A few people were standing on the landing of a typical townhouse in Greenwich Village, one was dressed in normal street clothes. The others were all in some type of traditional robes. The only woman in the group spoke and said, “Mister Pangborn, it has been a pleasure. I wish you a pleasant life and remember what I asked of you.”
The man in plain clothes bowed to the woman and said, “Thank you master. I hope your life is filled with fewer issues in the future and I will let you know as soon as I find out anything.”
He slightly nodded to the two men next to the woman and then turned around and began to walk down the street. The people stood for a few more moments, before walking back inside. A dark skinned man dressed in green robes was the first to speak once they were back inside and said. “I still do not like that he possesses so much knowledge and we are just going to let him leave the order.”
“Master Mordo, Mister Pangborn will not upset the balance. I have seen his future many times and in every single one he does the same thing. He is a man who just wants to live a normal life and not worry about the bigger picture like we do. Now let's go back and spar, I don’t think you are completely understanding my lessons yet.”
Mordo visibly flinched at those words but said nothing as he followed The Ancient One deeper into the sanctum.
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The next few weeks flew past quickly and my routine didn't change much. My clone would be programming Monday thru Friday, while my parents were working. My parents made sure they had the weekends off so they could spend it with Emily and me. Which normally included May and Ben at least once for a meal, sometimes more. Peter would join us sometimes with his parents, but most of the time he would join us with May and Ben. His parents always seemed to be busy working, so he stayed with May and Ben half the time. It kinda sucks, but they treat him really well, so I don't think he is missing too much.
It took almost four weeks, but my clone finally finished the programming, connected the computer to the internet and ran it. Once it was uploaded to the internet It took about a week for the main program to go through and finish its first task. Securing funds and setting up bank accounts for all of it, the main portion of the money came from stealing it from criminals. It wasn't hard at all to find it either, criminals might hide it well enough. But the program I made would hack through everything and find out who actually owned the bank accounts. Shell company owned by another shell company, that is registered in a country that won't share records? If they had anything online my program found it. Once it collected all of the data behind these accounts it compiled them into a list for me to go through.
To check the list all I had to do was connect to the internet after a week and run the program I made on the computer. The program I made acted completely separate from our home computer and lived online on different servers throughout the world. It would also move around and not stay anywhere for more than a few hours. The great thing about doing it this way was that if someone tried to find whoever was doing everything, all they would find is what servers they had connected from. It left nothing else to trace, since the program itself was doing everything. It was a pretty brilliant piece of programming and I can’t even take credit for it. Some hacker in my past life was the one who came up with it, they used it for over ten years and no one even knew about it. They were only skimming hundreds of millions of bank accounts over that time though, like fractions of a cent at a time.
They must have felt that if no one knew about it, it wouldn’t count. Because once they had enough money, they made an anonymous post about what they had done. People didn’t believe it at first, but then the base code was uploaded online and the person had even explained how they did it. It was chaos for a few weeks while people figured out how to reverse engineer the code and figured out how to trace it back to who was using it. All the copycats who decided to use it were caught pretty quickly, but the original hacker who made it was never found. They had already removed their copy of the program and had stopped using it long before they even released the base code online.
While I am not skimming any accounts, I am not worried about getting caught. I changed and upgraded the code so much, it is not even close to what the original code was at this point. I just wanted to use its server hopping ability, which to this day is still brilliant. Even Sam said it was one of the greatest things he has ever seen a human code. Pretty high praise coming from an A.I.
After getting the funds I needed for phase one in place I started step two. This step took almost three months to finish. Peter and myself both had our second birthday, while we also celebrated Emily’s first birthday during that time. I have to say that Emily and Peter have the same eating habits when it comes to birthday cakes. I am also sure that my parents were over the moon when they saw how Emily ate her first birthday cake. I mean we have a framed ten by twelve-inch picture of it in the downstairs hallway. The only other thing of note is my parents seem to be working on having another kid already. I have no idea how Emily can sleep with how much noise they make, or maybe my hearing is just really good. At least I can escape to my mindscape when they start.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
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It was early morning, up in the middle of some snow covered mountains. Hidden somewhere here in the middle of the continental United States is a decommissioned S.S.R. base. Or at least it should be, it is actually the first base that Nick Fury started to have secretly built back up with modern technology and equipment. It is being overseen by Sam Koenig, a trusted aide, or at least that is what Fury thought. He had made a trip out here in secret to check on the base's progress and find out from Sam when the base should be up and running.
But there is currently a bigger issue that Director Fury is having as he looks around the conference room he is standing in. It’s all the people who shouldn’t even know that this place even existed, let alone be here in the first place. He looks over at Sam, who is currently talking to one of his brothers. The frown on his face just deepens as he looks over the rest of the room.
While he can somewhat rest easy that every person in the room has a connection to S.H.I.E.L.D. He looks to the one person who everyone seems to be avoiding, a man he never thought he would see again, Hank Pym.
He probably has a worse frown than I currently do.
Another person who was even more of a surprise to see was someone who helped train him into the man he was today, Peggy Carter was here and sitting next to her was Sharon Carter, her great niece who was just accepted into the S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy. He frowned a little deeper.
He turned his head back towards Sam as he said in an icy tone, “Sam, you mind telling me why the fuck all of these people are here. In a place that only you, me and three other people should even know exists?”
Sam froze mid talking, his mouth snapped shut and he started to turn pale as he slowly turned towards Fury. The rest of the room had also quieted down and everyone looked at Sam waiting for his answer. This made it even worse for him and as he tried to speak, he lost his voice. The only thing that could come out of his mouth was a strange wheeze. He tried to speak again, but still no intelligible sounds came out.
As he was trying to speak again, another voice was heard from the other side of the room. “Are you trying to play a joke to lighten the mood, Fury? If everyone else here is like Sharon and I, we were explicitly asked to come here by you for a matter of the utmost importance. We were also told to make sure no one knew about it, not to be followed or tracked and not bring anything that has GPS.”
Fury looked towards his former mentor and said. “I am pretty fucking sure I would have remembered if I told a bunch of random people about something above their clearance level.”
Hank glanced over at Peggy first then turned to Fury and said. “You didn’t ask me to come here. Someone else sent me a message, they said Janet was alive and could help me find her. I was then told about this place, how to get inside and when I should get here.”
Peggy stood up and looked at Hank as she asked, “Janet is still alive?!? I thought that she died stopping that nuke?”
Hank shook his head slightly before he said, “No, she went quantum stopping the missile. I had no idea how to find her or even if she was alive because of that. Now someone who was somehow able to find me in hiding and I couldn’t find after spending over a week trying to trace back how they contacted me. They told me that not only was she alive, but they could also help me find her. I decided to take the chance.”
Everyone had stopped talking and was quiet as Hank Pym talked. Hank glanced around the room for a moment at everyone as he finished, before he turned back to Fury. As they were staring at each other the wall behind Fury lit up and a face started to appear on the wall sized monitor. Fury noticed as everyone turned to look behind him, he broke eye contact with Hank and turned around himself. On the screen before him was an older looking nondescript Asian man. The only thing to really note was the man's completely black hair and irises. It almost looked like his eyes were completely black if you weren't paying attention. His eyes did a quick sweep of the room before he said, “Looks like everyone is here. I am glad you all could make it. But then again, when I asked you to come here, you didn’t know it was me asking.”