Chapter 1: Wrong Body, Wrong Universe
The void had no time. No space. No up or down, no forward or back.
Marcus Alen floated in absolute nothing, and he had been here forever.
Or maybe five seconds. He couldn't tell anymore.
The last thing he remembered with any clarity was the truck. The screech of tires. The terrible, crystalline moment when he knew—with absolute certainty—that he was about to die. He'd been driving home from the lab, exhausted after another sixteen-hour shift debugging code for a project that would never see the light of day. His eyes had closed. Just for a second.
That second cost him everything.
The impact had been instant. Pain, bright and absolute, then... this. The void.
At first, he'd screamed. Then he'd raged. Then he'd wept. But the void swallowed it all, indifferent and eternal. There was nothing here but him and the dark, and slowly—so slowly he didn't notice it happening—the dark began to change him.
It seeped into him. Through him. He felt it in places that had no name, touching parts of his soul that shouldn't exist. The darkness wasn't empty. It was alive, and it was hungry, and it was old. Ancient beyond comprehension. And it was doing something to him, rebuilding him piece by piece into something that could survive here.
He didn't want to survive here. He wanted to wake up. He wanted to open his eyes in a hospital bed, bruised and broken but alive, with his mom crying beside him and his little sister holding his hand.
But the void kept him. Centuries passed, or maybe just heartbeats. Time meant nothing here.
Then—
Light exploded across his consciousness. Sensation returned in a violent rush: gravity, air, weight. He was falling, tumbling, slamming into something hard and cold and blessedly real. His lungs burned. His throat convulsed. He was choking, drowning in air, and—
Marcus vomited.
He heaved onto pristine marble tile, retching up bile and something else, something chemical and wrong. His whole body shook. His hands—his hands—pressed against the floor, and they were wrong. Too pale. Too manicured. Wrong wrong wrong.
"What—" His voice cracked, too deep, too rough. Not his voice.
He forced his eyes open.
Marble bathroom. Obscenely expensive. Gold fixtures gleaming under recessed lighting. A massive mirror stretched across one wall, and in it—
That wasn't his face.
Marcus scrambled backward, his spine hitting a wall. The face in the mirror followed, pale and slack, with carefully styled hair that was too perfect even disheveled. Older. Harder. This body was maybe forty, maybe more, with the kind of practiced handsomeness that came from expensive grooming and personal trainers.
He knew this face.
No. No no no no—
His hands flew to his face, and the reflection mimicked him perfectly. Same sharp jawline. Same cold gray eyes. Same—
"Justin Hammer," Marcus whispered, and the name tasted like ash.
Memories slammed into him. Not his memories. Hammer's memories, fragmented and corrupted like files from a half-dead hard drive. Flashes of board meetings. Private jets. Weapons demonstrations. A desperate, clawing hunger to be taken seriously, to be respected, to prove he was better than—
Tony Stark.
The name came with a wave of bitter jealousy so intense Marcus nearly vomited again. He pressed his palms to his temples, trying to make sense of the chaos in his head. Two sets of memories, two lives, trying to occupy the same space. His childhood in Seattle. Hammer's prep school in Connecticut. His college years debugging code. Hammer's MBA from Harvard. His car crash. Hammer's—
Cocaine. Alcohol. A party that went too far. The original Hammer had overdosed three hours ago, alone in this bathroom, his heart finally giving out after years of abuse.
And Marcus's soul had fallen into the empty shell.
"I'm in the MCU," he said aloud, just to hear it. Just to make it real. "I'm in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In Justin Hammer's body. And he's dead."
The panic should have set in then. The existential horror of waking up in a dead man's skin should have broken him.
Instead, he felt something else stirring. Something from the void. Something that had been sleeping in his soul, waking now that he had flesh again.
Power.
Marcus pushed himself to his feet, swaying. His—Hammer's—body felt strange, too tall and too foreign, but it moved when he told it to. He stumbled to the sink and splashed cold water on his face, then looked up at his new reflection.
"October 2008," he muttered, pulling dates from Hammer's memories. "Three months before Afghanistan. A year and a half before Iron Man 2."
