The last thing Elias Thorne remembered was the blinding, existential clarity of cold nitrogen gas filling his lungs. A catastrophic failure in the experimental cryo-sleep chamber—a project he'd poured his life savings and questionable academic credentials into—had ended his run on his original Earth with a sterile, almost ironic fizzle. He was forty-two, perpetually broke, and universally ignored. His great ambition—to solve complex thermodynamic equations just for the joy of it—had yielded nothing but debt.
Then came the noise. Not the silence he'd expected, but a horrific, echoing cacophony that felt like his skull was being violently compressed. It was the sound of a world too loud, too bright, and far too sticky. He tried to articulate a protest, a final, philosophical observation on the unfairness of it all, but only a wet, furious scream escaped.
He was being held by a blur of white uniform and sterile scent. His perspective was all wrong—low, distorted, and dependent. He was small. Disturbingly small.
Wait. The thought didn't form as a simple word, but as a complex, multi-layered data analysis: Sensory input suggests an infantile state. Auditory feedback identifies standard hospital environment. Tactile receptors indicate a high-thread-count cotton garment. Conclusion: Rebirth hypothesis is $99.98\%$ probable.
His newborn brain, however, didn't just calculate this probability; it simultaneously traced the likely physical mechanism of the sensory registration, the historical context of the hospital environment, and a rough $T$-cell count of the nurse holding him. It was a terrifying, instantaneous cascade of information that dwarfed anything Elias Thorne had ever experienced.
It was then he understood the true nature of his transfer. He hadn't just been reborn; his consciousness had been uploaded and debugged by something infinitely vast and, critically, his cognitive processing power had been replaced with something monstrously efficient. He didn't just feel smart; he felt like a universal compiler running on infinite bandwidth.
He felt like Rick Sanchez.
A woman with eyes the color of old gold and hair like spun midnight descended, her face etched with a combination of exhaustion and aristocratic reserve. She spoke to the nurse in flawless French, her voice a low, melodic purr.
"Mon petit… Lucian," she whispered, taking the bundle.
Lucian Rothschild. Born June 12th, 1989. London, England.
The first five years of Lucian's life were a maddening exercise in patience and intellectual suppression. He was trapped in a body that couldn't properly articulate the complex truths his mind effortlessly processed. He spent his infancy analyzing the architecture of the Rothschild estate, calculating the exact tensile strength of the Persian rugs, and, most importantly, modeling the future.
The Rothschild family resources were staggering—a deep, complex web of historical wealth, political influence, and financial leverage. It was the perfect substrate for his ambition.
But the ambition itself was now different. The Rick-level intelligence wasn't just good at math; it was fundamentally nihilistic in its scope, yet pragmatic in its execution. He didn't want to solve one equation; he wanted to control the variables of reality itself.
He also had a crucial piece of meta-knowledge: The MCU.
1989. The timeline was a glorious sandbox. Tony Stark was just a reckless teenager. S.H.I.E.L.D. was operating in the shadows. The Tesseract was dormant. The Age of Miracles hadn't truly begun. The technology of this world was hopelessly archaic to him.
By age three, Lucian was speaking six languages perfectly, designing complex algorithms in his head, and subtly guiding his family's hedge fund investments to capitalize on early tech booms, attributing the advice to "a very smart dream."
At five, he was a prodigy deemed "borderline miraculous" by every tutor the family employed. He demanded access to advanced physics textbooks, not to read them, but to spot the flaws in the foundational mathematics.
"The entire Standard Model is missing a fundamental symmetry layer, Tante Marie," he announced over Earl Grey tea one afternoon, sketching a Unified Field Theory concept onto a napkin. "We need a non-abelian gauge group for the strong-electroweak interaction, but the current model treats gravity as a separate entity. This whole paper… it's lazy."
His intellect was both a terrible gift and a secret weapon. He realized that the greatest barrier to global domination wasn't political; it was technological bandwidth. If he could accelerate the timeline's tech by twenty years, he wouldn't just be rich; he'd be untouchable.
