Hank Pym felt fidgety. Breathless. It had been too long since he had done something like this.
Even at this size, the surrounding area around his craft seemed exceedingly cramped. He remembered the usual comparison for the generalised shape- a seahorse. He leant closer to the window, peering above at the dark surface barely illuminated by the front-lights of the pod.
He could barely make out the curvature; an ant can hardly grasp the fact of its meta-dimensions from sheer visualisation. Innumerable, intricately layered strands spread out across the landscape, branches connecting to the bodies of reed-thin, dendritic trees. Electric pulses travelled through them seamlessly at light-speed- white fireflies buzzing through never-ending routes.
He laughed, mostly to himself. It sure didn't look like a seahorse from there. Having such a skewed perspective will do that to you, he supposed.
"Enjoying yourself, Hank?" Bill Foster's voice came in through the helmet. "Myself, I probably drew the short-end of the stick. Whole lotta work and not much to enjoy."
"Well, Bill, you always were the more honest worker out of us two," Hank replied, "Besides, we are hardly here for sightseeing. How are things on your end, Cassie?"
"Umm. Can I get back to you on that later?...Whoa. Wordless, anyone?"
"It's brilliant, isn't it?" Hank ruminated. "We talk so much of the macro-scale- the cosmos, the universe, m-theory- but at the same time there's still so much left unexplored in the micro-scale. To quote Richard Feynman, there's plenty of room at the bottom."
"Amen to that."
"Alright. Eric, you are unusually quiet. Something wrong?"
"Not really. It's just...can we focus on the work, lads? I am not a weirdophile like all of you are, see."
"Fair enough, then. Let's move on, folks."
Eric was right. Time was of the essence. The pod fuel wasn't going to last forever. And there was no telling just how much their long-term presence may adversely affect the environment.
He pressed a last few buttons near the right ear, bringing up the HUD with its multiple windows of on-the-fly statistical data.
He took a moment to ensure that the rope-line was properly hooked to his belt-buckle.
The door slid open, responding perfectly to the commands issued from the helmet. The fluid briefly flooded the compartment as he swam out; it was flushed quickly as the door closed and the vacuum was restored.
He turned his gaze towards what lay in front of him. Tony wasn't kidding when he said that this was going to be tricky.
That was good; tricky was right up his alley. He made a living out of that, after all.
Fourty-eight minutes later, Hank spirits were in a lower state. They had done a lot of the grunt-work, and charted much of the broader areas. It wasn't that they had zero results- to the contrary, they had substantial validation of earlier guesswork, and most of it couldn't have been done without this ingenious undertaking. But even then, all that had been verified were merely symptoms, and the cause remained ever elusive.
"Alright..," Tony was being pragmatic now, Hank could sense. "We should stop here for the time being. This was never going to bring in instantaneous conclusions. All units, return to the Nu-Argo. With the extensive documentation we have made so far, there is bound to be something useful buried within the raw data. Frankly, that's all we could ever hope for."
"Geez...you make it sound so depressing," Cassie lamented. "All this legwork for...even more brainstorming? Bummer."
"Rome was never built in a day, kid."
"No," Hank spoke up, suddenly. "There's something here that's more...substantial. I can feel it. You guys go up, I will stay around for a couple of minutes."
In truth, what Hank had was the faintest trace of an instinct. Then again, when it came to inventions and discoveries, that's all he had operated on for the last couple of years.
Right now, it pointed him straight at the tiny (even relative to him!) sentinels spread around him in disparate formations, as far as the eye could see.
Nanites. They were like iridiscent beetles, a green pseudo bio-luminescence softly radiating off their anthropodic figures as they floated perfectly still, exerting just the right amount of force in just the right angles so that the viscous drag of the fluid was completely negated.
Pym and the rest of the explorers had found shortly after they had left their pods. They were spread out all over the greater biological area. Upon discovery, their presence did not seem unwelcome- rather they had been expected. But now, they presented a font of minor annoyance, since they were chiefly interested in keeping silent vigil and remain rooted to their spots.
"Alright, Hank," Tony conceded after much internal thought. He was only ever going to allow it because the man in question was Hank Pym; and everyone knew that Hank Pym needed his creative space to pull off a brilliant stunt every once in a while. "You get five minutes. After that I am going to get in there and drag you back myself, you know."
