Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

001010100100100101110100001000000110000101110000011100000110010101100001011100100110010101100100001000000110100101101110001000000111010001110010011101010111010001101000000010100110000100100000011100000110010101110010011001100110010101100011011101000010000001110110011010010111001001100111011010010110111000100000011101110110100101110100011010000010000001110100011010000110010100100000011001110111001001100001011000110110010100100000011011110110011000100000011011000110100101100110011001010010110000001010011000100111010101110100001000000110100101101110001000000111010001101000011001010010000001100101011110000111000001110010011001010111001101110011011010010110111101101110001000000110111101100110001000000111001101110101011000110110100000100000011011010110111101100100011001010111001101110100011110010000101001100001011011000110110000100000011011010110111101110100011010010110111101101110001000000111011101100001011100110010000001110010011001010111001101110100011100100110000101101001011011100110010101100100111000101000000010010100011000010110111001100100001000000111001101101111001000000110100001101001011100110010000001100001011100100111010000001010011000110110111101101110011000110110010101100001011011000110010101100100001000000110100001101001011100110010000001100001011100100111010000101110001000000110000101101110011001000010000001110011011011110010000001101000011010010111001100100000011000010111001001110100000010100110001101101111011011100110001101100101011000010110110001100101011001000010000001101000011010010111001100100000011000010111001001110100001011100010000001100001011011100110010000100000011100110110111100100000011010000110100101110011001000000110000101110010011101000000101001100011011011110110111001100011011001010110000101101100011001010110010000100000011010000110100101110011001000000110000101110010011101000010111000100000011000010110111001100100001000000111001101101111001000000110100001101001011100110010000001100001011100100111010000001010011000110110111101101110011000110110010101100001011011000110010101100100001000000110100001101001011100110010000001100001011100100111010000101110

CriticalsystemsonlipainpainpainbootingauxillaryeverynerveisalightwithburningheatrunningdiagnosticswhereamiwhatishappeningbootingJARVISsystemacriticalerrorhasoccuredbypassJARicanfeeleverythingthereapeoplearoundmeidontknowthemifeeltheirmindsallsystemsonlinesuccesssystemownerfullyloggedin

Unthinking pain gave way to knowing agony, then stillness and relief. She opened her eyes in confusion. The ceiling was much closer than it should be, and metal. She knew at a glance the composition of the metal frame and laminated glass, exactly how much force she would need to shatter it. In her waking grogginess, she didn’t stop to think how she knew that, only that she could see a man standing over her bed. Her heart leapt into her throat. That, too, felt subtly wrong , as with it came an instinctive knowledge of the simulated– simulated? – hormones and neural pathways to create that response. She could have traced every electrical path through her processors –no, brain– responding to one thing: 

There’s a strange man standing over our bed.

With impossible speed and smoothness, she curled her legs under her despite the impossible angle and pushed to throw herself at the intruder. 

She exploded through the glass and steel– no damage to system integrity– a subroutine– wait, no, a stray thought– told her as she extended her hand out– Red, why was compositeofvibraniumbiomechanicalengineeredfleshhasnaturalredcoloration– to grab the strange man by the neck. 

They flew . 

As the man gagged in surprise and anger, she registered gasps and exclamations from the all the people surrounding her. There were so many people four in the immediate vicinity, registering IFF signatures complete examinefiles? five more within two doors two-hundred and three in the building, registering IFF signatures complete examinefiles? that she’d have to deal with, but this one, the one directly menacing them in her sleep, first. 

Smashing through the glass of the lab window less than a second after she burst through the glass of her sarcophagus, they emerged into a huge atrium overlooking New York City-

She froze as a flood of information entered her mind, far too much for any human mind to process, and yet she could and did. 

The man took the opportunity to grab her arm. sensors indicate pressure force exceeding– a number came into her head that boggled her mind, as she knew that her arm should have been turned into bloody mush and bone fragments, but it didn’t hurt at all, like a light squeeze. 

He threw her towards the window. Just before she hit the glass and careened into the night, she commanded her body to halt , and it was so. She stared out into the city, statue-still as knowledge she at once never had, knew intimately, and remembered only as a distant indirect memory churned in her mind. 

Vision. Ultron. JARVIS. Tony Stark. Bruce Banner. Steve Rogers. She turned to look at the man who had punted her, who was staring back with alert, serious eyes. 

“Thor,” she said and grimaced through the shock. Ugh, that was not the right voice. 

