Dying is, frankly, the most overrated, terribly managed experience in the entire universe.
That was my first coherent thought as I floated in a sea of bruised, agonizing darkness for the second time. My entire body felt like it had been run through an industrial meat grinder, reassembled by a blind mechanic, and then left out in the snow.
If this is the afterlife, I mentally complained to whatever cosmic management was listening, I'd like to speak to a supervisor. Where are the pearly gates? Where's the peaceful white light? Hell, I'd settle for a lake of fire if it meant it came with a decent heating system. It's freezing in here. And my head hurts. Since when do ghosts get migraines? This is violation of the concept of eternal rest. I want a refund!! I'll sue!
I kept mentally ranting, fully convinced I was just a lingering consciousness trapped in the void, until something entirely un-ghostlike happened.
I heard a beep.
It was faint at first, a rhythmic, high-pitched ping that sounded suspiciously like a heart monitor. Then came the smell. The afterlife shouldn't smell like sterile alcohol swabs, stale coffee, and the heavy, metallic tang of industrial scrubbers. It should smell like... I don't know, clouds. Or brimstone. Not a hospital ward.
Then, a voice broke through the dark.
"—don't care what the manifest says! Look at him! He is a child! A human child!"
The voice belonged to a woman. It was sharp, raspy, and completely out of patience. She sounded like she had spent the last decade arguing with brick walls and was currently contemplating taking a sledgehammer to this one.
"I need a full bio-scan, yesterday. And I want to know exactly which sector of the cargo bay he was pulled from. You don't just spontaneously generate a prepubescent boy in the middle of a secure airlock!"
A second voice, male, younger, and distinctly terrified, stammered a reply. "Doctor, we checked the cryo-logs three times. There's no record of him. He wasn't on the ISV. He wasn't in transit. One second the perimeter sensors tripped in the secondary loading dock, and the next, the automated loaders found him unconscious next to... well, next to that thing."
"That 'thing' looks like a high-end medical diagnostic unit, which is exactly what my department has been begging the board for," the woman snapped back. "But that is entirely beside the point! What is a kid doing in..."
Wait. My genius brain, currently operating on emergency backup power, paused its complaining. ISB? Cryo-logs? A doctor yelling at a technician?
Dead people don't hear a women screaming about lost boys.
I forced my eyes open.
The light was a blinding, unfiltered fluorescent white that felt like an icepick to the retinas. I groaned, turning my head. The movement sent a violent wave of nausea rolling through my stomach. I was lying on a rigid, metallic examination table covered in scratchy paper.
I blinked rapidly, letting my eyes adjust. I was in a medical bay, but it looked like it had been built inside a military bunker. Heavy steel bulkheads, exposed conduits, and medical tech that looked both highly advanced and heavily battered. In the corner, sitting completely inert beneath a tangle of hastily attached diagnostic cables, was a familiar red rectangular pod. Baymax. He had survived whatever happened, but he was completely powered down.
I tried to push myself up, and that's when I felt the heavy, unnatural weight anchored to my left arm.
I looked down, my breath catching. The brass and crystal device—the thing my father had tried to tear apart—was no longer a loose object. The obsidian bands were tightly, clasped around my wrist. It was warm against my skin. The core wasn't angry crimson anymore, nor was it its resting amber. It was a deep, tranquil emerald green, pulsing with a slow heartbeat.
It's attached itself to me, I realized, my mind racing. When the lab went critical, it didn't explode or at least it didn't explode in a destructive kind of way. It bonded with me. It warped me out of there. I stared at the green glow. The Transwarper, I thought. It wasn't a great name, but given that it had just slingshotted me across the fabric of reality, it was accurate enough.
"Hey. He's awake."
I snapped my head toward the voice. The woman who had been yelling stood at the foot of the bed. She was tall and lean, wearing a stained white lab coat over a faded t-shirt and cargo pants. Her hair was orange, wavy and shoulder length, and an unlit cigarette was tucked behind her ear. She stared at me with a mix of intense medical scrutiny and genuine, horrified disbelief.
"Easy, kid. Don't sit up too fast. The gravity here is a little lower than Earth standard; it'll mess with your inner ear until you acclimatize," she said, pulling a penlight from her pocket. "Follow the light."
Lower than Earth standard? I swallowed hard. Before I could process that, the heavy metal doors of the medbay hissed open with a pneumatic clack.
Two men walked in, completely changing the oxygen in the room.
The man in the lead moved like a coiled spring. He had a military buzz cut, arms thick with corded muscle, and three massive, jagged scars running down the right side of his face. He looked like the kind of guy who considered chewing glass a light snack. The man behind him was a stark contrast—a nervous-looking corporate type in a crisp golf shirt, clutching a datapad like a shield.
"Is it true?" the corporate suit demanded, his voice high-pitched and frantic. He looked at the woman. "The perimeter alarms weren't a glitch? A kid? You're telling me a child bypassed the exterior automated defenses and the entire cryo-manifest?"
"He didn't bypass anything, Parker, he was found unconscious in the secondary loading dock," the woman snapped. "And his biometrics are a mess because his localized EM field is frying my scanners."
The scarred military commander stepped closer, his icy blue eyes locking onto me. "I don't care about his scans," he rumbled, his voice a low, gravelly threat. "I want to know how a kid got onto my base without tripping a single thermal optic."
I pulled my knees up, my mind working at a million miles an hour. Okay, Tony. You're in a military-industrial complex on a planet with lower gravity. You have a powered-down robot and a multiversal Transwarper on your wrist. Lie. Lie like your life depends on it, because it probably does.
