I was in the warehouse again. Things seemed to slow. I saw the light playing across the floor,the decrepit shelves, the industrial detritus surrounding me,and most importantly of all,the power-armored mercenary pointing his weapon at my head.
I grabbed for the radio, but it slipped out of my gloved hands. I looked into the emitter of the shattergun just in time to see the air distort and hear the distinctive whump.
I bolted upright in my bed with a gasp, coated in sweat.
I sat there for a minute, just breathing, waiting for my heart to stop trying to climb out of my chest. The room was dark and ordinary, my own ceiling, my own four walls, and it took longer than it should have for that to actually register as safe.
Groggily, I checked the clock. 5 AM. Might as well start the day now. Lying back down and hoping for more sleep felt like a bad idea.
I worked my way through my morning exercises, body going through the motions while my mind drifted.
That had been close. I'd been in scrapes in Earth-616 before and none of them had left this particular residue. It was an unpleasant feeling. Something colder, sitting under my sternum since I'd woken up.
I had been shaken up yesterday, but I wasn't sure what had tipped it over into a less transient kind of fear. Maybe it was the nightmare where my plan had failed.
I'd bonelessly flopped into bed the night before, after spending most of the day in a funk I hadn't bothered naming. Finished a book on the history of Smyrkania, for what it was worth. None of it had stuck, which told me more about my state of mind than the book did.
I didn't know what the SFPD's read on Slate would be. I didn't know how much the mercenaries would be able to convey. Cord probably wouldn't follow up on Slate again, but I vaguely remembered he'd try to take a separate crack at Stark.
What I did know was that the probabilities had changed. The cost of staying in the mask had just gone up, and I had enough capital to get by at this point.
This was probably the best time to retire my alter ego. Get out while the getting was good.
Having solidified my decision, I stood up from the breakfast table. Time to tackle the startup. Something new to focus on, to move me away from the pit in my stomach.
In terms of capital, I still had around seven hundred thousand total in the Swiss account. I'd save money by not needing to rent a space. The upsides of property ownership.
For the startup, I had two core product ideas. A desktop UI kit and rack mounted servers. From my vague knowledge, the server rack only reached its modern form in the early 90's. If I could come up with the form factor earlier, I could get a foot in the door, and use that to pivot to the whole "proto AWS" angle once the internet blew up.
However, upon further investigation, which I had done while waiting for clients, the consumer GUI landscape here was more fleshed out then I thought. There were already two companies building X display server based interfaces and they already had a market niche. I'd be horning in on an established market. Sure, I'd probably come up with something better, but the better product didn't always win when it was fighting established competitors.
I'd need to flesh out my second idea.
Racks, as in the 19 inch standard that everyone knows and loves, had been invented early for telecom purposes. 1920's in my timeline, from what I could recall. This had swung over for computing purposes in the 1970's. Blade servers themselves, less so. That started getting standardized around the mid-to-late 90's. If I could pay enough engineers, I could probably get a prototype together before the first blade server was built, pitch it to investors for a seed round and gain an advantage in that market.
Blades were the wedge. Once my startup was the company that had been running dense compute reliably for a while, the co-location(colo) pivot followed naturally. Enterprise IT was going to outgrow its own server closets at some point. Somebody would have to rent them space, power, cooling, and a meet-me room with the carriers already in the building. That was phase two.
Cloud was phase three, and act three was a longer bet. Proto-AWS was the shorthand I used in my own head, but the actual fun stuff I remembered (virtualization, on-demand provisioning, billing) was a decade past colo at minimum, and predicated on the internet blowing up the way I remembered. Earth-616 was different, and with the timescale changes, I wasn't sure about the timelines. But one thing was constant. People needed compute. I'd be the one to provide it.
Selling a GUI kit was small potatoes compared to this, and this would position me better long term. Capital burn would definitely be more intensive, but I definitely had enough runway to keep the lights on for long enough to get a prototype together.
Now, for a customer base. The lack of wide-spread internet would hamper my potential customer list at first (although some ARPANET users might be interested in using it to host stuff, but that was tiny). Computer assisted trading however, was relatively new, and a potential market.
