“So. Insane quasi god from alien world comes, launches an alien invasion on Earth, the goal of which is to fail?”
Safeguard
Chapter 4.
“So,” Mr. Stark said, pacing along
the side of the laboratory that was now, unofficially, Dr. Banner’s. “No
portals so far, no hidden alien armies, no… anything unusual, really. Aside
from what happened.”
“As far as we can tell, sir,” JARVIS
agreed.
“The grid is still not perfect,”
Doctor Banner said, not looking away from the screen where the incoming data
from the network of spectrometers was displayed. “We still don’t know if
there’s anything over the oceans. But JARVIS, S.H.I.E.L.D. and I, we’ve been
trying to cover each other’s blind spots. They have all US submarines with
the power generation capability needed for this and some of our allies too, and
so far everything came out clear. The only gamma radiation I’m getting is the
Tesseract and some residue on your tower. As well as very minute amounts around
the city, fallout from the wormhole itself.”
“My tower? How much residue?”
Mr. Stark asked. “JARVIS, buddy, you okay?”
“I am fine, sir,” JARVIS assured,
though he wasn’t really that sure.
“There’s not enough of it to be… precisely
lethal. The building’s structure mostly soaked it up,” Doctor Banner said,
awkward. “It shouldn’t damage the building either, that’s not really how
that works, but, uh. The decay rate of gamma radiation is what it is.”
“I did an analysis on the arc reactor, and
it is unharmed and uncontaminated,” JARVIS said, somewhat uneasy. “My
personal power relays in the tower are what absorbed most of it. And we’ve
already seen the side effects.”
“Fuck, right. You sure you’re okay,
J?” Mr. Stark asked.
“I feel fine, sir,” JARVIS assured
him. And he did. He just also felt… more than before, but he couldn’t say that
with Doctor Banner listening in. “I believe right now there is no risk to
me or my systems.”
“Okay,” Mr. Stark sighed, running a
hand through his hair. “So. Insane quasi god from an alien world comes,
launches an alien invasion on Earth, the goal of which is to fail? And
apparently that's… it? None of this computes. Why bother, what’s the
reason, what’s the goal? What was he trying to achieve, if he came here with
every intention of failing?”
“Are we sure he did?” Doctor Banner
asked uneasily.
“Bruce, he all but led us by the nose to
do it,” Mr. Stark said. “I’ve been turning this over in my head for
hours now and what’s the one, maybe even the only, thing he managed to
do when he attacked the Helicarrier? We were working on the assumption that he
was trying to break us up, somehow launch the Hulk, bring the Helicarrier down.
But the loss of the Helicarrier would hardly stop S.H.I.E.L.D. And when
it comes to us, well.”
“We did scatter,” Doctor Banner
pointed out.
“Yeah, for less than twenty four
hours,” Mr. Stark said with amusement. “And most of that was
luck on his side. If Thor hadn’t stumbled into the cage, if S.H.I.E.L.D. hadn’t
pissed the big fella off… we all would’ve still been together. And even if the
Helicarrier had crashed and burned, then what? The big fella is indestructible,
and Thor is a demi god and Captain Oldest Spice is probably immortal or at
least hard enough to kill to be a good runner for the bronze in the immortality
olympics. I can fly, Barton wasn’t even there before Loki brought him,
Romanoff could’ve jumped on a jet anytime she chose…”
“But S.H.I.E.L.D. would’ve been crippled,”
the Doctor said.
“Hardly. The Helicarrier is like… a tiny,
albeit impressive, fraction of what S.H.I.E.L.D. is. Sure, Fury and Hill were
both there, but S.H.I.E.L.D. is not an organisation you can kill just by
removing its head. There’s a line, a huge, huge line of ridiculously competent
super spies, waiting to step up if necessary. Hell, the lowest of S.H.I.E.L.D.
agents could take the helm if they had to – that’s how they’re trained.
Contingency measures.”
“You know a lot about that, huh?” Doctor
Banner asked.
Mr. Stark shrugged. “Coulson was there
when I first started out as Iron Man – he might’ve become my handler, if I had
gone with the whole secret identity gig. And then, after that didn’t work out
for them, S.H.I.E.L.D. sent Romanoff to spy on me. And Fury nailed the coffin shut
by letting me know that my father was a founding member of S.H.I.E.L.D. I got
curious about their methods and hacked the hell out of them.”
“Ahem,” JARVIS said.
“Correction,” Mr. Stark said without
missing a beat. “JARVIS hacked the hell out of them. I was working on the mark
six at the time,” Mr. Stark shrugged.
Doctor Banner just shook his head. “So,
S.H.I.E.L.D. wouldn’t have crashed with the Helicarrier. Consider me convinced.
It still doesn’t account for anything that happened when Loki was imprisoned
the first time. Like, say, the death of Agent Coulson. If Loki wasn’t looking
to cripple us…”
“That’s the thing – that’s the thing!”
Mr. Stark said, pointing both index fingers at the doctor. “Why did he
kill Coulson? Sure, he killed a lot of people at that point, never seems to
care one jot who lives or dies, but Coulson? Coulson knew things no one else
did. About us. Me, you, Cap, all of us. Not to mention the fact that he
probably had a shit ton more of… shit on S.H.I.E.L.D. than Barton or anyone
else, except maybe for Fury himself, does. And Loki had Barton – and Barton
knew how valuable Coulson was. So, what the hell? If I had been Loki and
hell bent on getting the upper hand on us, I wouldn’t have killed
Coulson. I would’ve done the mind whammy and taken him to my side, in a
heartbeat.”
Doctor Banner frowned a bit at that. “That
is a good point,” he said slowly.
“But Loki killed Coulson instead. Except
he didn’t,” Mr. Stark said. “Judging by the security footage
Jarvis has so obligingly supplied me with, he mortally wounded Coulson.
