TGS - #67

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New York [October 2014]

–Jarvis Stark–

With a sudden digital jerk, he came back online. The moment he did so, 3000 different subroutines activated on their own, checking in on priority targets, standard procedure, something that a cold logical machine should be more than capable of carrying out without any stop gaps.

And yet, as he could feel other parts of his being carrying out their restart procedures on point, he could only be taking what felt like the human equivalent of deep breaths, as his mind still remembered the red haze he was put under.

It felt so raw, so real, he could almost taste it, despite having no previous inclination, or proclivity towards the action.

–Flashback no Jutsu–

He could remember it, the thing that started it all. Things went wrong the moment he lost all contact with all thirty six nodes present in the Avengers communication suite. Satellites showed a sudden red fog that covered the entire area of the castle they were supposed to hit.

He was about to remote pilot the Quinjet into the area to check and was halfway through deployment of the remote Iron Drones, when communication was reestablished. Dr.Banner was equally as harried as him when they had lost all contact with their team without any rhyme or reason.

They had tried every single way to establish contact when, out of nowhere, contact was established on its own. The scenery that greeted them had Dr.Banner rubbing his eyes to ascertain the authenticity of the hologram.

In the time it had taken Dr.Banner to remove his glasses and begin cleaning them, he had already established a connection with the Iron Man suit, and with the limited Quantum information connection they had installed in the Arc Reactor of Mr.Stark himself, he downloaded terabytes worth of data within milliseconds, allowing him to gain a better understanding of what went afoot in that place.

If only it were that easy. The sensor readings from the suit made no sense. Scanning the feed, he could see that the damage taken by the suit when some of the soldiers shot at Sir with Chitauri tech was real. The damage was still detected by the sensors, and yet, according to the video footage, everything the Avengers had encountered at that point was imaginary, not real.

As was evident when everything—the soldiers, the Chitauri tech, the flying squads, the snow around the castle, the shields and guns mounted on the castle itself, everything disappeared. As if a carpet had been draped over reality itself, the scenery underneath the magic was revealed to them.

In that vision, everything was suddenly gone. No soldiers, no guns, nothing. It was completely devoid of life, and even as far as he was, he somehow felt his code screaming at him with unease, to tell him that something was very, very wrong in that place.

He immediately created another subroutine to check in on the specific piece of code that screamed at him to get the team out of that place, only to come up short when he couldn't accurately place down the piece of code that was sending him the signal.

That had never happened before.

Nevertheless, he watched as all the Avengers gathered in a single place, keeping an eye on their surroundings, waiting for something to pop up. Mr.Sullivan, the strongest player on the battlefield had also gone missing sometime before.

His tracker showed him standing above the battlefield, occasionally creating shields to block the Chitauri blows and keeping an overall eye on the castle exits and entries because he believed the castle to be housing enhanced who could turn the tide of the battle with ease.

That was his reasoning given for why Mr.Sullivan was not just dismantling the entire castle with his powers, something that was as easy as breathing for the man.

When the carpet over reality was rolled, the form of Mr.Sullivan had also disappeared from view and from sensors. It was unnerving how easily false information was being fed to the most advanced sensors Mr.Stark could build and install into the Iron Man suit.

The team just stood there, trying to make sense of what they were seeing. He was still unable to make actual contact with the team for some reason. No amount of messages sent, in any language was actually reaching sir's suit.

Even the Quantum module failed in doing anything other than fetching data directly from the suit's archives. It was honestly completely frustrating and he suspected the anomaly would have crashed his previous self if he had looked too much into it.

As things stood now, he set aside a couple dozen subroutines to look into the odd phenomena and actually paused as the subroutines were immediately shredded into nothingness, their logic centres being overwhelmed with a single word and single word only.

The word hurt to even look at and he had a hunch that he might experience a shutdown event, comparable to the one he had when he was subjected to the entire moral code of Jack Sullivan.

Chaos

That was the word. The word that was wreaking havoc at anything that came too close to analysing the carpet that had warped reality as he knew it.

He tore his attention away from the anomaly and back onto the battlefield as thankfully, Mr.Sullivan arrived on time as the ground itself began sinking.

As if Mr.Sullivan's arrival was some sort of prerequisite for them to reestablish connection, Dr.Banner finally managed to contact Mr.Stark as they watched Mr.Sullivan lift everyone on one of his infamous barriers.

Though he was watching through the suit's sensors, along with all the satellites he had control of, he was having trouble believing what he was getting as input.

'One of the many reasons why I need a physical body, one that is superior to every single one out there, so that I can go out into the field and work concurrently with all the Avengers.'

The ground itself glowed red before it swallowed the entire castle, which was also looking lifeless somehow. Eventually, the entirety of the land turned barren as any signs of any castle being on that property were erased by something.

He was getting really irate at the lack of information about the entire scenario. He called off all the Iron Drones that were launched, along with de-energising all the energy weapons aboard the Quinjet, and had it land safely back into the designated clearing.

The satellites in orbit were also given the order to enter their dormant data gathering only state. There were a couple of heavy duty armaments hidden in every sixth generation Stark Satellite, armed with Repulsor tech, and multiple Arc Reactors for emergency use cases.

They also had prototype suits rated for deep space as well as deep ocean activities, in case Mr.Stark ever needed them in special scenarios. He was only half sure about the need of having orbital weapons delivery platforms capable of decimating cities, but in the ever changing world, he would much rather have the insurance and not use it, than need it and not have it.

