Chapter 1
“Hey, Mr. Peabody, you there?”
Silence greets him, but then, Tony hadn’t expected an immediate answer.
Beneath him, the streets and rooftops flash along, cars and bikes and pedestrians, thousands of people crossing his awareness for a fraction of a second before they’re gone. The population of the Big Apple, most of whom he’s never even met, and yet they’re all relying on him, relying on his skill, his ingenuity, his effort.
And who has he to rely on? A handful of trusted allies, none of them in the area. Those he used to rely on are off on their own missions. Some of them aren’t even allies anymore, and others are so busy that they don’t even return his messages except once in a blue moon.
In a city of eight million people, he’s feeling… lonely. Cut off. There’s no one free to help him, and he’s feeling drained enough to need… something. Support. Camaraderie. Someone who’s going through a fraction of what he’s been through in the past few months alone.
“Peabody?” he persists. And then, with impatience bubbling up in his chest: “Finch?”
A change in the comfort noise, a sudden ear-jarring click. “Yes, yes, I’m here.” The half-hidden irritation in Harold’s voice is enough to give Tony a much-needed grin.
“Were you just waiting for me to stop calling you ‘Mr. Peabody’?”
“Shockingly enough, Mr. Stark, I have things to do with my time other than waiting on your every communique. Things over here have been, shall we say, a bit stressful, and I’ve found it difficult to focus with my attention divided in so many different ways.”
Following FRIDAY’s readings in his HUD, Tony swoops around toward the north, the signals getting clearer, narrowing down. “Is your New York on fire? Because mine’s on fire.”
“Well, not literal fire, though the analogy seems apt enough.” Harold pauses. “Are you placing an interdimensional call while you’re literally fighting fires?”
“Flying between fires, and fighting the things that are making the fires, but yeah. Got, like, eight minutes before the next one manifests,” he adds, double-checking the time in his readout. Yeah, he’ll be there in time to clear out any civilians. Barely.
“Do be careful, Mr. Stark,” Harold admonishes, and Tony can just picture the look of horror on the face of a man he’s never actually seen.
Rubbing his aching neck, Harold starts sorting out multiple apps and windows as he tries to keep track of the conversation. It’s a few minutes he can ill spare the attention for, but then, he’s used to multitasking. He is a genius, after all.
Tony’s voice comes across surprisingly clearly, for coming from a place outside their reality. “You ever feel like there’s too many emergencies and not enough resources to handle them all?”
Whipping through one keyboard command after another, Harold’s fingers never pause, but he does huff. “Frequently.”
“God, I miss JARVIS. This all wouldn’t be so hard to take if I still had him to help manage what’s left of my life.”
“You… you lost your ASI?” Harold asks, his heart clenching in sudden distress.
“It’s complicated,” Stark replies after a moment. “He’s still alive. Sort of. Just… experiencing the world for the first time. He’s got better things to do than hang out and be my butler, and I don’t begrudge him the opportunities, just… what we had together was… irreplaceable. And I’m reminded of that every time I turn around.”
An Artificial Super-Intelligence surpassing its creator’s design… coupled with Stark’s insistence on terming his creations “alive,” the very idea sends a thrill of fear down Harold’s spine. Despite his seemingly idle fancies that the Machine might one day grow enough to choose its own name, Harold finds it difficult to even imagine a future that maintains human lives and free will while also making room for a truly sapient ASI.
And yet… his own creation seems, for now, to value humanity and human choice even more highly than the parameters he’d set for it. Given how thoroughly the Machine has surpassed both his expectations and his nightmares, Harold has all but come to the conclusion that it is, in some sense, alive. Though he’s tried to deny it even to himself, what else could account for its behavior? He set the goal of protecting the Numbers; the Machine found ways to do so more efficiently by working around its own limitations. He set the goal of self-preservation; the Machine went so far as to invent a human alias and move its own hardware into hiding.
What more need it do to prove some level of autonomy and self-awareness? The fact that Harold finds the prospect terrifying does not alter the reality of everything his creation has become.
“God, I miss my team,” Stark says fervently. “You know, I used to appreciate flying solo. Never thought I would need—or want—a team, but now it feels like… the stuff that used to be easy is so much harder as a one-man job.”
That, too, hits home. Being drawn into a friendship with Nathan, unwillingly at first but then coming to enjoy his company, to rely on him. Drawing John into the mission, while his attempts to maintain distance faltered and fell apart, until at last he found John equally irreplaceable. For all Harold’s intent to remain solitary and self-sufficient, he’s time and again come to realize the unparalleled benefits of a trustworthy partner.
And then… losing them. Permanently or temporarily, it has always felt like tearing out vital organs. How apt that the first loss left him crippled in body as much as spirit.
It’s a moment before he can pull himself out of his own head long enough to address Stark’s comments. “Are you the only one left?”
“Oh, I get a little help here and there, it’s just… you know, I was about to say that we’re more at odds than my original team, but that’s thinking too highly of the original team. Half of which are in hiding or in prison, and we… we had a little falling-out.” The surface amusement at the apparent understatement does little to disguise the darkness behind the words, though Harold can’t quite make out whether he’s picking up on animosity or self-deprecation. Possibly both.
“The ones who supported me,” Stark continues, “they’re off infiltrating terrorist rings and running countries and such, so New York’s protectors are down to just… me.”