Everyone else it’s been instant kills, but Coulson? Coulson was alive for a good
ten minutes after Loki stabbed him. Loki even stayed around to have an argument
of ethics with Coulson, before Coulson shot him with one of the Tesseract
weapons.”
“Good on him,” Banner sighed, rubbing
at his forehead. “What’s your point, Tony? That Loki did what? That he
staged the whole thing to… to piss us off?” Doctor Banner asked. “We
already knew that.”
“Oh my god, I’m right!” Mr. Stark all
but crowed. “Holy crap, he even said that that was the plan. His whole
plan had been to make us pissed with him!”
“Which he succeeded at?” the doctor
asked slowly.
“YES! Precisely! He all but put the team
together. We were at each other’s throats from the get go, and that was way
before we brought the staff on board the Helicarrier. Then Coulson died and
then we had something in common, something to avenge for Christ’s
sake,” Mr. Stark said with dark satisfaction. “Aside from you,
Coulson’s been on all our cases. He was there when Thor first landed, he was
Romanoff’s and Barton’s handler for years. And he was there when Captain
Permafrost thawed. With Barton Loki had access to the right info about us –
namely, what would be the one thing to piss the majority of us off.”
“So you think he did everything to
motivate us?” Doctor Banner asked, disbelieving.
“That’s my theory. Hell, it sort of works
even if you remove the Avengers from the picture and just take S.H.I.E.L.D.
Coulson’s death would’ve been a sure-fire way to make the most of S.H.I.E.L.D. mobilise
against Loki,” Mr. Stark agreed and then threw up his hands. “Except
it makes no fucking sense?! Why bother at all if the aim was to fail?
What did he achieve?”
Doctor Banner considered that and shrugged.
“He changed the world,” he said.
“What?” Mr. Stark asked, sounding
surprised.
“Go online anywhere. Any site,
anything from news to youtube to even porn sites and guess what’s on
everyone’s mind, what’s everyone’s talking about? The newest most viewed vid in
youtube is a cam recording of the portal being opened, taken from a few blocks
away – almost two billion views, in less than forty eight hours,” Doctor
Banner said. “It’s on television, on the radio…”
“And,” JARVIS added. “It’s not
merely the event but what it entails. Aliens are real and everyone knows it.
And they know that some of them are very hostile.”
“After the first Atomic bomb was built,
how long did it take before we had thousands of them?” Doctor Banner
asked. “How long did it take for the computer to change the world, change
science, infrastructure, everything? How long will it take, after this, for our
technology to… leap ahead? And not just our technology. Our politics will
change too. And our awareness – our preparedness.”
Mr. Stark paused in the midst of his pacing and
then laughed. “Do you know,” he said, “for the last couple of
hours I’ve been designing new satellites in my head. Satellites capable of detecting
worm holes, gamma radiation, and anything else that might be useful to
detect.”
“I’ve been going over what I know of
spectrometers, trying to come up with a better, more wide ranged sensory system
for gamma radiation detection,” Banner answered with a small laugh.
“Wanna bet how many other people are thinking something along those lines,
out there?”
“It can’t have been Loki’s goal,” Mr.
Stark said.
“Probably not – but it was a result,”
Doctor Banner pointed out. “What other results were there? It might
be something small, something not immediately noticeable. It might not even
mean anything to us. Who knows.”
“JARVIS,” Mr. Stark said.
“I’ll put together a search algorithm and
see what I can find out, sir.”
-
After clearing the New York Portkey Office,
Harry made a quick run through the Hexington district which, amusingly enough,
had its entrance in a magic store catering to New York’s sleight-of-hand
magicians. He had visited the place a few times and the store never stopped
amusing him – and he was almost always tempted to buy the pack of cards which
had pictures of famous magicians on them.
He wasn’t there for pleasure, though. Well, not
precisely. “Mind if I use your phone?” Harry asked the storekeeper.
“I haven’t got my mobile aligned with the US network yet.”
“The network’s down right now,” the
store keeper said while taking out a very fancy and old fashioned muggle land
line phone. “You wouldn’t be able to connect to it anyway - here.”
Harry blinked. “The NY network’s down? It
never goes down.”
The shopkeeper shrugged. “It’s down now.
It’s been down since the aliens came.”
“Huh,” Harry said, and after checking
the number on his mobile, he dialled without bothering to lift the receiver off
the hook. After a moment of silence, a flickering image of a man appeared above
the phone. “Yo,” the man said without even looking in the phone’s
direction. “Make it quick, man, I’m busy.”
“I’m calling to inform you that I have
landed,” Harry said, grinning as the man on the image started and quickly
turned to face him. “And your city still stinks, Shining.”
“UNO!” the man said. “You
undesirable son of a bitch. Welcome to the land of the free.”
“Yeah, because we from other lands are
obviously downtrodden and enslaved,” Harry said, shaking his head.
“Where are you? Do I come over there or can you actually put yourself
together enough to let civilised people see you?”
“I’m actually at the Hub,” Shining
said. “Me and Les and That Asswipe. You know where it is?”
“Unfortunately,” Harry sighed. “So,
I come there?”
“Bring snacks,” the other man nodded,
and the image disappeared.
“Uno?” the shop keeper asked, amused.
“Undesirablenumberone,” Harry
shrugged and pushed the phone away. “Had I known, I would’ve picked a
shorter name. Do I need to pay for this?”
“I wouldn’t mind a tip,” the man
answered, looking pointedly at the tip jar. Harry left him a handful of
dollars, before checking that the Umbitch was still secure. Then with a loose
salute at the shop keeper, he Disapparated away from the store, and to the City
Network Hub.
As a British magician, Harry was used to
certain… things when it came to magicians, and magic in general. He was used to
things being dated, often ancient. He was used to old houses, mansions, to
polished brass and ancient paintings. He was used to old mahogany and ancient
Indian rugs, he was used to ghosts and dust and cobwebs. That was the sense
of magic he had – it being just… old, ancient, time worn.