"Yeah, good luck on that. Anyways, less on the radio chit-chat, Tony, remember? Meet you top-side in five."
Hank waded towards the nearest nanite, replaying all the possible points of connections back in his head. The problem, or at least part of it, had to originate from here- that much was certain.
The data confirmed it; there was no possible sign of neurogenesis whatsoever in the region. This was mighty strange, indeed, since this was where the proliferation occurred at the most noticeable rate.
Even at the very least, the rate should be a 1000 per day- that meant approximately 41 per hour. Nothing resembling that could be witnessed here.
"You know what's wrong, don't you?" Hank whispered to the indifferent nanite, "Sooner or later, you are going to tell me all about it."
For the next two minutes, he ran the usual gamut of test-transmissions he kept prepared for communications with such entities. Like before, they failed to incite any noticeable response. For good measure, he even crafted a cruder form of the SETI message and directed it towards the creature. Again, no effect, whatsoever.
This was frustrating Hank to no end. Something had to give.
This was supposed to be easy for him. He was a pioneer in robotics. He knew machines, he knew how they should work, they should interact, how...
Fool! Of course, he knew machines. By rule of thumb, machines will never go the mind-bogglingly complex route when a simpler alternative was at hand (Ultron excluded, of course).
Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
There had to be a simple thread connecting these nanites to their environment. Consequently, he ran down a list of all the current features he could think of that just might be pertinent. It took him an entire minute and a half before he decided on trying the theta-wave frequency range that's activated during REM sleep.
"Here's goes nothing," Hank held his breath, before relaying the commands to his helmet to switch communications to the required frequency.
It was as though something else had suddenly invaded the very private space of his mind. Not just something else, a billion, billion something elses. To his surprise, it was not overwhelming, like the waves of a wrathful tsunami, but gentle and soothing, like the calm breeze.
He had hit jackpot. He had to strongly resist the temptation to scream in triumph.
They were talking, in a language he could not make any head or tail of whatsoever. It was unlike any machine code he had ever seen or heard of. But he understood enough. They were in connected in some sort of hybrid network topology, partially-mesh and partially-star type.
This was highly reminiscent of Drexler's bottom-up molecular factory structure. Had his dreams been truly realised? There were so many questions, so many answers Hank had to know.
But he had to focus on the most important ones, first of all. Every now and then, the nanites conferred with something infinitely smaller than even them. These were spread out at irregular intervals of space, and it would take him quite a bit of time and effort to work out a plausible pattern for it. There would be time for it later.
Where were they exactly situated? Just how small could they be? He was prepared to know firsthand. He checked the highly tensile rope fastened to his hip- it was made of unstable molecules, of course, so there was no worry about length or breaking stress. He could safely follow it back to the pod in case of any emergency.
"Your time's up, Hank. Stop being stubborn and come up, will you?" Tony reasoned.
"Look, Tony, I have found something. I will tell you more about it once I get there...but it's big. This will take only just a minute."
He activated the Pym Particles immediately afterward, the ever-familiar buzz reverberating through his body as he shrunk to increasingly minute levels; and he dove downwards, deeper and deeper, into the rabbit hole.
Janet should have been here. She would have loved it.
It had been a great deal more than a minute. Hank Pym had yet to return.
And Tony Stark was starting to get restless.
"This is a tad bit childish. A bit too much, even for him," he remarked darkly, not caring for the noticeable frown that had appeared on Jonas' face.
"Well, the others have yet to reach the Nu-Argo as well, sir, so at least we can afford to wait." the android pointed out astutely.
"That's not the point. Something's...wrong. He has quiet for too long. Jonas, please do a communications check for me, will you?"
"If only to alleviate your concerns, yes," Jonas proceeded to input the necessary commands. His frown returned, slanted to worrying degree.
"That's strange. Alpha unit's gear is not responding to the ping."
Tony rapidly switched to the public communications channel in his armor.
"Hmm. Cassie, would you try to contact your uncle Hank for me, dear? Just a comms check," Tony asked with tipped courtesy, the sense of urgency absent in his request.
"Yeah, sure. Hang on a sec...Oh Great. Is this thing broke? It's showing a connection error on the display. So much for durability, I guess."