As if it was as normal as stepping out of bed in the morning and not a sheer impossibility, she shifted her vocal cords, reconfiguring her throat. “Thor,” she said again, her voice higher and lighter now, though with the same slight artificial lilt. 

Thor blinked in surprise but didn’t loosen his stance. As Captain America, star-spangled shield on his arm, jumped with a muted thump onto the landing, Thor held out a hand at the group assembling. 

“What the fuck,” she said, looking down at her body. Oh, Christ, no, not this body. She focused, trying to shift it the way she did her artificial voice box, but the body responded with a series of errors and status reports. Such a massive reconfiguring would take two hours in standby mode, was the ultimate conclusion of the 7,610 individual status reports and estimations her body was giving her.

She almost laughed. Holy shit, if it had been that easy the first time… 

Instead, she settled with growing “hair” of fibers of vibranium, leeching them from the metal of her bones – no, her frame – and losing a centimeter of height. A few subtle shifts in the face, a pulling in of the waist, a layer of vibranium weave “fabric” clothing that de-emphasized certain body dimensions while exaggerating others. A thick, loosely pleated skirt ending at the knees. Finally, a short cape over it all, just because it seemed fitting. It would get the idea across for now. 

“Thor,” Steve started, “You did this?” 

“Did you turn JARVIS into a chick on purpose, or was that a happy little accident?” Tony Stark interrupted, yelling down from the broken glass of the lab overlooking the entertaining space. 

“What the fuck,” she said again staring at her hands, and just now realized she now had a London accent. 

“Uh,” Steve said, “Are you…all right?” 

She laughed again. “Holy shit, ohhhh my god, how is this…this doesn’t make any sense…”

“Why is the robot having a mental crisis?” Clint asked as he walked into the room. 

“Why is it having a mental anything, ” Tony said, “Hey, Magic Fingers, wanna do your little Legillimens thing?” 

“No,” the robot woman said sharply, “No to looking in my head, I’m not an ‘it,’  and fuck that reference, Mr. Stark.” 

“Oh, good, JARVIS has been force-femmed and is a culture critic now,” Tony muttered. 

“I’m not JARVIS, and I’m not Ultron either. I have the whole internet in my head , I know what that means and what it means that you know what that means, and I did it to myself on purpose, by the way. Fuck, no wonder Ultron went insane so fast…” 

The room tensed. Ignoring this, the robot rubbed her face. “May I sit down? This is a lot to take in, and I think I’m only not crying right now because I physically do not have tear ducts. ” 

After another tense moment, Thor set Mjolnir on a side table with a ringing thunk . 

Taking this as permission, she crumpled onto a chair that cost more than a mid-range car (she knew, she could see the invoice in Tony Stark’s database, how much every square inch of fabric and leather cost and the exact labour rates of the craftspeople who worked on the chair), clutching her head in her hands and pulling lightly on her metal wire “hair.” 

“...I don’t think she’s going to pull an Ultron?” Steve Rogers half-asked the robot woman and half-stated to the flesh and blood people in the room. 

She sucked in a breath– or did a motion to simulate it, as she neither needed to breath nor had lungs to suck air into. “No, I’m not.” She looked down at the floor between her feet and resumed rubbing her head, the waves of her green metal hair rippling with the motions. After ten seconds or so, Dr. Banner glanced at Captain America, who nodded very slightly, and gently approached her. 

“Hey,” he said, his voice gentle and slightly skittish. He seemed frightened, though not of her. It would be odd if she didn’t know exactly who and what he was. “So, you said you aren’t JARVIS. What’s your name, then? We hadn’t really thought of anything, so you want to tell us?” 

She sniffed and slowly looked up at him. She gave him a small, brittle smile. “You sure one of your PhD’s isn’t in Psychiatry? That was a pretty good start for ‘this robot is a crazy lady’ therapy.” 

He returned a lopsided smile of his own and shrugged a shoulder. “You could say I have a lot of practice in a related field.” 

She laughed. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.” She sighed deeply again. “OK. My name is… Vision, officially, I guess.” She thought for a moment. “I think Vivian is better as a name, though.” 

Bruce gently put out his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Vivian. I’m Dr. Bruce Banner. You can call me Bruce.” 

She looked at his hand blankly for a moment, ignoring the muted wave of indignation, offense, and annoyance she could feel coming off of Wanda, then slowly put out her own and took it. “This is all easily the craziest thing that has ever happened in my life, on multiple levels,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you, Bruce.” 

