Chapter 200: The Avengers Meeting
"Does everyone here just genuinely love pizza that much?"
Nick Fury sat on the conference room sofa and watched the Avengers tear into the pizza in front of them with the focused aggression of a pack of hyenas, his expression doing things he couldn't quite stop it from doing.
The Apocalypse situation had kept them all away from the cafeteria through lunch, which meant the solution was a delivery order from the nearest place that had pizza.
Don't ask why a SHIELD facility of this size didn't have someone assigned to bring a proper meal to its senior leadership on a day like this.
The answer was that ordering pizza in a crisis was an American institution, and SHIELD was nothing if not an American institution. Word had it that every time something significant happened in this country, pizza orders near the Pentagon spiked dramatically. SHIELD had inherited this proud tradition in full.
Faced with Fury's commentary, the assembled Avengers exchanged a look and collectively, wordlessly, ignored him.
Tony, sitting in an armchair with one leg crossed over the other, glanced at the slice in his hand and spoke without ceremony. "Fury. Honestly, your taste in pizza is not great."
"There's a place not far from here that's considerably better. Next time we do this, just order from there."
"And another thing —" He reached for a glass of cola on the table. "Are you really that cheap? You made me cover the pizza."
A director of a United States government agency, and he couldn't float a pizza order. The sheer audacity.
Not that the amount meant anything to Tony. That was almost beside the point.
Fury shifted slightly in his seat. "Ahem. Stark, as you know, our contractual relationship with Umbrella Corporation has kept us engaged on operations consistently. The department's discretionary budget is running a little thin at the moment."
"My intention is to keep expenses lean through the rest of the year. Once the appropriations come through from upstairs, I'll have someone transfer the full amount to your account."
He delivered this with a completely straight face. If you didn't already know the "full amount" in question was somewhere north of two hundred dollars, you might have assumed he was discussing a meaningful sum.
Tony's expression twitched.
Leaving aside whether Fury actually intended to pay him back next year — at Tony's billing rate, the mental energy required to remember a debt this small wasn't worth it. Which was precisely why this particular, hard-boiled man had probably never planned to pay it back at all. Otherwise, why push it to next year?
Tony had read him correctly on this. Fury genuinely had no intention of paying.
In fairness, a few hundred dollars was beneath Tony's notice. And Fury hadn't been lying: the operational budget was genuinely stretched thin right now. Everything was running on the bare minimum.
Across from them, Captain America had been quiet for a moment. Then, with deliberate calm, he reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, counted three hundred dollars from it, and placed the bills on the table.
"If the department's tight on funds, let me get this one." He said it like it was simply the obvious thing to do.
Everyone looked at the three bills on the table. Then everyone looked at Tony.
Tony stared at the money, then looked up at Steve, visibly thrown.
Not far away, Black Widow touched her chin with a vaguely uncomfortable expression. Peter Parker dropped his eyes to his lap. The others found sudden interest in various points around the room.
"This pizza sure is some pizza, huh. Right, Wanda?" Pietro broke the silence first.
"Mm. And this cola is very... cola." Wanda reached for her glass and took a sip, eyes forward.
"...Rogers." Tony looked back at Steve steadily. "You didn't actually think a couple hundred dollars was going to make me not want to buy lunch for everyone, did you?"
Steve blinked, caught off guard before he could respond. Peggy Carter stepped in from beside him, smooth and unhurried. "What Rogers actually meant was that he's saving you for the next proper dinner, where we can really take your wallet for a walk." She gave Steve a quiet kick on the ankle as she said it. "Everyone knows Stark has money. If you pick up this one, we lose our leverage for the expensive one."
She let that land, then steered the room. "More to the point — rather than sorting out who's covering the pizza, I'd like to know what was so urgent that you called everyone in, Tony. Has something serious happened?" Black Widow followed the opening smoothly, pulling the conversation with her.
Peter Parker, who had been working his way through a slice, got the message and finished it in two large bites.
Without a mask, Peter Parker defaulted immediately back to being a teenager who didn't quite know where to put himself in a room full of adults.
Tony wiped his hands on a napkin, stood, and made a light gesture at the air in front of him.
A virtual display materialized.
"I'd assume even people who've been completely off the grid today have seen the news by now."
On the display: footage of Apocalypse disassembling an entire city in what appeared to be no time at all.
The room went quiet. Every face in it became more serious than it had been a moment before.
None of them had been in that fight. But they had all seen, through whatever channels they had, what Apocalypse had done to that city.
As the footage reached the moment the nuclear blast consumed everything, Tony paused it. The image switched: the Battle of New York. The Chitauri invasion at full scale.
When the Chitauri first arrived, Earth's conventional forces had been almost entirely unable to engage the alien army head-on. If Umbrella's Astartes Legion hadn't deployed when they did, New York would have fallen long before the Avengers could have done anything meaningful about it.
"Stark. Frankly, I still don't follow what you're getting at."
Fury stared at the display. "These situations were both resolved."
Tony glanced at him. "You're right. They were resolved."
"But at what cost?"
"Erasing an entire city with a nuclear warhead?"
"If Matthew Lawrence's body hadn't been strong enough to take a nuclear strike directly, we'd be down one more Avenger right now."
"I want to ask everyone here: does that count as a win?"
The easy register Tony had been carrying all afternoon was gone. His expression was completely serious.
What the room landed on first, hearing that, was not the cost question.
It was: Matthew Lawrence's body is strong enough to take a nuclear strike directly.