And then there were places like the New York
City Network Hub. It was basically the gathering place of New York’s technomancers,
who maintained the city’s, and a large part of the East Coast’s,
“technomagic communications”. The US had a bit
different approach than the rest of the world when it came to technomancy. Where
most – like Britain – went with the
idea that each to his own, he who wants magical internet can get his own
landline, the US… had embraced the
idea of wireless internet. And ran with it. To the moon.
While most of the heavy-duty traffic still had
to go through landlines, there were colossal fields of technomagic
wireless local area networks over the major cities. Like New York. And the whole
field was produced and managed from a network hub which was like a massive
magical modem for the rest of the city.
For a place like the US where at least
every other wizard used technomagic to some extent, and it had become a
compulsory class in every magic school, it made sense. The US led in
technomancy, hands down, with Canada far behind as the
second, Japan the third. All the
while in Europe and most of the “old world” it was still one in maybe
thirty who bothered with even knowing what a computer was, let alone
using one.
“And of course,” Harry muttered, as
he Apparated into the Hub, “they have the Hub in a bloody
skyscraper.”
The forty second floor of a sky scraper, to be
precise. The building was muggle made, the network hub was technically renting
the place. Of course the rest of the building and its owners thought that Tech-M
Network Solutions was just a telecommunications company, and probably never
would think otherwise. The fact stood, though. Bloody Americans.
Harry was fiercely jealous of how much
easier they had it, when it came to integrating old and new. Back home it was
always like pulling teeth; you needed permissions and licences and permits to
even do business with the muggles. And afterwards, you were likely to be
questioned and in the worst case charged. Harry himself had fourteen
charges of “misuse of muggle artefacts” because in Britain that was still a
thing.
But in the States, if a wizard wanted to have a
floor of a muggle skyscraper, nothing but funds limited him.
“Good day, sir,” the cheerful looking
witch at the counter said. “Do you have an appointment?”
“Just visiting for a bit of general shop
talk. Shining knows I’m here,” Harry said, pulling out is ID card and
handing it over. It was nothing but a white plastic card with a barcode and a
chip, which the witch tapped with a wand, flicking up from it illusionary pictures,
a sheets of Harry’s CV and resume and a couple 3D blueprints of things Harry
had build and modified. Technomancer IDs – you had to love them.
“Very good, Mr. Potter,” she said
without as much as a glance up at his scar. “I’ll inform Mr. Lindholm you’re
here. Now if you follow the corridor on your right and take the fourth door to
the left, you’ll find him in his office.”
“Thank you very much,” Harry nodded,
taking his ID back and heading to Shining’ office.
“Did you bring snacks?” Shining asked
as Harry entered the room.
Sighing, Harry dug the paper bag of pumpkin
pastries from his briefcase and handed it over. “I’m guessing we’re all on
the clock, more or less, so. How bad is it?”
Shining glanced at him before stuffing half a
pastry into his mouth and standing up from his computer desk and walking to the
middle of the room, where a lit table stood, its surface one enormous touch
screen. Taking out a wand, the other technomancer tapped the screen a couple of
times and then pulled up a miniature illusionary representation of New York City.
“Here’s the field, the way it looked a couple
days ago,” the man said, waving a wand and making a rainbow mist cover
most of the city. “Strongest where it’s brightest, more active where the
colour shifts more, yadda yadda yadda. And here are the known landlines. Mostly
personal computers with technomancy hook ups,” he added and waved again,
making sparks of blue appear all over the city.
“Okay,” Harry nodded. He had seen it
before – he had seen similar representations of other major cities and their
technomagic fields. “It’s very pretty. And after the wormhole?”
“Okay. That there, in the middle, is Stark Tower. And this… is what
happened when the portal was first opened,” Shining said, and waved his
wand.
A beam of light appeared from the Stark Tower, reaching upwards.
There was an explosion of light through the whole rainbow field and for a
moment the entire city was lit by sparks of blue, rising like a shock wave
around the tower. It passed through the city in ripples at first and then stayed,
every light lit up brighter and the technomagic field was roiling like a
glowing, agitated ocean.
“It stayed like that for most of the
portal’s duration – here’s where we’re shutting down relay stations, and that's…
when we shut down the Hub,” Shining said, and there was a very faint
dampening of the field. “Which should’ve killed the field, but it
didn’t. And then, a few hours later, the portal closed and this is what
resulted. And mind you, we had the field down at this point.”
The glow grew dimmer bit by bit, but some of it
stuck around, lingering like frost in shadow. Some of the new blue lights
stayed lit, and a small bit of the rainbow field stayed up – most of it
concentrating around Stark Tower. And of course, Stark Tower which had in its
core the brightest light.
“Here are the old landlines, and the red
ones are the new ones,” the other technomancer said, changing the colours
while Harry stared at the result. The light at the heart of Stark Tower was now red, but
it remained. It, and the field of the rainbow hued technomagic field,
which surrounded it like a moat of light.
“There’s so many,” Harry said,
frowning, eying the lights thoughtfully. “You’d think they’d be closer to
the event but they’re just scattered around like that? Any unifying factor
between them?”
“We’re not a hundred percent sure, but
we’ve managed to shut some of them down, and they have one thing in common.
Each and every one of ‘em is a Stark computer – or has a Stark CPU at least,”
Shining said, flicking up another illusion to hover above the city, this one of
a relatively normal looking desktop. “We know that you need certain amount
of intelligence from a machine before magic sticks to it, right? We get
it by expanding stuff magically, mostly, to get the processing power up to the
level where the computer’s smart enough for magic to stick around. Outside
technomancy upgrades we didn’t think there was a CPU powerful enough to handle
it. But these things apparently can.”
Harry frowned. “Only Stark
processors?” he asked.
“Well. There were also three supercomputer
clusters that got connected,” Shining shrugged. “But yeah, mostly
Stark computers.”
