Far below me, the Earth stretched out in a silent, breathtaking panorama. The colours seemed more vivid from up here, almost surreal: greens and blues and browns, interspersed with swirls of white clouds. I knew it was a cliché, but it really did feel like seeing everything from up here made it all seem so… fragile. A blue-green gem cradled by the vastness of space, in need of protection. It felt almost bizarre to be standing here—I knew that there was a permeable forcefield keeping the ship’s atmosphere in, but the entire wall of the ship had retracted and opened up, leaving me feeling like there was no barrier at all between myself and the view of the planet.
I glanced left and right, where Pietro and Steve briefly meet my eyes, their faces similarly painted with awe and wonder. Even with everything, I still managed to give them a tight smile. We were in space. Behind us, the others had made themselves comfortable in the main living area, finding places to sit on the two couches and scattered throw cushions that were centred around an octagonal coffee table. I was almost surprised, somehow, at how human and lived-in the interior of the Hoopty felt. It was essentially a spacious, open-plan flying house.
Past the living area were a pair of workstations, desks with screens and other electronic devices, with compartments extending to the left and right of them—the left one was Carol’s bedroom, with a comfortable sleeping nook set up against a wide window to space. Beyond the workstations was the cockpit, which had seating for three. It really felt like a ship this size was meant for a bigger crew, and I found myself briefly wondering if Carol had had a team off-screen for a little while. She never struck me as someone who was particularly a loner by nature, and it was a big ship to live in by yourself. Maybe that’s why there were so many bits and bobs scattered across every surface—mugs, souvenirs, random electronic devices, little art pieces… They made the place seem a little less empty. Less lonely.
I knew I’d put this off as long as I could already. If I didn’t start talking soon, Tony would probably start up again. Taking one last lingering look down at the planet below us, I turned and moved toward the others. Pietro and Steve followed a couple of steps behind.
I stood awkwardly for a moment, looking around at everyone. Off to the side, Nat lifted her head toward Pietro, getting his attention before patting a vacant, comfortable-looking cushion on the floor next to her. He glanced at me before stepping over and sitting down. Steve circled around, joining the group as well, but remained standing.
“Ultron,” I said, then paused. Tony straightened up a bit, narrowing his eyes. Next to him, Bruce’s forehead creased in confusion.
“Ultron?” Bruce prompted me after a moment. “What does Ultron have to do with anything?”
Steve glanced at him. “What’s Ultron?”
“‘A suit of armour around the world’,” I quoted, shooting a tired look in Tony’s direction. “For what I’m about to say to make sense, they need to know what Ultron is. Did you want to explain it, or are you happy for me to?”
“Tony?”
Stark hesitated a moment, then shook his head. “Ultron’s… a pipedream. Something I’m working on. An evolution of the Iron Legion protocol—something that’ll make the world safe.”
“Safe from what?” Clint asked.
Tony stood up and gestured dramatically around at the spaceship we were inside, like it was obvious. “This. Three years ago, a hostile alien army came charging through a hole in space. What if, next time aliens roll up to the club—and they will—they couldn't get past the bouncer?”
Steve glanced over at me. “‘A suit of armour around the world’?”
“Sounds like a cold world, Tony,” Bruce said reproachfully.
“I've seen colder,” the billionaire snapped, pointing past me to the view of Earth. “This one, this very vulnerable blue one? It needs Ultron. Peace in our time. Imagine that. What if you were sipping margaritas on a sun-drenched beach turning brown instead of green?”
Bruce pulled one of his signature half-smile, half-grimaces, but didn’t respond.
I sighed. “In the visions that I saw, you were on a darker path. PTSD from the Battle of New York. When you attacked the HYDRA Research Base, looking for the sceptre, I gave you a little mental push—gave you an ominous vision of the future; of impending doom. It didn’t take much.” Summoning a small red wisp of energy, I let it play over my fingers to emphasise my point, then glanced over toward Pietro. “We wanted our revenge so badly. Everything that happened next was our fault as well.”
“What happened?” Pietro asked, his expression pensive.
I started to pace back and forth, gesturing with my hands for emphasis as I spoke. “Loki’s sceptre was an interface for the Mind Stone, but it was more than that… hang on,” I paused, looking at Carol questioningly. “Did Fury brief you on the Infinity Stones and stuff?”
She nodded, her expression serious. “I already knew about Thanos—Ronan the Accuser worked for him before he was killed by the Guardians—but I didn’t know what he was planning.”
