Chapter 134 - Mushy Terms

Chapter 134: Chapter 134 - Mushy Terms

Thor had discovered that mortals became much more entertaining when offered an impossible task and alcohol in the same room.

Barton stood over Mjolnir with his right hand wrapped around the leather grip, his shoes planted against the floor and the expression of a man preparing to expose a cheap carnival trick. The hammer remained on Tony’s coffee table. Thor lounged opposite him with one arm stretched along the back of the sofa, smiling into his drink.

"You may use both hands," Thor offered.

"Generous."

Clint pulled until the tendons stood out along his forearms without moving the hammer, and Thor’s smile broadened with every second.

The gathering had begun as an excuse to drink after Sokovia. Fury’s operation possessed no official name, no surviving agency and no sensible insurance category, so Tony had called it a victory party and made the catering department deal with the philosophical details. Natasha’s left shoulder had been cleaned, closed and bound by Stark medical equipment. Steve’s shield was less fortunate. Several inches of its rim remained blackened and missing, which had forced Tony to place it behind glass before Steve could carry the damaged thing through the furniture.

No one had asked whether Lucius was invited. Asking had never influenced his access to the building.

While Thor encouraged Clint to injure himself for Asgardian amusement, Tony, Bruce and Lucius stood one floor below in the restricted laboratory.

The sceptre rested inside a transparent containment frame. Its blue housing remained open beneath three scanners, exposing the counterfeit Stone that Lucius had installed in Sokovia. Yellow light moved inside it with the quiet assurance of an object that had never been stolen, rebuilt or asked to lie for several decades.

Tony had placed two holograms above the central workbench.

JARVIS appeared as a restrained blue web, clean connections branching from a simple core. The model looked almost modest until one noticed that every line represented enough active decisions to run Stark Tower, manage the Iron Legion and prevent Tony from ordering industrial equipment while drunk.

Beside it, the false Stone’s neural map folded through itself in a golden thicket. Connections opened inside connections, vanished beneath layers and returned somewhere they should not have been able to reach. It looked less like a mind than an argument conducted by lightning.

After enlarging both models, Tony indicated the first. "JARVIS started as a language interface. Now he runs the company whenever Pepper and I are busy pretending we do. That is the best artificial intelligence on Earth."

"Thank you, sir."

Tony pointed at the golden lattice. "And this makes him look like a calculator with excellent manners."

"I am choosing to interpret that as praise."

Tony possessed one of the most dangerous minds in the universe. His ego remained the only thing in the room with a fair chance of outgrowing it.

Bruce leaned closer to the shifting structure. The party had persuaded him to lose the jacket, but not the caution. "It isn’t code in any way our systems should be able to read."

"They can read enough." Tony split the model and laid one half over the behavioural architecture he had been training for planetary security. Most of the connections failed. A few joined, lit and remained stable. "The distributed program already learns across independent bodies. This could let it think across them without waiting for a central system to approve every response."

"Or it could let one mind reach every body at once."

"That is also how management works. Nobody calls Pepper an extinction risk."

Bruce merely looked at him.

"Nobody who still enjoys employment."

Lucius kept behind them and allowed the two scientists to cook their next catastrophe. The original Mind Stone rested safely in his Inventory, beyond every scanner Tony owned. What they were admiring was his counterfeit, built to preserve the shape of the opportunity while keeping the useful cosmic object for himself.

He had no particular concern for the Avengers as a collection. He read hundreds of comics. In one, they were dead. In another, they were evil. Several had managed both, sometimes without even changing costumes. The hentai and doujinshi had added further branches that no responsible continuity should acknowledge without protective eyewear.

The SMS deity could have dropped him into any contaminated mixture of them and called the result character development.

Lucius had stopped expecting purity from the universe. He was stronger after every worthwhile sacrifice; the real Stone belonged to him, and the remaining Eternals were still waiting to become improvements. All the plot required was controlled heat and enough distance to avoid being splashed when the pot exploded.

Tony snapped his fingers in front of him. "Try looking involved and tell me what you think, wizards, gamma and fruit varieties. With this architecture, I can put protection around the whole planet."

Bruce straightened away from the display. "You want to connect the defence program to something we don’t understand, give it access to the Legion and let it decide what counts as a threat."

"I want it to recognise a threat before New York develops another hole in the sky."

"That much power should not sit in one mind, Tony, whether human, alien or artificial."

Tony brought up the twenty-three failed designs that had preceded this one. Each broke apart around a different central dependency. "It won’t sit in one body. No command centre, no single kill switch, no government console with a large red button and a senator leaning on it. Every unit sees, learns and responds."

"Which means every unit shares the same mistake."

