Extremis

by Marie Jevins

  “No, Maya. This is my fight to finish. No one else will understand the level of threat, and I’m the only one who can handle him.”

  She raised her eyebrows with skepticism. “I doubt that.”

  “Look,” he explained. “Anyone else will make the same mistake I made. Overconfidence. He’s far more dangerous than he looks because Extremis is still evolving. I don’t want the death of an Avenger on my hands.”

  “Tony, you said he’s going to Washington. For God’s sake, at least warn them.”

  “If I die on the table, you warn them. Contact number is in my phone. Phone’s in my armor. The PIN is 0000.”

  “Really, Tony? Why not just make it ‘password’?”

  “Cut me some slack. You know it’s a new phone. I just got it on the way down here.” He laid his head back now.

  “Maya, this is what I do. All I have is making the future and stopping the animals who want to take the future away from people. This muck of yours is the future. It shouldn’t be wasted on killers. You know that. They all need to see that, and so do I. Are the bags hooked up?”

  “Tony, if we’ve made even one mistake in the compiling…”

  “Stop it, Maya. We haven’t. You haven’t. You’ve always been ready to use this. You’re smarter than I am…always have been. All those years I was making weapons, you were working on this. Getting it right, while I was just a guy in an Iron Man suit.”

  Maya punched a sequence of keys, then slowly pushed a hydraulic press, compiling the final live dose of the Extremis serum. She removed the completed cartridge of serum from the compiler and snapped it into a hypodermic jet injector. She inspected it for a moment, held it up over the operating table, then looked at Tony.

  “Ready?”

  She held the injector to Tony’s shoulder and pulled the trigger, releasing the serum into his blood.

  “Hold still,” said Maya. “Don’t squirm.”

  “I know this seems impossible,” said Tony, “but I always wanted to be more than I already am. Sal said something about that. That he’d tried to instill a sense of the future in us both. That was it. Funny: This is the second time I’ve had to work against the clock for the Iron Man to save my life.”

  Tony choked, gagged, and spat up blood. Maya pulled the jet injector back from his body and let it drop to her side, its cartridge empty.

  “One last thing,” Tony whispered. “Text Mrs. Rennie. Tell her to...cancel my…meetings.”

  He jerked violently, howling in pain. Black liquid mixed with blood spewed out of his mouth as his back arched involuntarily. With one final spasm, Tony Stark, the invincible Iron Man, collapsed, limp on the operating table.

  F O U R T E E N

  Oh, God.

  Tony felt a steady, painful throbbing in his head. His heart palpitated, thudding erratically. His lungs gurgled, and his joints pounded with pain. He saw nothing but blackness all around. I’ve lost my sight, he thought.

  Then he realized: He wasn’t supposed to be conscious.

  “What’s happening, Maya?” But words wouldn’t come. He couldn’t move his mouth. He couldn’t move anything at all. He struggled to speak, to tell Maya that something had gone wrong. To say that he felt trapped—bound in a rigid, thick cast, a stiff coating. That Extremis had caused him to feel nothing but continued agony and exhaustion. The process had failed.

  “Can you hear me?” He spoke, but he didn’t speak. Like in a dream, except he wasn’t able to wake up.

  A dull, red glow crept into his peripheral vision.

  As it brightened, Tony realized it was a light. A reddish light in a dingy room lined with scrap-heap paneling and sheetrock. A makeshift room in a cave of metamorphic stratified rock. He knew this place. He knew the old, simple ceiling fan that rotated, off-balance, overhead, its blades covered in dust. As if it would fall at any moment.

  He’d seen this before.

  “Can you hear me? Am I alive?” He could speak now. He could move. Ah, but the pain.

  “I can hear you, Mr. Stark. You are alive.” That voice…a man’s voice. Not Maya. Not Futurepharm.

  “AAAaaahh!” Tony jerked up, his eyes wide open now. He coughed, reached for a glass of water that wasn’t there. Grabbed at the electrodes Maya had placed on his chest, but they weren’t there either.

  He lay on a filthy cot in a small, poorly lit room. He knew this place. He was back in the mountains of Afghanistan. His hand went straight to his naked chest, to the damp, bloody bandages. This wasn’t real. This was Tony’s transformation seizing control of his mind, Extremis invading his most private thoughts and memories.