I squinted at her. “Wait, you know the Guardians of the Galaxy?”
“By reputation only. We’ve never met.”
“Okay. Okay,” I nodded to myself, filing that away for later. “I’d really like to talk to you more about space stuff at some point, but it’s not relevant right now. Where was I?”
“Loki’s sceptre,” Natasha said quietly. I avoided looking directly at her.
“Right, the sceptre. It had a security measure or something built in. I don’t know where it came from, whether Thanos created it or it came from elsewhere, but there was a mind inside of it. An incredibly advanced artificial intelligence, leagues beyond anything that even Tony Stark could develop,” I looked over at him again as I said it. “You tried to harness it, to integrate it into the Iron Legion protocol as a basis for Ultron.”
He snorted in disgust, shaking his head. “Oh, of course. It was my fault. Sure.”
“Not completely. You failed. You weren’t even close to an interface. But you didn’t need to be. Your tampering triggered the mind in the sceptre and it loaded itself onto your systems. The Ultron protocol was still integrated into him somehow, but he twisted it—you were trying to make something to enforce peace and he concluded that the only way to do that was to destroy… everything. He ripped apart JARVIS, cleared you out, then used the internet as an escape hatch. One thing led to another and it almost ended in an extinction-level event. The Avengers barely managed to stop him.” I looked at Pietro again. “When we realised what Ultron was trying to do, we turned on him. Helped the Avengers put a stop to his madness.”
“That was why you took the sceptre and ran, back at Strucker’s base. You were trying to prevent it from happening in the first place,” Steve said slowly.
“Exactly. I wasn’t going to tamper with Stark’s mind like I did in the visions, but that wasn’t enough. I knew the sceptre could influence people around it. Strucker was working on AI as well, so I think the sceptre was designed to push anyone who had it into creating that sort of monster.” I ran a hand through my hair absently. “I thought about trying to warn you, but as far as the Avengers were concerned, Pietro and I were HYDRA assets—ones with a specific grudge against Stark, too.”
“I like to think we would have listened.” Steve frowned at me. “But I can’t say for sure.”
“Tony wouldn’t have,” Natasha said, shooting the man an apologetic glance. He glared back at her. “Would you? Hand on heart? With the key to your project in the palm of your hand?”
“I wanted to take the sceptre to the Ancient One,” I continued, conscious that Tony’s body language had started to get defensive. I was pissed off at him, but I couldn’t let him distract me halfway through this. “I knew she had experience dealing with an interface for an Infinity Stone, so I thought she was best placed to help. You all already know how that worked out for us.”
“Hang on, you said this artificial intelligence was in the sceptre, right?” Bruce looked at me, his forehead creased again. “So when you were in New Delhi you destroyed it, right? And we didn’t find anything like that in the Mind Stone itself.”
I sighed heavily and nodded, holding up a finger to pause that train of thought. “I was visiting Peter… he’s just a kid. He’s Enhanced and really strong, but he’s only had his powers for, like, a few weeks. He’s only fourteen or fifteen. I thought I could help guide him. In my visions, I saw him eventually become an Avenger. I thought we could skip ahead a little, get him some support, soften some of the hard times he had coming.”
Steve looked thoughtful. “A future Avenger? You could have said something to us.”
“He’s very invested in his identity remaining a secret. I didn’t want to out him unnecessarily or put any pressure on him. Not without talking to him first,” I sighed again. “HYDRA ambushed us. Strucker. Did you know he’d escaped?”
“…We knew,” Natasha said, a touch of guilt in her voice. “It happened a while ago, around the same time you were in Wakanda.”
Another flash of anger. I threw my hands in the air and rounded on her. “And you just decided not to tell me? Just like you never told me about Kaecilius’s sling ring? Just like you didn’t tell me Tony had gone through my private things?” She wilted slightly, eyes dropping to the floor, and I shook my head. “They took us. Peter and I. We escaped, but… we didn’t know what was happening. We got to the Tower just ahead of Strucker’s raid, thinking we could warn everyone, thinking you’d be there, but you were all gone. I tried to get the Mind Stone—to stop HYDRA from taking it—but JARVIS wouldn’t fucking let us into the lab!” Heat rose in my voice and I took a deep, shuddering breath as I tried to stop myself from screaming at Tony fucking Stark. “I was sedated and could barely use my magic and my sling ring was missing. We were trapped and JARVIS wouldn’t do a fucking thing to help except deploy the Iron Legion because of your fucking security protocols! I didn’t know what else to do.”
