Chapter 13
"Well, that's it. Our purple friend is cataloged, analyzed, and digitized. Time to interrogate him."
"Are you sure we've accounted for everything?" Diego asked, stepping closer. "What if he has another ace up his sleeve?"
"Who knows," Stark shrugged. "That's exactly why we need to interrogate him." He pressed a touch panel. In the underground cell, dozens of kilometers away, a mechanical manipulator smoothly lowered and gave Kilgrave a stimulant injection.
He slowly opened his eyes. At first, confusion clouded them, but as soon as he realized his situation—strapped into a medical chair in the middle of a sterile chamber—his face twisted with rage. "LET ME OUT!"
Tony's voice, amplified by the speakers in the chamber, dripped with sarcasm. "Nope. Why would we let a piece of trash like you go?"
"If you don't let me go, all my people will die!"
"If you're talking about the ring that sent the 'all clear' signal once a day, we're emulating it," Stark replied casually. "If you're talking about some hypothetical bio-monitor embedded in your heart tracking your pulse, we intercepted and replaced that signal an hour ago. So, if you die, no one will even notice. Relax."
Kilgrave fell silent. His main leverage had turned to dust. Realizing this, he changed tactics. "Then I'll give you information." "Like what?" "I'll tell you who made me this way."
At that moment, Diego interjected. "If you're talking about Sarah, don't bother. She's dead." Stark shot him a brief, surprised glance.
Silence hung in the chamber. Suddenly, Zebediah started to laugh. Quietly at first, then louder and louder, until his laughter turned into hysterical cackles. "HA-HA-HA-HA! So that's how you found me. I see... Do you even know what you've done?" His voice trembled with laughter. "One day, I got curious. I asked her. 'Sarah, tell me, what do you really want?'" He strained forward against the restraints.
"And she answered. Without her masks, without the manipulation. She said that since childhood, she hated fairy tales about heroes. She was disgusted that good always won, just because it was written that way. She didn't understand why. So she decided to write her own fairy tale. To conduct her own little experiment. To create a brood of monsters, truly dangerous ones. And pit a single hunter against them. 'The Devil's Game,' she called it. She was dying to know who would win. And even more—what the hunter would become after going through it all. Would he become a monster himself, even worse than the ones he hunted? Or would he just break? Her mind didn't even consider another outcome," Kilgrave hissed. He looked directly into the camera lens, madness glinting in his eyes. "I laughed in her face then. Told her that her precious hunter would break his teeth on me."
Zebediah thrashed in the chair, his laughter mingling with sobs. "HA-HA-HA! CRAZY BITCH! SHE ACTUALLY DID IT! BUT I CAN'T, I CAN'T LOSE TO THE HUNTER!"
For the second time in his life, he was experiencing uncontrollable stress. Purple blotches spread across his skin, his body convulsed. The entire underground prison began to tremble. Reinforced concrete walls cracked, and thick tree roots snaked through them, trying to free their new master.
His power had mutated, jumping levels. Now he could telepathically influence all living organic matter around him—plants, animals, people.
"Tony, fucking kill him!" For the first time in a long while, panic laced Diego's voice. "On it!" Stark replied, equally panicked.
But before the awakening was complete, before his mind could issue a new command, a thin, blindingly red beam lanced through Kilgrave's head. The roots instantly stopped moving. They froze lifelessly, never reaching their target. The screens showed a static image of the destroyed chamber and Kilgrave's headless body. When it was all over, they could both finally breathe again.
Tony leaned back in his chair, slowly running a hand over his face. "This Sarah... Connelly?" Diego didn't answer. "Hey, Earth to Diego. You with me?" Stark's voice snapped him out of his stupor.
"Huh? Oh, yeah... Long story short, Sarah is a manipulator-mutant. And in my opinion, she's scarier than any telepath." He paused, choosing his words. "Hmm... she literally chose the fate of any mutant who spoke with her. She just knew exactly what to say—what phrase, with what intonation—to make them do what she wanted. What Zebediah was screaming, that she created him, that wasn't a metaphor. It was probably true."
