Avengers

by Dan Abnett

+Choices selected+

  “Broadcast. Message begins: This is Iron Man. Condition Alpha emergency, Pine Fields. Requesting priority handshake protocol and location access. Repeat, urgent.”

  +Negative response+

  “Dammit, get me S.H.I.E.L.D.”

  +Negative response+

  “Avengers, priority. All active or inactive, field or home.”

  +Negative response+

  Comms had been down across the board for over ninety minutes. This was more than jamming, more than a network collapse. It was certainly more than bad cell coverage. Links had been closed and locked. There was no way of telling how extensive it was. Maybe Eastern Seaboard. Maybe global. Maybe he should be home with an oak-aged single malt and a Flintstones marathon on cable.

  Because Zero Six meant back to the Stone Age.

  00:29:21.

  He was five minutes out from Pine Fields. Last try.

  Iron Man rolled, flying on his back, guided by suit telemetry and HUD. He mapped the sky above, spotted a near-Earth satellite that would be overhead for another two minutes, and boosted the arc reactor in his chest. When he spoke, his suit converted the message to a unibeam pulse that bounced off the satellite.

  “Avengers priority, this is Iron Man to NSOC. Priority, urgent. I’m bouncing this signal as a photon packet. Convert and bounce back response. Urgent.”

  A crackle.

  “This is NSOC. Network is down. What’s happening?” A woman’s voice, focused, professional, but with a flustered edge to it.

  “Hey, you. Glad you’re on the ball. No time to explain. Alert all stations. List follows. I need priority handshake protocol, Pine Fields.”

  “Negative on that, Iron Man.”

  “I think under the circumstances, you can give me clearance.”

  “Love to comply, sir. Protocols rewrote eight minutes ago. We have no access, either.”

  “Suggest USCYBERCOM Source Overwipe Protocol.”

  “No one’s supposed to know about that, sir.”

  “No one’s supposed to be flying across D.C. at head-height, but that’s happening, too. Get DIRNSA to authorize. Condition Alpha.”

  “Actually, the director’s already authorized, sir. Overwipe is active. The protocol is being blocked.”

  “Okay, it’s worse than I thought.”

  “How bad did you think it was?”

  “Bad enough for me to think there was no capacity for it to get worse.”

  “The entire network is locked. SIGINT, processing, collection, analysis, tailored access, under and over, inter-bureau. Is this foreign?”

  “Yes. No. Domestic, in the worst way. I…hello? Hello, NSOC?”

  Static. The satellite had passed over.

  He rolled. The target zone was coming up fast.

  00:27:21.

  Trees, gray in the early morning light. An access road. Outer fence. Inner fence. Ditch. Inner inner fence. Anonymous buildings, dark oblongs like aircraft hangars discretely placed on hardpan behind screens of maple and larch. Cars parked in a lot to one side. A mass of writhing electromagnetic and thermal activity, showing like a flaring sunspot on his HUD.

  Pine Fields. It was the NSA’s primary homeland Black Chamber, a server farm and watch station. Four-hundred-and-six-megawatt power consumption. There weren’t supposed to be any Black Chambers left in the world. They were a dirty cyber-espionage throwback to colder wars. The few maps on which Pine Fields actually appeared listed the complex as a logistics center for a manufacturer of leafblowers. Leafblowers. Seriously. That was like pretending Matt Murdock wasn’t, in fact, Daredevil. A blind man could see it.

  More parked cars. A row of recycling bins. A cinder path leading along the back of the property to a clump of smaller utility and service sheds. Pressure-sensitive fiber cabling buried in the topsoil for a half-mile radius. Digital camera mounts. Low-light camera mounts. Motion detectors.

  An air-to-air missile.

  His collision-warning alarm sounded. Iron Man rolled. The missile, the size of a baseball bat, passed over his shoulder. It retraced, arced around, and locked onto him again.

  Seeking motion or heat. Nice. Stark didn’t recognize the design, which was hardly surprising since it had been configured and built about eighteen minutes earlier.

  He rolled an evasive, flash-cooled his suit’s outer layers to thwart heat-tracking, and then landed and froze.

  The missile came right at him.

