~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For 40 advanced chapters, visit my Patreon:
Patreon - Twilight_scribe1
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After sending off the butcher's delivery boy—who spent all day dreaming about petting a tiger—Henry prepared Katie's breakfast and lunch. With the now-overdue videotapes in hand, he planned to swing by Blockbuster first before heading to Stark Pictures for work.
One of the biggest perks of being a CEO was the lack of fixed working hours. No clocking in or out—come when you wanted, leave when you felt like it.
The downside was that people tended to treat you as being on call twenty-four hours a day. Once something went wrong, they'd dial the company-issued mobile phone immediately. There was no hiding.
Fortunately, since he'd only just taken office, Stark Pictures—whose main business was equipment rentals and sales—was practically a nobody in Hollywood. There weren't many "urgent crises" that had to reach Henry after hours.
The supercomputer installation was being handled by professionals. Henry's role was to monitor progress and solve problems; it wasn't as if the entire operation would grind to a halt just because he wasn't present.
That was why he could leisurely drive out, take his time with breakfast, and then head to Blockbuster to return the tapes.
Early in the morning, Blockbuster wasn't open yet—but they had a return drop box. You just tossed the tapes in, and when the store opened, an employee would log the return. There was no need to match their business hours. After all, since they stayed open late, Blockbuster's opening time was much later than normal office hours.
Once that was taken care of, Henry finally arrived at Stark Pictures to supervise the engineers assembling the supercomputer codenamed "Hollywood Kid."
To be honest, Tony Stark might possess a genius brain—but he had zero talent when it came to naming things.
Iron Man? Coined by the media.
JARVIS, the first AI? Named after the family's old butler.
FRIDAY, the second AI? A supporting native character from Robinson Crusoe.
The Jericho Missile? Named after the ancient city north of Jerusalem, over three thousand years old, known in the Bible as the "City of Palms."
In the Old Testament, Jericho was destroyed by God, and anyone who tried to rebuild it would be cursed. That was why a missile bore its name.
Then there was his daughter, Morgan—a name so common among women it was practically a market staple.
The name first appeared in Arthurian legend as Morgan le Fay, which in French roughly translates to Fairy Morgan. Yet in those legends, she was often portrayed as an evil sorceress. It made one wonder what Tony expected of his daughter—perhaps that if she met a scumbag, she'd have the power to make him regret it?
Later, the AI Karen used in Spider-Man's suit—by that time, "Karen" had already become slang for a "privileged, demanding woman," hardly the image of a warm, friendly neighborhood big sister.
It carried a strong vibe of "If you screw around, I'll fry you," which made the existence of a minor-restriction mode seem perfectly natural.
And after Tony Stark's death, the AI that controlled most of Stark Industries' technology—EDITH, short for Even Dead, I'm The Hero—had a name so flamboyantly narcissistic it practically screamed Stark.
In short, Tony's naming skills weren't far removed from outright trolling. Which made it easy to understand why the supercomputer Stark Industries was building on the West Coast ended up being called "Hollywood Kid," and exactly who it was mocking.
As the butt of the joke, Henry adopted a simple philosophy: the one with the money is the boss. Tony Stark was paying for it—Henry was freeloading—so enduring a bit of verbal ribbing was hardly unbearable.
Caring about face but not substance wasn't something Henry, who considered himself a small fry, could really comprehend.
Besides, the server-grade computer he'd hand-built at home didn't even come close to a proper supercomputer's performance.
Even though Hollywood Kid was primarily designed for image processing, it wasn't useless for other tasks either.
Once Henry got access permissions and opened a backdoor, he could use it however he liked—so long as he didn't hog too many resources and draw attention.
And with a supercomputer as a foundation, the iteration speed for encoding and decoding upgrades would skyrocket.
Otherwise, using off-the-shelf consumer hardware meant high-quality video playback would stutter—not because of network lag, but because the hardware simply couldn't keep up. Watching that was painful.
In that situation, just testing playback effects wasted enormous amounts of time waiting for machines to crunch data, invisibly slowing progress. With better hardware available, who would ever say no?
If anyone was more eager than Tony Stark to see the supercomputer completed, it was Henry.
Still, he didn't interfere with the engineers' work. After all, the East Coast hadn't even finished shipping all the components yet—rushing would be pointless.
Beyond monitoring the supercomputer's assembly and the compilation progress of post-production software, Henry spent most of his time pondering this question:
If I were to build a supercomputer myself, how much hidden tech could I actually bring into play?
Although he was one of the designers of Hollywood Kid, what he'd contributed hadn't exceeded the technological limits of the era by much. For example, the chip fabrication process was still at the micron level, not nanometers.
In other words, if he truly went all out, he could build a computer that outperformed Hollywood Kid across every metric.
The real bottlenecks were size and power consumption.
His hand-built home server was only slightly larger than a standard desktop and consumed under 350 watts. Hollywood Kid, by contrast, was roughly the size of a twenty-foot shipping container—a terrifying power-hungry monster. The power cables alone were as thick as an arm.
Its electricity consumption was so extreme that Tony Stark briefly considered building a large-scale Arc Reactor on the West Coast as well—something that, on the East Coast, was still strictly a laboratory prototype.
The palladium-based Arc Reactor had been a project led by Howard Stark. It had only ever been used inside Stark Industries' labs and had never entered commercial production.
As for the miniature Arc Reactor meant for powered armor? That thing didn't even exist yet—Tony probably hadn't even thought about it.
Considering that Arc Reactor technology was essentially cold fusion—a form of nuclear fusion that no one in Henry's pre-transmigration world could actually achieve—it wasn't something you could mess with casually, like a diesel generator.
In the United States, nuclear power plants were regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Fuel procurement, facility construction—building one without proper authorization was a straight ticket to prison.
Not to mention nuclear waste disposal. You couldn't just toss it in a trash can or flush it down the sewer.
And Tony Stark planned to build it inside the city, at the Stark Pictures building. Convincing the Los Angeles city government and appeasing city council members alone would cost a fortune.
After calculating the licensing costs, construction expenses, and long-term maintenance fees, Tony Stark quickly abandoned the idea of building a commercial Arc Reactor on the West Coast.
Better to just pay the electric bill—it was cheaper.
Though Henry regretted not getting a look at the Arc Reactor's blueprints or the real thing, the disappointment passed quickly.
From his recent dealings with Tony Stark, one thing was clear: don't mistake him for a pure research genius and a business idiot. This guy was sharp as hell.
If Henry so much as glanced at the Arc Reactor schematics, how much knowledge would he be forced to cough up in return?
Who knew whether Tony's "accidental" slips and later reversals were just bait, deliberately cast to reel someone in.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
🎉 Power Stone Goal Announcement! 🎉
I'll release one bonus chapter for every 500 Power Stones we hit!"
Let me know what should I do
Your support means everything—let's crush these goals together! Keep voting, and let the stones pile up! 🚀
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~