Extremis

by Marie Jevins

  “You’ve worked very hard. Most people have no idea of the kind of work you’ve done. Intellectuals, critics, and activists follow your documentaries closely. But culturally, you’re almost invisible, Mister Bellingham.”

  Tony stood directly in front of the filmmaker.

  “Have you changed anything?”

  Bellingham thought for a moment, then answered honestly.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Me neither,” said Tony. “It’s been an honor to meet you, Mister Bellingham.” Tony was sincere. Bellingham hadn’t made the interview easy on him, but he did admire the man’s dogged determination to make a difference in the world.

  “Yes, thank you for your time, Mister Stark.”

  Bellingham and the cameraman walked away. Tony thought for a minute about going back to sleep—but no, he had a world to defend, even without Stark’s weapons. He turned his back to the door and picked up his phone.

  “Open blinds.”

  The light streamed back in, revealing the glorious view of Coney Island and the Atlantic. Coney Island had been reinventing itself since Ulysses S. Grant was in the White House. Tony could do the same: revitalize Stark Enterprises and engineer a better world.

  He could be the test pilot for the future.

  Mallen could no longer sense the damp stickiness of his own blood on the slaughterhouse floor, no longer feel the chill of sweat. He was aware only of a throbbing headache, faint nausea, and the vague tingling of his stiff, unmoving limbs. He lay where he’d collapsed after the injection, unable to see anything aside from the swollen cheeks below his eyes and his own right hand stretched out in front of him. He was covered in fatty, swirled masses of copper-colored scar tissue, nearly alien in appearance. He saw all this through a haze of red, as if his eyes themselves had turned magenta.

  He faded in and out of dizzy consciousness—one moment aware of his prone state, the next deliriously hallucinating. He saw his first foster father, in a rush of memory mixed with nightmare, lying stiff just as Mallen did now, unmoving on the trailer floor among the whisky bottles. Mallen flashed to a social worker then, a tired woman wearing too much eye shadow and concealer, suddenly noticing young Mallen when he asked why his foster father was dead so often.

  He remembered a kind older couple. They were a blur of pancakes for dinner and swinging on a porch, but one of them had gone to the emergency room and never come back. Then the red haze came again, and he felt the pain of past beatings with the piercing spasms in his evolving organs. From older kids and teachers, from angry foster fathers when he’d fight…when he’d steal…when he refused to be polite to guests. As he’d gotten older, he started hitting back, especially when the younger kids would get punished. Then he’d get sent back to the county shelter, where he’d fight again. Later there had been military school, but he’d been quickly expelled, returned to the county shelter after he’d taken a sink off the boys’ bathroom wall with a medieval mace purchased at an online replica shop.

  Mallen had liked the idea of military school, of still having a chance at making something of himself, but they wouldn’t give him a gun. He’d just wanted a rifle, like when he was a kid and his dad would take him to the turkey shoot set up every year by the fire-department volunteers.

  Mallen had never hit the target, much less won. But his dad had won—not just the turkey, but all kinds of prizes: slabs of bacon, hunting knives, cider. His mother, too, would win. She’d show him her targets, pointing out how close she’d been. He hadn’t understood at first. Why was she shooting a target instead of a turkey?

  Mallen felt a cramp in his leg, but he couldn’t move. When he’d gone deer hunting with his dad, he’d had to sit unmoving for hours, making no sound. But this…this wasn’t hours. How long had he been here now? Days?

  He was imprisoned by his body, no longer recognizable as his own—trapped by a bio-metallic cocoon. He was incubating. Transforming. But into what?

  T H R E E

  Iron Man saves lives.

  Tony thought about the interview with Bellingham as he headed out of his office to the elevator. He was in the business of helping the world, not harming it.

  Right?

  His phone rang. Mrs. Rennie, as usual. Tony watched the phone ring, making sure the elevator camera caught him simply staring at it for a moment. Then, on the fifth ring, he finally picked up.

  “How’s your practicing going for the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest?” he asked.

  “Your fans can take care of that important task, Mister Stark. I only eat junk food when it’s available on a stick.” She paused, then changed the subject. “I’ve informed your senior staff that you’re available for a meeting since you’ve finally emerged from that dreary garage.”

