I noticed the latest Forum teaser for this last night, and figured it
was a good time to reread the series from the beginning; by the time
I'd finished, the new installment was up. These notes are from a
second read today.

(Yeah, I read all three back issues plus the new installment in one
evening. I read really, really fast. Always have.)

> Wednesday, July 14, 2032

For reference, this is about a month after the end of the previous
installment.

> "Two 55s... and that brown one's a military boomer,"
> ...
> "Sixth AD Mobile is engaged with another military boomer in Tinsel
> City."

I think it's safe to say GENOM has spotted the connection between
Stark and the Knight Sabers ...

> "Now, I'm not a paranoid man, but if I were I'd maybe suspect there
> was a connection."

... which is not lost on Stark, or Stingray. Good.

> "This is private property," the red-and-gold figure announced in an
> amplified, slightly distorted voice. "I'm afraid I'm going to have
> to ask you all to leave."

Snappy entrance quip, check.

> Six hours later, Benjamin Stark sat at the JARVIS console in the
> Armory

Taken as a whole, this episode's general slower pacing and lack of big
set-piece battle scenes makes a nice contrast with the previous three.
But I'll admit I'm a little disappointed not getting to watch the fight.

> "We agreed that you wouldn't associate Iron Man with Stark
> International until Legal finished researching the position."

On the first read-through I missed that this is setting up Linna's
delivery of her thesis.

I think I like Ben and Pepper's working relationship better than where
the movies went with Tony and Pepper.

> "We're gonna have to bring her into the loop sooner or later. She
> runs the company, not him."

This bit of setup I did catch.

I'd guess Pepper already suspects some sort of connection with the
Knight Sabers at this point...

> "Oi, Zoner! Tell Stark to come catch my show Friday night at the
> Tunnel Rat. I want to show him what I think of my new toy."

Did he make the show? It's never mentioned again.

> "We've got all this cool stuff. We'll be seeing a lot of it this
> week. Between us we could make the whole world, measurably better,
> not just within our lifetimes but within the decade. So why don't
> we?"

This entire keynote is, I think, basically unchanged from when it was
posted StarkWire a few years ago, and I don't have a lot to say about
it except that I really appreciate an Iron Man who realizes how much
more can be done with the tech he's developed than just cranking out
power armor.

> "C'mon. Let's revolutionize the world."

I do think Utena would approve.

> "After thirty years in the service of Soviet science, I have learned
> to trust my instincts."

May as well stick this query up front. Clearly this universe's Soviet
Union is much more in the traditional Cold War mold than what we have
over in NXE. Did the collapse of 1989-93 in the real world just ...
not happen? (It's certainly imaginable.) And is that canonical for
BGC, or specific to this version? (I haven't watched any BGC at all.)

> "Can it be that you find yourself... drifting away from journalism?"

I didn't actually expect to see Stark's prior history with Natasha
appear at this point—I thought its presentation as a Forum
standalone meant it would be omitted. Probably the right choice in
terms of pacing, though.

> ... my other 'assistant', Boris ...

It had to be.

> "...You see, I'm a student at the Mega Tokyo University School of
> Law..."

Sylia picking this approach to Pepper says good things about her
skills as a businesswoman. Not a side of her we get to see all that
often.

> I WISH TO DEFECT TO THE WEST. CAN/WILL YOU HELP ME?

The way this was set up, I didn't realize it was Vanko who wanted to
defect until I got to the bathroom scene. I thought it was a Soviet
AI inhabiting the "Tireless Worker," or else possibly Natasha.

> "I do believe I can get you in touch with some...let's say 'deniable
> contractors' who would be happy to help for the right price."

It's good to have contacts, isn't it?

> When she turned to return a greeting from the hotel doorman, Nene
> caught a flash of chin and profile—and her heart stopped. It can't
> be...

I thought Natasha and Nene would turn out to be related somehow...

> Nene was dressed in her Knight Sabers datasuit, augmented by a
> headset that was projecting a small holographic HUD for her at eye
> level

I'm a little surprised it's Nene running the tin suit for this show.
Would have expected Rhodes.

> "Weight, about four pounds; electrical output, three megawatts. [A]
> compact, safe, highly efficient, and completely clean source of
> uninterrupted high-density energy, which works at room temperature
> and without emitting dangerous radiation byproducts....not a nuclear
> fusion device. It is, rather, a straight-up matter-energy
> converter."

Because I am that kind of nerd, here's a little back-of-the-envelope
analysis of what must be going on inside an arc reactor. It's good
for ten years (or "over 3,500 days", if you prefer) with no servicing.
Assuming it can run continuously at three megawatts of output that
entire time, and achieves perfect overall efficiency, that comes to
roughly ten grams of mass consumed (0.3 ounces, if you prefer). The
efficiency has to be damn close to 100%, because even 1% overall
losses would be 30 kW of waste heat, and neither the Iron Man nor the
Black Widow suit seems to be equipped with that much of a cooling system.

