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General Hao saw the hesitation on Ethan's face and grew agitated.
"Kid, don't be hasty about it. My daughter is two or three years older than you, certainly, but she is a genuinely beautiful young woman. In her day, the men who wanted to court her could have formed a queue that ran from the north end of Northridge Province to the southern border."
Ethan, regarding the general's own weathered features with open skepticism, privately reserved judgment on the queue.
In an earlier phase of his life, Ethan might have entertained the offer on a give-it-a-try basis. He was, after all, eighteen, and a beautiful older woman being offered by an enthusiastic general was not, on its face, an offensive prospect.
But matters had changed.
Ethan was, at this point, fairly thoroughly preoccupied with his own CEO. The office, the bet, the water cups, the lump on his skull that was still faintly tender to the touch. Whatever the state of that situation, it had crowded out his capacity to seriously consider anyone else. He could not, in honest conscience, accept a matchmaking introduction while his attention was so completely occupied elsewhere.
After a stretch of good-natured haggling, Ethan finally extracted himself from the general's enthusiasm, though not for free. The price of his escape was a complete set of battle armor, which Hao negotiated out of him with the relentless cheer of a man who had decided that if he could not have Ethan as a son-in-law, he would at least walk away with hardware.
Ethan did not, however, work entirely for nothing. In exchange, Hao committed that the Northridge Military District would, when Ethan needed it, temporarily lend him access to selected pieces of military equipment.
On the surface, a borrowing arrangement was a poor trade against a full set of battle armor.
But the surface was misleading. Ethan had J.A.R.V.I.S., the most accomplished reverse-engineering intelligence on the planet. Any piece of equipment the military district lent him would pass, however briefly, through J.A.R.V.I.S.'s analysis, and the manufacturing specifications would be in Ethan's database before the equipment was returned. A single loan was, functionally, a permanent acquisition of the underlying technology.
The trade was, in honest accounting, heavily in Ethan's favor.
He did not mention this to the general.
The materials returned to the Larkspur Avenue headquarters, and from there Ethan had Blackout shuttle the relevant portions down to Underground Laboratory One.
After considerable effort, the full set of Megatron's component materials was finally staged in the laboratory.
In the era before J.A.R.V.I.S., Ethan would have had to fabricate everything himself, a process that would have consumed every waking hour for months. With J.A.R.V.I.S. handling the manufacturing, Ethan's personal involvement was minimal. He spent two or three days transcribing the complete Megatron manufacturing specification from his own memory into New Future Technology Energy's most secure internal database, formatted for J.A.R.V.I.S.'s fabrication systems, and then handed the build off entirely.
He was not concerned about the security of storing the specification.
There were two reasons. First, with J.A.R.V.I.S. guarding the database, Ethan was confident that no entity on the planet could breach it. The same intelligence that had walked through the Aurelian Republic's national security infrastructure in a single hour was now the gatekeeper of New Future's internal systems.
Second, and more fundamentally, even a successful breach would yield nothing useful. A thief who somehow extracted the complete Megatron manufacturing specification would be able to build a flawless ten-meter chassis. And then they would have a flawless ten-meter chassis that did absolutely nothing, because the chassis was inert metal without a Spark, and the Spark could not be manufactured. It could only be obtained through the System. What the thief would build was a very expensive, very intricate statue.
"Sir," J.A.R.V.I.S. reported, "the Megatron manufacturing process is substantially more complex than any previous Transformer build. Full fabrication and assembly of the chassis will require approximately one month."
Ethan nodded. A month was acceptable. The chassis would be ready well before he had any actual need for it, which was the correct order of operations. Build the weapon before you need it, not after.
That evening, back at home, Ethan closed his bedroom door and opened the System interface to review the day's Prestige.
The media saturation of the previous days had done its work. The entire Republic now knew about the Hidden Dragon program.
