Marvel: A Lazy-Ass Superman

After leaving Alexei—the super soldier—in Sokovia, Henry and Katie returned to Los Angeles.

Whether befriending the Red Guardian, who seemed intent on operating independently, would prove beneficial or troublesome was difficult for Henry to judge.

After all, Alexei’s life experiences had already diverged significantly from the version Henry remembered from the movies before his transmigration.

Without spending ten or twenty years rotting away in prison and having the rough edges of his personality worn down, this version of the man couldn’t be predicted based on the image of the middle-aged, washed-up uncle from the future films.

For now, all Henry could do was wait and see.

On the American West Coast, it wasn’t even noon yet.

After unloading the armor at Sheep Cave Valley Laboratory and before he even had time to clean it, Henry sent Katie back to the apartment building.

He hadn’t forgotten that he was still a working man.

So off he went to Stark Pictures.

At present, the studio’s most important project was the computer-generated visual effects for The Matrix.

4K cameras had finally reached the stage of commercial viability, though hard-drive capacity had become the new bottleneck.

Storage capacity was either a market problem or something Stark Industries would eventually solve.

For now, the drives were simply small and needed frequent replacement, but they already met the practical requirements of film production.

Hard drives weren’t significantly cheaper than film stock, but they had one major advantage: they could be reused.

If you ruined a roll of film, it was ruined forever.

A hard drive, on the other hand, could simply have unwanted footage deleted to free up space.

Another benefit of digital cameras was that each shot existed as a separate file.

Compared to sorting through physical film reels, the workflow was dramatically simpler.

And when it came to visual effects production, digital footage was cheaper to work with because there was no need to convert film into digital assets first.

As a result, the market hadn’t yet become a battlefield between digital and traditional film.

Most directors simply chose equipment according to creative needs, while producers made decisions based on budget considerations.

Now that the technology had reached the stage of user adoption and market promotion, Henry’s usefulness had diminished considerably.

Ironically, from a business perspective, this was where the real war began.

Establishing a foothold for digital cinematography within the entrenched film-camera market—and gradually expanding its influence—required meticulous business strategy and a sustainable commercial model.

Fortunately, Stark Pictures employed plenty of people passionate about exactly that.

Having spent far longer immersed in Hollywood than Henry ever had, they knew far better where to attack and how to proceed.

Since the Kryptonian’s heart wasn’t really in business management anyway, he happily treated himself as an idiot who understood nothing except technology and watched his subordinates conquer territory on his behalf.

Besides, as CEO, even if he never stole credit from his employees, people would still praise him for ”excellent leadership.”

That was good enough.

Having stayed away from the office for more than two days, however, Henry still had to deal with accumulated paperwork.

Three minutes later, the entire backlog had been processed.

He instructed Black Fatty to distribute the documents to their respective departments.

In the past, he would deliberately slow down and pretend the work took longer.

Now he didn’t even bother acting anymore.

As long as he didn’t demonstrate super-speed in front of people, everyone could imagine whatever explanation they liked.

For all he knew, everyone already assumed he was the kind of executive who blindly signed anything placed in front of him.

If that was their impression, there was no point trying to change it.

Honestly, the misunderstanding was convenient.

Wearing a new pair of glasses, Henry appeared to be handling company business as usual through his computer.

From time to time, he monitored development progress hidden behind the company’s internal Git repositories and occasionally offered guidance to teams falling behind schedule.

In reality, the retinal projection system built into his glasses was connected to his own private servers.

The twenty-three remaining entries on S.H.I.E.L.D.’s list had all been tagged with trackers, either on their persons or somewhere nearby.

Now Henry was analyzing the data those trackers had transmitted.

As expected, some trackers had failed.

Fortunately, each target had been assigned multiple devices. Every group still had at least one or two functioning trackers providing useful information.

None of the twenty-three targets had completely slipped out of sight.

And by ”useful information,” Henry meant that after one or two weeks of data collection, patterns had begun emerging.

Much like ordinary office workers, these people displayed highly repetitive routines.

At fixed times every day, they traveled to specific locations, wandered within limited areas for extended periods, and then returned to another location at predictable hours.

Occasional deviations from those routes could be compared against maps and business listings.

Doing so revealed whether someone had gone to a bar, restaurant, strip club, or somewhere else entirely.

From that, Henry could infer personality traits and behavioral tendencies.

One particularly interesting discovery was that, after meeting Henry, the entire group had relocated to Toronto.

Despite being a Canadian city, Toronto was often treated as America’s backyard—a status never extended to Canada’s French-speaking regions.

By infiltrating Toronto City Hall’s administrative network, Henry discovered that the building these twenty-three individuals regularly visited was registered under a company called Cybertek.

At first, the name didn’t ring a bell.

Then he remembered the S.H.I.E.L.D. agent who had arranged the original meeting between himself and the twenty-three candidates:

John Garrett.

That realization immediately brought Cybertek’s background back to mind.

In Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., John Garrett—one of Hydra’s leaders operating under the codename The Clairvoyant—was chiefly known for spearheading the Centipede Project and advancing the Deathlok Program.

As for the Centipede Project’s core technology, the Extremis Virus, Henry had no idea whether it existed yet.

He certainly hadn’t asked Tony Stark whether he had ever slept with a biologist and casually left behind a brilliant equation afterward.

The Deathlok Program, however, was another matter entirely.

Cybertek was the organization responsible for researching it.

And they had begun surprisingly early.

After nearly dying in an incident back in 1990, John Garrett initiated the Deathlok project as a means of saving himself.

Although Henry couldn’t confirm whether Garrett’s history matched the television version exactly, Cybertek’s connection to the man was almost certainly real.

Digging deeper into publicly available information about the company uncovered something that genuinely surprised him.

Cybertek was engaged in constant legal battles—mostly patent infringement lawsuits—with an American corporation.

That corporation was Omni Consumer Products, commonly known as OCP.

Headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, OCP was one of the city’s largest industrial conglomerates.

Cybertek’s primary public business involved prosthetic limbs.

OCP also produced prosthetics—but maintained extensive robotics research divisions as well.

And when people heard ”robotics research,” they shouldn’t imagine twenty-first-century humanoid robots like Boston Dynamics’ Atlas or Sony’s QRIO.

Those technologies belonged to a later era.

In reality, industrial robotic arms used on automated manufacturing lines also fell under robotics engineering.

For a major corporation based in Detroit—the Motor City—to specialize in such technology wasn’t surprising at all.

The reason OCP caught Henry’s attention was because it reminded him of something important.

In this Marvel universe, one of science fiction’s most iconic film franchises had never appeared.

RoboCop.

Both companies had pursued the same basic concept:

Using the bodies of dead soldiers or police officers and reviving them through advanced cybernetic augmentation.

For Cybertek, that infamous effort was the Deathlok Program.

For OCP, it was the project that would eventually become RoboCop—though no rumors of its existence had surfaced yet.

It served as a reminder that the hidden technologies lurking beneath the surface of this world weren’t limited to future Marvel heroes and supervillains.

The number of dangerous players operating in the shadows was far greater than that.

In Henry’s mental threat assessment, the world’s danger level quietly rose another notch.

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