(By way of comparison, a 3MW steam-turbine electric power plant is
lucky to do better than about 35% overall efficiency.)

(The arc reactor must also be capable of throttling back to only about
ten watts at idle, or it would always be too hot to touch! Think
about how hot a 100W incandescent bulb gets.)

Total matter-energy conversion is not that far beyond understood
physics. You don't even need antimatter; you just need proton decay,
which has never been observed to happen in nature but is expected to
happen (very, very slowly) and could conceivably be forced to happen.
Assume the fuel is hydrogen (so there are no neutrons to complicate
things). Each atom's proton becomes a pi-zero meson and a positron;
the meson decays to two gamma photons, and the positron annihilates
the hydrogen atom's electron, producing two more gammas. As subatomic
physics goes, this is neat and tidy—no particle showers, no neutrinos,
nothing but electromagnetic radiation.

"All" that's left to do is convert the energy of those gamma photons
into electricity. That part might actually be harder than making
the proton decay happen in the first place: gammas generally go
straight through everything without even slowing down. Doing it
inside a four-pound ball the size of an orange, with no dangerous
radiation whatsoever escaping ... well.

What I'm saying is, I understand why Benjamin Stark doesn't like to
call himself an engineer, but this thing is one damned impressive feat
of engineering, even if it's not yet ready for mass production.

> oddly hesitant to strap unlicensed nuclear accelerators to their
> backs

I seem to recall RL!Gryphon observing that "you're not one of me
unless you can produce a Ghostbusters quote appropriate to any
situation." Possibly in the annotations on EPU Destroys the Marvel
Universe?

> О божэ, это она

Machine translates as "Oh [my] God, this is it." I'm not sure it got
the "это она" part right; "it's her" would make more sense in
context... maybe those are the same phrase in Russian?

(Possible typo: GTrans thinks it should be "боже" rather than "божэ.")

> She's a good girl—a gentle girl! Like her sister was, before you
> people got your hands on her.

So, Natasha went through something like Red Room training at a very
early age, and her parents wouldn't have that for both daughters;
perhaps now we know why Nene's living in Japan...

> "I'm not sure if I'm more surprised that Zoner decided to make a
> move there, or that he's apparently her type."

Are we sure it isn't Sylia who made the move?

> "On a point of order, Ms. Potts," JARVIS put in, "while the Mark III
> can fly, all available test data indicates that Mr. Stark, as yet,
> cannot."

Made me chuckle.

> "I don't... I don't talk about this a lot, and there's a lot of
> things I didn't know were going on back then. But, I had... I
> have... an older sister."

And ... yep. Poor Nene.

> "C'mon, Dr. Valuk. How many times have you seen every tech outfit in
> this room, including your own, each come up with a new, competing,
> mutually incompatible standard for something, then all try to take
> them to market against the Giant Competition at the same time? I can
> think of five such occasions in the last six years, and that's just
> off the top of my head. And what happens every single time? We all
> lose."

Stark demonstrating a good solid head for business is also a nice
change from movie Iron Man.

> "The market will grow, and our monolithic friends will find that
> iron-fisted grip of theirs loosening as they start finding less and
> less people are interested in putting their money into a dying
> paradigm."

One could read this as a criticism of Soviet central planning, if
one were so inclined. :-)

> Nene hesitated, half-in and half-out of the hole they'd entered
> from, feeling as though her sister's angry gaze would melt the
> faceplate clean off her helmet.

So I guess there is a bit of a set-piece power armor battle? More
of a face-off, really. Nice job doing tense and climactic without a
single shot fired.

> "You will hear from me again once I know what part you played in
> it... because I know you played one."

So I have to wonder, to what extent is Angry And Not Even Pretending
Not To Be A Spy an act, versus her more congenial bodyguarding-the-VIP
persona (in which she was at least smiling at Stark's jokes) or the
five-year-old honey trap persona? Are they all an act? I do hope
we get to find out if there's still someone in there whom Nene would
recognize as her sister.

> «I know that bastard Stark had something to do with this, and I am
> going to need everything to find out what. He won't outmaneuver me
> this time.»

This sure does make a pretty sharp contrast with "...but she wouldn't
mind encountering this American again" from the flashback.

Oh, don't worry. Next issue will have your full recommended daily allowance of big set-piece battle scenes.

>> "Oi, Zoner! Tell Stark to come catch my show Friday night at the
>> Tunnel Rat. I want to show him what I think of my new toy."
>
>Did he make the show? It's never mentioned again.
>

Alas, probably not; he spent pretty much the whole weekend running the conference.

>May as well stick this query up front. Clearly this universe's Soviet
>Union is much more in the traditional Cold War mold than what we have
>over in NXE. Did the collapse of 1989-93 in the real world just ...
>not happen?