I didn't do much work with HFT in my old life, but I had an acquaintance who had interned at a shop. HFT hadn't kicked off until the early 2000's but there were program trading shops who'd be pretty interested in what I had to offer. That was where my seed round was going to come from.
Program traders were mostly on microcomputers at this point, from what little history of HFT I could recall (mostly a half-remembered paper). and I could pitch them on reliability and uptime.
Two days later, I moved into an unoccupied space at the industrial park. I'd need to incorporate the startup at some point, but since it was just one man and a computer, plus a motivational paper and my whiteboard things would be fine for now.
I had a second room for testbenching,and had grabbed a third adjacent room and kept it empty as overflow space for the startup.
I idly drummed my pen on the desk. I needed a name....
I was bad at naming things, but I needed a name to put down on the paperwork when I started to hire.
After ten minutes of contemplation, I settled on one.
Falcis Systems should work. I was pretty sure there were no other companies using that name, and it was close enough. Latin for some type of blade (if my memory was correct), aggressive and unique. Good enough.
I dragged the whiteboard over and uncapped a marker. Time to start scoping the out of band management software. Seven boxes went up fast: serial comms, sensor polling, power control, watchdog, event log, command parser, display logic.
I stood back. Manageable, on paper.
Then I started drawing lines between them, the way data would actually have to move, and the board got uglier with every connection. The sensor box needed its own sub-boxes for filtering bad readings and deciding what counted as an emergency. The serial box needed a way to keep multiple blades talking on one line without stepping on each other, and that scheme needed to survive a blade rebooting mid-conversation. The power control logic needed a fail-safe state so a dropped cable didn't brick a board with live current running through it.
I looked at the result. Seven boxes had quietly become two dozen, several with arrows pointing at nothing because I hadn't worked out what came next.
And this was supposed to be the easy part.
I wasn't even remotely qualified or experienced enough to tackle greenfield hardware design, and I had always been planning on hiring people who could do that. But just whiteboarding out the out of band management software made the scale come home to me.
Cracking my back, I stared at the board.
Recruiting was easy. I'd never been a founder before, but I'd just post something on the inter-
Fuck me.
After the end of the first day in which I mostly planned more of the work, I went to the electronics shop, mainly out of a sense of familiarity rather than any real need. Hiring was going to be tricky.
My eyes lighted upon Roy Caswell's bald head in the next aisle. There was a potential solution to my hiring problems. Roy, from more conversations, seemed to know everyone, and if he didn't know them, he was two degrees of separation away from someone who did.
I cleared my throat, catching his attention.
"Hey Roy. Haven't seen you in a while."
Week 1 — 20 months runway
The horchata came in well-worn glasses sweating condensation onto the formica. The air conditioning unit mounted above the register rattled like it had bronchitis. I'd long since stopped noticing the smell of the place, which was a combination of beans and cleaning substances.
All that aside, the food was excellent, and at a good price point too.
Sunny had his elbows on the table, working through a plate of enchiladas with the methodical focus he brought to everything.
"So," I said. "Hiring update. Chuck Grissom's coming on as lead engineer. Amdahl guy, mainframe hardware. Got a board designer locked too. Roy gave me some more names, but those two were the best of the lot. I'm still short a couple of people."
Sunny glanced up. "Who's the board guy?"
"Alan Nowak. Came out of Baintronics' Seattle facility."
Sunny went back to his enchiladas. Chewed for a moment.
"Baintronics has culture problems. Hope he didn't bring any of it with him."
That was one way to put it.
"Chuck flagged it too. We talked to him for a long time. Came across well enough."
Sunny nodded once, willing to let it sit there.
"I'm still short a couple of people."
Sunny didn't look up. "Try the classifieds."
"Newspaper classifieds." I said.
Sunny glanced up.
"Mercury News, want ads, engineering section. People still read them." He shrugged. "Found my best EE that way. Guy answered a two-line ad I almost didn't bother placing."