"Only until the system learns."

Bruce’s protest remained, but its edge softened as Tony moved from aspiration to architecture. The safeguards covered independent permissions, layered restrictions, civilian exclusion and local shutdown. The objections became questions, then modifications, then the dangerous silence of two brilliant men discovering that a terrible idea had interesting engineering.

Tony looked to Lucius again. "You’ve been unusually quiet, which usually means theft or nudity."

"If you think it can protect the world, go for it."

Bruce turned away from the model. "Is that your entire contribution?"

"I also recommend backups, advice that has kept me alive through several friendships."

Tony sent the first integration trial into an isolated environment. The display filled with rejected connections, but eleven held. JARVIS began another variation before Tony asked.

"I shall continue the trials. The interface may require several hours."

Above them, Clint’s shout of effort carried faintly through the ceiling.

Tony closed the defence model. "We should get back before Point Break convinces somebody to rupture something expensive."

Bruce looked towards the ceiling. "Are you worried about the hammer or Barton?"

"The table, because I own the table."

By the time they returned, Clint had surrendered, and Tony had decided failure suffered from inadequate equipment.

One gauntlet of his new armour sealed around his right forearm. Lucius’s dark-gold shell no longer covered the suit, but Tony had kept enough scans to complain about the parts he could not reproduce. He gripped Mjolnir and pulled until the servos whined and the table creaked beneath the effort.

Thor raised his cup towards Bruce and Lucius as they entered. "Stark believes more metal shall improve his worth."

"It improves most things," Tony grunted.

"It has done nothing for your height."

Tony abandoned the attempt before the table gave him a repair bill. "Banner, scientific integrity demands an independent trial."

Bruce looked at the hammer, then at everyone waiting for him to become irritated. "Scientific integrity says I don’t perform strength tests in a room full of people hoping I turn green."

"Cowardice wearing glasses, then, so Sam can save scientific integrity."

Sam Wilson remained in his chair. "I watched a seven-foot demon rot Captain America’s shield. I’m comfortable with my current ranking."

Natasha shifted her bound shoulder against the sofa. "A sensible man should be disqualified from this building."

Thor laughed and gestured towards Steve. "Then let the captain try."

Steve approached without Tony’s performance or Clint’s suspicion. He set both hands around the grip and tested the weight.

Mjolnir moved.

The shift was barely more than a scrape against the wood. Thor’s cup stopped short of his mouth. For one heartbeat the delight left his face, replaced by the private alarm of a prince watching constitutional reform happen on a coffee table.

Steve saw Thor’s reaction; his mouth tightened at one corner, and the hammer settled back into place.

"Nothing."

Thor lowered his cup with care. "It was still a worthy effort."

"That sounded a little nervous."

"You mistake pity for concern."

Natasha declined before anyone asked. Some questions did not improve by receiving answers in public, especially when the answer came from an enchanted weapon belonging to a man who treated barrels of liquor as family history.

Tony began explaining fingerprints, runic security and the likelihood that Thor had built the entire contest around an Asgardian access code. Thor listened with magnificent patience before giving them his simpler conclusion.

"None of you are worthy."

The room objected at once.

Lucius smiled from the edge of the gathering. For all the speeches attached to it, the hammer’s judgment was a runic riddle backed by Odin’s authority. Righteousness had never been the same thing as being right, and Steve’s principles had already started negotiating with themselves the moment every arrow pointed towards Bucky Barnes.

Lucius did not give two fucks about the moral examination. Tony was a dear friend, annoyingly intelligent and infected with enough good intentions to qualify as a chronic condition. He was also Lucius’s partner. More importantly, Lucius remained convinced that Tony was this universe’s deprived version of Doctor Doom, denied a throne and forced to express himself through patents.

For benevolent and selfish reasons, Lucius had no intention of betraying that friendship.

He walked to the table, closed one hand around Mjolnir and lifted it.

Conversation died.

Thor was proud of his shield-brother. Lucius tossed the hammer across the room. Thor caught it against his palm, laughing as though the show confirmed something he had known to the rest of the room.

"Stop playing with mortals, shield-brother. Their shoulders are fragile, and their egos are worse."

Tony looked from Lucius to the hammer. "You could have led with that."

"Then I would have missed your machine lose an argument with a handle." Lucius turned towards the open balcony. "I am leaving, Playboy, because the stench in here is becoming difficult to bear."

His gaze passed over Natasha and stopped on Steve. Her expression did not move, while Steve’s shifted slightly.

Lucius rose from the floor and drifted towards the night beyond the balcony. Before crossing the glass, he turned back.

"Rogers, find someone else to repair your friend with the mushy brain. I will not help you."