The quiet of my home had been warmed by Andromeda's permanent presence. I was cooking dinner, which was thoroughly unnecessary, secure in the knowledge the maid would get it the next day. I didn't keep anything sensitive here and Hydra had vetted the maid, so I was fairly sure she wasn't planting any bugs in my home. For now, anyway.

"Hey babe," Andromeda said, her voice nervous. "How's the food going?"

"It's…" I had no idea what was the matter, "going fine. Should be happy, healthy, and wholesome, like the Synnergy promise." The ever-healthier profile of the delicious tasting meat substitutes were tempting me back to vegetarianism, something the transition here had freed me from.

"Yeah, Stacey was excited about this line when I visited her today."

"How'd that go?"

"Fine. Anything going on at work?" Andromeda asked, trying to stay conversational. She'd get to her point eventually.

"Well, I'm making progress on replicating the effects of the Ant Man suit without alien technology and Quantum tunneling should follow that fairly closely," I lied. Obviously, I had made up the whole problem, but it was a useful cover that had run its course. I wanted to make sure that I was able to deliver a thousand super-soldiers to anywhere threatened by Thor's next big adventure, wherever that was. SWORD had tapped Jane's phone for obvious reasons, but she hadn't had any interesting phone calls. "But mostly, I expect the first edition of Osiris should be licensed to move forward in California for people with terminal illnesses."

Osiris was the public facing, deep-immersion system we were using. I had decided, as an executive decision, that the inner-reality would be supported by internal programming instead of by the inference engine that Radcliffe had preferred. But the prospect of success was still high.

"I guess I'll have to tell Mom to sign back up," Andromeda said with a laugh and her body seemed less tense. "But that's good. I'm glad she'll be able to use it if she wants to. You won't make her do the labor exchange?"

"Nobody has to do the labor exchange," I said, pulling the fake meat onto our plates. The labor exchange was a way for poor people who wanted to upload to offer their services for intellectual or artistic tasks within the system to people outside the system. Osiris got a chunk of the labor's pay, of course. "As long as their family wants to maintain them at full speed, we keep them up and running without any labor. It's only about three hundred a month. But under no circumstances will we make your mother pay her way." It remained to be seen how the Supreme Court would rule about Osiris' uploads as people, though we weren't contesting it. The whole theory of the product was that the person was still them, not a post-life hologram that did a good impression.

"Thank you, Mike," Andromeda said, reassured. I realized, somewhat belatedly, that Andromeda's real concern wasn't about the compulsion to serve on the labor exchange as a general rule. It was her fear that I, her husband, might decide not to cover her mother's bills. I didn't think of my relationship with Andromeda as one with a subordinate - She was my wife, after all. But I was also a solid number two in Hydra's internal pecking order, the Heir Apparent to my wife's whole world, and so to her, anything I deigned to do was my discretion.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

I didn't like that thought at all.

"Anyway," she said, "I'm glad you're making progress on the suit, I think I'll want to hang up being the Hornet pretty soon. If that's okay with you."

"Dear, whatever you want is okay with me," I said, looking her in the eye. "This is our marriage, we're working together through life. We have more than enough money and good press to do without the Hornet, even if religious groups are kicking up a fuss about the Osiris project." Not surprisingly, most churches were not excited to take Tina's word for the persistence of the soul and Tina's former wizardly colleagues were not leaping out from the bushes to join her in agreement. Tina was now the only Avenger with a negative approval rating in polls.

"Really?"

"Yeah, really. Look, I make my Head decisions as executive decisions because that's my job. I'm the one with all the information and it minimizes risks of other people" having villain brain, "doing anything stupid. But your life is yours, I'm not trying to micromanage it. If you want to start a line of pseudo-science wellness tricks, you can. You shouldn't, but you can. If you want to be a stay at home wife and arm candy, that's up to you."

"I'm not planning on starting a pseudo-science line," Andromeda said. Something was still off and nervous about her. Her body language was much more confident these days than it was before the serum, but it was still genuinely off and it bothered me.

I took our plates to the table, "Alright. So what's bothering you?" Waiting was suffering and at this point I just wanted to know.

"I'm not bothered!" Andromeda practically shouted.

I held up my hands in a gesture of surrender. "Okay, okay, sorry I said you were," Oh no. "But something is different right? You've got something you want me to know right?"

"I'm pregnant."

What I didn't do was say 'Shit' or 'damn it'. We'd been using protection, obviously, but my grandparents had managed to have like eight pregnancies on 95% effective stuff anyway. I guess that was informative. I wanted to ask if she was sure, but I was fairly sure she was. If she needed to run a pregnancy test with a counter-example of a super soldier, she'd just seen Stacy today. So I managed to dodge any 'Are you sure?' Or 'Really?' questions as well. There wasn't any reason to be worried about our child's future, except that his parents were members of a totalitarian cult aiming at world take over. We had a ton of money, the air was unprecedentedly clean, and we were only going to have more money and cleaner air as time went on.

So I managed to say something relatively inoffensive after a couple of moments of thought, "Yeah, okay, good."