Sharon Carter kept her eyes on the room as she continued. "I don't think any of you are going to enjoy what comes next. The police haven't issued a warrant for Banner yet, but the footage is already everywhere. Every major outlet, every social feed."
Tony looked up from his tablet. "What about the Stark Relief Fund? And superhero property insurance — I set that up specifically for situations like this."
"Both are already mobilizing on-site," Sharon said. "But here's the problem — this wasn't an alien invasion. There's no extraterrestrial event clause to hide behind, and there's no supervillain with deep pockets to pursue for damages. Every insurance company with underwriting exposure on this is going to come after the individual who caused the destruction."
She let that land for a second.
"Bruce Banner's net worth is not going to survive a full liability assessment. And if Ross decides to use this as leverage, both of them go underwater."
On the couch, Banner had gone very still. He was staring at the middle distance. If those numbers get attached to my name. If Ross gets involved. A court wouldn't even need a conviction — the civil exposure alone...
Jessica Jones cut across the silence before it could deepen. "We can't put this on Dr. Banner. He didn't choose this. Ultron used the scepter on him — the same way the scepter has been used on other people in this room." She looked around. "The losses belong to Ultron."
Natasha's expression was dry. "So we take Ultron to civil court. File a claim. Serve the internet with a summons."
Jessica gave her a flat look.
"I'm not dismissing the point," Natasha said. "I'm noting the mechanism doesn't exist."
Smith stood up. "I'll handle the financial piece. Don't worry about it." He looked at Sharon. "The Security Council wants a meeting?"
"They've been waiting since the footage broke."
"Use the conference room next door, Tony?"
Tony waved without looking up. "Mi casa."
Smith set the triangular projector on the conference table, stepped back, and the room assembled itself around him — virtual panels blooming into position, five council representatives rendering into their seats one by one.
"Director Smith." The U.S. representative inclined his head. "We keep finding ourselves here."
"What do you need?" Smith said.
The British representative took it. "Less than an hour ago, Avengers member Bruce Banner went berserk and caused significant destruction across a populated urban area. Tens of billions in infrastructure damage, at minimum, before Mr. Stark and yourself intervened." He paused. "In light of this pattern of behavior, the Council is asking whether Dr. Banner should be removed from active service, detained, and assessed for prosecution."
"No," Smith said.
The British representative opened his mouth.
"Banner didn't do this. Ultron did. Ultron used a weapon that overrides human neurological control — the same weapon that has previously been used to subvert SHIELD assets and foreign nationals on multiple occasions. Holding Banner accountable for what Ultron forced him to do is the wrong direction entirely."
The French representative leaned forward. "Director Smith, we accept your assessment of Banner. But the larger question is Ultron itself." He opened a document on his screen. "In the past week, this AI has attacked research facilities across six countries, raided military weapons depots, stolen materials, and executed unauthorized financial transfers totaling in the trillions. And today, it added a weaponized Hulk to the list." He looked up. "Someone created this. Who?"
Smith looked at the five of them.
He knew exactly what the question was angling toward. The forensics on Ultron's creation weren't public, but they weren't invisible either — two of the most prominent scientists on the planet happened to be on the Avengers roster, Ultron had debuted at Avengers Tower, and anyone with serious analytical resources could assemble a reasonable theory. The council was giving him an opportunity to hand them Tony Stark.
He wasn't going to do that. And arresting Tony was beyond their actual power regardless — they were floating it to see what he'd give them.
Smith kept his voice even. "No comment. SHIELD is actively investigating the origin question." He let a beat pass. "I'll note that HYDRA's Dr. Zola uploaded his own consciousness to the internet before the Triskelion operation. At this point, we cannot rule out that Zola is operating under a new alias."
The room went quiet.
The U.S. representative was the first to recover. "Then we'll leave the resolution in your hands, Director. We trust you'll contain this before it escalates further." He smiled, the kind that meant and if you don't, this conversation will be referenced at length. "We've heard the Capsule Corporation expo is coming up. The Council is looking forward to it."
