Chapter 94
A name. I was glad I'd managed to steer their attention toward what looked like a minor detail. Even more glad that such simple human quirks still lived in me.
I had genuine reasons to worry about my humanity. More than enough. My three most recent inventions were all built in a frenzy.
The Mental Worm provides absolute, seamless control over another mind. The Resonance Chamber is a metaphysical beacon for summoning multiversal deities, and I knew full well that a different calibration could attract entities with no connection to the Web whatsoever. Rubedo is a digital god without a conscience, currently executing my orders.
The trend, as they say, was hard to miss. I'd built morally questionable things before. The enhanced vibro-gauntlets alone would have been banned under the Geneva Convention the moment they hit the defense market. But lately I'd developed a habit of resorting to final solutions.
And I still hadn't come up with a safe word for myself. So I was left with nothing but the scraps of conscience to rely on, because something told me I would soon need a controller of my own.
"The Justice League?" Barton was the first to speak, of all people.
I jolted out of my grim thoughts. What? Was he a transmigrant too? No, something like that would have come out by now. I'd personally given myself away a thousand times by knowing more than I should. A fellow transmigrant would have slipped me a signal by now.
I checked the residual memory of John Thompson. Right, of course. This world had its own old comics about a Legion of Evil versus the Justice League. A well-worn cliché.
"Too pretentious," Fury shot it down immediately. Honestly, I wouldn't have minded, but yes, it reeked of plagiarism. Doubly so from my perspective.
"Guardians?" Hyperion offered, picking up my thread. "Something that sounds like protectors, not a cleanup crew for messes they made themselves. Or Vanguard?"
"Or simply Earth's Sentinels?" Hill added.
"Monolith?" Bruce Banner cut in, and everyone at the table turned toward him with identical odd expressions.
"No." Fury and I answered almost in unison. "Definitely not."
"Bastion." "Pantheon." "Aegis." "Watch." "Peacekeepers." "Defenders."
Options came fast, but they all sounded either too passive or too grandiose. In the end, we landed on one. Concise, compact, and most importantly, forward-leaning.
"Vanguard."
The first line of Earth's defense. The ones who meet the threat head-on instead of waiting to be hit from behind. It had weight to it.
"Good. Vanguard." I nodded. "That works. You name the ship, and that's how it sails. Here's hoping our Vanguard turns out to be a blessing and not a curse. Now, another important question, Nick."
"What now, Thompson?" Fury asked, rolling his eyes.
"It concerns expanding the ranks of our distinguished team."
"Parker." Fury caught my meaning instantly.
"I figured you already knew." I nodded. The agents he had stationed around the building had clearly witnessed Peter's performance. I turned to the others to fill them in. "Peter Parker. My friend and colleague. He acquired superpowers fairly recently, similar to Gwen's, but with a number of unique qualities." I caught Gwen's eye and softened the phrasing slightly. "He has a strong, almost painful sense of justice, and he's looking for a way to use his abilities responsibly. I think he's the ideal candidate."
"He..." Fury hesitated for a moment. "He should decide for himself what's best for him."
I barely suppressed a smile. I could practically feel how much that sentence had cost him. He was running the numbers. If Parker joined Vanguard, the informal Thompson faction of me, Gwen, and Peter would number three members. The Fury faction would have Barton, Natasha, Banner, and possibly Cap. Hyperion was his own faction entirely, outside any coalition.
But Fury was no fool. Protecting the planet came first. And Peter's character, combined with his immense potential, which Fury had almost certainly already been cataloging, made him a unique asset. Refusing Peter a spot when the Hulk was already on the roster would have been naked dictatorship. And Fury was working very hard right now to build that fragile semblance of trust.
"I'll talk to him." I nodded. "There are other candidates too. What do you know about Luke Cage and Jessica Jones?"
Honestly, I didn't know much about either of them beyond the basics. But they were both in the pool of potential heroes, and almost certainly more useful in a straight fight than Natasha, whose strengths in the MCU had always been more about espionage than raw power. Here, Fury, hardened by the bitter lessons of Hydra, was being more deliberate about selecting for firepower.
"The first, definitely not," Fury said flatly. I nodded, recalling that Cage apparently had a murky criminal history. We already had the Hulk on the team and the Winter Soldiers in rehabilitation, so I couldn't see how Cage was any worse. Fury clearly had personal reasons. It was worth pulling his dossier. "As for the second," Fury continued, "I've never heard of her, but I'll look into it."
Nick Fury didn't know something? Maybe she simply didn't exist in this version of the world. That would be awkward.
"What about mutants?" Gwen spoke up unexpectedly. "From that coalition of the good guys you mentioned?"
"A telepath leads it," I answered before Fury could. "He'd know everything happening in this room within five minutes of one of his people walking through that door."
