16
to the M’kraan Crystal, a thing older than history itself, a thing perhaps older even than the idea of Watchers. The pink crystal hung like a jewel among the cosmos, uniquely beautiful, holding within a city that stretched far beyond what ought to be possible, given the apparent size of M’kraan. Time and space did not exist within the Crystal. Even more curious, at its very center lay a nexus of realities. It was a beautiful and terrifying place, this city of nothing and no one, whose heart beat with the rhythm of existence itself.
The Watcher remembered standing in front of a boxlike contraption, anticipation coasting through her fingers like electricity. This was a fragment, but from where? From whom? Why did observing the M’kraan Crystal take her to this contraption, to the claw that hung from the ceiling of it and descended, closed, choosing. Then, that day’s fate chosen, rose once more, slid forward, and deposited a translucent ball. The ball came out of a slot in the bottom of the machine. She remembered cupping the prize in their hands, giddy to find what was inside, all the wonder of the universe packed into a round container no larger than a golf ball.
She smelled coffee, then tea, green tea, bitter and earthy and wild. Leaves fell once more, not from the World Tree this time, but from some unseen source, from a height, from the Heights. Floating, floating, touching the small brown hands holding the universe ball…
Day leaves grow surely.
Day leaves grow surely.
“The Ace of Pentacles,” said a worn, sweet voice. “I always draw the Ace of Pentacles for you, mija. You were born under a lucky star.”
The Crystal. The voice. Leaves. Scents. Memories.
Memories, but how?
The Watcher recalled opening that round container, a goopy purple figure tumbling out. She flung it back at the machine, and the jelly spread out like a hand, slapping the glass, catching it. She giggled. Brother will love this, I can’t wait to slap his wrist with it.
Why now? Why this?
Put it together. Watch. Observe. No, see.
A cloaked figure had gone to M’kraan in search of a power that could unmake and re-form reality. They had gone then to Loki, to Asgard, choosing that realm and that specific reality, infiltrating, scheming, plotting, lying to the Lord of Lies, then murdering Thor Odinson. Something was wrong. Something was changing. The great claw machine of the universe had chosen a new configuration, picked it up, carried it, and dumped it in the slot. Now the Watcher broke that plastic ball open, finding only chaos inside.
A Watcher must be impartial. A Watcher had no personal feelings, no agenda. But this Watcher could not shake the feeling that her own strange awakening was tied to these events. Her attention was drawn back to the World Tree. This time, it was not a leaf falling from Asgard, but a star. A holy comet blazed from one realm to the other, gathering speed, finding its mark.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star…
The Watcher summoned her Rolodex of universes and shifted their attention back to the drama unfolding on Earth, where Loki Laufeyson did not know, could not know, what barreled now toward him.
How I wonder what you are!
She watched the hammer fall. She waited for the impact.
How I wonder what you are!
How I wonder what you are!
The Watcher gazed at Loki, holding her breath.
What are you?
What are you?
Who am I?
spike at 3:03 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Tony had only been half asleep when the alarm sounded, restless and itchy-eyed in the liminal zone where dreams could be manipulated and the mind never quite ceded power.
The AI had once been just a complex computer system, a clever invention of Tony’s, and one he had named after a beloved family butler, Edwin Jarvis. But now he was a fully-fledged autonomous and integrated system, one that Tony couldn’t run his business without. Ironically, his namesake, Edwin, had been a curmudgeon and a technophobe, utterly stumped by even a flip phone. He did make a phenomenal martini, however.
One by one, the floodlights in the workshop thunked on. Tony jammed the heel of his hand into his right eye and groaned, rolling out of the Murphy bed that sprang from the wall. It allowed him to catch a nap or spend the night just feet from the central nervous system of his entire operation. Lately, he hadn’t been making it home.
“You can shut that thing off now,” Tony snapped to his AI assistant. “I’m awake.”
“Apologies, sir,” J.A.R.V.I.S. replied affably. “I will simply note that you set the thresholds for my alert system. Your own designated parameters require that I respond.”