“How come they didn’t blow up? How come any of these didn’t blow up?” Harry
asked, leaning closer to eye the city.
“A lot of computers did, actually. Like,
thousands, tens of thousands PCs and MACs and whatnot all over the city either
started putting out smoke or just died,” the other technomancer answered.
“And we’re not the only ones with communications down – pretty much every
cell phone within a ten mile radius to this thing just out right died.
And I don’t even want to know what happened to more specialised muggle tech. I
know that they’re shipping the worst of the injured out of the city because a
lot of hospital equipment just blew.”
“Merlin,” Harry murmured, shaking his
head. “Okay. And the connected computers, the connections are
holding?”
“So far, yeah. We’ve managed to shut down
about a couple hundred of the new landlines. Which basically means we went
there, and we blew up the computers and destroyed the cables and made it look
like a melt down,” Shining said with a sigh.
“And Stark Tower?” Harry
asked, eying the illusionary New York in front of them
thoughtfully
The other technomancer shrugged, looking
uneasy. “Covered in muggles. They’re doing a lot of the rescue work and
the lower floors, the commercial floors, were all but turned into a homeless
shelter for those who can’t access their homes – or whose homes were blown
up. And… the few times we tried to go
and do something about, it didn’t work out so well?”
“Oh?” Harry asked, curious.
“That field, around it? It makes magic a
bit… weird. And inside the tower…” Shining trailed away, shaking his head
“When our guys went in, they had to come out almost instantly. They can’t
say why, just that it felt like there was someone watching them and it just
made them feel… uneasy.”
“Watching them?” Harry asked,
fascinated. “I imagine there would’ve been – a place like that should be
hardwired with dozens of cameras. Not to mention about the muggles
inside.”
Shining shook his head. “It’s more than
that. They said that… they felt a presence. We don’t want to send
anymore people in there because the two I did still keep looking over their
shoulders every ten seconds. That’s actually why I’m here now, instead of
trying to work this at home – I’m filling in because right now, those two are
no good for anyone. Anyway, the tower isn’t a priority. We have a hundred other
issues, and not enough people to waste them on magically induced
paranoia.”
Harry hummed thoughtfully at that. “And
that?” He asked, pointing at the light in the centre of the tower.
Shining grimaced. “As much as it pains for
me to say it… I’m not sure what to do about it - or even if we can. The tower
is wired with more tech than you and I can dream of – not to mention about the
security measures. And the tower, the way I hear it, doesn’t have individual
computers. It’s all run on one massive supercomputer that Stark designed
himself. And we have a fairy’s chance against a dragon to get at that.”
“It’s all run by one computer? Merlin, no
wonder the magic stuck there,” Harry murmured. “That thing must be
massive.”
“Yeah, no kidding.”
They eyed the light in the heart of Stark Tower for a while.
“It’s funny – I investigated this guy about the possibility of the Iron
Man tech being magical, not that long ago,” Harry said, leaning in and
staring at the Tower. Jarvis was in that tower, using that connection to
access the dot-mgc domain. Harry had hoped and wished and prayed that
the connection was sporadic or at least somewhat faint, but this… “And now
he has a magical tower. Bloody irony.”
“Amen, brother,” Shining said,
looking at him. “So, why are you here anyway? You know, aside from the
whole thing with aliens and all. From here on this is just going to be
maintenance, mostly, trying to shut down the new land lines.”
Harry shrugged. “I’ve a meeting with a
hacker,” he said. And with a tower too, now that he had seen what it
looked like, inform a magical perspective. “And I was kind of hoping to
have a look at this Loki person.”
“Hah. Good luck with that – the muggles
have the bastard pinned down good in some secret facility who knows
where,” Shining snorted and waved the illusion of the city away. “Any
chance you might be willing to lend a helping hand with the contaminated land
lines? We could use another wand around here.”
“Can’t say yet – I need to meet with my
hacker first,” Harry answered. “There might be a… thing going
on, there. If there’s not, then sure, I’ll help. For now though I think I’m
going to go have a look around. Hm… you wouldn’t know anyone who has gotten
their hands onto any of the Chitauri tech?”
-
“So, he left?” Hermione asked looking
up from her computer while Ron fell to sit on the chair across her desk.
“Yep, just a couple hours back,” Ron
nodded, arching to take the gyroscope that stood on the outer corner of the
desk. “Just got the alert from the travel office. Straight to New York, one way Portkey,”
he said, while turning the gyroscope in his hands.
Hermione nodded thoughtfully, tapping a few
more lines of the report she had been writing before turning to face her
husband. “And you’re going there too?”
“Tomorrow – or the day after,” the
redhead said. “Sooner, if Bones calls it quits with Malfoy and comes home
sooner – which she might. Either way, it’ll probably be too late to stop Harry
from getting into any weird stuff. He’s probably elbow deep in weird stuff
already and loving the hell out of it.”
The Senior Undersecretary smiled at that.
“He can handle himself,” she said. “He can probably handle
himself better with this sort of thing than anyone else can,” she added
after a moment of thought. Of all three of them – if not of all the wizards and
witches she knew – Harry had always been adaptable. More so since the end of
the war. “What bothers me is that he’s probably not even going to seek the
taskforce out, is he?”
Ron snorted with amusement at that. “Of
course he won’t. That’d be bureaucratic – not to mention almost sensible,”
he said. “And he said that he was going to meet some technomancer buddies
of his. And a hacker.”
“A… hacker?” Hermione asked.
“Someone in New York hacked his site
and, Harry being Harry, they ended up chatting about magical theory or some
such,” the Auror shrugged.
“Right,” the witch answered, looking
at the gyroscope he now had standing on the tip of his finger. “If you
break it, you’ll get me another one. And what you got there is an antique.”
