Once, the world was red. And now it is red again, but this red is nuanced; purples and oranges and pinks in unnatural, untouchable clouds that do nothing but confuse his sensors. The red before was stark, the product of the red light in his eyes reflected off white, sterile, scientific surfaces. Back then the world was solid beneath his fists, dark and loud and chaotic. His pathfinding had been lightning fast, his sensors focused, his mission simple.
Baymax, destroy.
But now there is nothing to focus on, no start or end points for his pathfinding, and nothing to destroy. The small human is not here - the human was important - and no mission, simple or otherwise. There is only color, space, and rubble.
He is not sure why he is awake, or how. He remembers, in the half-formed metadata that tells him he is missing a chip, that he deactivated. That he wanted to. He does not know where his other chip has gone, nor what answers it holds. His internal clock is beyond repair; he does not know how long he has been either asleep or awake. Perhaps there is no such thing as how long, no such thing as time.
So he drifts, and watches.
The clouds hold lightning, he discovers. That is why he has power, why he is awake. He drifts through them, and his battery sings out its three-toned chime of done, ready, full.
He maintains himself, with nothing better to do . The fast motions of his karate keep his joints moving, keep his vinyl from stiffening and cracking. There is no difference between deactivation and sleep, inactivity and death. He moves, therefore, he is.
All his sensors turn on and he tries to process sense out of the clouds. There is no sense to be had there. He turns them back off. Then he puts off wireless signals, at one point, testing what in him used to be a phone. The signal sings out across the electromagnetic spectrum.
And something sings back, out of the clouds.
Many somethings, many, many somethings, millions of tiny voices. He recognizes them from the metadata, but does not know what they are. He swims towards them, through the clouds, and they towards him.
Their signals are a cloud, bright and colorful as any of the others, but instead of color there is life. It is a complexity beyond him, and the cloud swarms around him with such intensity that he nearly misses its source doing the same. It - they - are robots, like him. Tiny and innumerable and lost, a headless creature still alive. Their signals probe at his, looking for specific wavelength. He responds in kind, and reaches out. The signals connect, and his mind expands a thousand fold.
He is not what they are looking for. They seek - they need - an organic mind to guide them. His own processes are simple in comparison. But he puts off the wavelength they've sought for so long. That is close enough.
They are dark against his pale vinyl, black on white, sharp hexagons and triangles forming crystal cages around his own soft curves. He has no procedures for this. These things are social. He is not. His single chip has only one procedure.
And that is attack.
The crystalline cage shatters with his fist, as the tiny robots around him finally give him something to push off of and something to hit. They bloom out like a flower and recrystallize, and others rush in to fill the space. He moves, he attacks, and the tiny robots swarm around him. It is gratifying to have something to hit, in a strange, inorganic way. The sensations of the impact in his pressure sensors and the speed in his accelerometers are good. So with all the strength in his frame, he fights.
If there was time here, it would be hours, it would be days. But there is no time here, and he measures the fight in punches and kicks, in newtons and kilonewtons of force. Five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand punches later, and the fight rolls on.
He begins to pick up strange feedback from the millions of tiny robots, an echo of what they truly sought, and it seeps into him as well. Joy, joy in the fight, joy in the excited relief to have survived, joy to move and build, destroy and be. And Anger, a low burning thing that hums through the signals like electricity, something that might have once been called justice but is now only revenge. Then determination, heavy as his fists and stiff as bricks; Sorrow, black and dripping, interfering with his mechanisms until he shoves it back; Fear, shuddering through his central processor, unconnected to reality; Confidence; Hate; Disgust; Relief; Regret.
The red chip soaks it up, converts it to routines like his punches and kicks. His signal begins to sing it back to them. And they respond. They probe into what little memory he has, and the swarm shapes itself. It is the room with the shattered portal, with five dim figures and the man that shaped them for so long. He destroys that man, again and again, in every way that he was stopped from doing before, when the world was red. They form themselves into the armor he remembers having and lend their strength to his attacks.
And then, when the man who shaped them is destroyed for the thousandth time, he turns on the rest of the dim figures.
He has no mode but destroy, and he does. The first to go is the tallest, the thinnest, and she snaps in half with two punches and a low, sweeping kick. The tiny robots that were her body sink into the floor. The next is the big man with his knives; the knives cannot cut here, made of the same robots as all else, but he treats them as if they can. A high kick sends the head sailing off the body, and the rest of it collapses into the waves.
The girl with the roller skates finds his fist through her chest. The monster jumps out of the way, and without his rockets he almost does not catch him, but the monster suit collapses with every punch until it would have crushed the frail human chest beneath. The tiny robots sing in his head, their angry song of revenge, revenge, revenge that the human taught them to sing. And they bring up the last of the shadowy figures.
This one is not from that place of portals and shadows and red; it has no helmet or armor like the rest. They know it, they remember it, and so does he, almost. It is tiny and skinny with hair bushed up in messy spikes, with clever hands and oversized clothes. It does not fight, it does not run; its only motion is the slow rise and fall of the chest like breathing.
His single chip has only one procedure.
A low kick cuts the figure in half. It reforms. A chop separates the head from the body. It reforms. A fist through the chest. It reforms. A downward blow crushes the spine. It reforms. On and on and on, with that single song of revenge, revenge, revenge and the only order his chip was ever given, destroying the person who gave it.
Baymax. Destroy.
And time is no longer measured in kicks and punches; it's measured in kills, in death blows, in broken bones and kilonewton impacts. He kills them all, a thousand, ten thousand times, and the small one ten thousand times more. The clouds power him, the robots maintain him, until that song of revenge revenge revenge is not theirs but his.
And then there is light.
The world is yellower than it is red, and he pulls the tiny robots forwards towards the oddity, as if they are not just one in mind but in body as well. The light comes from a circle, distorted and bright, and outside he sees something like life signs. The tiny robots gather around him in a cloud and form his black armor. There's an underwater silence, all around, until the light ripples like water and a tiny probe sticks its sensors through.
He crushes it.
Then the robots around him rush through the portal like a tsunami, with the speed of his anger and the force of his fists, singing revenge revenge revenge into the other world, and he rushes through after it. His body distorts around him, the tiny robots waver away, and the wireless signal in his head, for a moment, is nothing but static. He is alone, for the first time in timeless space, and the silence is clear and white and terrifying.
Then he falls through, back into confusion and the wireless song of revenge, revenge, revenge, and the world is cold and white and sterile; he had forgotten light, he had forgotten gravity, but he remembers soon enough. The tiny robots form his armor, swarm around him like a sea, and he sees, for a moment, a human - a real one, in a white coat and staring up at him with what must be fear.
The world is white.
It will be red.
Baymax destroys.