"Heh. I still underestimated you. I never thought your ambition would be this great."
"You're replacing every company here with cloned puppets brainwashed to obey only you. Impressive. Very impressive."
After hearing Killian's explanation, J. Jones let out a bitter laugh.
His earlier composure, and the faint hope that he and his son might still leave this place alive, had vanished the moment the clones stepped out.
If their positions had been reversed, J. Jones believed he would have done something even crueler.
The only thing that made it unbearable was the thought that his family had spent a century building everything they had, only for it all to become someone else's dowry.
"W-what is this?! J. Jones, you told us he was as good as dead! You said there was no way he could survive! That's the only reason I joined you bastards in the first place!"
"So what the hell is this supposed to be?!"
At that point, one of the businessmen had clearly figured out what was happening. Terror had completely shattered his mind, and he started screaming at J. Jones.
But no one paid him any attention.
"Kill them."
Killian rose to his feet without the slightest reaction, his expression cold as he gave the order and turned to leave.
He had no interest in wasting time on people who were already finished.
There were still more important things waiting for him.
A moment later, gunfire echoed through the chamber, and all the wealthy men Killian had dragged here collapsed into pools of blood.
"Boss! This...!"
Killian had barely reached the door when a shout full of disbelief stopped him.
He paused and turned back.
In his memory, his men had almost never shown visible emotional shock.
But the moment he looked over, he realized he had been wrong.
Lying among the human corpses was an ugly green-skinned alien.
And the green blood leaking from its body gave the whole place a grotesque, unnatural air.
"Holy shit!"
Killian was genuinely stunned.
He had only meant to eliminate a group of competitors, yet somehow he had uncovered a Skrull.
But once the shock passed, excitement hit him just as hard.
The Skrulls were a race whose natural talents could rival Mystique from the X-Men universe. Not only could they copy any target they saw, but with enough development they could even imitate superhuman abilities.
And more importantly, the Skrull race seemed to possess a natural advantage in DNA-level adaptive fusion.
Killian did not yet know exactly how far that potential went, but he was certain it would not be small.
"Quick. Isolate it and move it into a growth chamber. Make sure the body doesn't degrade."
"And get Samuel here immediately. I'll be over in a minute."
There was no time for him to think further. If the cellular activity in the corpse dropped too far, the value of the specimen would fall with it.
At Killian's urgent order, the Blackwatch operatives immediately lifted the body and rushed it toward the adjacent incubation chamber, while others went to get Samuel.
"Boss, you called for me!"
Not long after, Samuel came running over, sweating heavily and breathing hard.
As a researcher, he did not exactly have the best stamina to begin with, and the sprint here had clearly taken a toll.
"That's right. Look over there."
Killian pointed toward the chamber where the Skrull corpse now floated.
Samuel followed his line of sight.
In the next instant, his breathing stopped for a beat, and then he rushed over at an almost absurd speed, pressing himself close to the chamber to inspect the body inside.
"No way... Boss, you're not messing with me, right? That's an alien?"
After checking it over again and again, even circling the chamber several times, Samuel finally turned back to Killian, still staring in disbelief.
"Do I look like I have enough free time to joke about something like this?"
"It was one of the rich men my people brought in. Before it died, it still looked human. Then the moment it died, it turned into this."
Killian answered directly.
As someone who worked with research himself, he fully understood the impact a specimen like this would have on someone like Samuel.
To a serious researcher, this was the equivalent of a nuclear explosion.
Because once a thing like this existed, it meant people had to accept that extraterrestrial civilizations were real, that some of them were ahead of humanity technologically, and that there might be more of them out there.
Which in turn meant one thing.
The law of the jungle had never disappeared. Survival of the fittest would once again force humanity to confront the need to unite.
Of course, the world being what it was, people would probably keep acting stupid anyway. Even after alien invasions happened more than once, humanity still had a habit of carrying on with internal conflict like nothing had changed.
But none of that really mattered to Killian.
If Earth's governments and factions could not be relied on, then he would simply create his own Earth Federation-style power bloc.
Something like a true interstellar super-corporate order.
"So this alien has a racial talent that lets it alter its own form. Just like I thought."
"Every species is born with a defining natural gift. Even aliens are no exception."
"If we can crack this alien's DNA coding, then the god-making project you gave me, boss, becomes dramatically easier. At that point, what we'll be missing won't be the technology, but biological samples from extraordinary lifeforms."
The moment Samuel grasped the key point, his eyes widened even further.
It was like the logic behind a chameleon. Humans discovered how it changed color, and from that understanding came adaptive camouflage materials.
A chameleon's skin contains multiple pigment cells in the dermis. By changing the way those cells shift and expand, the animal changes color.
Even the U.S. Department of Defense had once developed chameleon-inspired concealment materials for military equipment, precisely because of the insight offered by that natural mechanism.
Sometimes what humanity lacked was not raw technological ability.
Sometimes all it lacked was something to imitate, and just a little inspiration.
Just like now.
Before Killian could say another word, Samuel had already started using the equipment to carefully extract biological samples from the Skrull. He handled the process with such care that it almost looked like he was working on his own body.
"As expected... Boss, this alien's biological cells shift in response to the surrounding environment. But based on what you said earlier, it should be controllable. We just need time to identify the switch."
"Interesting... The outer layer of its cells is effectively blank... I see. The change is transmitted through a signal-response system tied to the nervous network."
"This is incredible!"
"This is practically divine craftsmanship. A species like this can achieve perfect cloning!"
As Samuel extracted the cells and transferred them to the experimental interface, every layer of deeper analysis only made him more astonished.
To him, this alien corpse was no different from a giant treasure vault.
