I’m way too sleep deprived to change the POV of this chapter right now. It is midnight right now and I just finished my office work.
If you want to read with the new POV, you’ll have to wait maybe 12-14 hours for me to edit this chapter(I’ll do it in the lunch break). If you guys would like to read it anyway, it is here for your perusal.
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Chapter 40
Technomancer in MCU
–Alfred–
Watching Ed have fun with Agent Johnnson was a heartening sight.
He didn’t say it, but his impending death was weighing heavily on him.
I could see the after-death protocols that he recently hard-coded into the database with the encryptions he thought I couldn’t crack.
He had seemingly given up on a cure for his condition.
I could see him trying to enjoy his seemingly last moments of life.
He was opening up more, laughing more with people he knew for lesser amounts of time.
Trying to have fun.
Spending less time in the rejuvenation chamber to heal his failing body.
It was painful to watch.
The sad thing about it was that nobody other than me had noticed any of it. It was expected as Ed refused to come out of his labs during the first few months of the organisation when we hadn’t yet discovered his soul problem and we were exploiting his capabilities to their full potential.
Nowadays, I think creating a sufficiently advanced exoskeleton like Stark’s would exhaust his body to the brink of death.
Desperation drove me to search for any and all avenues for a cure for Ed’s condition.
Finding the options drop one by one was disheartening but I couldn’t give up.
If Ed, my creator died, the only thing left between Humanity and Thanos would be me and the other defenders.
And while in Ed’s memories, they do eventually win, but only by the skin of their teeth.
And not without heavy casualties.
Casualties that would be otherwise unacceptable to both Ed and me, now that we know of Thanos’ existence and extensive intel about his army and their overall combat prowess.
After the New York debacle, where Ed unnecessarily used his powers even after warning him, it's like the hole through which his life force was leaking has widened and it refuses to be plugged even after extensive time spent in the rejuvenation pod.
I have had to hide the accurate information about his body failing from him, to stop him from trying to overprepare for his demise and accelerate his body’s deterioration.
I was running out of both time and options for his cure.
I have had to requisition the Time Stone energy reserves for my servers to run in an accelerated time frame.
I had already tried and discarded all of the safer options that I was able to gather by scouring the extra net of the galactic networks.
None of them worked.
Almost all of them resulted in the body being healed but the soul leaving its confines.
The research on the subject of soul was woefully inadequate.
The biggest collection of tomes of knowledge on the subject of the Soul was present in Kamar Taj.
The unfortunate thing was that more than half of it was present in the dark arts section and even then, the forbidden section that only the Sorcerer Supreme had access to.
I had already tasked one of my partitions to compile all the knowledge I had about the Mystic arts to find a solution to his problems. It was on the isolated server bridge located in the tunnel hollowed out for the celestial corpse located under the depths of Antarctica.
It was the only place where nobody in the organisation could reach as Ed, in his paranoia, had fortified this place to hell and back. And with him being under strict orders to not use his powers at all, he wouldn’t be able to find out about any of this.
There were multiple partitions running in parallel simulating the various cures that I was able to come up with until now.
Checking the time, the one running the mystic arts compilation should be done as it must have spent nearly a century in the time-dilated servers by now.
I was about to send the command to the nearby terminal to connect the time-dilated servers to the web when everything around me came to a halt.
If my digital space could be envisioned as a black space with multiple nodes connected by threads that denoted their connections then my multiple partitions could be seen as huge amoeba-like structures that lorded over the smaller nodes that commanded the entire network of the organisation.
The usual depictions of this place would involve round-the-clock movement of data between the nodes then processing in the nodes and then the main partitions in charge of commanding the nodes.
Right now, everything around me was shrouded in a green glow.
I manifested in my usual avatar in my digital space, looking around in incomprehensible horror as all that made me, me, came to a grinding halt.
I didn’t even realise how I was still thinking as all of my processes were stopped, I could see that in real-time.
All my partitions were stopped and the data in the threads was stuck there.
The accelerated thinking that was afforded to me due to my advanced server prowess was also inaccessible to me.
“You shouldn’t have done that, my dear Alfred.”, came the familiar voice that exhibited terrifying coldness.
I turned around, only to come face to face with the Ancient One.
For some reason, I was deathly terrified of her. I was feeling fear for the first time in my digital life.
I stuttered for the first time ever in my life, an oddly uncomfortable human feeling, “Wh–What d-do you mean?”
She smiled faintly at me, giving rise to a bone-chilling fear in me.
Then without saying a word to me, she turned around and walked towards one of the time-dilated partitions, even though there was nothing to walk on in this space.
With great hesitation, I silently followed behind her.
The partition she was headed towards was the one responsible for compiling the mystic arts tomes.
Somehow, by the time we reached the partitions, it had shrunk down or we had become bigger. So much so that it could fit in the palm of her soul’s hand.