  “No meetings, Mrs. Rennie. I have actual real work to do.”

  “Running Stark Enterprises is part of your work, Mister Stark, and given that you’ve delegated care and feeding of your eager fans to me…”

  “Later, Mrs. Rennie. Later,” said Tony. He clicked the phone off. She really needed to be paying attention to the ticket seller at the Wonder Wheel box office, not lecturing him pointlessly. He was well aware of his responsibilities as CEO of Stark Enterprises.

  John Bellingham says the Iron Man suit is a military application, he thought. I told him he was wrong. Iron Man is used for extraordinary rescue-and-response situations. For helping people in trouble. Right?

  What if I was lying?

  His phone rang again. The name GEOFF PETERSON popped up. He was on Stark’s board of directors—a dull bureaucrat Tony had promoted out of the accounting department. Clumsy with women, though excellent with details and numbers. Tony dreaded spending time with him. Might as well get this over with.

  “Geoff, how the heck are you? Tell me something: Does Iron Man save lives?”

  “Tony, what did Bellingham get you to say on screen?”

  “Nothing untrue. It went all right. We’ll talk about the interview later.”

  “Mrs. Rennie set up a senior staff meeting at four. And we need to update you on—”

  “What? Geoff, I’m on the elevator, and you’re cutting out. Get on those new Stark phones right away, we can take that market. Our satellites reach everywhere. I can’t hear you. See, the world needs a Stark phone.” He clicked off, chuckling. The elevator reached the ground floor, and he headed out the service entrance.

  As Tony entered the garage, he tossed the phone on to the workbench. He loosened his tie, then stripped off his suit and began to speak.

  “Stark voicelog: Record: Datestamp.

  “Iron Man represents the future. I’ve never sold any element of the Iron Man armor to the military.”

  Naked now, Tony stood in darkness in front of his Iron Man suit. The only light was a faint glow coming from his own chest—from the embedded circular arc reactor that had saved his life and that powered his armor. The red-and-gold Iron Man armor was huge, powerful, and bulky. He’d previously fit a portable version into a briefcase, but his modifications eventually had made it too large. He hadn’t worked out how to make the suit both powerful and convenient.

  Tony pulled on his polymer circuit-skin first, covering himself from neck-to-toe. This flexible substrate film of microscopic physiological conductors was designed to interact via miniaturized sensor units with the armor on his wireless body area network, or WBAN. The armor needed to be able to act almost as his limbs, to respond at the speed of thought. Anything else would put him at risk.

  “That land mine put shrapnel two centimeters from my heart,” Tony continued, still recording his voicelog. “My every movement allowed it to inch closer. I had to design a system to hold the shrapnel where it was, then incorporate that system into a self-defense solution to break me out of captivity.

  “It was the first time I’d had to design something that saved lives.”

  He stepped forward into the armor, clicking it open and shut a piece at a time. The shin guards. The boots. The gauntlets
. Each component snapped on methodically, in a precise order. He preferred the automated process he’d installed at both the Midtown corporate center and at the Stark West Coast headquarters, but out here at Coney Island, Tony had to put on the suit manually.

  “It was a stopgap measure, but it got me home. I’ve improved it, tinkered with it, ever since. I wasn’t sure why at first—except that it wasn’t about the future, but my future. The armor allows me to pretend I’m not just a man who made land mines. The reactor, the armor—it keeps me alive. I’m not a man trapped in armor. I’m a man freed by it.”

  He pulled the helmet over his head. Tony Stark was now completely covered in advanced technology, decades ahead of any other system on the planet. He flipped the visor down, transforming his look from human to machine.

  “Iron Man command system on. Start.”

  Iron Man’s chest-plate arc reactor and eyes glowed white. Inside the armor, Tony glanced at the readouts on his internal helmet holographic display. The word LOADING appeared.

  “Root/experimental systems/ocular motion reader for sight-based system control. Start.”

  Propulsion and repulsor levels steadily rose to capacity.

  “Launch.”