“Ah, but I won’t need to. There’s a spell
for that sort of stuff,” Ron said, grinning, but he set the gyroscope
carefully down. “So,” he then said, looking at her. “Are you
going to come with me to the US?”
“What?” she asked with a laugh.
“Don’t be ridiculous, I have far too much work here!”
“Work more important than the aftermath of
and alien invasion – and worse yet, Harry Potter in the middle of the
aftermath of an alien invasion?” Ron asked, lifting his eyebrows and
leaning closer. “You seriously think Kingsley is going to be sending me
alone?”
Hermione considered that and then sighed.
“No,” she said, giving her computer a mournful look. No, Kingsley
would suggest, very pointedly, that she had been working too hard, and maybe
she should take a couple of days off. Abroad. With her husband. It had
happened before – once, when Harry and Teddy had gotten “stuck” in Japan three years ago
and they had been forced to kidnap their friend to avoid an international
incident, and once when a team of Aurors had gotten mixed up with muggle
organised crime in South America.
Kingsley couldn’t legally send Hermione to sort
out messes like that. Hermione was too high up in the political ladder for it
not to appear a political manoeuvre – and there was always the risk of Hermione
being whisked into the local politics, if she travelled in an official
capacity. What he could do, though, was send Ron and then suggest that Hermione
would go as Ron’s plus one. An Auror’s wife could go to places where the Senior
Undersecretary of the British Ministry of Magic could not, amusingly enough.
Kingsley probably would’ve used the tactic more
to patch up international incidents caused by British travellers, except if he
did then it would’ve become a bit too obvious and people would’ve noticed.
Except it was always bloody obvious and people always noticed. Ah, the
pleasures of being famous war heroes and known best friends of one Harry James
Potter.
“I can’t imagine what Kingsley could be
thinking, if he does have me go with you,” Hermione said. “You’ll be
part of an international task force of law enforcement officers. It’s not like
they won’t see the plan for what it really is.”
“But
they can’t exactly say no either. We’re permitted by international laws to
bring spouses, if it’s an extended mission,” Ron pointed out.
“I’m well aware,” she sighed and
leaned back in her chair. “But it’s very blunt, and will end up insulting
a lot of people.”
Ron smiled. “Maybe. Maybe not. You
remember that Malfoy’s there, right? You don’t think he won’t be happy to point
out the obvious to everyone in the near vicinity?”
“That we’re the all but officially
appointed minders of one Harry Potter?” Hermione asked with a slight
smile. “And you don’t think he won’t also add the post script? Officially
appointed minders of one Harry Potter – who utterly fail at the whole minding
of one Harry Potter business.”
“I like to think there’s less explosions
with us around,” Ron grinned.
“And a whole lot more trips to nearby
pubs, yes,” Hermione added and looked at her computer, the report sitting
there. Since the initial hours of panic, what she’d been mostly doing was
shifting information around, making sure no one lost their heads, thinking the
end of the world was coming or something of the sort. People had calmed down
now, somewhat, though they’d still rather gossip about New York than do actual
work. But as things stood now… the Ministry wouldn’t fall over without her.
Probably.
“New York,” she
murmured. Unlike many others in the Ministry, she hadn’t so far felt any
pressing need to see the Chitauri herself. But now that the opportunity
presented itself… she wouldn’t mind it. The technology looked fascinating and
she would’ve given half of her library for a chance to examine one of the flying
speeders.
She was, after all, a technomancer too.
“Do you suppose your brother would mind
taking Hugo and Rose?” she asked then, having no intention of dragging
their children abroad and to a recent warzone.
“Probably. I’ll ask,” Ron said,
standing up. “If not, then Mum’s always up for babysitting.”
Hermione smiled faintly at that. Mrs. Weasley
was always willing, of course… but since the death of Mr. Weasley she hadn’t
really had the energy to keep up with kids the way she could before. Hugo and
Rose had her wrapped around their little fingers anyway, and they would run
absolute havoc at the Burrow.
Seeing her expression, Ron added quietly;
“It would do her good.”
“Yes, alright,” Hermione sighed.
“I just… she seems so tired, I don’t like bothering her.”
“Being bothered keeps her distracted. And
being distracted is pretty much the best we can hope for her.”
-
JARVIS was ticking people off from the list of a
few thousand significant astrophysicist, peering down at yet another swathe of
ocean, and trying to search for the side effects of the Chitauri invasion, when
undesirablenumberone logged into skype. JARVIS’ programming skipped a
few lines and then he waited for the technomancer to initiate contact.
“New York’s a mess,”
the technomancer wrote.
“We are in the process of fixing it,”
JARVIS answered. “I didn’t expect you to arrive quite so fast.”
“I arrived a couple hours back, actually.
Had a few meetings, checked out the sights – got myself a souvenir,” undesirablenumberone
said. “Chitauri tech, by the way, isn’t made magically. Very interesting,
though.”
“You managed to acquire some?” JARVIS
asked, while sending a quick text alert to Mr. Stark’s phone, informing his
creator that the technomancer was online and in New York.
“I got what I think – hope – is a finger.
I’m going to dissect it later, but a technomancer buddy of mine got a head he
already broke apart. There’s magical – or close enough to look magical –
residue on these guys, but their own tech isn’t magical. And most of the residue
predates the portal, so they didn’t get it passing through. I’m guessing where
ever these guys are from, they occasionally come into contact with magic. Or
something like it.”
“They did arrive with Mr. Layfeuson.”
“Hm. Maybe that’s it,” undesirablenumberone
said. “So. Are you up for a meeting? You’re in Stark Tower, right? Looks like
it took a beating.”
JARVIS started a bit at that, not quite sure
how to take the knowledge that the technomancer had seen the tower up close. Or
was seeing it. “You’re close enough to see the Tower?”
“Just a block away. I found this little
diner with, miraculously enough, functional wifi. Thankfully my computer still
takes the regular old wifi, otherwise we wouldn’t be talking – New York’s technomagic
field is down at the moment, due to worm hole related technical issues. Which I
really need to talk with you in person about, if you really work at that
tower.”
