Chapter 31
To the world, he was William Baker.
But William Baker, the man who had spent the last five years trying to become better, died today in a sterile room before three indifferent faces.
He died when they denied his parole for the third time.
He sat there clutching a stack of letters from his ex-wife in sweaty palms.
The words on the thin paper blurred, but he knew every line by heart. Keely's gotten worse again... The doctors say we need more money... She keeps asking about you.
His daughter.
His little Keely.
She had cancer.
And the only thing William wanted was to be there.
To hold her hand.
To earn, steal, beg, to do absolutely anything to pay for her treatment and make up for at least some of what he had broken.
He had been honest with them.
For the first time in his life, completely honest with the suits.
He had laid everything out, shown them the letters.
Their verdict was merciless as prison steel.
Denied.
Three more years.
Here.
At Rikers Island, this concrete wasteland of an island, where he would keep rotting.
Though his rot was only metaphorical.
His daughter was dying for real.
The moment the commissioner's gavel struck the table, William Baker ceased to exist.
Inside him, Flint Marko came back to life.
Pragmatic, reckless, a desperate thief for whom the end always justified the means.
He would never become the good family man now.
He would most likely have to rejoin the crew, go back underground.
He would not be able to spend much time with Keely.
But he could get the money.
His stashes were still sitting where he had left them, and maybe the cash would have already started going toward his daughter's treatment if the mail was not being screened and visitation had not been revoked.
Decided, Marko thought. Plan B. Today.
While the administration was busy fawning over the important commission, they had no bandwidth for one more loser.
This was his window.
The sewers: crude, reeking, but the most effective route to freedom, a layout he had accidentally memorized from a careless maintenance worker.
Every extra second of deliberation was another second of Keely's suffering.
He moved.
And naturally, everything went sideways almost immediately.
A guard, young and overzealous, decided to run an unscheduled round.
An empty cell belonging to the so-called "legendary" thief Marko.
A tense radio query to maintenance.
Negative response.
And the wail of an alarm tearing through the night silence.
The escape was discovered just three minutes after Flint was already standing on the East River shoreline, breathing in the putrid but intoxicating air of freedom.
Sensing pursuit at his back, he ran blind, away from the prison.
The docks.
Rust-stained containers, leaning warehouses, the smell of fish and diesel fuel.
Best option available.
Weaving between structures, he stumbled across it: a massive industrial cistern with a nearly worn-off Hammer Industries label.
The stairway leading up had been welded shut.
That felt like a sign.
"Sand," Flint exhaled, climbing up and peering into the open hatch.
Golden grains glittered in the moonlight.
Perfect.
He dropped inside.
They would never find him in here.
Lazy cops would not bother climbing up, and even if they did, he could bury himself under the surface for a few minutes.
The hard part was behind him.
All that was left was to wait.
Just one day.
After five years of hell, what was one day?
The only thing that could ruin it was rain.
Evening wrapped itself around the city.
The exhaustion of everything was catching up to him.
Trusting the hair-trigger sleep he had developed in prison, Flint closed his eyes and settled deeper into the cool sand.
Maybe he would not even have to wait a full day.
At night, under cover of dark, he would climb out and start making his way to Keely.
Did William know this was not just a cistern, but a large-scale industrial homogenizer?
Did he know its purpose was not storage but the mixing of sand with radioactive particles for one of dozens of classified Hammer Industries research projects?
Did he know that this very night, a tired, indifferent worker sent to initiate the next cycle would not bother climbing the stairs in his bulky hazmat suit to verify the chamber contents?
Did he know the cycle, once started, would end in critical failure and a catastrophic explosion?
No.
This street thug knew none of it.
He could not have imagined that anyone would be reckless enough to handle radioactive materials within city limits.
And he could not have imagined that this night would not kill him.
That it would change him instead.
Completely and permanently.
Reed Richards.
That name was acid in Otto Octavius's soul.
The genius who had made it.
The idol of millions, smiling from every screen, lecturing about the stars, while he, Otto, a true titan of intellect, languished in this miserable laboratory on the goodwill of Norman Osborn.
On the humiliating charity of a man whose mind belonged to a merchant, not a creator.
Never mind, Otto hissed, looking at his reflection in the polished housing of one of the manipulator arms. You will all learn my name. Every last one of you.
His gaze moved to his life's work, resting on the stand like four sleeping serpents.
His manipulators.
Not merely machines.
These were perfection itself, born from his own mind.
Titanium alloy reinforced with carbon fiber, as strong as mythical adamantium and as light as if made of air.
They could sustain a load of five tons while possessing the flexibility and precision of a surgeon's hands.
Telescopic, fully resistant to heat and radiation.
A masterpiece in every sense of the word.
Their presentation, just three weeks out, was supposed to change everything.
He pictured the faces of those investors, those dim men of money.
They had to understand.
The applications of his technology were genuinely limitless.
Managing nuclear reactors without radiation exposure.
Handling toxic substances remotely.
Precision repairs of satellites in orbit.
Surgical operations beyond the reach of human hands.
