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Seeing Bumblebee parked at the side of the personal laboratory, Ethan was suddenly struck by an obvious practical question.
The personal laboratory's entrance was approximately two meters tall, which was sufficient for human personnel and for vehicle-form Transformers. But a vehicle-form Bumblebee was approximately three meters long. A robot-form Bumblebee was six meters tall. And the Mark-class armor units that the facility had to accommodate were considerably larger still. None of those configurations could comfortably pass through a standard utility door.
"J.A.R.V.I.S. How exactly are the larger units supposed to enter and exit?"
"Sir. To accommodate the various physical configurations of the Transformer class, and to provide rapid deployment access for the Mark-series armors, the rear section of the laboratory contains a vertical-lift helicopter platform and a horizontal catapult launch rail. Both surface through concealed apertures in unoccupied lots adjacent to the entry wasteland. The apertures are sealed when not in active deployment and are functionally indistinguishable from undeveloped terrain when closed."
Ethan, hearing the foresight built into the facility, found himself thinking, not for the first time, that the hundred thousand Prestige he had spent acquiring J.A.R.V.I.S. at the very beginning of his System career remained the single most cost-effective decision he had ever made.
He turned, walked deeper into the personal laboratory, and stopped.
Beside the laboratory's main work area, in a recessed alcove that had been specifically prepared for them, stood the Mark V and the Mark VI armor units. Both were in upright storage configuration, in perfect condition, polished, ready for deployment. The Mark VII flight pod was racked separately along the adjacent wall, its modular weapons mounts visible in their storage cradles.
Ethan looked at the armors. He had been so occupied by the public-facing work of the past three months, the corporate setup, the seabed reactor program, the opening ceremony, that he had not, in fact, personally tested any of the armors since their initial calibration.
He filed that away as a project for the near future. The armors would need flight time. The combat protocols would need exercise. He could not leave them sitting in storage indefinitely.
J.A.R.V.I.S. guided him next to the core of the facility.
The core of Underground Laboratory One was its dedicated reactor.
The unit was housed in its own subordinate chamber, separated from the personal laboratory by a thick mercerium-blended bulkhead. It was, on visual inspection, larger than any of the ten seabed reactors. Its containment geometry was different. Its cooling architecture was different. Its emission profile was different.
J.A.R.V.I.S. walked him through the relevant specifications.
The unit had been designed without the constraints that had governed the seabed reactor program. The seabed units had been engineered for survival in a corrosive deep-water environment, for resistance to crushing pressure, for compatibility with state monitoring protocols, and for compliance with the very specific output ceiling that Ethan had agreed to deliver to the Republic. The seabed reactors were, in honest engineering terms, deliberately conservative units. They delivered the impressive performance they did, but they had been designed with substantial safety margins.
The laboratory reactor had been designed without any of those constraints.
Its output, J.A.R.V.I.S. reported calmly, was greater than the combined total output of all ten seabed reactors.
By a meaningful margin.
Ethan absorbed the figure and did not comment.
The reactor was, technically, his own private power supply. Its existence was known only to himself, J.A.R.V.I.S., and the two Transformers who had been involved in its construction. The state did not know. Yvette did not know. The senior pupils now staffing his corporate executive ranks did not know. As far as the Republic of Valoria was concerned, the seabed reactor program represented the entirety of New Future Technology Energy's nuclear capability.
The state had a fifteen-percent equity stake in the firm's known technology base.
The unknown technology base, sitting fifty meters below Ashford City and humming quietly at an output level that exceeded the Republic's national-priority project, was, in equity terms, entirely Ethan's.
He continued the tour.
After completing the walkthrough, Ethan returned to his personal laboratory and sat down at the central console.
He could not wait any longer to see what the day had delivered him.
"Open System panel."
The familiar interface assembled itself in his perception.
[Prestige: 1,573,200]
Note: Prestige accrual is influenced by the emotional reactions of individuals in the host's world. Reactions such as shock, awe, gratitude, admiration, and lasting impression generate substantially more Prestige than transient or low-intensity emotional responses.