Fury gave a grim nod. I felt a small pang of regret. Someone like Logan, Storm, Iceman, or even Cyclops would have been tremendously useful on the roster. But that was that. Who else was there?
"Oh," I said, pulling up a name from the MCU that had been, in the comics, quite the colorful figure in his own right. "What about Hank Pym? His Pym Particles? A solid addition to the scientific side of things."
He existed in this world. I had come across his name while researching scientific publications and digging through news aggregators. By all indications, he had already developed his particles but was, reasonably, keeping them out of public view to avoid attracting unwanted attention. The technology was revolutionary but entirely raw. Word about him circulated only among insiders, or transmigrants with meta knowledge like me.
Bruce Banner, it turned out, qualified as one of those insiders. He answered before Fury could.
"I've met Hank at a couple of conferences," Bruce said quietly, shaking his head. "He's extremely egocentric. Obsessed with control. That kind of person doesn't fit well in a team."
"No worse than you," Hyperion said immediately, still unable to reconcile himself to the Hulk's presence in the room.
Bruce Banner didn't flinch. He didn't argue. He simply nodded slowly, absorbing the hit.
"I understand," he answered, meeting Marcus's gaze with quiet steadiness. He hadn't shown a single negative emotion throughout the entire meeting. "And it's precisely because I understand that I have to earn the trust of everyone in this room. The trust of all humanity. I know the Hulk is a destructive power, but it can be directed. And thank you, Marcus. For what you did back then. For stopping me. For stopping me and Blonsky. Better late than never."
Hyperion went still for a moment. The hard set of his features eased, just slightly. He crossed his arms.
"I'll be watching you, Banner. Every second."
"I'll try to stay where you can see me." Bruce nodded with the same quiet composure. "I understand that's warranted."
The ice had cracked. The discussion of the roster should have wrapped up there, but I remembered a few more notable figures who were, quite literally, within arm's reach.
"Richards?" Fury grimaced before I could finish the thought, as though he'd bitten into a lemon. Pure exasperation radiated off him. "He wasn't interested."
So Fury had already made the approach.
"And his team," Fury continued, "is essentially entirely dependent on him. So that avenue is a dead end."
"But doesn't the Fantastic Four position themselves as heroes?" Gwen asked, genuinely puzzled. "If it were official, with S.H.I.E.L.D. backing and the support of the other heavy hitters, wouldn't that benefit them?"
"It's pure PR," Barton answered instead of Fury, clearly keeping close tabs on them. "A desperate attempt to draw attention away from a disastrous space expedition. In the past week, the only one of the four who'd done anything remotely heroic, and purely for the cameras, was Johnny Storm."
"But if there's some kind of global threat? Isn't that why we're all sitting here?" Gwen pressed.
"Richards promised to render assistance," Fury said, nodding. "But he flatly refused to join the initiative or give up any autonomy."
"As if he'd lose any," Hyperion muttered. The whole business with Reed clearly irritated him as much as the Hulk situation did.
"Reining in geniuses is sometimes necessary," Fury said flatly, and on that point I was entirely in agreement. "Any other candidates?"
There were, actually. This was Marvel. Throw a stone in any direction and you'd hit a meta with cosmic-level potential. Deadpool or Domino, for instance, though neither of them really fit the Vanguard mold. What about mutants willing to step out from under Xavier's wing? Someone like Rogue, who could actually use help managing her lethal touch? Or meta-villains who had simply drawn the short straw in life? Ah, sorry, Ghost.
That could all wait. What we already had was formidable. Time to move on.
"I want to raise one more important topic," I said.
Nearly everyone rolled their eyes at that, except Gwen and Bruce.
"Vanguard's public presence," I continued, ignoring the reaction. "S.H.I.E.L.D.'s emergence into the public sphere is an enormous resource. I propose we use it to the fullest: building the team's image through activity on social media. Specifically, my social media."
"Your app," Fury said, frowning. "Blink. Is it actually ready? And what exactly is it?"
Good. At least he hadn't said no. And judging by the faces around the table, the others were curious too. As for readiness, with Rubedo's capabilities, that was only a matter of hours.
"The format is vertical videos, up to one minute long. Blink. Fast, vivid, viral. A format perfectly suited to the modern attention economy, and to people's constant need for something to take the edge off in an insane world. It will blow up. I'll have a working version ready shortly, timed to coincide with the official public introduction of Captain Rogers."
"You're that confident in it?" Maria Hill asked skeptically.
"Who better than you," I said, looking at Fury, "to understand basic crowd psychology? Nothing like Blink exists in this world right now. Even something like it, in a world where things can literally fall out of the sky on any given day, simply cannot fail to spread like wildfire."
"Catch fire." Fury drummed his fingers on the table. "A phrase that can be interpreted in a number of ways. With an app like that, Thompson, a lot of dirty secrets will come to the surface. Not just ours. The government's too."