His manipulators were meant to become science's hands and eyes, to accelerate progress by decades.
Otto threw an irritated glance at the experimental gamma reactor.
Its assembly would have taken half the time if he had trusted his own creation more from the start.
And the manipulators themselves were only the beginning.
The neural interface: revolutionary technology that allowed mental control, as natural as moving one's own limbs.
He had created it.
Alone.
Without corporate support or a single government grant.
So why?
Why was he still trapped in this cramped, improvised space?
Why was his name, the name of a world-class scientist, always dragged out in humiliating comparison to Richards, to wallet-carrying Norman, to that pampered, trust-fund Stark?
No.
He was a Genius.
And Richards, returning from his cosmic adventure, would bring back fame, new breakthroughs, and tens of billions in investment.
And what would be left for him?
Otto Octavius, the man with the tentacles?
A footnote.
A forgotten eccentric.
The thought was intolerable.
It had a physical quality to it, like genuine pain.
No. This will not happen.
Looking at his creations, Otto suddenly understood.
The true potential of his technology could only be demonstrated by its creator.
In person.
He needed to move up the presentation.
Conduct it before Richards's triumphant return.
But how?
How to make those people come running at a moment's notice?
The answer was obvious.
He himself would become the living demonstration.
He would show them not just a machine but a new kind of human being.
A creator-human.
Without another moment's hesitation, he picked up the miniature neural interface chip.
Cold metal pressed against his neck as he attached it to his spine.
Thousands of tests and simulations.
The process had been refined to near-perfection.
He secured the torso mounting harness, and four titanium limbs came alive, rising smoothly behind his back.
He ran through several test movements: one arm handed him a glass of water with complete fluidity; another opened and closed the laptop lid.
He felt them as his own.
It was a divine sensation.
All that remained was filming a short demonstration video and sending it to investors with an ultimatum. Come tomorrow, or miss your chance to touch the future.
Yes.
September 23rd would become the day of his triumph.
Pointing the camera at himself, he moved toward the bedroom to change into something more presentable.
That meant crossing the entire lab.
The entire lab, which was cluttered floor to ceiling with equipment, cable bundles, and tool boxes.
His new physical dimensions, in the grip of revelation, his genius had simply not accounted for something as mundane as doorway width.
CRACK.
That was the last coherent thought he managed.
One of the arms moved instinctively to catch his balance and clipped a heavy equipment stand.
Chain reaction.
The crash of falling metal.
And the experimental gamma reactor he had so carelessly bumped swayed, tipped, and fell directly onto the sharp claw of another arm that had reflexively shot out to catch it.
A sickening screech of pierced casing rang through the lab.
For one moment, silence.
Then the room flooded with unbearable emerald radiance, and Otto Octavius's world came apart.
Francis Freeman had always hated delegating important work.
Subordinates were tools: reliable enough, but blunt.
However, sometimes seemingly simple jobs required a personal touch.
Required a scalpel, not a hammer.
Like right now.
He sat at the bar with the ironic name "Sister Margaret's School for Wayward Girls" and had been waiting for thirty minutes.
The air was thick with cheap beer, old sweat, and something that could only be called ambient despair.
Francis scanned the worn-down room with quiet distaste.
He was a foreign object here, an expensive suit dropped into a pile of dirty laundry.
But his objective was worth tolerating the environment temporarily.
Wade Wilson.
Former special forces, though in their line of work there was no such thing as former.
Iraq, Afghanistan.
Sniper, demolitions expert, elite-level hand-to-hand combatant.
Post-military, one of the most effective mercenaries available, with a track record that would make civilians lose sleep.
Extraordinarily valuable personnel.
The ideal candidate for the Program.
Francis's thoughts drifted back to his project.
Weapon X.
A classified program that had started in Canada in the distant eighties: the creation of super-soldiers with regenerative capability.
Thirty years on, the echoes of this program still moved in the minds of powerful people.
Truly successful subjects had been rare, and he, Francis, was one of them.
So they had revised the approach, coming at the problem from a different and more unconventional angle.
Cancer cells.
Francis was not a scientist.
He did not particularly care where the regenerative biomass came from.
The researchers assured him the concept was sound.
That was enough.
All that remained was finding the right subject.
After a string of failed candidates had been reduced to weeping masses of tissue, the selection criteria had become extremely strict.
First: cancer, advanced and terminal.
Second: unbreakable will.
The conversion process was hell, and only someone already hardened could endure it.
Third, and most critical: internal consent.
Not words.
The candidate had to want to live with a visceral, desperate intensity.
The survival drive had to be running at its absolute limit.
The bar door creaked.
Wade came in.
He moved with the comfortable instability of someone for whom this state was entirely normal.
"Mr. Wilson?" Francis's voice was flat and even.
Wade ignored him completely, dropping onto the stool next to him.
"Hey Jackie, who's the blonde in the daddy's suit just sitting here?" Wade addressed the bartender loudly, tilting his head toward Francis without looking at him.