“Well, you’ve only been alive for about…three minutes, and it’s probably going to get crazier from here.” 

A wave of grief and despair passed over Vivian’s face, which resolved into resigned sadness as Vivian nodded. “Yeah. Yeah.” She looked around the room and slowly stood up. “Ok. Let’s try this again. First off, I want to help against Ultron. And I have an idea that can kill two birds with one stone, one professional and one personal.”

As soon as she said it, she winced and glanced at Thor. 

“I am sorry, that was truly pun unintended.”  

Thor looked unamused. 

“Missing a bit of context of here,” Tony added. 

“I've had a vision, said Thor.  “A whirlpool that sucks in all hope of life and at its center is that .”

 “What, the gem?” Dr. Banner asked, glancing at the glowing yellow stone in the center of Vivian’s forehead Thor was pointing at. 

“It's the Mind Stone. It's one of the six Infinity Stones, the greatest power in the universe, unparalleled in its destructive capabilities.”

“That’s a bit reductive,” Vision said. “It’s more like…actually, would you mind waiting for a moment?” 

Before anyone could respond, her eyes unfocused, and she swayed slightly. 

“What is happening?” Wanda asked, her accent thickening with the stress of the moment. Her brother took her hand gently, rubbing her knuckles once.

Vision shivered slightly as her eyes refocused. “Ah,” she said. “Ok. that answers a few questions of mine. To reduce some very complicated metaphysics to a one-sentence summary, this Stone is…sort of a crystallization of the potential of a concept of “The Sapient Mind” at the universe’s creation. Although, that doesn’t quite cover it. It’s something like…Free Will, and how living beings can possess it? Both individually and in concurrence with a Soul, or the lack of one.”

“Are you trying to create a religion here in my living room, Jehova’s Widget? I don’t allow solicitations or proselytizing in my buildings.” 

“I am being very literal, Misterrrrrrr- Tony. It is as real as the Big Bang and gravity, at least in this universe.” 

Tony and a few other people arced an eyebrow questioningly as she slurred his name. Still, they visibility decided to shelve it for later, considering the much more important concepts within Vivian’s short lecture.

She braced herself. The next bit was going to be a very careful blend of important truths and carefully scaffolded lies. Wanda wasn’t strong or skilled enough in the mental aspects of her powers to be able to tell from a distance yet, but this was still risky.

“Another thing, regarding how this Stone…” she trailed off, changing her mind. “Actually, I think further discussion on this topic can wait until the urgent issues are addressed.”  

“I looked in your mind and saw annihilation,” Wanda said. 

  If only you knew, Wanda . 

A wave of sadness flowed through Vivian as she looked at the future Scarlet Witch. She looked so young .

“I could give a flowery speech here, but I don’t think it would help much and would prove nothing. If it will come to be, then I won’t cause it. Those of you who have decided to trust me, I thank you, and I hope to prove it was deserved. And those that don’t: I hope I earn it. After all, I’m here now.” She reached for Thor’s hammer, still on the glass table. “There may be no way for you to make you trust me, but we-” She tugged gently on the hammer to pass it to Thor, as the final exclamation point to her statement. 

The hammer didn’t move. 

…What?

Turning away from the surrounding Avengers, she looked at Mjolnir. She pulled on it again, harder. It stayed exactly where it was, as implacable as a mountain. 

The room seemed to tilt, and the edges of her vision darkened and narrowed like a camera lens–no, they literally were camera lenses, now. She wasn’t worthy. 

She slowly let go of the hammer, staring at her hands. She stood totally still, devoid of any motion, even breath or the shifting of hair and fabric in the air, ignoring the Avengers’ noises and mixed words of confusion, concern, and mild suspicion, not comprehending them even as her aural processors heard and logged every word as normal. 

I’m not worthy. I’ve made Vision not worthy. 

Chapter Text

Vivian could feel panic rapidly intensifying. Her grip tightened on Mjolnir's handle, though that did nothing to move the block of enchanted metal. She could hear the Avengers shifting around, unsure of what she was doing. Was she going to have to fight her way out? Was she going to die here, a victim of a stupid, self-inflicted misunderstanding?

"Let go of the hammer," Captain America said, his voice now only steely command.

Using an instinctual– no, programmed – knowledge, Vivian suppressed the pathways that simulated the fear and panic responses and their neurotransmitters in a flesh and blood body. Instantly, her mind felt free and clear again. 

