"AAAHH—" That was Tony, screaming as hair was ripped from his bleeding scalp.
Click-click-click-click— That was Sam, hammering the shutter button like a man possessed.
"OH MY GOD—" That was the cameraman and Anna, gasping in unison.
"Oh my God! Spider-Man is Tony Stark—Tony Stark is Spider-Man! HUGE scoop! Absolutely ENORMOUS!"
Gone was Anna's usual on-screen persona of the poised, intelligent beauty. Her brown hair was a wild mess, sweat streamed down her face, black eye shadow smeared halfway across one cheek, her blouse was disheveled, and she was barefoot.
She didn't care one bit. Eyes practically manic, she shoved Tony's head down with one hand, mashed his mouth against her microphone with the other, and shrieked: "Tony! Why did you decide to become a super-hero? You grew up with both parents, a wonderful life—what made you emulate Batman's Bruce Wayne? Is it because you're both sons of Gotham?"
"Aagh—son of a—OW..." Tony clutched his broken leg with one hand and pressed the other against his scalp, which felt slick with blood. A whole patch of hair ripped out by the roots. This psychotic woman!
I've ALREADY had you, remember? I've had every inch of you and you didn't make a peep—and NOW you're screaming?!
Okay, that was just Anna's internal monologue. She didn't say it out loud—not out of embarrassment, mind you. This was a live broadcast, and Anna might have been shameless, but she still had professional standards.
Even discovering that Spider-Man was her ex-fling, Anna had zero intention of calling him an ambulance. If anything, she grew even more excited: "Mr. Stark—you said the F-word just now. Does that confirm what the experts theorized? That you suffered some form of... violation? Yes, of course—you entered college at thirteen. You must have encountered those twenty-something adult students... Good heavens, no wonder you became a notorious playboy the moment you graduated from MIT! The root cause of such a drastic personality shift was—"
Before Tony could object, Anna had already barreled ahead in a tone that treated pure speculation as established fact: "After years of debauchery, your mother's passing two years ago finally jolted you awake. You reclaimed your childhood dream, decided to start benefiting humanity by becoming a super-hero, and this ODM apparatus is your masterwork!"
Tony's internal monologue: "Violation"?! "Playboy awakening"?! "Childhood dream"?! "Benefiting humanity"?! For the love of—we slept together, Anna! A hundred nights of passion! The LEAST you could do is call me an ambulance—my leg is KILLING me!
But he never got a word in edgewise. Anna fired off her next question in rapid succession: "Tony—what happened tonight? How did you lose control?"
"Oh, right—you brought home twin sisters last night! That explains it! Ladies and gentlemen, as you can see, Tony Stark's excessive, er, extracurricular activities have left him physically depleted, resulting in tonight's mid-air wipeout. Now then, I'm sure our viewers have just as many questions as I do for Mr. Stark. Let's move on to the next question—"
Tony: I want to cry. This is so unfair. My ODM rig doesn't require physical exertion! Even if I were physically depleted it wouldn't matter—wait, I'm NOT depleted! Anna, I recognize you now—could you PLEASE stop talking over me? This is supposed to be an interview, not a one-player game! Let me answer something!
"Tony, you deliberately mounted green LED lights all over your safety helmet. What's the deeper meaning? Are you mocking someone, or engaging in some kind of self-deprecation? Does each blinking little light represent a woman you can't forget? And the color of your ODM rig—"
THWOP-THWOP-THWOP-THWOP-THWOP—
The sudden roar of helicopter rotors overhead cut Anna off mid-question. Before she could react, six fully armed men rappelled down on fast-ropes.
Four masked operatives carrying automatic weapons fanned out to create a perimeter, pushing Anna and the crowd back. The other two swiftly loaded Tony onto a stretcher that had descended with them.
One man signaled upward. The winch cable retracted smoothly and steadily. Once Tony and his stretcher were hauled into the belly of the Super Stallion, the helicopter banked hard and thundered away.
Oh, and one of the operatives scooped up Tony's fallen green hat on the way out.
The entire extraction took under three minutes. By the time the helicopter vanished from sight, Alice from Fox News had only just managed to fight her way through the crowd—and could do nothing but shake her fist at the departing aircraft and curse.
Anna, spotting the furious Alice, felt her own frustration evaporate. No comparison, no despair. Sure, her own interview had been cut short, but she'd still come out miles ahead of Alice. And Tony being whisked away so quickly had an upside: her footage was now an exclusive. Ha!
President Maya paid no attention to the chaos in the square. By this point, her Shadow Clone had already activated stealth mode and slipped away from the scene.
Yes, Tony's broken leg was entirely President Maya's doing. But she hadn't used Shadow Mimic to control Tony's body directly. He'd been wide awake with a supercomputer backing him up—Her Excellency wasn't stupid enough to leave that kind of evidence.
All she'd done was adjust the angle of a few satellite dishes. Even if Tony investigated afterward, he'd conclude it was simple bad luck—random signal interference.
The principle behind it was elegant in its simplicity. Broadcast vans transmitted massive data loads to communication satellites, running at extremely high power output.
Meanwhile, Tony's sci-fi-grade ODM system relied entirely on his off-site supercomputer for real-time control, which demanded ultra-low signal latency.
Frankly, given 1990s technology, very few entities on Earth could meet those requirements. Forget the supercomputer—that alone was reserved for major national research programs. What kept Tony airborne wasn't some special fuel; it was thick stacks of crisp green dollar bills.
And the signal's real-time stability and reliability actually limited Tony's operational range and choice of venue.
Too far from his relay infrastructure and the signal degraded. Too many buildings creating interference and the signal died completely.
It was basically the same as cell phone coverage. Remote mountain areas got zero bars. Walk into certain dense urban alleyways and your signal dropped to nothing.
Stand near high-voltage power lines or any strong electromagnetic source and your phone call dissolved into static.
Even in 2018, with cell towers on practically every corner, streaming video still buffered constantly.
Now imagine 1990s wireless data speeds. A 20 KB/s connection was considered blazing fast.
Tony was essentially trying to run a live-stream on 2G. Sure, his family's supercomputer was beastly and his signal hardware was cutting-edge—but the technological ceiling of the era was the technological ceiling of the era. Even a genius had to put in the research hours to push past those limits.
After all, a genius wasn't God. You couldn't conjure technology out of thin air.
President Maya had spotted this vulnerability and exploited it—adjusting the broadcast dishes' angles to create a semi-artificial electromagnetic dead zone, positioned right in Tony's calculated flight path.