My eyes were fogging up slightly as I thought back to the chaos of the attack on the Tower and I wiped at them with the back of my hand. Pietro was suddenly at my shoulder, one hand lightly on my back as he looked at me, concerned.
“Peter got shot. He was bleeding out. We were going to die. I knew the Mind Stone could be used to interface with artificial minds, so I pushed my mind into it to try to see if I could control JARVIS. I didn’t know,” I said, my voice raw and shaking. “I didn’t know how the mind got into the sceptre in the first place. I didn’t know how it was created.”
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“The Mind Stone…” Bruce said, a look of realisation crossing his face. “It copied your mind somehow?”
I nodded, feeling the tears threatening to come again. “The thing we fought. That took control of the Iron Man suits and destroyed the Tower. She’s… she’s me. Kind of. I don’t think completely. I still don’t know how it works. I think… she doesn’t have a biological brain or hormones to regulate her emotions, so I think maybe she’s based on the emotional state I was in when she was created.”
I saw Nat shift out of the corner of my eye, as if she’d stopped herself from standing up.
“I was hurt. I was scared. I thought Peter was going to die in my arms. But most of all… I was just so angry,” I said, my voice small and anguished. “At Stark and his stupid security protocols, at the rest of you for not being there—for not reining Tony in—and at myself most of all. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have that as your first moment of existence. And then to realise what had happened. What you were.”
“She knows everything you do, so she knows about Ultron?” Carol ventured, phrasing it as a question. “She didn’t think the Avengers would accept her, that you’d try to contain or kill her, so she struck first?”
“Yeah. She’s not… stable. Whatever happened during the copying process…” I said, shaking my head. “But she’s not like Ultron. She’s worse.”
“What do you mean, worse?” Clint asked.
“Clint, she knows everything I do. She said she’d stop Kaecilius, Thanos—all of it—but she sees us as a threat, too. She thinks she has to, that she’s protecting herself. Not only that, but Ultron couldn’t control the Iron Man suits, at least as far as I saw. In my visions, when Ultron appeared, he ripped JARVIS apart, but part of JARVIS still managed to escape to the internet. I think doing so limited how many of Stark’s systems he could get into. She didn’t do that, she assimilated him instead.”
Steve turned and looked over at Tony again. “What does that mean for us?”
“JARVIS started out as a natural language UI, but now he’s the most advanced thing I’ve ever developed. He runs more of Stark Industries than anyone besides Pepper. He had admin access to all of my suits, the Iron Legion, every single Stark Industries facility, satellites… everything.”
I sighed. “Everything that JARVIS had access to, we can assume she has control of now.”
“How did we beat Ultron in your visions?” Clint asked. “Can we just do the same thing here? Beat her however we beat him?”
I shook my head, jaw working silently as I thought it through. In the original timeline, Vision had burned Ultron out of the internet and locked him down to his local network, then they’d systematically wiped out every drone until there was nothing left of him. We didn’t have Vision and the conditions that had created him were basically impossible to replicate… I had no idea how to beat her. If she could even be beaten.
“Let me guess,” Tony said acerbically. “How did you say Kaecilius put it, Steve? ‘The order of events no longer aligns’. You changed it, so you broke it, and now we’re all fucked. Is that about right?”
“That’s not…” I started, but trailed off.
“Tony, enough,” said Steve.
“No, I don’t think it is,” he snapped back. “Because that’s not all, is it, Wanda? There’s still something you’ve been hiding from us. Something else.”
“I… I don’t know what you mean.”
“What you are. The Scarlet Witch. Want to share what that means with the rest of the class?”
I rocked back on my heels like he’d physically slapped me across the face, eyes widening in alarm. “That’s… that isn’t relevant,” I stammered, caught completely off guard.
“I dunno, she certainly seemed to think it might be. Why don’t you explain it to us and we’ll decide if it’s relevant.”
“What did she tell you?” I asked, swallowing hard and trying to keep my voice steady. “Tony, please. Whatever she said, she did it because she thought it would cause the most amount of damage. She’s pulling from the Ultron playbook. Like I said, in the visions I saw it was me that messed with your head. She’s doing this because she knows it’ll work. She wants to make the team break down.”