Yes, pretty much. There are a few old posts lying around here that imply the USSR did collapse and then was reconstituted, but I had mixed up this setting's backhistory with that of NXE (where that did happen). More on this in a moment:

>And is that canonical for
>BGC, or specific to this version? (I haven't watched any BGC at all.)

The original Bubblegum Crisis predates the fall of the real-life Soviet Union, and as far as I can recall it doesn't particularly mention happenings in the Eastern Bloc one way or the other. For our purposes, we can assume that the setting has the stock "1980s cyberpunk set in the 2000s" backdrop in which the 1917 USSR is still a going concern (albeit with a somewhat more functional economy). The whole thing with Natasha and Ben's backstory is futurized Cold War spy stuff.

>> "Can it be that you find yourself... drifting away from journalism?"
>
>I didn't actually expect to see Stark's prior history with Natasha
>appear at this point—I thought its presentation as a Forum
>standalone meant it would be omitted. Probably the right choice in
>terms of pacing, though.

Well, you didn't see all of it, just the first encounter. He mentions another in his conversation with Nene, but as we will see at a later point, their paths have crossed several times since 2027.

>> ... my other 'assistant', Boris ...
>
>It had to be.

It did, although, oddly, not as a direct Rocky & Bullwinkle reference. Natasha had at least two KGB partners named Boris in the 1960s comics. That may itself have been a Rocky & Bullwinkle reference on the part of Stan Lee & co., the timing would have been about right for it, but it's not the joke I'm actually making. :)

>> I WISH TO DEFECT TO THE WEST. CAN/WILL YOU HELP ME?
>
>The way this was set up, I didn't realize it was Vanko who wanted to
>defect until I got to the bathroom scene. I thought it was a Soviet
>AI inhabiting the "Tireless Worker," or else possibly Natasha.

The former is an interesting idea, although in a situation like that, "defect" would not quite be the right word.

>> "I do believe I can get you in touch with some...let's say 'deniable
>> contractors' who would be happy to help for the right price."
>
>It's good to have contacts, isn't it?

If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them...

>> Nene was dressed in her Knight Sabers datasuit, augmented by a
>> headset that was projecting a small holographic HUD for her at eye
>> level
>
>I'm a little surprised it's Nene running the tin suit for this show.
>Would have expected Rhodes.

Rhodey still works in the US at the moment; he's chief test pilot for Stark Aerospace, so he spends most of his time in Burbank.

>(The arc reactor must also be capable of throttling back to only about
>ten watts at idle, or it would always be too hot to touch!

Well, yeah, it doesn't actually have to do anything but sit there making a bit of visible light. (That's where most of its waste energy goes.)

The performance figures he's giving there are extremely ad-hoc; he's not actually saying he expects the thing to be able to pump out three megawatts of electricity continuously for ten years, rather that its maximum output is three megawatts and, in "normal use" (however he's arrived at that standard with such a limited sample size), he expects the fuel core to last ten years. That's in the Iron Man application, where most of the time it's not really doing much of anything. Running, say, a hospital, you would probably need to throw a new unobtanium triangle in it every year or so. :)

>What I'm saying is, I understand why Benjamin Stark doesn't like to
>call himself an engineer, but this thing is one damned impressive feat
>of engineering, even if it's not yet ready for mass production.

I think he's kind of semi-deliberately not looking directly at that; there are some pretty significant existential conundra there that he's not really ready to confront just yet.

>(Possible typo: GTrans thinks it should be "боже" rather than
>"божэ.")

Oops, that's an artifact of how I have to render Cyrillic lettering in the HTML source files. My text editor, which is otherwise very capable and for which I've developed some specialized regexps and whatnot for formatting large files semi-quickly, doesn't support the fully extended Unicode character set, so I have to render things like Cyrillic letters and beyond-Latin-1 diacriticals (the lowercase o with macron that appears in Kongō's name, for instance) as their ampersand entities. Cyrillic actually has two e characters, one for the "eh" sound and one for the "ee" sound. Amper ecy semicolon is the one for the former; what I actually wanted there was amper iecy semicolon, the one for the latter. боже.

>> "I'm not sure if I'm more surprised that Zoner decided to make a
>> move there, or that he's apparently her type."
>
>Are we sure it isn't Sylia who made the move?

In fact, we're pretty sure it was.