"I... I snuck on," I said, letting my voice shake just enough to sound like a terrified kid.
The corporate guy—Parker—let out a dry laugh. "Snuck on? Kid, you don't 'sneak on' to an ISV. The security protocols—"
"I hacked the manifest," I interrupted, projecting a bit of my natural arrogance. "Your encryption is outdated. You're using a localized subnet. I bounced a phantom signal through the automated cargo loaders and registered myself as a crate of high-density machine parts." If i'm right that these guys still built their tech from earth, and using my knowledge of my life before being reborn as a kid Tony Stark, then these facts i'm freestyling like a pro, would be the only logical conclusion.
The room went dead silent.
"You hacked the ISV manifest?" the commander asked, dangerously soft.
"I'm smart," I said. "My name is Tony Stark."
I braced myself for the reaction. The widened eyes, the sudden deference, the questions about Howard Stark.
...Nothing.
The name didn't land. Parker didn't gasp. The commander didn't flinch. The doctor just looked at me with pity. Nobody knows the Starks here, I realized with a sudden, dizzying wave of relief and terror. I really was in another universe.
"My parents were engineers," I continued smoothly, weaving the lie. "They died back on Earth. The state was going to put me in a group home. I didn't want to go. I knew about the off-world colonization and I wanted to see it." I pointed to Baymax's pod. "That's Baymax. He's a healthcare companion. I built him. I hid inside his secondary cargo crate. I hooked myself into the cryo-feed to survive the trip, but the unfreezing process messed up my memory of the landing."
Parker rubbed his temples. "A stowaway orphan. Do you know what the shareholders will say? The PR nightmare..."
The scarred commander wasn't listening to Parker. His sharp eyes had dropped down to my left arm. He stepped closer, pointing a thick finger at the Transwarper.
"And what the hell is that?" he asked. "The doc says you're giving off EM interference. Is that the source?"
I looked down at the brass and emerald device. Play it cool.
"Oh, this?" I lifted my wrist slightly. "It's... well, it's a watch."
The commander raised an eyebrow, clearly unimpressed by the bulky, glowing piece of alien-looking hardware. "A watch. That doesn't look like any watch I've ever seen, kid."
"It doesn't tell time," I admitted with a sheepish, totally fabricated shrug. "It's my first invention. I built it when I was seven. It's just a kinetic generator hooked up to a faulty EM coil and a lightbulb. I created it as an experimental energy deflector. I just... I keep it as a memento. Because of my parents."
I looked down, playing the grief card for all it was worth.
"A deflector," he mused, reaching a hand out toward my arm.
Instantly, the emerald light in the core flared. A low, subsonic warning hum vibrated from the brass casing. It was the exact same sound it had made when my father had tried to touch it.
The commander paused, his hand hovering inches from the device. He could feel the vibration. He could sense the raw power rolling off it. He pulled his hand back, a slow, grim smile spreading across his scarred face.
OH CRAP I SHOULD HAVE JUST CALLED IT A SHITTY WATCH!!!!!
"Well, well. Ain't that something," he murmured. He looked at the corporate suit. "The eggheads in R&D are gonna wet themselves when they see this. A personal shield generator that fits on a wrist? Do you know what my boys out in the bush could do with tech like this?"
"We are not confiscating the child's property to give your mercenaries new toys," the woman hissed, stepping between me and the commander. She glared at him with a fury that burned brighter than the fluorescent lights. "He is a civilian. A minor. He is going back on the next transport to Earth, and until then, he is under my medical jurisdiction."
"With all due respect, Doctor," the commander said, his tone dripping with condescension, "this facility is under military lockdown due to the ongoing hostile environment. That makes everything on this base a matter of security. Including the kid."
"He's a PR liability, and the next transport doesn't leave for six months!" Parker argued. "If the RDA board finds out—". He was clearly freaking out...
RDA. The acronym finally clicked in my brain. The lower gravity. The ISV. The military base. The reason these three look so damn familiar!
I slid off the examination table. My legs trembled violently, but I ignored them. The adults were too busy arguing to notice me walking toward the far wall, where heavy metal blast shutters covered a reinforced window. There was a small gap in the metal.
I pressed my hands against the cold glass and looked out.
I saw towering, impossibly massive trees that reached hundreds of feet into the air. I saw vibrant, bioluminescent cyan and purple foliage. And hanging massive in the sky, taking up the horizon, was a colossal gas giant banded with swirling rings of sapphire.
Polyphemus.
"Hey! Get away from the glass!"
The man grabbed my shoulder and roughly turned me to face him.
"You don't want to look out there," he said, his voice dropping into a harsh, warning growl. He gestured to the glass, his scarred face close to mine. "You think you're smart because you hacked a computer? Out there is the meat-grinder. Every living thing that crawls, flies, or squats in the mud out there wants to kill you and eat your eyes for jujubes."
The woman walked over, shoving the commander's hand off me with a fierce glare.
"My name is Dr. Grace Augustine," she said, her voice softening slightly as she looked down at me. "This paranoid jarhead is Colonel Miles Quaritch. And the suit panicking over his paycheck is Parker Selfridge, the base administrator."
She crossed her arms, looking out at the alien jungle.
"Welcome to Hell's Gate, Tony. Welcome to Pandora."
I stood there, my mind spinning as the reality of my situation set in. I was on Pandora. But at what time period, judging by their looks, it couldn't be too far from the events of the first movie, could it ?
"Dr. Augustine," I said, looking up at her, my genius brain already calculating survival odds and how to get Baymax online using RDA power grids. "I think I'm going to need a lab."