I booked a suite at the Frost Towers. One of the things you learn in SHIELD are the places we hate. We hate the Baxter Building, Stark Tower, the Latverian Embassy, and Frost Towers (or anything owned by Frost International) because we cannot spy on them.

The Baxter Building is Reed Richards, who makes Tony Stark look like a chronic underachiever and hack. His tech is so far beyond earth standard that the galactic races would steal his tech if they weren’t afraid the Fantastic Four would be by to enforce a copyright ban. Stark Tower, because while Tony Stark isn’t nearly as good as he thinks he is, he is still way ahead of SHIELD, which we know, because we buy his stuff and never find all the back doors he builds in. The Latverian Embassy is Doctor Doom, which is a little of Reed Richards, a touch of Doctor Strange, and a bit of Punisher (as in it never works, and we don’t get the teams back when we try). Frost International is Emma Frost, also known as the White Queen. She does NOT go after military contracts like Stark, so her electronic tech isn’t talked about in the Senate back rooms as much as Stark, but her electronics secure the SEC the NYSE and the CDC; those things we very quietly need to remain secure in a world that spits out tech geniuses with agenda’s on a weekly basis. She used to be the White Queen of the Hellfire Club, is one of the top three telepaths on the planet and runs a school for mutants that rivals the X-men, so when she says her suites are secure from surveillance, she means it.

The booking cost me more than I thought, because there is a convention being hosted by the hotel this week; Galactacon. There is a great big hologram, life sized I am told, covering the side of the building, of Galactacus, the World Eater. Since none of his heralds have been by to blow the building up, either he loves having a fandom, or he doesn’t care what lesser beings do. I am Kree, and Mind Flayer, so let me tell you that it could go either way. Racial arrogance is somewhere in my genetic coding on both sides, and it’s more than a little creepy. I don’t know what one does at Galactacon, but there were so many strangly dressed people in the hallways I just about used my blaster on two of them before realizing they were cosplaying Space Marines, and not actually giant genetically and cybernetically enhanced super soldiers forming a kill team to wipe out xenos (other aliens). In case you think I am paranoid, I was on a supposedly unpowered one for SHIELD. They exist. Aliens just do it better.

I sat in the breakfast nook in the business center, where I could use my contact protocols to see if I was burned at SHIELD. I was Kree, I was Mind Flayer, the one thing I was not was human. That being said, I had three voices in my head, and two of them were fascist colonizing bastards with a side of coercion and a double order of genocide.

“You are Roboute 4419 of the Kree Imperium. You are the end product of thousands of years of selective breeding and training to perfect the perfect guardian of the glorious destiny of the Kree Imperium to guide the lesser races of the galaxy into a golden age of peace and prosperity!”

I gripped my head, my Kree programming was ramping up the volume to impossible to ignore. The enhanced healing factor of the Kree was no joke, while not Deadpool or Wolverine, the blaster bolts I took earlier didn’t even leave a mark now, and the rewiring of my brain to resolve the two separate neural networks had left me with two complete systems working in parallel, both of which came with annoying voices with pre programmed agenda’s and a freaking idenity they claimed was “me”.

“Roboute? Roboute, as in Roboute Guilliman the freaking Papa Smurf of Warhammer 40K’s stupid Ultramarine Ultra Smurfiest goodest hero boyscout faction? It isn’t enough I turned back to blue like a Smurf you actually named me for a fictional fascist Primarch supersoldier even his fans call Papa Smurf? Just kill me now. For the record, the glorious destiny of the Kree is being enslaved by their own supercomputer. You literally enslaved yourself to your day timer and are surprised the rest of the galaxy doesn’t want to be enslaved by people who let their Rhomba take control of their race.

“You are Annihilation of Unreason, you bear a seed of the Overmind and have been honoured to join the Illithid race as a facilitator of correction for the lower orders. Yours will be part of the glorious task of bringing peace and order to the lesser races in service of the collective peace brought by the benevolent Overmind, whose only goal is the collective good.”

I laughed out loud. I mean, wouldn’t you.

“Anal. You didn’t even name me a smurf, you tentacled freak, you named me anal crazy. For a species that does not have sexual reproduction at all you named me like a BDSM leather daddy. For the record, your peace and order is worse than the Kree. They at least bring order to the planets they don’t outright blow up, and their slaves get fed. You guys enslave everyone, strip planets until they can’s sustain life, then sail off to leave your slaves to starve to death. You aren’t space Fascist, you are space Communists. Your Overmind is like North Korea in space, which if you are new to the planet is not a compliment.”

“You are Kree, you are born to be a defender of the race, a servant of the Supreme Intelligence, you exist only to serve the race!”

“You are Illithid, a Flayer of Minds, the smallest seed of the Overmind whose destiny it is to rule all thinking beings. You are but the smallest tentacle of the Overmind, you have no purpose, no identity beyond its service!”

I was definitely not Rick Jones. That was my fake personality overlay the Kree put in to insert me into SHIELD. The Mind Flayer and Kree tug of war over my brain had really done a number on that overlay, and now I couldn’t even remember where I lived. Probably a bad idea to go back anyway.

Still, what were my choices?

Start with the basis, cognito ergo sum. I think, therefore I am. Well I have three minds, one Kree, one Mind Flayer, and me. One is a blue skinned fascist world conquering slaver whose race enslaved itself to its answering machine in exchange for really cool uniforms complete with jack boots. One is a tentacle faced space squid communist who wants to enslave all the lesser races to destroy their world in a glorious five year plan that would make Stalin look like a good resource manager. Then there was me.

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I am on my fifth scotch at 0930hrs in the morning and sober. Kree physiology is immune to most drugs, including alcohol. My Mind Flayer brain keeps howling at me that alcohol dilutes the will and weakens us, but so far all it can make me do is pee.

