"I'm so excited to be working with you," Dr. Hansen said as we walked into Synnergy. She'd been recruited into S.W.O.R.D, flipped on Killian and was now researching Extremis with Synnergy. "I'm impressed with your work in clean energy."

I grinned at her, "I'm pretty much done with that work now," I said. "Moving on to bigger things."

"What could be bigger than the energy crisis?" Hansen asked as we handed our badges to security.

"Politics, but I'd be moving on anyway. By the end of the year, the cost of a full year of energy usage by the average American will be less than the cost to fill a truck with a tank of gas." At $3.60 per gallon, things were real bad for the oil extracting nations. Hydra was keeping a close eye on the collapsing budgets of Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. Mass unrest was stirring, OPEC was choking, and it was about to get much worse for them. Between Tony and I, a solid third of the United States was now running on clean energy at 2¢/kwh. But once the satellites were in orbit, it would be .5¢/kwh for me and maybe also for Tony, depending on if he had been sand-bagging this entire time to avoid monopoly accusations.

"Wait, what? How"

"We're putting up solar satellites," I said, grabbing my badge back from Synnergy. "And once we've done that, we'll be open-sourcing broadcast power receivers to cut infrastructure costs and help bring under-developed countries into the 21st century."

"Really?" Hansen shook her head. "That's amazing. You must be so proud of all you've accomplished."

I shrugged. "Abundant power isn't going to keep humanity safe from alien invasion," I said as we got into the elevator. "This might."

The Extremis formula was one of the most useful technological innovations in world history. I had been disappointed to discover that it didn't produce a permanent altered state, you needed regular dosing, but it was still one of the most incredible inventions ever. It brought with it the most powerful healing process known to mankind, it made individuals with it tougher physically, users had fire-related attacks, and it gave a regeneration factor that would've cost me a hundred points in GURPS. It just had the small, minor problem that sometimes when people used it they might explode. We were here to fix that problem.

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"I'm flattered," she said as we got onto the elevator. "But don't you think the Super-Soldier Serum is enough? I'm not enthused about making better, more powerful super soldiers."

"Dr. Hansen, you shouldn't embrace the idea that these technologies are solely military. When we develop it, men and women will have nearly even physical health, and they'll be able to lead full lives to being a hundred. Yes, the military will use it too - But everyone will be safer for it, not just the military. But to answer your question about the Super-Soldier Serum being enough, I don't think anything is enough," I said as the elevator began to rise. And I didn't. Tony Stark had dropped a spaceship on Thanos and he'd walked it off. All that for a drop of blood. But if we can combine the Super-Soldier Serum with Extremis, if I reproduced my shrink suit and added the teleportation feature, and if I can persuade Tony to at least share his repulser tech, I think we'd have a good start. If I managed to complete my immersion upload system, of course, we'd be able to have an immortal phalanx of androids as well, but that wasn't here or there.

"You are very paranoid," Hansen said as we climbed off the elevator. I thought it was interesting description, even though it kept recurring over and over again. From my perspective, I was just an ordinary guy, putting in a reasonable effort to be ready for the common threat. Maybe my brain had been broken by Dungeon and Dragons optimizer thinking, maybe I'd spent too long on SpaceBattles in my old life. Maybe Hansen was just projecting my theory onto the defeated invasion of D.C. because she didn't realize that that was a weak showing on Thanos part. Eventually, we made it to Dale and Stacey, both of whom had taken the enhancement and were now muscular, healthy looking super-soldiers in lab coats. Dale still looked weird to me without his glasses.

"Dale Yorkes," Dale said by way of introduction.

Hansen smiled and shook his hand, "Maya Hansen, consulting scientist with S.W.O.R.D. It's a pleasure to meet you in person Dr. Yorkes. Dr. Yorkes," she said, extending her hand to Stacey who smiled and shook it.

"We've been looking over the files you sent us," Stacey said as we walked towards the lab, "And we're not sure what's causing the glitch, as you call it, but we have narrowed down the causes of it. Also, Mike, you were worried over nothing - It looks like the insertion gap isn't solved by the Super-Soldier Serum."

I breathed a sigh of relief. I had been worried about that one. The extremis formula used an existing slot in human genetic code to amplify recover systems and I had worried it might overlap with the mechanisms of the Super Soldier Serum. So, once we had it up and running we should be able to splice them together. Just had to get it up and running, without explosions. S.W.O.R.D. had sent a consult copy to Tony, but he hadn't answered and while I had hopes that Tony would actually warm to me at this point, it was going to take time we might not have. I didn't know anything about the second Thor movie, when it was or anything like that, but I wanted to be ready when it hit regardless.

"Of course we're free next Friday, by the way." Dale said after a moment to me.

I grinned at him and gave him a thumbs up, "Good, good, that should be everyone then."

"Is something next Friday?" Hansen asked, confused. Right, we had just been talking the Super-Soldier Serum.

"Well, Dr. Hansen, I'm going to ask you to keep this secret a bit better than Dale but my wedding was rather famously interrupted."