(Six months later)
The banner over the main entrance reads DATASTREAM DYNAMICS in letters tall enough to see from the street, and underneath, in a cleaner font that Gwen picked because she said it "didn't try too hard," a single word: EDEN.
I've walked past it four times this morning. Each time I tell myself I'm heading somewhere with a purpose, and each time I end up standing in front of it again, reading it like the letters might rearrange themselves if I look away too long.
They don't. It's still real.
Six months since the pier. Six months since Vanko, since the hospital, since Coulson's sedan pulled away with a man none of us fully understood strapped to a gurney in the back seat. I don't think about that night much anymore, not because it stopped mattering, but because everything after it moved so fast that the weight of it got buried under sheer momentum. Peter finished the power housing in March. Gwen locked the interface build in April. Tony's fabrication team turned out hardware faster than any of us expected, because Tony doesn't know how to do anything at a normal pace, and apparently that includes manufacturing.
And now it's launch day, and the building smells like fresh paint and coffee that somebody brewed too strong, and there are people setting up camera rigs in the lobby who keep asking me where the media lounge is, and I keep pointing them the wrong direction because I genuinely don't know where Olivia put it.
This is actually happening.
I check my Digivice out of habit. Nothing urgent. No alerts, no rogue signatures, no Shadowstone pings. Just the clock, ticking toward 2:00 PM, and the faint background hum of my partner signatures all clustered together in the Digi-Home, probably arguing about something I'll hear about later. Renamon's signature sits apart from the rest, the way it usually does, closer to Gwen's end of the readout than mine.
A text sits unread further down the screen, from Jessica: Can't make it, stuck helping my mom with something today. Watching the livestream the second it starts. Proud of you, Ethan. I type back a quick thumbs up and let it go. She'll get the full story tonight either way.
The main floor is already filling up. Screens mounted along every wall cycle through EDEN's promotional material, the stuff Olivia's team and the Stark Industries PR division spent weeks putting together. Sleek shots of the interface. A thirty-second demo reel that makes the whole thing look like science fiction, which, to be fair, it sort of is. The pre-registration counter in the corner of each screen ticks upward every few seconds, and I catch myself watching the number climb the same way I used to watch my Digi-Coin balance after a good supply box haul.
Except this number has six more digits than anything I've ever pulled from a box.
I find the team in the control room on the second floor, which is less a "room" and more a repurposed conference space that Peter and Tony turned into a nerve center over the last week. Monitors cover the far wall, each one tracking a different system: server load, regional latency, power draw from the arc reactor array, interface response times. It looks like mission control for a space launch, and I'm pretty sure Peter designed it that way on purpose, because he's Peter.
Tony's leaning against the center console with a coffee mug that has the Stark Industries logo on one side and a sticky note on the other that reads "TOUCH MY MUG AND DIE" in what I'm fairly sure is Gwen's handwriting.
"There he is." Tony lifts the mug in my direction without standing up. "The kid who built a world and then spent the morning staring at a banner instead of running his own launch."
"I wasn't staring. I was inspecting. Quality control."
"Four times?"
"It's a big banner."
Peter's hunched over a terminal near the window, running something that involves a lot of green text scrolling very fast. He looks up when I walk in, and the grin on his face is the kind that comes from someone who already checked everything twice and liked what he found both times.
"All green across the board." Peter spins his chair to face me. "Power systems are nominal, the reactor array is holding steady at about sixty percent capacity, and we haven't even started pushing real user load yet. Tony's team built the housing tighter than the original specs called for, so we've got headroom."
"And the encoding layer?"
"Running clean, same as always." Peter doesn't look up from his terminal. "Still don't know how half of it actually works under the hood, but it works, so I stopped asking a long time ago."
I let that sit without adding anything to it. Some questions are easier to leave alone than to answer honestly.
Tony tips his mug toward Peter without looking at him. "That's what happens when you let actual engineers refine a teenager's napkin sketch."
"It wasn't a napkin sketch. It was a detailed schematic."
"On graph paper. With crayon highlights."
"They were colored pencils, and the color coding was extremely logical."
I leave them to it. They've been doing this for months, the back-and-forth that sounds like an argument but functions more like two people who respect each other too much to say so directly. Tony builds Peter up by pretending to tear him down, and Peter earns it by refusing to flinch. It works. I don't need to be in the middle of it.
Gwen's at her own station near the left wall, running a final pass on the interface layer. Her screen shows EDEN's landing environment, the first thing a user sees when they put the headset on. She's made tiny adjustments to it every day for the last two weeks, tweaks so small that nobody else on the team can tell the difference. She can, though, and that's always been enough reason for her.
I pull up a chair next to her. She doesn't look up right away, her fingers still moving across the display, nudging something a pixel to the left.
I lean in to see what she's fussing over now.
"You know nobody's going to notice if that icon is two pixels off center."
