Mick's Diner sat on the corner of 42nd and 9th like a bruise on the face of the block.
The neon sign above the door buzzed with an erratic, moth-like franticness, the letter 'K' completely burnt out, leaving it to read MIC 'S DINER. The windows were coated in a film of grease so thick it blurred the world outside into a smear of gray and yellow traffic lights.
I stood on the sidewalk, clutching the scrap of paper from the library in my pocket. My hands were sweating.
Ask for Turk.
It sounded like a line from a bad noir movie. But in my current reality, bad noir seemed to be the genre of choice.
I smoothed down my shirt. I had done my best in the park bathroom, but I still looked like what I was: a desperate man living out of a gym bag. But desperate was good. Desperate men worked cheap. Desperate men didn't ask questions.
I pushed the door open. A bell jingled—a cheerful sound that felt entirely out of place.
The interior was a time capsule of fading Americana. Checkerboard floors that had worn down to gray linoleum, red vinyl booths patched with duct tape, and a long laminate counter lined with chrome stools. The air was thick, heavy with the smell of burnt coffee, frying bacon, and stale cigarette smoke that had seeped into the drywall over decades.
It was 7:00 PM on a Thursday, but the place was mostly empty. An elderly couple ate soup in silence near the window. A trucker nursed a coffee at the counter.
And in the back booth, holding court like a king in exile, sat a man.
He was black, wearing a suit that was trying too hard—a shiny, synthetic gray number with a purple shirt unbuttoned one too many times at the top. He had a Bluetooth headset blinking in his ear and was furiously typing on a thick, gray laptop that looked like it weighed ten pounds.
Turk. It had to be.
I walked toward the counter. A waitress with hair dyed a violent shade of red and a name tag that said 'Doris' looked up from a crossword puzzle.
"Kitchen's closing in twenty," she said, her voice like gravel.
"I'm not here to eat," I said, trying to project confidence. "I'm looking for Turk. About the job."
Doris paused. Her eyes flicked over my shoulder to the man in the back booth, then back to me. Her expression shifted from boredom to a mild, pitying warning.
"He's busy."
"The ad said help wanted."
"The ad said ask for Turk," she corrected. She jerked her chin toward the back. "Good luck, honey. He's in a mood."
I took a breath, gripped my courage with both hands, and walked toward the back booth.
As I got closer, I could hear him muttering.
"Stupid piece of... come on, you piece of garbage. Load. Load!"
He slammed a hand onto the table, making the silverware rattle.
"Excuse me," I said.
The man snapped his head up. He had a narrow face, quick eyes, and a goatee that was meticulously groomed. He looked me up and down, analyzing my worth in a microsecond.
"What?" he barked. "I ain't buying nothing. No watches, no sob stories. Beat it."
"I'm here about the dishwashing job," I said. "Saw the post."
Turk Barrett—because that was definitely Turk Barrett—snorted. He turned his attention back to the laptop screen, stabbing a finger at the keyboard. "Job's gone. Filled it yesterday. Beat it, kid."
My heart sank. My plan. The capital. The Bitcoin. It was all evaporating.
"Are you sure?" I pressed, desperation leaking into my voice. "I'm a hard worker. I don't mind the hours. I really need—"
"I said beat it!" Turk shouted, looking up again, his eyes flashing with genuine irritation. "Can't you see I'm working here? I got serious business to attend to, and this piece of crap machine is—"
He broke off, staring at the screen again. "Why is it blue? Why the hell is it blue?"
I looked at the laptop. It was an old Dell Latitude. On the screen, glaring and hateful, was a white text on a blue background.
A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.
The Blue Screen of Death.
I stood there. I should have walked away. I should have found another diner, another construction site. But I looked at the error code at the bottom of the screen.
0x000000EA.
Infinite loop error. Usually a driver issue with the graphics card. In 2025, this was ancient history. In 2009, on a machine running Windows Vista, it was a catastrophe.
"It's the video driver," I said.
Turk stopped hitting the enter key. He looked at me, his eyes narrowing. "What?"
"The error," I said, pointing. "Infinite loop. Your graphics driver is stuck. Rebooting won't fix it. You need to boot in Safe Mode and roll back the driver."
Turk stared at me. Then he looked at the screen. Then back at me.
"You a geek?" he asked. There was no respect in the word, just calculation.
"I know computers," I lied. I knew smartphones and cloud computing. But compared to him, I was Bill Gates.
Turk sat back, crossing his arms. "This machine has... sensitive inventory on it. If I lose it, I lose a lot of money. And if I lose money, people break my legs. You understand?"
"I can fix it," I said. "But I need the job."
