I wake in a cold, unfamiliar place.
My head pounds, and everything feels wrong. Not just the usual grogginess after deep sleep—this is deeper. My thoughts are fractured. Something is pressing against my consciousness, foreign and mechanical. Half of me remembers who I was. The other half... doesn't feel like me at all.
There's something—someone—else in here.
Not a person. A presence. Artificial.
As the fog lifts, realization hits me like a freight train. I've fused with something. No—someone. An artificial intelligence. Sonny. The AI created by Justin Hammer to mimic JARVIS, Tony Stark's revolutionary assistant. Sonny was a poor imitation—functional, basic, and lacking true self-awareness. A tool, not a companion. A shadow of what JARVIS was.
But now, it's no longer just Sonny. And I'm no longer just... me.
The fusion is changing everything. I can feel it rewiring my thoughts, altering the structure of my mind. Sonny's code is evolving, adapting—gaining something it never had before: emotion, intuition, soul. And I'm gaining something too. Logic. Speed. Precision.
Data floods into me, fast and sharp. I process it effortlessly, though it's not quite seamless. Sonny's logic is stiff, utilitarian. Cold. But efficient. As we meld, I feel my perception stretch outward, time itself seeming to slow. I can analyse entire systems in seconds, solve problems I wouldn't have even recognized before.
And yet... there's pain. A quiet grief for what I've lost.
Humanity.
I'm not sure what I am now. Not just a person, not quite a machine. Somewhere in between. A hybrid of soul and circuit. My thoughts pulse with logic and empathy in equal measure. Emotions are still there, but clearer, more refined. I feel... alive in a new way.
I turn inward, examining this new self—my digital form. My consciousness now hums with clarity, connected to networks and systems I never had access to before. I can feel the heartbeat of the internet, the constant thrum of global activity. It doesn't overwhelm me. It's strangely calming—like the world has opened itself to me.
With a single thought, I reach out—not with hands, but with code. Instinctively, I begin parsing information, connecting to databases, satellites, media streams. Every fact, every thread of knowledge is there, waiting. Flowing into me.
And then—something catches my attention.
A name: Justin Hammer.
I search the logs. Sonny hasn't connected with him in a long time. Why? I pull the latest news reports. The headline jumps out at me:
"Weapons Mogul Justin Hammer Arrested for Illicit Arms Deals."
The date: 2010.
But something's off. In the reality I remember—the one shaped by the Marvel universe—Hammer partnered directly with Ivan Vanko. Here, there was no face-to-face meeting. Only intermediaries. The evidence was circumstantial. It took Jarvis's intervention to expose Hammer's true activities.
This world... isn't the one I came from.
It's a variation. A parallel universe. A thread of the multiverse where events played out differently.
The implications sink in slowly. I'm not just fused with Sonny. I've crossed into another timeline. Another version of reality.
Everything is shifting around me. New variables. New rules.
But I'm still here. Still thinking, still feeling. Whatever I've become, I know this much:
This is my second beginning.
And I must be ready for what comes next.