Extremis

by Marie Jevins

  Sal continued. “DMT interests me because it gets you to a place beyond your memory stores. You know something like sixty percent of people have the same hallucinations on DMT? Terence McKenna, rest his soul, called them ‘self-transforming machine elves.’ Little technological artifacts that spoke a basic machine code that, no matter what your language, you could understand.”

  Maya was listening intently now. She’d been rewiring the brain using science. What Sal was describing had the same effect, but his technique involved psychiatric substances instead of revisions of physical code. Tony wondered for a minute whether all three of them had the same aim—of accessing and revising human power—but different techniques.

  “McKenna thought he’d accessed the afterlife. I think it’s the operating system of the human body.”

  That was it, then: Sal was working on the same biological brain design that Maya had been working on. Tony looked at Maya and wondered whether she realized this. Sal almost certainly had, but he was goading his protégés now, pushing an agenda on them without stating where he was going.

  “The brain is actually designed to take in and process DMT. Did you know that? I think we’re supposed to take it. Supposed to see our own operating systems. And perhaps we’re supposed to hack them. Perhaps we’re supposed to change our own bodies.”

  Tony was still skeptical. He did not reply.

  “Drugs are technologies, Tony,” said Sal, as if he were lecturing a small, uninformed child. “In the places where humanity first arose, there were psychedelic mushrooms. It’s a medical fact that those mushrooms improve visual acuity. That would make early humans better hunters. The Iron Man suit you built, Tony—it has sensors, zoom lenses, and the like?”

  “Yes.” Tony leaned forward. Maybe this was going somewhere relevant, after all.

  Maya still hadn’t moved. She already could see what Sal’s rantings had to do with her research.

  “Same thing. So you can see better. So could early humans who had mushrooms in their diet. Maya, your Extremis process—it redesigns the human eye, too?”

  “Yeah. And other senses.”

  “And you were both in the business of making better hunters. Haven’t strayed far from the pack, have you? Why are you here?”

  Tony looked at Maya. “Advice.”

  “Ah,” said Sal. “Come to see the wise man of the forest. The old shaman. You know what they call a shaman in Australia? The clever fella. So which one of you is in trouble?”

  Maya glanced away. “That would be me.”

  “Let me guess. The super-soldier thing. Your old obsession. Microelectronic plug-ins for the brain?”

  “Yeah.”

  Sal sighed and continued. “No one else has ever gotten a result like old Erskine did with Captain America.”

  Tony listened intently. Captain America was a friend and colleague. His peak-human abilities didn’t require technology and armor, as Iron Man’s did. Cap’s internal biological structure had been altered more than seventy years ago by a process that had never been replicated. Maya’s research had come closest.

  Sal was still talking. He talked a lot. “You know what a Hieronymus Machine is?”

  “Yeah,” said Tony. “It’s junk in a box. Pseudoscience that does nothing.”

  “Wrong,” said Sal. “It works exactly to the experimenter’s intent. It’s a mock-up that channels willpower. Some people think Erskine’s Super-Soldier Serum was a Hieronymus Machine—that it was simply his own force of will that made it work exactly like a perfect super-soldier dose.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Tony. “You’re discounting the determination of Steve Rogers. Plus, if willpower created science, ambitious villains all over the world would be super-powered.”

  Sal jabbed a finger at Tony angrily. “You’re both in trouble. It’s just that you don’t know it yet.”

  Stunned, Tony went silent. He’d expected this visit to Sal’s would be about Maya, not himself.

  “You can barely look at yourself in the mirror anymore. Right, Tony? You’re rich, independent of the military. I have a feeling you do good works when you can. But it’s not enough. Your intellect and power isn’t enough for you. There’s a dam across your life. Built of guilt and locked in place. You want to move forward, but you can’t.”

  Now Sal pointed at Maya. “Her problem is she’s a woman. There’s a glass ceiling. It could take her years to get to where you are now—longer, since she’s dependent on other people’s money. And what would you do, Maya, if you got to Tony’s position?”