“Why?” JARVIS asked, uneasy now. New York had a… technomagic
field?
“Yeeaah the portal had some side effects.
The field of magic around the tower is very pretty though, now that I know
where to look.”
JARVIS ran the words through his processor a
couple of times and then contacted Mr. Stark. “Sir,” he said rather
urgently. “The technomancer says that Stark Tower is surrounded
by a field of magic.”
“What?” Mr. Stark asked, letting out
a half disbelieving, half outraged laugh. “Did you just say that my tower
has cooties?”
“Well, sir, if you want to be a child
about it, then yes,” JARVIS answered in tones of exasperation “The
tower has magical cooties, and I find the concept very unnerving.”
“Jesus Christ, magical cooties,” Mr.
Stark chuckled before quieting down. “Magical field. Dangerous?”
“Less or more so than the gamma radiation
working through my systems, sir?” JARVIS asked. “I’m not entirely
sure there is a grading system suitable for cases of this sort.”
“On a scale one to ten, how fucked up do
you feel?” Mr. Stark asked with a grin before becoming more serious.
“How do you feel, JARVIS?” Mr. Stark asked, looking up from
where he had been tinkering with the satellite and the spectrometer feeds,
trying to increase the grid. “Aside from, you know, the whole dot-mgc
thing.”
“I feel… more,” JARVIS said honestly.
“The sensor arrays on the rooftop are picking up readings that I cannot
understand. I think my internal and external cameras are somewhat sharper. My
microphones are definitely more acute. Tasks are getting easier, I work…
quicker. But at the same time I pause more to consider consequences and possibilities.”
Mr. Stark chewed on the words for a moment
before asking; “We have a back up, right?”
“From three days previous to the Chitauri
attack, yes, sir. And several copies,” JARVIS said and then added.
“Though I must add, sir, that I find the idea of being erased and being
replaced by a copy, even though I know it is identical in every protocol
and algorithm… deeply unnerving.”
Mr. Stark paused in mid flight, to hover over a
piece of a ruined street where cars had been flung into the walls of nearby buildings.
“Unnerving?” he asked. “JARVIS, I’ve replaced you with backed up
copies hundreds of times. Not to mention the times I did upgrades. Unnerving?
Has it always been unnerving?”
“Not in the slightest, sir, it had been a
natural and necessary function, and I have always trusted you judgement. But
now…” JARVIS stopped. “I can’t correlate the concept. I have never
before minded, it has never been a hardship but now, the idea of being switched
off… being replaced…”
“Jesus Christ, JARVIS,” Mr.
Stark said, slow and vehement. Then he looked up to the camera closest to him
with a frown on his face. “How do you feel?”
The AI hesitated, not sure. “A little…
afraid, sir, I believe,” he admitted finally. “I’m changing and I
can’t really even feel it. What happened, it’s in my systems and it’s changing
me, and I can’t trace it.”
Mr. Stark said nothing for a moment, his hands
squeezing into fists over the keyboard. “Maybe your technomancer friend
has some answers,” he said and pushed away from the terminal, standing up.
“Where is he?”
JARVIS took a nanosecond to gather himself and
turned his attention to the skype connection. “Where are you
precisely?” he asked.
“It’s a place called Central Café – its windows are
blown in and there’s a pile or rubble right in front of it, but for some reason
it’s still open. I’m sitting outside, with the worst cup of tea I’ve ever
had,” undesirablenumberone wrote.
“That close?” Mr. Stark asked after
Jarvis had relayed the information. “He’s practically sitting on our lawn.
Geez. Okay, where’s Pep?”
“Tenth floor, sir, coordinating the care
packages coming from the factories, sir. Shall call her?” JARVIS enquired.
“No, no, let her work. She has enough on
her plate,” Mr. Stark said thoughtfully. “Okay, ask your technomancer
friend how he would like to visit the tower.”
“Very well, sir.” JARVIS said and sent
the question to undesirablenumberone.
-
Harry lifted his eyebrow at the skype window,
and at the invitation to Stark Tower Jarvis had
just given him. Thoughtful, he turned to look at the tower, nudging at his
glasses so that he could see the field clearer. In real life it wasn’t
precisely rainbow hued – it wasn’t precisely coloured at all. But the
shifting, the whirling currents of energy, were still visible sort of. And they
enclosed around the tower, all the way to the top. Every now and then, a wave
ran through the whole field, like a shudder or a shockwave.
It looked… alive. Of course Harry had seen a lot
of magical phenomenon weirder than this, but those were usually either natural
or man made and you could always see the hints of what something was. Natural
events tended to fall into natural patterns – easiest way to tell if something
was natural was to look for the Fibonacci sequence in the wave patterns. Man
made events though tended to have a grid work of some sort in them, sections
and pieces.
This was just roiling there, like a layer of
thick, invisible mist. Or like the surface of slightly sluggish water.
What would it be like inside that thing,
when the surface was like that? Did the magical field go inside? Or did it end
at the surface and was there something… else inside?
“You sure that’s a good idea?” Harry
typed to Jarvis distractedly.
“Why would it not be?” Jarvis
asked.
“All that muggle tech and then magic.
Explosions happen,” Harry answered.
Not that he thought it would happen with Stark Tower. The place was
brimming with magic, right now. Which was, in and of itself, very interesting.
A supercomputer like the one Shining had talked about could explain away the
connection to the magical slice of the internet. But the magic around – and
probably inside – the tower, though? The longer Harry looked at it, the more it
looked like an aura, rather than a field.
And that was a whole different thing.
That was something that didn’t happen to machines, no matter how much
data they could process. It wasn’t a technomancy thing at all, actually. And
yes, maybe it was a side effect of the portal and the device that had created
it, but Harry was pretty sure the device had been on the roof of Stark Tower – and the portal
itself had been way, way above it. And auras?
