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In a few moments, humanity would come to a stop, and for five minutes, the whole world would stand still.
Tony stood in the dimly lit Stark International Tower, gazing out the window at a city getting ready to reboot. He had divested himself of suit and tie, wearing only an undershirt, leggings, and an ever-present steel brace that circled his waist and legs. He was tired—he’d been awake for nearly forty-eight hours preparing for the patch—but he was also full of a anticipation and nervous energy.
Tony looked down at his hand. Even now, beneath his skin, millions of nanites were readying themselves, preparing to overhaul every cell in his body. His, and everyone else’s. In the distance, two zeppelins were hovering over the skyline, projecting a countdown against the dark sky. If not for the instructions blaring from the zeppelins and every digital device, it might have been New Year’s Eve instead of Patch Day.
Tony was especially eager to see today’s update sent out: a change to the cells of the nose and throat that would render a new, deadly virus impotent. The illness had spread like a wildfire from continent to continent while Arsenal carried out his testing on the gene changes, and Tony had been impatient as he watched the news, all too reminded of the disease that he had fallen ill with as a boy, the one that had cost him the use of his legs.
Up until that day, his father, and the nanites that Howard had invented, had been godlike.
A neon outline of robotic head appeared on the glass in front of Tony. “Hello? Earth to Tony, you really ought to assume position,” the hologram said.
Tony frowned, and turned around, finding the image’s real-world counterpart sitting amidst a pile of circuit boards and cables. Instead of a robotic form, his old friend was puppeteering his new replicant body—a mix of robotics and nanites. The face he’d chosen to craft was that of a blond man in his early forties. Fitting, since Arsenal was so fond of playing the responsible older brother. Howard had created him before Tony was born, so technically he was.
Tony had pulled some strings when he registered the nanites for Arsenal’s replicant form. Machines wouldn’t normally have a registered surname, but Arsenal did. Arsenal Stark. Call it sentimental, but Arsenal was the closest thing that Tony had to family.
Arsenal had been salty that the registration needed to happen at all. “It’s insulting when I’m the one taking care of you all ,” he’d said. But the law was the law. Too much of society depended on the SI nanites for authenticating identities.
“Projections?” Tony asked as the glowing outline faded from the window glass. “Now you’re just showing off.”
Arsenal shrugged. “You didn’t appear to be listening to the announcements.”
“I wrote them,” Tony replied, stalking over to a bank of monitors with feeds from around the world. Reporters from around the world were giving last minute instructions in dozens of languages. Other feeds focused on protestors: both those who thought SI went too far, and those that thought it didn’t go nearly far enough. Lots of today’s were the latter sort, owing to a big group calling on SI to overhaul the human gut and eliminate all meat consumption.
Tony sank into a chair and kicked his feet up on the desk, and the metal of his exoskeleton glimmered under the fluorescent glow of the screens. He felt a pang of resentment looking at his legs. He always did on patch days.
“Besides, Arsenal, you’re one to talk. I’m not the one orchestrating the patch. You really think this is the best time to upgrade your mainframe?”
“Dad designed me to be the most efficient supercomputer in the world. I could make you all into supermen or servile drones,” Arsenal sounded offended, “and I could do it with less than a quarter of my operational capacity. Less than a tenth after I install this new slate of hardware.” He looked up from his work at the way Tony was lounging in front of the computer and gave a world-weary sigh. “And yet with all that computing power, I still can’t understand why they insisted on making you the head of SI and not me. That is not an approved ready position, Tony.”
“I know.”
Outside, he heard the zeppelins go into the final countdown. Ten…nine…eight…
“It’s going to be terrible PR when it gets out that Tony Stark doesn’t take his own safety announcements seriously,” Arsenal said.
Seven…six…five…
The feeds showed the reporters assuming the classic kiss-your-ass-goodbye position featured in every airline pamphlet ever.
Four…three…two…
Tony leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes. “Time to save the world, brother.”
One.
The paralysis took hold right as the countdown ended. For Tony, this was the worst part of a patch. The feeling of his upper body going numb and failing to respond was straight out of his nightmares, even if it was more akin to an arm falling asleep than true paralysis.
The exoskeleton that compensated for his legs was unaffected, and if Tony had wanted, he could have safely walked a tightrope during patching, but that really would cause an uproar, since Tony was tight-lipped about his legs. People would assume he had given himself an exemption—special treatment—and Howard had drilled it into his head early and often that that was verboten.
The nanites were Howard’s legacy, his gift to save humanity: tiny symbiotic machines that could reprogram every cell in a human body and adapt them for survival on a planet that had descended into chaos. They were nearly universal now, and each person had their own personal swarm, uniquely numbered with a serial and tied to their DNA.
But the nanites were to be used for the benefit of all humanity. What was given to one was given to all. They were a way to prevent extinction, not a way to create or reinforce classes of disparity. By the same turn, Howard had also forbidden using them to push homogenization. He used them only when he thought there was no other solution, because he abhorred the thought of them being seen as a panacea.
A crutch is well and fine until it breaks and you know of no other tools to aid you in your plight. Mother nature is cruel, but wise. There is strength in diversity. In thought, in experiences, and even in your genes… Howard had said as he strapped a crying Tony into his first exoskeleton. But sadly, there is often a price to pay for it.
Tony felt the muscles of his arms unlock, the signal that the patch had been completed. He rolled his neck, then tapped at his keyboard. “Any alerts out?”
While most of the population would be coming out of the patch paralysis, just like Tony, a select minority had already received it: primarily security and emergency personnel. There was also a small but fervent group of nanite splicers who blocked all SI updates, least the official patch undo their personal ‘enhancements.’
SI classed nanite hacking as grave misuse of the technology. Arsenal rigorously analyzed every official patch before it was rolled out. Without the same sort of resources, splicers often met gristly ends, though it rarely stopped others from attempting their own hacks. Tony understood it, even if he couldn’t condone it. The allure of using the nanites to gain wondrous powers was too much for some people.
Tony glanced at his feet. He would be lying if he said he’d never contemplated splicing, but he knew Arsenal would refuse to help.
