Knowing the World

Henry had no idea when 1991 had arrived. After finding a place to live and settling in, his schedule was packed to the brim without a moment's rest.

He visited both actors' unions, and the results were exactly as Old Gary had said.

The Screen Actors Guild still had some scattered opportunities, but they were all from obscure little production companies and directors—low-budget films where one person did the work of many.

Occasionally, a lead role would pop up, but the synopsis alone made it seem unreliable. There were even bizarre projects requiring the lead actor to chip in money to help produce the film—was this some kind of Hollywood scam?

As for the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, there weren't even scattered opportunities. The clerk handling registration flat-out told him to find a Talent Agency. Picking up scraps wouldn't land him any work.

Taking a laissez-faire attitude, Henry put together an actor's resume and mailed audition materials to every crew whose recruitment criteria he met.

To pull that off, Henry had to deal once more with Giovanni, the Italian guy who ran a Photo Studio. Besides developing more headshots, he also needed a set of full-body shots for auditions.

Per Old Gary's advice, he didn't go for fancy artistic photos. Just simple ones that showed his full-body proportions and features clearly. Too much flair would be a drawback, making it hard to see the key points.

He shot a set of four such photos, printed in bulk—a hundred sets total—for three hundred bucks. That was a rock-bottom, fire-sale price, enough to make the poor, greasy Old white men cry.

Still, Henry commissioned Giovanni to order a Stark Industries i486 personal computer, priced at forty-five hundred bucks, including a keyboard, monitor, and a 28.8kbps modem.

A mouse... mice weren't standard equipment in this era, and using one was a whole other story—those in the know, knew.

The reason he went to Giovanni was that the stores in Los Angeles only carried IBM or Dell brand personal computers.

Buying loose parts and assembling them yourself wasn't the mainstream approach in this era, so finding computer components wasn't easy.

Especially Stark Industries' "premium" products—without connections, you couldn't buy them on the West Coast. Let alone loose Stark-brand computer parts.

Wanting to try out Stark products, Henry had no choice but to ask Giovanni for help, mentally preparing to wait God knows how long. The greasy Old white men with a big beer belly promised to sort it out within two weeks.

But spending time browsing stores wasn't a total loss. Henry bought himself a TV set, a VCR, and an answering machine.

He even snagged a turntable and a decent number of vinyl records at a dirt-cheap price.

Because the mainstream in this era was cassettes, and CDs were on the rise, vinyl was a sunset industry. Who would've guessed that nearly twenty years later, vinyl would make a comeback?

The answering machine was for catching calls he might miss when he wasn't home.

He thought about getting a mobile phone, but seeing the brick-sized, weapon-grade phones of this era, Henry gave up.

They were flashy, expensive, and totally unnecessary. Answering machines and B.B. Call pagers were still the mainstream.

With a TV and VCR, of course, he used them to watch classic movies. In this era without binge-watching shows or anime, classic old films were the best way to kill time.

But aside from checking the actors' union daily for new jobs or hearing from any crew, Henry mainly spent his time at the Los Angeles Public Library.

They say vision and insight determine a person's height. Suddenly going from under the red flag to this gun-every-day happy United States, and in a universe with a different background, Henry deeply felt that his past life's knowledge was woefully inadequate.

Not to mention how much useless stuff exam-oriented education taught—if you put that in a research field, it wouldn't even count as an introduction. This was the 1990s of the 20th century, not the 90s of the 2nd century.

With a super brain, possessing incredible memory and computational power, not leveraging that advantage and only knowing how to punch people would be a colossal waste.

It felt like having a top-tier computer that could smoothly run AAA games at full settings and also run AI models offline.

But the user only used it to download movies and browse the web, occasionally smacking people with it like a brick. Seriously...

Even if he didn't expect to become a research giant like the two generations of the Stark family or Mr. Ho with his crooked neck and glaring eyes, as someone without power or influence, if he wanted to hide in the upcoming information age, understanding these tools was the best way to parasitize.

Henry didn't just absorb knowledge from the information industry; he comprehensively swept through all the books in the Los Angeles Public Library, from science to art, from culture to history.

Although libraries with a long history like this one had so-called restricted sections, those usually held antiques like first editions or unique copies, not forbidden knowledge.

So Henry only read books in the public reading area, without deliberately trying to sneak into the restricted section.

When no one was watching, he could sweep through an entire bookshelf's collection in about a minute.

If someone was watching, he'd slow down, but he'd still grab a book, flip through the pages with his thumb, finish it in a whoosh, and move on to the next. It didn't look like how a normal person reads at all.

This flipping-not-reading motion actually caught others' attention. A few times, they called the librarian over to ask what he was up to.

Henry didn't say much. He recited a few books from memory and let people randomly quiz him on any page. After a few rounds, he became a minor celebrity among the library staff—just a weirdo who read incredibly fast.

Though it went against his intention to keep a low profile, in this world full of oddballs and eccentrics, it wasn't that eye-catching. What could reading do, turn him into a genius? Tell anyone, and no one would believe it.

In just over two months, Henry finished all the public collections in the city library, including old materials like journals and daily newspapers.

Among them were the latest scientific journals, which supported Henry in fully lighting up Earth's tech tree.

He wouldn't claim to have mastered all of Earth's technology, but he had a grasp of eighty to ninety percent.

For the rest, using deduction alone, plus the development trends of the thirty years or so from his pre-transmigration world, Henry already had enough capability to develop future tech that could be called black tech in the present.

But what really blew Henry's mind was the slightly different social development of this world.

Various supernatural phenomena were out in the open, discussed and studied. The main reason for this change was the Mutants, born from unknown causes.

Their traces and randomness made them hard to hide.

On the other hand, the main social conflict in the contemporary United States was still between black and white. The black civil rights movement, starting with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., kept white people too busy to worry about the Mutant issue.

Who knew when some big brain would come along and shift social conflict from black people to Mutants.

Still, these two-plus months finally let Henry know what kind of world he was in. He gained a clearer understanding of the future.

The new book is signed. Request for follow-up reads, collections, and recommendations. Thank you~~