It felt like nothing I had done was working. As far as my sources could tell, Erik Stevens was still active in Afghanistan. Maybe T'Chaka had reached out. Maybe he was hoping to get Killmonger on his return home. Maybe he was just ignoring my advice. The idea had been that he take decisive action before Killmonger faded into the black ops aether. If Killmonger slipped into the darkness, when he emerged in a decade he'd set fire to Wakanda and then turn and attack the rest of us. I had taken substantial risks and revealed genuine foreknowledge to try and avert that and I had gotten… nothing.
I'd been waiting for Stark to emerge as Iron Man for a long time. It was mid-November and I had been getting nervous. But finally, there had been a series of attacks on the Ten Rings throughout the Middle East by an "unknown entity". That was why I had scheduled this dinner date with Andromeda at her apartment.
I felt like a heel for manipulating her feelings. She seemed to be a boring, middle-class white girl public servant. A real believer in the Red, White, and Blue. I hadn't had that kind of sentimentality for our country since I was twelve. It was both genuinely sweet and terribly naive.
Andromeda answered the door in a long blue dress with a smile on her face. I handed her a bottle of wine wrapped in a cloth to keep it clean of my fingerprints.
"Mmm," she said, taking the bottle of wine, "This is a good vintage."
"That's what I was told," I said. Entering the apartment, I saw it was actually very… bright. She had painted flowering trees onto soft, light colored walls. Her furniture was all unpretentious lightwood or soft furniture, clearly relatively new. "It looks nice."
"You mean it isn't a blank slate like your place?"
"I have four apartments, Drama," I replied.
"You could hire an interior decorator for all four with like a week's income, so I don't really want to hear it."
"You don't get rich by spending money."
"You know how Scrooge won't spend any money on candles even though he's rich? That's you, Mike." she chided me.
"You read it!"
"Of course I read it, you've been nagging me ever since you heard I hadn't ever actually watched any movie versions."
"It's one of the great works of English literature!"
"I think it's a cry for help," Andromeda said as we walked into the kitchen where she had laid out ingredients and kitchen gloves like I asked her to.
I opened my mouth to contradict her but thought better of it. I looked down and away, "Speak comfort to me, Jacob," I said instead. I had liked it in the other world as well. But to be fair, I was a multi-millionaire who didn't spent my money on anything and didn't have any friends except the girlfriend I was vamping to get access to a secret organization which I still did not officially know existed.
"You will be met by three spirits," she said, holding up the wine bottle and shaking it. "One will tell you to get normal friends,"
"The next line was actually, 'I have none to give, it is offered by other sorts of ministers to different kinds of men.'"
"Kinda dark to be hoping for me to tell you that."
"Look, my life is complicated," I said.
"You are a businessman," Andromeda said, sitting up on the counter next to where I was working. "You fly around selling your products, making wild new advancements in technology, and going on TV interviews to talk about how 'the future of energy and industry is still right here in America'. Self-made, self-educated. You're basically a hot Benjamin Franklin. Your life isn't complicated, you're just living in your head."
That's not really where my problem was, but I couldn't say so. I just shrugged instead, "I spend time with you," I said, putting whatever honey I could into my voice.
"Whatever, you're just ignoring the topic." she said, hopping off the counter and looking annoyed. "I'm going to go to the bathroom."
"Okay," I said. It was hard to fight back when I knew I deserved it. She walked off and I could hear her footsteps the whole way down the hall. She wasn't loud, it was just one of the side effects of my transition here. Excellent hearing, excellent eyesight. Excellent taste, too, which meant other people's cooking was a bit of a drag. I know, I know, I still liked Dr. Pepper, but that was more of a comfort thing.
I took my duster out of my pocket and scanned a few prints off the bottle before I heard her turn off the sink from washing her hands. I didn't have a plan, at the time, for what to do with the prints. I was mostly doing it to remind myself that I was cultivating an asset. By the time she'd made it back, I was back to prepping food and we were back to talking about something else.
"Y'all watching the Ten Rings situation?" I asked after a few minutes had passed and I was sure we were back to an emotionally positive place.
"Yes," she said, rolling her eyes. "I mean, uh, no comment. Why would we be monitoring the sudden appearance of a seemingly supernatural being destroying the Ten Rings like an angel out of the Old Testament?"
"Word is it's a robot," I said as I turned the oven on and took off the gloves.
"You sending out Botler to beat up the Ten Rings?" she poked without giving any more information out to me. Still cagey two months into it.
"Nah," I said. My phone started buzzing, "Let me check this."
She nodded. Benefits of both having high demand jobs, "What? I'm on a date."