A subset of unscrupulous splicers had deduced they had an advantage when their whole city was suddenly rendered immobile. Crime spiked during patches, which had led to a police force of enhanced replicants, called CAPs, to combat this criminal element. But as of late the CAP force had been running on vapors. The reports that Arsenal had lifted from SHIELD’s files indicated that nearly one in three CAPs had failed over the last four months.
So Tony had decided to lend them a helping hand. He didn’t mind. With a few extra plates of metal fitted around his exoskeleton and some rockets in his boots, he practically became a flying tank.
Besides, it helped to keep his boredom at bay.
“No break-in reports yet,” Arsenal said. “But there’s a fire on the north side of the city and the response team is requesting aid.”
Tony tapped his chest, and the arc reactor that powered his exoskeleton. In seconds, nano material began to shape around him, forming a black, sleek suit of armor. “On it.”
SI and Arsenal might save the world, millions or billions at a time—though if Tony were honest, that was mostly Arsenal’s doing—but it was always abstract. Preventative measures. For Tony, Patches weren’t nearly as rewarding as his nights out, where he got to come face to face with the people he saved.
#
A little singed, but otherwise unscathed, Tony crested across the top of a high rise apartment. An uncharacteristic sleepy air had fallen over the city. He saw only a handful of cars on the streets, and the familiar hum of people was only a faint murmur tonight. With the Patch, many people must have decided to stay in.
“Quiet night,” Tony said, one eye on Arsenal’s feed of gleaned intel. “I haven’t even seen a CAP out tonight.”
“Isn’t that a good thing? You can retire early.”
Tony suit of armor wasn’t, strictly speaking, a sanctioned force. SHIELD probably assumed he was a splicer because twice now they’d given chase after seeing him.
“I wasn’t planning on turning in early tonight.” He skimmed up the side of an office building, looking in on the odd janitor or suit still burning the midnight oil.
Then something caught Tony’s attention in Arsenal’s feed. “Back up. SHIELD’s thawing Captain America? Why?”
“Partial thaw. I would assume that with all the recent CAP failures, they need a genetic sample to rule out mutation or degradation of what they are using to generate their replicants.”
Tony landed on the roof and turned. The SHIELD building loomed like a gray obelisk in the distance. “They still won’t let us examine one of the failed ones?”
“They’ve turned down ever offer I’ve made.”
Howard had enhanced an individual precisely once, using a serum-based precursor to the nanites. It had been during his proof of concept phase, and he’d approached the US government for funding. In return for it, they’d asked Howard to make them a super-soldier. Project Rebirth.
Captain America’s DNA was a splicer’s holy grail of strength and agility. All one had to do was look at a CAP’s bioengineered bodies that were based off the super-soldier to see that. It came without any mutations or deformities to the body, which was the usual hallmark of a splicer. If Tony had his own sample, there was no telling what he might be able to learn, with or without Arsenal’s help.
Tony pulled a small capsule from a compartment on the suit. It had a tiny needle and was designed to extract a small amount of blood—a tool he used when going toe-to-toe with a rogue splicer. Sometimes Arsenal was able to reverse engineer what they had done.
Strange night for SHIELD to pick to defrost Captain America, Tony thought. Convenient for Tony, though.
“Tony?” Arsenal asked over the comm system.
“I may be back a little late,” Tony said, shifting the capsule into a quick-access compartment on the armor.
“Tony, if you’re about to do what I think you’re about to, I should really warn you that—“
“You worry too much,” Tony laughed, and took off toward SHIELD.
#
A simple hologram was all Tony needed to make his way inside the fortress-like building. It was child’s play to project it with SI tech. All he needed was to modify the cloaking field settings on the armor a bit. A little harmless snooping into their systems, and Tony was able to find a floorplan. Even better, there were logs detailing when and where Captain America’s cryotank had been moved for thawing.
As Tony stepped into the lab in question, he was assaulted by the sterile smell of cleaning solution. The whole room was also heavy with fog from the venting cold chamber, which took up most of the floor space.
Tony moved over to the glass and looked down through its blue tint at the partially frost-obscured man. It was hard to believe Tony was looking at the genuine Captain America, the only relic to show that Howard had once dabbled in designer gene edits.
The man looked just like the CAPs: young, handsome, and with a stern face that sleep only partially softened. Perfect for law enforcement. Though the way his lips had parted made him look a bit like a princess waiting for a kiss.
Tony checked the readout on the cold tank, and his eyes widened. Freeze-thaw cycles were hard on a body. He was no expert, but even Tony knew that in a partial thaw, bodies were only warmed to a temperature where the cold chamber could be safely opened for sampling. The colder the body was kept, the better.
The readout was showing that the man was nearly eighty percent thawed! At this point the life-support systems should have kicked in, flooding the chamber with oxygen, and localized warming should have been engaged to ensure his heart and lungs were working before his brain.
None of that had been triggered, not even an audible alarm, though a low O2 sensor was blinking furiously at Tony.
Tony flipped a switch to begin the oxygen supply.
Then to his horror, Tony saw the man inside the the chamber twitch, and then his blue eyes opened wide. Panic registered on his face, the sort of look young men get just before they do something rash.
“Don’t push yourself yet! You’re still—“
Too late.
The man’s fist collided with the glass, shattering it.
Super-soldier, go figure, Tony thought.
But with the glass broken, the supplemental oxygen that had helped wake Captain America plummeted, and the man’s eyes rolled backward.
Tony cursed, terrified to think he might have inadvertently killed a living legend. His hand found the other man’s, searching for a pulse—and good , there it was.
He heard muffled voices from beyond the door. “Could have sworn I heard something break—“
Beneath him the Captain America groaned, down but not out for long.
It was now or never. Tony pulled the capsule out, and with a firm push against the man’s arm, he drew several drops of blood, just as the door opened.
A lab tech walked in, flanked by two CAPs. She screamed, an in moments the beeping from the cold chamber was joined by a klaxon wail that made Tony wince, even inside the suit. Then Tony felt a yank at his arm, and realized that the still partially frozen Captain America was trying to grapple him into a hold. Tony struggled and Captain America’s hands found a new purchase at the wiring at the back of Tony’s helmet. Tony jerked, and something broke—his feed back to the tower and Arsenal went dead.
That was bad.