  Why can’t I wake up?

  “Not so much with the noise, Mister Stark.” A warm hand was on his shoulder. Not Maya’s small hand, soft from years of desk jobs. The rough hand of a man.

  “And not so much with the moving. There is a piece of shrapnel lodged next to your heart. I could not remove it.”

  Ho Yinsen stood above him. His friend. His savior. The thin, white-haired Asian man who had saved Tony’s life after the Stark Sentinel should have killed him.

  “I know you.” Tony turned his head slightly, furrowed his brow, and spoke the same words he had that day in Kunar province. “We met at a conference in Bern…you’re Ho Yinsen, the medical futurist.”

  “Good memory for one who was so blisteringly drunk,” said Yinsen. “If I had been that drunk, I wouldn’t have been able to stand, much less give a lecture.” He laughed a bit, showing his brown teeth. “I got too used to the easy living of the conference-touring scientist. The hotels. The room service. The expense account. Then you take one wrong turn in a foreign city, and…here I am.” He smiled and wrinkled his eyes behind his round, wire-rimmed eyeglasses. He still wore a wrinkled suit, the tie long since removed. His white shirt was unbuttoned casually at the top, stained with blood from some unknown medical emergency. Maybe Tony’s own.

  “And where’s here?”

  “A remote camp of the…well, what do we call them? Insurgents? Gunmen? Terrorists? Guerrillas? It is all the same.”

  Tony leaned forward on the cot.

  “They have Yinsen, the great medical innovator, for combat medicine. And now they have Anthony Stark, the great weaponeer. You see this?” Yinsen motioned to a pile of electronics—old CRT monitors, used PCs, worthless mobile phones, cables, unarmed ordnance, makeshift explosives, fuses, broken detonators—stacked on an old door set up as a makeshift table on two sawhorses. “This is your future now. This will shortly be explained to you, probably with great violence.”

  Tony stared quizzically.

  “They want you to build them a weapon that they can use against the Americans,” said Yinsen.

  “From this?” Tony sat up now, one hand to his chest. “Oh, God, that hurts…”

  Yinsen stood up, laughed sharply, and leaned forward. “Lucky for you, your wound is fatal. You will be dead within a week. The shrapnel is moving. You will be slowly stabbed to death by a chunk of your own munitions.”

  “Swell,” said Tony.

  “Yinsen is not so lucky. For he is tougher than John Wayne’s old boots, and he will live forever.”

  That sounded like a slight exaggeration, but Tony let it go. “I can’t give these people a weapon,” he said.

  “If you try hard,” said Yinsen, mock-cheerfully, “you could make yourself die first.”

  “You’re not helping.” Tony scratched his head. That hurt, too. Everything hurt. Getting hit by your own land mine sucked.

  “You are lucky to have me as a friend, whitey,” said Yinsen.

  “Yes, I am,” Tony acknowledged. He cracked his neck and began, unsteadily, to push himself to his feet. “In Bern, you were talking about helping land-mine victims in Korea. Magnetic wound excision.”

  “I cannot remove the shrapnel,” said Yinsen, apologetically. “It presses on your heart. There could be a rupture.”

  “Not remove it,” said Tony. “Hold it. Hold it in place. Stop it from working
itself in deeper.” He stood up.

  “AAKKKK!” Tony’s heart pounded, and his muscles seized up. He clutched his aching chest and vomited blood. He fell to his knees, spitting more blood on the dirt floor.

  “Back to bed with you,” said Yinsen. “Die in relative comfort, at least.”

  Tony crouched on all fours now, unable to stand. He was glad to be still wearing his trousers, the same ones he’d had on when he’d arrived in Kunar. “Did…did you see my presentation at the conference?”

  “I am afraid I walked out. Something about exoskeletons for soldiers. War stuff.”

  “It wasn’t for war,” Tony gasped, still staring at the floor. “That was just to get the funding. You can’t just…wish the future into being. I’m a pragmatic dreamer. It has to be bought and paid for. Even the munitions I made…were just stealing money from the Army for the real work.”