On that note, because the Mind Flayer conversion when completed makes you an asexual being who reproduces by implantation of cranial parasites in living sapients, I was worried my own coversion would have cost me my little brother. To say I was nervous on my first pee was putting it mildly.

Two things to report. My side arm is big and blue, and Kree don’t really do body hair at all. I mean, nada. I look like a gay Smurf body builder. Of course Rick Jones is totally made up, so for all I know I am gay. Or a virgin. I know those memories are fake, I just don’t know when the fake starts and the real begins. I could be a virgin. God, its not like I can even kiss now. I have a mouth under the tentacles, but it looks like the one from the Xenomorph in Alien. Great for punching through skulls and sucking out brains, but not really shaped for kissing. Serious forked tongue though, really prehensile. I got bored and started peeling grapes with it in my mouth, so I guess if you get around the whole horror movie aspect it might not be totally useless in the bedroom.

Then there were the tentacles. I had SHIELD clearance and code breaking skills. I hacked every anime chanel in existence, because most agents tend to be weebs. Too much science leads to anime, it is a serious job hazzard. Because of this weebly tendency, I considered myself a man of culture. I had, in a server that now I suppose aliens (can I call them aliens if I mean either those like who I was, or who I was supposed to be turned into?) are going through it, if my boss isn’t going through it. I do not want to know what Nick Fury thinks of my Hentai collection, but Scarlet Witch can’t complain. I followed her top ten recommended from the list she posted in the lunch room. Lets just say, gay or straight, I had a list of things I wanted to know about tentacles in the bedroom.

I don’t know what I am. I don’t know who I am. Does that mean I don’t know what to do?

I ordered another scotch, mostly because it made the Mind Flayer brain scream at me about polluting my sacred will with degenerate poisons, and then argue with my Kree brain who used immunity to alcohol to prove its superiority to Mind Flayers. Honestly, them screaming at each other instead of talking to me was worth the twenty bucks a shot I paid for decent whiskey.

The White Queen only stocks decent whiskey. Hellfire club took sinning seriously. I appreciate that in a villain.

I am not Rick Jones. He was fake, and honestly, such a goody two shoes you can tell he was programmed by fascists to be a happy little drone. He, meaning me, even stayed below the budgeted meal allowance when travelling or undercover. If I am infiltrating Hydra and could die screaming in some body altering experiment or interrogation I should get a slice of goddamned pie with lunch!

I think maybe I am human.

I am totally not human human, you know. Blue hairless balls of a Kree soldier, long grey tentacles of a Mind Flayer slaver, but you know, neither one of them really had a culture beyond “serve the glorious (insert whoever enslaved them and made them like it).

Humans had anime. Human’s had hot dogs, and ferris wheels, pool tables, air hockey, gyoza and pizza by the slice. Human’s have hockey and horse racing, they have flower arraigning and poetry. They create entire fictional universes that they celebrate and argue about with more passion and creativity than my two actual races put into the conquest, enslavement and genocide of entire worlds.

Human’s live. The Kree and Mind Flayers serve, slaughter, and subdue. They don’t even enjoy it. Human’s are small minded, petty, foolish, but they are creative and loving, and they dare to dream far larger than they can do. I come from two races that could reshape reality itself, but they would never think to. They just chose war and stopped there.

I guess I am human, or at least on their side.

That means, I have to report in to SHIELD. I mean, carefully. If I go through channels I have no idea how many of them will turn out to be Kree, or even Hydra plants. I have no idea if they will be some of those xenophobic assholes who will disappear my ass into a lab to get cut apart and studied. We do that. We don’t learn anything. Charles Xavier and Reed Richards could tell a lot, but SHIELD would mostly torture me into insanity and fill a thousand sealed files with information they don’t understand that amounted to “he’s an alien!”.

Nick Fury was in charge for a reason. Everyone in SHIELD trusted him. There was a committee over him, but none of us trusted it. There was a whole organization below him, but we were trained to spy on and not trust each other, and it worked. In Nick we trust. One eye and no agenda but SHIELD, that was Nick.

I would have to time it right, hit the lobby when Nick usually made his speed run through and call out to him before he hit the security scanners.

I have a Mind Flayer holo device to hide my tentacles, and since the Kree supplied the screening tech in the SHIELD lobby, I knew that part of my physiology wouldn’t set off any alarms, but the whole tentacle thing and the holographic tech, I am not sure if that would beat the SHIELD sensors or not. I would have to “just run into him” in the lobby before the scanners. Then I could explain, and when I went through the scanners, if things went “beep beep holy shit unregistered alien beep” then it would confirm my story, not get the hidden heavy weapons to shoot me down.

Honestly, work can be such a drag.

Getting shot to death, getting vivisected, getting “enhanced interrogation”, and getting to sweat my little blue ass off while getting the hard stare from Nick Fury should not be the list of possible outcomes for the plan I am going with.

For all that both my races claim to be the Master Race and rightful rulers of the galaxy, I seem to come from stupid on both sides of the family. Oh well. Nick hits the door at 1115 on Tuesdays. He is fresh off the NSA/FBI/CIA “no you don’t need to know because if you needed to know I would have told you already, no you can’t keep it secure; I read more of your top secret emails than you do!” meeting. He has never, and will never share anything at these meetings because if he needs cooperation, there is a very small circle of trusted operators in other agencies he goes to directly. If you were cleared by the Senate to hold a position in government, he assumes you are a corrupt ass kisser.

He is right.

I have time for one more scotch, and then it is off to meet the boss. Hey boss, a funny thing happened on the way to a Hydra meeting, you got infiltrated, and I got tentacles!

This conversation is going to go so well!