  So, not motion or heat. Guided.

  He launched again, his boot jets puffing a shock-circle of dust and grit off the hardpan. The missile snaked after him.

  00:26:40.

  In the other corner of his HUD, another counter started running down.

  00:00:11.

  Time to missile impact.

  “Jamming.”

  +Jamming failed+

  “Countermeasures.”

  +Countermeasures failed+

  “Holo-ghost decoy.”

  +Decoy failed+

  “Oh, for god’s sake…”

  Iron Man rolled again, came up facing the oncoming missile, and fired his palm repulsors.

  The missile detonated.

  The blast smacked him out of the air and threw him one hundred and twenty meters into the side of the nearest server barn. He hit, dented the siding, and fell to the ground.

  * * *

  TONY Stark had almost been tempted to let the missile hit him and allow his armor to soak up the damage. He was glad he hadn’t gone down that route. Whatever warhead that thing had been packing, it was much stronger than he had anticipated. If it had hit him, it would have killed him.

  Because, he realized, it had been designed to kill him. For something so small to pack that much punch, it had to contain an antimatter charge.

  An Iron Man buster.

  “Reboot.”

  +Systems rebooting+

  Two more missiles streaked in.

  “Enough already,” he growled.

  Feet braced, force field on, he fired his repulsors, taking out one missile with each hand. They both exploded in midair, white-hot. The blast waves rocked him.

  No more of that.

  If they were guided, that meant he was being watched. He charged his unibeam, and pumped out an EMP and an ultrasonic blast. Every camera mount in the compound went dead, knocked out. Every lens shattered. If they rebooted—and they would—they would be blind.

  He knelt, placed his right hand flat on the ground, and fired a thermal pulse into the soil, frying the net of pressure-sensitive cables and the motion sensors.

  The missile-impact clock had stopped and vanished. The other was still running.

  00:16:10.

  Sixteen? How the hell had the count jumped to sixteen minutes?

  Tony Stark used a word that his publicist didn’t approve of.

  “You still there, sir?”

  “Hello? That you, NSOC?” he replied.

  “Yes, sir. Sorry for the break. I’ve repositioned the site-to-site. I’m bouncing off a traffic chopper over Anacostia.”

  “Nice.”

  “Improvised.”

  “Nicely improvised. What’s your name, NSOC?”

  “Uh, Special SIGINT Support Supervisor Lansing, sir.”

  “Special SIGINT Support Supervisor is a title, not a name.”

  “Uh, Diane Lansing, sir.”

  “Hi, Diane. I’m on-site at Pine Fields Black Chamber.”

  “The NSA no longer operates Black Chambers, sir. And…Pine Fields does not officially exist.”

  “In a little under fifteen minutes, most of the world’s population is going to wish it didn’t actually exist, Diane.”

  He took off, flying low around the side of the nearest server barn. The e-mag activity levels inside were topping out his suit’s ability to measure them. Power consumption was passing five hundred megawatts.

  “Say again, fifteen minutes, sir? Fifteen minutes until what?”

  “Zero Six, Diane.”

  A
pause.

  “Please specify.”

  “I wish I had a better name for it, Diane. I honestly do. A guy like me, you’d think I’d have thought about it, maybe prepared a code word in advance. Sloppy, I guess. I’ve got code names for most things. I guess I could have called it the Von Neumann Horizon. Or the Kurzweil Moment. Or the Vinge Point. Something.”

  “Zero Six, sir?”

  Iron Man jetted up and landed on the vast building’s flat roof.

  “Six zeroes. That’s what my count’s going to read. 00:00:00. Fifteen, no—scratch that, fourteen minutes and change from now. Singularity point.”

  “Singularity? Sir, are we talking about an ASI event?”

  “Yes, we are, Special SIGINT Support Supervisor Diane Lansing. Kudos. And when I say that, I don’t mean to sound patronizing. I am genuinely impressed that you’re keeping up. It restores my faith in the staffing caliber of the NSA. If I sound patronizing, it’s because I’m being shot at.”