Watching Samuel completely forget his existence and sink straight into work mode, Killian could only smile helplessly. Then he told the guards to lock the area down and turned to leave.
Samuel's work was only beginning.
Killian's, on the other hand, was nearly finished.
And after he left the research island and returned to the villa...
That very night, the previously missing CEOs all returned to their respective homes with their original attendants, resuming what looked, on the surface, like perfectly normal lives.
But beneath that surface, something strange had begun.
Some wealthy figures who had already sensed something was off were shocked to discover that CEOs they knew had started dumping their stock holdings, and moving control over to an entity called the Eden Life Foundation.
As time passed, the number of companies the Foundation moved into kept growing.
By the end, it had spread across dozens of major firms.
At one point, someone estimated that the recent holdings under the Foundation's control were worth multiple trillions of dollars.
And the most unbelievable part was this:
The CEOs who cashed out had poured that money back into Eden Life Foundation as well.
Rumors about the Foundation spread through Wall Street like wildfire, then across the United States, and eventually the whole world.
Everyone knew that people who built companies worth tens or hundreds of billions were not fools.
And yet in the span of only a few days, those same people had sold off their shares, handed control to the Foundation, and invested their liquid wealth into it too.
That alone said enough.
Suddenly, executives and financial predators everywhere began looking for a way into Eden Life Foundation.
Investment.
Consultation.
Cooperation.
Anything.
At that level of capital concentration, everyone went mad.
Eventually people even began whispering that perhaps the Foundation really had mastered longevity.
Because there was otherwise no reason those men would willingly give up the shares they had once treated like their own lives and hand them over so cleanly.
After that rumor spread, Eden Life Foundation instantly became the object everyone wanted to reach.
Yet the more people tried to investigate it, the stranger it seemed.
No public contact.
No investment trail.
No visible address.
It was as if the Foundation had appeared out of thin air.
And so, a veil of mystery fell over Eden Life Foundation.
It felt close, almost within reach, yet impossible to truly touch.
And while the world was busy speculating about the Foundation's origins...
AIM was already making its next move.
In the public eye, AIM began opening cooperation with various countries for factory construction and controlled nuclear fusion reactor deployment.
And for the latter, AIM offered every nation a clear choice.
Option one: cooperation. AIM provided the technology, the country provided manpower, materials, and infrastructure, and then paid AIM ten billion dollars annually in technology licensing based on the plant's operational term.
Option two: a clean one-time buyout of one hundred billion dollars, with AIM fully responsible for construction from start to finish.
And at this point, another recent development had to be mentioned:
AIM Construction.
A newly formed division made up of over ninety percent robotic labor, with the remaining ten percent consisting of personnel responsible for public-facing matters, coordination, and oversight.
The biggest reason Killian had not made it one hundred percent robotic was simple. At this stage, he still did not want to openly wipe out human labor entirely. If he did, he could already imagine the flood of public condemnation that would come crashing down.
Even so, under those conditions, AIM's outward expansion spread like a virus.
Yes, the cost was high.
Yes, there was little room for partner nations to make profit.
But in terms of safety and performance, this was still vastly superior to the nuclear plants they were already using.
After all, nuclear leaks might be rare, but nobody wanted their country becoming another Chernobyl.
And unlike the past, they could not count on a wave of volunteers throwing away their lives to contain catastrophe.
On top of that, many countries still had no nuclear power infrastructure at all, and even with money, it had once been difficult to secure the technology and equipment.
So under AIM's offer, quite a few states still gritted their teeth and pulled huge sums from their treasuries to fund construction.
Over the following months, AIM's construction robots rolled out of American factories in endless numbers and were sent abroad almost immediately to participate in the projects.
As controlled fusion began spreading, the global technology scene exploded.
First Stark Industries formally unveiled the American Peacekeeper, a tri-domain intelligent combat machine for land, sea, and air operations.
Then Osborn launched into military manufacturing, announcing single-soldier flight boards and personal combat armor.
Even Pym Technologies announced in the same month that it had secured a major classified government contract.
And those were only a few examples.
Under the relentless pressure AIM had been applying since the beginning of the year, and now with summer nearing its end, every major company felt the threat pressing down on them.
And everyone understood the same thing.
If they could not produce genuinely explosive innovation of their own, then being overtaken, absorbed, or simply pushed out by AIM was only a matter of time.
And so, a dual-front race in both technology and military development officially began.
Every company threw its full weight behind trying to seize its own field before anyone else could.
Some even started expanding into neighboring sectors, hoping to stake claims before AIM showed its real fangs.
But that also led to an unprecedented winter for everyone else.
As the giants expanded like mad, the survival space for mid-sized and small companies became thinner and thinner.
For Killian, though, all of that had already become secondary.
During the Foundation's resource-integration phase, he had uncovered several unusual projects under Roxxon's control.
And to be fair, for a company that had managed to survive from the Second World War all the way into Marvel's later eras, Roxxon had always been doing things in the shadows.
Among those projects, Killian picked out the most interesting and personally went to inspect it.
So now, under the escort of J. Jones, he had arrived at one of Roxxon's secret research facilities.
What he saw there was enough to make even him acknowledge just how insane Roxxon really was.
For any major technology company, robotics research was practically mandatory. Once human labor became expensive, robots became inevitable.
The manpower savings alone made that obvious.
But unlike AIM, whose technological foundation already exceeded the present era by decades, most companies lacked the means to produce truly advanced intelligence chips and internal architecture for full autonomous robotics.
Which meant there was an alternative.
The age-appropriate solution.
Cyborg conversion.
If you could not build a truly intelligent robot core, then the human brain became the perfect substitute.
(End of Chapter)
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