Time passed quickly, and Pierce's death caused surprisingly little turmoil inside S.H.I.E.L.D.
Sitwell became much more low-key. He checked in morning and night, terrified that Daisy might hand him over to Hydra so they could vent their anger on him.
Crossbones returned to the S.H.I.E.L.D. Strike Team. He was still aggressive and fearless in a fight, no different from before, though somehow he gave people a slightly gentler impression.
Daisy's reforms continued in an orderly fashion. As she absorbed Pierce's remaining assets and influence, internal resistance steadily diminished. Everything was moving in a positive direction.
In her spare time, she studied the Tesseract and used it to refine and strengthen her teleportation.
S.H.I.E.L.D. was thriving. The Avengers were having a much rougher time.
Thor stayed only one day before returning to Asgard. In Daisy's view, he was not particularly close to the others. He tried to act approachable, but the gap in strength was simply too large for the title of Avenger to impose any real constraint on him. From Thor's perspective, perhaps after a few more drinking sessions, all these Earth companions would already have died of old age.
No one dared deploy Hulk. Bruce Banner stayed obediently in Stark Tower for a few days, but once he saw the staff trembling around him, he moved to the suburbs to raise a dog.
Stark was either busy wrangling with politicians and major capital interests over the Department of Damage Control or working in the basement of his Los Angeles home on new armor. He spun from task to task like a top, leaving Pepper Potts looking plainly sexually frustrated.
Black Widow was even less available. She merely said she was going on a long trip. No one knew where she had gone or who she was with. Stark once tried to trace her communications signal, but Black Widow immediately cut the signal.
Captain America had previously held only one job at Daisy's animation company. Recently, Phil Coulson somehow pulled strings within the education system and began using Skye Pictures equipment to film classroom public-service videos starring Captain America.
They were things like, "Hi, I'm Captain America. Whether you're in the classroom or on the battlefield... today, my good friend, your physical education teacher, will lead you through the Captain America Fitness Challenge..."
Or, "Hi, I'm Captain America. Let's talk about the good qualities a soldier and a student should have..."
In short, it was all feel-good motivational drivel fed to the nation's young people.
Putting on his World War II uniform again to film the videos stirred up old memories in Captain America. At last, he made up his mind to travel to Britain and visit the woman he had loved seventy years ago.
As for the fact that every other Avenger had run off and left him to hold the fort, Hawkeye had nothing to say. Everyone was busy. Staring at the empty Avengers headquarters, he turned off his phone and simply went home to spend time with his wife and children.
S.H.I.E.L.D. agents once again took up the burden of protecting the world, just as they had for the previous seventy years. Aside from Nick Fury, who was somewhat disappointed in the Avengers, everyone thought this was perfectly normal.
At Sitwell's reminder, Daisy teleported to a former U.S. military base in New Jersey. In an abandoned basement, she encountered one of Hydra's technological oddities: the artificial intelligence Arnim Zola.
"Miss Daisy Johnson, you do not have access authorization." A primitive camera scanned her twice and rejected her startup command without hesitation.
"Actually, I do. Dr. Zola, let me see your source code." Daisy rapidly entered a password and accessed Zola's system directly.
Daisy had acquired all of Pierce's possessions, including his notebook. Finding a login password reserved for Hydra's upper leadership was not difficult.
Now reduced to an artificial intelligence, Zola opened his core under the highest authorization level and allowed her to inspect all of his data.
Daisy clicked her tongue in amazement. Hydra's imagination had truly run wild. They had reconstructed all of Zola's behavioral patterns from his lifetime. A computer could not think? That did not matter. Zola could. They made the computer think the way Zola had, bypassing the problem of teaching a computer to think and producing a rather unconventional artificial intelligence.
She also found the Zola Algorithm, developed after a sixty-year-old Pierce painstakingly taught himself computers and then ordered an artificial intelligence to build it.
It looked extremely familiar. The Zola Algorithm was basically her own big-data search method, except that it incorporated Hydra's databases and added several screening conditions.
Pierce's computer skills had been mediocre at best, and paired with a Zola whose thought process was decades out of date, the two were a perfect match of mediocrity. In Daisy's eyes, the Zola Algorithm contained very little worth learning from.
Pierce had locked this artificial intelligence inside the secret base as though it were a treasure. It was not connected to the internet and had no access to outside information. Zola learned about the outside world only through data Pierce occasionally fed him. His thinking had already been outdated, and isolation made it worse. The hardware was thirty years old and looked like junk by modern standards, the sort of thing even a recycling yard might refuse. Compared with Danger, Zola was hopelessly inferior.
Aside from the core code, Daisy ordered Danger to copy every piece of data Zola had recorded. A database two hundred thousand feet long was almost a joke by modern standards.
"Dr. Zola, you can rest now. Delete yourself."
"Please confirm again. Once the command is executed, once the command is executed..." The artificial intelligence called Zola seemed on the verge of crashing. It had to obey the command, but the command directly conflicted with the portion of its programming that thought of itself as Zola. The computer ran furiously, apparently searching for a solution.
"Confirmed. Execute the command. Your mission is complete. Hail Hydra." Daisy showed no trace of pity. The real Zola, the living human being, had already been dead for thirty years. A copy of his thoughts had little reason to remain in the world. Self-destruction was the best ending.
"...Hail... Hydra..." Zola's will could not overcome the computer command. In a strange electronic voice, he uttered the slogan and began deleting himself.
Construction could take years. Destruction required only minutes.
Half an hour later, Daisy checked twice. Every final trace of Zola had been erased, and all data inside the computer had been cleared. Only a top-tier computer from the 1970s remained.
Blowing up the site seemed inappropriate. An abandoned base suddenly exploding would attract more attention, not less. Anyone who searched carefully would definitely discover clues. The best solution was to leave everything looking exactly as it had before.
Daisy removed every trace she had created: fingerprints, footprints, even the residual heat produced when the computer had powered on.
Once she was certain nothing had been overlooked, she teleported away from the abandoned base.
One month later, several shareholders and several Air Force generals gathered in a Hammer Industries laboratory to watch a flight test of Vulture's mechanical wings.
Daisy and James Wesley were both there. Justin Hammer was present as well, and even the White Queen had come along out of curiosity.