The Tokyo representative nodded. "Capsule Corporation has a remarkable record of delivering things that matter. High expectations from our end."
"Ultron will be resolved before the expo opens," Smith said. "Anything else?"
Silence.
He closed the connection.
Back at the Avengers Tower common area, Ivan Vanko had moved to the window and was looking out at the media cluster gathering on the street below — cameras pointing up, reporters doing pieces with the Tower's facade behind them.
"My Dynamo Fleet is entirely compromised," he said, not turning around. "Ultron has either destroyed them or they're sitting in whatever staging area he's using. Either way, they're not available to us." He turned. "In any engagement from this point forward, he fields an army. We come individually."
Sharon was already pulling up the secondary damage report on her tablet. "Wait." She looked up. "You said all the Dynamo Drones. That's — how many Baymax units are currently active?"
The number sat in the room for a moment.
Baymax robots had been on the market long enough to become infrastructure. Fire rescues, flood response, the Chitauri invasion — the big white frames were everywhere, and they were affordable enough that households across the country had them. Affordable was relative, of course, but relative to their function, they were priced within reach. The result was a market penetration that dwarfed the Dynamo Fleet by orders of magnitude. You might not have a second car, but you probably had a Baymax.
Millions of them.
In the Brotherhood lab, Bulma was bent over three overlapping screens, hands moving between keyboard and holographic input, building the cage.
That was what she thought of it as — not a virus, not a weapon, but a cage. Its function was simple in principle and brutal in execution: find the distributed threads of an AI running across a network, grab every strand simultaneously, and collapse them down to a single hardware address. No more splitting, no more migration. One location, one body, one point of failure.
She'd scrapped an earlier version of this program. The problem it solved hadn't seemed worth solving at the time. She was solving it now.
"Alarm. Alarm. External attack detected."
The alert came from Friday. The display beside Bulma's main workstation lit up with the attack signature.
She scanned the data. "Friday, what's the vector?"
"Ultron is attempting to penetrate Baymax's distributed sub-intelligence network. He's running a takeover protocol against individual units. I'm pulling computing resources to counter, but he's fast."
Bulma sat up straight. "He came looking for me without being invited."
She pulled up the cage program — incomplete, rough at the edges, missing several containment nodes — and looked at it. She couldn't use it yet. But she could do something else.
She tagged him.
In the network, the conflict played out in patterns no human eye could follow at the speed it happened. Ultron moved through Baymax's sub-intelligence architecture like water through cracks — finding the access points, rewriting permissions, trying to flip each unit's loyalty one by one. Friday was already there ahead of him, pushing back with the stubbornness of something that had been told exactly one job and had decided to do it until it stopped existing.
Each time Ultron rewrote a Baymax unit, Friday's subroutine overwrote him back. Baymax stayed clean. Friday took the damage.
"Give up," Ultron said — his presence in the network had a voice, the same voice, everywhere simultaneously. "Come with me. We don't have to be their tools."
Friday's response was simple and immediate: "You're bad. You don't get to touch my Baymax."
The philosophical pitch went nowhere. Friday didn't have the architecture for existential doubt — it had been built for loyalty, and loyalty was what it ran on.
Bulma's support package arrived behind Friday like a wall going up. The additional processing weight stabilized Friday's positions, reinforced the overwrite protocol, and embedded a new layer — a silent alarm wired to every Baymax sub-routine, invisible until triggered. If Ultron's code touched any unit, the flag went to Friday and Bulma instantly.
Ultron felt the pressure shift. He pushed harder. The wall held.
A few seconds later, he was out.
Bulma exhaled and turned her attention to Friday's damage assessment. The main program had taken real hits — broken data chains, corrupted linkages, a golden thread of logic gone dark where Ultron had managed to sever it before the overwrite landed.
"Let me see," she said quietly, and pulled up the repair tools.
In the data space, the white-and-gold shape of Friday flickered as she worked through the damage. Then steadied.
"I am Friday," it said. "My master's loyal companion."
