Margerie Aust wanted children.  Her husband, Jeffrey, did not.  His focus was primarily on celebrating his first million dollar profit through a series of wise business investments.  So, of course, Margerie Aust did what any reasonable wife would do:  Without the knowledge of her husband, she altogether ceased taking her birth control.

And that was how Samuel Ethan Aust came screaming into the world in the early summer of 1979.  It was the first time he existed to disappoint his father, but it would certainly not be the last.

It wasn't that Samuel wanted to be the bane of Jeffrey Aust's existence; he simply was without even trying.  He did his best to pay attention in school and earn high marks on all of his assignments.  The thing was, Samuel couldn't stop getting distracted.  He liked to build things  —  out of pencils, glue sticks, Scotch tape, bits of paper, whatever it was that he could find.  When he wasn't crafting the next great technological advance out of school supplies, he was drawing its schematics.  And when he wasn't doing that?  Well, let's just say Samuel served a lot of detentions in his younger years.

Despite holding minimal affection for his son, it was Jeffrey Aust's legacy that he most wanted to pass along to little Samuel.  Unfortunately, Samuel wanted nothing to do with it.  So much so that the ink was barely dry on his high school diploma when he enlisted in the military.

This probably would've all worked out fine if Samuel had ever in his life learned to stay in his own lane.  Unfortunately, with the humility that accompanied his SEALS training came a sense of duty to his team that he couldn't shake, and Samuel suffered the sort of physical injury in the line of combat fire that forced a medical discharge.  It took months for him to fully recover from everything but the PTSD that he totally doesn't have.

So it was that God (or whatever deity you believe in) hit that big old reset button in the sky on Samuel Aust's life.  Instead of taking up his father's mantle and walking the easy road, he leased an apartment in Cambridge and attended coursework at M.I.T. to pursue his interest in engineering.  After receiving dual degreees, he moonwalked over to the West Coast where starter tech companies tend to prosper and founded one of his own, specializing primarily in weapon defense systems for no particular reason at all.