Henry had not even noticed when 1991 arrived. After finding a house and settling down, his schedule had been packed to the brim, leaving him without a moment to spare.
He had visited both Actors Guilds, and the results were just as Old Gary had said.
The Screen Actors Guild still had a few scattered opportunities, but they were all low-budget films from obscure production companies and directors, the kind where one person was expected to do several jobs.
Occasionally, leading roles became available, but their descriptions alone made them seem unreliable. There were even bizarre projects that required the lead actor to pay into the production themselves. Was this some kind of Hollywood-style scam?
The American Federation of Television and Radio Artists did not even have scattered opportunities. The staff member handling registrations told him plainly to join a talent agency. He would not find work by picking it up off the ground.
With a take-it-as-it-comes attitude, Henry made himself an actor profile sheet, then sent audition materials to every production whose recruitment requirements he met.
To do that, Henry had to deal once again with Giovanni, the Italian who ran the photography studio. Besides developing more headshots, he needed a set of full-body photos for auditions.
Following Old Gary's advice, he did not need flashy artistic portraits. Simple photos that showed his full body, features, and proportions would do. Anything too fancy would count against him and make it harder for people to see what mattered.
He took a set of four such photos and ordered more prints, a hundred sets in total, all for three hundred dollars. That was already a fire-sale price, and the poor greasy old white man looked ready to cry.
Still, Henry asked Giovanni to order him a Stark i486 personal computer for four thousand five hundred dollars. It came with a keyboard, monitor, and a 28.8 kbps modem.
A mouse... In this era, mice were not only far from standard equipment, but using them was also hard to put into words. Those who knew, knew.
He had gone to Giovanni because the stores in Los Angeles only carried IBM and Dell personal computers.
Buying loose parts and assembling a computer yourself was not yet mainstream in this era, so computer components were not easy to find.
Especially Stark Industries' "premium goods." Without connections, it was impossible to buy them on the West Coast. Forget about purchasing loose Stark computer parts.
Wanting to try Stark products for himself, Henry could only ask Giovanni for help, while mentally preparing himself to wait an unknown amount of time. The greasy old white man with the big belly did promise to sort it out within two weeks.
Still, spending some time browsing the stores had not been entirely fruitless. Henry bought himself a television, a VCR, and a telephone answering machine.
He even picked up a turntable and a considerable number of vinyl records at remarkably low prices.
Cassettes were the mainstream in this era, while CDs were on the rise. Vinyl was a sunset industry. Who could have known that it would make a comeback against the trend nearly twenty years later?
The answering machine was for calls he might miss while he was away from home.
He had considered buying a mobile phone, but after seeing the brick-sized phones of this era—large enough to use as weapons—Henry gave up on the idea.
They were conspicuous and expensive, utterly unnecessary. Answering machines and B.B. Call were still the mainstream means of communication.
With a television and VCR, naturally, he used them to watch classic films. In an era when he could not binge-watch shows or anime, classic old movies were among the best ways to pass the time.
However, aside from regularly visiting the Actors Guild to see whether new jobs had appeared or whether any productions had contacted him, Henry spent most of his time at the Los Angeles Public Library.
They said one's horizons and experience determined one's height. Having suddenly come from beneath the Red Flag to this happy United States where shootings happened every day—and an alternate universe with a different background, at that—Henry deeply felt that the little knowledge from his previous life was nowhere near enough.
Never mind how much useless material exam-oriented education had taught him. In the field of scientific research, that knowledge did not even qualify as introductory material. This was only the 1990s, not the 2090s.
He had a Super Brain, along with extraordinary memory and computational ability. If he did not make use of such advantages and only knew how to punch people, would that not be a terrible waste?
It was like having a top-of-the-line computer, one capable of smoothly running AAA games at maximum settings and running AI models locally.
Yet the user only used it to download movies and browse the internet, occasionally treating the computer like a brick to hit people. This...
Even if he did not expect to become a scientific giant like the two generations of the Stark Family or that Mr. Huo with his tilted head and glaring eyes, a powerless nobody like him needed to understand these tools if he wanted to hide himself and survive as well as possible in the coming information society.
Henry was not merely absorbing knowledge related to the information industry. From science to art, culture to history, he went through every book in the Los Angeles Public Library.
Although older libraries like this had so-called restricted sections, they usually contained antique books such as first editions or unique copies, not forbidden knowledge.
So Henry only read the books in the public reading areas. He had no particular desire to sneak into the restricted section.
As long as no one around him was paying attention, he could skim through all the books on an entire shelf in roughly a minute.
If someone was watching, he slowed down somewhat, but he would still take down a book, flip through its pages with his thumb, and finish it in a flash before moving on to the next. He did not look anything like a normal person reading.
This habit of skimming books rather than reading them had drawn other people's attention. Library administrators had even been called over several times to ask what he was doing.
Henry did not say much. He recited several books from memory and let them randomly quiz him on any page they chose. After a few such incidents, Henry became somewhat known among the librarians as a strange man who read exceptionally fast.
Though this went against his original intention of keeping a low profile, in a world full of extraordinary people, it was not that eye-catching. What could reading do, turn someone into a genius? No one would believe it if he told them.
In just over two months, Henry had read through every publicly available book in the city library, including old materials such as journals and daily newspapers.
There were even the latest scientific journals among them, supporting Henry as he lit up Earth's technological tree in every direction.
He could not claim to have thoroughly mastered all of Earth's technology, but he had covered more than eighty or ninety percent of it.
By deducing the rest, combined with the developments of the next thirty years or so in the world he had come from before crossing over, Henry already had enough ability to develop future technologies that could be considered black technology in the present day.
But what truly overturned Henry's worldview was this world's rather different social development.
All kinds of supernatural phenomena were openly discussed and researched. The main cause of this change was the Mutants born for unknown reasons.
Their traces and randomness made them difficult to conceal.
On the other hand, the primary contradiction in contemporary United States society remained the issue between Black and white people. The Black Civil Rights Movement that began with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had left white people with no spare attention for the issue of Mutants.
He just did not know when some self-proclaimed genius would appear and shift social conflict from Black people to Mutants.
Still, these two-plus months had finally allowed Henry to understand what kind of world he was in. He now had a clearer understanding of the future as well.
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