The choice of a company address was no joke—it was basically the difference between "start-up with potential" and "back-alley scam with a logo."
Hell's Kitchen was a hard no. You couldn't recruit decent employees there, unless your hiring pitch included hazard pay and body armor. So Daisy, clutching her wallet like a Victorian maiden clutching pearls, gritted her teeth and rented two tiny offices in Midtown. The rent was high enough to give her recurring dreams of debt collectors with pitchforks, but it came with Wi-Fi and a roof.
Then came the online job postings. She recruited a few students from the nearby university to code for her. The concept was simple: big data. It's not rocket science—it's barely "science" if you ask certain old-school academics. The magic lay in the idea, and Daisy had something no one else did: future vision. She knew where the tech wave would go and intended to surf it.
While others were still whittling wood to make rafts, Daisy had her engine humming on a digital speedboat. She spent three days setting up the framework herself, then passed it off to the student coders. That's when the real horror began.
The kids had all the passion of a soggy sponge. They cared more about break times and in-office entertainment than actual work. Daisy nearly burst a vein.
Storming into her office, fuming, she opened her inbox—and bingo. A job application had landed.
Name: David Lieberman.
A quick glance told her this guy had graduated from the State University of New York and "assisted" in many projects. Translation: glorified intern. But something about the name tickled her memory.
Wait. David Lieberman? As in that David Lieberman—future NSA analyst, friend of Frank Castle (aka Uncle Punishment), code name: "Micro"? What was he doing applying to a two-bit startup?
Smelled fishy. Time for a coffee meet.
The café meeting was... surprising.
"Mr. Lieberman, how old are you again?" Daisy asked, squinting suspiciously.
"Twenty-six," he said, dead serious.
Daisy stared. This man had beard mileage and forehead creases that could double as vinyl records. But his ID and resume checked out. Apparently, stress ages people like bananas.
She relaxed a bit. If he hadn't joined the NSA yet, maybe he was still moldable. He had the right foundation, just lacked the spark.
Interestingly, David was kind of like her—solid base, but his creativity was still boxed in. He'd never even heard of big data, but the moment she explained it, his eyes lit up like a conspiracy theorist at a flat-earth convention.
He confessed that Daisy's job post had stood out from the digital job-seeking noise like a lighthouse in a fog. As they chatted, he realized her ideas echoed thoughts he couldn't quite articulate.
His first impression? Young boss, questionable academic history, but sharp as a knife and possibly psychic.
Daisy's impression? This dude is too smart to be unemployed. "Mr. Lieberman, with your skillset, why my company?"
David shuffled, looked uncomfortable. Turns out, his wife was pregnant with their second child, the first was still a toddler, and the man needed to stay close to home. By coincidence—or fate—Daisy's office was across the street.
Daisy gave a nod of approval. A family man who codes? Gold. And more importantly, unlikely to flake.
She also recalled the original timeline. Lieberman had taken his ninja-like tolerance for betrayal to superhuman levels. In one reality, his wife kissed Uncle Punishment right under his nose—and he watched it all unfold on camera. And did he go full revenge mode? Nope. He just drank himself into a stupor and forgave them.
Marvel's number one emotional punching bag, folks.
So yeah, Daisy practically threw a party in her head. If she ever had to delay payroll, this was the guy you wanted on staff.
The contract was finalized. David Lieberman became her technical director and dove into the project like a man finally getting to scratch a decades-long itch.
For legal affairs—and lowkey surveillance—Daisy brought in her trusty spy retainer, Maki Matsumoto. Maki was twitchy and paranoid (who wouldn't be after living under constant threat?) so Daisy taught her karate basics. Maki turned out to be a natural. If Daisy hadn't enhanced her own strength, she'd be flat on the mat.
Office? Rented.
Computers and servers? Rented.
Student employees? Short-term contracts.
David's salary? Low.
Maki's? Non-existent.
Frugality wasn't just a policy—it was the culture.
Still, the $100,000 gift from the NYPD was shrinking faster than a villain's courage in front of Thor. And the algorithm was only 25% done.
While pinching pennies on company spending, Daisy wasn't about to live like a monk. She bought a second-hand Ford, ate well at local diners, and practiced marksmanship and karate like it was going out of style.
Finally, when her bank balance looked like a student loan payment, she completed a basic version of the big data algorithm. It wasn't elegant, but it was long-winded and did the job. She locked herself in, optimized it, and ran it on the rented servers.
In this era, data security was a joke. Like, "put your passwords on Post-It notes" level of bad. Her algorithm chewed through the data like a Pac-Man on a sugar rush.
The code was done. Now came the hard part—convincing someone to pay.
Many brilliant ideas die because no one knows they exist. Daisy wasn't famous. David was a tech guy, not a salesman. Maki? Effective at surveillance, terrible at pitching.
So Daisy turned to her old skill: cyberstalking.
She hacked into a security camera, picked a target, and observed them for two days. When satisfied, she tucked a pistol into her waistband and went for a good ol' face-to-face.
This wasn't just any visit—this was a scene straight out of a noir film.
She found the address: a sleek high-rise in the upscale district. The target lived like a hermit with a Netflix addiction. Perfect.
Daisy didn't bother with the front door. She jimmy'd the window, slipped in like a cat burglar, and waited in the shadows, chilling on the sofa like a Bond villain ready for dramatic lighting.
Cue the tension.