Chapter 49: Matthew Lawrence's Benevolent Student Loan Program
The arc reactor's disappearance prompted Tony Stark to lock down the Stark Industries campus entirely. He searched every corner of the facility through the night, and at considerable personal expense hired an Umbrella security team to assist with the sweep.
The irony of this arrangement was not something Tony was positioned to appreciate.
Matthew had hidden the reactor within minutes of acquiring it. Without a tracking system installed on the device, the search was going to end exactly one way.
Days passed. The investigation quietly reached the same conclusion that all investigations reach when the object being searched for has been competently hidden. It was dropped.
Tony's current hope was simply that whoever had taken the reactor would not do anything catastrophic with it. That felt like a reasonable minimum.
Sunlight cut through the office windows.
Matthew was on the sofa, watching the projection screen. Tony Stark's press conference was in its final minutes.
The man who had spent some time being uncertain about what the Iron Man identity meant for him had arrived at clarity. He stood in front of the cameras and said it plainly: he was Iron Man, and he was done pretending otherwise.
The announcement did exactly what announcing things like that does to a company's stock price. The shares that had been sitting at a bruised number recovered immediately.
Matthew, who had bought a portion of those shares at the bruised number not long ago, watched the recovery with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had understood the situation before the market did.
Three knocks at the door.
"Come in."
Eleanor entered, composed as usual.
"Sir. Mr. Tony Stark settled his account a short while ago. One hundred and five million dollars. He also asked me to pass along a message."
"What message."
Paying was one thing. Accompanying it with a message was the kind of thing Tony Stark would do.
Eleanor cleared her throat and produced an impression of Tony Stark's voice with the dry accuracy of someone who had been listening to it for weeks.
"Mr. Lawrence. Please remember to delete the photo. Otherwise I will have my PR team announce to the world that you are a man without integrity."
"Fine." Matthew made the sound of someone exercising patience. "Deleted."
One embarrassing photo. He could let it go.
"Additionally, sir. The young man named Peter Parker completed his onboarding this morning, as you instructed."
"Good."
"All the procedures you specified have been initiated. Blood work, CT scans, DNA panel. Everything has been sent to the lab."
Matthew nodded.
Eleanor hesitated.
"Sir. Are you sure you want to invest this much attention in a college student who hasn't graduated yet?"
She genuinely could not identify what made this particular individual worth the effort. He was unremarkable by every visible measure. There had to be something she was missing.
She looked at Matthew with the specific expression of someone who was hoping a look would prompt an answer.
Matthew, reading this, offered one.
"He's not as straightforward as he looks." He stood and picked up the newspaper from the desk. "You've seen the Spider-Man reports? The ones in some of the papers lately?"
The society section of the Daily Bugle was face up. In the center of the page: a photograph of a figure in a red outfit of some description, the image blurred significantly. Below it, a headline in bold.
YOUR FRIENDLY NEIGHBORHOOD SPIDER-MAN STOPS ANOTHER BANK ROBBERY!
Eleanor took the paper.
She studied the photograph with the attentiveness of someone whose professional training included assessment of visual intelligence.
Her first conclusion: whoever had taken this photo had not been given adequate equipment, or had been given adequate equipment and done something very wrong with it. The image was blurred past the point of editorial acceptability by any standard she was aware of. She genuinely could not rule out that the photographer had taken it through a frosted window.
Her second conclusion: the person in the photograph was operating on a limited budget. The costume consisted of what appeared to be a red athletic top and a red fabric mask with two holes cut in it for the eyes. That was the complete list of components. Someone with any disposable income at all would have spent some of it on this.
She set the paper down.
"Your meaning, sir... is that you believe Peter Parker took this photograph. And that he has talent in this area."
Matthew looked at her.
"Think bigger."
Eleanor picked the paper up again. She looked at the blurred figure a second time.
"Perhaps... you believe Peter Parker has a personal connection to Spider-Man. And you want to use that connection to make contact."
Matthew put one hand over his eyes.
"Eleanor." He said it patiently. "Is there any possibility that Peter Parker is Spider-Man?"
Eleanor set the paper down again.
She looked at it for a long moment.
She had met Peter Parker. She had observed him during the onboarding process. He was a soft-spoken, somewhat nervous university student who appeared to find sustained eye contact a meaningful challenge.
She looked at the photograph.
She looked back at Matthew.
"Are you serious."
"Completely." Matthew said it without inflection. "A poor superhero. Uncomplicated motivations. Exactly the right profile for a long-term investment."
He paused, as though something had just arrived in his mind.
"Speaking of which. Eleanor. I've been thinking about launching a low-interest student loan program through some of our subsidiaries. What's your read on the feasibility?"
Student loans. One of the more efficient mechanisms ever developed for the systematic extraction of wealth from people who needed it.
The federal rate ran close to ten percent annually. Private lenders routinely exceeded fifteen. The interest compounded continuously during the repayment period, producing a figure at the end of the loan term that bore little resemblance to the figure at the beginning. The number of people in the country who had borrowed for their education and were still paying for it years later, principal essentially unchanged, was not a small number.
The students who had been carrying those rates for years would not be indifferent to a lower one.
And the gratitude that followed would not be either.
Matthew estimated this would, if implemented well, produce System points at a rate the Nursery had not achieved.
"Low-interest student loans." Eleanor processed the concept. "You're continuing the public welfare operations?"
"Yes."
"There will be resistance to rolling it out. But I can work on that." She thought about it practically. "Compared to the Nursery, at least this one generates revenue."
In Eleanor's private accounting, the Nursery was a pure expenditure. Student loans, even at reduced rates, produced a return. For a normal company, the word "small" would not apply to that return.
"Sir. If this program moves forward, what are you planning to call it?"
Matthew considered.
"The Matthew Lawrence Benevolent Student Loan Program."
Eleanor said nothing for a moment.
"You're certain about that name."
"Do you have a better suggestion?"
"...No."
***
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