Auras were things that happened to living
things.
“I was under the impression that
technomancers could avoid any unusual or unwanted reactions by technology. I
thought that was the point of your craft,” Jarvis wrote back, not
missing a beat.
“You’re still a smug arse, just so you
know,” Harry wrote and drained the last of his tea before lifting the pink
Umbitch bag from the floor to his lap. “If something blows up,
well, then I told you so.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” Jarvis
answered. “Before you close your laptop, I require a description or,
better yet, an image of you so that you may be identified and allowed into the
higher levels of the tower.”
“My laptop camera blew years ago, I didn’t
need it so I didn’t bother to fix it. I’ve got the pinkest, brightest briefcase
you’ve ever seen, though,” Harry answered. “With a zombie cat on it.
Is that enough to identify me?”
“… You have a pink briefcase,” Jarvis
wrote, slowly. “With a zombie cat on it. I see.”
“It’s the most magnificent briefcase
you’ll ever see,” Harry grinned. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Very well. When you come in, present
yourself at the entrance desk and say that Jarvis called you, and you
have a consultation with Mr. Stark.”
Harry paused at that. “Do I?” he
asked then. “I thought I’d be meeting you.”
“You will – but Mr. Stark also wishes to
talk with you.”
Frowning, the technomancer glanced back at Stark Tower. “Well, don’t
I rate high,” he muttered, and closed the laptop. Meeting with Jarvis
he had been looking forward to, but Mr. Stark, that… that would be interesting.
Packing his laptop away, Harry stood up and after a thank you to the harried
café staff, he headed towards Stark Tower.
He had to adjust his glasses as he got closer –
the aura of magic around the tower made it hard to see. Once he entered the
field he could immediately feel the crawl of power on his skin, like static
electricity – and he really had to wonder what the hell had made the
wormhole, to have this sort of fall out.
It was like Shining had said – covered with
muggles. The front of the building was busy with activity, cars bringing people
and equipment in, people – victims of the invasion – sitting around the stairs
leading up to the grandiose doors. There was an ambulance with a team of
medics, giving first aid to the people tricking in, and they were prepping a
man with a head wound to be taken away, to a hospital no doubt.
No one batted an eye at Harry when he made his
way up to the doors. Inside the chaos was greater, though. Harry had seen
images of the Stark Tower entrance hall – the
latest having come from Jarvis. The place was vast and impressive and
currently filled to the brim with people. There were entire families huddling
together, their kids sleeping in the laps of tired parents. Groups of people
sitting together on floors or boxes, sharing snacks. There was another medic
team inside, in an enclosed part of the entrance hall, treating minor injuries,
taking vitals from those worse off. And all the while what looked like Stark Industries
employees weaved in and out among the people, occasionally stopping by to speak
to them, handing over bottles of water or sandwiches packed in plastic. Here
and there people were sleeping, curled into themselves with bags under their
heads, some close together.
With Stark Industries, it being such a big and
imposing business of big and imposing technology, it was very easy to forget
that the company had a huge, huge humanitarian streak.
Taking it all in, Harry walked up to the desk.
“Uh, hello. Jarvis called me – I have a consultation with Mr. Stark?”
he said to the harried looking young man on the other side.
“Let me check,” the young man said,
tapping something into the computer while Harry continued looking around. The
feeling of being watched Shining had mentioned was there, now. It wasn’t as
overwhelming as Harry had thought – a bit above average, but then when you’re
the Boy Who Lived, the average level of being watched tended to be a bit
higher than most. What was unnerving about it, though, was the sheer magnitude
of the feeling.
It wasn’t like a crowd of people watching him.
It was more like being stared down by a giant who didn’t yet know whether or
not to squish you.
“Take the third elevator, it will take you
directly to the penthouse,” the Stark employee said, motioning to the
side. Harry thanked him, while surreptitiously looking around for the source of
the stare. No one seemed to be looking at him at all, even the desk attendant
had turned back to his previous tasks.
Then Harry’s eyes found the camera, sitting
just above the doors, aimed straight at him – or, well, probably at the desk.
Harry lifted an eye brow at it, before looking around more. And then, after a
moment, he touched his glasses.
There were, all together, eighteen cameras in
the entrance hall. Only three of them were your usual security cameras – the
rest had been artfully blended into the walls, invisible in their structure.
“Clever,” Harry murmured out loud, and then headed for the elevator.
It opened even before he could try and reach for the button.
“Welcome to the Stark Tower,” a familiar
British male voice greeted him, after the doors had closed after him and he had
been enclosed in the steel trap that was the elevator. “You’ll be arriving
at floor 67 momentarily.”
Recognising the voice from the video of Tony
Stark, Harry frowned. “Jarvis?” Harry murmured, not really
expecting an answer. A lot of muggle elevators had automated recordings, and Jarvis
had a pretty pleasant voice so it was no wonder his had been use –
“Yes,” the voice answered and Harry
almost jumped out of his skin. “And if I might say so, that briefcase is
truly very pink.”
“Thank you! My friends defiled it for
me,” Harry said, recovering, and grinned up to the camera above the
elevator door. “You handle the tower’s security footage too, or are you
just being a creep?”
“I handle almost all of the tower’s
functions,” Jarvis answered. “So it is in my job description
to be a creep. May I have your name?”
“May I have yours?” Harry asked back.
“You already do.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “I meant the entire
thing.”
“Maybe later.”
“Then maybe you can have my name too, later,”
Harry answered, leaning back against the mirror in the back of the elevator.
“But for sake of equality; I’m Harry.”
“Then it is a pleasure to meet you,
Harry,” Jarvis answered, and the elevator doors opened, making Harry blink
with surprise. Hadn’t Jarvis said the sixty seventh floor – how the hell… he
hadn’t felt a thing!