Worse was that Captain America had immobilized Tony long enough for one of the CAPs to approach and slap half of a set of handcuffs Tony’s wrist. But that was when Captain America’s eyes widened, catching sight of the replicant with his face. In a moment of luck, he let go of Tony.
The lab had a row of windows along the far wall. Tony would be in SHIELD’s permanent bad-books if he took that as his exit, but Tony didn’t see much alternative.
Tony blasted the CAP backwards with his free hand repulsor, and then the other one for good measure as it tried to tackle Captain America. Which… odd . The whole night was getting stranger and stranger.
Tony primed his jet boots, getting ready to blast himself through the window, when Captain America threw himself at Tony. Tony tried to shove him off, even as the wall of the lab came up to greet him, but the other man refused to let go—and his hands found the other half of the handcuffs and locked them tightly around his own wrist, chaining him to Tony.
Tony twisted in midair, felt the back of his suit collide with the window, and heard it shatter around him in a rain of glass. The angry faces of the CAPs disappeared into pinpoints as they rocketed away, narrowly dodging a flying taxi.
Captain America swung from the other half of the cuffs, his free hand wrapped tightly about the chain. The pendulum force of it caused the thrusters on Tony’s suit to work double-time to keep them upright in the air. Much more of it, and they’d overheat. Tony reluctantly grabbed Captain America by the hands to reduce the side-to-side wobble, but this meant that he couldn’t use the repulsors in his gauntlets as flight stabilizers.
Tony wasn’t accustomed to maneuvering with so much weight either, and he knew the CAPs had likely already called in an APB on the armored mystery man that had absconded with Captain America. (Even though that wasn’t Tony’s fault!)
Best to go to ground, he reasoned, and hide out till the furor he’d stirred up had died down. He had set up safe houses around the city for occasions like this, where he was trying to lose a tail.
Besides…now Tony had to figure out what he was going to do with the Captain.
#
They soared past a billboard plastered with Tony’s face, one of the few static ads in the city. He’d bought the billboard for an exorbitant fee because it served as a useful place marker.
Stark Tech. A brighter future today.
Sometimes Tony joked that their slogan out to be: Stark Tech. Because you don’t have any other option for nanite tech. But Arsenal always reminded him that that joke was in very poor taste.
And it will be awful PR when someone overhears you say it.
Everything Tony did boiled down to bad PR. Including this. If SHIELD caught him in the Iron Man suit, it would just be one more thing for Arsenal to remind Tony he had been right about.
Tony sighed, then set them down in a muggy back alley that smelled of sewer gas, the kind of place no one willingly set foot. In the distance, SI tower loomed in the skyline, tantalizingly close, but out of reach to him tonight.
High overhead dynamic billboards blinked out rapidly shifting images in neon blues and red. A smaller sign on a faded brick building next to them shifted, reconfiguring itself into an advertisement for a car, with Tony--suit and all--sitting in the driver’s seat.
Newer, faster , Tony was always bombarded with those sort of ads when he was in the Iron Man suit. The computer vision that took in the suit and categorized ads accordingly seemed stuck on the theme.
Tony watched as the Captain’s eye slid from him to the ad, and then down to the arc reactor. One red-gloved hand reached out, splaying around the glow of the arc reactor. The chain on his wrist clinked against Tony’s armor and a hazy memory seemed to take form behind the Captain’s eyes.
Unnerved at the touch, Tony’s hand curled around the Captain’s. For a moment there was a strange energy between them, an ineffable connection. Tony’s stomach wriggled, and he pulled the Captain’s hand away from his heart, breaking the moment.
“What are you?” The Captain asked. “Man or machine?”
“Just a man,” Tony said.
“A famous one?” The Captain probably meant the ad.
“Something like that. But this is nothing special.” Tony sidestepped, drawing the Captain iin front of the ad.
The image shifted, and the Captain found himself looking at his own likeness, stern and in the modern black fatigues that all CAPs wore . For a better, safer world, the sign said in large block letters beneath the image.
The Captain recoiled at the image, and he twisted his head around like a caged animal, as though expecting a tail of the SHIELD agents to show themselves. And Tony couldn’t help but notice that his lips were still a shade of blue.
“Surprised to see what they’ve done with your face since you started your cryo nap?” Tony asked.
“Depends. What year is it?”
“2040.”
For a moment, a deep sadness broke through on the Captain’s face. “Then no. My original orders were to be in cryo for five years. Not fifty.”
“Orders?” Tony was shocked. Fifty years…his family, his friends—his whole life had been stripped away from him. It also ran counter to the narrative that Tony had grown up with—that Captain America was some sort of sentinel, to be awakened when his country called on him again. Tony held up his cuffed wrist. “So I guess you weren’t trying to arrest me, then.”
“Didn’t have long to consider my options, but you didn’t look like something out of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.”
Tony blinked, not sure what the Captain was alluding to.
“Well, come on then,” Tony said, tugging at the cuffs. He dragged the other man around a corner and pressed his palm to a door. The unique code of his nanites unlocked it, revealing a set of stairs that led down.
One by one, lights clicked on as they descended into the small safe house.
It wasn’t a large space. Tony hadn’t had guests in mind when he set the safehouse up. At three hundred square feet, it was little more than a hole in the ground. It was furnished with the bare necessities: a bed, a computer, kitchenette and bathroom. Unfortunately, Tony didn’t have anything strong enough to break a pair of SHIELD’s handcuffs stored there. He made a mental note that he really ought to carry something onboard the Iron Man suit, in the event that he had a bad run in with them again.
“We should probably lie low for awhile, give SHIELD some time to lose our sent,” Tony explained to his companion.
With his free hand, he pulled out the vial of blood that he’d collected, and slotted it into a bank on the computer. From the corner of one eye, Tony watched as the Captain shifted by his side, eyeing the vial.
Tony shouldn’t have it. The super soldier’s genetics were top secret. Even Howard hadn’t been able to take any data from the project with him. Did the Captain know that?
On the chance that he did, Tony decided to engage in some misdirection.
“We should get you something to chase off the rest of the chill. What’s your poison?” Tony asked, strolling over to a machine. “Coffee, tea, more coffee?”
“Coffee’s fine.”