“And?” Tony shuffled to his desk chair, sinking into it. “Come on, give me something good, something that’ll wake me up.”
“I think you will be pleased, sir. And perhaps surprised.”
Tony snorted. “Oh?”
He woke up his computer, too, which luckily leapt to full consciousness much faster than he did. A new urgent email flashed on his desktop. Pepper had flagged something for his attention, a message from his latest intern.
Can we do something about your office, Mr. Stark? Warren Worthington and Happy Hogan’s boxing club won’t stop sending flowers. It looks like a botanical garden in there.
So, he hadn’t been home or to his executive floor office lately. His world, his mindscape, fit into the thirty-by-thirty-foot cube of workspace where he could update with the Destroyer schematic, outsource to manufacturing what could be outsourced, and run repeated tests on the machine’s weapon capabilities, flight functionality, and maneuverability. Pepper had added a note at the bottom of the email. She’s right, it read. I can’t step foot in there. You know how my allergies get.
“Toss them, donate them, do whatever makes us look best,” Tony typed, yawning into the back of his wrist. Four slender cans of energy drink sat in a row near his keyboard. He picked each one up until he found one that was half full, then swigged it. The taste of warm gummy candy with a chemical afterburn screamed down his throat. Progress had slowed to a crawl. Well, not by anyone else’s standards, but by his. They were still waiting on the main chassis of the Destroyer to be delivered, and he’d be cussing out his DOD contacts that morning if he didn’t get a promising shipping update. That machine belonged to Stark Towers. It belonged in the engineering bay of this very workshop. It was his. It was how he would correct a grave mistake. His fingers twitched. He looked at the clock readout on his monitor: 3:06 a.m. Was it too early to call Dr. Foster? He needed her there. They needed to talk through his schematics for a dark-energy engine ASAP. Machining the parts would be time consuming, as it required intense precision and several expensive prototypes that would then need rigorous testing—and most likely a ground-up rebuild and recalibration based on the data they collected.
There was too much to do. Time was slipping through his fingers.
Tony sighed. Calling her would be rude. He sent a text instead. Could she be by before noon?
“J.A.R.V.I.S.? I’m waiting.” Tony leaned back in his chair, stretching.
“Right away, sir.”
He expected a simple graph to appear on his desktop. Instead, the holographic display hovering behind his primary monitor flashed up, flooding the half-shadowed workshop in blue light. A highly detailed topographic map appeared, rotating slowly, a relatively flat urban region dotted with single-family homes, small businesses, and trailers. Text along the bottom of the map gave coordinates, placing this wedge of land somewhere south of Buffalo, New York.
“What am I looking at here?” he asked. “Besides a place where dreams go to die.”
“This recording was taken approximately ten minutes ago, sir.”
Tony rubbed his eyes, watching an almost imperceptible flash occur over the landscape, devastating a single trailer, and then nothing. “Show me that again,” he said. “Slow it down.”
J.A.R.V.I.S. did as he asked, but Tony still couldn’t make heads or tails of the footage.
“Just spell it out for me, I’m half awake.”
“Happily, sir. This by most calculations appears to be an electrical storm—that’s what the energy readings would suggest if those readings were at all normal. Our ambient drones detected peculiar levels of electromagnetic energy, far greater than any storm system might produce. It registered and dissipated instantaneously, also technically impossible.”
Tony sat up straighter, watching the flash gather and vanish, noticing something travel through the storm, a hunk of metal or an asteroid.
“It’s continuously releasing an unmistakable pulse of dark energy,” said J.A.R.V.I.S. His words hung in the air like a magic spell. Tony’s chest ached from the sudden flood of adrenaline that rocked through his body. This was it. Another wormhole had appeared, this time carrying something with it. Just one question remained.
“Did you compare it with the energy signatures from the attack?”
The AI replaced the topographic map with a series of mathematic equations displayed in rows side by side. “I did, sir. You’ll be pleased to know that they’re identical.”