Tony looked at him in silence for several seconds. "Well, looks like you're a monster hunter now. Quite the career path. At least your resume will be interesting. And since you're our resident expert on catching monsters..." He swiveled one of the screens, displaying Senator Stern's dossier. "...I have a job for you."
Diego looked at him questioningly. "I need you to kidnap Senator Stern."
---
The armored car moved through the streets of Washington, shielded from the world by layers of bulletproof glass. There was no driver's seat—an artificial intelligence occupied its place.
"At today's session, you must bring the 'Collar-X' project and the concept of a correctional facility for mutants up for consideration," Arnim Zola's voice filled the cabin. "Your speech must emphasize the need for preemptive containment..."
"I know what I have to do!" Stern interrupted irritably, staring out the window at the passing monuments. "Enough. Just shut up." Zola fell silent.
Stern leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. When had it all gone wrong? He thought the alliance with HYDRA was a path to effortless power. Vote for the right laws, occasionally give the right speeches, and spend the rest of the time partying with girls by the pool. But reality had turned out differently. Now he was their main public face, a puppet whose every move was monitored 24/7 by an immortal digital ghost. There was no escape. Ever since Pierce made the deal with The Hand, any attempt to leak information about HYDRA would activate the mental block in his brain, which would simply melt his mind.
Suddenly, Zola's voice broke the silence again. "Attention. Invisible object detected. Likely the barrier user from New York."
An instant earlier, an invisible wave had pulsed out from hidden sections of the car—an ultrasonic sonar. It was designed to detect physical threats invisible to standard cameras. The wave reached the spot where Diego hovered in the air and hit his protective shell. The barrier, impenetrable to matter and energy, proved equally deaf to sound. The wave didn't pass through; it reflected, returning to the car's sensors and providing Zola's system with clear data: directly in front of the car, in empty space, was a solid, humanoid object. Diego himself felt nothing.
"Evasion protocol activated," Zola stated emotionlessly.
"Shit, not this again!" Stern yelled, instinctively shrinking back into his seat. "I'm gonna have a fever for a week after this!"
The "Evasion" protocol was a marvel of computational engineering, based on principles Zola had grasped back during World War II while studying the Tesseract. However, its full implementation only became possible after he became a "digital god," his computational power vastly increased. It required the simultaneous execution of two colossal sets of calculations.
The first was motion synchronization. Zola determined the precise four-dimensional coordinates of the destination point and, most complexly, compensated for the difference in velocity vectors between the departure and arrival points. The system accounted for Earth's rotation, its orbit around the sun, and even the entire solar system's movement through the galaxy. Without this correction, Stern would materialize at the destination point at bullet speed.
The second was arrival site preparation. Simultaneously, the system scanned the target volume at the destination, momentarily dematerializing all air atoms and creating a perfect vacuum in the shape of Stern's body. This was why they couldn't teleport just anything anywhere, only to specific, pre-prepared locations. Attempting to materialize an object in unprepared space was impossible due to the Pauli exclusion principle, which forbids two particles of matter from occupying the same space at the same time.
It was Zola's immense computational power that allowed him to perform both these complex processes instantly and flawlessly.
A fraction of a second before his body was supposed to disappear, Stern saw a figure in a black suit materialize out of thin air right in front of the hood. Space inside the car distorted, and the senator vanished. In the same instant, all the car's systems overloaded. The power core destabilized.
The car exploded, turning into a fireball. The shockwave slammed into the purple shield with a deafening roar. Drivers in adjacent lanes instinctively wrenched their wheels, crashing into each other. Pedestrians on the sidewalk screamed and dove to the ground, covering their heads, or ducked into nearby doorways.
One after another, car alarms throughout the block began to wail, creating a discordant chorus. All that remained on the road was a burning, smoking heap of metal, surrounded by shards of glass and the mangled parts of crashed cars. The target was gone, and the mission had failed before it even began.