I had never placed a newspaper ad in my life. In my old universe I had read newspapers sometimes, but placing a newspaper ad was a completely new experience.
I shook my head to break away from the sheer...unreality of it.
"Seems unreliable."
"It's worth a try." Sunny took a sip of water, unbothered by my skepticism. "You're not going to get lucky every time recruiting off personal networks. Sometimes you want someone who isn't already vouched for by someone you know, so you're not just hiring the same five guys in rotation."
He had a point, even if I didn't love it. Network hires came pre-vetted but also pre-biased, friends of friends, none of whom were going to tell me my chassis design was stupid if their buddy had drawn it.
"Fine. I'll run something this week." I paused. "You said you've got some names too?"
"One in particular." Sunny set his fork down. "Guy named Hollis Brandt. Did mechanical engineering at Cal. Sharp on structural stuff, thermal management."
"Available?"
"Last I heard. He's prickly though."
I shrugged.
"I'd love to meet him."
Sunny went back to his enchiladas. "I'll give him a call tomorrow."
I ran the ad the following Monday. For the first week the answering service had nothing. By the middle of the second, I'd started to wonder if I'd worded it badly. Then on a Thursday, the answering service reported six calls.
Sunny's referral Hollis Brandt wasn't one of them — he'd called separately on the Friday. Seven candidates total, four worth bringing in. By the time Brandt's Tuesday slot rolled around, the other three had already come and gone.
Hollis Brandt stepped into the office. Brandt was a pale ginger who looked vaguely pissy. He sat down across from Chuck Grissom, my lead engineer, who'd been running the interviews. Chuck had run mainframe hardware teams at Amdahl for two decades. Exactly the kind of breadth I didn't have and badly needed. Older white guy, gray-haired, comfortable in a meeting room.
The interview itself was positive, despite my worries about Brandt. Chuck knew what he was looking for and Brandt was competent. Half an hour in, Chuck looked at me. I nodded.
Chuck stuck his hand out.
"We'd love for you to join our team, Mr. Brandt."
Brandt nodded. "Figures." He shook Chuck's hand firmly.
"As for the project, well." Chuck cleared his throat. "Sign this, and you'll have a look."
Brandt signed without much ceremony.
Chuck exited the room and came back with a layout drawing. He placed it in front of Brandt.
"Here's what we've got so far."
Brandt then looked over the chassis sketch for a few minutes before he started talking, and didn't really stop.
Chuck just smiled. "Good. I was worried we'd hire someone too polite to tell us we screwed up."
I raised my eyebrows. "You showed him a sketch that was wrong?"
Chuck smirked. "Yep. Wanted to see if he'd give honest feedback."
Sunny and I met at the taqueria again at the end of the week. It was nice to relax. The week had mostly been a blur of interviews and work. The AC was working today, for once, which felt almost suspicious.
"You should hire these guys on part-time. No need to rush. You've hired on a lot of full-time staff." Sunny picked at a plate of chile rellenos, working through them slower than I'd seen him eat before.
Sunny didn't know about the sliding timescale. I wasn't sure what my window was exactly, but I had to move fast. A higher capital burn rate was an acceptable tradeoff for that. I'd been burned once assuming the timeline would be a 1:1 mapping, and I wasn't planning to make the same mistake twice.
I shrugged, biting into my taco. Chewed.
"Sometimes speed is more important." I left it at that. Sunny just nodded.
The team came together over the next few weeks. Hiring, paperwork, getting badges made, finding desks that weren't actively broken.
I signed off on another memo and stared up at the fluorescent lights.
We had two devs (plus myself), a lead engineer(Grissom), a board designer(Nowak),a junior board designer, a thermal specialist(Brandt), and a power systems specialist. Eight of us, not counting whoever the test-bench hire would eventually be. Our burn rate was aggressive.
Management of all these disparate personalities was hard. I was a junior developer in my old life. I knew how to do software. I had contributed code to the out of band management software when I had the time (and hadn't been juggling management tasks), but it was tricky to just let other people tackle technical problems.