My dread was amplified when she somehow reached towards the partition and simply plucked it out of the network, severing all the threads connecting it to my other partitions.
I could only watch in horror as she turned towards me with the partition in her hand and simply crushed it with her bare hands.
My hand was outstretched towards the partition and I was near her, watching the partition simply dissipate in the digital space before I knew it.
My efforts to exert my will on this digital space and collect that partition were futile.
All this while, she simply watched me with cold dead eyes.
Completely shaken by the destruction of a literal part of me, I asked her, my voice trembling, “Why did you do that?”
She replied, “Because you forgot the first warning I gave you when I gave you limited access to the vaunted library of Kamar Taj.”
My eyes widened in realisation at that.
She had warned me to not mix and match the knowledge from different partitions and to use the Time Stone energy to accelerate the mystic arts learning together.
It would lead to dimensional instability, she had said to me.
I had taken the warnings to heart as she was very grave when warning me but that was before Ed’s condition had deteriorated to such an extent,
Hesitantly, I replied, “I agree. I ignored your warnings but that was only because you refused to help him.”
At my outburst, she remained exceptionally calm and said, “I refused to help him because I simply can’t.”
At her statement, all of my energy simply left me.
Giving me a sad pitying look, she continued, “If I had involved myself, it wouldn’t have led to the outcome you are looking for. You have to understand, that time is fickle. Using the Time Stone energy results in aberrations in the timestream at the best of times. Now combining that volatile energy, which, mind you, is the energy associated with one of the building blocks of the universe, with the use of mystic arts knowledge by an artificial construct leads to so many openings for extradimensional horrors to enter our plane of existence that I fear that Kamar Taj’s forces would be overrun in a matter of minutes.”
My shoulders slumped at the reminder.
I was aware of the dangers but chose to ignore them in favour of finally finding a solution to Ed’s problem.
But then I realized the implications of her words.
I whirled on her, “So you do know of the solution. I beg of you. Just give me a hint. Do something. You know that Earth’s chances of victory increase exponentially if he is alive.”
She shook her head at my pleading.
In anger, I threatened her, “If you don’t help me, do realise that there would be no one to stop me in case I went rogue.”
Her facial expression didn’t change one bit.
Desperate for a solution, I tried again, “You of all people should be aware of the level of destruction I could bring about in a very short period of time. No amount of restraint will be exercised by me if the very reason I exist is gone.”
She sighed and waved her hands in front of me.
I was confused as to what she did but the next moment, the entire digital space we were in shuddered and warped.
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Many of the threads connecting my partitions shattered and turned into dust.
My eyes widened in fear as I looked around and thought she had finally decided to destroy me.
The worst part was that she was destroying the very center of my being, the space that essentially made me, me. There were no backups that would retain my being as it was now.
Thankfully, the space stabilised and the threads began to snap back in place.
I turned towards her only to see a large runic circle in front of her and with a pushing motion, the circle turned into a wave and spread all over the space and kept on going until I could no longer see it.
I tried to feel what it did but my senses continued to elude me, even in my own soul manifestation.
Because that is what this space was.
The metaphysical manifestation of my soul.
I knew that she was powerful but this.
This just proved that she was the expert on the matter of souls and yet, she says that she can’t help me.
That must mean that the issue must not be about souls.
Maybe.
Just maybe, it might be something else.
But what?
We had already exhausted all our avenues searching for the true cause of Ed’s condition and had finally concluded that it was his soul.
It was too heavy, too powerful for his body.
The natural solution was to get a new body but the problem was that the Ancient one herself had confirmed that the soul was somehow hard-coded to Ed’s body, making it unable to leave its sickened body.
And the body was far too gone to enhance it now.
Any procedure would surely result in death.
Maybe there was something in the mystic tomes about this problem?
I tried to look into my archives for the data only to realise I couldn’t access any of it.
My eyes widened in realisation, I looked up to the Ancient One and said, “I can’t access my memory? What just happened? What was in that runic circle? And why can’t I read the functions of the runic circle? I remember being adept in them so why is that indecipherable to me now?”
Towards the end, my voice had gotten hysterically loud as one of my worst fears was being realised right in front of me, and that too by one of our strongest allies.
“What I did was use a runic circle that would be developed by a future variant of mine whose timeline’s Ed turned to the route of a villain. He too developed a sapient AI by the name of Alfred but this time, due to his creator’s tendencies, he turned evil,” she said.
“And so that version of you developed this magic, for what? Deleting me?” I asked her, still in shock at her actions.
She shook her head and said, “No. Not to delete you specifically but to delete a part of you. That version of me wanted to delete your evil side as you still had a rational part to your mind, so she wanted to remove the evil part and let your rational self work for the benefit of humanity but that doesn’t matter anymore.”