  Yinsen was interested now. “And what is the real work?”

  “Test-piloting the future. The Iron Man program I floated at the conference is not about exoskeletons or war. It’s about becoming better. It’s about bringing on the future. The earliest stages of adapting machine to man and making us great.” Tony stood up now. Slouching to stop his chest from aching, he gingerly stepped over to the table of obsolete electronics. He wiped the blood from his mouth.

  “We’re going to make a prototype Iron Man out of this junk.” Tony thought back—forward?—to the present for a moment. To the armor destroyed during the battle on the interstate, now crumpled and lying in a corner of Maya’s lab. To his new alloy suit in the briefcase, waiting for him. “A wearable weapon for hosts. And you’re going to build a magnetic field generator into the chest plate.” He glanced back at Yinsen. “We’re going to build something that keeps me alive long enough to get us both out of here. Because my work isn’t finished yet.”

  A mild static shock coursed through Tony’s limbs, jolting him back to the present. Extremis was affecting his muscles, flowing through his body and creating localized micro-spasms, but he couldn’t move to relieve them. He was held in place, incapacitated by what felt, ironically, like a rigid suit of iron.

  Then Maya spoke in a distant, muffled voice.

  “Tony? Tony, are you okay in there? You’re inside a cocoon of synthesized organic bio-metal. I’m shooting x-rays of your right hand and knee once an hour. I’m seeing progress in the bone structure. The second hour showed all bones in your hand had been rebuilt, and now the knee is being modified. But I can’t see anything else because of the cocoon. I thought I’d still get your vital signs through the framework, but they’re blocked. I don’t know if you’re alive. Give me a sign, anything. Try to breathe loudly or something. Whine, moan, anything.

  “Tony, can you hear me? Damn you for trying this. This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”

  He tried to respond, tried to see, to open his mouth to ask how exactly she’d thought things were supposed to be. But instead he passed out again, losing himself in the past.

  Days had gone by now. Tony stood, still shirtless but now with a crude flexible metal plate affixed to his chest. That was Yinsen’s magnet, designed to pull the shrapnel away even as it fought to reach Tony’s heart.

  Tony shielded his eyes from the single generator-powered lamp overhead that lit the musty room. He gave a quick glance at the surveillance camera in the corner and hoped no one was watching. They had to hurry.

  “I tell you…either it’s finished or I am.” He tossed a wrench down on the table.

  “It is done…and probably so are you,” said Yinsen. He picked up the gray steel chest plate that he and Tony had hammered into shape, and advanced toward Tony. “Quickly now.”

  Tony slipped his arms through the straps that would hold the chest plate in place. “Oh, God. That’s heavy.” Yinsen gave the chest plate a push, adjusting it.

  “Will you be able to move?”

  “Once the power’s on. If the power cells are good, if they’re storing and recycling the arc-reactor energy. If my math was right with the palladium we pulled out of that dud warhead. And my math is always right.”

  Yinsen walked around to tighten the straps across Tony’s back.

  “Lock it in place, Yinsen. Quickly. It’s making my chest tighten.”

  “It is all I can do to lift it. Hold on a few moments more.”

  Tony stumbled. “Too heavy.”

  “Get the power on,” said Yinsen.

  Tony twisted the rotary switch around the arc reactor on the chest. Later, this would be the technology he’d implant internally, replacing the magnet and keeping the shrapnel at bay. But now, nothing happened. Yinsen went to his bag and dug around.

  “The last of my medical kit. A stimulant,” he said.

  “I have a piece of metal rubbing against my heart…and you want to make it beat faster…?”

  “Get the power on, Tony.”

  “I’m trying.”

  The chest plate sprang to life, glowing white from the palladium arc reactor, and Tony stumbled back in surprise. But he no longer had problems with the weight of the armor.

  Yinsen came over with an injector. He pressed it against Tony’s neck and depressed the trigger.

  “This either saves you or kills you,” said Yinsen.

  “Either way: Thank you for trying, my friend.” Tony glanced up at the security camera. Their captors would be along any minute. “Been a hell of a week, hasn’t it? The next bit’s going to be really interesting. Let’s finish getting this suit on me.”

  “Wake up, Mr. Stark! This laziness is unacceptable. You have a business to run.”