By the time Lucian was nine (1998), he had convinced his grandfather, Lord Alistair Rothschild, a man whose skepticism was legendary, to front the seed capital for his "research venture." Lucian had done this not through persuasion, but through demonstration.
He didn't present a business plan; he presented a cure.
He isolated a stable, self-replicating nanite structure capable of targeting and dissolving malignant cancer cells with 99.997% precision, leaving healthy tissue untouched. He called the compound Aether-Alpha.
Alistair watched his grandson, this unnervingly intense boy who never seemed to blink, feed the data into an anonymous peer-reviewed journal. The initial trials, which Lucian facilitated through discrete family contacts and highly controlled labs, were revolutionary.
"Lucian," his grandfather asked, pale, staring at the clinical trial results that promised to eradicate the modern world's most feared disease. "What do you call this operation? The foundation?"
Lucian, perched on a ridiculously expensive leather armchair, looked up from a schematic for a plasma containment field. He had already calculated the ethical pitfalls, the market disruption, and the geopolitical storm this announcement would cause.
"We don't call it a foundation, Grandfather. We call it an Industry."
He typed the name onto a screen, the letters bold and stark: FRONTIER INDUSTRIES.
"The world, Grandfather, is stagnating. It waits for incremental improvement. Frontier Industries will not wait. We cross the borders of what is possible, economically, medically, and physically. We are the new edge."
The initial goal wasn't profit from the cure itself—that was too messy, too politically dangerous to monopolize fully. The goal was to establish the company's reputation and secure unlimited capital access.
The Aether-Alpha patent was granted to a newly created non-profit wing of Frontier. The Rothschild name guaranteed credibility; the nanite cure guaranteed instant global reverence and a flood of government research grants.
With the reputation secured, Lucian pivoted Frontier Industries toward his true technological ambition: Manufacturing the Impossible.
His flagship project, launched in secret in a discreet Icelandic facility (chosen for its geothermal power source and low seismic activity), was code-named Prometheus Protocol.
The focus: Synthetic Organ Generation.
Lucian understood that the next great medical industry would not be cures, but replacements. He designed the Bio-Fabricator Unit (BFU-1), a machine that transcended simple 3D printing. It was a molecular assembler integrated with advanced biological scaffolds.
The BFU-1 didn't print layers of material; it used focused sonic and magnetic fields to precisely assemble progenitor cells from a synthesized bio-ink into fully functioning, immune-matched organs—hearts, livers, kidneys—in a matter of hours, ready for immediate transplantation.
By 2002, when Lucian was thirteen, Frontier Industries, leveraging the massive goodwill from Aether-Alpha and the strategic pricing of the BFU-1 units (sold only to accredited hospital consortiums for a high fee, but with the promise of eliminating transplant waiting lists), had exploded.
The company wasn't just profitable; it was necessary. Every major nation was either buying Frontier tech or trying to steal it.
Lucian, operating entirely behind a curtain of hand-picked, intensely loyal executives, was already looking past medical tech. He was using the astronomical profits to fund what he called the "Iron Veil Initiative"—the development of advanced, energy-efficient robotics, miniaturized arc reactors, and a global, encrypted, high-speed quantum communication network that would completely bypass existing internet infrastructure.
The goal wasn't just wealth anymore; it was strategic control of the future timeline.
By 2007, just months before his eighteenth birthday, Lucian received the official valuation report. He glanced at the number and felt nothing but the intellectual satisfaction of accurate forecasting.
Frontier Industries Valuation: $500,000,000,000 USD.
Five hundred billion dollars.
The MCU was about to meet its new, incredibly well-funded, and frighteningly smart wild card. Iron Man was still tinkering in his garage, unaware that a teenager with the mind of a drunken, universe-hopping scientist was already sitting on technology that made the Arc Reactor look like a car battery.
Lucian smiled, a cold, calculating curve of the lips that held none of the warmth of youth. He had the money. He had the power.
Now, he thought, picking up a schematic for a new kind of space-faring propulsion system, let's see what we can do about those pesky aliens that are coming.