The large array of protestors shouting at me as I drove up was not a surprise. Between the various Hollywood guilds and the energy unions, I had known people were going to need to let it out. "Out With Thoth," read many of the signs, decrying the new Hydra subsidiary using my engine that was being boycotted by every guild in Hollywood, "Job Destroyer" was next to images of nuclear reactors and oil wells on others. At least it wasn't West Virginia. I had been burned in effigy in half the towns there by this point. Four percent of the national energy supply was a lot and I was eating everybody's lunch.
The cab pulled up and said, "Yikes, tough break."
"Don't worry about it," I said with a smile, handing the man a hundred dollar bill and getting out of the car. There were going to be protests here until I dealt with them. That was just the score.
My decision to move to California was the only rational one in the context. Alexander Pierce was certainly the head of the D.C. branch of Hydra and probably the present head overall of the organization. If I wanted to grow, I had to move somewhere that I could expand under a less totalizing project. Besides that, if I got control of the PRIDE, I should live where my power base is.
It was late August and no sacrifice had yet been committed. I had gotten lucky enough to have missed the attack on Culver University by Banner, now "still-at-large." The U.S. had rolled out the first Iron Man suit, here called the Patriot Armor, and silenced a very large number of international disturbances with it. Tony, well, I didn't know what Tony was doing, but he was getting more permissions for his Arc Reactors at a high pace.
The move to California had required a bit of finesse, but once I had lined everything up according to my interest, I had come down to move in. Now was the tough part - Meeting with my critics. This wasn't a picket line, I could've walked straight inside and not interacted with them. My sleep might not have been great for a few weeks, but they would've gotten tired of standing outside eventually.
Probably. Protests are fun.
I walked up to the crowd and a wall of boos and shouts hit me like a wave. I let the wave wash over me and stood there, patiently, as wave after wave of boos continued. Each one was an ebb, the end of the high tide. Once I was fairly sure I would be audible, I said, in the calmest possible voice, "If anybody wants to talk to me, let's do that. Open porch for awhile,"
The clamor that broke out at that also took a few minutes, but people did want to talk. Protestors are passionate people. But they want to be heard - Being heard is the point! That's why they go out and do it.
I waited while they worked it out - The organizers would speak to me first. So there I was, sitting cross-legged on my house's lawn, the first union organizer, a woman from the Screen Actor's Guild came up to talk to me.
Her name was Maria Gonzalez, she was in her mid thirties, and she had been in a few big name pictures but she wasn't (in my opinion) anything all that special as an actress. Pretty enough with some solid but no stand out supporting roles. Still, she had a reputation in Hollywood for fair-mindedness, a useful form of likability that didn't quite blunt her edge. A classic straight shooter.
"Mr. Trent," she said, holding out her hand. I shook it, smiling. "We were surprised you decided to move to a town whose key industries you are directly assaulting." I put that smile away and replaced it with a concerned, thoughtful look. I said nothing. "You know that half the guilds in Hollywood have called for a boycott of your products." I nodded thoughtfully and waited. " You're threatening to put thousands of people out of business. Doesn't that bother you?"
"Well, firstly, I'm primarily a technology supplier but I get the worry. Still I think it's a little premature," I said after a moment. "I have faith in the talents of all the people who come to this town to make art. The actors, stage managers, and so forth will still have lots of work in old-style films and television. What I envision is an expansion of human creative forces that means more options and choices for everyone - A veritable cornucopia of art. Art that might be produced by union members if the SAG weren't calling for a boycott of Thoth."
"Yeah right, you hired scabs but you'd really love to hire union labor."
"I don't know why that's so unbelievable," I said. "Trent Industries is a union shop. It's literally in the company charter, a mandate for the workers to have a voice and the voice of their choosing. I wrote that, nobody held my hand to the fire and demanded it. I'm not the only board member of Thoth but if the Screenwriters or Animators brought us a contract, I'd vote we sign it." It would probably not matter - I doubted that the Hydra members on the board were great lovers of unions - but I would sincerely vote yes.
"And the actors, props, costumes, and lighting? What do you say to all those people you've replaced with holograms?"
"I say two things, I'm not replacing anyone," I was absolutely replacing people, "as I've already said. And insofar as Thoth leads to market crowding, which we're a long way from any proof of, we'll be employing a lot of those people in new functions. I continue to support expanded training and education options as well as local theaters and arts programs and projects. I'm not the bad guy here."
The exchange went on like that for awhile. I never really won her all the way over, but she just didn't have a lot on me at this point. Thoth was a long way from its goal of running over the Hollywood system. And honestly, Hydra was so hellbent on using it to put out propaganda that I thought it would continue to underperform for a long time to come.
Next came an energy union organizer. This was going to be, ah, worse. Pete Hoffman was in his late forties and less ideological than Maria, a classic hard hat with a belligerent attitude towards employers born of genuine resentment of upper class dweebs.
"In December you said that you thought Oil, Gas, and Coal were going to be with us a long time. How's that working out for us?"
"Well," I said carefully, "Fossil fuels still account for eighty four percent of U.S. energy demand."
"Ah don't give me that bull," he said, getting up in my face. "This isn't some college debate, you know what's happening to our work, our jobs, our families because you're undercutting us."
I paused and sighed, "You're right that things have moved much faster than I thought, I'm sorry, that was a dodge. This is your lives and your pocket books, and you know how hard hit your industries have been. But I'm not undercutting anybody, I was selling at market rate before Stark undercut everybody," I said, which was objectively true, "Do you want me to send my guys to the unemployment line with you? Do you think that would help, make this whole country a little poorer, gouge a few more wages on the race to the bottom? I provide good, union jobs. Any of your guys get laid off, we need lots of men with experience who are willing to work hard. We're growing fast, we're going to keep growing. Batteries are the next big stage and you'd better believe I'd love to have your guys on the line."
"Half your jobs are in tiny little states like Wyoming and Montana."
That was objectively true, but I had to do it or else I'd be getting all my subsidies stripped by the Senate right now. Buying Senators by putting your industry in their cities is a time honored American tradition. "Look, I'm bringing jobs with me. We're repurposing a local Tesla solar factory and it's not going anywhere." There are, after all, still House seats in California.
After awhile, my conversations with the union leaders wound down. The frank truth was that I was the friendliest industrialist to labor in California or basically anywhere, for all my aspirations to monopolistic robber baron-ism. So while my actions were the cause of rising labor unrest, it was just hard to find anything particularly blameworthy in my actions. I was only doing what made sense in the market, I wasn't stiffing my employees, I just didn't have a bunch of bureaucratic fat to cut out and I didn't want to pay people to do nothing.
Eventually, I got a chance to speak to the crowd at large for a few minutes as it got to be time for everybody to go home for the evening.
"Folks," I said in the loud, clear voice I'd been graced with upon entry. "I'm so glad you're out here, demanding a response from me. I've tried to answer as many people as I could tonight, but I'll be back out tomorrow and for the next week if you need to talk to me. I know that the economic downturn has been hard on all of us and that you're worried about your industries, your jobs, and your futures. I want to make sure we can leave a better, more beautiful world for all of our children, not just my children. I'm continuing to call upon the U.S. leadership to undertake a real industrial policy so that Americans can get to work on building our country, I hope you'll join me in that. I hope you'll continue to challenge our feckless leaders in Washington, Republican and Democrat, who say there's nothing they can do. Folks, there's a lot that they could do if they were willing to make even the most basic of sacrifices like you did by coming out here today."
The crowd was much larger the next day.