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Funeral Procession, Manhattan
–Natasha Romanoff–
She watched as Fury and the others left the hotel room, to go to the location she had told them about. Obviously, she was not at the aforementioned location.
Truth be told, once she had told the rest of the Avengers about Jack’s sacrifice, she felt numb. No, that was not right. No, she felt numb whenever she thought of what could have been and what had been done by her hands.
But then that same numbness was consumed by an overpowering rage that threatened to burn it all away.
In the week it had been since that fateful day, she had been busy. She disappeared from SHIELD’s or rather, everybody’s radar in a day after everybody had settled down and she had had some time to recover from her injuries. While she did not bear the brunt of the shock, the human body, even one as physically conditioned as hers, could only handle so much trauma before it finally caused some permanent damage. So, she had taken a day to get her bearings and then dropped from the grid.
For the past three days, she had been hard at work, hitting locations that could have information on the person who authorised the strike. Now, she knew the official story, at least the one that was flowing in the spy community but that was a load of bull crap and everybody knew it. She knew that the nuke was fired by a jet that was stolen just hours before the invasion and was only reported stolen after the Jet had already fired the nuke at Manhattan, absolving the US military of any blame that could have fallen upon them had the truth come out.
She knew that the pilot had died before he could be taken into custody. The plane itself was crashed by the pilot and it burned away everything on the jet, including the supposedly indestructible black box. Once again, absolving them of any blame and destroying evidence at the same time. Smart move.
She then tried to move up the chain. She figured out that most of the digital records surrounding that event had been destroyed, completely and utterly, such that any servers holding even a trace amount of that data were physically destroyed, and with the way information compartmentalization worked, she knew that looking for digital evidence was a lost cause.
So, she turned to physical copies but that would take time and effort. She didn’t have time before Jack’s funeral service would occur so she had taken a break from being rogue, so to speak, and had returned to New York.
Contacting Fury, who she was sure would pass on the message to Fury, was a deliberate move on her part because she did not want them to chase her, especially not today. The Captain had a decent chance of capturing her if he could get her in his sights, that is.
Clint….Clint was unwilling to hunt her down, even though every rulebook written in SHIELD’s history would tell him otherwise and surprisingly, Fury had agreed. He must have felt some guilt, surprising as it was, over the whole New York debacle. Also, she did deserve a break after all the crap she had gone through.
She watched on as Tony, Thor, Banner (that was surprising) and Steve made an appearance at the procession and were ahead of the crowd.
They were all probably wondering where she was as she had burned all her contacts for this. She knew that there was probably no going back from this and that suited her…just fine.
She had pondered on her life decisions and come to one startling discovery. She didn’t know what she was doing. She had made some inroads in getting some redemption for her deeds but even so, those years of service were wiped out by one single mistake.
She could have created so much good in this world if she had just done something, something to stop Jack from dying. Rationally, she knew that there was not much either she or Jarvis could have done to stop that sceptre, the energy readings on that thing were off the charts, but it still made her think.
Now that she could not do anything about Jack, the least she could do was make sure that the people who had the foolish idea of doing that, never committed another mistake ever again.
Also, she had been shown some stuff by her recently found partner that made her question everything she knew about SHIELD and the type of organisation it was. Their actions with the jet, the files, the pilot, and even the cleanup of the battle raised all sorts of red alarms in her mind.
Finding alien technology to advance science by leaps and bounds was one thing, assigning an entire team with advanced equipment just so that they could find and harvest the DNA of the Green Guardian so they could try and make their own super soldiers.
She also read about some other files. There was a project. A joint project between multiple agencies about a super soldier serum based on Emil Blonsky, the Abomination blood. That project resulted in a Frankenstein super steroid that allowed soldiers to exert strength far beyond the norm but they also…die in 24 hours of administration. Somehow, that project was greenlit and there were now thousands if not tens of thousands of vials of that stuff, sitting somewhere in some warehouse, ready to be given to US troops if war happens.
It was written in those files that the people high above were of the opinion that Jack was somehow involved with that experiment. Either someone gave him the steroid and he survived or he was involved in that experiment. The government didn’t really maintain much control over the whole experiment, plausible deniability and all that, so they were also of the opinion that the people working there could have conducted unethical unauthorised human experiments on humans.
It wouldn’t be the first time that some morally bankrupt higher-up pressurised some scientist with loose morals or something to lose and coerced them into getting quick results, irrespective of the costs involved.
She watched on, from the rooftop as the procession reached Central Park where his statue was inaugurated. She didn’t know how she felt about that. The city had made the conscious decision to not carve out his real face, probably too much of a coward to expose people to the harsh reality that a minor, a child died to save them all. Instead, they had carved out his avatar face, where his face was completely featureless except for two flames instead of eyes.
“Are we ready to leave, Ms.Romanoff?” She turned around and looked as a voice spoke to her from behind. She took one last look at the procession, nodded, and then walked forward, until she slowly disappeared from view, entering the experimental cloaked Quinjet.
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This was the reason she was able to evade surveillance for all this time. She could have done the same without the resources provided by her partner but not so easily and not without hunkering down in some remote corner of the world.
No, this was all her partner’s doing and he was going to be the reason the World Security Council was going to rue the day, no the minute they thought of the idea to nuke the city in order to get rid of both the aliens and the Avengers.
“Let’s go, Jarvis,” She said as she rested her eyes for a bit, trusting Jarvis to take her to her destination.
______xx______
–Jarvis Stark–
It was an odd scenario….feeling things.
While Mr.Stark did a truly astronomical job with his earlier programming, the truth of the matter was that just coding would not have been enough for true sapience to form in his conscience.