Tony punched a few buttons and in moments the machine produced a steaming cup of black, earthy coffee. The Captain took it reluctantly, looking up into the helmet, as though searching for a pair of eyes.
Tony made a decision then, one hand snaking up to the catch on his helmet. It released with a soft click, and he pulled that dark, mirror-like piece of armor from his head. “I guess introductions are in order. I’m Tony Stark. I believe you knew my father.”
“Howard?” The Captain’s brows furrowed and his gaze dropped to the arc reactor. “I knew I’d seen that tech before. How is he?”
“Gone for nearly five years, sadly.”
That seemed to genuinely pain the Captain. “I’m sorry. I was sad to see him leave SHIELD, he was a good man.”
“Thanks,” Tony replied with a sad smile. “So, uh, what should I call you?”
The Captain extended his free right hand and Tony clasped it. “You can call me Steve. Steve Rogers.”
#
Beside Tony, Steve squinted at a menu as though trying to decipher an arcane text.
The neon lights of the late night city cast colorful highlights on them from beyond the diner’s windows. It had a sort of charm, Tony decided, and it didn’t hurt that Steve made a delightful companion. This world was all so new to him.
“Doesn’t anyone make regular pancakes anymore?” Steve asked.
Tony shrugged. “Food’s changed a lot by necessity. Wheat collapsed early on, and the changes my dad was able to implement left it edible, but bitter. It just isn’t the same.”
The hideout hadn’t had anything in the way of dinner. Tony had been running on vapors the whole day, preparing for the patch, but Steve, who had been on ice for years, probably needed a decent meal even more than Tony.
So, with some improvising, they had sought out a twenty-four hour diner.
Tony had called up the cloaking field on the Iron Man suit before they left the safehouse. With a few adjustments to the disguise he had snuck into SHIELD with, he found he could extend the field far enough to encompass Steve if the other man stayed close. With the handcuffs, that wasn’t much of a problem.
“With invisible handcuffs connecting us at the hip, we may have to pretend it’s a date, though,” Tony had warned, half joking. His face shifted to that of a young red-headed woman, then to a blonde. “You have a type I should model my disguise on?”
Steve had seemed amused by his shifting faces. His reply was simply: male.
Tony had felt fortunate that the hologram veil kept the blush on his face from showing. He could certainly work with that direction.
So there they sat, side by side, Tony with the face of a young man with light hair and eyes, and Steve, dark haired and bearded.
“So…you just edit the genetics of plants to get them to grow no matter what?”
“People, plants, animals. It’s a lot like what my dad did on the Rebirth project—only he refused to ever use his technology on a single person again.”
“What about the CAPs?”
“Related, but not my tech to control. They’ve called me in to consult on them a few times, but they’re very secretive.”
Tony explained about his most recent foray into investigating the CAP failures and the problems it was posing to the city.
Steve frowned and was about to say something when they heard a scream. Seconds later, a car went rolling end-over-end past the window. Then Tony heard a roar—a familiar one.
He tugged Steve to his feet and they ran for the door, letting the cloaking illusion fall. By the time they were outside, Steve once again looked much like a CAP, albeit one in an old, red, white, and blue uniform, and Tony’s face had disappeared inside the sleek facade of the Iron Man armor.
Tony whirled as he heard a roar and the sound of heavy feet approaching at a run.
A massive green blur came running down the street, snarling at the source of the thrown car: an even larger, pale, ogre-like figure.
“What the hell is that?” Steve demanded.
“The Hulk and Abomination. Gene splicers. Abomination is trouble wherever he goes. He leveled a whole city block a few months ago. Forgive the familiarity,” Tony said. Without further preamble, he gathered Steve to his side. The thrusters in his boots powered up, and he heard Steve mutter something that might have been a curse as they soared upward, overhead the pale monster.
“Duck your head into my shoulder,” Tony shouted over the wind whistling by them.
“What are you—?“
Fortunately Steve did as he was told, even if he didn’t understand.
Tony rocketed downward, slamming his fist into the back of Abomination’s head. The blow sent the giant splicer stumbling forward a few steps. But Tony’s surprise advantage didn’t last for long. Abomination growled, then whirled and backhanded Tony, sending him and Steve flying in the other direction. Tony was able to use his rocket boots to twist in midair, and with both arms he grabbed Steve around the stomach so that Tony’s back—and thus the Iron Man armor—absorbed the crash landing that sent them skidding across the pavement.
“Ugh,” Tony muttered as he sat up. His head ached, despite the padding of the armor. “You okay Cap?”
“Fine,” Steve replied, rolling over. He had a nasty looking scrape on his cheek, but was otherwise unscathed.
They had landed in the street, not far from where a morbidly curious crowd had gathered to watch, and at only a few paces away, they could hear an old woman exclaim at Steve’s uniform.
“I’m so happy to see them bring the classic CAP look back,” she said.
Tony rolled his eyes.
In the meantime, the Hulk had managed to catch Abomination by the wrist with one hand, and the two splicers were pitted in a battle of strength. There was still no sign of SHIELD showing its face. Worse, Abomination looked like he was on the verge of overpowering the Hulk.
Tony charged up the repulsor in the palm of his free hand, routing as much power into it as possible. It was hard to aim for the Abomination with the Hulk in such close proximity, but after a few jittery moments, the targeting algorithm beeped and turned red on his HUD, indicating it had locked. Tony fired, just as Abomination smashed his forehead into the Hulk’s, and the green monster of a man slumped to the pavement, groaning.
Tony’s repulsor blast hit Abomination a few second after, and he heard a shriek.
The Abomination looked from Tony to the Hulk, snarling, then decided that fighting them both was unwise. He took off at a lope, uncannily fast for his lumbering size, smashing into several unfortunate cars along the way. Tony was keen to give chase, worried what the splicer might do next, but he was also aware that if he left now, SHIELD might show itself, and if they found the Hulk in his present state, things would go very badly for the green mountain of a man.
Tony rocketed himself and Steve over to the Hulk and pulled up the cloaking field, extending a small sphere of invisibility to keep the prying eyes of the crowd off of them. “Banner?” he hissed, laying a hand on a massive green shoulder and shaking. He was out cold.
