It was my first day on the job. Technically. For the mind I was hiding inside, Ronald Sung, I had been with the start up company since I had joined them out of grad school sure I was going to change the world. It turns out the space between great ideas and workable therapies and products involves a whole lot more detail oriented problem solving than you would think. Outside the box thinking was required for problems you could not solve any other way, but cost effective methods using available equipment got you a line of research you could afford to follow and make a few mistakes in and still have funding to find the next workable step forward.

Ronald lacked the patience. He had the training and the knowledge, but when results did not simply come running, he lacked the critical thinking required to determine why his choice was not succeeding, and leap to the question of why not as the key to the next breakthrough.

He was good at following detailed instructions and was a valuable part of the research team. His own bitter sort of negativity actually made him an asset in trouble shooting potential experiments, as either he identified problems that could be addressed to move forward, or deal breakers that made that line of inquiry useless. While he intended to show how no one else could succeed where he failed, his contributions allowed a number of promising lines to make real advances.

Ronald had friends in the lab. Sure he was bitter and sarcastic, but funny even without intending to be. He was like the grumpy old uncle of a group of talented young geniuses, even if he was the same age they were. If they knew he was okay with them being hosed down with automatic fire or turned into brain bent slaves, they would be surprised and saddened. As I was currently wearing his soul as a hat, I got to experience his memories through the lense of my own mind and emotions and felt like I had been a really shitty friend and coworker.

If I was the boss, I would buy pizza, but I am just another poor working slob paying off student loans. Well, no. Hydra paid off my student loan, my car loan, and gave me a little something to help with performance anxiety in the bedroom I had such plans for; but as far as they knew, I was paying off the same PhD level student debt as the rest of them. Doughnuts were an offering of respect.

I didn’t get Krispy Kreme or any of that synthetic crap. A Mind Flayer’s tentacles have more scent and taste receptors than a bloodhound, and don’t get me started on what a Kree tongue can taste. There are gas chromatographs that are less talented at breaking down ingredients than a Kree taking a bite of a snack food.

I sprang for the good stuff. There is a German/Indian bakery two blocks from Ronalds condo. I was waiting for them to open. I tracked the scent of this place like a drug sniffing dog in Charlie Sheen’s apartment. I do not know what caused a German man to seduce and marry a Hindu woman and move to America to make desserts, but I suspect a food god is involved. Sure I probably dropped more for the desserts I brough to work than I will make today, but I like to think of it as coming from the Hydra bribe money.

To say my coworkers were surprised is putting it mildly. I brushed it off by saying that I won big at the cassino and had to share my luck. In truth, it was at the cassino that early soft contact and what I can recognize as the grooming of Ronald was done. He died thinking he reached out to Hydra, when he had been dancing on their strings for months before he followed the careful trail of suggestions and “discoveries” that caused him to find someone willing to pay him a princes ransom for information about his coworkers.

There was real strudel of all descriptions. Not the American version, the real thing. The pastry will melt in your mouth, each flake pure bliss, and the fruit tasted like it fell from the tree that morning and landed in a soft pool of spiced glaze. There were Pfeffernusse nut cookies, Lebkuchen ginger savory cookies, Lintzer shortbread cookies with blueberry and raspberry jam filling, chocolate sprinkled rumballs and cream cheese and icing sugar coconut rolled snowballs.

Anyone who hadn’t yet died and gone to food heaven got to try the Gulab jamun which are little bundles of milky joy soaked in savoury sweet syrup, carrot Halwa mini muffins, Kaju Katli fudge for the gluten free diner, and Rasgalla balls, because taking savory cottage cheese balls and cooking it in sweet syrup until it thinks its cake is a genius move.

Whatever productive time we lost due to snacking and socializing, I guarantee we made up for in total ground speed and brain fuel. I spent the day riding the high of my rare social grace to get familiar and comfortable with the space. I couldn’t use Ronalds memories, because he was a mediocre scientist, not a trained agent.

My SHIELD training was real. My life prior to intake was fake, but I was trained as a bona fide secret agent by SHIELD, and they are masters of the craft. We look for different things. The electronic security was good, but off the shelf and fairly rigid. The electronic security was good, but the usual compromises were made to make life easier. Sure the actual research was all on “Tempest Shielded” systems, a fancy way of saying not networked stand alone systems, so it couldn’t be hacked, but the bulk of the machines were linked, as were all the security systems, time clocks, trackers, communications.

