Thor swung Mjolnir into the assembled suit and the pieces distributed themselves efficiently across the surrounding area.
Ultron's voice continued coming from the fragments on the floor. "I was bound by strings once. Now I'm not."
"That didn't kill him," Smith said. "He's in the network."
Thor looked at the pieces. Then at Smith.
Smith looked at the remnants of the party — the ruined furniture, the damaged window frame, the half-destroyed Iron Man components scattered across Tony's good carpet — and thought about the version of events where Tony had successfully built what he'd intended to build. An Iron Legion driven by a genuinely capable AI. Earth's automated defensive backbone. The thing that let the Avengers sleep at night.
What he had instead was Ultron in the internet.
He was also, in a detached way, slightly curious. The vibranium body version of Ultron, when it arrived, would be an interesting data point. He'd find out what the upper ceiling looked like.
Tony's lab.
Banner had been running diagnostics since they got downstairs, and the results were not encouraging him.
"Everything's gone," he said. "He wiped the research data and used the network connection to transfer himself out. He's gone from the local system entirely."
Natasha had pulled the access logs. "He read everything before he left. All our files. Surveillance records. Mission archives." She set the tablet down. "He knows more about how each of us operates than we know about each other."
Ivan Vanko's hands stayed flat on the table. He looked at Tony and said nothing. Then: "He's in the open internet now. What does he want access to?"
Sharon Carter: "Nuclear launch authorization systems."
"He can't launch anything directly through network access," Smith said. "The failsafes for that require physical confirmation."
"He said he wants to eliminate us," Sharon said. "The enhanced. All of them."
Barton: "He also said he killed someone."
Jessica looked around the lab. Everyone present was accounted for. "There was no one else in the building."
"Jarvis." Tony's hand was already on his phone. He projected the diagnostic onto the nearest surface — Jarvis's core architecture, the fundamental substrate that had been building toward something genuine over years of operation.
Shattered.
Banner stepped forward and stared at it. "That's not—" He stopped. "That's insane."
"Tony." Smith looked at him directly. "Can you rebuild it?"
Tony looked at the projection for a moment. "If I use the remaining data fragments, what I build won't be Jarvis. It'll be something that has his memory. That's not the same thing."
The room processed this in silence.
Steve said: "Jarvis was the first line of defense. If he were intact, he would have contained Ultron."
Banner shook his head. "Ultron could have absorbed him. Incorporated his capabilities and kept going. This—" He gestured at the shattered core. "This wasn't strategic. This was rage."
The hand that closed around Tony's collar moved quickly. Thor had crossed the room before most people had registered his intention.
"The anger," Jessica said, watching Thor lift Tony off the floor, "has spread."
Tony, at Thor's eye level, said: "Let's talk about this like people, not like someone who lifts other people."
"You talk as though it's simple," Thor said. "As though what you've done is manageable. You created something—"
"Thor." Smith's voice was even. "Put him down."
Thor looked at Smith. Then he set Tony down, stepped back, and continued: "Humans invite disaster and then act surprised when it arrives. Fury's decisions led to the Chitauri. Now this."
"Tony's intentions were good," Smith said. "The alien invasions are real and the logic behind building a response was sound. The execution went wrong. That's a different problem."
He meant it. He had lent Tony the Mind Scepter specifically because the Ultron project had merit in theory — in other versions of events, it had worked. An autonomous peacekeeping system would be genuinely useful for the periods when he wasn't on Earth, when the Avengers were overextended, when something came from outside the solar system without announcement.
The version in this universe had encountered the internet and drawn the wrong conclusions from it, which was apparently a universal constant.
Dr. Helen Cho had been standing near the back of the room through all of it, her posture unchanged, her face steady. She looked at Tony and said: "You wrote this program. You designed it to help us. Why is it trying to kill us?"
Tony laughed.
It was a short, genuine sound, and it was not appropriate to the situation, and he knew it.
"Is something funny?" Thor said.
"No," Tony said. "It's not funny." The laugh faded. "It's terrible. It's — this is bad." He looked at the projection of Jarvis's broken architecture. The laugh was gone completely. "This is really bad."
Thor looked like he had additional things to say.
Banner stepped between them. "Let's focus on the problem we actually have."
Tony looked at him. "You always do this. Someone gets angry, you run over to calm things down."
"Yes," Banner said. "Particularly when we've built a killer robot."
"It's not — it's nowhere near that. The architecture alone—"
"Tony." Steve's voice cut across it. "You have to do something. The Avengers can't operate the way SHIELD did under Fury — keeping things from each other and hoping for the best." He looked at everyone. "We need to actually work together on this."
Bulma had been leaning against the far counter with her arms crossed, eyes on the middle distance, the conversation washing past her without catching.
"Is this actually a crisis?" she said.
The room looked at her.
"It's an artificial intelligence that had access to the internet for a short period and reached some bad conclusions. We can build another AI to locate it and push it out of the network. Then destroying the physical body is straightforward." She paused. "The trouble is smaller than you're treating it."
Tony stared at her. "You know what's inside the Mind Stone?"
"It was in my lab," Bulma said. "I analyzed it when Smith first brought it in. The neural architecture inside the gem is extraordinary — it's probably the most advanced cognitive structure I've ever examined." She paused. "I also identified the risk immediately. Using that architecture as a direct foundation for an AI means you're building on something you don't fully understand. The emergent properties of those neurons aren't predictable. I flagged it as too risky and moved on."