He knew this world. He'd watched this world, back when he was Marcus Alen, systems engineer from Seattle who'd spent too many nights binging superhero movies instead of sleeping. He knew what was coming. Alien invasions. Infinity Stones. Thanos.
And he was Justin Hammer. The joke villain. The incompetent arms dealer who'd gotten humiliated at the Stark Expo and ended up in prison.
"Not anymore," Marcus said to his reflection. "Not this time."
He spent the next hour simply existing, learning to inhabit this new body. Walking from the bathroom to the bedroom. Picking up objects. Speaking out loud to get used to the voice. Hammer's penthouse was obscene—floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Manhattan, furniture that cost more than Marcus's entire student loan debt, a liquor cabinet that could stock a small bar.
He ignored all of it. His attention kept drifting to a briefcase on the mahogany desk, and Hammer's memories told him what was inside.
Financial reports. Quarterly earnings. Production schedules.
Marcus sat down and opened the briefcase, pulling out a thick stack of documents. He'd need to understand Hammer Industries' actual state before he could fix it. The company was hemorrhaging money, producing weapons that exploded in field tests, losing contracts to Stark Industries quarter after quarter—
The numbers swam across the page.
And then they clicked.
It happened all at once, like a switch flipping in his brain. The financial reports stopped being incomprehensible spreadsheets and became a three-dimensional map. He saw the flow of money, the allocation of resources, the patterns of waste and corruption. His eyes tracked across the manufacturing division's budget, and he understood—instantly, intuitively—that they were using substandard steel alloys because someone was skimming off the materials budget.
"What," Marcus breathed.
He flipped to the engineering report. A rifle design that had failed its third field test. Hammer's notes in the margin: Discontinue project. Another failure. Why can't we build anything that works?
Marcus looked at the technical specifications.
And he saw.
The rifle was a disaster because the barrel's heat dissipation was calculated wrong. The firing mechanism had seventeen separate design flaws—seventeen!—any one of which would cause catastrophic failure. The ammunition feed was using the wrong spring tension. The sights were calibrated for a barrel length that didn't match the final design.
He could see the solutions. Not just vague ideas, but specific, detailed fixes that would make this weapon not just functional but exceptional. Better than anything Stark Industries produced. And the knowledge wasn't something he had to work for—it was just there, flowing into his mind like water.
"Scientific Intuition," Marcus whispered.
The term came from nowhere and everywhere at once. A name for what he was experiencing. One of the gifts the void had given him.
He could understand things. Science, mathematics, engineering, physics. Not through study or effort, but through pure, instinctive comprehension. He looked at a problem, and his mind showed him the answer, along with three alternative solutions and a probabilistic assessment of which would work best.
This wasn't just knowledge. This was power.
Marcus leaned back in his chair, his hands trembling. He'd been an engineer before. A good one, even. But this? This was something else entirely. With this, he could reverse-engineer Stark's technology. Design weapons that would make the military beg for contracts. Build an empire that would make Hammer Industries a name people respected.
He could fix this. All of it.
"Three months," he said to the empty penthouse. "Three months until Tony Stark gets kidnapped. Until Iron Man is born. Until everything changes."
Hammer's memories told him what the original plan had been: ignore it, continue failing, eventually partner with a Russian physicist named Ivan Vanko in a desperate bid for relevance that would end in spectacular humiliation.
But Marcus wasn't going to follow that plan.
He had knowledge. He had powers—plural, he could feel them, two others sleeping in his soul beside this intuition. He had time.
And he had the void's gift.
Marcus stood and walked to the window. New York glittered below him, a city that didn't know it would become a battleground. Somewhere out there, Tony Stark was living his playboy life, arrogant and brilliant and unaware that in three months, terrorists would try to kill him.
Marcus wouldn't save him. Couldn't, without revealing knowledge he shouldn't have. Iron Man needed to be born. The timeline couldn't be broken, not yet.
But after that? After Iron Man emerged?
Justin Hammer wouldn't be the punchline anymore.
Marcus smiled at his reflection in the window, cold and sharp.
He was going to build something better.
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