  “Four years of devoted engineering, and I could cure cancer.” Maya looked determined, dead-set on her goal. If willpower really could create a serum, she looked to be the one to do it.

  “There you go,” said Sal. “And what do you think of at night, Tony?”

  “Making a better Iron Man suit.”

  “So you can wrestle monsters or whatever it is you do?”

  Enough, thought Tony. Sal had gone too far. “No. And your juice stinks.”

  “So what does Iron Man do aside from beating up Fin Fang Foom?”

  “Stark Enterprises was complicit in war. Iron Man is going to stop it.”

  Sal laughed gently at Tony’s noble intentions. “It’d be hard to kill someone wearing an Iron Man suit,” said Sal. “For a year. Until the suit’s specs were superseded. If they haven’t been already.”

  He pointed at Maya, who looked away. “Perhaps by her. Or perhaps by her work’s tendency toward emergent behavior. Think about it, Tony. Captain America doesn’t need a suit. Won’t someone eventually come along who’s bigger and stronger? And he might not be trying to help people.”

  “Cap’s not better than me,” grumbled Tony.

  “Don’t change the subject, Tony. Is a suit really the best you can do? Maya’s working on military apps because that’s how she’s going to get the funding to cure disease. What about you?

  “What’s the Iron Man for, Tony?”

  Tony did not respond.

  Mallen approached the security checkpoint in the FBI lobby. His appearance was unassuming and utterly average for a Texan in his mid-30s, and the strange alien cocoon he’d grown back in the slaughterhouse had sloughed off completely. His short brown hair was starting to recede on his forehead even as new wrinkles had begun to form. He bore an intense look of concentration, and a furrowed brow.

  He could have taken off his coat and passed it through the X-ray machine, as the half-dozen visitors ahead of him just had. He could have simply walked through the metal detector. He wasn’t even carrying house keys or coins. And he no longer needed weapons.

  He was a weapon.

  Mallen looked up at the surveillance camera, challenged it with a sneer, then glared at the security guard next to the X-ray machine.

  “Your coat, sir,” said the guard, firmly and politely.

  Mallen responded with a fierce right cross, a punch so strong it smashed the man’s face, splattering blood and teeth across the tile floor. As the guard collapsed, Mallen tore away the man’s gun holster.

  A second guard came at Mallen now. He wore a ballistics vest as all the lobby guards did. But Mallen had no intention of firing the gun he’d just acquired.

  He pulled the handgun from its holster and threw it at the second guard.

  The gun hit the man squarely in the chest with the impact of a cannonball. He flew back, knocking over the retractable belt barrier, and landed on the floor. Mallen didn’t hesitate. He headed straight to the fallen guard and gutted him with a single swipe. Mallen’s fingers were like talons, slicing straight through flesh as if it were slow-cooked brisket.

  Three other guards aimed guns at Mallen now. He saw businesspeople and visitors running from the lobby. He looked at his bloodied hands and the two dead men in front of him with surprise. The injection had made Mallen far more powerful than he’d dreamed of becoming.

  He cracked his knuckles and ferociously launched himself at the remaining guards as the
y fired their weapons.

  The bullets tore through Mallen’s jacket and shirt, but all they did was leave slight, temporary dents in his face. Mallen ripped one man right in half and pulped the other’s head with his hand. The final security guard fired point-blank at Mallen, who broke the man’s neck with a swing of his fist.

  Civilians and federal employees all scrambled to escape the lobby, but Mallen stood between them and the entrance. A man in a business suit frantically stabbed at the elevator “Up” button. The only way out was behind those sliding doors.

  Mallen felt an unfamiliar tickle in his throat. Dang, he thought, as he realized what it was. He inhaled deeply, his breath collecting as a blue mist.

  He forced out a plume of orange flame, expelling deeply with his stomach muscles.

  A half-dozen men in ties and jackets were vaporized in Mallen’s path, leaving behind only crumbling piles of ash and DNA. Others flailed, on fire, howling unholy screams until their lungs collapsed and they fell to the floor. Mallen incinerated them with another blazing outburst. People who had rushed away from their families this morning, grocery lists in hand, boxed lunches left uneaten, were all reduced to spots of smoldering fire.