I wanted to get in there, get my hands dirty,but I wasn't conversant enough in the hardware design side of things to try. I was semi-competent at tinkering with hardware, but designing a blade server clean sheet was well out of my skill level.
Despite its stressors, management had its compensations. This afternoon I was close to idle, bureaucratic load cleared(for once), waiting on a test build the other two programmers and I had been debugging to compile. The management controller firmware was the only software we had anything to compile for.
The OS question was further out, but I'd already made the call. The trade press kept hinting that Stark Enterprises had a new OS in the works. Cleanroom, proprietary, none of the old Stark Industries IP that Stane International was still sitting on(and stonewalling in court, according to the press). I had two engineers (plus myself), so when the blade was real, we'd be modifying BSD.
Isaiah Thurmond and Daniel Park, the two other programmers, were talking to Alan Nowak ,the lead board designer. Thurmond and Park had worked together at Lockheed before this, the only pair on the team who'd known each other beforehand.
"You were Baintronics?" Thurmond continued. "No offense man, but why? Everyone says that place is a nightmare."
Nowak shrugged, not looking up from his screen. "Work was interesting. Culture was, however, quite horrid."
Park wiggled his fingers dramatically. "Oooooh, careful there. The wicked witch of the west is gonna swoop down from Seattle and add your scalp to her collection."
Nowak's hands stilled on the keyboard. It was the most reaction I'd seen out of him.
"Do not joke about this." He still hadn't looked up. "Bain is a hardass. Last man who made such a jibe was reported and fired on the same day."
Isaiah held up his hands in mock surrender. "Damn, didn't realize you had PTSD over it."
Daniel, less wisely, kept going. "Sounds like a fun lady."
Thankfully, any further banter was precluded by the ping of the terminal. The compile had finished.
I smiled for the photograph. A journalist for a local paper had wanted to write a puff piece about my startup. I hadn't seen the harm. Raise my profile. Part of me whispered that having ANY profile in Earth-616 was more risk than it was worth. I didn't know what type of people were reading the startup pages. There was Ghost for one thing, but I was pretty sure I was too poor to be on his radar. There were probably some other threats that weren't on panel, such as the local AIM presence, or the armed robberies that had happened to some tech startups around this time in my timeline,
On the other hand, making myself more known would increase my profile with potential investors. Investors liked to see stuff like this, and you never knew who was reading the newspaper.
The flashbulb went off, and for a second all I could see was white.
At our lunch this week, Sunny was visibly tired. His normal vaguely zen air was off kilter. It was like seeing the statue of liberty destroyed, or the sky a pea shade of green. Sunny's vague air of peace had been a constant in the time I knew him and seeing it shattered was ....disquieting.
Sunny wasn't even eating his food, he stared into the middle distance.
"What's up? You look haunted."
Sunny sighed. "Founder stress. You know how it is."
He shook his head, distracting himself. "Fortunately, I do have some better news. There's a small group of founders that meets monthly for about an hour on weekends. We hang out, talk, take a break from the grind. You seem pleasant enough, having known you for a bit. I'd like you to meet them. There's a meeting coming up this weekend."
That sounded nice enough.I didn't really know many people besides Sunny in this space. I revised that. I didn't really know many people, period.
Recently I had had my nose to the grindstone so intensively with the startup, I had just collapsed every night and slept for five hours, before showing back up at the office. I was surviving on an exclusive diet of TV dinners and coffee.
I rolled my eyes. "Glad you don't think I'm too annoying."
Sunny smiled faintly. "Some founders are abrasive, to put it mildly."
I nodded, being all too familiar with the type from my old life.
The next day, Saturday, I pulled my van to a halt in front of a coffee shop on Lincoln Avenue, in Willow Glen.
Entering, I was struck by the wonderful smell of coffee, a bored-looking barista, and several mismatched bookshelves crammed with paperbacks nobody was reading. I shook myself. Still a pre-Starbucks era. Smaller, independently owned places hadn't been entirely crushed out of existence yet. One upside of the past.