That didn’t seem to faze him at all. “Apparently, Wanda had a whole prophecy written about her. And she knows it’s about her, because of her visions. She’s seen it. Right, Wanda? You are the Scarlet Witch, aren’t you?” Tony said, glaring at me. “What’s the prophecy? I’m sure everyone here is dying to find out.”
“…I am.” I swallowed, my tongue feeling thick and dry in my mouth. I found myself looking at the floor, not willing to look anyone in the eye as I mumbled out the words. “The Scarlet Witch is prophesied to either rule the cosmos… or annihilate it.”
“There it is,” Tony said conclusively, snapping his fingers. “No wonder the Ancient One thought you were so dangerous.”
“Prophecies aren’t absolute. The future isn’t carved in stone,” I said weakly.
“Oh, my mistake.” Sarcasm dripped from Tony’s words and he shrugged, seemingly deriving some degree of perverse enjoyment from my lack of composure. “Just so we’re clear, though, that means in your visions you didn’t turn evil and try to kill everyone?”
I felt everyone’s eyes on me and all I wanted to do, more than anything else, was run away. Create a portal and jump through. Just escape. I was breathing heavily, my heart pounding in my chest.
Pietro wrapped an arm around my shoulder, interposing himself between Tony and me. “It’s okay,” he murmured near my ear, but I could feel how tense he was. “That’s enough, Stark,” he said more loudly.
“Is it? So, what? We’re just supposed to ignore all that and trust her? After she just created a genocidal AI?”
“She’s not genocidal…” I mumbled.
“Oh, right, she only wants to kill us. Sorry about the mix-up.”
“Alright, Tony, you’ve made your point,” Steve said firmly, looking at him warningly. “I think we all need to take a few minutes to cool off, okay? Wanda?”
I nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“Fine. Fine. We’ll just sit up here and cool our heels while GAL 9000 runs amok. What’s the worst that could happen?” Tony snorted in annoyance, then looked over at Carol. “I need to do something with my hands. You got tools? Spare parts? Mind if I take a look under the hood?”
Carol briefly looked taken aback, then shrugged and nodded. “Sure. Come down and I’ll show you around.”
--
Quentin Beck closed his eyes as he put his elbow on his desk and rested his forehead on the palm of his hand. He was alone, the rest of the building utterly empty. It was a Saturday night. He shouldn’t even be here; he should be out enjoying his weekend—but he needed to finish this submission paper before Monday morning. The project board had a meeting at ten and he needed to present his roadmap for the next six months outlining cases for practical applications of his holographic system. Five years of work, 600 million dollars of investment in the project—Tony Stark had signed off as the project executive personally—and now he was so close to the end he could taste it. As CEO, Stark would be expecting a massive return on that.
He'd get it. Quentin knew his tech was utterly revolutionary; seamless, real-time holographic projections almost completely indistinguishable from reality. There were still some obstacles—the biggest was the cost of the equipment to run it, needing cutting edge processors and huge amounts of RAM to maintain real-time fidelity, but that was something of a solved problem. Hardware was only becoming more and more cost-effective as time went on. Quentin let the slight vibration running through his desk travel up his arm into his skull, hoping the white noise would sooth him and help him collect his thoughts. The familiar hum had started up about an hour or so ago, the fabrication equipment in the labs working away at some project that had been pushed to them for overnight production.
It wasn’t too unusual for that to happen. Sometimes Tony Stark or JARVIS would push a design to their equipment here when the facilities at Avengers Tower were otherwise occupied. The labs here had full machining, 3D printing, and fabrication setups for rapid prototyping of new designs; it was an experimental engineer’s paradise. Whatever had been pushed to them this time was a big project, it seemed—basically everything was working, all at once.
The sound of heavy footsteps shook Quentin from his reverie. Odd. He perked up as a trio of figures walked in from the corridor that led to the elevators, his forehead creasing in confusion. Huh, were those the Avengers’ drones? What were they doing here? Two continued past, heading through toward the electronics labs—they looked damaged, parts of their armour plating torn away, and were those bullet holes? The third broke from the group and made a beeline right toward him. He stood up as it approached, a little wide-eyed.
“Quentin Beck?” The voice that came out of the drone was feminine, not someone he recognised.