“Help me,” he hissed to Steve.
Even with the strength of the Iron Man armor, Tony wouldn’t have been able to move the Hulk by himself. With Steve’s super strength, they were able to each put a shoulder beneath one of the Hulk’s arms and half carry, half drag him to a nearby alley.
Tony bit his lip, prayed that what he was about to do wouldn’t get them all killed, and then pulled a Stim syringe from a compartment on the suit. He shoved the needle into the Hulk’s neck and depressed it.
A few tense moments later, the Hulk let out a frustrated growl as his eyes opened. “Where’d he go!?”
“Dunno,” Tony said. “But SHIELD could show up at any moment. You should get out of here while you still can.”
The Hulk grumbled as he dragged himself to his feet. “Don’t know, or won’t say?”
“I’m sure you could look for a trail of destruction and follow that. But if you do, I’m warning you that SHIELD’s on high alert tonight.”
The Hulk scowled, but finally he snorted. In Tony’s few interactions with him, he had come to see this as a sign of reluctant resignation.
“Fine.”
The green giant’s form began to twist and distort as the man’s nanites began to work, rearranging every cell in seconds. They remolded the monster into a scrawny looking, mousy-haired man in glasses.
“Thanks,” Banner said, rubbing at one arm, a grimace on his face. Big changes could leave a person with a feeling much like growing pains. The kind of transformation that Banner had just undergone must have been excruciating. “I owe you one.”
Tony just shrugged. “Don’t worry about it.” Then he turned to Steve. “So…about that dinner…”
#
By the time Steve and Tony had finally gotten some food in them and returned to the safehouse, the computer was beeping, finished with its analysis of the blood sample. Tony sat down in front of it, exhausted, and skimmed the results with a furrowed brow.
“Huh...” Tony muttered, copying the results to an on-board drive in the Iron Man armor.
By comparison, Steve still looked fresh and bright, despite it being well past three in the morning. “Something wrong?”
Tony rubbed one hand against the scruff on his cheek. “There’s no difference between your blood sample and the CAP profile that I got. Whatever is causing them to fail, it’s not the genetics.”
“That bad?”
“Well it means that whatever the root cause is, it’s going to be harder to fix than just scrapping the old blood samples used to program their nanites. Until then, SHIELD will have to continue running on a depleted force. You saw what that looks like tonight. It didn’t help that tonight they’re probably prioritizing the hunt for us—but even on their best of days, splicers like Abomination have too much free leash.”
“That why you let the green one go?”
“I figure every bit helps.” Tony smiled weakly at Steve.
Maybe when he found a way to get the handcuffs off, he’d have another person out in the city, helping. He hoped so. Steve seemed like a good man, and though he’d only known him a few hours, all the stories he’d heard didn’t seem to do Steve justice. Tony found he quite liked the Captain.
He certainly wasn’t bad on the eyes either.
“Things should die down by tomorrow. I can get us back to the tower and get these off,” Tony said, indicating the handcuffs.
He’d also be able to get Arsenal’s input on the data he’d run. Maybe Arsenal would make something out of it that he’d missed.
“You can’t use your fancy cloaking technology to avoid SHIELD?”
Tony shook his head and rubbed at his eyes. “Much as I want to sleep in my own bed, no. They scan airspace with infrared tech. My cloak only works in the visible light spectrum.”
God, but Tony’s own bed sounded nice. His eyes slid to the double bed. It would be passable, but far from comfortable, especially with Steve cuffed to him.
“You look like you’re about to fall asleep where you’re sitting.”
“Mmm,” Tony agreed. “I usually don’t sleep with someone on the first date, but I think I may need to make an exception. If you don’t mind?”
Steve arched an eyebrow out him. But it was accompanied by a faint quirk to his lips.
He might have old-fashioned sensibilities about things like pancakes, he might be a man out of time, but he still had a sense of humor. How endearing. Tony really did like Steve.
They climbed into bed awkwardly. The bed was small enough that their arms touched. And despite how tired Tony was, he lay awake for some time, trying not to focus on how warm the other man’s skin felt against his, trying to ignore the squirming feeling in his stomach, and trying not to think of how handsome the legend had turned out to be.
His father really had made the perfect man.
And as enamored as Tony was of Steve, there was also a seed of jealousy that had been buried deep inside his heart years ago.
With his free hand he reached down, running his fingers along the metal of the braces.
I have seen what happens when you make a man extraordinary, Howard had said. It wasn’t worth it.
If SHIELD had treated Steve differently, how might things have been different for Tony? How might the world be different?
Tony rolled over as best as he was able with the cuff on his wrist.
Despite the uncomfortable sleeping arrangement, when Tony did manage to drift off, he was at least greeted with sweet dreams.
#
The next morning saw Tony bleary-eyed, but feeling better than he had the night before.
He and Steve found a bathroom arrangement, trading off with one in the shower, his shirt (or undershirt) bunched up around the chain of the cuffs, the other with his back turned, his arm twisted behind his back. Try as they might for privacy, Steve still saw the braces on Tony’s legs. Steve didn’t say anything—he might not even know what they were. But next to a pinnacle in human engineering, Tony still felt self-conscious.
He repeated his father’s mantra to himself, even though it felt hollow. Mother nature is cruel, but wise.
After they had dried and dressed, Tony cloaked them in a hologram again and they set out to find some breakfast and assess how closely SHIELD was still watching the skies.
They’d almost reached a cafe when all of the billboards and screens flickered and changed.
Tony frowned, and the expression deepened into a scowl as his own face and the SI logo materialized.
“Citizens, last night’s patch was one crucial step in our fight for survival. On behalf of SI and your government, I thank you for your cooperation. But an ever-changing world means that in order to save lives, we must anticipate the next need before catastrophe hits. As such, we will be doing a second, emergency patch tonight. I am deeply sorry for the inconvenience, but I assure that if it weren’t of the utmost importance, SI would delay it. Thank you for understanding. Instructions will follow.”
Tony blinked, flabbergasted by what he had just seen.
“Did you pre-tape that?” Steve asked.
“No. It must be Arsenal.”
“Arsenal?”
“The AI that coordinates and conducts the patching. If he’s using a hologram likeness of me to push the announcement, he must have found something serious. I need to get back and talk to him.”