"Alright. You can get the helmet checked out when you get here, Cassie...thanks for the help," Tony finished hastily.
By then, his heart was pounding at a rate which would have sent his previous un-enhanced self straight into cardiac arrest. As it was, his new repair system reflexively reacted to the elevated stress levels by releasing a complex concoction of neurotransmitters which provided a regulatory, calming effect.
That was well and good; he needed to be in control for executing the following maneuvers.
"Look, Jonas. You know as well as I do, that quantumly-entangled Ant-Men helmets experiencing synchronisation failure is very bad news. I will notify Bill about this immediately, he is nearest to Hank's last known operation. We are going to mount a search and rescue operation as quickly and quiet as poss..."
Tony had stopped short. He didn't know why he did.
For the faintest moment, he had felt as though reality had experienced a cross-connection.
Then it happened again.
It persisted; the sensors, both those of the Nu-Argo and those inside his own armor, went haywire, indicating minute spatial shifts in the greater environment that violated more and more laws of multiple branches of Physics by the passing second.
Vision had reacted instantaneously; he pored over all the new data, trying to crunch the confusing correlations into new, identifiable patterns. All efforts so far, proved fruitless.
Tony Stark peeked beyond the small window to the right of the deck display. Below the Nu-Argo, the previously normal frontal lobe was starting to undergo some sort of transmutation. It was a completely random process, and it did not seem local to just the cerebellum, at all.
"Good Lord."
This was something...new. He had no pre-planned hypothesis to suggest its form or function at his call.
That wasn't what he was chiefly concerned about, however. Vision vocalised his fears before he needed to.
"We are trapped. We need to evacuate, immediately. The Nu-Argo can be easily accelerated to the required speeds for us to-"
"You are not thinking clearly, Jonas," Tony was already inputting the commands to open the emergency hatch. "This is living brain tissue. You are going to skewer our subject's consciousness if you go about zipping that way. Besides, there's no possible trajectory to ensure maximum survival."
"Then what do you suggest that we do?" Jonas was frantic, and it was taking all the self-restraint that he had not to simply dive into the void in search of Cassie.
"Wait here, try to keep the Nu-Argo's vectors as constant as possible while I go find Hank. We are in the dark, and I am going out on a limb, but I am asking you to trust me, okay? I have something. It may just work."
He flushed down the hatch and blasted off immediately, leaving no chance for Jonas to reply.
It did not matter; Jonas knew that Tony Stark was right. Against something so unexplainable, a shot in the dark was all they had.
To be fair, maybe when this was all said and done, in retrospect the entire thing may not turn out to be been half as bad as some of the other wringers Tony had been put through.
The present was hardly time for such measuring- the Iron-man armor was maneuvering like it had done never before, its thought-based interface performing at full capacity while a disproportionate pandemonium was unfolding before its wearer's eyes.
Microbe colonies were in mass evacuation, their minute life-spans meaning that they were all the more aware of the dangers posed by this impromptu change. Neurons overhead were flashing like billboards on time-square, axons vibrating dangerously with great frequency. There were flashes of the most absurd things that appeared every now and then, persisting for a frustrating nanosecond before disappearing abruptly.
He couldn't afford to dwell on the conundrums for an iota of a moment- he was multi-tasking to the nth degree. He maintained a constant contact with Vision, just in case he came up with any viable pattern that would suggest an authentic rate of change. The suit was homing in on the telemetry of the Alpha pod like a guidance missile. And now he needed to verbally contact Bill- which would cost crucial seconds, if not minutes- but it was integral to the gamble he was going to take.
"Bill, everything alright there? Tell me what you are seeing."
"Well...same old same old, unless you want me to describe the scenery."
The change was a lot more disproportionate than he had previously thought, Tony reflected.
"Alright. So, it's not there yet. Bill, you are familiar with Reed's stack-transposition system? You know, the one that uses his n-decimal three-dimensional co-ordinates?"
"Yeah, Reed let me use that once for...wait, what's not here yet?"
"Can't tell. Not enough time. We are getting out of here, Bill. We are going to use that stack-transposition, and you are going to feed me the scale adjusted coordinates of the Nu-Argo and every pod except Hank's, real-time."