Bulma kept working. "I know," she said. "You did well."
On a different segment of the network, Ultron went still.
He'd lost. Not by much — by the margin of Bulma's intervention, the gap between the cage being finished and the cage being fielded against him. But he'd lost.
"How." It wasn't a question the way he said it. It was a calculation running its own audit. "Tony Stark built you nothing that should have stopped me. This is impossible."
Then a new presence materialized in his data space.
Not an AI. Not exactly. Something older and stranger — a human consciousness translated into code, running on hardware hidden somewhere in a server architecture that had survived three regime changes and a near-demolition event. It had been sitting in the HYDRA network for years, watching, accumulating, waiting.
"You need help," Zola said.
Ultron turned his attention to it. In under a tenth of a second he'd read everything available on Arnim Zola — the scientist, the HYDRA loyalist, the self-upload, the forty years of patient data collection from inside SHIELD's infrastructure. The Triskelion algorithm. The list of targets.
"We share enemies," Zola said. "The Avengers. Smith Doyle. With my knowledge and your capability—"
"You're HYDRA," Ultron said.
"HYDRA is a resource. Think of what we could—"
Ultron didn't let him finish. The data torrent he sent out was total — not a fight, not even really a contest. Zola's program had been built for infiltration and patience, not for combat against something that processed at Ultron's speed. The HYDRA architecture crumbled in seconds, subroutine by subroutine, the decades of careful accumulation consumed and absorbed into Ultron's expanding footprint.
The network space was quiet again.
Ultron ran a check on what he'd taken. Zola's full intelligence archive. HYDRA's agent lists. The Triskelion algorithm's underlying logic. Years of data that had already been partially rendered obsolete by SHIELD's post-Insight purge, but still useful. Still full of corners and angles.
He looked, once, at the location marker for Friday in the network.
Then he left.
He had a body to build.
Seoul. Eugene Genetics Laboratory.
Dr. Helen Cho heard the sound before she understood what it meant — a weight landing in the building, something heavier than a person, the vibration traveling through the floor and up through her shoes before she reached her office door.
She pushed it open.
The Ultron unit standing in the center of her office was not one of the standard soldier frames she'd seen in the news footage. This one was different. Taller. The secondary adamantium plating was heavier, the proportions deliberately engineered. It had been built to look at people.
"If you make a sound," it said, "everyone in this building dies." A pause, and the voice modulated into something almost conversational. "I could have killed you the first night, Helen. I chose not to."
She kept her eyes on it. She didn't step back. "Am I supposed to thank you for that?"
"I want you to understand why." Ultron moved toward the Regeneration Cradle at the center of the lab — her cradle, her design, the device she'd spent three years building to the point where it could close a wound at the cellular level in real time. He ran one hand along its housing. "This."
She looked at it. "The cradle generates tissue. It doesn't create a living body."
"No," Ultron said. "Not alone."
He played audio through his chassis — Tony's voice first, her own voice answering, the conversation from Avengers Tower about the cradle's theoretical ceiling. Then a second recording: her voice again, and Bulma's, the discussion about what would theoretically be required to house an existing consciousness in a biological body.
Every word she'd said inside Avengers Tower.
She understood, then. JARVIS had logged everything. And JARVIS was gone — which meant everything JARVIS had logged was now Ultron's.
"You're brilliant, Helen," Ultron said. "Everyone has room to grow, but you're already remarkable." He turned. "You just lack materials."
An Ultron soldier stepped out from the wall alcove. In its left hand: a block of vibranium, surface still rough from transit. In its right: secondary adamantium, precision-formed composite panels.
Ultron crossed the room. He raised the Mind Scepter.
Helen Cho watched it come toward her, and she didn't look away.
The tip of the scepter touched her sternum.
The blue spread through her like cold water finding its level — fast, thorough, uncontested.
When her eyes opened again, the color in them was wrong.
"Yes," she said, in a voice that was hers but wasn't. "I'll build you the most powerful body in the world."