[Inventory: empty]
[Tier-2 Market: locked]
Spend 2,000,000 cumulative Prestige to unlock the next market tier. Current cumulative spend: 1,248,000 / 2,000,000.
Marvel Catalog
Artificial Intelligence Architecture, Larval Stage (J.A.R.V.I.S.) | Iron Man series | Acquired Mark V Armor Manufacturing Specification (suitcase deployment, lightweight, limited armor) | 100,000 Prestige | Acquired Mark VI Armor Manufacturing Specification (next-generation chest reactor, improved combat performance) | 150,000 Prestige | AcquiredMark VII Armor Manufacturing Specification (flight-deployable combat pod, modular weapons mounts) | 200,000 Prestige | Acquired Stark Element Synthesis Specification (a synthesized element discovered by Anthony Stark, enables clean miniature fusion and underwater operation) | 200,000 Prestige | Acquired Vibranium Synthesis Specification (one of the hardest metals in the Marvel framework, with notable kinetic and acoustic absorption properties) | 500,000 Prestige
Transformer Catalog
Bumblebee Manufacturing Specification (standard Autobot combat unit) | Acquired Single-Use Spark (animates one Transformer chassis) | 100,000 Prestige ... Megatron Manufacturing Specification ... Optimus Prime Manufacturing Specification ...
Ethan sat with the panel open and let himself enjoy the number for a moment.
One million, five hundred and seventy-three thousand, two hundred Prestige.
The opening ceremony of New Future Technology Energy had delivered, in a single day, more Prestige than the cumulative total of every previous Prestige-generating event in his life. The seabed reactor reveal. Mercerium going public. Holt's announcement of the state partnership. The decommissioning of the West-East Power Corridor. Each beat of the morning had been a Prestige multiplier, and the multipliers had compounded.
A pattern that Ethan had been gradually noticing across his System career also clicked into sharper focus with this data point.
Low-grade emotions (passing shock, casual surprise, transient disgust, fleeting curiosity) produced relatively small Prestige increments. The kind of reaction that you forgot about by the next morning generated almost nothing.
Higher-grade emotions (sustained admiration, lasting gratitude, awe, the sense of having witnessed something one would tell one's grandchildren about) produced enormous Prestige increments. The kind of reaction that reshaped how someone understood the world generated cascading returns.
Today had been the latter, at scale. Several hundred senior figures had walked out of his opening ceremony with their understanding of what was possible permanently revised. The cabinet officials. The senior industry executives. The press section. All of them, by the time they reached the front entrance, had been operating in a different mental universe than the one they had walked in with.
And the day's total was only the surface layer of the harvest. The morning's events would be reported, analyzed, and rebroadcast through every media outlet in the Republic over the next several days. International coverage would follow within a week. The Prestige flow had not finished. By the end of the month, Ethan estimated, he would have processed several million additional points from delayed-reaction audiences who had not been in the reception hall at all.
He could afford to be ambitious in his current purchases.
He scrolled the System panel and let his eyes settle on a specific entry deeper in the Transformer catalog.
Megatron Manufacturing Specification (Jet-form chassis, top-tier combat unit in the Transformer framework. The current leader of the Decepticon faction. Standard Transformer units are not, by general assessment, qualified to engage Megatron in combat.) | 1,000,000 Prestige
Ethan stared at the number.
One million.
It was the most expensive single item he had ever seen the System offer, and it was offering it casually, the way the system always offered things, as though the price tag were an ordinary matter rather than the equivalent of several entire previous Prestige accumulations.
If he purchased the specification, plus the Single-Use Spark required to animate the chassis, the total cost would be 1,100,000 Prestige. More than two-thirds of his current account. Enough Prestige to acquire four or five complete standard Transformer specifications.
It was a steep price.
Ethan thought about it for approximately six seconds.
