This will be the last chapter that heavily focuses on running his company
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Uru generator constructions had begun being built all across America and Canada. Due to these Uru fragments being larger than the one Nick had in New York, they were generating more electricity than Nick even knew what to do with!
Valentine Industries had once again been in the news. Clips were going viral online showing massive drones lowering down fridges or chest freezers.
People had been buying from Amazon just to see the novelty of a drone delivering their package, Amazon sales were the highest they've ever been thanks to the implementation of drones.
Knowing the stupidity of people, Nick knew they'd throw or shoot things at his drones trying to knock them out of the sky. So he had his drones remain at 350 ft at all times during their flight. Then when the package was ready to be dropped off, the drones would lower down and unload the packages as quickly as possible to avoid conflicts.
He had GPS on all of his drones and reinforced his larger drones to withstand medium-caliber bullets. The reason for this was the anti-gravity tech in his large drones, the value of those things was immense and would surely incur peoples greed if they ever figure out.
Even with all of his precautions, people still managed to knock some of his smaller drones out of the sky by shooting them. Wanting to minimize this in the future, Nick abused his connections and had those people criminally prosecuted.
He had to make an example out of them to scare people in future for going after his drones. He hired lawyers to charge them with multiple criminal charges and civil lawsuits. There was an almost immediate drop-off on attacks on his drones, nobody wanted to spend over a decade in prison over destroying a drone after all.
Nick, Micro, and even Peter, when he got out of school, had focused on making sure there were no slip-ups or accidents with the drones. A fridge falling out of the sky would be a horrific outcome.
These drones represented his company, and even if Amazon had decided not to employ Nick's company, he was sure he'd find another one. Thankfully, Amazon didn't turn down the offer. Valentine Industries had become Amazon's main transport company!
Of course, this came with some clauses, the main one being Nick couldn't transport for any other company. This seemed like a terrible idea at the moment.
Amazon was quickly growing in popularity, but currently, there were many other companies larger than Amazon that Nick could've worked for, but he chose Amazon.
Nick knew in a few years that Amazon would grow past Walmart's in online sales to become the No. 1 company on the fortune 500.
During these past six months, Micro was Nick's golden goose. The man had created a simple machine learning AI and installed it in all of the drones. Basically, the longer the drones were operational, the more efficient they became and made fewer mistakes!
This was the key for Nick's drones, and once every month, Micro scheduled updates where all of the drones would share their data with one another, allowing their AI to improve all together!
After just the third week during the trial period, Nick was informed that Amazon would like to sign a 10-year contract with him for his services.
That's when he immediately began hiring construction crews all across America. With the contract secured, he needed the Uru power plants to make the deal possible.
Thankfully, unlike radiation that was insanely dangerous, Uru was relatively safe. If anything went wrong, a program Micro Installed would remotely shut off the power plant by simply turning off the electric current that activated the Uru.
Right now, every state in America was having Nick's drones deliver boxes, all of his Uru generators having been constructed 2 months ago.
Due to them now being spread out all across America, Nick upped the security on his Uru.
Should the power plant ever be attacked, an armoured standby drone would immediately grab the Uru and take off while a dozen attack drones would eliminate the intruder. He couldn't lose his Uru no matter what, it was the only thing that allowed his Drones business to be possible.
It'd been five months since Nick ended his trial period with Amazon. In that time, he'd built multiple warehouses in each state and hired employees to service the drones. An in-depth video that Nick gave on how to fix the daily wear and tear was sent out and allowed halfway competent people to fix his drones.
For drones too damaged, they'd be put in the warehouse's storage where eventually a skilled technician would come by and fix them. These guys costed more than double what he paid those who just fixed the daily damages, but they were worth it.
Obviously, Nick was approached by the Government to see if he planned on selling this technology to them. Nick agreed only because he knew they'd eventually just shoot one out of the sky to replicate.
All models but the large drones powered by Anti-Gravity were sold to them. They didn't complain as they only wanted Nick's drones for recon purposes and didn't realize the tech that went into the larger drones, or else they'd have demanded to get those as well.
At this point Nick was raking in money hand over foot thanks to the drone transport and Earbud sell. He was honestly having difficulty managing all of his money and eventually had to hire a CFO to manage company funds.
The CFO was a man named Mark Friedman. He was the 4th pick for the position, but Nick went with him. Micro ran a search on the first three and found that two of them worked for the government while the other had a shady background.
With him hiring more employees to run his company, everything was beginning to become more autonomous. Nick was feeling free from having to run the company. He understood why Tony just declared his secretary the CEO so he didn't have to deal with all of this stress, he will definitely copy him in the future!
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Sitting in his office chair, Nick looked out of his bulletproof window and saw his employees going in and out of his building.
'With all of these people coming and going it'll be a lot easier to have a thief break in, i need to tighten the security on my laboratory. Although i really only have the anti-gravity tech to work on.'
Micro had already designed two computers that were being sold under Valentine's Logo: one with decent specs for a cheap price and the other, a more expensive one that's currently the best computer on the market.
Micro was currently working on Sofie, the company's version of Alexa. It would have a base operating system but also machine learning so that each Sofie would be unique and change to fit its user's demands.
Nick hoped it would be ready for Christmas, but it wasn't possible. His wireless earbuds were, however, one of the top 100 items bought as a Christmas present.
"My company is growing larger along with my tech, but I've greatly stagnated in personal strength. The problem is that I've reached a point where casual monsters wouldn't make me stronger, just give me different abilities. I need actually strong beings to absorb, but those don't show up every day, especially before the Avengers kick off the culture of superheroes and villains!"
Nick knew he was lacking in strength but couldn't do much about it at the moment, it was an era of relative prace after all. He could only rely on Micro's software scanning the internet for something while he worked on his anti-gravity tech.
Thankfully Nick wouldn't have to wait long!