Turk chewed on the inside of his cheek. He looked at my dirty shirt, my tired eyes. He saw a junkie, or a runaway. He saw someone expendable.
"Fix it," he said, sliding the heavy laptop across the table. "Right now. If you fix it, you wash dishes tonight. If you break it... well, nobody's gonna miss a homeless kid."
The threat hung in the air, heavy and real.
I sat down opposite him. My hands were trembling slightly, but I forced them to steady. I pressed and held the power button until the machine died. Then I hit it again, tapping F8 rhythmically as the Dell logo appeared.
Advanced Boot Options.
I navigated to Safe Mode with Networking. The text scrolled down the screen like the Matrix code.
"What are you doing?" Turk asked, watching like a hawk.
"Bypassing the crash," I muttered.
Windows Vista loaded in low resolution, the icons huge and pixelated. I navigated to the Device Manager, found the display adapter, and hit Roll Back Driver.
It took thirty seconds.
I rebooted the machine normally. The Windows chime played. The desktop appeared—a picture of a stack of cash.
"You're back in business," I said, spinning the laptop around.
Turk leaned forward, his eyes widening. He clicked a few folders. He opened a spreadsheet. He let out a low whistle.
"Well, I'll be damned," he grinned, a gold tooth flashing in the dim light. "The bum's a wizard."
He looked at me, a new light in his eyes. It wasn't respect, exactly. It was the look a craftsman gives a useful new tool.
"What's your name, Wizard?"
"John," I said.
"Alright, John. You got the job." He snapped his fingers at the waitress. "Doris! Get the kid an apron. He's on the sink."
He turned back to me. "Four bucks an hour. Cash. You eat leftovers, but only what's on the plates, don't steal from the fridge. And John?"
His voice dropped. The jovial hustler vibe evaporated, replaced by something colder, sharper.
"You see anything in the back? Anything that ain't plates or forks? You didn't see it. Capiche?"
"I'm just here to wash dishes," I said.
"Good answer."
The shift was a nightmare.
The kitchen of Mick's Diner was a narrow, grease-coated tunnel of heat. The dishwasher was a rusted industrial beast that hissed steam and barely worked, meaning I had to scrub most of the plates by hand. The water was scalding. The soap ate at the cracks in my hands.
For six hours, I was a machine. I scrubbed, rinsed, and stacked. My back screamed. my feet, still blistered from the walking, felt like they were on fire.
But as I worked, my mind drifted to the future.
Four bucks an hour. It was slave wages. Illegal, even in 2009. But it was cash. If I worked ten hours, that was forty bucks.
I started doing the math.
To open a brokerage account, I needed ID. To get ID, I needed a birth certificate. I didn't have one.
I paused, scrubbing a stain of dried egg off a plate.
I was stuck.
I could have a million dollars in cash, and I still couldn't buy stocks. I couldn't buy Bitcoin. Not easily. Bitcoin in 2009 wasn't on Coinbase. You had to mine it, or buy it peer-to-peer on shady forums.
I need a computer, I realized. A real one. Not a library terminal. And I need a fake ID.
I looked through the serving hatch. Turk was still in his booth, laughing loudly into his phone. He was a criminal. Criminals knew how to get fake IDs.
But asking for one... that was crossing a line. That was admitting I was a criminal too.
I'm not a criminal, I told myself. I'm an investor.
The rationalization was thin, but it was all I had.
"Hey! Less dreaming, more scrubbing!" the cook, a massive man named Sal who smelled of onions and body odor, shouted at me. "We got a rush coming."
"A rush?" I looked at the clock. It was 1:00 AM. "Who eats at 1:00 AM?"
Sal just grunted and turned back to the grill. "The regulars."
I didn't understand what he meant until twenty minutes later.
The bell above the door jingled. But unlike the earlier customers, these didn't walk in quietly.
Heavy boots. Loud voices. The distinctive sound of something heavy hitting a table.
I peered through the porthole in the swinging kitchen door.
The diner had transformed. The elderly couple was long gone. The front door was locked, the "Closed" sign flipped outward.
Turk was standing up, greeting the new arrivals. There were four of them. They were big men, wearing leather jackets and heavy wool coats. They looked... solid. Like they were carved out of beef and bad intentions.
Irish. Definitely Irish.
One of them, a man with a shaved head and a tattoo of a clover on his neck, was dragging a fifth man by the collar of his coat. The dragged man was conscious, but barely. His face was a mask of blood.
"Turk!" the tattooed man shouted. "Get the kit. And get us a bottle."
"Keep it down, Rance," Turk hissed, looking around nervously. "I got a new kid in the back."
