The morning light filtering through the grimy transom window found Emma Frost waking up on a slowly deflating air mattress. She sat up with a groan, the unfamiliar ache in her back a stark reminder of her new, bizarre reality. The baggy sweatpants felt alien against her skin. The air smelled of concrete dust and ozone, a scent so far removed from the perfumed halls of her father's estate that it might as well have been from another planet.
"Good morning, Your Majesty," my voice, now permanently deeper, echoed from across the workshop. I was sitting at my workbench, a holographic schematic of a complex data algorithm hovering over my hands. I slid a steaming styrofoam cup and a paper bag onto a nearby crate. "Your royal breakfast has arrived."
She stood, stretching with a feline grace that even my borrowed clothes couldn't hide, and peered into the bag. It contained a bagel with cream cheese and a black coffee. Her expression was one of profound disappointment. "This is a step up from cold pizza, Sterling, but only just. I assume the royal chefs are on strike?"
"The royal chefs are also the royal engineers, the royal security, and the royal janitors," I shot back with a grin. "We're a little understaffed at the moment."
She took the bagel, her business-like demeanor returning as she surveyed our "headquarters." "If we're going to do this, we need to be official. This... partnership... requires a name. Something that speaks to our potential without revealing our hand."
"I was thinking 'Sterling Industries'," I joked, just to see her reaction.
She gave me a look of such withering disdain it could have frozen lava. "Absolutely not. It's egotistical and sounds like a mining company from the 1950s. It needs to be clean, forward-thinking. Something like 'Apex Dynamics' or 'Nexus Solutions'."
"Too generic," I countered. "Sounds like every other soulless tech startup that goes bust in six months. It needs to reflect both sides of our operation. The power and the product." I leaned back, considering it. "My abilities... they're about energy. An aura of power, you could say. And what we're going to build is the future. Innovations."
Her eyes lit up. She walked over, her mind clearly already turning the name over, examining it from every corporate angle. "Aura Innovations," she tested the words. "It's strong. Vaguely mystical, which will intrigue the tech blogs, but corporate enough to be taken seriously by investors. It has brand potential. I like it."
"Then Aura Innovations it is," I said. "Raphael, begin the digital incorporation process. Delaware C Corp. Register me as the founder and CEO. List Ms. Frost here as Chief Operating Officer."
Emma stared at the server, then back at me, a flicker of true awe in her eyes. It was one thing to be told about my abilities; it was another to see a corporate entity being willed into existence by a disembodied voice from a glowing black box. "You have an AI."
"She's the brains of the operation," I said. "Raphael, meet Emma. Emma, Raphael."
Emma simply nodded, accepting the reality of a talking super-server with unnerving speed. Her mind was already calculating its potential. "While your pet AI handles the paperwork, I'll need seed money. I can't walk into a bank with a fake ID and a sob story. I'll need to open a corporate account, and that requires a legitimate initial deposit."
"Already handled," I said, sliding my tablet across the workbench. It showed the balance of my Monero wallet, now converted into just over fifty thousand US dollars. "It's not much, but it's clean and untraceable."
She looked at the figure, then at me. "You're full of surprises, Mr. Sterling."
"You have no idea," I replied. "So, COO Frost. What's our first move? We can't exactly start selling energy absorption technology or psionic dampeners."
"No," she agreed, her mind already working, plotting a corporate takeover of the world from a dusty garage. "We start small. Something revolutionary but digestible. Something we can patent and license for a fortune, building our capital and reputation before we unveil the truly... impossible stuff. World-changing tech attracts world-ending attention. The last thing we need is S.H.I.E.L.D., Stark, and probably Doctor Doom kicking down our door because we invented cold fusion on day one."
I swiped the screen, bringing up a few of the non-military tech schematics I'd developed with Raphael, based on Thorne's knowledge. "I have three options ready to prototype. An advanced medical scanner that can pre-diagnose cellular decay. A small-scale, high-efficiency clean energy source. And this."
I highlighted the final file. "A lossless data compression algorithm. It can reduce file sizes by 90% with zero degradation of quality. It would revolutionize data storage, streaming, everything."
Emma's eyes locked onto the third option, a predatory gleam in her gaze. It was the perfect opening move. Not a revolution, a quiet coup.
"That one," she said, her voice a low, excited whisper. "We start with that. It's brilliant. It's not a tangible threat, so the giants won't try to crush us; they'll try to buy us. We patent it through Aura Innovations. I know exactly who to license it to first. A few back-channel deals with some mid-level streaming companies and cloud storage providers. We'll make them rich, and they'll make us legitimate. We build a web of dependencies. By the time the big players like Stark and Hammer realize what's happened, we won't just own the market; we'll be the market."
I looked at her, at the fierce intelligence burning in her eyes, at the way she effortlessly mapped out a corporate strategy that would take years for anyone else to conceive. I was the King, the one with the power and the vision. But she? She was the one who would build the kingdom, brick by bloody brick.
"Alright, COO Frost," I said with a grin. "Get ready to conquer."