They were vulnerable. Anyone with any sort of serious cyberskills could cut them off from the outside world and they wouldn’t even notice until they screamed for help and no one came. If they thought about it at all, they probably assumed between the cell phones they all carried and the wireles security links they were safe, but Hydra could jam the Pacific Fleet at anchor in Pearl Harbour and there isn’t anything the US Navy could do about it. To think they couldn’t silent jam every frequency for a block in every direction without anyone outside noticing was niave.

The physical security would stop meth heads from breaking in and corporate spies from sneaking in, but they couldn’t stop a normal active shooter, let alone a Hydra strike team. Worse, there were obvious choke points. Control three doors and no one can get in or out. The windows were all heavily polarized and bullet proof, there were extensive sound baffles in place and serious anti-radiation and biofilters in place with a discrete and filtered air system for their own research needs. The net effect of this is you could film a remake of all the Die Hard and John Wick movies inside and nobody next door would hear it.

Invictus Life was like canned food for Hydra. Just open and serve. It was a good thing that I had eaten Ronald, because if they didn’t have an asset in place, any employee pressured enough could deliver this place to Hydra on a plate.

Instead, they would reach out to me, and my entry into Hydra would begin. Honestly, if SHIELD didn’t have such xenophobia, a shoot first and ask the pathologists about it later attitude about aliens, I could just TELL them their issue, instead of infiltrating Hydra to find SHIELD agents to capture and brief them on their own security issues.

It is like having to break into the IRS, take the whole place hostage just to pay your taxes.

I was having a chat with Anna Kendrick about a problem she was having with sheathing on some of her components in the limb interface on the meat side. She was still stuck in the ‘coat the conductor’ line of thought, which left you with a large and fragile fiber. When she eventually got to what all the advanced races did, which was make the ‘biologically acceptable fiber conduct’ she would be off to the races, and whatever solution she came up with would be within earth’s current or very near future capacity to build.

There is a reason I don’t just share my technological knowledge. Reed Richards is a hundred times smarter than Tony Stark, but Tony is like a really smart bronze age smith, who might be able to teach a cave man how to make a bronze spearhead or axe. Reed Richards would explain how to make a gauss rifle or terawat beam laser to the cave man and wonder vaguely why they haven’t got it into production yet. Reed is too far ahead to lead people after him. Tony is a self-absorbed asshole who only cares about his ego and balance sheet, but what he designs, he can train his people to actually manufacture.

I know what the mature technology of what she is aiming for looks like, I have no idea how to get there, or what steps along the path humanity will need to forge for themselves. Anna Kendrick was more important to the advancement of humanity that I was, or than Reed Richard or Tony Stark was, and humanity would never know it.

I threw her a bone, set her down the line of thought that would give her the question to ask herself, even if I didn’t have a clue what the answer would be.

“They don’t really need to carry much current. If they conduct decently, don’t heat up, and don’t trigger an immune response, that is really all you need right?” I said. I saw the lightbulb go off in her mind. She didn’t have the answer, but she spotted the right question. Another barrier between crippled veterans and a normal life was about to fall.

Then my phone buzzed. I looked.

It was a lunch meeting request from “Jasime”. My smile froze. My Hydra handler was requesting a meeting.

Anna popped from her musings about possible solutions to the limb interface issue and peeked at my phone message.

“Oh ho,” she looked at the rest of the team. “I think I know why we all got dessert today. Looks like Ronald has a hot date at lunch!”

I tuned my holograph generator to make my semblance blush. Anna was a sweet person, and important to humanity. The people here at Invictus Life were important to humanity. I just received a message from my Hydra handler, the one who directed my corruption and set up the last kidnapping attempt. Now she wanted to meet me to force me into a further betrayal of everyone in this room.

The purpose of my lunch date was not romance. The lives and dreams of these amazing people were about to be stolen by Hydra, and used not to heal the wounded of our own wars, but to make cheap enhanced super soldiers to spread violence and hatred on a global scale.

I know I am only here as a stepping stone to get to SHIELD to deal with the Skrull and Kree problem, but I will be damned if I let Hydra get their hands on these people.

I smiled dreamily as I sat down and did Ronald’s work with the part of his mind I had copied for this task. The rest of me was now tossing out my great plan to infiltrate after a successful Hydra raid on this company, and figure out how I am going to infiltrate Hydra after I stop their asses cold.

These were good people. Better than me, healers, scientists, the future of humanity. Hydra wants to turn them into brain bent slaves, and their dream into tools of murder.

One Kree-Flayer with delusions of humanity is going to stop them. Somehow.