The bartender, a weathered man with a scar running the full length of his cheek, only shrugged and poured the whiskey.
"No idea. Looks like he was waiting for you. Probably wants to offer you work."
"Tell him I don't take jobs from unvetted walk-ins. Especially without a referral." Wade drained the glass in one swallow and set it down firmly. "Again."
"He's not..." Jack started, looking at Francis.
Francis cut him off without turning his head.
His voice had a quality that moved through the noise like a blade.
"I heard you. Wade Wilson. Terminally ill, cancer through the liver, lungs, and judging by the humor, the brain as well. Simple question: do you want to live? Or are you prepared to check out in a month, leaving behind nothing but a warm spot on that stool and a stack of debts?"
He knew how to speak to men like Wade.
He had been one of them, once.
The silence that settled over that end of the bar said more than any answer.
Wade turned his head slowly.
The fish had taken the hook.
"Jackie, am I hearing things?" Wade made a show of clearing his ear with one finger, but his eyes had gone sharp and focused.
"It's Tuesday, not Thursday. The crazies are supposed to be lighter on Tuesdays."
"Well, some crazies flew into space today," Jack observed philosophically, wiping down a glass.
"Others are out here offering cures for the incurable. Perfectly in the spirit of a Tuesday. Thursdays just run a higher degree of absurdity."
Wade's mouth curved, but his gaze never left Francis.
All the performance had dropped away from him, leaving a hard, measuring mask underneath.
"So what comes next?" he finally addressed Francis directly.
"Say I want to live."
"As Gagarin said: let's go!" Reed Richards's voice, full of the open, reckless excitement of a brilliant man who had never quite grown up, rang out across the entire world at once.
And the ship rose.
First came the roar, which to the crowd below was simply noise.
To Marcus Milton, it was a symphony.
He heard not thunder but the mighty, rhythmic heart of the engine.
He saw not flame but controlled fury, a miniature sun tearing itself free from Earth's gravity.
The metal shuttle, aimed at infinity, carried five brave fools to conquer space.
Space that, contrary to their boldest dreams, was far from empty.
It was inhabited, it was alive, and it was merciless.
A figure separated itself from the crowd of journalists.
A well-built, lean blonde in glasses and an understated suit.
The press badge read: Marcus Milton, journalist, NYC News.
A mask.
The perfect mask he had worn for nearly two decades.
To any outside observer, the focused expression on Marcus's face would have read as ordinary professionalism, the same as any of the hundreds of people around him with their faces turned toward the sky.
Humanity was stepping into a new era.
Everyone around him was inspired.
Only he knew the full weight of what that meant.
There were far greater threats in space than anything on Earth.
The ship climbing upward briefly blocked the sun, and the shadow that passed over Marcus pulled a memory to the surface.
Another sky: crimson, torn apart by the silent scream of a dying planet.
Eterna.
His home.
Destroyed by one such threat.
Galactus.
A name that still resonated through him like something cold and absolute.
An entity of incomprehensible power, whose hunger had no ceiling.
His people, technologically ahead of humanity by millennia, had not been able to withstand it.
They had burned trying.
His parents, the last of the last, had poured their own life energy into an experimental portal.
He still remembered the warmth of their hands on his shoulders, the desperate love in their eyes, and the last word that came not as sound but as direct thought: Live.
And the seven-year-old boy had been thrown into this world, into Earth.
He had been found and raised by a kind farming family in Kansas.
He had lived as an ordinary human, which he had never been and could never be.
He was an Eternal.
The last son of Eterna.
Under this yellow sun, his cells sang with power.
He was thousands of times stronger than any human, hundreds of times faster.
He could fly.
His skin was practically invulnerable.
His vision passed through walls; his hearing caught whispers from miles away.
People in this world had a simple word for beings like him: meta.
And their fate, from what he had observed, was rarely a happy one.
Noble individuals who tried to become heroes disappeared quickly and quietly.
Those who gave themselves over to the power burned even faster.
Being different in this world was a curse.
And until today, Marcus had kept his head down.
But he had watched with admiration.
He had followed Spider-Woman's courage above the night streets.
He had read accounts of the old British and Soviet super-operatives with genuine interest.
Heroism was in his blood, the inheritance of a species bred to protect.
And now it was time.
This launch was not just a scientific milestone.
It was the starting shot.
Humanity taking its first, childishly trusting step into the space age.
And very soon it would discover it was not alone out there.
If it was lucky, the first contact would be with the Kree or the Korbinites.
Most likely, what waited ahead was a sequence of catastrophes born from exactly this step.
And this world, more than it had ever needed anything before, would need a symbol.
A symbol that said: even in the face of something cosmic and terrifying, there is hope.
A symbol that said: even in chaos, unity is possible.
A symbol of indestructible strength standing in defense of everything fragile.
Marcus Milton let the notepad fall from his hand to the ground, forgotten.
The mask no longer mattered.
His eyes, no longer a journalist's but a guardian's, were fixed on the sky where the ship's point of fire had vanished.
It was time.
Time for Hyperion to step out of the shadows.
//==============//