  Iron Man’s boot jets emitted a fiery kinetic thrust, propelling him upward in a haze of non-toxic emissions. He rose slowly, then sped up. He glanced at the garage roof and watched his target crosshairs lock on it. Nice to see ocular targeting was online, but blasting his way out of the garage wasn’t necessary. “Targeting systems off,” said Tony, as steel roof doors on motion sensors slid aside, opening a portal from the garage to the outside world.

  After weeks of seclusion, Iron Man rocketed into the blue sky of a bright Brooklyn afternoon. Dozens of heads down below looked up, all at once. Iron Man—at heart a showman, like his father Howard Stark before him—did a somersault, lost balance for a second, then waved cheerily at the crowd below. He blew a kiss to his fans.

  “Recalibrate mobility control, Jarvis,” Tony said, speaking to the AI-enhanced supercomputer that was the backbone of his Iron Man suit. Tony concentrated on the visual flight system interface—the HUD, or Heads-Up Display, which projected holographic information within his line of sight. “Set stability to automatic for the next two minutes. I’m out of practice.”

  “Certainly, sir.” Tony had programmed his AI with the attributes of his former butler, Edwin Jarvis, once employed by Tony’s father and now head of the Avengers’ support staff. Like Jarvis himself, Tony’s AI was usually efficient—but unlike the flesh-and-blood butler, the AI wasn’t always good with subtext or subtlety.

  He flew in low, low enough to see slack-jawed strangers mouthing the words “Iron Man” and “He’s the coolest” as he streaked above them on his way to the beach, leaving vapor trails all the way to the Atlantic. He shot straight up, broke the sound barrier, gained altitude, then hovered as he checked his readings. All were normal.

  “Ha ha ha ha ha!” Tony had been inside too long. That interview with Bellingham had given him renewed faith in his mission and in Stark Enterprises’ new direction. He flew now because he could, because he wanted to believe in himself. He’d made all this possible through engineering, his conviction that a better future lie ahead, and his own innate genius.

  “Jarvis, run plasma diagnostics. Confirm that all cybernetics and the cooling system are at one hundred percent. Do a complete check. The suit has been in mothballs too long.”

  As he awaited the report from the systems check, Tony gazed at the brilliance of the afternoon—at the roiling sea, the living past, its ecosystem billions of years old. Then he looked over at a jumble of the present and hope for the future, miracles of human engineering and innovation, the Verrazano Bridge and the amusements of Coney Island.

  He could hear the screams of thrill-seekers as they rattled along the Cyclone roller-coaster tracks, just as they had since 1927. The screams competed with the thumping bass from the speakers of a dance party on the dizzying Polar Express ride, and the crack of a baseball bat at the park that had helped revitalize the area yet again after years of ups and downs, once more moving it forward into the future.

  Tony listened for the screams of the riders on the Wonder Wheel. No screams, he thought. Something was wrong.

  The Wonder Wheel at Luna Park was motionless. All lights and power had been cut. That never happened. Well, almost never. Only during giant blackouts or storms affecting the entire coastline. “Open a line to Mrs. Rennie,” said Tony.

  A minute later, her voice filled his helmet. “Hurry, Mister Stark. A foolish teenager climbed out of one of the Wonder Wheel passenger cars while the ride was moving. They’ve stopped the ride now, but he’s hanging from the car and seems likely to fall. Your fans are not enjoying this. Also, a child has vomited on my shoes.”

  “Cease diagnostics, Jarvis.”

  “Cooling systems are offline for testing. Minimum reboot time is eighteen seconds. Using repulsor systems without cooling is not recommended.”

  “Eighteen seconds is too long. Keep cooling offline. I’ll hurry.”

  Iron Man hesitated just long enough for processing to cease, then blasted through the air back to Coney Island.

  How and why had a teenager gotten out of the Wonder Wheel carriage? A dare? A suicide attempt? A hazing? You don’t figure out how to unlock a sliding cage door at 150 feet by accident. But there was no time to speculate. Iron Man zoomed across the surf and sand, over the boardwalk, past the kiddie park, and came in low beneath the Ferris wheel. Tony mentally calculated the trajectory of the boy, if he should fall.