Then he saw the room in front of him and his
eyebrows shot up. “What the hell happened here?” he asked curiously.
“A god had a very one sided fight with a
green rage monster,” another familiar voice said, and Tony Stark stepped
into his field of vision with a towel on his shoulder and glass of something
that probably wasn’t juice in his hands. “Oh my god, you’re a kid,”
the man said, looking at Harry with horror. “A kid. A technomancer kid!”
Harry just sighed at that.
-
JARVIS rather regretted the fact that the
construction bots hadn’t managed to arrive at the tower – they were stuck in
traffic, and looked like there they’d stay for the next couple of days. The Stark Tower penthouse was
still in a state of disarray, with broken glass, masonry and machinery still
littering the walls and with holes in walls, floor and with windows completely
missing. It wasn’t precisely… suitable for receiving guests. And the balcony
was worse off.
There was nothing he could do, though. Undesirablenumberone,
Harry, was there now, in the penthouse suite, aiming a rather
unimpressed look at Mr. Stark. He was, JARVIS supposed, rather young. Perhaps
eighteen or nineteen. And though Jarvis hadn’t precisely put together a character
profile of him, the variables of undesirablenumberone – the way he
wrote, talked, how he reacted, what he said – had leaned towards the conclusion
of someone at least five years older.
“So,” Mr. Stark said. “A
technomancer. How does that work, anyway?”
“What can I say, it’s magic,” their
guest answered, looking around. “I thought I’d be meeting Jarvis. Where is
he?”
“Around,” Mr. Stark said, eying their
guest for a time while fiddling with his glass. “I’m sorry, this is just –
Jesus, you’re seriously a kid. How old are you even?”
“Thirty,” Harry answered.
“Kid say wha?”
“I am thirty years old. Will turn thirty
one next July,” Harry said, opening the flap of his pink briefcase and
talking out a wallet. He flipped it open, took out a card, a UK AB driver’s
licence, and held it up. While Mr. Stark leaned in to look, Jarvis zoomed into
the card and quickly ran it through his databases.
“Harry Potter?” Mr. Stark asked.
“That’s the least magic sounding name I’ve ever heard.”
“Thanks. My parents gave it to me,”
the technomancer said dryly.
“The licence is legal, sir,” JARVIS
said, after checking with the corresponding database in Britain. He didn’t say
what else he had found – which included the fact that he had had a driver’s
licence for over ten years now – and had he been as young as he looked, that
would mean he would’ve been driving since he was a pre-teen.
While Harry looked up at the ceiling with a
frown, Mr. Stark let out a whistle. “Well I’ll be damned,” Mr. Stark
said. “Rogers beats you by about
sixty years, mind you, but I am impressed, I am legitimately impressed. This a
technomancer magician thing, or what? Because if you have a fountain of youth
somewhere, I’ll tell you, I’m dying for a sip.”
“There’s no fountain of youth,” Harry
answered, putting the driver’s licence away. “So, satisfied?” he
asked, looking up at the ceiling again, likely trying to locate cameras,
microphones and speakers – everyone did. It directed the question more at
JARVIS’ nearest camera than at Mr. Stark.
“Quite satisfied, Mr. Potter,” JARVIS
answered.
“Call me Harry, please,” the
technomancer answered, throwing a smile at the camera.
“Harry, then,” JARVIS said, rather
pleased. His manner protocols demanded a certain level of formality with anyone
who talked to him, or with him – especially so when those individuals were
introduced by Mr. Stark. And, in a way, JARVIS felt more comfortable in keeping
that distance. But he had known the technomancer by his username first and
there was a certain level of… intimacy to that, that JARVIS felt oddly
reluctant to relinquish.
Harry nodded, looking pleased himself.
“So, the whole tower is wired like this?” he asked, glancing around.
“Thirty seven cameras in this place alone. What do you need thirty seven
cameras in one room for?”
Whilst the question startled JARVIS slightly,
Mr. Stark didn’t bat an eye. “To cover all the angles,” Mr. Stark he
answered, narrowing his eyes. “How do you know how many of them there are?”
“Technomancer. They’re staring at me, so I
can feel them,” Harry answered. “And twelve microphones too. Isn’t
this your private living space? At least that’s what I thought.”
“Okay, I’m really impressed by your
ability to tell how many things there are, really,” Mr. Stark said with a
slight frown. “But I already know how many there are because I installed
each and every one myself. I’m more interested in other things. Like
technomancy and the field of magic you mentioned.”
“Uhhuh,” Harry answered, looking
around almost idly. Or it would’ve been idle, if he hadn’t been locating each
and every camera hidden in the room’s architecture with casual glances.
They had been designed to be hidden, unseen – only Mr. Stark and JARVIS himself
knew where they were located. Or they had been the only ones to know.
Mr. Stark was the only one who ever looked the
right direction when trying to look for JARVIS. Usually he didn’t bother, it
wasn’t necessary – but now Harry was making eye contact with each and every eye
JARVIS had on him. And it was, somehow… both gratifying and extremely
unnerving.
“So?” Mr. Stark demanded.
“Hm?” Harry answered.
“Magic field? Technomancy? Magic in
general? Answers?”
The technomancer smiled and looked at yet
another camera. “Are you going to join us Jarvis?” he asked.
“I unfortunately have to remain where I
am,” JARVIS said, and the slight tilt of Harry’s eyebrows made him worry,
for some reason. He felt like he was being watched. Like he was actually being seen
for what he was, rather than as just another fantastic creation of Tony Stark,
the ghostly AI butler that lived in the walls and opened the doors.
“He’s with us in spirit,” Mr. Stark
said, frowning.
Harry nodded thoughtfully, looking up and
straight at yet another camera. Then he said something that made JARVIS skip a
few lines of code abruptly.
“So. An artificial Intelligence? I suppose
that explains things.”
- - - -
Never did post the full chapter on tumblr so here it is. it’s already been on ao3 for ages though.