  The drones came in low over the rooftop, gusting along on near-silent fans. They were matte-gray turtleshell dishes with ocular mounts at the front and turbo-fan wheels at the corners. The drones had been surveillance units, but they had been revised into tac units sometime in the last five minutes. Hastily nano-woven cannon drums under their snouts were unloading streams of ultrakinetic submunitions in Stark’s direction.

  “Sir? Sir?”

  His force field and armor sucked up the first shots, but they knocked him back. Depleted-uranium penetrator pellets, probably fired by some kind of miniature rail-gun function. More than capable of overwhelming his force field and the polarized iron/platinum/carbon-nanotube composite skins of his armor. More than capable of ripping him open and vaporizing his bones and organs.

  More Iron Man busters. Tailored specifically to kill him.

  “Please hold, caller,” he said.

  He was moving, the gunfire chasing him and making a terrible, shredded mess of the roof. Hand open, he fired a repulsor blast from his palm. One drone blew out, its casing ripped. It began to spin and disappeared over the edge of the roof, trailing sparks.

  The other spurred forward, firing. He felt the impacts across his abdomen. He’d have bruises in the morning. If there turned out to be a morning.

  There was no time for finesse. He rushed the drone and punched it hard enough to send it sailing away over the trees. It looked like it was going to end up in Delaware.

  He turned his attention back to the buildings around him, using his HUD to map the complex energy presentation surrounding the site.

  “Sir?”

  “I’m okay, thanks for asking. I hear the concern in your voice, Diane.”

  “Are you confirming an ASI event?”

  “Yes, Diane. An Artificial Super Intelligence is going to begin critical intelligence explosion in… let’s see now…eleven minutes. At that moment, it will achieve both post-human and post-AGI levels of cognition, and things will be over for us, no matter how much overtime we get.”

  “Oh god.”

  “It’s using the Black Chamber facility here as a nest, Diane. An incubator. A factory. There are raw materials, power, plus access to pretty much every communication, transmission, and data process on the planet—official and unofficial. Because the Black Chamber, through its monitoring network, is attached to pretty much every communication, transmission, and data process on the planet—official and unofficial.”

  “This is about more than cognition, then, sir?”

  “Yes, Diane. Yes it is.”

  He was scanning. Two barns over: the epicenter. A seething web of HUD-visible energy. He took off.

  “You’re smart, Diane. This isn’t just about breaking the ASI cognition threshold. This is about co-opting global communication and data systems to form the ASI cortex. Diane, you remember those movies in the 90s about computers taking over the Internet? They usually starred ex-Brat Pack actors trying to find a new career rung.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Computers taking over the Internet. It sounded so scary. Of course, it’s meaningless. But this, this is…a holistic subversion of human technology, hard and soft, slaved to a cognitive entity that is not only going to be smarter than us, it’s going to be smarter than the smartest thing we can imagine, and then it’s going to become smarter than things we can’t imagine, and then even smarter still. It will be unfathomable. It will be omnipotent. Civilization won’t just end—it will be redundant, forgotten. It will have no meaning or definition. And we will become meat components in a transitioned totality that we cannot even envision. If we’re lucky.”

  He landed on the next roof, swatting aside another drone as it came whizzing at him. He fired a focused laser beam from his arc mount and cut a slice through the skins of blast sheeting, copper signal shielding, cooling panels, and EMP insulation. He dug his fingers into the gouge and peeled back the roof.

  “Diane, Professor Stephen Hawking said that the achievement of ASI would not only be the biggest event in human history, it would also be the last.”

  Iron Man dropped through the torn-open gap, boot jets firing.

  “Sir? I have DIRNSA with me now. He’d like to speak with you.”

  “Diane, I’d rather speak to you.”

  “Sir, the Director is insisting.”

  Inside the barn sat the vast block units of the server farm, black oblongs the size of cargo containers set on the inert concrete floor. They were festooned with what looked like undergrowth or weeds.

  It was nanotechnological fiber-growth. Iron Man could actually see it building, replicating, entwining, spreading.

  Thriving.

  “It’s because he’s insisting that I’d rather keep talking to you, Diane. You’re staying calm, you’re well-informed, you’re smart, like I said, and you have a nice voice. Does he look angry and agitated? I imagine he does.”