"Tell Ms. Albertson I said hi," said Leif, one of my upper management in expansion. "I should've taken your advice on Stark Industries. Get to a TV."
"Hey, uh, you got cable?" I asked, covering the phone. I only remembered too late it was 2009. Everybody had cable.
She gave me a funny look "Yeah." then she frowned, opened her mouth to say something and then closed it.
Oh goddamn it. I thought before chiding myself that she was choosing to avoid the fight. "Leif wants me to see something on TV," I said covering the phone's lip. "Leif, thanks, I'll go watch it. News, I'm assuming."
"Yeah, news. Business meeting about it tomorrow."
I don't know what, exactly, I was expecting as I turned off the stove and lamented the oncoming meal of super-salty take out. When I got to the screen, I realized expecting it to be an Iron Man reveal was stupid. I had known this consciously, it was obviously stupid. Tony had been forced public by his duel with Obadiah. But somehow I had still expected that scene from the movie where he chucks the cards and says "I'm Iron Man."
"Tony Stark has just announced a new arc reactor. He's projecting it will produce three gigawatts per hour at its averaged energy production level. The construction cost of this new project is estimated at a billion dollars with operating costs at less than two hundred and fifty million per year thereafter, a bargain bin price for energy in the United States."
I collapsed onto the couch, staring at the screen with a vague haze of disbelief. But how? I asked myself. Tony had said in Avengers 1 that the tower was powered by an arc reactor. That was thirteen times the energy output of 2009 Google. It was twenty six times the energy necessary to run a large hadron collider. It was 0.6% of the United States' total energy consumption, slightly more than existing geo-thermal. About two thirds of the entire solar energy sector's existing output level. It was bullshit.
I had premised my whole strategy on the continuing existence of energy demand. It was the core thesis of my project. I'd poured millions of dollars in profits back into an aggressive expansion of production of energy within the United States.
And he just… tweeted it out. I mean, not literally obviously, but still. The problem endured. Who did this shit? How was this possible?
"Babe, you alright?" Andromeda asked, her face worried.
"Well, at least my Stark stocks are now worth money," I said.
"How much do you own?"
"A lot," I said honestly. That had been most of my expenditures in outside investment. Why not bet on a sure thing? "Your workplace hiring?"
"Oh, don't be dramatic. It can't be that bad."
"Well, to be honest, I probably am one of the few energy production magnates who could cut down to, what is it, two cents per kilowatt hour? So I guess I shouldn't complain too much."
"But they're saying it will take three years to build the new arc reactor to scale."
"It doesn't matter. Energy isn't sold on energy's present price but on its, well to simplify, its levelized expected future costs. You put all the energy into a bucket, or all the clean energy into a bucket if you're a hippie, and then you estimate its cost and then you try to undersell that while overselling your margin. Tony Stark is putting out a clean energy source that is going to dominate the existing competition, even sold at a substantial mark-up. That's obviously good for America," I rallied myself, "it's just a bit hard for me."
"Ice cream," Andromeda said, getting up from the couch. She came back with the actual ice cream carton putting it on the table. She scooped out a bowl's worth of ice cream for me and put the bowl into my hand.
"Well, at least we know who the robot's maker is," I said, taking a bite of ice cream.
Her eyes widened for a split second and then she schooled her expression, "What do you mean?"
"It's Stark, it's obviously Stark. That kind of energy efficiency? His still unexplained escape from captivity? The connection with the Ten Rings? It's Stark."
She let out a long breath, "I forget how smart you are sometimes."
"Seriously, though, is your workplace hiring?"
"Um," she said after a moment. "I mean, I don't know, but let me go make a phone call."
Yeah, I was obviously going to listen in on that. I ate my ice cream with my eyes closed, my ears straining through the door and the wall. She turned on the dishwater to drown it out, but my hearing was just that good.
"Hey Dad," she said. She was calling… her dad?
"Hi honey," he said.
"We need to get Mike onside," she said, her tone quiet but blunt.
"Honey, I hate to say this, but I don't think you're really being objective."
"He's Stark-smart. He's going to be rich. He gets intelligence analysis. Do you want another Howard Stark?" Wait, what?
"No, of course not."
"Right, so we need to move now on bringing him in."
"You could just deal with him now." Taking that to mean kill me.
"No, Dad. Look, I'm inviting him to Thanksgiving, he doesn't have any family, we need to make him feel welcome. He needs to know that we're his backers, set him up for later in life."
"Alright," he said, "I still think you just want to introduce him to your mom and I, but I trust your judgment."
"Hail Hydra,"
"Hail Hydra."