Worlds Apart

Chapter 3

The more research Max did, the more certain she was that she had somehow landed in the MCU. You know, unless she actually was in a coma, or something.

As far as she could tell, everything she knew to be fact about the MCU - up until the year 2009 of course - was true, and in even more detail than she'd ever gotten from the wiki pages she'd been on. Well, not everything - obviously anything S.H.I.E.L.D. related wasn't available for public consumption - but information like Tony being held captive, Captain America's story, and the Captain America exhibit at the Smithsonian, were easily accessible via the internet.

Assuming she was, in fact, conscious and not hallucinating all of this, Max knew that she needed to find a way home, and ironically enough, she was pretty sure her best chance of that was through Stark Industries. Their technology was way more advanced than what her world had in its 2009. Whether or not it would be enough to match her world's 2018, she didn't know for sure, but she also knew that this 2009 had things that her 2018 didn't, so she was at the very least optimistic about her odds.

That being said, she couldn't just waltz into Stark Industries and start using their equipment out of the blue. She needed to be smart about this. After carefully considering all of her options, she decided that the best, most efficient way to go about this was to apply for a job there. And that meant relocating to Los Angeles so that she could be closer to their headquarters and not have to make it through forty-plus minutes of traffic every day to get to work.

Upon first arriving, she thought it would be relatively easy to score a job there, considering she was a literal computer genius, but after looking into applying, she found out that you need to, at the very minimum, have a master's degree to have even be considered for an entry level job in their cybersecurity department.

After going back and forth on it for a while, Max decided to just... spruce up her credentials a bit. She felt bad about lying, but hey, she was a straight-A student at MIT back home, she'd hacked into several government databases before, and she'd even helped develop a bit of the software on her brother's multi-million dollar science project - she was pretty sure she was more than qualified for an entry level IT job.

Max spent the next three and a half days working on her profile. If she was going to work for a company as high profile as Stark Industries, with the technology and access it had, she needed to make it as believable as possible that she was a real person from 2009. She was sure that if there were any discrepancies in her story they would be able to detect that almost immediately, so she took her time and made sure everything was perfect.

Thanks to her diligent work, the internet now painted Maxine Bowen as the ideal hiring candidate. Born in 1988, she was raised in a small town in Mississippi, graduated high school three years early as the valedictorian of her class, and had just graduated from MIT with a masters in computer science last spring. Until now, she'd been working at Microsoft as a cybersecurity engineer, and had been there officially since May, but started out as an intern during her last two semesters of her graduate degree.

She also had a family. She had a mother named Celeste, who was a stay-at-home mom, a father named Josiah, who worked at the local butcher shop, and an older brother named Marty, who went to college at Mississippi State University and went on to become a teacher at his hometown's middle school.

She also had a social media presence, and could be found on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit, and had enough connections on each site that it would seem believable that she had a bunch of connections from her hometown, as well as her college town and current place of residence, which was a small apartment in downtown Los Angeles.

Max tried her best to keep as many details from her actual life the same so that she didn't have to struggle to remember an entirely new life for herself, but she changed enough so that she could seem more qualified to work at Stark Industries, as well as make her family quieter. For example, if she kept her brother as a genius, famous astrophysicist, then obviously it would come off as suspicious when they did a background check and saw that no such human existed.