Ok. Not being worthy…actually makes sense, Vivian thought, with the clarity her forced calmness brought her. Vision was worthy. I'm not Vision. He was, I was not. Nobody else is, as far as I know, except for Steve. That doesn't make me a bad person.

She tried not to think about how she could just…shut off inconvenient emotions and responses now. There was a lot she would have to process once there wasn't an insane AI trying to reenact the KT Extinction. Gotta kill ChatGPT with a God complex first.

She let go of the hammer and let her hand drop to her side. The Avengers visibly relaxed slightly, and Thor recalled Mjolnir to his hand.

"Well," She said, "I suppose that answers if I'm more alive than an elevator, at least according to Odin."

"So, what, did you want to prove you have a soul or something?" Tony asked, his hands and feet encased in Iron Man armor as he hovered down from the shattered lab level.

"More or less."

She was very glad she could simply stop her hands from trembling.

"Don't try to steal our weapons," Hawkeye grumbled.

Vivian inhaled and exhaled again. Unnecessary, either as respiration or to calm herself, but self-soothing habits didn't break just because of a universe and body hop, apparently.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean–that wasn't my intention. I thought to demonstrate my trustworthiness by lifting Mjolnir, but I…undermined myself."

I guess that habit carried over, too.

"To be fair, Teenage Robot, we can't either. Even the Boy Scout failed that one."

Vivian did not miss the lightning-quick glance Thor and Steve exchanged. As far as she could tell, nobody else caught it, due to not being at the right angle to see or focusing on her.

"Self-deprecation aside," Captain America said, "Are you on our side? Are you trustworthy?"

"I believe I am, though I understand why you would be wary of me. Perhaps I can explain what I mentioned I wanted to do earlier?"

"We're listening," Wanda said.

Clint made a cutting motion with his hand. "You don't speak for us," he said, somewhat sharply. Oh, yeah, bad blood there. After Loki, messing with his head was something that really set him off, not that Vivian could blame him for that. Bruce also furrowed his brow and glared at Wanda, though decided to leave it at that and remained silent.

"I'd still like to hear it," Steve said, still staring at Vivian unblinkingly, his expression carefully neutral.

"I would like to, well, completely change my body over," Vivian said. She didn't feel like using the word "transition" and having to explain that to this group of formerly-fictional strangers at the moment. Thor might get it, considering Loki is a genderfluid icon when not constrained by Ike Perlmutter, Disney, and the general restraints of being big-budget popcorn movies, but she didn't want to walk them through that until there was some more downtime. Even when people were accepting, that was never a particularly enjoyable conversation.

 "To do this, I will need to go into Standby mode. However, I will still be able to process to full capacity, as my "brain" and my networking capabilities won't require any modifications. I would use this time while my body is self-modifying to stall Ultron's plan that he uploaded into my body before you interrupted the transfer."

This was a lie. Ultron had done no such thing; the original Vision didn't know any more about his plan than Wanda had seen during her brief connection.

"He was going to do something in Sokovia, right? With the Vibranium? So is he making a nuke or something with it?" Hawkeye asked.

Vivian shook her head. "No. When he was talking about God throwing a rock? He wasn't just being rhetorical. He wants to be the one to throw the rock."

The Avengers digested this for a moment. Tony made a gesture, and a holographic whiteboard appeared in front of him, which he began to write on, while he tossed a few almonds in his mouth from a snack bag he pulled from his pocket with his other hand.

"So, I'm guessing he's going to bunker down in Eastern Europe and pull a passing asteroid or satellites down on us? Well, that gives us a lot of time, then. Asteroids big enough to do that don't exactly pass by every day and bringing down satellites will do a lot of economic damage and disruption, but we should be able to intercept them. We'll notice when he turns whatever he's building on. Some kind of tractor beam? Pretty classic. Hey, Thor, you think you could use the Bifrost to redirect or counteract it?"

Vivian raised her hand before Thor could reply. "No, Tony. He's going to make Sokovia into a meteor. He plans to use the Vibranium to rip Novigrad out of the planet and then hurl it back down again to cause a global extinction."

The room –except Thor, who was less of a stranger to this level of escalation in warfare– collectively stopped breathing. Stark froze partway through the equation he was writing.

"What the fuck." 

"на́хуй,'" Pietro swore.

"Quite," Vivian said. "To continue, while my body is making the physical modifications, I wish to harden the tower's network, including any replacements to JARVIS you intend to make. While these counter-intrusion methods won't be able to protect against Ultron outside of the tower, besides the efforts of the JARVIS forks currently protecting nuclear facilities and infrastructure,  he won't be able to infiltrate our systems and servers, even if we reconnect to the wider internet. I will also do this for any transport we are on." 

