The Victor's Ambition

Salomon had been keeping an eye on Pym Technologies' developments, though he had not involved himself in them. That was simply his style. He had always rarely involved himself in that "superhero" bullshit. He had no idea why the concept of "superheroes" had arisen in the first place, and those people seemed to do nothing but disrupt order and cause trouble. But considering the US Government's consistently weak social control and the federal nature of state autonomy, their emergence was understandable. The tasks that should have belonged to the government had gone undone, leaving room for "superheroes" to operate.

He preferred to regard them as a social science experiment, exploring the philosophy of governance under an incompetent government. Like the gangs of Prohibition, they supplemented the government's control. The only difference between the Avengers and the Mafia was whether they got involved in gray-market industries. For that very reason, if the Avengers failed to reach an agreement with Capitol Hill, their fate would be no different from that of the Mafia during Prohibition. He had even written an SSCI social science paper on public administration because of this, with Darcy, who worked in the same physics lab, listed as the second author.

Because of that second-author credit, Darcy gave him a fierce kiss.

He was certain that when the Avengers met their end, his paper would be cited frequently. It was hard to imagine that such work could have been written by a physics undergraduate and a former social science major who was now a physics graduate student, especially when Salomon had only just graduated from Oxford and was preparing for further study. No one had expected him to still find the time to show off his abundant energy. To those who knew the truth, it was even more unbelievable,