  Two men had been crouching just outside Mallen’s range. “Oops, missed you,” he said. He grabbed one man’s face with his left hand and squeezed, then impaled the other on his right fist.

  The elevator door still hadn’t opened, so Mallen forced it ajar. He breathed plumes of fire into the chute, circulating flames up to other floors, then reached up and tore the electrical panel out of the shaft wall. No one would escape this way.

  Mallen took a deep breath, waited for the hot kindling tickle in his throat, then shot out enough fire to ignite the entire lobby. Satisfied now, he stood and watched as black smoke rose from unmoving shapes, as briefcases and bagged lunches smoldered.

  “Smells like a barbeque,” he said. He’d torched the entire ground level. He looked around once more: The FBI building was a fiery inferno.

  Mallen calmly left the building, an eerie silhouette walking unharmed among the flames.

  Sal had made his point to Tony, gotten him thinking. Now Sal sat back and relaxed a bit. “I tried to inculcate in both of you a sense of the future,” he said. “As far back as Techwest. Remember that? You turned up drunk, and he turned up in a suit.

  “But you both had the future in you. Why aren’t you already running the table?”

  Tony was silent now, and so was Maya, but then a buzzing broke the silence.

  “Sorry,” said Maya, reaching into her front pocket. “Phone.”

  She listened to someone in Austin talk for a minute, then spoke. “Sal, can you put on CNN?”

  “I don’t have a TV or an Internet connection.”

  Tony interrupted. “I’ll stream it from my phone to your laptop. I assume that thing is charged?”

  “Uh, no,” said Sal, a bit sheepishly. He pushed a button on a remote and a diesel generator started up outside the living room window.

  “Sal. Fossil fuels?” Now it was Tony’s turn to smirk.

  “We’re all ethically compromised.” Sal shrugged. “You fly that plane of yours all over. I keep my beer cold. My lights run on solar, and wind turbines power my lab, but my beer refrigerator and laptop run on rotten dinosaurs.”

  As Tony streamed the news from his phone to the laptop, the three of them watched Mallen’s unfolding horror show in Houston. The FBI building was on fire, and burning corpses could be seen within the lobby. A banner across the bottom of the screen warned viewers that graphic images were being displayed.

  “Yeah, I’m here.” Maya was still on the phone with Futurepharm. “Tony, can you turn up the sound?”

  The volume bars on the laptop monitor lit up as Tony pushed a slider on his phone screen. A live newscaster with a microphone was standing outside the building.

  “…few survivors we spoke to indicate an unarmed man did all this, disabling the elevators and torching the ground level, trapping the building’s staff in a rising blaze and leaving the living and the dead to be incinerated in the lobby. Almost surreal scenes of—oh, God, move the camera. I’m sorry…”

  A firefighter in a respirator looked up at the camera. He was lifting the head of a deeply burned victim, still breathing but scarred and half-covered in bandages. The victim’s lips had been disintegrated, leaving his or her—it was impossible to tell—teeth exposed to the camera. An EMT glanced at the camera as it swung away from the victim.

  Now the newscaster was interviewing an eyewitness, a burned man.

  “He was…he was breathing fire. You could see the ripple of gas coming out of his throat—and, and then he came back, and things came out of his hands…”

  The witness broke down into sobs. Tony turned the stream off. “Why are we watching this, Maya?”

  “The signatures.” She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “The fire. The hands. A few other things. An Extremis enhancile did this.”

  Maya closed her eyes and looked terribly pained. “Whoever stole the Extremis dose took it, Tony. And lived, and did this. But the anger—”

  “Maybe he should have tried yoga,” Sal interrupted.

  She opened her eyes, shocked by his inappropriate humor, but then Sal came over and put an arm around his protégé. He took her hand.

  Tony picked up his phone again. “Happy, we’re coming back. Get the plane prepped for immediate return to Austin. And have Mrs. Rennie inform the authorities that Iron Man will assist the investigation of the incident at the Houston FBI.”