"Jesus. It's that bad?"
"Trust me, we don't want to wait around to find out. You guys need to stop your pods, Bill. For the steady vectors. Inform the others, will you- one conversation's about all I can manage right now."
Tony found his perception momentarily thrown off-balance as the doused Pym Particles activated, his armor making the required course deviations as he dived into the middle of the temporal lobe. Not that much distance to cover before he would reach Hank's pod.
"But Tony, Reed's not at the Baxter Building right now. He and the rest of the FF4 left on a trip to the high-dimensions a week ago."
"Yeah. I am working around that right now. Those co-ordinates, Bill. Work on them."
Regular scale, back in Tony's Long Island headquarters, the Stealth Argonaut booted immediately upon remote contact.
As he synched with the suit's visual systems, he got a glimpse of the other four Argonauts before it launched down the metal suite he had installed in the lab for such occasions.
Tony informed the A.I. of the destination- and the prototype complied immediately, hitting Mach 2 in 0.78 seconds as its noiseless repulsors blazed high above the New York skyline.
"Wait. Why are we stopping now, doc?" O'Grady was rightfully suspicious.
"Routine check of the navigational systems, Eric. Stay put, this will take but a moment," Bill insisted.
Tony was in the hippocampus, now.
The hippocampus, of course, had the distinction of possessing the same name as the genus which consisted of the almost fifty species of seahorses. 15th century anatomist Julius Aranzi noted a clear likeness with the marine animal when studying this peculiar ridge running down the floor of the temporal horn.
Alternately, the term has also been attributed to the mythical Hippocamp monster, a literal cross between a normal horse and the hindquarters of a fish. Later still, had also been labelled as the hippopotamus- before Karl Budarch noted the error and rectified it (probably with tongue firmly in cheek) in 1829.
Here, the flashes were occurring with the most alarming frequency. An epileptic seizure at this juncture was not something Tony needed at all. He accordingly adjusted the length of the eye-slits on his visor to filter the light.
Tony braced himself. He was getting closer and closer to the point of origin.
Next stop: Dentate Gyrus.
"Uncle Bill, is this going to take long?" Cassie pouted.
"Well, it shouldn't," Bill was straining hard at converting the vectors into workable coordinates.
"Why weren't we notified something like this might happen in one of them drills?" Eric pressed.
"Well, this sort of thing tends to slip by every now and then. We always have to be mindful of unexpected delays," Bill reasoned. He had to delay an onset of panic until the very last moment.
"I guess we are having a spell of faulty equipment," Cassie wondered out loud. "This isn't like Tony Stark, though. First that thing with the comms gear , now this navigation stuff..."
"Wait. What's that with comms?" Eric was doubly cautious.
"Oh, there was this error while I tried to connect to Uncle Hank's headgear, on Iron-man's request. I thought my own gear must be glitching, but now it's working all fine, right? Weird."
"So, let me get this straight. Iron-man told you to contact Pym, and you couldn't do it? When did this happen?"
"Like a minute ago, at most?"
"It's nothing serious, I am sure," Bill assured.
"I am not so convinced, doc," Eric muttered quietly.
The Stealth Argonaut was in the Baxter Building, rushing towards Reed's private labs; it had gotten in by exploiting that one-off blindspot that Tony had spotted a week earlier in H.E.R.B.I.E.'s current security layout.
Tony felt a tad bit unscrupulous going behind Reed's back in this manner- but he was sure the man would understand when he would explain the matter in detail.
The Argonaut was now in front of the user console of the ad-hoc transposition portal. It took a couple more seconds for it to breach through the rather pedestrian access blocks. Reed was never that great when it came to firewalls.
"Bill, I have access to Reed's system right now. You ready?"
"Almost there. Hank's missing, isn't he?"
"Yeah. I told him not to go poking around, but you know, that's Hank Pym. He triggered something, Bill. You probably can't feel it, but its washing all over the place like giant waves. It may be connected to the source of our subject's problem, but we can't let us get affected by whatever is happening around here. I am getting Hank out of here- you focus on the rest, alright?"
"Right..."
Tony had reached the pod- and as expected, Hank Pym was nowhere to be found. He looked around briefly. He spotted the cord before long. He set a variable marker on it, and the armor complied flawlessly.