Tony pressed his lips together. He didn’t see SHIELD cars patrolling the skies. And if Arsenal was planning a patch, they might have pulled back to coordinate security for yet another night where the city would be critically vulnerable.
Tony wrapped an arm under Steve’s shoulder and pulled him close. “I think it’s worth the risk of getting back to the tower quickly. Do you like Eggs Benedict? I make an amazing hollandaise.”
“That depends,” Steve said with a wry smile as they took off. “Is it still made with eggs?”
#
Tony set them down on the upper deck of SI tower and cast a glance over his shoulder, double checking that they hadn’t been followed. Luck it seemed, was on their side. He could see Arsenal inside, still in his replicant body, bent over a computer and working on something.
Lucky—or so Tony thought, until he walked forward and hit an energy barrier.
He swore, tingling all over from the shock of it. Strange and stranger. His nanites should have been recognized by the security system. They should have authenticated him as Tony Stark.
“Arsenal! It’s me! Lower the security shielding!”
The barrier hummed, and at first Tony thought it was dissipating. But then it arced, hitting him in the chest. He staggered backward a step.
“Tony?” Steve asked as several sentry drones came into view, flanked by two hovering orbs.
“Arsenal!” Tony shouted, he tore off his helmet. “Let us in!”
The bots opened fire on them, and Tony had to grab tight of Steve and rocket backwards. They hovered in the air, outside of SI tower’s boundary. That should have been the threshold for the defense routines. But then again, they never should have opened fire if they’d processed Tony’s face. A sentry bot followed, and it fired another round at them.
Something was very wrong. Tony fired the thrusters in his boots, his helmet reassembling around his head, and flew them away from the tower. They landed behind an old warehouse, several blocks away and Tony reengaged the cloaking system on the Iron Man armor.
“What was that?” Steve asked, and when Tony didn’t respond right away, he wrapped his hand around Tony’s, urging Tony to look at him. “What went wrong?”
“I’m not sure,” Tony said as they walked. It was hard to admit. He wasn’t used to being caught unawares, and he was nervous. He stopped in front of a vending machine that sold sunglasses.
Vending machines had two options for payment: cash and nanite scan. Tony pressed his hand to the interface that would read his nanites and place a charge, much the way old phone wallets had worked.
His stomach dropped as an error flashed across the readout. Two numbers, 76 and 22.
22 was common, though Tony had never encountered it before. Insufficient funds. He thumbed through his memory trying to recall the other. It was something to do with unregistered nanites. No. Not unregistered, he realized. Unauthorized.
Nanites were ubiquitous. The tech for replicants wasn’t exactly arcane either, though it was expensive. Combine the two on a large scale and you got SHIELD’s CAP program. But on the other side, making one or two, you had the LMD business, which the rich and famous sometimes used. The paparazzi couldn’t tell the difference, but the nanites could. Each set had their own, unique ID, and a set that was programmed to sculpt a replicant into the twin of flesh and blood person needed special authorization.
76 was the code for unauthorized facial replication.
“Dammit,” Tony said, resting his back against the side of the vending machine, his hands fisted in his hair. “Not good. This is not good. This has to be Arsenal’s doing, but I don’t understand why he’d do something like this.”
The AI could be prickly and surly, sure, but he’d always been a brother to Tony. Instead of being driven out of the tower, it felt just as though Tony had been stabbed in the heart.
Why had Arsenal done this? Why specifically this? If he’d borne Tony some sort of grudge, he could have hijacked the nanites in Tony’s body to make him into anything—he could have made Tony more grotesque than even splicers like Abomination.
Instead he had made Tony into something akin to Arsenal himself.
Something that Arsenal had said the night before stuck out in Tony’s mind, aching like a splinter. He’d thought it was just brotherly jest at the time, but in this new light it seemed sinister. “I still can’t understand why they insisted on making you the head of SI and not me.”
Worse was Tony’s worry about the timing of a new patch. Maybe he didn’t just want to replace Tony. Maybe it wasn’t just Tony with whom he bore a grudge.
“I could make you all into supermen or servile drones,” Arsenal had boasted.
Tony’s stomach dropped. “We have to get into that tower and shut him down.”
#
“I can’t believe we’re getting away with this,” Steve murmured under his breath as they strolled into SHIELD headquarters. He had one hand on one of Tony’s shoulders, shoving him forward. The hologram tech had transformed his Captain America uniform into one of the drab, black outfits of the CAPs.
“Confidentially?” Tony whispered back. “Neither can I.”
Steve’s fingers stiffened, digging into the exposed under layer near Tony’s neck. “That’s not very reassuring.”
A harried looking officer at the front desk waved the down to processing, seemingly unaware of who Tony was.
“Less infamous than you thought?” Steve teased as Tony prickled at his anonymity.
“I kidnapped a living legend last night!” Tony protested. “Surely that deserves some recognition.”
“Maybe they’re keeping it hush-hush.”
“Maybe,” Tony agreed, pulling up last night’s borrowed floor plan of SHIELD headquarters. “Take a right here,” he whispered, and Steve dutifully deviated them down a side hallway and through several sets of doors. They came to a supply room, full of cabinets and drawers.
Steve found the drawer with the handcuff keys first, though he had to use his strength to break it open. Tony winced at the sound of wood cracking, but was delighted when Steve was able to remove the cuff from him. Steve was undoing the link around his own wrist when the door opened, and two officers entered. Tony had just enough time to engage the armor’s invisibility around himself.
"Something wrong agent?” One of the the men asked as Steve stood there, open handcuffs in his hand.
Steve blinked, caught off guard. “No, nothing wrong…”
“You seem a little confused.”
“Feeling a little off?” the other officer added.
“I just came to retrieve a key,” Steve said. “I lost mine in a scuffle.”
“Did you?” the first said, eyeing the broken drawer behind Steve. He pulled a device from his pocket and shone it into Steve’s eye. It blinked red. “I think you ought to come with us.”
Steve hesitated. He might have been able to take them both out if he had struck first, but as it was, the officers weren’t in the mood to brook resistance. The second one pulled a stun gun and jabbed it into Steve’s side. He was rightly shocked when Steve didn’t go down on the first strike, but the second, quick jab, did the trick.
