Yes, Harvard professor Fowler had played Tony Stark. Tony Stark wanted to play President Maya. And President Maya had decided to fight scheming with more scheming. All that remained was to see who got screwed hardest.
The President was fairly confident the unlucky one wouldn't be her.
Norman Osborn—mid-thrust, trying hard to make a baby with his wife—suddenly shivered hard and finished prematurely. Some formless dread was whispering at the edge of his mind, like something called "a scheme" had targeted him.
Were the Parkers up to something again? Unable to face his wife, Norman buried his head in the pillow, brooding.
Yes. Our unscrupulous President had dropped Tony's tracker in a trash can next to Oscorp.
Tony was no saint. The ODM gear he'd handed to Happy had a signal tracker built into it. The sort of microscopic trackers that could be implanted inside a body undetected—the kind you see in the newly-released Mission: Impossible – Fallout—were pretty useless since too many instruments could detect them. The nineties were different. Tech wasn't that advanced. Most people didn't even have the concept of a tracker. And Tony's tracker was the most advanced product of its era; an ordinary person could never spot it.
Even if someone detected it afterward, it'd be too late—their position would already be compromised. Manhattan wasn't that big. Tony's trick would bait ninety percent of people. The other ten percent only escaped because they weren't greedy enough to take the gear.
But President Maya wasn't in either of those categories. She was the one. Okay, fine—she wasn't the Messiah. She was just very careful and very capable.
She'd spotted the tracker while the ODM gear was still hanging on Happy's waist. Super-sensing really was the most useful superpower going. Of course, even if a normal person could sense a small red LED pulsing inside, they might not identify it as a tracker.
The inside of that case was complex—tons of similar components on the mainboard. Even if you flew in Reed Richards from the West Coast (Mister Fantastic of the Fantastic Four—smarter than Tony), he wouldn't spot the issue right away.
In fact, even President Maya would only have caught it because she'd been so curious the night before that she'd scanned and studied the gear thoroughly. Without that, she'd have walked right into it tonight out of sheer greed—yeah right.
She wasn't like the 1993 ordinary Marvel-Earth locals. She wasn't some uninitiated innocent who'd never lived through future-era wiretapping and tracking dramas. She also wasn't some muscle-head with superpowers and no brains.
By the time her Shadow Clone had brought the gear into Maya's little bedroom, it had already been disassembled into a pile of components.
In other words: for a clever, careful, and very well-informed President, Tony's tracker was a cheap little trick. Nothing serious. Unless Tony went to the trouble of isotope tagging—spending a fortune and getting impossibly lucky at going through the crowd one by one—he wasn't catching her. If that method somehow exposed her, she'd admit defeat.
And why did she pick Norman Osborn, the old Green Goblin?
Why do you think? Proximity! Your company tower is right here. So obvious. Of course you were the target.
With her conscience half broken already, the President had also applied an Oscorp senior technician's fingerprint to the tracker—might as well take a shot.
Not long after President Maya left the area, the bodyguard Happy came tearing up in a car and found the broken tracker exactly where the signal had gone dark.
Maya was riding a wave of excitement right now. Never mind the rest—those two 150-meter (490 ft) carbon nanotube cords alone were worth at least $200,000. Not an exaggeration. Most people couldn't have bought them at that price.
Think about it. Tony, terrified-of-death spoiled super-rich heir, was he really going to trust his life to anything but the very best material on Earth?
With this stuff, Maya could save a lot of Chakra going forward. Before this, her whole flying-and-swinging routine hadn't been driven by yarn tensile strength—it had really been Shadow Touch pulling her along. Super tedious to control, and the jutsu burned through Chakra.
Now, with Tony's carbon nanotube cord, she only needed Shadow Touch to pull the cord taut so the arrowhead anchored into a wall. Then her own arm strength would carry her the rest of the way. Basically just like Peter Parker. A huge Chakra saver—at least seventy percent less effort on acrobatic traversal going forward.
And as for Tony's DIY vector-thrust turbine module? President Maya decided to use that too. She could fake "pure-tech" visuals, avoid her superpowers getting spotted, and generally swing around even more audaciously.
So, riding the wave of Tony's free materials, President Maya spent three days building her own custom v2.0 of the ODM gear.
Meet in the middle of sorcery and science! President Maya's flavor was magic-plus-tech—Magi-Tech Limitless Power.
This new v2.0 upgrade really earned the name ODM gear. It was way more tech-advanced than the genuine article from Attack on Titan.
It was slightly bigger than the original—the original was 20 × 5 × 5 cm (8 × 2 × 2 in); v2.0 was 30 × 8 × 8 cm (12 × 3 × 3 in). The color went from pure black to silver-white with a black spider spray-paint job. Ridiculously cool.
It could fire carbon-nanotube cable, and it could also use vector-thrust as auxiliary propulsion. Of course the vector-thrust was strictly auxiliary—she'd almost never use it.
The bigger change: President Maya had installed two subwoofers in the case. Oh—and a cassette tape deck. So while flying high over the rooftops she could blast whatever pumping tunes she liked. That is, President Maya was now a superhero with her own BGM.
Uh… does that sound a little like one of those overdramatic teens riding a motorcycle with the stereo blasting?
Oh, come on, think about Wonder Woman Diana—her BGM is amazing!
Okay, the BGM was actually a side feature. The real purpose of the audio system was to monitor police radio traffic across multiple precincts.
Sound familiar? Exactly. Just like little Spidey. Except President Maya's version was stronger—if necessary, she could hack into a precinct's private line.
Tony definitely didn't know that by cracking his Green-Hat helmet, President Maya had already obtained partial control of his supercomputer, which in turn let her do what J.A.R.V.I.S. could do—hack the NYPD information network.
Let's not forget the President's previous life's day job. She'd written brand-new code and slipped it into the supercomputer's OS. Of course, this was like piggybacking on someone else's Wi-Fi—do it once or twice and nobody cared; do it too much and the host would notice. Then they'd swap the password. You think your brute-force cracker is going to get you through that?
You're wondering where this poor-kid President Maya got a computer?
Well, as the old ad says—and it wasn't lying: "To learn computers, use a Subor Learning Machine." Maya had a DIY 16-bit PC in her own bedroom—DOS-based, floppy disk storage, a screen about the size of a lunchbox. Playing games was out of the question. She could bang out code and write small programs. That's about it.
Ordinarily Maya barely touched it. She'd built the whole thing for one purpose: the New York City computer competition. That first-place trophy had netted her 500 influence points.
Now do you finally understand why the President was so stingy? Why she'd rather wait for the Black Shop to refresh on the natural daily cycle than spend 100 points to refresh it manually? The poor-kid days had left deep scars.