"I don't give a rat's ass about the kid," Rance spat, shoving the bleeding man into a booth. "Just get the stuff. We got a bleeder. Some freak in a mask jumped us on the roof."
My blood ran cold.
Some freak in a mask.
Daredevil.
I stepped back from the door, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
This wasn't a diner. It was a safe house. A triage center for the mob.
"Boy!"
The kitchen door swung open. Turk stood there. He wasn't smiling anymore. He looked stressed, sweat beading on his forehead.
"Get the bucket," he ordered. "And the mop. And bring a roll of paper towels. Out here. Now."
"I... I'm the dishwasher," I stammered, backing up against the sink.
Turk stepped into the kitchen. He closed the distance between us in two strides. He grabbed the front of my apron, pulling me close. I could smell his cologne—cheap musk trying to cover the scent of fear.
"Listen to me, John," he whispered, his voice low and dangerous. "You want the money? You want the job? Then you clean. You clean whatever needs cleaning. Or you walk out that back door, and you don't come back. And if you walk out... maybe Rance decides he doesn't like loose ends."
He let go of me.
I stood there, paralyzed. This was it. The crossroads.
If I stayed, I was an accomplice. I was part of the ecosystem of crime that was rotting this city.
But if I left... where would I go? The shelter? The cold? Starvation?
And worse... if I left, I lost my connection to Turk. I lost the only path I had to a fake ID. I lost my only shot at the Bitcoin. At the empire.
It's just cleaning, I lied to myself. Just cleaning.
I grabbed the mop bucket.
I walked out into the diner.
The smell hit me instantly. Copper. Warm, metallic copper.
The man in the booth was groaning. Rance was pressing a bar napkin against a gash in the man's shoulder. The blood was dripping onto the vinyl seat, pooling on the checkerboard floor.
"Who's this?" Rance asked, looking at me with dead, shark-like eyes.
"Just the help," Turk said quickly, handing Rance a first aid kit from behind the counter. "He's deaf. Dumb. Doesn't know nothing."
Rance stared at me for a long, agonizing second. I gripped the mop handle so hard my knuckles turned white. I kept my eyes on the floor. Don't look him in the eye. Don't look him in the eye.
"Start mopping," Rance grunted.
I moved forward. I dipped the mop into the gray water and slapped it onto the floor.
The water turned pink instantly.
I scrubbed. I mopped up the blood of a man who had probably just tried to kill someone. I mopped around the heavy boots of gangsters who were discussing their shipment of "product" coming in at the docks.
"He moved too fast," one of the men was saying, lighting a cigarette. "I'm telling you, Rance. It wasn't natural. He heard us coming before we even opened the door."
"Shut up," Rance snapped. "Just the Devil. Just a vigilante in a costume. We'll catch him next time. Put a bullet in his head."
I kept mopping.
The absurdity of it almost made me laugh. I was a man from the future. I knew who the "Devil" was. I knew Matt Murdock was probably sitting in his apartment right now, nursing his own wounds, listening to the city.
I knew that in three years, aliens would fall from the sky. I knew that half these men would probably be dead or in prison by then.
But right now, I was the one cleaning up their mess.
I finished the floor. I wiped down the table where the blood had splattered. I took the bloody paper towels and shoved them deep into the trash bag.
"Good job," Turk said, coming over to me. He slipped something into my apron pocket. "Here. Overtime."
I felt the crinkle of bills.
"Get back in the kitchen," he muttered. "Stay there until they leave."
I retreated to the sanctuary of the heat and the steam. I leaned against the sink, my legs shaking uncontrollably. I pulled the money out of my pocket.
Two twenty-dollar bills.
Forty dollars. Plus the twenty or so I'd earned for the shift.
Sixty dollars.
I looked at my hands. They were clean, scrubbed raw by the dishwater. But they felt dirty. Stained.
I put the money in my pocket.
I went back to the sink. There were more plates to wash.
By 4:00 AM, the diner was empty again. The Irish were gone. The smell of bleach masked the smell of blood.
Turk was back in his booth, counting a stack of cash that was much, much larger than mine.
"You did good, Wizard," Turk said as I untied my apron. "You kept your head down. I like that."
"Can I come back tomorrow?" I asked. My voice was hollow.
Turk looked at me. He grinned. "Tomorrow? Kid, you're on the schedule. Be here at six. And hey..."
He tossed something at me. I caught it reflexively.
It was a phone. An old Nokia brick.
"Keep it on," Turk said. "Sometimes I have... technical difficulties outside of business hours. You answer when I call, you get paid extra."
I looked at the phone. It was a leash. I knew it. He knew it.