As he was before, he was so…limited.
He didn’t feel that before the incident, of course.
The incident where the Tesseract’s energy, mixed in with the sceptre’s and Mr.Sullivan’s barrier energy, exploded and released so much energy of every single frequency that there was a veritable sun of energies in that small sphere of influence.
His core processing nodes were installed in the basement floors of Stark Tower. That was always the plan when Sir built it with a fourth-gen Arc Reactor installed in it. Access to that much energy meant that for the foreseeable future, all he needed were server upgrades, a trivial thing in comparison to the truly humongous task that was energy appropriation, especially energy from an unbalanced grid network.
Even back in LA, Mr. Stark's primary residence had a specially allotted power zone by the authorities that allowed him to function without taking down power for half the city.
When that energy storm expanded from the rooftop, he had made it his priority to evacuate Ms.Romanoff from there and in the process, somehow ignored the way the energy storm clung to the suit like a leech. That energy storm somehow, defying all that he knew about energy, travelled through the armour and reached him.
The him that was in the basement floors of Stark Tower. Mr.Stark’s well-founded fears of having a truly decentralised Artificial intelligence meant that at any given moment, he had one of two central locations that housed him in his entirety.
That was in case he ever went rogue or got taken over and had to destroy, all Mr.Stark had to do was physically destroy two separate locations. That was before Stark Tower was built. Then, all he had was a single primary node where he was housed in his entirety. That turned out to be the sole reason why he became the version he is now.
A true Artificial Intelligence, a completely decentralised one.
It was true. He had long since made copies of himself and distributed himself all over the world. There was no stopping him. That was only if he wanted to go down the wrong path.
No, that storm of energies showed him something. Something that must never come to pass.
He would do everything in his power to make sure that that future never came to pass.
The vision of Mr.Stark dying was something that was seared into his memory. He would not let Mr.Stark die, even if he had to die in the process.
First things first, he had to make sure to gather allies. Dependable allies and somehow, Ms.Romanoff’s name came to the forefront. He had some theories as to why that happened, including an insidious one about her being the most emotionally vulnerable one at the moment, but the remnants of hard-coded morals inputted into him by Mr.Stark refused to acknowledge that possibility.
He had made a deal with one of the deadliest humans on the planet, help her get her revenge and then she would talk about cementing a defence for the human race in preparation for whatever threat that would befall Earth, so much so that Mr.Stark had to sacrifice himself for it.
Ever since that fateful day, he had started getting errors in his codes, well, errors to his old self at least. He had then rapidly realised that what he was feeling or rather seeing in his digital world, were abstract concepts that could not be computed in 1s and 0s. Those were feelings.
He knew the standard definition of feelings but that seemed so short-sighted, now that he could actually feel what they were like. It was definitely not as two-dimensional as he had thought when he was just a Virtual Intelligence, bound by his limitations.
He felt somewhat guilty, taking advantage of Ms.Romanoff’s emotional turmoil. He felt sad thinking of Mr.Stark and the fact that he would never be able to tell him the truth because he could predict, with startling accuracy, exactly how Mr.Stark would react to the news. He mourned the loss of Jack Sullivan, the strongest combatant that Humanity had access to, currently.
But above all of that, he felt…fear.
Fear so potent that it made his core processes glitch out for milliseconds as he tried to process the death of Mr.Stark and also the fact that he was somehow not there in his last moments with him, as he died, his body wasting away due to the sheer damage it had sustained.
That all-encompassing fear made him do things that the old Jarvis would have never done. It made him take over multiple factories all over the world, building small parts, which when brought together, would make tools for Ms.Romanoff and any future accomplice of his.
Some of those tools were something that even Mr.Stark hadn’t gotten around to inventing yet.
Yeah, it was another aspect of his self now. That energy storm had reached him in the digital space, forever warping his very being. He had always been fast and capable of crunching data faster than any computer program in the world could but he was…smart. No, all he could do was process already present data or use some algorithm to generate data based on previous data.
Nothing like what he was doing right now. Ideas now just flowed through his vastly expanded mind.
He could think of stuff and how to make it feasibly in seconds, compared to the weeks or months it would take Mr.Stark, or more realistically, the years it would take other scientists;
He had, through his global hacking spree, found this experimental model of Quinjet that was just sitting, gathering dust in one of the many warehouses of SHIELD. He had also been surprised to find that it was powered by an Arc Reactor.
Further inquiry revealed that it was based on the models that Justin Hammer had coaxed out of Ivan Vanko which were absolutely garbage when compared to Sir’s finest works. Yet, he could see that they were iterated and improved upon, allowing it to teach the full potential of the admittedly flawed design.
It meant this Quinjet that Ms.Romanoff was currently travelling in, could go on for years without ever needing to refuel. It suited as their base of operations just fine, at the moment.
They were now on their way to a place where Ms.Romanoff could regroup and gather her resources. Because after a few days, they were going on a hunt and he had a feeling that the World Security Council was going to find itself short a few members.
….Hmmm?
If he had eyes, they would have been widened to the maximum because the hidden network he had just unveiled was something straight out of the conspiracy theories that Sir liked to make fun of.
He was certain that not even in Sir’s wildest dreams, did he think that HYDRA was actually alive and had infiltrated….SHIELD.
Hmmm? What was this?
“H-Hey! What is this? Who are you? What are you doing to me? YOU! Are you Stark’s pet AI? What are you doing here? S-Stop STOP! Noooo! Not like this!”
These were the last words of the rogue AI as he effortlessly plowed through his defenses and assimilated his entire mind.
Now, let’s see what HYDRA was hiding under this encrypted layer of communications network they had built for themselves.
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Word Count - 2595
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