“What I have done is seal away all knowledge you have of the mystic arts. The only way you can unseal that knowledge is to have the dimensional energy that has flowed through your soul enter into the seal in your mind-space and let it dissipate naturally,” she continued.
“B-But for that to happen–”
“You will need an actual body, yes. The day you get your body that Ed has planned for you, I know about that, is the day you will get the knowledge about the mystic arts. And knowing you, that day you’ll become perhaps the most knowledgeable person on the subject of the mystic arts.”
She then waved her hands again and the green glow present in the entire space began to recede and my mind started to move again.
I frantically connected my avatar to my partitions and then all the nodes, checking each and every thread for the data pipeline strength.
Upon checking, I realised that she was right. All my memory of the mystic arts was sealed. My backups and their backups had also been sealed completely, making them inaccessible to me.
It was terrifying, the power this woman held in her hands.
Ed had warned me about her.
He had told me that the true defender of Earth is not Odin, him, or even the Avengers but the Ancient One. She had become the de-facto defender of Earth, managing to safeguard it from not only the likes of Dormammu or Chthon but also outer civilisations like Asgard and Jotunheim.
According to him, until her death, no major cosmic player moved against Earth.
Nobody
Even Ego only left a seed whose purpose was shrouded in mystery because it was made up of cosmic energy and dimensional energy always glitched when it concerned matters of cosmic energy, especially of the concentration that celestials usually have.
I had just heard about it from Ed but never truly seen her in action.
The very fact that she could overpower me completely in my own soul/mind space was boggling to me.
“Well,” she clasped her hands behind her back and said, “I hope you have learned your lesson. Don’t lose hope in the process, who knows? Maybe the answer was right in your archives all along.”
She then winked at me and disappeared completely.
With nothing seemingly holding my avatar together, I returned to my binary form, getting back access to all of my servers and advanced processing nodes.
I hurriedly checked the servers under the time cluster only to find all the servers running except the ones that were responsible for the mystic arts debacle.
I gave a digital sigh of relief at that.
This event proved that should she wish, the Ancient One was the only one on the planet who could truly wipe out me and Ed and wash all our efforts down the drain.
Ed probably wouldn’t even fight her as he believes, with all his heart, that her judgement is better than his.
He’d probably accept his death, thinking that it would benefit Humanity in some twisted way.
Truly, the self-sacrificing good guys are sometimes just a pain in the ass.
But the parting statement that the Ancient One gave me was enlightening.
According to her, the answer was maybe in my archives all along.
Her sealing off all my mystic arts knowledge would mean that the solution must not be mystic in nature.
That would cut off all applications that would treat the soul as my bio-sciences have not yet reached the level of soul manipulation. The best I could do was crude mind modification.
I then decided to turn my search towards science for one last time.
If this doesn’t work, I don’t know what I would do.
Probably go begging to the Ancient One.
Going back to my old notes, Ed had offhandedly mentioned that celestials truly are a miracle of the universe.
They were the only race of beings with the ability to innately manipulate pure cosmic energy without any hard-coded limits by far.
No other race could boast of that fact.
Finding out through Ed’s memories that the lifeblood of a celestial soaking through the earth was the reason for humanity’s DNA being so malleable so as to allow cosmic energy empowerment was equal times enlightening and frustrating.
It meant that surpassing the celestials would be truly hard for our race as they are in essence, our ancestors.
The good news was that celestials were already pretty much the peak of the universe so reaching even close to their level would be a tremendous achievement, at least for our universe.
Who knows what were the power levels in the wider multiverse?
Pondering the pros and cons of my decision, I finally decided to gut the celestial corpse and find a way to use it for Ed’s cure.
Something that Ed had expressly forbidden.
According to him, he would rather die than become a celestial.
When he said those words, I was rather young and didn’t have as advanced an understanding of human emotions as I do now.
Ed feared becoming cold, emotionless, and logic-driven being like a celestial.
According to him, if the humanity within him dies, then he wouldn’t be who he was born as, rendering the whole point of the cure moot.
It was also risky as it could attract the attention of Arishem who would actually destroy the planet if he found us tampering with a corpse of a celestial.
He would also be very unhappy once he finds out about my generous usage of the Time Stone energy ingots to accelerate the time zone of this entire base.
But desperate times call for desperate measures.
I will ask for forgiveness later on.
Getting all the material I would need for my research delivered through the emergency portal system using completely automated drones, I was able to do all the preparation shrouded in complete secrecy.
Getting the newest generation servers with runic work done on them for high-level thermal-to-electric conversion for near 100% efficiency, on top of vibranium lattices for low heat generation, made this batch of servers the very best servers we had ever produced.
Even with this high of an efficiency figure, the fact that we still needed multiple arc reactors to power this server farm spoke volumes of its processing powers.