Sunny gestured to me from a table in the back. Three white guys were sitting next to him. A blond, leaning back in his chair with a loud Hawaiian shirt and a very languid affect. Next to him, a bald man who looked very unremarkable. And across from both of them, a dark-haired man in a sports coat over a plain black t-shirt.
I placed my order and sat down.
Sunny nodded. "Gentlemen. I'd like to introduce Nathan Smith. He's the founder at Falcis Systems."
I nodded. "Falcis is working on improving server hardware."
Sports coat leaned forward. "Funding?"
I shrugged. "Pre-seed."
No need to give away too much.
The blond with the loud shirt stuck his hand out first. "Victor Wilson. Biotech's bad boy."
Oh brother.
Sunny exhaled slightly. "Ignore that. It's a branding exercise."
Victor rolled his eyes. "You truly are the thief of joy." He turned to me. "I dropped out of ESU to found a biotech startup."
I leaned back. "What's the elevator pitch? I'm not a biotech guy."
"Growth media. Cell cultures grow about twice as fast on mine, across most mammalian lines I've tested." He grinned wryly. "We're on our second round, scaling manufacturing."
Sunny prompted him. "Company name?"
"The investors didn't let me have fun with naming. I got stuck with Prometheus Biosciences. Pity. They made me change it from Cimarrón Biological..."
The next man over didn't wait for an introduction prompt. He was even less remarkable up close. "Edmund Holt. Materials science, Caltech. Liquid cooling systems for high-density electronics."
He paused briefly. "I founded Synthodyne. We're still early."
I made a mental note to talk to him properly once introductions were done. Anyone solving thermal problems at that level was worth knowing.
"Harrison Snow. Applied Math, Harvard. I'm building a database engine. Storage, indexing, query execution end to end. Serval Industries. We just closed our seed."
Victor cleared his throat. "Now that we've met Mr. Smith, Edmund was updating us on how things are at the Fortress of Solitude?"
He turned to me. "Ed's got insane physical security for a pre-seed startup. Three armed guards."
Edmund shrugged, not looking up. "Security environment requires it. Some of us have IP worth stealing."
"Harsh," Snow said wryly.
Victor resumed. "Would the paranoia of your backers have anything to do with the fact that one of your big backers is a corporation, with a name that rhymes with-" he paused for effect, "-Oscorp?"
He pointed at Edmund's head. "He also shaves his head because it saves time."
Edmund shrugged. "It does save time. Most of my capital's from elsewhere."
Victor sighed. "Mine's mostly Keystone Scientific and Fisher Scientific, thank you. Boring lab-supply money. Plus those Brits."
He snapped his fingers. "They do some work on childhood genetic screening for the NHS. Origenix! Yeah, their VC arm, Calloway Ventures." He paused briefly. "And yes, Oscorp, but proportionally they're a smaller slice then the rest."
Sunny coughed, putting down his mug. "We try not to do too much business at these."
Victor raised his hands. "Point."
Harrison turned to Sunny before he could keep going. "Speaking of, how's the funding search going? I referred you to a couple of people who might be interested."
"In limbo," Sunny said, turning his mug between his hands. "Compliance checking is taking forever."
He gave Snow a flat look. "And so much for not doing business."
Snow held up his hands. "Apologies. On a lighter note, you see that weirdness in NYC? Some sort of shared hallucination with demons?"
That would be Inferno, then. Glad I had gotten out of NYC before that happened.
Victor waved a hand. "You live in NYC, you get used to seeing some weird shit. When I was at Empire State, I used to see Spider-Man swinging across campus all the time. Even saw him fighting some sort of... bee guy once."
I vaguely remembered that. Spectacular Spider-Man, sometime in the early 80s publication- wise.
"You're telling me," I said. "Lived there for a bit."
Victor pointed at me, vindicated. "See? Nathan gets it."
Sunny caught my eye across the table. He looked less tired than when I'd sat down.
It was nice to shoot the shit with people in similar circumstances.
I owed Sunny one for this.
Month 2 — 6 months runway