  “I can confirm that, sir.”

  Something lunged at Iron Man. It was a humanoid shape, but taller than a man—a skeletal machine-form. Like the missiles and the drone guns, it had been designed and purpose-grown through rapid nano-facture in the past few minutes.

  Part of the new breed. A foot soldier of the new order. An extension of the ASI that was about to be born, a tool, a weapon.

  00:06:31.

  The clock had jumped again. Development rate was accelerating exponentially.

  Iron Man punched the machine away. It made no sound as his fist shattered the structure of its head. Two more attacked him, ripping at him with nano-formed claws.

  “Sir?”

  “I’m experiencing a malware issue here, Diane. Please tell the Director that instead of talking to me—or yelling, which I predict is more likely—he should use his authority and influence to coordinate SIGINT Threat Division, USCYBERCOM, S.H.I.E.L.D., CHCSS, Homeland Emergency Protocol, and SYStemic Overwatch. Tell him to contact the Avengers if he can. Tell him to get the Air Force mobilized and ready to nuke this site if I order him to. Tell him that all Stark Industries resources are now available to him on my authority. And tell him to wake up Potomac Gas & Electric.”

  “Sir?”

  Iron Man took a stinging punch to the faceplate. He wheeled and smashed a nanoform. The other clawed at him. He elbowed it aside and blew off its legs with a repulsor blast.

  He could see others self-building in the nanotech growth around him.

  “Tell him to cut the power. Now, while we still can. Everything. D.C., East Coast, national grid, public and support.”

  “Sir, there are discrete generator systems on site with you, backups that will cut in if national goes down.”

  “I’ll handle those. Tell him to cut everything he can. Is he doing it? Diane, is he doing it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A nanoform knocked Iron Man off his feet. He got back up and punched his fist through its chest plate.

  00:03:12.

  “Sir? Sir, are you close? Can you see it?”

  “Yes, Diane, I can.”


  Iron Man smashed more nanoforms aside. Ahead, he could see a shape being manufactured. Autonomic nano-facture systems were constructing a body. A vessel for the ASI.

  “It’s actually quite beautiful, Diane,” Stark said. “In its own utterly scary way. It’s like seeing a universe being born. The future. Possibilities.”

  “Sir, do you know what it is?”

  “Yes, Diane. A friend of mine made it. The original iteration, anyway. His greatest achievement. His biggest mistake. I—Diane?”

  Nothing. No response.

  The figure ahead of him, twice the size of a man, raised its head and stared at him. Its head was ovoid, burnished silver. Final scabs of nano-assembly waste composite were peeling off it like ash. Its slit eyes, almost vertically set, glowed red. Its mouth was a fixed grimace—half snarl, half smile.

  “Anthony,” it said. The voice was almost perfectly human. “Hello, Anthony.”

  “Hello, Ultron,” said Tony Stark.

  00:00:01

  FOUR

  SIBERIA

  23.55PM LOCAL, JUNE 12TH

  A MONSTER came out of the blackness behind him.

  As fast as the lightning that was his to control, Thor wheeled and punched it in the face. The blow pulverized the monster’s huge, chisel-blade teeth and smashed it back into the rain and the smoke.

  Thor Odinson—Thunder God, Avenger—heard rocks split and crack as the monster landed some distance away.

  Thor frowned. Torrential rain, as black as blood, streamed off his mail and hauberk, making his cloak hang lank and heavy. Beads of water dripped from the strands of his golden hair. He was far from amused.

  Monsters were distractions. He resumed his task.

  “Obey me,” he growled. Raindrops beat at his face. The wind howled.

  “Obey me,” he repeated with greater emphasis—this time not in the frail dialect of Midgard, but in his native tongue, the ancient language of Asgard.

  The tempest did not cooperate.

  This was no surprise: The storm was unnatural. Thor could feel the prickle of magic at work, but he didn’t need that telltale itch to know that the tempest was not an Earth-normal meteorological state. Even in the bleakest depths of Siberia—in its remotest and most exposed regions—the weather did not shroud the landscape in a fog as dark as smoke, nor did the downpours cascade as black as oil.