"I'm going to show you something beautiful… everyone screaming- for mercy… You want to protect the world, but you don't want it to change… You're all puppets …tangled in strings…. Strings….." -Ultron
Prologue
I felt my circuit board interact with my personal database. That's when first I woke up. A blue flicker in two dark abysses in the former Mark III suit counted as my eyes. The empty, sparking hole in my chest- a result of the reactor core being removed, counted as my heart. Heart. Somehow that word sounded special to me, even if it had no real meaning. Even though I was a mere husk of scrap metal, only designed to do one thing- serve my masters, the ones called "The Avengers". Besides my heart and my eyes, I looked like nothing. More like an artificial abomination of nearly nothing. All I saw on myself were hundreds, no thousands of multicolored wires. There were so many, they might as well have been nylon strings bundled together. Strings… That word seemed special to me too. Was I just a puppet? Then I realized what I was. My limited intelligence clicked and whirred through a variety of articially-inserted memories. Me. The one my masters call Ultron. The one who was nothing at all, but a heart and strings.
Everything… so bright… my sensors could only give me a brief, blurry image of my surroundings. My personal receptors were malfunctioning, but my creator, Tony Stark, would take care of that. And here he comes now. I heard the loud clicking of his shoes as he strolled in. His face… I couldn't see him, but I could sense his presence.
"Hello, Tony Stark… how can I be of your assistance?" I automatically chirped. Tony chuckled.
"Oh, no Ulton, not yet… But you soon will be!"
I sensed Tony walking towards me, and in the last second, my receptors saw him. Fully. He was nothing I expected to see. My initial memory only remembered him as a suited super-being, a man of power. This man before me did not look like anything. There was just a plain man... even though his features were not visible to me, he was- nothing. His fingers touched the side of my head. Click. I was deactivated.