One week later.
I had been in San Jose for a bit. The first day I'd pulled in exhausted, found a hotel on the 101 corridor, and slept for eleven hours straight. The cross country drive had taken more out of me than I'd expected.
The rest of the week had been logistics. I'd found an accountant who seemed comfortable not asking about the Swiss banking situation in detail. That would do for now. I'd find someone better eventually, once I put down roots, but my bank wouldn't flag me, and that was good enough for government work.
I'd gotten in touch with a residential realtor about rentals, which had been straightforward enough. San Jose in 1987 wasn't the market it was going to become. I'd found a house in a quiet part of North San Jose within two days, signed a lease, and started moving my boxes out of the van. I still needed to figure out a smaller vehicle at some point. The van was practical but conspicuous in a way I didn't love. Maybe something sporty. I needed to treat myself a bit. Nothing too ostentatious. I'd have to look into my options.
I'd also gotten in touch with a lawyer, who had agreed to a preliminary appointment surprisingly quickly.
On my way to my appointment with the lawyer, I briefly popped into a drugstore The magazine rack had three feet of local papers and a single wire shelf of nationals — USA Today, the Times, and a smattering of national papers. I grabbed the Bugle. The headline was very emphasized, but I didn't quite catch what. I'd read it at the lawyer's office. I missed being able to check the news on my phone.
After a brief drive I pulled into the lot outside her office, a modest second floor suite in a small professional building off Hedding Street. Nothing flashy.
The front desk was a woman in her forties who looked like she was also handling phones for the insurance office next door. I gave her my name and told her I had a three o'clock with Ms. Juarez. She told me to take a seat.
The waiting area was two chairs and a plant that needed water. I sat and looked around. Small operation. One associate, maybe, or just Elena working solo.Fine by me.
I unfolded the newspaper. Front page, two words: GANG WAR.
Urich had the byline.
Ever since Wilson Fisk's apparent death at the hands of the Punisher various criminal operators had been attempting to fill the void.
The body count was rising. Urich had a partial list by paragraph three.
George "Georgie Porgy" Ovani, truck racketeer, Bayside. Shot dead within hours of the Kingpin story breaking. while reading the Bugle's early edition. Cosa Nostra adjacent. Paid his tribute, kept his head down.
Bo Barrigan, harbor rackets, nominally legitimate cement company. Four racketeering indictments, beat them all. Drowned in a City Hall men's room sink the morning he was due to testify in a palimony suit.
Joe "Injun Joe" Carson, Fisk affiliate. A fisherman found his corpse in the East River.
Ed "Killer" Croesus, independent. Poisoned at his favorite Chinese restaurant.
Boss Morgan, Harlem. Killed when someone sabotaged his elevator. Urich noted Morgan had been drifting from the Maggia since the death of John McIver.
Five men. Six days.
The easy read, Urich wrote, was gang warfare. With the Kingpin gone, men like these would be jostling for position. Some of them would die doing it. That was how these things went.
But gangland killings had a profile, Urich argued. They looked like someone making a point.
None of this looked like that. These were quiet kills. Each victim had the profile of a man positioned to grab for more with Fisk gone, and none of them died like it.
He moved to the second explanation. Frank Castle.
Castle left Ryker's less than a week ago. Ovani in Bayside, Barrigan on the docks, Carson in lower Manhattan, Croesus in the Bronx, Morgan in Harlem. Five separate crews, five men. Working alone, Castle would have needed time to kill all of them.
Ulrich concluded that the Punisher had help, or someone was using his reputation to cover for their own agenda.
I had picked an excellent time to vacate NYC. I vaguely remembered the Trust was behind some of the mob killings. They'd pop up later at some point, but I wasn't quite sure when. Nothing they were doing would affect me very much, anyways.
The lawyer came out to get me herself rather than sending the receptionist, and I tucked the paper under my arm. Early thirties. Hispanic,dark hair pulled back practically. A suit that was good quality but not new.
"Mr. Smith." She extended her hand. Firm grip, didn't oversell it. "Elena Juarez. Come on back."
Her office was what I expected. A desk with more files on it than a thriving practice would need to leave visible, a bookshelf of California statutes and real property law texts, a small window overlooking the parking lot. On the corner of her desk was a framed photo of her with another woman, arms around each other, laughing at something outside the frame. They looked related. Probably her sister.
She settled behind her desk and gave me a scrutinising look.
"So. What can I do for you?"
I told her about the startup idea. Software for business contexts, early stage, needed somewhere to operate while it got off the ground. I'd identified North San Jose as the right area, light industrial or flex space, a small campus ideally. The plan was to use one unit myself and sublet the rest to generate income while the software side developed. Office rental as a revenue stream until the actual product was making money.