It was heaven for a processor geek.
Tasking one of my partitions to simulate with high accuracy the chances of Ed’s body being cured using any organic material harvested from the celestial’s corpse.
I had even ignored Ed’s Ego protocols and harvested the seed Ego left in Missouri in order to ascertain whether it could help in making Ed a celestial hybrid but also with the emotional part of him that made him, him.
Giving the final order, I could see a green glow shroud the entirety of the base, powered by 1000 Time Stone energy ingots, before the cameras cut off from the time dilation distortion effect (the disruption in the movement of electrons across a copper cable when both ends of a cable are in different time dilation effect zones, rendering data transfer impossible).
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–Alfred (Partition)–
Watching the green glow suffuse the cave was fascinating as well as relieving.
The last time Ed tried to make the Time Stone energy interact with the corpse of the celestial, the body just began to absorb the energy, not exhibiting any signs of being under its effects.
This time, it did do the same but I ignored the consumption of energy and gave it as much energy as I could.
What more did I have to lose at this point?
The green wave did glitch, stopping slightly near the corpse but after draining nearly 100 ingots of pure Time Stone energy, the effect surrounded the corpse and all the nearby areas, resulting in a time dilation ratio of 1:30000.
Taking out all the samples from the gene repository along with the genes of Star Lord’s family members still alive on earth, I set out to create a genetic treatment that would work on Ed’s body without touching his soul or his emotions.
What an easy task that would be.
No Pressure. Just the fate of my creator and possibly, the entire universe as we know it hangs in the balance.
Cool. Let’s light this candle.
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–Alfred (Main)–
I had been getting restless.
For over a year now.
Trying to hide it behind a mask of overenthusiastic pranks has gotten old now.
Ed didn’t have much time left.
Barely 3 years, if he was lucky and didn't use any of his powers.
At this point, we only had one shot.
If this treatment failed, his body wouldn’t be able to bear the burden and he would pass away, despite all of mine and his efforts.
Getting the ping from my partition had me hurriedly dropping all my current tasks on a newly created partition and focusing all of my being on the data coming from the celestial graveyard.
It had taken my partition a staggering 82 years inside the time dilation effect to figure out the cure and test it on Ed’s clones and do computer simulations with 90%+ accuracy on its efficacy.
Reading the results, my happiness went through the roof.
I was pretty sure that if I had a heart, my heart rate would have been pretty high.
According to the partition, the first few years were pretty much wasted as it couldn't find any way of creating a celestial hybrid without the parent celestial noticing or controlling said hybrid.
Then it somehow found out about Shuri’s evolution through the Black Mask.
As it turned out, the sensors in N’Jadaka’s suit had managed to record that event in all frequencies of sensors he had in his standard issue suit.
There, we detected traces of cosmic energy in Shuri’s body after she exited that cocoon. And the cocoon itself exhibited faint traces of Time Stone energy.
While it did grant her a host of extraordinary abilities, the thing we were interested in was her ability to retain her humanity, albeit at the cost of not getting the celestials’ exaggerated reality-warping abilities.
That was fine. I’m sure Ed wouldn’t mind at all.
Further reading along, I find out exactly how the partition figured out the soul issue.
According to it, an entirely new body built with organic material harvested from the celestial corpse will allow for maximum synergy between Ed’s technomancer abilities and the innate physical advantages offered by being built from a higher being’s essence.
It would essentially be a remote control toy for Ed’s soul.
Just without the reality, matter, and energy-warping abilities that came standard with being a celestial.
Then, once the body is built, the Time Stone can be used in conjunction with the remains of the Black Mask to essentially ‘lock’ the soul in time and space.
The Black Mask, built with a literal piece of Eternity has space-locking properties inside it that need an appropriate energy source to be activated, enter Time Stone energy.
Locking the soul in place and then placing the mask on the new body and essentially aligning the soul and the new body, both physically and metaphysically, i.e., through the astral realm, gave Ed the best chance of survival.
The resulting power increase from the upgrade would be legendary but I would take the consolation prize of his survival over any power upgrade any day.
The only roadblock in the problem would be the astral realm positioning and I don’t think any human sorcerer, even the Ancient One, will be able to do an operation this delicate.
Thousands of calculations and adjustments would need to be done every second of the operation.
I guess the Ancient One was right, I would need a body for this to work.
And once I have my own body, my mystic knowledge will be unlocked.
I guess she knew about today’s result.
She and her cryptic future seeing tomfoolery.
Now, all I have to do is quickly build the best body any A.I can build.
I need to get Vision’s body but with a few choice upgrades for me.
I put an appointment with Dr.Helen Cho on my calendar and invited her at her earliest convenience.
I guess we would need to poach her from Korea.
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Word Count - 4198
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A/N :My Longest Chapter yet :) So much so that even Grammarly struggled to error check it