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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—co 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 sothing went wrong, they'd dial the company-issued mobile phone imdiately. There was no hiding.
Fortunately, since he'd only just taken office, Stark Pictures—whose main business was equipnt 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 ti 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 ti 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 codenad "Hollywood Kid."
To be honest, Tony Stark might possess a genius brain—but he had zero talent when it ca to naming things.
Iron Man? Coined by the dia.
JARVIS, the first AI? Nad after the family's old butler.
FRIDAY, the second AI? A supporting native character from Robinson Crusoe.
The Jericho Missile? Nad after the ancient city north of Jerusalem, over three thousand years old, known in the Bible as the "City of Palms."
In the Old Testant, Jericho was destroyed by God, and anyone who tried to rebuild it would be cursed. That was why a missile bore its na.
Then there was his daughter, Morgan—a na so common among won it was practically a market staple.
The na 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 t a scumbag, she'd have the power to make him regret it?
Later, the AI Karen used in Spider-Man's suit—by that ti, "Karen" had already beco 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 na so flamboyantly narcissistic it practically scread 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 sothing Henry, who considered himself a small fry, could really comprehend.
Besides, the server-grade computer he'd hand-built at ho didn't even co 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 consur hardware ant 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 ti 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 ti 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 nanoters.
In other words, if he truly went all out, he could build a computer that outperford Hollywood Kid across every tric.
The real bottlenecks were size and power consumption.
His hand-built ho server was only slightly larger than a standard desktop and consud 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 extre that Tony Stark briefly considered building a large-scale Arc Reactor on the West Coast as well—sothing 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 comrcial production.
As for the miniature Arc Reactor ant 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 sothing you could ss with casually, like a diesel generator.
In the United States, nuclear power plants were regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Fuel procurent, facility construction—building one without proper authorization was a straight ticket to prison.
Not to ntion 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 governnt and appeasing city council mbers 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 comrcial 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 disappointnt 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 soone in.
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