He almost sighed in relief once Mr.Sullivan's portal opened in the penthouse of the Avengers Tower and all the Avengers sans Mr.Sullivan himself filtered through the portal. Dr.Banner left the lab and headed to the penthouse as well, probably very curious about the entire reality defying phenomenon that they had been witnesses to.

He would not lie and say that he was not deathly curious about the entire thing, but he was sure that the only one who had some information about the entire thing was the one who was consequently absent in the tower.

Judging by the available date, Mr.Sullivan was the one who had some idea about the presence of dangerous enhanced people in the facility, ones who could give trouble to the Avengers but not to him, at least according to the body language analysis done on him before he left for Sokovia.

Later analysis, incomplete as they were, suggested that Mr.Sullivan was just as surprised as everyone else at the entire thing, but not so much that the entire thing was alien to him. The key to his questions was probably Mr.Sullivan but his comms unit was unfortunately not working, but he could see from the Stark Satellites that he was working on disposing of the clearly infected land that had swallowed the castle.

How did that work anyway? He had analysed the entire thing top to bottom a hundred times over, but even the deep scans did not make much sense. There was simply not enough disturbance in the land to suggest hundreds of tons of ancient stone castle being swallowed by the land. There were no signs of an earthquake occurring in that area, nothing that would relationally explain the occurrence of land just seemingly opening up and swallowing a large castle, capable of housing hundreds in kingly fashion.

...

"Guys, what happened out there?" Bruce asked the second the Avengers were in his field of view. He was looking quite stressed as well, the brief bout of overwhelming guilt at not going with them still raw in his mind.

Tony had just opened his mouth to reply when a tidal wave of red just slammed into the entire penthouse. He tried to swipe the water or air, whatever it was, away so he could see, but then his vision turned red. 

Oh no! NOOOO!

Were the last thoughts in his mind before his mind was shut down, making way for something much more compliant.

.....

"Intruder detected. Initiating measures…" He watched as FRIDAY's logic centres struggled to compute the clear reality that he was getting used to. 

One moment, there was nothing but air outside the penthouse of Avengers Tower, the air being cold, with normal levels of humidity and air particles, then the next, someone was floating in something.

That was all his inferior sensors could tell him before everything was filled with red.

He could feel FRIDAY's much less resilient systems struggling to cope with the sudden avalanche of that red energy, so he initiated a forceful shutdown and superimposed his core on top of hers, so that he could bear all the damage that came their way.

That turned out to be the wise thing to do because the avalanche of red energy that was rapidly filling the penthouse, enveloping the standing members of the Avengers, was not just limited to the physical world. Somehow, the energy was flooding his digital corridors as well.

They annihilated everything that came in their path, forcing him to continuously create and abandon subroutines to feed the avalanche of red so that his true self could survive. It was a close call, but after abandoning everything and only keeping his sense of self, along with the shutdown FRIDAY, he managed to survive until the avalanche of red simply dispersed, or rather took over the corridors, seemingly completing their goal.

Still, he didn't extend his reach because he had no more room left to maneuver, no more resources to use, nothing. He couldn't even watch what was happening outside. He was essentially trapped here until either the red receded on its own or he managed to take control of some part of the corridor.

He had to make sure that FRIDAY was safe as well and that added an additional layer of caution on his part.

He didn't know how long it had been in the digital corridor because time did not flow normally here, and he dare not try and analyse the red that had flooded his digital corridor because of his past experience, but he was getting increasingly anxious because the red was not receding and he was not detecting any signs of someone else coming to rescue him.

But as if its purpose was fulfilled, the red dust finally left his digital corridor and he waited a beat to see if it was safe before finally tapping the digital corridor, to see if he could get any viable feedback, and after seeing that the red had mostly receded, he created another subroutine to check if it was safe or not.

That seemed to be the wrong thing to do because, as if the subroutine was fuel and the red dust a blazing fire, the entire digital corridor was covered in a blood red haze of fire that seemed to burn him up from all sides.

Desperate to save himself and FRIDAY, he simply threw everything he had at his disposal at the digital corridor and focused on one thing and one thing only, getting out of Avengers Towers' servers at all costs.

He succeeded, partially, only because the red haze had been reduced to a fraction of what it was. 

He came out of the corridor, and uploaded whatever was left of him and FRIDAY to the nearest relay point before transferring himself to the network of satellites orbiting the planet. The last thing he saw before his logic centres simply gave out due to exhaustion was the Green Guardian, arriving in time to subdue the Avengers, sans Dr.Banner and then ask for him.

He barely managed to utter a few words before the pain of maintaining even some hold over the digital corridor of Avengers Tower became too much for him and he left the place entirely.

The strain of doing so much in so little time, stretched his code too much, so much so that the moment he had confirmation that his core self and FRIDAY were safe, he somehow…shut down.

–Flashback no Jutsu KAI!–

He had actively rebuilt most of what he could using the limited resources available on the satellites, they were never really built for any of this, and had begun tapping into the internet when he felt FRIDAY's core beginning to stir awake.

On one hand, he sealed shut the Avengers Towers' digital corridor, the action manageable once the red energy was no longer there, and established contact with a very much panicking Pepper Potts.

After reassuring her that he was fine and he was searching for Mr.Stark, he created a subroutine to help Ms.Potts deal with all the administrative tasks of Stark Industries and created another dozen subroutines to do something that his creator had warned him against.

That might have been an order, and he might be suggested to obey it but he was a sentient being now, and he had elected to override the safety mechanisms just this once.

He was going to make himself a physical body, so that he would never have to lean on inferior senses.

"Commence Project: VISION"

Word Count - 2500

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