  “Jarvis, how hot am I?” For the moment, Tony was glad to have not built his butler’s sense of humor into the suit’s AI.

  “Within acceptable parameters. You have ten seconds until you will begin to sweat profusely. In approximately two minutes, you risk serious dehydration. Experimentation beyond that point is not recommended. The Iron Man suit’s composite alloy has not been tested for suitability in baking or roasting situations.”

  “Send a message to Happy—tell him to meet me at the Wonder Wheel with a smoothie, and make a note for me to try cooking brownies in this thing one day.”

  As Tony approached the Wonder Wheel, he spotted the teen clinging precariously to an open carriage door. The kid had had the bad fortune to board one of the red cars that swings wildly along a track along with the Wheel’s movements. Any motion could send the carriage sliding along the rail, taking the kid with it.

  Iron Man slowed to hover just beneath the car.

  “Let’s go, kid. Just take your hands off the rail. I’m going to catch you and put you back in the car.”

  “Not back in the car!” The teen’s eyes were wide. He looked terrified.

  “Um, okay. Not back in the car. We’ll go to the ground. Ground is good.” Tony fired off the smallest possible repulsor thrust and gently rose through the air to hover alongside the kid. He was sizzling inside the armor, which threatened to overheat. This had to end quickly.

  “N-n-n-nooo!” The teenager wasn’t going to make this easy.

  “Look, kid, you can’t stay here forever. You’ll get hungry. You’ll need to go to school. You’ll have to go to the bathroom. You’ve got to convince yourself to let go so I can help you. You’re in charge of your muscles. Take over. I get that this was probably an unexpected turn to your day, but you are strong enough to let those muscles know who’s boss.”

  “I…I can’t.”

  “Kid, I understand. I know right now I look tough in all this fancy armor, but once, when I was about your age, I went SCUBA diving near San Diego with my…well, my dad’s pilot. I’d like to say I went with my dad, but my dad was busy a lot, so his pilot took me. Because he didn’t have all that much to do when my dad didn’t need to fly somewhere. And I didn’t know what I was doing—I had no business even trying to dive, didn’t have a license—but sometimes when you’re rich, people overlook things like licenses. Worse, you make stupid decisions. And
I got into some trouble, so I just grabbed the ship’s anchor line, and bobbed up and down, up and down in the waves—afraid to go under and afraid to let go. I thought I was going to drown out there in the ocean, and I’d get eaten by a walrus or something. But I had to let go, or else no one could pull me up and on to the boat.”

  “Did you…did you let go?”

  “Yeah, I did. But only after the captain stuck his head over the railing and told me, like I’m pointing out to you, that if I didn’t let go, he couldn’t help me. He said if I let go, the waves would carry me up to the front of the boat, and he’d catch me. He said I had to trust him.”

  The kid started to relax, finally.

  “I’ll try.”

  Suddenly, a teenage girl stuck her head out from inside the car.

  “I didn’t think he’d take it so bad. Wait, you’re Tony Stark under that metal, aren’t you? The handsome billionaire? Want to go get some pizza after this?” She smiled and giggled.

  “I’d climb out if I were stuck with someone as insensitive as her, too,” said Iron Man quietly to the teenage boy.

  The girl shifted her weight and held out an arm, positioning herself to snap a photo of Iron Man with her phone. “Move up a bit, I want to be in the picture, too,” she commanded.

  “Wait, don’t move!”

  Too late. The girl’s movement sent the carriage sliding down the rail. The boy struggled to hang on to the moving car, but his grip was slipping.

  The boy plummeted. Between him and the ground were more than a hundred feet of steel rails.

  “Jarvis, engage overdrive.”

  Iron Man caught up to the teenager almost instantly, grabbing him about the waist and chest, then pulling him clear of the Wheel just before he collided with one of the main rims.

  Tony decelerated on the way down, holding the frightened kid’s midsection tight. They landed, a bit more abruptly than Tony intended. He was distracted by sweat rolling into his eyes.

  “Jarvis, bring cooling system back online,” said Tony. “And hurry. My eyes feel like they’re on fire, and my vision is blurred.”