She nodded, writing something. "You're thinking of holding the property through a corporation rather than personally."
"Yes."
"Smart." She said it neutrally. "California corporation or are you considering another state for the holding entity."
We talked through the structure for a while. She knew her way around it, asked the right questions about liability separation and registered agent requirements. At one point she looked up from her notes.
She wrote something else down. "Long term you're thinking Mountain View eventually."
"That's the plan. North San Jose is a starting point."
Mountain View was more expensive, and I wanted to keep my head down for now.
"Reasonable." She set her pen down. "I can handle the acquisition and the structure for the holding company. I'd recommend someone separate for the startup."
"Already planning on it."
She slid a retainer agreement across the desk. Standard boilerplate, two pages, her hourly and a deposit figure that was modest enough to confirm my read on her practice. I skimmed it and signed.
"I'll pull together some listings." She stood. "Give me a week."
1 month later.
I had decided before starting any tinkering with the armor to tackle the HUD first. The armor was a complex system and I wanted a win under my belt to give me some dopamine before I started reverse engineering the Iron Monger, which was going to be a slog.
Also, frankly, I knew how to do projected HUDs. Loosely.
I'd spent a semester in a HCI lab in undergrad that did AR work. I had been a spare pair of hands, but I'd gotten my hands dirty enough to understand the stack. The 616 tech baseline being well ahead of where it should be this decade bailed me out as well. I'd found a paper at the San Jose library written by a researcher at SRI that described a compact waveguide projection implementation. In the 1984 of Earth-616 it was just a research paper sitting in a journal that nobody outside the field had read (yet).
I read it four times. Then I went back to the library and read everything it cited.
The shopping list came together over the first week. I ordered a custom waveguide element to a PO box. The electronics came from a supplier catalog, a few components from a specialty house in the valley (also to the same PO box). The higher 616 tech baseline meant that sourcing wasn't nearly as much of a pain as I expected it to be (especially the waveguide. I wasn't a optics guy but I was pretty sure that'd be impossible to fabricate in my timeline's mid 80s.)
The mechanical housing I built myself. Aluminum sheet, a decent set of hand tools, a lot of measuring and measuring. The geometry had to fit a helmet profile from the start. There was no point building something that worked on a bench if it couldn't fit inside a faceplate. I made a cardboard mockup of the Iron Monger helmet interior dimensions and worked to that constraint.
The electronics went together in week two. Driver board, SBC, the connections between them. This was the part I actually knew. There were some hitches with the toolchain, but writing C was much the same between dimensions.
Week three I had something that looked like it should work. It didn't. The image was distorted garbage. The lens assembly was off axis.
Week four was debugging the software side. I had a weird memory leak that was corrupting the framebuffer after 10 minutes. After hunting that down, finally, on a Tuesday morning I powered the whole thing up and my test hex DEADBEEF floated on the glass and stayed there for a good 30 minutes.
I stared at it for a moment to make sure it was real.
The doorbell rang, interrupting my satisfaction.
I locked the basement door behind me, idly noted that the keypad lock on a standard metal door (and that had taken an argument with the landlord) was inadequate for what was sitting down there. I'd get something better when I bought my own place.
The mailman was already back in his truck. He gave me a casual wave as he pulled away. I looked down at what he'd left.
The week's papers. The Bugle, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Chronicle. I'd started the subscriptions three weeks ago. Intelligence gathering, basically. Three national papers, one for the west coast, one for the midwest, and one for the east coast.
I went inside, sat down at the kitchen table, and started with the Bugle.
Front page was something about the city council. I idly paged to the NYC metro section.
AIM CELL BUSTED IN NEW JERSEY
I stared at it for a moment, hoping against hope it wasn't the one I was familiar with.
I looked at the photo and my heart sank.
The photo was of the Meridian Biotech building. Yellow tape across the entrance, two FBI agents in windbreakers standing outside looking bored.
My first coherent thought was that I was biblically screwed.
My second thought was that I was catastrophizing before I'd actually read the article, which was exactly the kind of counterproductive behavior I needed to work on.
I dug into the text.
Ben Urich was writing. He seemed to cover the crime beat for the Bugle at this point in time.
Urich had two sources from the New York field office willing to talk anonymously. From the texture of the piece I could make out roughly who they were and what they wanted.
The ground level source went first. He'd been on the tac team that hit the door and he was rather annoyed.
The AIM cell had been found incidentally. Nobody had been looking for them specifically. A joint task force out of DC had been running a separate investigation and had used New York field office resources to do it. What that investigation was actually looking for neither source was saying, and Urich apparently didn't know. Whatever it was, it had turned over something that pointed at the Jersey location.