Ethan had noticed a difference in the public's engagement this time. When he had revealed the battle armor and the reactor in earlier months, the public reaction had been surprise, but a slightly detached surprise. The armor and the reactor were impressive, but they were also remote from ordinary life. The average citizen of the Republic was not going to pilot powered armor or operate a fusion reactor. The inventions were spectacular but abstract.
The Hidden Dragon program was different, and the public understood why.
The reporting had made the implication plain: if the pilot succeeded, the probability of power outages across the Republic would drop sharply, and electricity costs would fall steeply. This was not abstract. This touched every household's monthly budget. This affected whether the lights stayed on during a winter cold snap. This was directly connected to ordinary people's daily material interests, and ordinary people had responded with correspondingly intense attention.
Ethan opened the Prestige display.
[Prestige: 2,176,100]
Note: Prestige accrual is influenced by the emotional reactions of individuals in the host's world.
He looked at the number and was quietly staggered.
Accounting for the Megatron purchase he had made earlier, the Hidden Dragon program had now generated, in total, over three million Prestige. A single program, a single sustained wave of public gratitude and awe, had produced more Prestige than the cumulative total of his entire System career before the opening ceremony.
The System, Ethan reflected, was essentially structured to compel him toward large-scale public benefit. The mechanic was transparent once you saw it. Genuine, widespread, materially-felt improvement in ordinary people's lives generated enormous Prestige. The System rewarded philanthropy at scale more richly than any other behavior. Ethan was, whether he had originally intended to be or not, being economically incentivized into becoming a great public benefactor.
He did not particularly mind.
He scrolled down.
The Tier-2 market was unchanged in content. But because he had crossed the cumulative-spend threshold with the Megatron purchase, the unlock conditions for the Tier-3 market had now appeared.
Tier-3 Market unlock: 2,000,000 Prestige.
Ethan grimaced.
Two million Prestige, simply to unlock purchasing access to the next market tier, before he had bought a single thing from it.
He had expected this. The System's pricing philosophy was relentlessly extractive, and the transition from one market tier to the next was precisely the kind of inflection point at which it would extract maximum value. The pattern had held from Tier-1 to Tier-2, and it was holding again.
After consideration, he decided not to unlock the Tier-3 market yet.
His current balance was a little over two million. If he spent the entire balance unlocking the next tier, he would have nothing left to actually purchase from it, which was the worst of both worlds. He would have access to a market he could not afford to shop in. There was also, still, a great deal of value remaining in the Tier-2 market that he had not yet acquired.
He would let the Prestige accumulate. The Hidden Dragon rollout was going to generate steady Prestige for months as it expanded across the Eastern Region. He could afford to be patient.
For now, he had a little over two million to allocate within the Tier-2 market.
His eyes settled first on the Vibranium specification.
Vibranium Synthesis Specification (one of the hardest metals in the Marvel framework, with notable kinetic and acoustic absorption properties) | 500,000 Prestige.
He purchased it without hesitation.
Vibranium was, in honest strategic terms, a foundational acquisition. Its kinetic-absorption properties alone made it transformative for armor design, for structural engineering, for a dozen applications Ethan could already foresee and several he could not. The five-hundred-thousand price was, for a material of that capability, a bargain. He authorized the purchase and felt the now-familiar rush of structured engineering knowledge flood into his memory.
Then he turned his attention to the Transformer catalog.
The most tempting entry, by a substantial margin, was the one he had been deliberately not looking at directly.
Optimus Prime Manufacturing Specification.
The undisputed leader of the Autobot faction. The strongest contemporary Autobot the System catalog offered. Ethan remembered, from the source materials embedded in his System knowledge, exactly what Optimus Prime was capable of. He had personally suppressed Megatron in direct combat. While gravely wounded, he had faced four battle-hardened Decepticons alone and destroyed all four. In partnership with another Transformer, he had killed one of the most ancient and powerful members of the entire Transformer lineage.
Optimus Prime was, by any measure available to Ethan, the single most capable combat unit in the catalog. More capable, even, than the Megatron currently being built in his laboratory.