As in — with his body. No armor.
Was he still human?
And also — wasn't the line about billionaires being obsessed with self-preservation? How had the CEO who looked like a stiff breeze might knock him over beaten the Hulk to the "survive a nuclear blast with your bare body" milestone?
"Tony. You're certain he walked out of that blast alive?" Black Widow was the first to ask directly.
Before Tony could answer, Fury stepped in. "I'll take that one."
"Yes. Matthew Lawrence was in that engagement. He survived a close-range nuclear detonation."
"Which is why I'm grateful." He delivered it with complete sincerity, without any of the cautious calculation he'd had in private an hour earlier. "Grateful that we have an Avenger that capable fighting alongside us to protect this world."
"So he really has reached that level."
Bruce Banner, who had been quiet until now, spoke up.
It was the first time he'd encountered someone who could give him that particular feeling — of recognizing something in another person that most people would call monstrous.
"Whether it's purely physical strength or something else, I can't say for certain," Fury said. "But what we can confirm is that he has the ability to withstand a nuclear strike at extremely close range."
He turned his focus to Tony. "Stark. You've said a lot. What's the actual proposal?"
"Happy to get to the point."
Tony closed the display.
"The reason I called everyone in is because of what I took away from both the Battle of New York and what happened today."
"I want to build a real line of defense for Earth."
"Or, to put it another way — I want to put a suit of armor on the planet."
"A suit of armor on the planet?" Steve frowned.
Tony had expected this. He kept his voice even. "That's right."
"Whether it was the Chitauri invasion or Apocalypse waking up: the reason both situations turned out as badly as they did is that we were entirely reactive. We were waiting to be hit before we responded."
"If we could identify and eliminate threats before they arrive, a lot of what happened today might never happen at all."
"Take the Chitauri. If we had a complete defensive perimeter in space ahead of time, we intercept them before they ever reach the atmosphere. The war ends out there. New York never becomes what it became."
"Prevention beats response. Stopping the war at the perimeter beats avenging the damage afterward."
"What about Apocalypse?" Steve pushed back. "He was a threat that came from inside Earth. You can't exactly move that fight to space."
"You're right. For a threat that originates internally, there's no perimeter that stops it." Tony didn't avoid the point. "But the other half of my proposal covers that. If we can mass-produce AI-controlled unmanned armor suits, then the moment a conflict breaks out, we minimize human casualties dramatically."
"Like today. If Matthew's body hadn't been able to take that nuclear hit, he'd be dead. With unmanned suits in that role, our people don't die. We lose hardware at worst."
Steve was quiet for a few seconds.
Then: "Tony. Every time someone has tried to win a war before it starts, innocent people have still died."
What he believed in was human judgment and human accountability. Tony's proposed system — a preemptive, automated defense designed to route around the problem of sacrifice — felt to him like the kind of thing that created larger disasters than the ones it prevented.
Tony's brow came together. "Rogers. Tell me which one of those two wars we just watched didn't cost innocent lives."
"I don't see the problem with this. It's like wearing protection instead of dealing with consequences afterward. Prevention is the only thing that actually reduces loss."
"And what you're describing is a hypothetical. We're talking about what actually happens."
"Heh heh heh — can we not bring adult topics into the metaphor, please?" Banner rubbed the back of his head.
"The point stands. If what we're asking is — what if it had been Carter in that blast today instead of Matthew?"
Tony caught himself mid-sentence.
"Actually — my apologies, Carter." He paused, slightly uncomfortable. "I only placed you recently. Please don't take the example personally."
Peggy waved a hand. "It's fine. I've heard worse. Go on."
"Right." Tony cleared his throat. "The question is: if it had been Carter in that blast, would you still be making the same argument?"
"We're Avengers. But we also have people we care about. If we have a way to avoid the losses, why wouldn't we take it?"
The room went quiet.
While everyone was still sitting with that, Bruce Banner spoke.
"Stark. I understand what you're trying to do." He paused. "Setting aside whether we actually have the technology you're describing. The AI element. I don't think it can be trusted."
"You've seen Terminator. The one with Skynet. And Arnold Schwarzenegger in no clothes."
This time Tony didn't have an immediate counter. He sat with it.
Banner wasn't wrong. Compared to Steve's objection, which Tony found abstract, this one he actually shared. The question of whether an AI, once it reached a sufficient level of independent capability, would eventually decide humanity was the problem. That was a real concern.
JARVIS was different. JARVIS was his, and that relationship had been built over years. Extending that kind of trust to an AI operating at a global scale was a different proposition entirely.
He understood exactly what a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence commanding an iron legion could do to humanity if it decided to turn. He had run the numbers. The conclusion was not ambiguous.
Without exaggeration: one miscalibration, one detail handled wrong, and humanity would find itself reverting to something pre-industrial. Possibly pre-everything.
"Banner." Tony was quiet for a moment. "Honestly — that's been on my mind too."
"Putting everything in front of the threat is how I've always thought about it. I don't think we can keep operating in reaction. Waiting for the hit and then responding to it."
"An offensive capability that eliminates the danger before it arrives is, to me, the best defense. Better than any shield."
"But the AI rebellion risk you're raising isn't low. The moment you give a sufficiently advanced system genuine independence, the history of science fiction suggests it decides it doesn't need us."
"I won't pretend I'm not worried about that too." Tony leaned back into the sofa, eyes going to the ceiling.
"What if we used the power of the Mind Stone to control it?"
The sentence dropped into the room without warning.
Everyone went still.
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