She realized she was being precious about it — too attached to the outcome — and solved the problem by throwing herself on the bed and sleeping through most of the anxiety.
When she opened her eyes, the press conference was on.
Tony Stark. Podium. Cameras. The announcement that immediately set every defense industry analyst's career on fire: Stark Industries was shutting down its weapons division. He said it, took no questions, and left the stage with the energy of someone who had already moved on to thinking about something else.
Two minutes later, the stock started its dive.
Three days. In just three days, over forty points per share were gone. The shockwave rippled through the entire financial market, rattling sectors well beyond Stark Industries itself.
Daisy closed her position at the peak of the drop.
It netted nearly three hundred million dollars.
She didn't hold onto it.
The supercomputer purchase had been the plan from the moment she started building toward this. The list of reasons was long: a permanent home for Crisis rather than squatting on Professor Xavier's infrastructure; a dedicated platform for decoding the Atomic Cutter's alien architecture; and eventually, the astronomical calculations required to triangulate the Power Stone's location across lightyears of space.
None of that worked without serious hardware underneath it.
Something in her — the Daisy Johnson who had grown up breaking into government systems through borrowed bandwidth — felt a surge of pure joy at the thought. Working through channels, the maximum she could safely draw from any national supercomputer was about ten percent of its processing capacity before the power draw flagged on someone's dashboard. Having one that was genuinely, entirely her own?
Every elite hacker in the world would lose their mind.
Xavier's institute technically had sufficient computing power. The problem was that running Crisis anywhere near full capacity would generate an electricity bill large enough to alarm even Charles Xavier. That wasn't an option.
She reviewed the major manufacturers. The decision was simple.
Stark Industries.
She knew the people. And they'd just shuttered their weapons program, which meant they were actively hungry for new contracts. Walking in with a nine-figure deal wasn't doing them a favor — it was mutual interest, which made negotiation easy.
Her maid spent two hours on her before she walked through Stark Industries' front doors. Everything replaced, head to toe — underwear to accessories. Daisy emerged looking like someone who had never spent a single day in an Afghan desert.
A contract at this scale required Obadiah Stane at the table personally. As the head of Skye Data, Daisy had to be there too. Both sides knew what they wanted, both sides needed the other, and after some back-and-forth on the specific figures they reached an initial agreement quickly.
The standard payment structure was three installments — pre-installation, post-installation, and twelve months into service. Daisy had no objection. She'd made a fortune, but pouring all of it out at once wasn't her style.
The contract documents were the size and weight of a reference book. Daisy glanced at the first page and handed the entire stack to her legal advisor Maki, who received it with the calm efficiency of someone for whom reading a contract line-by-line at a methodical pace was not only normal but preferred. The lawyers and accountants from both sides settled in.
Obadiah offered her a tour.
Stark Industries was vast. The public-facing headquarters was just the entry point; the R&D campus behind it extended further than most people realized. Obadiah guided her through it with the ease of a man who had spent decades walking these halls.
"Everything I've poured my life into is here," he said. Ordinary enough at first — then something surfaced behind his eyes that he hadn't planned on showing. He redirected smoothly.
"You've made an excellent choice, Miss Johnson. Stark Industries can absolutely deliver a custom configuration to your specifications. But a machine of that class draws extraordinary power. Have you worked out the infrastructure side?"
He'd landed a real point. The operating costs of a supercomputer at that scale could approach its purchase price annually. Outside of national labs and a handful of specialized government installations, almost no private entity could run one sustainably.
"What do you have in mind?" she asked.
He gestured for her to follow.
The R&D campus was largely quiet. After Stark's announcement, non-essential staff had been sent on extended leave. Missile inventory could be quietly liquidated — Obadiah was already managing that. But active R&D had stopped. Their footsteps carried in the empty corridors, her heels against the polished floor making a sound slightly too large for the space.
She wasn't concerned about Obadiah making a move. The building wasn't empty, and she'd arrived with a full delegation. He wasn't that reckless. And if he were, she wasn't the one who needed to be worried.
They entered a lab. In the far corner stood the Arc Reactor, glowing with pale blue light — steady and slow, like something breathing.
Obadiah extended a hand toward it with what looked like genuine pride. "Stark Industries' Arc Reactor would be an ideal power source for a supercomputer at your scale. The output is more than sufficient — the pairing would be seamless. A genuinely elegant solution."
The sales pitch crystallized immediately. Bundle the reactor with the contract.
"It's remarkable," she said, keeping her tone neutral. "But the scale makes urban installation impractical, and I'm not sure the safety profile is there yet."
Neither objection was invented. Howard Stark's reactor was brilliant in conception and somewhat dated in execution — the materials science hadn't kept pace with the underlying theory. More telling: there were no blueprints for it in the company's files anywhere. Howard had kept that particular document close. The reactor also hadn't been integrated into Stark Industries' own power grid, which told her everything she needed to know about internal confidence in its stability.
Obadiah absorbed this with the composure of someone who had been in high-stakes commercial negotiations for forty years.
"You're right, of course." He slipped seamlessly back into the role of the loyal company veteran. "Our predecessors left us something extraordinary. We haven't been able to honor it as we should. It's a masterpiece gathering dust." He shook his head with just the right amount of regret.
Internally, Daisy was mildly impressed by the performance. Externally, she gave him nothing.
Howard figured you out early, she thought. That's why the blueprints aren't here.
"You're known as a physicist of some standing, Miss Johnson," Obadiah continued, trying a different angle. "Perhaps you could help us improve it? Even some initial work might open doors."
It wasn't pure flattery. She had a reputation to back it up — though it had come at a cost. She'd been submitting paper after paper to Yale to offset all the unauthorized leave she kept taking, including three months in Afghanistan that had left the university quietly displeased. Three papers delivered under those circumstances, each one grounding theoretical physics in direct field experience, carried a density that purely academic work rarely matched. The standing estimate in certain circles was that she'd pushed the frontier of human physics forward by roughly two years.
Her reputation had spread faster than her formal credentials. In hushed conversations, people were already comparing her to the seventeen-year-old who had graduated from MIT and outperformed every evaluator he ever met.
The Democratic Party's interest in her as a visible success story hadn't hurt either — there were people in her corner quietly amplifying the signal for reasons entirely their own.
She had no formal title yet. She had something more useful — the reputation.