Ethan hesitated over the entry for a long moment.
And then he did not buy it.
His reasoning was practical. On the surface, he faced no immediate crisis that demanded a combat unit of Optimus Prime's caliber. Maha had withdrawn. Sterling Energy was collapsing. The corporate war was, for the moment, won. His actual present-day bottleneck was not combat capability. It was construction throughput.
So instead of one supremely powerful Transformer, he purchased five standard-grade Transformers.
The reasoning was sound on multiple fronts.
First, construction. If five additional standard Transformers had been available during the building of Underground Laboratory One, the construction would have proceeded substantially faster. The future held a great deal more construction. The expansion of New Future Technology Energy's physical footprint, the additional reactor facilities, the transmission infrastructure, all of it would benefit from additional Transformer labor.
Second, contingency. As New Future's operations expanded across the Eastern Region and, eventually, beyond, the range of situations the company might need to respond to would widen. Having multiple Transformers on standby gave Ethan operational flexibility that a single elite unit could not.
Third, and not least, the government. The materials for Megatron's chassis had already strained Director Holt's procurement capacity to a noticeable degree. If Ethan came back to Holt again, this soon, with another massive specialized-materials request, he suspected the normally composed Director might genuinely lose his temper. Five standard Transformers, built from more conventional materials, would not require the same level of government procurement support.
He confirmed the purchase of the five standard Transformer specifications.
Five more chassis to build. Five more Sparks would be needed, eventually, to animate them, but the Sparks could be acquired incrementally as Prestige accumulated. For now, the specifications were in his database, and J.A.R.V.I.S. could begin fabrication once the Megatron build freed up laboratory capacity.
Ethan closed the System interface and lay back on his bed.
A foundational new metal. Five new Transformers in the pipeline. Megatron under construction. Vibranium in his knowledge base.
It had been a productive evening's shopping.
About ten days later, after intensive preparation by the entire New Future Technology Energy operations team, the energy line conversion for the whole of Ashford City was finally complete.
The conversion had been the largest single operational undertaking the young company had attempted. Every substation in the city had been retrofitted to accept seabed reactor output. Every transmission segment had been inspected and, where necessary, upgraded to handle the new load profile. The grid-management software had been rewritten to coordinate the reactor feed with the city's demand cycles. J.A.R.V.I.S. had overseen the technical integration; the four hundred New Future employees had executed the physical work; the state had provided regulatory clearance and coordination at every step.
Now, everything was staged. The moment the order was given, Ashford City's power supply would switch over from conventional thermal generation to seabed reactor power.
In the executive suite on the thirtieth floor, Yvette Caldwell stood at the window, looking out over the city that was about to become the first municipality in the world to draw its electricity from reactors at the bottom of the sea.
"Has the public notification been completed?" she asked.
Her secretary, standing nearby, answered promptly.
"Completed, President Caldwell. The media and every level of municipal government have been running notifications for the past two days. The public has been informed that there may be a brief interruption during the switchover. If a momentary outage does occur, it will not cause panic. People are expecting it."
Yvette nodded.
The notification had been essential. The conversion affected the electricity supply of an entire city. A switchover of this scale, if it had been attempted without adequate public warning, could have triggered confusion, economic disruption, and the kind of public alarm that turned a routine technical operation into a crisis. Two days of saturation notification had inoculated the city against that risk. The people of Ashford knew the switchover was coming, knew it might involve a brief flicker, and knew that the flicker was the sound of their electricity bills falling.
Yvette took a slow breath.
She picked up the phone on the desk and connected to the command room.
For a moment, she let herself feel the weight of it. The first city in the world. The culmination of three months of the most intense work of her professional life. The proof, about to be rendered in the most concrete possible form, that the impossible thing her Chairman had promised at the opening ceremony was real.
She spoke into the phone.
"Command room. Begin energy conversion. Now."