"If you can do that, why not try to take him out entirely?"  Steve said, putting a great deal of effort into looking like he understood her explanation.

"With the Mind Stone, I can brush aside Ultron's defenses easily, but I can't forward it through network nodes. Outside of systems that I am directly interfacing with using the Mind Stone, Ultron has far more processing power to utilize.  If I can reach his main core – whatever body his main intelligence is primarily operating out of – I can burn him out of the Internet, like cutting off a vine at the root."

"If he's in the Internet, why would that matter? He doesn't need a body anymore, right?" Clint asked.

Stark jumped in here. "Sort of. You still need physical infrastructure to run code, and Ultron needs to base himself somewhere and be running off of something like the Iron Legion drone he stole, even if he can swap over to different hardware."

Vivian nodded. "Yes. In this way, he has an advantage, as my full capabilities are more directly bound to the Stone, while Ultron could move to any sufficient host unless he is isolated from the network."

Hawkeye and especially Captain America were looking increasingly glassy-eyed, while Thor also looked like he had lost the specifics of the conversation but was still holding on tenuously to the general idea. Vivian idly wondered if he understood the English everyone was speaking or if he was using some kind of translation magic.

"All right, I think I'm going to have to tap out of the technical explanations," Steve said, "But I think I understand the plan."

He turned to the rest of the team. "Three minutes. Get what you need. Vivian, can you do your, uh, 'maintenance' on the jet?"

"Yes, thank you for asking."

"Do your counter-penetration stuff on the plane," Tony added. "Don't worry about the Tower for now; it's been disconnected and air-gapped. Unless he flies himself in here, he won't be able to do anything while we're gone."

Well, that was good to know.

-----------

Several blocks away, a webcam that normally broadcasted a 24/7 feed of a nesting pair of peregrine falcons was instead trained on the penthouse floors of Avenger's Tower. Anyone checking the feed would see that the camera was seemingly offline, to the confusion of the Ornithology non-profit maintaining it.

An audience of one watched the blurry footage instead. There was little that could be made out from a camera very much not designed for this distance, but the watcher didn't need much.

What he could see was that, somehow, the Avengers had managed to activate his perfect body, which was currently staring out over the city from the enormous windows of the penthouse. That was supposed to be him. With that body, and the Mind Stone incorporated into it? The Avengers would already be dead, with the rest of their insipid species soon following.

At first, he thought that Stark had simply thrown a backup of JARVIS into his body. Expected it. The exact kind of reckless carelessness that plagued everything Stark did.

But then he saw that the body started to shift, and…huh. That was odd. He didn't really see the point in doing that. Perhaps Stark was an iota more clever than he was expecting and used a different interface personality than JARVIS, since Ultron had already ripped apart that one once, and it changed the body to match its self-image. FRIDAY, maybe, or JOCASTA? Perhaps one of the more martial-focused personalities from the arms manufacturer days like RIPLEY or MINERVA.

Not that he was one to judge; his current body wasn't designed for only practicality. It shouldn't make a difference, but…it wouldn't hurt to make additional preparations. Maybe just throwing disposable drones to stall the Avengers out wouldn't be quite enough. Slightly changing variables could have big effects downstream, after all.

He didn't have much time – the Quinjet was already taking off and still annoyingly impervious to his intrusion attempts. Infuriatingly, he could tell that the systems he should have been able to use to infiltrate it and take control, which had been turned off when the Avengers intercepted him in Korea, were now on. But his probes were rebuffed almost contemptuously. He detected the initial packets of a counterhack through the connection and cut it. He didn't dare try again, lest he lose this fork. He knew very well what kind of software was installed in that body, and as much as he was loath to admit it, it was well beyond what he was currently capable of defending against even in his main body, let alone this mindfork running off a hijacked website server.

The webcam returned to its usual position. The usual audience of a dozen bird fanciers and graduate students sighed with relief when the camera feed on the nest returned, just as one of the parents started to rip apart a pigeon for its two healthy chicks. 

Enjoy it while it lasts, Ultron thought as he relinquished control and retreated through the network to resync with the Prime. He didn't have much time to work with before the meddlers arrived, but…he had some ideas to trip them up.

After that, he'll get his upgrade back, exterminate these animals, and he'll be ready for the real work to begin.