He thought about Megatron's recorded combat capability, as the System materials described it. He thought about the strategic position he was constructing. He thought about Maha Energy, about the corporate war he had openly declared, about Pieter Harris's promise that the world outside the Republic of Valoria would be less hospitable than the world inside it.
He thought about the Vibranium specification in the Marvel catalog, sitting at 500,000 Prestige, that he could not now purchase if he spent on Megatron.
He thought about the fact that he had no idea what was sitting in the Tier-2 market that he would unlock with this purchase.
He gritted his teeth.
He purchased.
"Megatron Manufacturing Specification acquired. Single-Use Spark, one unit, acquired. Cumulative tier-progress spend now exceeds 2,000,000. Tier-2 market unlocking. Standby."
The familiar disorienting rush returned. An enormous volume of structured engineering knowledge poured directly into Ethan's working memory, and his physical body responded as it always did to a System knowledge upload. A sudden cascade of micro-headaches. A brief loss of fine motor control. The dissociating sensation of trying to track a piece of architecture that was being inscribed into one's mind faster than one could consciously parse it.
The process lasted twenty minutes.
When it concluded, Ethan was leaning forward on the central console, breathing hard, a thin line of sweat down the side of his face. He waited for the residual disorientation to fade.
When his vision cleared, his eyes carried a small, sharp glint of awed recognition.
The complexity of Megatron's manufacturing specification was, by an order of magnitude, beyond anything he had previously processed. Bumblebee's specification had been intricate. Blackout's had been more so. Megatron's specification was the kind of engineering that could only exist as the product of a hostile interstellar civilization that had spent millennia refining its weapons platforms.
Truly fitting, Ethan thought, for the leader of an interstellar conquest faction.
The blueprints were now in his head. The remaining work was, comparatively, straightforward.
He stood up from the console.
He crossed the laboratory floor to where Bumblebee was parked.
He opened the driver's door and lowered himself into the seat.
Bumblebee, the moment Ethan settled into the driver's position, shook its entire chassis in a small, distinctly aggrieved motion.
The motion was not a malfunction. It was a complaint.
Ethan, slightly startled, sat with his hands on the steering wheel for a moment. Then he remembered.
He had been operating in public Bumblebee-mode for the early phase of his Transformer career. The yellow sports car had been the face of his work. The Bumblebee press conference. The Aurelian Republic incident. The first wave of media saturation. Bumblebee had been the star.
In recent months, however, Bumblebee had been at the residence more often than on the road. The seabed reactor program had been Blackout's operation almost entirely. The ten reactors had been carried into the deep sea on Blackout's shoulder, one after another. The opening ceremony's project tour had featured Blackout, on warship decks, in front of the cabinet and the national press. Blackout had been the one the entire Republic had watched, all morning.
And Bumblebee, who possessed a small but distinctly persistent personality matrix, had apparently been keeping a tally.
Ethan placed one hand on the steering wheel.
"All right. Little Fellow."
He spoke in the tone of a man addressing a sulking child.
"I know. Blackout has been getting the limelight for a few months. I haven't been giving you proper attention. I'm aware."
The car remained still.
"I promise. The next field operation, you're coming with me. Not Blackout. You. We'll go for a real drive."
A small, satisfied click of vehicle systems settling occurred underneath Ethan. Bumblebee, mollified, returned to standby readiness.
Ethan smiled despite himself.
His emotionally complicated yellow sports car.
He settled into the driver's seat. J.A.R.V.I.S., from the laboratory's central control, activated a section of the rear wall. The wall rotated and slid aside, revealing a long, downward-angled ramp that opened into a service tunnel extending out beyond the immediate footprint of the laboratory.
Ethan eased Bumblebee forward.
He had Megatron to build. He needed materials, manufacturing access, and the privacy to assemble a ten-meter-tall interstellar war machine without being noticed.
The personal laboratory had all three.
The Transformer the Republic of Valoria would meet next was not going to be a sports car or a heavy military helicopter.
It was going to be a jet.