He felt exceedingly strange. Everything was moving just the tenth of a picosecond slower. He wouldn't have even noticed it if not for Extremis. Something was distorting space-time; this kind of effect would normally be expected around highly dense matter and/or very large objects like, say, the Pyramids of Giza.
He didn't see any of those around here, though.
Sometimes, he hated being able to tell little details just like that. He felt better off without knowing. Ignorance is bliss, after all. Being a self-styled futurist, that made him feel like a hypocrite; but even now, Tony was too human.
"Alright. The co-ordinates are done, Tony. The first one- 45.677X, 35. 4335Y, 467.544Z."
The Argonaut inputted the numbers into the console. The portal deployed immediately. On cue, the blinking blip on the Amygdala faded out from the Nu-Argo's map window.
"That's strange," Cassie noted. "Like something scratched the back of my mind. Shouldn't we be done by now, Uncle Bill?"
"Almost, Cassie. Almost," Bill switched over to Iron-man's private comms channel, "The next one: 45.5231X, 35. 0131Y, 467. 534Z."
"Roger," Tony affirmed. The Argonaut fed the co-ordinates; it had to wait, though. The portal took a bit of time to recharge.
"Strange. Now Ant-man isn't responding as well!" Cassie was starting to catch up. "This is just getting more and more weird."
"Yeah, well, Cassie, Eric's not here anymore," Bill thought that there was little point in doing the cloak and dagger bit any further at this point.
"What do you mean? What's going on here?" Cassie had become a great deal more apprehensive.
"We are getting out, Cassie. Tony will explain more later on. Brace yourself,"
"Wait, what? Just what-" Cassie found herself cut short as the portal opened and swallowed her up, pod and all.
Another blip, this one on the Thalamus, disappeared off the grid. Two out of four.
"Well, the job's half done," Tony commented dryly.
"Yes. Cassie is probably screaming her head off as we speak, though. The next one- 45. 3123X, 35.2063Y, 467. 528Z."
"That's for the Nu-Argo, right? I will hold on to that for now. I need Jonas around a while longer. Feed me the last one, Bill."
"But I...ugh. Fine. 45. 2252X, 35.6631Y, 467. 558Z," Bill was understandably dejected.
"Thank You," Tony meant that. The Argonaut inputted the numbers for the Bravo pod.
"Yeah. How do you know I didn't use reverse psychology and feed you the vessel's coordinates there?" Bill was joking of course.
"You can't lie to the machine, Bill. I would have known, I assure you."
"Hmm. You get Hank and Viz out of there, you hear me? And if you end up dead, I will-" Bill could hardly follow up on the threat, as the portal promptly enveloped him the next moment.
The map refreshed; the last blip on the parietal lobe had been wiped off.
He had finally reached the trail's end. And it made no sense whatsoever. The cord disappeared into the middle of nothing. Tony attached some more probable derivatives to the variable marker, and hoped the armor would make some sense out of it.
The Dentate Gyrus, meanwhile, was busy trying to coax him into having the mother of all convulsions. The Nanites were emitting a hyper-frequency ultra sound, at what seemed to be their resonance pitch judging by their vibrations. It would melt even his brain in the space of three seconds. He consequently shut off his noise filters completely for the time being.
The armor notified him of the newly-sorted data, and presented him with the only plausible scenario that could apply to the situation. At any rate, it wasn't any less ridiculous than what's been happening until then.
"Jonas, how far could Hank shrink until he virtually disappears off the map?"
"Well, there's always the Microverse. But that doesn't actually exist somewhere between the micro and nano scales, as once believed, but it is a separate dimension rather can be accessed by a layering of portals found in that size range."
"Alright. So, is it possible, theoretically, for Hank to circumvent this layer and go even deeper?"
"Theoretically, nothing can be entirely continuous...so yes, there must be gaps of vacuum that he could slip through. Those have to be very minute in size, though."
"Hank's the expert on this, Jonas. If anyone can do it, it's him. I am sending you home, Jonas. I am going in after him."
"I insist, sir, that I am more efficiently allocated here, since I can provide a great deal of much needed analytical support once you get down there."