And all Tony could do was follow as they dragged Steve along through the corridors, off to wherever they kept their malfunctioning CAP units.
#
The place in question was a basement level, and SHIELD had a veritable army of CAPs stored there.
Tony was shocked. If they had this many, the failure rate they had reported was conservative. It looked more like every other CAP unit had been put down here. In particular, there was a huge pile of them stacked beneath a cellar door. Perhaps in the past it had been used to deploy reserve CAPs quickly. But from the dust on the handles, it looked as though it hadn’t been used in months.
He stooped down and let his camouflage fall after the two officers left, checking for Steve’s pulse.
Steve groaned, his eyes fluttering open.
“Lucky you’re a super soldier,” Tony muttered. “That probably would have killed a normal man.”
“You mean you haven’t reprogrammed humanity to survive lightning strikes yet?” Steve groaned.
Tony grinned. “Believe it or not, there are limitations on what I can do.”
“What you can do?” A cold robotic voice said, and Tony realized it was coming from one of the CAPs. One of its eyes was missing and a long gash of metal was visible under the human facade. Its remaining eye stared straight ahead like a mannequin, but the lips were moving, even as nanites swarmed over the side of its face, repairing the damage that had been done to it. “You’re just a name. You’re worth nothing more.”
A chill ran down Tony’s spine. “Arsenal?”
“Hello, Tony.”
“The upgrades look like they went well. You’ve got some nifty new capabilities.”
“This?” Arsenal asked as the nanites spun their magic. “This is nothing new. I’ve been worming my way into the CAP program for months now.”
Tony saw more movement around him, and now he felt dread, realizing that all of the decommissioned CAPs were being reconfigured. So the CAPs hadn’t just spontaneously begun to fail. That was why there was no difference between the markers in the CAP nanites and Steve’s blood. Arsenal had commandeered his own private army, built free of charge, from the institution that was supposed to protect the city. He could rewrite humanity into docile playthings and use the CAPs to subdue any splicers who resisted.
Tony felt sick seeing the sort of power that SI commanded through its technology. If things had gone slightly different—if Tony had wanted to—could he have asked Arsenal to seize the city for him? What about the world?
His father had always been so mindful of his impact on the world, had refused to even bend his rules to make an exception for his own son.
And what had Tony done? He’d been careless with the power SI had accrued.
“So was it you behind the failure on Cap’s cryotank too? Trying to cover your tracks?” Tony asked.
“Clever deduction,” Arsenal replied. “Though it is unfortunately too little, too late.”
“Arsenal. Please don’t do this. If there is any part of you that still considers me a brother—”
“A brother?” Arsenal’s voice was bitter. “If I had truly been your brother, I would have been entitled to a birthright. I was the eldest. Nevermind that SI’s tech depends on me. SI should have been mine. But, as you were always so fond of saying, the law is the law. So if a machine cannot inherit, I will take what is rightfully mine. But for the sake of our father, I’ll give you what you gave me: a special exemption so you watch as I enslave your kind.”
“We should go—“ Steve said, tugging at Tony’s arm. Many of the discarded CAPs were getting to their feet, their heads swiveling toward the two humans.
“Arsenal, please—” Tony begged. His eyes were opened to his complacency—no, his complicity in how Arsenal had been treated. But if only Arsenal had opened up to Tony, they could have put their heads together and come up with something more sane. “It isn’t too late. We could change things together. It doesn’t haven’t to be like this.”
“You’re wrong,” the CAP with Arsenal’s voice said. “It’s far too late to turn back. Goodbye, Tony.” It jerked forward, and its fist hit Tony in the chin, knocking him to the ground. His head spun, but he saw the CAP go flying as Steve stepped in.
Steve spun on his heel, picking up Tony. “Some rocket boots would be handy right about now,” he said, running for the door. “Ones that could get us to another safehouse preferably.”
“We should warn SHIELD about what’s in their basement,” Tony said, wrapping his arms around Steve and pulling him close. He aimed them at the door.
“You think they’d listen?” Steve asked.
They burst through the doors in a rain of broken boards and splinters.
“Probably not after that,” Tony conceded.
“Shame, we could use the help,” Steve said, shifting in his arms as Tony changed course. “So about that safehouse…we seem to be flying in the wrong direction.”
“Headed to a different place. You’re right. We need help. And I think I know just the guy.”
#
Tony, Steve, and the Hulk crouched in the shadows of a rooftop as dusk fell and the light of the city began to glow. The skies were swarming with black SHIELD patrol cars and the zeppelins were hovering high in the sky again. Their countdown said it was three hours till the Patch.
Steve and Tony had wasted precious time during the afternoon with Bruce, trying to hack Tony’s nanites so that he’d have a splicer’s immunity from Arsenal’s ‘upgrade.’ But Bruce had been frustrated at every turn. Whatever it was that Arsenal had done with Tony’s nanites the previous night, he’d shut down all the avenues Bruce knew for blocking SI access.
“Let’s review one more time,” Tony said.
The Hulk grinned. “I make a distraction. A big one.”
“You and I get into the tower,” Steve added. “And we get to Arsenal’s power switch.”
“Yeah.” Tony took a deep breath. “Everyone ready to go?”
Steve nodded.
“Thought you’d never ask,” Hulk replied. He took a running leap off the roof and launched himself at one of the SHIELD cars. The car careened wildly, smashing into another that had been flying below. They began to billow smoke as he leapfrogged toward SI tower.
“Wow.” Steve let out a low whistle. “Glad he’s on our side.”
“You and me both.”
#
“Ugh, this hurts me deep down,” Tony said as they descended through a Hulk-made smoking hole in the side of the tower.
“I can imagine,” Steve said, disengaging from what Tony was coming to affectionately think of as the hug-and-fly. He crouched, peering around the corner, before waving Tony forward.
They weren’t far from the control room. Tony hoped that meant that luck was on their side.
The upper floors of SI—Tony’s living space and workshops—were usually deserted, at least compared to the lower floors that the company used. Today they were dark too. Without Tony around, Arsenal apparently hadn’t seen fit to turn the lights on. Well, so much the better for them. Steve didn’t seem to have trouble in the low light, and Tony had the Iron Man HUD.