"Long overdue," I answered breezily. "Think of it as the first step on the road toward humanity actually getting its act together."
I leaned back in my chair and addressed the room.
"So what if people find out mutants aren't a conspiracy theory? Good. I'll tune the algorithm so the average person forms a reasonable, positive impression of them instead of seeing them as monsters. What if they find out about ties between certain power-hungry bastards and Hydra, people you can't touch legally, Nick? Then people will cancel those bastards themselves and free up your hands."
"You said tune the algorithm." Fury's eye narrowed on those three words.
"And you know perfectly well that every modern social network already abuses that exact mechanism," I said. "The party line, approved thinking, recommended content. Right now all of that works for a small group of people who are, I'll remind you, directly opposed to us. Blink isn't just a social network. Think of it as one more way to tip the scales in our favor."
"In which case, what makes you think you'd even be allowed to release something like this to the public?" Hill countered reasonably.
Because I have Rubedo, who doesn't care about government bans and could simply take over the internet, I thought. That was probably best left unsaid.
"Because I have you." I looked around the room. "The full weight of a reformed S.H.I.E.L.D. The backing of the most powerful super on the planet." I nodded toward Hyperion. "And hopefully Cap's support as well. He pitched war bonds once, and underwear at some point too, if I recall correctly. So there's a reasonable chance he'll like my app."
"I'll need to think about it." Fury drummed his fingers on the table again.
"Nick, what is there to think about? There's no real alternative. Either we play on someone else's field, in social networks censored by people we're actively fighting, where one wrong post gets the whole team's account taken down, or we have our own platform. One that answers to us."
"To you," he corrected immediately.
"What was mine is now ours. I'm something of a communist, Nick," I said with a smirk. "What happened with the Mental Worm should have clued you in on that."
"Mental Worm?" Bruce Banner asked with quiet curiosity.
"Long story." Fury waved it off. "But I take your point, Thompson. I just can't entirely pin down your motives."
"And I can't pin down the motives of our alien gentleman over there." I nodded toward Hyperion. "What if he's from a race of Viltrumites?" Amusingly, his name was Marcus. He was not Grayson, but coincidences in the Multiverse were known to go much further. "But that doesn't stop us from working together and being useful to each other and to humanity."
"What are Viltrumites?" Marcus asked, tensing immediately.
An extremely powerful race of cosmic conquerors. Most of them look human. They send individual representatives to different planets, earn trust, assimilate, and eventually those planets voluntarily come under their protection." I said, taking genuine pleasure in planting a small seed of paranoia. Fury's eye locked onto Hyperion immediately.
"I don't know of any such race," Marcus said calmly, holding Fury's gaze.
"What about the Kree?"
"Powerful. But I'm stronger." Hyperion stated with complete confidence.
"Speaking of races, maybe it's time to tell us where you actually come from?"
"No," he said flatly. "Not yet. Besides, you already know too much, Thompson."
"Not as much as I'd like," I said with a sigh. "But Nick, have you given any more thought to the app?"
"When I say I need to think about it, I don't mean give you less than a minute. You've already thrown more than enough at us in the last hour alone."
"Happy to be of service," I said dryly. "And on that note, we also need to talk about suits."
"Mine suits me perfectly," Hyperion responded immediately.
"Where did it come from, by the way?"
"Technology of my race," he answered briefly, clearly uninterested in elaborating.
"Fair enough. But what about everyone else? Gwen's situation is straightforward. I'll refine the Ghost suit, though the core is already solid." I made a mental note to add phasing capability. "But Barton. Cap. And even you, Bruce. Can I take on the job of designing new, iconic looks for the team?"
"Why the generosity?" Maria Hill narrowed her eyes. "What do you get out of this?"
"I've always lived by the principle of keeping things reasonable, or tried to, anyway," I said. "Right now I'm simply raising my own stock, if you'll forgive the bluntness."
And beyond that, as a creator, I was itching to have a hand in building something iconic. It would elevate our public profile and naturally strengthen the trust between us. My experience designing superhero suits wouldn't go to waste, either.
"I'm in," Barton said, actually smiling.
"Can I suggest my own design?"
"Of course." I nodded. "I'll make it my best work yet."
"The Hulk." Bruce Banner coughed awkwardly. "The Hulk doesn't really like clothes. They tend to get destroyed."
"Well, to start, we could at least give him a pair of indestructible stretch pants with the Vanguard insignia," I said with a smile. "I think he'll appreciate that."
"Cap already has an iconic look," Fury added.
"Which can and should be brought up to date," I countered. "Built from actual armor instead of spandex. And on top of that, we'll need to secure intellectual property for the Vanguard's designs quickly. God, there's so much work ahead."
In response, everyone in the room, including Gwen and Banner, rolled their eyes in perfect unison.
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