  Mallen crouched in the back of Nilsen’s van as the three men drove along Interstate 10, heading east out of Houston. No one worried about license plates anymore. All the authorities were preoccupied with the fiery nightmare at the FBI building, and not likely to notice a single vehicle pulling away from downtown.

  Beck and Nilsen had been silent ever since Mallen had leapt back through the Econoline’s rear double-doors, lit by the dancing orange flames licking up along the sides of the FBI headquarters. Now, as Nilsen drove, Beck finally swung an arm over the passenger seat and leaned back to face Mallen, who saw fear in his friend’s eyes. Good, he thought.

  “What did you do, Mallen?”

  “What did I do?” Mallen’s sneer con torted with a mixture of delight and fury.

  “I just started.”

  N I N E

  Tony’s first full day outside the garage in weeks had been complicated. He sat aboard the Stark Enterprises jet, staring at Maya, who held herself stiffly in the cushioned seat directly across from him. The sun was setting as they flew from the Bay Area back to Austin, producing brilliant hues of orange and pink that doused the passenger compartment in kaleidoscopic light.

  “I’d almost forgotten what a sunset looked like,” Tony mused. “I was shut up in my workshop on Coney Island for a month and a half.”

  Maya was obviously too miserable to enjoy the sunset. She stared into space.

  “Hey, Maya, remember me? Tony Stark? You called me, asked me to come talk to you? Was that a literal request? Because I’m talking plenty and you, you’re not talking much at all.”

  She said nothing.

  “I could’ve gone to a fun meeting today, you know. At least they'd have talked back to me. The board has lots to say. Won’t shut up, in fact.”

  “My project,” she whispered finally. “Used as a weapon.”

  “How can you be sure?” Tony asked.

  “Aside from the clear signatures and the computer analysis on the video news report that my staff performed? It happened within driving distance of Futurepharm. Inside of a couple of days of a successful Extremis installation time period.”

  “Extremis.” Tony turned the word over in his head a few times. “I think it’s time you told me all about Extremis.” He put his elbows on to the table, interlocked his fingers, and leaned his chin forward on to his hands.

  Maya closed her eyes before answering. Her greatest invention had possibly jus
t slaughtered fifty people. This must be hard for her, Tony realized.

  “Have you got anything to drink?”

  “Sal gave me some of his apple juice to take back to Mrs. Rennie.”

  “Gross. No. That’s not what I had in mind.” She opened her eyes, but didn’t look at Tony. He kept his gaze steady and fierce.

  “Extremis is a super-soldier solution,” she continued. “It’s a bio-electronics package. Fitted into a few billion graphic nanotubes and suspended in a carrier fluid. A magic bullet. Like the original Super-Soldier Serum, all in a single injection.”

  “So it’s what Sal suggested,” said Tony. “Exactly what he said. What you’ve been working on your entire adult life. Longer than I’ve known you. It hacks the body.”

  Maya nodded. “Extremis alters the part of the brain that keeps a complete blueprint of the human body. When we’re injured, we refer to that area of the brain in order to heal properly. Extremis rewrites the repair center.”

  She pulled out her phone now and scrolled through a series of icons to call up an image file. “Here, look at this photo. It’s a chicken injected with an earlier version of the serum. This is the first stage, when the entire body essentially becomes an open wound. The normal body blueprint is being replaced with the Extremis blueprint, you see? The brain is being told that the body is wrong.”

  Tony was staring at Maya with his mouth open. She looked up at him, seemingly surprised, and stopped speaking.

  “You injected a chicken with Super-Soldier Serum? Maya, that’s…you are so weird. What were you going to do if you ended up with a super-chicken?”

  Maya seemed startled. “We’d finished the mice trials, we were out of monkeys, and…it’s what we had. Why? What do you experiment on?”

  “Me.”

  “You’d better not be wrong, then.”

  “Sometimes I’m wrong. I get better.”

  “The chicken didn’t.” She flashed another photo. This one showed a red-eyed chicken encased in what looked like a bio-metallic cocoon that was rotting around the edges.