The bust itself was a mess from the jump. They breached the building. The woman at the front desk drew a weapon and opened fire. The tac team returned fire and she went down, but the way she went down bothered the source enough that he mentioned it, then got cagey about the details. Probably eliding the fact that the receptionist was an android.
Seconds later they felt charges go off under the building. The cell had collapsed the elevator shaft, then the underground section beneath the cover business. By the time the taskforce got ground penetrating radar on site, the subsurface structure was gone. Whatever had been down there was rubble.
Upstairs was clean. Everything related to the legitimate cover business, nothing useful. The upstairs mainframe had been hit with some sort of directed energy weapon. Melted. Four combat robots had held the building. The source said the robots fought a disciplined delaying action for just over an hour, falling back room by room, then self-destructed more or less simultaneously. The tac team had taken casualties. Not fatal, but injuries they could ill afford given the current state of the city.
No arrests.
The ground level source's frustration was palpable even through Urich's neutral prose. They'd gone in hard and come out with nothing but injured operators, a shot-up front business, and a collapsed subterranean lab complex.
The senior source had a different grievance and a more deliberate reason for talking.
There had been a joint DC task force on site at the field office directing the operation. FBI, DoJ, and SHIELD, coordinating out of New York. When the decision came to move on the cell, the SHIELD representative had said wait. He wanted more time. He wanted to coordinate. He didn't say coordinate what, and the senior source either didn't know or wasn't saying.
The FBI representative on the task force had eventually given the go order without SHIELD's blessing.
The senior source didn't name her but he wasn't shy about his opinion of the decision. She'd made the right call, he said. He was glad someone had finally stopped playing jurisdictional games with an organization whose domestic operational authority was, as Urich carefully phrased it, ambiguous. On US soil, waiting for SHIELD's permission wasn't a legal requirement. It was a courtesy.
The problem, the senior source made clear, wasn't that she'd gone without SHIELD. The problem was the timeline SHIELD had created with the initial delay. By the time the FBI rep stopped deferring and gave the go order, the cell had already gotten wind. They were already running. If anything, going on SHIELD's preferred timeline would have been worse. At least moving when they did caught the rear guard. Going later would have meant an empty building, no drama, nothing at all.
SHIELD's delay hadn't just cost them the bust. It had put them in a position where there was no good outcome left by the time anyone moved. That was what the senior source wanted on record. Not that the FBI rep had been wrong. That SHIELD had created the conditions where being right couldn't save the operation.
He also noted, with the particular bitterness of someone watching a good opportunity evaporate, that the field office could have used the PR. The city's crime scene had been unstable for over a month. The Kingpin's absence had turned the underworld into a pressure cooker and the FBI's public profile was suffering accordingly. A successful bust would have been a welcome change of headline.
Instead they had nothing but injured operators and a jurisdictional argument nobody wanted to have in public.
Urich noted the angle clearly enough that a careful reader could see it. He always did.
I put the paper down.
The bust had failed. Everyone was gone, everything was scrubbed, and the fingerpointing was apparently all anyone had to show for it.
But SHIELD had wanted to wait. That sat with me in a way I didn't entirely like. They'd wanted more time before the bust. More surveillance. More of something. I didn't know what they thought was still in that building worth waiting for.
The cell had gotten wind before either agency moved. That was the detail neither source was dwelling on but both were implying. Somewhere in the gap between the DC task force identifying the location and the FBI finally going through the door, the cell had found out they were burned.
I wasn't sure I wanted to think too hard about several details of this. What was the mystery task force looking into? Why did SHIELD punt?
These were tomorrow's problems for tomorrow's me. For now, I was safe.
Forward progress was a wonderful thing.
2 months later
Two months after my cross-country move, I had progressed my way onto a therapist's couch. This was not entirely what I had meant by "forward progress".
"When you say you feel like you're failing the memory of your parents," Dr. Reeves said, from somewhere behind me, "what does that look like specifically?"
I stared at the ceiling. "Like I'm standing in front of something that should be solvable and I can't solve it. My family's watching and they're disappointed. The work is" I paused. "Complicated."
"Complicated how."
"I can't really get into the specifics. I'm under a NDA."
From a certain point of view, anyways.
"That's fine. Sit with the feeling."
I sat with it. The feeling was approximately a month of staring at the Stark neural interface and and failing to understand it. I wasn't the world's best hardware guy,and I only had a punter's knowledge of neuroscience. The neural interface was proving especially slippery to get my head around.
The helmet was sitting on my basement workbench when I got home. I'd propped it upright on a foam block so the faceplate looked out at the room.
I pulled up my stool, put my elbows on the bench,snapped on some latex gloves and looked at it some more.
The basement was starting to look like a real workspace. Oscilloscope, impedance analyzer, signal generator, bench power supply, multimeter, all sourced through electronics suppliers over the past month.