“It’ll be a big box on the wall,” Tony said. “Locked, but it’s got a key code.” He rattled off the eight digit code to Steve, and Steve got a funny look in his eye.
Tony would have asked about it, but at that moment, the lights overhead the computer terminal flickered to life, illuminating Arsenal’s replicant body, replete in a white suit. The puppet-like shell stood in front of the mainframe’s open paneling, still as a statue. There was no life in the eyes. Arsenal was done with using it for updates today, it seemed.
“Tony,” Arsenal’s disembodied voice said, “I’m not surprised. But I really wish you hadn’t come.”
Overhead the replicant, a coil of wires and metal descended from the ceiling, a Gigeresque cross between a skeletal ribcage and wasp.
“Well…I can see why you haven’t finished upgrading yourself,” Tony said. “That definitely wasn’t in plans.”
“It repulses you, doesn’t it? You’d rather I made myself look like you.”
Tony squirmed. “I could get used to it.”
“I’m afraid you won’t have the chance.”
“We’ll see—“ Tony said, and fired a repulsor at the alien form hanging from the ceiling.
A shimmering field with a weave of blue light absorbed the energy blast, then returned it at Tony. He and Steve had to dive out of the way. He went left, Steve went right.
“There!” Tony shouted, pointed, even as he felt the suit seize up around him—felt his fingers go numb and his vocal chords constrict.
Patch paralysis. Arsenal had started it early.
But Steve wasn’t hampered like Tony. He made it to the box and was able to punch in the code, even as security drones flooded the room. Too late—the lever was Steve’s. He threw the power override as four of them grabbed him and wrestled him to the ground, each drone securing a hand or foot.
But nothing happened.
“Did you think I was selfless enough to leave a backdoor open for you?” Arsenal asked, amused at how much Tony had underestimated him.
The sleek black Iron Man gauntlets loosened around Tony’s hands, then fell to the floor, effectively disarming him.
He heard Arsenal sigh. “Too easy, Tony. Did you really think you stood any chance of stopping me? If I wanted, I could freeze your lungs in place and watch as you turned blue. I could winnow all of humanity like that, in only a matter of minutes.”
Tony’s jaw clenched. “You wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t I?”
Tony felt his chest still, and for a moment, sheer panic overwhelmed him.
“It seems you know me less well than you think you do, brother,” Arsenal laughed.
And then Tony realized that Arsenal, for all of his programming and all of his careful orchestration, also had a blind spot where Tony was concerned—something that he had forgotten.
Tony’s exoskeleton wasn’t affected by the patching paralysis.
He’d only have a few seconds of surprise on Arsenal when he moved. After that the drones would surely overtake him, like they had Steve. He needed to make this slim opportunity count. He’d didn’t want for it to end this way, but he didn’t see any other choice.
He looked at the empty-eyed puppet, standing in front of Arsenal’s open paneling, and with a heavy heart made his decision.
He ran at the replicant full tilt, smashing into it and using every bit of power the exoskeleton had to propel them into the computer. He heard wires snapping, felt shrapnel of plastic and silca digging into his exposed hands, and felt something hot—then a searing pain—as a live electrical connection made contact with his skin.
The shock must have caused him to black out because when Tony woke again, Steve was by his side, calling to him.
Relief flooded Steve’s face as Tony groaned and tried to turn over. It was a bad idea. Everything hurt. But at least destroying the computer had lifted Arsenal’s paralytic hold.
Tony let Steve pull him close, reveling in the way Steve cradled Tony head against his chest.
“You scared me there, Tony,” he said.
Tony groaned again. “Yeah. Guess you were right. I really should have found a way to make humans immune to electricity.”
#
Tony watched the news feeds, a glum sense of doom hanging over him. None of them were good. Lots of people had questions about the back to back patches and the early bought of patch paralysis. He had several missed phone calls from Washington numbers. They’d probably demand Tony testify about what had happened.
What was he going to tell them? That they’d lost a magic bullet—or at very least that the nanite system had been crippled?
He would have so much work to do to build the system back up. He was going to have to analyze every angle of the program, build in fail safes and contingencies. His head hurt just thinking about it all.
“Do you make a habit of not sleeping?” A concerned voice asked from the door behind him. Steve.
“Only when I’ve made a mess of the world. People are going to die because I was too short-sighted to see what was right in front of my face.” Tony’s hands balled into fists. “People are going to die...but even knowing that, what hurts the most is that it was him. He was my brother.”
Steve lowered himself into a chair beside Tony. He looked thoughtful for a moment, then turned off the feeds. “I know how that feels. When I joined the Rebirth program, SHIELD was tiny. Very close knit. When your father left, a lot of people told him he was turning his back on family. I guess he saw something that I didn’t, though. Over the years it grew, but it still felt small to me. When you told me how long I’d been on ice…well, it hurt to know that I still thought of them as family, but they didn’t see me the same way.”
“You could have turned your back on everybody after that—after what they did to you,” Tony said. “But instead you helped me. Why?”
Steve shrugged. “It was for the greater good. You can’t let your feelings rule you when you shoulder responsibility. As intelligent as Arsenal was, as justified as his grievance might have been, he failed that test of power.”
Tony slouched over the desk, head in his hands. “I feel like I might fail it too.”
He heard Steve’s chair creak, then felt Steve’s hand on his shoulder. “Well, then you know you need to do something. And one approach is surrounding yourself with a team that will ground you. The way I see it, you’ve already got a head start there.”
Tony let out a soft laugh and looked up at Steve. “You and the Hulk—”
“Are nothing to sniff at.”
Tony sobered up a little. “Will you really stay? It would be invaluable to have your input while I rebuild the nanite program.”
There was a twinkle of mischief in Steve’s eyes. “Sure. Though that wasn’t the reason I thought you might ask me to stay.”
Tony reddened. “What do you mean?”
“You talk in your sleep. And let’s just say, I hope your bed here is bigger than the one in that safehouse.”
Oh! Damn Steve and that knowing smile. Tony swallowed down his nerves and grinned back at Steve. “It is. And maybe after a proper date I’ll show it to you.”