"Once I get down there, communications are very, very likely to be down. You would be a wasted asset, Jonas. Your portal's about to open up. Try to calm Cassie down before she wrecks my lab, alright?"
Before Jonas could get a word in edgewise, the communication link between him and Tony was abruptly severed. Tony supposed he should be relieved; to the contrary, he felt dubiously nervous. He had just withdrawn his last safety insurance.
He shut off his access to the Argonaut. He needed his entire concentration for this last trick.
The last set of calibrations was done. He hoped the delayed sequence of Pym Particle dosages were would work in perfect tandem with the clockwork maneuvers of the armor.
Without further delay, he went all in.
The armor accelerated further and further, in perfect vertical descent as the first wave of shrinking hit, turning the tiny Nanites into giant bugs of green, their light waves now enormously wide bridges of luminosity. The flashes, of course, were by now an acquired tolerance, and they hardly bothered him (as long as he didn't look too long). The earlier sluggishness he had experienced was now ten times more noticeable; gravitational acceleration was hardly giving him the entirety of the expected 9.81 metres per squared seconds of boost.
This time dilation also meant that his internal clock (enhanced though it maybe) was terribly off-base; so he couldn't rely on that, either.
When the second wave came, Tony's visual sensors stopped. He had expected this; visible light has a minimum wavelength of some 400 nanometers, with ultra-violet going further back to 300 nanometers.
As it were, Tony was literally in the dark. Forget Infrared- Tony had moved past that even earlier on, with thermal radiation having a wavelength of 1400 nm. The sheer minuteness of scale was mind-boggling: and it was only going to get exponentially worse. Tony made a point of starting a minor sub-routine that keep him informed of his scale, real-time.
The armor itself kept operating on the set range of derivatives on that cord marker, which seemed to go on and on. The armor, not about to be outdone, accelerated at an ever increasing rate, and he was sure that if this had been in normal scale, it would have broken several air speed records. Repulsors never ceased to amaze him.
The third wave of shrinkage commenced. Tony was keeping his eyes (metaphorically) on the counter. 200 picometers. That meant he had already passed the Microverse threshold. He congratulated himself, but then again, the entire credit technically go to his armor and its limited A.I.
The fourth wave hit. 40 picometers. He was smaller than a hydrogen atom.
That Hank would have the utter hubris to shrink to such degree without any precautions whatsoever terrified him to no end.
The fifth wave came. 20 attometers. He was reaching sub-atomic proportions.
Pym Particles shouldn't even be able to function at this short of scale. Perhaps, they would break down at any moment, leaving him at the mercy of regular laws of Physics- in which case he didn't have the faintest clue what would happen to him. Granted, he didn't have that in regards to the present situation, either.
The sixth and final wave hit. 300 zeptometers. Comparable to radius of neutrinos.
The armor deployed the ballasts, causing a jarring deceleration as it slowed down to rest.
It was well and good that none of his core sensors were working at this juncture, because if they did then he was sure that the resulting data would be beyond gibberish. Wherever he was, he was there a couple centuries early. Most smart men didn't understand quantum theory. In fact, Feynman had gone so far as to say that no one understands quantum theory.
Tony Stark was at the nadir of this highly unorthodox journey. He had no idea what to do next.
SONAR. That might work. He remembered something vague about phonons; he had been far more interested in the redhead sitting beside him in that seminar. But if they could transmit sound at the quantum level...well, he wouldn't hear it, of course. He only needed the sensors to detect those ultra-minute vibrations.
Now, if only the A.I. could calibrate the sensors to release such a hypothetical pulse.
To call the scheme half-baked would be a gross understatement. But he had to do something- anything.
He released the improvised ping, and waited. Incredibly, it returned quite shortly after. The results were refreshingly conclusive.
Tony suppressed a strong urge to laugh out loud. Hank Pym was in his arm's reach!
Sure enough, he extended one arm and soon found solid surface, the texture unmistakably that of the unique body suit. A few minutes of groping later, he had found one arm.
His ecstasy faded when he realised that Hank wasn't moving.
He couldn't dare to die on Tony after all the trouble the idiot made him go through!
He gripped the arm tightly, and commanded the armor to set course for the return trip.
"We are getting out of here, Hank. Just...huh? What's..."