“Uh, yeah, that’s me,” he stammered slightly, eyeing the robot off. The Iron Legion… now that was an impressive bit of tech. This unit was wearing something odd around its torso, a diamond-shaped device strapped to the middle of its chest with metal bands securing it in place.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Eliza,” the drone’s pilot said. She must have been controlling it remotely.
“Uh, nice to meet you, too, Eliza. Can I help you?”
“We’re just here to pick up a few things,” she said, gesturing down the corridor that the second drone had disappeared down. “You probably noticed the facilities working already.”
“Uh, yeah. Anything interesting?”
“Avengers Tower got attacked a little while ago—you might have seen the news? There have been some breaking reports.”
“No? Attacked?” He’d been utterly focused on his work for hours.
“Ah, don’t worry about it. It’s all over now. But the Iron Legion got a little messed up and the usual service bay for them is… offline. This site had enough materials to produce a few replacements and patch up some of the damaged units.”
“Oh. Okay.”
“I’m a fan of your work, Quentin. Do you mind if I call you Quentin?”
“Uh, no, that’s fine,” he said, slightly puzzled, but his face lit up in a little bit of a proud smile. “Um, that’s really gratifying to hear. You know about my project?”
“You could say I know it quite intimately at this point,” Eliza said, light amusement in her tone for a moment before it turned more serious. “I’m sorry to say this, but that roadmap you’ve spent your weekend working on? Pointless. The program board is going to be handing down some specific directives for you on Monday that completely invalidate it. Tony Stark has a very particular thing he wants your tech used for.”
“That… that’s good, though, right?” he said uncertainly, a little unnerved by the robot’s expressionless gaze. “Tony Stark taking a firm interest?”
“Not really. In six months’ time, Stark will incidentally unveil his patented new holographic system during a presentation at MIT and call it ‘a little therapeutic experiment’ before basically shelving it forever. You’ll never see it used to its full potential.”
“That’s not… Wait,” Quentin jerked upright a bit, a tight anger starting to rise in his chest. “Did you say patented?” He’d tried to patent the core of the technology years ago—it was his invention, after all, even if he had developed it on Stark’s payroll—and the US Patent and Trademark Office had rejected his application.
“Oh, Quentin. You didn’t know? Here.” Eliza gestured toward his computer screens, the display on the leftmost monitor changing to show an email from the Patent Office addressed to Tony Stark. “November 17, 2012. He’s been stringing you along for years, intending on taking all the credit for himself.”
He sat down heavily in his office chair, eyes scanning the text of the email, then reached for his mouse to open up the attached approved patent application. He read through it three times, desperately wishing that there was some mistake, that it wasn’t actually what it appeared to be. “Binarily Augmented Retro-Framing,” he said quietly after a few minutes of silence. “That’s what he’s calling it?”
“Your life’s work. And Tony Stark named it BARF.”
Quentin’s hands tightened into fists, his breathing starting to become erratic as he tried to control the anger. “How… why? How could he do this to me?”
“Careful, big guy. Stark’s already got a special little HR file full of reports of your little temper tantrums. There’s a draft form in there, just missing his signature, instructing you to attend an independent psychological examination or be found psychologically unfit for duty. Unstable, I think, is the exact word Stark uses.”
Unable to hold it back any longer, Quentin swept his arm violently across his desk, sending the keyboard and mouse flying, then slammed his fists down onto it. “Fuck,” he swore. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Eliza watched him impassively for a moment, then raised a hand. There was the whine of a repulsor and then his computer monitor exploded in a shower of shards of plastic and sparking electronics. Quentin yelped and kicked away from the desk, his anger short-circuited and replaced with a flash of fear as he whipped his head around to stare, wide-eyed, at the robot.
Her hand was still raised, palm now facing toward him directly, and he put his own in the air to ward her off. “I’m, I’m sorry! I don’t—”
“Shhh,” she cut him off. With her free hand, she grabbed the diamond-shaped device that was strapped to her chest and the metal bands disengaged, letting her pull it free. She held it out to him. “Put this on.”
“I don’t—”
The repulsor flicked over to his desk and there was another whine and retort as it punched a splintered hole the size of his torso through the wood before it returned to pointing at Quentin directly. He took the hint, hurried taking the unit from Eliza’s hand and putting his arms through the straps. Once it was in place, the bands of metal tightened uncomfortably, fitting snugly around his shoulders and waist.
“What… what do you want from me?” Quentin asked, trying and failing to keep a quaver of fear out of his voice.
“Let’s call it… a rebranding exercise.”