  Mrs. Rennie? Tony struggled to open his eyes inside the high-tech cocoon. He couldn’t do it.

  “The board demands you respond immediately regarding your extended field test of the new phone. Mister America from the Avengers has called several times—something about a fight he saw on the television news—and he seems quite concerned that perhaps you’ve expired. And your fans weren’t happy with the Wonder Wheel, which isn’t surprising given what a disaster that excursion was. They want to see your Iron Man creature do tricks for them. And where is your worthless self? Answer me immediately, Mr. Stark, or I shall be forced to inform Ms. Potts that you are with this Maya character, that you replaced your hands with duck noses, and have gone missing.”

  No, no, thought Tony. Don’t tell Pepper. She won’t trust me again. I need her to trust me. She’s what is truly good in my life. And she needs to finish her field research…it’s crucial to the company’s future.

  But Tony couldn’t speak, and he had to be imagining this anyway. Mrs. Rennie was in Coney Island. He was in Texas. There’s no way she could be here, on the other side of the bio-metallic cocoon, barking demands at him. Would Maya have even let her into the lab? And what was that about duck noses?

  Then he realized she wasn’t in the room. She was inside the cocoon with him, a big floating Mrs. Rennie head.

  “Mister Stark, call me the second you grow your hands back, or use that eye thing you do to tell your fancy phone to call me. How can I expect to run a business with you eating all the toner and sending me all these poodles?”

  He hadn’t expected a vivid imagination to be a side effect of Extremis. This was worse than that time he and his buddy Rhodey, from the Air Force, had gone to central Africa to negotiate with those warlords who’d claimed to have salvaged warheads. They’d both taken that experimental malaria medication for the CDC trials and started hallucinating. Rhodey had been about to hit him with a rock that was really a hyena, and Tony had been convinced that he was there as a missionary charged with saving Rhodey’s soul. Thankfully, a bigger threat—an angry renegade bull elephant—had snapped them out of their delirium.

  Stay calm, Tony reminded himself. Rest. Wait for Extremis to rebuild the body’s healing center. Recompile.

  But then Mrs. Rennie morphed into Obadiah Stane’s big, bald head, hovering in front of Tony.

  “I know where Pepper is, To
ny. I’m going to go find her. And when I do, I’m going to force her to tell me what mission you sent her on. She’s helpless without Iron Man’s protection. And I’ll use that information to take over Stark Enterprises—again. Do you remember that, Tony? When your company was mine and not yours? Do you remember how you ended up locked out, living on the streets? How I renamed it Stane International?”

  How could Tony possibly forget when his father’s business partner had launched a hostile takeover? When he’d used not only legal channels to shut Tony out of his own company, but had also made his own armor and called himself Iron Monger?

  How do I change the channel in this hallucination?

  “Pepper Potts is anything but helpless, Stane, whether Iron Man’s around or not.” Tony forced his dream self to argue Pepper’s defense. If he stopped trying to move his mouth and accepted that this wasn’t real, he could do it. “She’s the most competent person I’ve ever met. She runs circles around you when it comes to business. If Pepper had been trying a hostile takeover against me instead of your pathetic self, Stane, I’d never have gotten back control of the company. I’d still be out on the streets today, drinking myself into a stupor.”

  “You’ll lose her in the end, Stark,” said the big, floating Obadiah head. “You don’t have what it takes to keep a smart, capable woman interested. You only get the trophies, the pretty ones after your money.”

  “How can I lose her, you idiot?” said Tony. “I don’t even have her. She still avoids me whenever I try to talk about anything personal.”

  “You haven’t even noticed that Happy Hogan is competing with you. Your own chauffeur, one of your best friends, is trying to steal your girlfriend.”

  “God, shut up! You don’t exist, Stane, and Pepper doesn’t need me—or any man—to take care of her. You’re a side effect of the Extremis, my own insecurities battling it out in my imagination. If I’d known I’d have to talk to you again, I’d have stuck with dying inside my armor.”

  “You need some whisky, Stark. It’ll help you handle your miserable failure against Mallen. You couldn’t protect those innocents driving those cars. Their deaths are your responsibility.”