Marvel: A Lazy-Ass Superman

Chapter 292: Chapter 292 — Reflections on the Beach

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California in summer is all about sun, sand, and bikinis.

Los Angeles alone has a string of famous beaches — surf spots and hookup havens where young people go to see and be seen. To make up for the fact that since waking up in Alaska back in autumn 1990 he hadn’t properly soaked up the sun, Henry had been bringing a beach chair and spending whole days rotating among L.A.’s notable shores: Santa Monica, Venice, Malibu, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Zuma, El Matador, Dockweiler...

Each beach has its own character and its own scenic attractions: pounding surf, bouncing bodies, endless pairs of legs — enough to distract anyone. For the first time Henry felt motivated to sunbathe daily and not get bored of it.

Of course, ”sunbathing” came with limits: he deliberately restrained his super senses — no atom-scale peeks at molecules, please. If he stared that close, would he start appreciating the balance of nuclei and electrons like an art critic?

But even while lounging, he wasn’t idle. It was 1994; the big tech event on his horizon was Windows 95’s impending release.

A point-and-click GUI controlled by a mouse — making computers usable without memorizing cryptic commands — that change would dramatically lower the barrier to personal computing. Henry had already put work into CK-branded windowing tools for Linux, but Linux and a Microsoft-led, fully integrated OS weren’t competitors in the same league. Linux’s advantage was open-source and free; Windows would be polished, commercial, and widely packaged.

Henry wasn’t primarily trying to get Linux to beat Microsoft in the consumer PC market — he was thinking bigger: the coming wave of the World Wide Web.

Even if browser wars (IE vs. Netscape) would be lively and worth watching, building a free, open-source browser still faced the same problem as Linux: people like free things, but few will do the unpaid, ongoing maintenance and porting work. Unless you turn it into a company with real incentives and funding, a casual open-source hobby project couldn’t outcompete Microsoft’s cash-fueled machine. At best, it would be an irritant.

Whether it’s a search engine, a portal, or something that lives only in the darker corners of the net, the critical piece is servers — the physical machines that host everything.

At his rental in L.A. Henry had cobbled together a server-class machine far beyond typical consumer rigs, but it was mostly a testbed — not a production server. So far CK’s online presence had been a hijacked affair: worms and scripts quietly occupying tiny pieces of university servers and hosting bits of his stuff. They were fragile: sysadmins would discover them and delete them, disks would die, or administrators would repave machines with no obligation to notify him. The result: deployments that kept evaporating.

So Henry began to think about permanent servers. ”Permanent” not in the sense of lasting forever, but in the sense of being located somewhere hard to tamper with and not easily forced to move. Two non-negotiable needs: power and network connectivity. He definitely didn’t want to be on the hook paying for either.

That pushed him to one conclusion: the seabed.

Underwater has obvious stealth advantages. He couldn’t swipe an Arc Reactor from Tony Stark, but for power he could exploit ocean currents driving turbines — ocean flow is more stable than wind or solar, so it’s a reliable source if you engineer for it. For connectivity, he’d piggyback onto existing subsea cables; with Henry’s underwater capability, splicing a discreet line was doable.

There’s another benefit: water cooling. Pure water doesn’t conduct electricity — it’s the ions that do — and if you fully isolate electronics and immerse them in deionized water you can get superb cooling without noisy fans. That lets you cut fan power and direct energy to compute instead.

So Henry’s beach days weren’t only to get a tan; they were scouting potential offshore positions for a buried server node. Find a seabed area with subsea cable traffic and decent currents — flatness didn’t matter, he could level things if necessary — and he could test whether the idea worked in practice.

The first subsea server would answer a bigger question: is this architecture actually viable at scale? What unforeseen issues would pop up when you try to deploy many of them? Henry wasn’t a cash-rich corporate genius who could quietly build a secret megafarm anywhere and never worry about operational costs. If he tried to go straight down the normal route, running servers means paying for electricity and bandwidth — and his little pile of black cash wouldn’t sustain that long.

So besides scouting locations, he was designing the hardware: from chips to storage, off-the-shelf parts didn’t meet his needs. If he was going to build it himself, he didn’t have to follow standard form-factors; his prime constraint was total power draw, and from that he’d size the ocean-current turbines. For a man who’d been hand-building computing rigs his whole life, this subsea server project was a real technical exam — the kind of problem you can’t brute-force with superpowers alone if you want a lasting engineering solution.

If he couldn’t clear this hurdle, he’d better give up the area and stick to using his abilities for everything else. But if he passed it, he could build something that wasn’t dependent on rent checks or data-center contracts.

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