>> "The market will grow, and our monolithic friends will find that
>> iron-fisted grip of theirs loosening as they start finding less and
>> less people are interested in putting their money into a dying
>> paradigm."
>
>One could read this as a criticism of Soviet central planning,
>if one were so inclined. :-)

Oh, it is. I mean, cosmetically he's talking about GENOM and the like, "free"-market monopolists, but he is well aware that Natasha is in his audience, and he rarely misses an opportunity to tweak her about the Virtues of Communism. Goes back to the time they crossed paths in Havana and she spent most of an evening explaining the dialectical-materialist basis for the inevitable triumph of Marxism-Leninism over capitalist greed. Weirdest pillow talk ever. Havana in August; it was too humid for murder. :)

>> "You will hear from me again once I know what part you played in
>> it... because I know you played one."
>
>So I have to wonder, to what extent is Angry And Not Even Pretending
>Not To Be A Spy an act, versus her more congenial bodyguarding-the-VIP
>persona (in which she was at least smiling at Stark's jokes) or the
>five-year-old honey trap persona? Are they all an act? I do
>hope we get to find out if there's still someone in there whom Nene would
>recognize as her sister.

Like many long-time espionage officers, Natasha is no long entirely sure herself what is and isn't an act sometimes.

>> «I know that bastard Stark had something to do with this, and I am
>> going to need everything to find out what. He won't outmaneuver me
>> this time.»
>
>This sure does make a pretty sharp contrast with "...but she wouldn't
>mind encountering this American again" from the flashback.

Well, like I say, she's conflicted. By this point they've tangled (... in various senses of the word) several times, and on the overall scorecard there is no clear winner. He is, if nothing else, a worthy adversary, and however hard she has worked not to disclose it in any official debriefing, she finds herself harboring a strange sort of affection for him. He makes her smile. He also makes her want to kill him. She's not sure any longer which of those is her "real" response, although she's open to the possibility that they both are.

She's a complicated woman, Natasha. No one understands her but... actually, I don't think anyone understands her.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Did you include the period between the two parts? When I threw it into Google Translate, combining the two sentences affected the translation.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

It takes me awhile to do these. Even if I weren't rusty, which I am, Ben has a long and proud history of dropping his choicest stuff right when I'm about to be buried at work. (The best Azula piece he ever wrote, back in 2014? Dropped like a day before I had to fly off to Denver on a week-long contract job, standing around in conference rooms waiting for the computers of GE execs to break.)

Today I spent yelling at systems administrators that, listen, I might just be a lowly desktop technician, but I know where the goddamn FTP server, is, I'm physically in the datacenter with it right now, and if you guys don't create the user accounts that I very carefully filled out the paperwork for this is going to get the attention of Senior VPs.

I'm slightly bitter. On the other hand, some days nothing happens at all and I spend all afternoon sampling the finest YouTube has to offer.

(Our systems administrators are good people for the most part but ever since we centralized operations into a giant NOC that is physically divorced from the rest of our company infrastructure they have a tendency to forget that "cloud" is a metaphor; the servers are still real objects in real racks somewhere that someone can physically put their hands and prove exist.)

... but I digress.

>Sylia picking this approach to Pepper says good things about her
>skills as a businesswoman. Not a side of her we get to see all that
>often.
>
>> I WISH TO DEFECT TO THE WEST. CAN/WILL YOU HELP ME?
>
>The way this was set up, I didn't realize it was Vanko who wanted to
>defect until I got to the bathroom scene. I thought it was a Soviet
>AI inhabiting the "Tireless Worker," or else possibly Natasha.

This is precisely how I read it as well. Indeed, my initial assumption on reading the teaser was that Vanko was going to be some sort of wrongheaded villain, with him and Stark being all "You stole my AI!" "It's a person; you can't steal a person. I liberated a slave." "It's a set of algorithms I created to more efficiently run powered armor systems, and you stole it to plug into your army of tin men! GENOM was right about you and your 'conference.'"

-Merc
Keep Rat

That's not the sort of question a gentleman answers.

There's also a 'difference' between the two instances from her perspective. The first, she tried to take something from him but was stopped. In the second, he took something from her and succeeded.

This is, of course, in addition to anything else that has occurred between them over the years as was stated above.

I'm thinking that Natasha has not been quite so successful at keeping her affection for Mr. Stark from coming to the attention of her superiors as she had hoped, and that the loss of Prof. Vanko on her watch, -at Stark's shindig-, they're taking no chances.

Again, might just be me reading into it the wrong way, but I wouldn't be surprised if installment 5 starts out with a dust-up in a hotel room.

-Man- this one was fun.

-Droken

This being Charlie Stross, the Soviet AI was literally an uploaded lobster colony that had somehow sussed out English from reading the internet and wound up getting asylum in the Belt, running mining machines or something.

Ben's in fine form, the gang's all here... except for the bad guys, who are mysteriously absent - I don't really count Russia.

Vanko was... not what I expected. The technoscrub from the movies is no great loss though. blech!

Exciting things in store for Iron Man influenced powersuits, though. And Justin Hammer's a prick as usual.

So what put this back on the active list after umpteen years, Gryphon? Not that I'm at all complaining - it was a very pleasant surprise!