"You have the heaviest coats," Jessica said, putting them over my seat.

Jessica Jones was the protagonist of a TV series I had only watched one season of. She was waifish and pale, with dark hair. She had super-strength, which she acquired after a car accident from a secret organization. I had hired her as a New York gofer more to keep tabs on her than anything, but also to hunt down the people who had given her super strength. Or rather, to provide a pretense for hunting them down which I could believably pass off to Hydra as a personal interest. Also, I hoped a bit of stability would make it harder for her to be kidnapped by Kilgrave who (in the series) had mind-controlled and raped her for years.

Jessica had super-strength and the classic noir detective's inability to let a case go or give up on someone in need. I hoped, with time, I might persuade her to go a more Avengers route with her powers, but for now I was just hunting down IGH.

"They're bulletproof," I said, standing up and playing with the shrunken RV on my wrist.

"You wear bulletproof suits to a syndicated television conference?" Jessica asked, nervous, "Why?"

"I spent my youth backpacking across Europe, Jessica," I said, staying calm. I still didn't know if Jessica was nosy by nature, or if she got that way as a defense mechanism after Kilgrave. Either way I didn't really want her looking into me and exposing Hydra before I was ready to book it out. "I had some close calls with muggers. Money's not a big deal, but I don't want to get shot in the chest. A heavier suit coat? Perfectly fine risk management strategy."

"Whatever makes you feel safer, I guess," Jessica said, not sounding very convinced.

I paid Jessica on a salary that was pretty good, even for New York City. The job was being on call - When I came to town, I usually got a full week of hours out of her doing a variety of prep and call work. Jessica wasn't… great at it, if we're being honest. She had an abrasive personality and she wasn't very organized. But in her free time, there were a bunch of personal development perks that we put into the contract she could spend her time doing. Combat training, guns and hand-to-hand, educational programs, acrobatics, a pool, a gym, anything that counted as personal development.

"Wish me luck?"

"Good luck," she said with a smirk.

—

"Mike, can I call you Mike?," the hostess, Alayna Mason. We were in a brightly lit studio with a friendly looking audience, recording at seven for one of those late night talk shows.

"Well, that's my pen name, so I'd appreciate it, Alayna."

"Yeah, so you wrote a book! It's a bit controversial," she held up the thin, one hundred and twenty page book to the camera. "It's called, Tail Risks: Solving Big Problems That Might Be. It's a bit of a departure from your usual work as a green energy producer. Before we get into the controversy, what made you write it?"

"I had a real feeling that our leaders weren't doing their job, which is to think and consider and make the long-term, hard choices we won't. Tail risks are things that are unlikely, but could very much happen. Losing with three of a kind in poker - Not a bad risk when the stake is a 50-50% chance if the stakes are a hundred or a thousand dollars. Absolutely insane if the stakes are the future of the human race."

"Right, so you talk about five major tail risks - Alien Invasion, AI Conquest, Super-Terror, The Great Plague, and Uplift. Could you lay out why those five scenarios?"

One, because it was a useful framing device for a set of relatively non-partisan policies that would be popular. Two, Avengers, Age of Ultron, both Civil War and Iron Man 3, Covid, and, well, me. "Uplift was really the jumping off point for me, especially as I've seen how radically my tech can disrupt existing energy industry. Here was this very tail risk, energy becomes basically free, and now it's well on its way to reality. When Tony Stark's existing bids on power production go into force, he'll be a provider for something like fifteen percent of America's current energy demand. Right now my products provide six percent of the energy demand and there's nothing but growth space with rural co-ops. What's more, as we use more clean energy, energy demand goes down, not up. That was two guys, with maybe five good ideas between us. What happens if there's ten of us? Fifteen? Who's making sure that the benefits of that get distributed where they need to be? The free market? Doesn't check out. And then I looked at the 'plans' for the other problems and it's even worse."

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

"Alright, so in this book you suggest some unorthodox solutions to these tail risks. You talk about industrial policy, a universal basic income, a centralized testing apparatus for flus and colds, an international AI treaty, military reform and renewal reoriented towards non-terrestrial threats. But what's put you on the map is your vocal opposition to the bioengineering ban that President Ellis promised in his election campaign. In light of the disastrous fight between the Hulk and Emil Blonsky, why do you think Americans should take this risk?"

Ellis had run in 2010 against Obama, who had run in 2006. I don't think Obama really deserved to lose - For one thing, the Great Recession wasn't his fault at all. But he did, so we got an empty suit in Ellis, a bland, boring Business Republican whose core claim to fame was that he had terrible positions on human bioengineering. Going head up against Ellis this early wasn't something I wanted to do - We were still in the honey moon phase, but also it seemed likely to me that we were on course for a boring, elite-consensus presidency with a Blue Senate and House preventing Ellis from doing anything controversial. It was a small-c conservative, old-world framework interested in reaffirming American hegemony without looking too closely into the fraying of the system. It was so obviously a sinking ship, especially as people like Stark and I came onto the scene and laid waste to the old order.

But here I was, arguing against it on national television. It was one of the moments where my sympathy with Hydra was highest - Clearly these clowns shouldn't be in charge.

"Americans are already taking the risk. I outline in my Super-Terrorist what I would consider a highly realistic scenario - A terrorist cell cracks the Super Soldier Serum. There's not a government in the world that hasn't tried to do that, and you can't tell me otherwise. Suddenly, even if the terrorist cell is fairly minor, you're looking at the possibility of hundreds of peerless warriors, preternaturally fast and strong, willing to engage in violence to achieve political goals. Captain America's kill count in the war, conservatively, was in the dozens but probably into hundreds. But he was attacking fortified bases of a cutting edge research division - These guys would be attacking schools and hospitals. And if these guys get the jump on us, we're not going to survive it. It would be much, much worse if it were a hostile autarky like Iran or North Korea. Blonsky and the Hulk were disasters, but we can't let that stop us from solving this problem for ourselves and for our fellow Americans."

"'Our fellow Americans,' Mr. Trent, are you running for office?'

I grinned sheepishly at the camera and shrugged, "I think if people want me to serve, they can call on me to serve."