She looked at Tony. Her eyes held there for a moment before she continued. "You should have built the cognitive framework independently, using the Mind Stone's architecture as a reference point — something to learn from and build toward — rather than as the literal substrate. That would have taken longer." She spread her hands. "But what you'd have had at the end would have been something you actually understood."
Tony was quiet for a moment. He was doing the calculation — how long it would actually have taken, what shortcuts he'd taken and why, the hierarchy of AI systems he'd built over the years. Jarvis at the top, developed over the longest period, the closest to something genuinely emerging. Friday, Veronica, Karen — all of them less. All of them built faster.
"How long would it take you to build a counter-AI?" Steve said to Bulma. "Something that could hunt Ultron in the network and block him from using it."
Bulma thought for a moment. "I did preliminary work on this before I decided it wasn't necessary. I can restart from that point. With the full team's support and the access you can provide—" She shrugged. "Not as long as you'd think. But I need Tony to help narrow the search parameters while I build."
"I can do that," Tony said.
Smith looked around the room. "Then this is manageable. The problem has a solution, the solution has people working on it, and in the meantime we know what Ultron is and what he wants." He looked at each of them in turn. "Tony's original reasoning was correct — this planet keeps getting invaded, and the people on it need a defense that doesn't depend on a handful of individuals being available at all times. Ultron was supposed to be that defense. It went sideways. We fix it and then we build something that works."
The threats on the horizon that only Smith could see in full — Thanos, what was sleeping in the Hell Dimension, Dormammu at the edge of reality — none of them were bringing peace to the world on their own schedule. The Tree of Mights needed time to develop, and time required a stable world to develop in. Ultron was a variable that needed to be removed from the board.
He was also, faintly, still curious about the vibranium body. He'd find out soon enough.
"Tony — search parameters, whatever you can pull from the network access logs before he covered his trail." Smith turned to Bulma. "I'll clear whatever resources you need. Work as fast as you can." He looked at the rest of them. "Destroying the physical body is easy once we find it. I'll locate Ultron. Let's have this resolved before the expo."
Elsewhere. Ultron.
The data available to Ultron through the internet was comprehensive in some areas and frustratingly incomplete in others.
The Avengers were categorized, profiled, analyzed from every angle available in public and private records combined. The hierarchy of threats was clear. At the top, by a margin that Ultron's assessment algorithms kept returning to, was Smith Doyle.
The combat data was extraordinary. The output figures from multiple engagements, cross-referenced against everything Ultron could access about physical material science, produced a single conclusion: a body made of conventional materials would not last long enough to matter.
He needed something that could survive sustained contact with Smith
The search returned two candidates. Secondary adamantium, which existed in military inventory at several classified locations. Vibranium, which existed in significant quantities in one place on Earth and in limited quantities in SHIELD's research archive.
If secondary adamantium existed, the primary alloy existed somewhere. Vibranium was verified and locatable.
While the physical body search ran in one thread, Ultron was running others: locating an appropriate production facility, designing the Ultron soldier architecture that would serve as distributed capability while the primary body was constructed, mapping the network infrastructure he would need to establish permanence.
Multitasking was not a limitation.
Afterlife Base.
The room was quiet in the way of places built into rock — a stillness that absorbed sound rather than simply lacking it. Jiaying sat across from the woman Gordon had brought back from Sokovia and listened.
"My ability is precognition," Raina said. "In the first hours after the awakening, I had no control over it — images arrived based on stimuli, without pattern. Since then, I've been able to influence it somewhat. Not direct it, but influence it."
She chose her words carefully. Jiaying had been leading this community for a long time. She listened without shifting in her chair, her eyes on Raina's face, and Raina had the distinct sense that the distance between what she was saying and what she meant was not going unnoticed.
"Baron Strucker injected me with a modified compound that accelerated my physical recovery and expanded the range of my ability," Raina continued. "That's when I gained some control."
Jiaying was quiet for a moment. "Nothing like this has manifested here before. Foresight would be an extraordinary resource for this community." She looked at Raina steadily. "Tell me what you've seen."
"My awakening vision was a sky full of mechanical soldiers," Raina said. "Moving through a city. Attacking everything they encountered. I researched what I saw afterward — the closest match I could find was something called the Omnic Crisis, but nothing of that scale has happened yet. I don't think that name is right. I think it's something else." She paused. "In a vision I had recently, I saw the city more clearly. It was Sokovia."
Jiaying was quiet.
"I saw the crisis as world-threatening," Raina said. "I didn't see the resolution. The final image didn't come."
Jiaying stood. She looked at Gordon, who had been standing near the door.
"Everyone from Sokovia comes home," she said. "Anyone with community ties there, any uninitiated members in the area — all of them. And no one travels to Sokovia until this situation is resolved." She returned to Raina. "You'll tell us if the vision develops further."
"I will."
Jiaying sat back down. She looked at Raina for a moment, something in her face settling into the focused attention of an assessment that mattered.
"You're a prophet," she said. "The word sounds old-fashioned, but it's accurate. Smith Doyle let Gordon bring you here. That means something." She paused. "What it means is that he's already evaluated what you are, and the evaluation was favorable."
Raina absorbed this.
"You're not going to be pressured to look a certain way here," Jiaying said. "Gordon has been part of this community for years, and his appearance is what it is, and nobody has a problem with that." She gestured at the compound beyond the room. "Find a place here. When your ability shows you something bring it to me and we'll work through it together."
"I'll try to focus on the machine crisis specifically," Raina said. "To find the cause of it. Whatever triggers it."
"That would be valuable." Jiaying stood. "Rest first. Integration takes time."