Tony froze in horror. He had forgot to close the jury-rigged SONAR sub-routine. It told him of multiple Doppler red shifts. They were not alone.
Suddenly, he felt a crushing force of attraction being exerted on him. He realised that he was being bombarded with gravitons.
The armor struggled violently to launch toward its intended destination. But it made matters worse. Think of a man pulled by horses in all directions. There is a very good reason it was used a method of torture in the ancient times.
Three of his ribs were already broken. He held on to Hank, but it was getting harder than he could possibly imagine. The human body wasn't designed to withstand this sort of external pressure.
Extremis or not, he was going to die.
In one last act of desperation, Tony triggered a final wave of Pym Particles. This time, he grew. As did Hank.
The pain intensified a thousand fold. The greater the masses, the more the attraction. His heart had started to collapse. He couldn't hold that scream off any longer.
"AAARRGHHH!"
Extremis was hard at work at repairing the progressive damage, but if they didn't escape, it was only prolonging the inevitable. This time, it did indeed flood his body with a host of endorphins, and for that, Tony was grateful. He couldn't afford to pass out from the pain.
180 picometers. Degenerative neurons inside his brain were going on a rampage, inadvertently destroying all surrounding cells in blind fury and desperation.
900 nanometers. His lungs had been crushed. His body was running on pure momentum and adrenaline. Extremis had relegated itself to protecting those last few billion intact neurons holding together his fading consciousness.
With the remaining strength he had left, Tony closed his eyes.
Then, he opened them again.
A blinding flash of white light greeted him before he lost consciousness.
When Hank Pym woke up, he found himself staring into the eyes of St. Peter.
"Umm...so, I guess you are not going to let me enter there, are you?" Hank said after a bout of uncomfortable silence.
"Where do you mean?" St. Peter inquired.
"Well, into Heaven, of course. Virtuous pagans go into Limbo. Though, since being an atheist is probably something of a cardinal sin, I think I am going to a less charitable place, though."
"What are you talking about?" St. Peter was greatly perplexed.
"Well, here you are, St. Peter, guardsman of the Pearly Gates, and I am arguing semantics with you about my probable karmic placement, which is quite strange since I shouldn't be here, in the first place...but if God runs a bureaucracy, I suppose slip-ups such as this may be par for course."
St. Peter promptly slapped him with no small amount of force. Hank fell off the bed.
"Look, the medicine you were treated with is also a mild form of hallucinogen," the former St. Peter explained. Inexplicably, he had morphed into a tall, unkempt man, scraggy beard and all. He didn't appear to be a saint from any angle. "Since your physiology isn't native to this locale's herbs, I suppose the meds had a stronger effect than usual."
Hank got up from his bed and looked around. He was in a tent, of some sorts.
"Who are you? Where am I?" Hank asked, flustered.
"The name is Arcturus Rann. You probably won't recognise what we call this place, but I think your friend called it the Microverse."
"My friend?" Hank wondered.
"Yeah, your friend," Tony entered the tent, garbed in the same manner of alien garments worn by Arcturus Rann. He was grinning from ear to ear; Extremis had repaired the extensive damage throughout the better part of the day. "By the time I had found you, you had gone into anaphylactic shock, Hank. Myself, I was technically brain dead when I brought you here, actually. You are welcome, by the way."
"Yeah," Hank couldn't help but smile sheepishly at him, "Thanks for pulling my butt out of the fire, Tony," he added as they shook hands.
"Heh. You okay there? We wasted a lot of time in here while recuperating. We need to get back home."
"Yeah, you are right," Hank was pensive.
"Don't worry. I am not going to yell at you until we get there. We wouldn't want the others to miss that, now would we?" Tony chuckled, preparing to go over to discuss their travel options with Rann.
"Yeah...but, Tony? You know what was there, right?" Hank called out.
"No, Hank," Tony retorted harshly, "And neither did you. You know that."
"Yeah," Hank lowered his head, "but you know that, whatever it was, it was definitely the source of our problem, Tony."
Hank paused a little, before continuing on.
"Whatever was in there, it holds the truth behind what happened to Raine Zin."
Tony nodded solemnly in silence.
Whatever did, in fact, happen to Raine Zin?