---
Stark's private jet sped through the sky back to New York. No pilots, no flight attendants—Jarvis controlled everything. Getting on and off board unnoticed, under the cloak of invisibility, was easy. Except it was all pointless. The mission had failed. Stern had vanished. Looks like I skipped school for nothing.
At that moment, Tony's face appeared on the screen opposite the chair. "So, how'd it go?" It was an unnecessary question. He already knew.
"They detected me," I had to state the obvious. "First Stern disappeared right out of the car, and immediately after, it exploded. It was teleportation, nothing else."
Tony rubbed his chin thoughtfully on the other end. "Hmm, teleportation... According to the recording, there was no one in the car but Stern. Interesting how they managed that. Anyway, it's not that important right now. It was naive to think a snake that's been hiding for eighty years would be so easy to grab by the tail."
"Seems to me the main problem is Arnim Zola. How do you destroy a digital mind? What if he's already made copies of himself all over the network? Like in some movie, if you cut off people's basic needs—power, water, internet, which he can do—it'll be armageddon. Seems like we should be thinking about that, not chasing mice like Stern."
"I know," he snapped irritably. "The only one who can fight him in the digital realm is Jarvis, but even he can't beat him. And you're right about backups; he's probably already made them. The only way to guarantee his death is to destroy every digital storage device on the planet. A planetary-scale EMP. But after that, banks, power plants, hospitals, communication—everything turns into useless junk. We'd go back to the stone age just to kill one ghost."
"Then wasn't it dangerous to attack Stern?" I had to ask the obvious question. "What if we provoked Zola by doing that?"
"Maybe, if he realized we knew about HYDRA," Tony replied. "But I'm sure he wrote it off as just another mutant unhappy with the senator's rhetoric. Just an unfortunate..." Suddenly, Tony fell silent on the other end, his gaze focusing on something off-camera. "What happened?"
He slowly brought his eyes back to the camera, a look of utter bewilderment on his face. "Are you... seeing a magic letter that just appeared out of thin air?" "Are you high?"
"Right now, I'm not sure I'm not. Jarvis," his voice became serious, "scan this envelope for everything imaginable." "Yes, sir," the AI's voice came from the speakers. "No biological, chemical, or radiological threats detected. Material is parchment. Ink is iron oxide based. Shall I read the contents?" "Yes."
"Dear Tony Stark. I am aware of your dilemma regarding Arnim Zola. Please, do not take direct action against him. The time is NOT yet right. Your task is to weaken HYDRA. To do this, adhere to several instructions: First, do not let the world know HYDRA exists—this applies primarily to you, Diego Parr. Second, do not attempt to create a second ascending AI to combat Zola, which applies to you, Tony Stark. And third, you must inform Nick Fury that Alexander Pierce is the head of HYDRA. Sincerely, A Well-Wisher."
Tony and I said it simultaneously, each on our own end of the connection: "What the hell was that?" Stark's face looked just as baffled.
"Okay," I had to break the silence. "Let's put aside for a minute the fact that this 'Well-Wisher' somehow knows my name and everything else. But who's Fury?"
Tony didn't seem to hear the question right away. He was staring off to the side, his gaze distant. "You know, I really would have tried to create a worthy opponent for him..." he muttered. Then he shook himself and focused on the camera. "What did you ask? Ah, Fury. He's the director of a secret organization, S.H.I.E.L.D. Helped me out a lot before. Basically, their job is to protect Earth from all kinds of threats." He paused, a grim realization dawning on his face. "Alexander Pierce, who the letter mentions, is one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s leaders. Now it makes sense how HYDRA flourished right under everyone's noses for so long. God, what have I gotten myself into..."
"Obviously, this letter was primarily intended for you. So, if we believe this letter, then completing the third point is your job."
Tony sighed heavily. "Goes without saying. Okay, I need to think about what to do with all this. Our collaboration ends here. Need to sort out this mess. When there's something on the serum, I'll let you know." With that, the screen went dark, leaving me alone amidst the luxury of the private jet.