"I'll notice." She finishes the adjustment, leans back, and looks at me for the first time. "And then it'll bother me for the entire launch event, and I'll be the one standing in the back twitching while everyone else celebrates."
"Fair enough."
She looks past me at the main monitors, at the numbers climbing, at the server readouts holding steady, at the whole operation running the way it's supposed to run. Something in her expression softens, just slightly, the same way it does when she finishes a problem she's been working on for a long time and the answer turns out to be exactly what she thought it would be.
"We actually built this thing, Ethan."
"Yeah." I look at the same screens she's looking at. "Yeah, we did."
Neither of us says anything else about it. We don't need to. The screens say it for us, and the screens don't lie.
The door opens and Olivia walks in with a tablet tucked under one arm and the kind of composure that suggests she's already handled six emergencies this morning and none of them were interesting enough to mention. She surveys the room, registers everyone's position, and nods once, like a general confirming her troops are where she left them.
"Pre-registration just crossed four hundred thousand." She sets the tablet on the edge of the console without ceremony. "The Stark Industries cross-promotion drove about sixty percent of that. Social engagement is trending above projections, and three of the major tech outlets are running live coverage."
Tony raises his mug. "You're welcome."
"You're acknowledged." Olivia's eyes move to me. "We're on track. The infrastructure team confirmed the satellite feed is stable, and the press briefing went clean this morning. No surprises."
"No surprises is my favorite kind of surprise."
"It should be." The corner of her mouth tightens in what I've learned to recognize as her version of a smile. "You've earned a boring day, Ethan. Try to enjoy it."
She leaves the way she came in, already pulling up something else on the tablet before the door closes behind her. Olivia doesn't linger. She never has. She shows up, delivers the information that matters, and trusts the people in the room to do what they were hired to do. I still don't fully understand what drives her, what she gets out of all this beyond the investment return, but today isn't the day to untangle that. Today the machine runs, and she helped build it, and that's enough.
I slip away from the control room and find a quiet hallway near the stairwell, one of those in-between spaces that nobody decorates because nobody's supposed to stay in them. I lean against the wall and pull out my Digivice.
"You guys watching?"
Gatomon's face appears on the small screen, close enough that I can see her whiskers twitch. "We've been watching all morning. You've walked past that banner four times."
"Five, actually. The fifth one was subtle."
"Nothing you do is subtle." BlackGatomon shoves into frame next to Gatomon, their ears overlapping. "Are we going to talk about how you've been pacing like a cat in a box, or are we pretending that's not happening?"
"I'm not pacing. I'm circulating."
"You're nervous."
"I'm not nervous. I'm... alert."
Gatomon's ear flicks. "You can be both, you know. It's not a character flaw to care about something this much."
I don't have a comeback for that one, mostly because she's right and she knows it, and saying so out loud would just give BlackGatomon ammunition for the next three weeks.
Agumon's voice comes from somewhere off-screen. "I think it's going to go great, Ethan. You worked really hard on this, and everyone here believes in you."
"Thanks, Agumon."
Gabumon, quieter, just behind Agumon. "He's right. You should be proud of what you've built. Not many people could do what you did."
Cutemon bounces into frame, nearly knocking Gatomon sideways. "This is so exciting, chu! Everyone is going to love EDEN, chu! I just know it!"
"Easy, Cutemon. You're going to break my Digivice screen from the inside."
"Sorry, chu!"
I look at them, all of them crammed into the little Digivice display, jostling for space, ears and horns and fur overlapping in a way that shouldn't work but somehow does. My partners. My family, if I'm being honest about it, the kind of family you don't get born into but end up building anyway, one weird, impossible piece at a time.
"Thanks, guys." I keep it short because anything longer would crack something I'd rather keep sealed until after the launch. "I'll check in again once we go live."
I pocket the Digivice and walk back toward the control room.
The hallway opens into the main floor, and the energy in the building has shifted since I left. The camera crews are in position. The monitors on the walls have switched from promo reels to a live countdown, white numbers on a dark background, ticking down toward 2:00 PM. Staff members move between stations with the quiet efficiency of people who've rehearsed this exact sequence a dozen times and know their marks.
Peter catches my eye from across the room and gives me a thumbs-up. Gwen's still at her station, but she's leaned back now, arms crossed, watching the countdown instead of her interface. Tony hasn't moved from the console, but the mug is down and his hands are on the controls, and there's something in his posture that I've only seen a handful of times, the stillness of a man who built something worth paying attention to and is about to watch the world agree with him.
Olivia stands near the back wall, tablet at her side, watching all of us the way she always does.
I take my spot at the front of the room, where the main display waits. The countdown reads 00:01:47. Then 00:01:46. Then 00:01:45.
Nobody speaks. Nobody needs to.
The room holds its breath, and for once, so do I.
***
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