“Dear Lord.”
“And Pepper…” A ragged intake of breath comes over the connection. “Pepper’s off handling things in a life that doesn’t include me anymore. I can’t even begrudge her taking that step—it’s gonna improve her life, it’s just…”
“Everyone’s leaving you behind,” Harold concludes sympathetically, almost without thinking.
“Yeah. You ever feel like that? Like it’s the holidays at boarding school and you’re holding a one-man snowball fight because your parents can’t be bothered to pick you up this year and all the other kids went home.”
Harold takes a deep breath, and sighs it out again, pushing back thoughts of his own father, of how teenage Harold got to share one last heart-rending conversation with the remnants of his dad’s mind. Of how other kids were attending prom while Harold was reinventing his identity and forging out into a new life, three steps ahead of the government hounds and a charge of treason, with no allies or resources other than his exceptional mind.
There are, of course, much more recent parallels to Stark’s situation. “What’s left of my team is entirely in hiding,” he admits, “as am I. To avoid getting imprisoned or, more likely, killed outright, we are forced to avoid each other. And yet, like you, we are all that stands between this city and disaster; no one else can act on the information we have, and the situation has become unmanageably dire.” He swallows. “The falling-out, though, hits a little too close to home. As does the feeling of being abandoned by those who were supposed to have your back.”
“Yeah? Captain Boy Scout beat me to a bloody pulp and left me for dead, after lying to me about his friend, the serial killer, who is, not incidentally, the one who killed my parents. My dad idolized the guy, but it turns out he’d sooner protect my dad’s killer than protect his son. Got anything comparable?” Then, a bare moment later: “I’m sorry, I just… it’s pretty fresh. I kinda hope you don’t have any basis for comparison.”
Harold sighs, and rubs the spot between his eyebrows. “Unfortunately, I do. Mr. Reese did indeed leave me, and it nearly resulted in my death. But I’m afraid that in my case, the one at fault was me.” Closing his eyes, he tries not to picture the disappointment, the betrayal on John’s face. The way that John had just… shut down. “He discovered that I had lied to him… or, more precisely, that I had withheld information, knowing full well that he had a right to know. It was my actions that had, however inadvertently, led to the loss of a woman most dear to his heart… and I knew that before I even met him face to face.”
Part of him wants to add that he did everything in his power to save John’s love, but of course that’s not true: He did not know of her plight until far too late, and he could have known, were it not for his own indefensible decisions.
Had he chosen differently… he could have been there in time.
“I was… I was trying to protect the world,” Stark says after a moment, almost as if he hadn’t heard Harold’s words. “Trying to protect the people I can’t live without. And it all backfired, and I didn’t see it coming. Almost couldn’t stop it. And the fallout…” A shuddering breath. “God, people like me should not be allowed to just make these kinds of decisions. It’s too much power, not enough checks and balances. I thought… somehow I thought he’d understand that.”
A well of sympathy cuts short any reply that Harold might make. His own checks and balances, however well-intentioned at the time, have led to unimaginable tragedy, and yet he can see no flaws in their structure, only in their application toward a flawed world and the flawed people who inhabit it (not even excluding himself in that equation). So often, he’s been made to question his personal rules, to consider amending them, only to remind himself of what led to their creation in the first place.
How greatly he fears a day he might abandon them altogether.
“—just assassinate potential threats from afar,” Stark is saying. “Boom, dead, no judge or jury, just remote executioner. Hundreds of thousands of targets, maybe millions, and it almost happened.”
It takes a moment for Harold’s brain to grasp the image, but it’s a chilling one, and shockingly close to his own fears for the future now that Samaritan has been unleashed. Targets marked for death by the merciless algorithms of an artificial superintelligence whose only goal is to improve the world, with no allowance for human freedom or the sanctity of every human life.
They’d fought so hard to prevent Samaritan from taking over, and yet it had come to pass. The Machine had even laid it out for them, the one way to stop it, had left that decision up to its creator, and Harold… Harold had fixated on his lines in the sand, let one man live and, by that decision, condemned thousands.
I was trying to protect the world. And it all backfired.
“Nobody should be allowed that kind of power,” Stark continues. Then, after a pause: “I guess that was Steve’s point, too, just… on a different level. Who gets to decide these things. Who gets sacrificed on the altar of necessity. Can’t save everyone, and he was… trying to protect the ones he cares about, just like I was. No matter what the cost.”
Through tear-blurred eyes, Harold pictures the bridge, with Grace on the far side. The peculiar happiness they’d found together had been sacrificed, leaving her heartbroken but safe, and yet it hadn’t been enough. If things had played out differently, he would have laid the world at the feet of their enemies… because with Grace as a bargaining chip, Harold would have broken every moral standard he’d ever held rather than see her harmed.
“You know the worst part?” Stark asks, breaking his train of thought. “Working together for the better part of four years, I’d finally started to see Steve for who he really is, not just the guy who stole my dad’s attention. Started to like the guy. Somehow I’d thought we were becoming friends, and then he—”
Three minutes to expected manifestation, comes a woman’s voice across the line.
Stark sighs heavily. “Well… guess that’s all the time I’ve got to whine about my life.”
“Do be careful,” Harold manages, before the line goes dead.