into a booth by the window and ordered without looking at the menu. Eggs, hashbrowns, bacon, toast. The waitress wrote nothing down.
Three truckers occupied the big corner booth. Maps spread across the table, coffee cups pushed to the edge to make room. They had the particular economy of motion of men who'd been doing this long enough that logistics was just thinking. One of them was tracing a route with his finger while the other two watched. A scheduling problem, from the look of it. I watched them for a moment, then looked away.
The eggs arrived fast and hot. I ate mechanically at first, still running on the previous night's fumes. The coffee was exactly as bad as advertised and exactly what I needed.
I felt better than I had since arriving in the 616. Not good, exactly. But the rawness of the night before had settled into something quieter, something I could set down for a few hours. I'd process it eventually. That was what the therapist was for.
I grabbed my notebook.
With my head marginally clearer, I'd be better able to formulate a plan of action.
I needed passive income while I was working on reverse engineering the suit.
Properties. San Jose was going to explode in real estate value in a while, and I'd be borderline braindead to not get in on that at some level. That would also provide me with one source of passive income. I'd also need somewhere to live. I'd probably end up renting at first just to get set up, but owning a house wasn't a bad idea.
The second avenue was investments. While I knew less about that, never having been a big stock guy, I had a vague idea about some corporate moves in-universe, but that'd be too risky to gamble on. The market could stay irrational longer then I could stay solvent.
The money I had. I wasn't sure about how it had been laundered, but a Swiss banking service was definitely going to raise some eyebrows. I'd need a very good accountant to handle that for me
Legal. I needed a lawyer to handle the holding company for whatever property I did own. While I wasn't planning on landlording being my main source of income, a holding company would help with the day to day and delegation so I didn't have to micromanage tenants.
I drew a line under that and wrote ARMOR WARS in capitals, underlined it hard enough to indent the page.
I needed to figure out the start and endpoint. The start was easy, see when newspapers started covering Iron Man going after a load of armored villains. Also, Stark was going to "fire" Iron Man at some point. That was another obvious milestone that would get news coverage. The third, and final milestone was Firepower running around shaking down Edwin Cord's business rivals. This would then be followed up by Iron Man beating Firepower in a fight.
Most of this would be covered in the papers. Voila, my reference point.
The second point was getting in touch with the villains with nonfunctional gear. I didn't know anybody on the west coast in terms of the criminal underworld. That was a problem for later though. I'd think about it and see if I could bludgeon anything out of my memory relating to the west coast scene.
The main blocker here was figuring out what Stark was fusing in the suits with his neutralizer packs, and figuring out a patch/fix. The other thing I could offer was improvements. Even Iron Man didn't have a full HUD setup at this point. HUD's would be good, and they'd give me experience with the display server codebase now, which could only help with the startup.
I scratched that. Dumb. No compositor, no client-server model. The software was the easy part. The armor was already reading its own sensors, just routing everything to analog gauges and status lights. I'd tap the sensor lines directly, run my own ADC board, convert the signals to numbers my controller could use. Cruder than integrating with the suit's RTOS properly, but I'd have more control. Reverse engineering the RTOS memory layout to find where it was storing stuff I'd want on the HUD was a later problem.
I'd taken a look inside the Iron Monger helmet while it was powered down. It was a nightmare. Gauges everywhere, status lights, the kind of panel that made sense if you were sitting still in a cockpit and not, say, trading punches with the Hulk. No idea how Stark had been managing pre-HUD. The current silver suit had something minimal, but from what I could recall he was still mostly on analog.
The actual problem was optics. Small LCD source, waveguide element, bounce the image onto the eyehole glass. The million-dollar question was geometry, fitting that optical path inside a helmet profile without needing more space. I'd spent enough time in an AR lab in undergrad to know the concept worked. Not enough to know if I could make it small enough. I wrote down optics books and moved on. Earth-616 being generally more advanced would be a help.
The calibration hardware was the other wall. Testing the HUD meant patching it into the helmet, which meant powering it on, which meant putting it on my head with an uncalibrated neural interface. I had no desire to hold the world record for "Most expensive at-home lobotomy". I wrote down Stark International calibration widget and took a forkful of hashbrowns. I'd need to get it through channels that didn't involve a purchase order. Bridge, future, cross when reached.
I outlined the second to last section.
Startup?
I polished off the last of my fried egg,and took a swig of coffee.
I didn't have a name for the company yet. That'd come with time. I figured that the best angle for an early tech startup to take at this point was building desktop UI's on top of an existing display server for a start, then try to roll a proprietary one. GUI's weren't widely spread, and building something for business contexts would be a good market to start in at this point in computing history.
I could also try my hand at building a better C compiler, which played more to my knowledge set, but I wasn't sure about that market. Open source would destroy the closed source compiler market pretty effectively, and with the 616's time compression...
For long term positioning... We'd see. I had some vague ideas about hosting people's stuff on server infra my company owned just when the dotcom boom was spinning up. Best to sell picks during a gold rush, after all.
Dotcom boom had been....late 90's. Before my time. Peaked in early 2000. I had been busy crawling and crying around 2000, but technically not before my time.
That was all long-term stuff. I moved on to the final item of interest, forking the last strip of bacon into my mouth.
Kinetic Solutions
I'd need another lawyer for that, mainly to deal with the intricacies of corporate law as it related to mercenaries. Probably need a full-on legal team. I shuddered to think what the law was surrounding PMCs. I'd need to separate it from the startup as well, but that was for lawyers to help me figure out sometime in the future.
I didn't need anything definitive for that right now, but I had a name.
With my plan of action now very tentatively outlined, I flagged the waitress down for the bill.