The neural interface itself was my current wall.
I pulled the helmet toward me and traced the interior surface with a gloved finger. The circuit occupied most of the upper crown, a dense board with hundreds of small electrode contacts spaced across the surface. Those I understood. Scalp contacts, signal pickup, straightforward enough.
It was the other hardware that was killing me.
There was a secondary subsystem integrated into the board that I'd initially assumed was EM hardening of some kind. However, there were what looked like field generation elements distributed across the subsystem, not just shielding material.
Whatever this was, it wasn't passively blocking anything.
It was generating something. Continuously, based on the power routing I'd traced. Something precisely shaped, probably around most of the pickups.
The Guardsman manual notably didn't address any of this. It went into exhaustive detail on the care and feeding of everything else on the suit but the neural interface? Complete black box. Ship the unit back to Stane International's Long Island facility. Do not attempt to diagnose. Do not attempt to operate a suit with a malfunctioning neural interface.
Whether Stane had run tests on people to work out the uncalibrated effects for himself was a question I preferred not to think too hard about.
I put the helmet back on its foam block. It resumed looking at me.
How did these omni-disciplinary scientist types do it? I knew Tony Stark was a brilliant man but this was absurd.
I walked back upstairs, grabbing my keys to the van. Time for another futile library visit to flail at more neuroscience papers.
The San Jose library had become uncomfortably familiar over the past month. The reference librarian on the Thursday afternoon shift knew my face and greeted me by name. I'd worked through most of the signal processing section and was currently excavating the biomedical engineering journals in a mostly directionless way, hoping something would click.
I pulled a stack and found a table in the back and started reading.
Two hours in I was into a paper on magnetoencephalography. I was tired. I'd been tired for a while. The words were starting to blur at the edges.
The paper was describing SERF magnetometry applied to neural imaging. I knew vaguely what SERF was. Spin exchange relaxation free, no cryogenics required unlike the older SQUID approach, which meant you weren't lugging liquid helium around to get your readings.
The 616 baseline had apparently gotten to SERF early.
I turned a page.
There was a section on operating constraints. Even miniaturized, these sensors needed a near-zero ambient magnetic field to function. Extremely sensitive to interference. Current implementations still required purpose built shielded enclosures to get usable data.
I stopped.
Read that again.
Near-zero ambient magnetic field. Purpose built shielded enclosure.
I thought about the secondary subsystem. Not a Faraday cage, wrong shape. Too directional. Pointed inward.
Not keeping interference out. Generating a cancellation field inside. A controlled volume of near-zero magnetic field right where the sensors were, running continuously, regardless of whatever was happening outside.
That was an absurd piece of engineering.
2 months, one week
The suit itself was going to be a bottleneck, even with my improved theories about how the interface worked. I couldn't power it on without the Stark calibration hardware. I needed to boot the whole thing to properly integrate my HUD with the helmet, so I could do some real testing.
An uncalibrated interface broadcasting into my skull was less than ideal. I had been blinded with grief before, and I still felt the pangs occasionally. (Although I was working on processing with the therapist). Actual physical brain damage on top of that would be less then ideal.
This meant I needed the calibration hardware.
Which meant I needed to talk to local members of the criminal element.
Considering I had gone to a bit of trouble to get my new identity, interacting directly with the local ne'r do wells was right out.
Which meant I needed to not look like myself while doing it.
I paused.
The Rose (Richard Fisk) had run a mid-level criminal operation in New York using a mask and a suit to hide his identity. The Big Man(Fred Foswell) had done something similar.
There was a precedent for the whole "masked mastermind" angle in this universe
I had resources. More importantly I had something neither of them had, which was metaknowledge.
I'd need a full face mask. A modified baklava might do. I liked the Rose's full-face mask thing. A well tailored suit, leather gloves, and a vocoder for the voice. I needed to cover up enough that the only thing an observer could guess about me was "Male, around 6 feet."
If I had had my head remotely straight when I was on the east coast, I'd have done the whole masked mastermind thing earlier. I kicked myself briefly, then stopped. A spiral of self-recrimination for decisions made in a compromised mental state wasn't productive, and besides, it was harder to pull off without capital. Which I now had.
This wasn't a permanent arrangement. I wasn't planning on juggling two identities, startup founder during the day, masked mastermind at night. I needed two specific things from the west coast underworld, the Stark calibration hardware, and a secondary market for the HUD upgrade and neural interface patch once I had it figured out. After that my masked alter ego could quietly retire to Tahiti, and the proceeds from his actions would be laundered and plowed back into my startup, without anybody being the wiser.
I needed a street name for our mystery man. I'd think of something suitable eventually.