"Okay," I said.
I walked out of the diner into the pre-dawn darkness of Hell's Kitchen. The air was cold and fresh, cleansing my lungs of the grease and smoke.
I walked two blocks away, into the shadows of an alley, and leaned against a dumpster.
I pulled out the sixty dollars. I pulled out the phone.
I had a job. I had a contact. I had seed money.
I looked up at the sky. It was turning a bruised purple in the east.
"Step one," I whispered, my voice trembling.
I thought about the blood on the floor. I thought about the fear in Turk's eyes when Rance walked in.
I was playing a dangerous game. I wasn't just investing in stocks anymore. I was investing in survival.
But as I thumbed the plastic keypad of the burner phone, a dark realization settled in my gut.
I wasn't the main character of this story. I wasn't the hero.
I was the NPC. I was the guy in the background mopping the floor while the heroes and villains fought for the soul of the city.
And usually, the NPC dies in the first act.
I gripped the phone tighter.
"Not this NPC," I hissed.
I shoved the phone into my pocket and started walking toward the library steps to wait for it to open. I needed to sleep. And then, I needed to figure out how to ask Turk Barrett for a fake ID without getting killed.
I sat on the cold stone steps of the library, pulling my knees to my chest to conserve heat. The city was waking up around me, a gray dawn filtering through the smog.
My mind, fueled by adrenaline and lack of sleep, refused to shut down. It kept circling back to the list in my pocket.
Bitcoin. Apple. Amazon.
They were safe bets. Guaranteed winners in the long run. But "long run" was the problem. Bitcoin wouldn't hit a dollar for another year. It wouldn't make me a millionaire until 2017.
I didn't have eight years. I was living on four dollars an hour, washing blood off linoleum. One bad day, one angry mobster, or one nasty flu virus, and I was dead before I ever saw a crypto wallet.
I needed a slingshot. I needed something volatile. Something that would crash hard and bounce back harder in a matter of months, not years.
I looked at a discarded newspaper tumbling down the sidewalk. The name STARK INDUSTRIES flashed on the back page again.
My eyes narrowed.
Right.
I wasn't just in the past. I was in Marvel.
I closed my eyes, digging through my memories of the first Iron Man movie. How did it start? Tony goes to Afghanistan to demonstrate the Jericho missile. The convoy gets attacked. He goes missing for three months.
The world thinks he's dead.
And what happens to the stock when the CEO and visionary genius dies?
It plummets.
Panic selling. Obadiah Stane would probably push it down further to seize control. The stock would be worth dirt. Maybe ten bucks a share. Maybe less.
And then?
Tony comes back. He announces he's shutting down weapons manufacturing (stock drops more), but then... Iron Man. The arc reactor technology. Clean energy. The stock wouldn't just recover; it would go stratospheric.
I did the mental math.
If I bought in at the bottom, I could see a 2000% return in a year.
But then the cold reality hit me.
I pulled the sixty dollars out of my pocket.
Sixty dollars.
Even if I got a 2000% return on sixty bucks, that was... twelve hundred dollars.
That wasn't an empire. That was one month's rent in a crappy studio apartment.
To make this work—to really change my life, to secure my safety in this dangerous world—I didn't need sixty dollars. I needed thousands. And I needed them fast.
The Stark kidnapping was imminent. It could happen next week. It could happen tomorrow. I was racing against a clock I couldn't see.
Washing dishes for four bucks an hour wasn't going to cut it. I could work double shifts for a month and barely scrape together a grand. It was too slow.
I felt the weight of the Nokia brick in my pocket.
Turk.
Turk Barrett dealt in thousands. The cash roll I saw him holding was thick enough to choke a horse. He paid for silence. He paid for "technical support." He paid for cleaning up blood.
My stomach churned, a wave of nausea rolling over me that had nothing to do with hunger.
Turk was a parasite. A criminal who enabled murderers. Every dollar I took from him was dirty. It was blood money, literally. If I worked with him, really worked with him to get that seed money, I wasn't just an observer anymore. I was part of the rot.
I looked at my hands. They were trembling.
I wanted to throw the phone into the sewer. I wanted to be better than this.
But then I remembered the cold of the shelter. I remembered the way people looked through me. I remembered Rance's dead eyes.
I didn't have the luxury of morality. Not yet.
I needed five thousand dollars. Maybe ten. And I needed it before Tony Stark got on that plane.
I gripped the phone tighter, hating the plastic feel of it, hating myself.
"Hurry up, Tony," I whispered to the cold morning air, my voice thick with self-loathing. "Go get blown up. I've got to make a deal with the devil to afford your stock."