Chapter 6: Marcus Johnson II
Notes: For more information about Transhumanism and the 're-sleeving' of minds in synthetic bodies check out the Takeshi Kovacs novels, as well as Eclipse Phase. It's an RPG but the majority of the information is written in a mission report style and it's very readable.
When a good man went to war, demons ran. When HR went to war, eventually even Nick Fury had to give in.
By Christmas, it had become clear Marcus Johnson was never going to get another credit card or checking account. "I shouldn't have done it."
She didn't even look away from her computer screen. "Done what, Director?"
"I should have met with you. I should have met with Emma Coulson, talked her out of sueing us." He wasn't going to say he was sorry, Nick Fury didn't apologize, but he could make some concessions.
"Mrs. Coulson will not be pursuing a lawsuit against us." Her fingers flew across the keyboard. No one was this busy, to not stop working when the big boss arrived. She was still pissed. "I visited her personally."
"Thank you. For cleaning up my mess." He picked up one of the knick knacks off her desk and wondered if she's show some human reaction if he threw it at her monitor or if she'd just keep typing. "I would like my cover identity back, Suzanne. What do I have to do to make that happen?"
She finally looked at him. He could see the anger in her eyes. "If you want Marcus Johnson back, fill out the paperwork on the web portal and send it to my assistant."
"That takes weeks. You could have it done tomorrow." What had Emma said to her? What had she had to say to Emma?
"I'm not interested in making your life any easier right now." She stared at him like he was something disgusting she'd found on the bottom of her shoe. "We have procedures in place, you'll need to follow them like everyone else. If you'll excuse me, Director, I have a lot of work to do. We've got a new batch of Agents to process."
He left her office, a vague sense of wrongness creeping up his spine. That was not a normal reaction to his avoiding a few meetings. Was she blaming him for losing Barton and Romanoff? They'd pushed everyone up a slot on the roster but even Ward was no substitute for their dream team sniper and spy.
He'd expected Barton to call him every once in a while but there had been nothing, not even a drunk call from an anonymous number. Nick Fury didn't have any friends but Clint had married the man who was practically Marcus' brother. You didn't just cut out family like this.
His desk phone rang. "What?"
"Sir, I believe Tony Stark has lost his mind."
"Tell me something new, Agent Hill."
"He's given out his home address on national television."
Oh, wonderful. The Stark headache was back. He was going to need to get Phil on a plane and… No, that wasn't going to work. "Send Blake out there. Tell him to be *very* nice to Pepper Potts. He'll need to go through her to get to Stark."
Blake called from California with bad news. "Miss Potts requests SHIELD not involve ourselves at this time, sir."
"What?" Marcus had seen the news. Their house had fallen into the ocean.
"She told me she would only deal with Agent Coulson, which puts me in a tight spot, sir. Unless we've developed the ability to raise the dead and no one told me."
Marcus had given Blake the upstep to Level 7 based on a recommendation from Phil, back when they'd thought he would be heading up the Avengers Initiative. If the man's own hand-picked successor wasn't good enough for Potts, who else could he send? "Have you spoken to Colonel Rhodes?"
"Colonel Rhodes won't take my calls. No one wants us here, sir."
"Come home." He was losing control of this situation. This was Suzanne's fault, somehow, although he wasn't sure how she could have poisoned SHIELD's relationship with Stark Industries and the military.
He hung up and locked the door to his office got a cup of coffee and talked to his ceiling. "Alright, Phil. You told me once that no one is irreplaceable but you're putting me in a hell of a bind here. I may have misunderstood Barton and Romanov's commitment to this agency versus their commitment to you. We seem to have lost Stark's loyalties. No one has seen any of the others in months. So help me out here. What am I supposed to do?"
There was no answer. He had escalating threats all over the globe and not enough hands. Phil had known everyone and he remembered everything, down to what his contacts took in their coffee. How many doors were going to be closed to them without Phil?
It was Dr. Streiten's idea and Marcus should have turned him down flat but he'd spent half an hour that morning wondering why Phil was late for their meeting before he remembered he met with Blake in the afternoon.
"Have you read much science fiction, Director?"
"I live science fiction, Doctor. I don't need more of it in my limited spare time."
Streiten turned on the holographic display in his office. "One of my favorite parts of science fiction is the concept of transhumanism, that we can use technology to alter the human condition. Tony Stark's arc reactor is one example. JARVIS is another one. A true artificial intelligence, who can think and act on his own will. I've heard rumors that the Life Model Decoy project was started to give JARVIS a body."
"It's true." There had been a lawsuit, ten years ago maybe, where Stark Enterprises had fought and won JARVIS the rights of personhood and it had all been in the court files. "Guy didn't want a body and California decided he didn't need one to be considered alive. That's why Stark started licensing out the LMDs."
"The LMDs are toys for rich people with paranoia problems. They look human, feel human, even to a doctor but they're not perfect copies of the people they're impersonating. They don't have to be. But if Stark designed them to hold JARVIS then their systems are capable of containing a human mind."
It took Marcus a minute to see where he was going with this. "You think you could put a person inside an LMD?"
"We were exploring the concept last year. We'd fully mapped a handful of subjects and backed up their minds. In our experiments when we loaded them in LMDs based off their own bodies, they provided nearly identical responses to memory and cognition tests. All those agents are dead now, lost at PEGASUS or in the Battle for New York. We could bring them back."
He had to ask, had to know. "Who do you have copies of?"
"They're not copies. They're backups." Streiten pulled up a list on his computer and turned the screen so Marcus could see it. "We lost so many people to Loki. If we could save even a few, don't we have an obligation to try?"
At the top of the list was 'Phillip J. Coulson' and Marcus had to look away.
Marcus was pretty sure it was a sign of mental instability that he was even considering this. When Clint Barton ever found out, he was a dead man, no questions asked.
He brought it to Hill, there was no one else he could trust. She read the doctors notes all the way through then looked at the subject list. "What, exactly, are you asking me, sir?"
"I am contemplating an extreme course of action, Hill. I need someone to sanity check me." What was unspoken was that usually that sanity check came from Phil and that was the problem here.
"The men we lost at PEGASUS were some of our best. If they were all we lost, we couldn't have afforded it." She turned off the screen of the tablet and slid it across the desk. "I am not objective here, Director. Agent Coulson was one of my friends too. If what you're bringing back is really him, you should do it."
It took them a few weeks to build a new body for Phil, to reconstruct his memories between his last backup and the battle on the carrier from security camera footage. It would never be as good as the backups but trauma did that to a mind, Phil would probably never notice.
They dummied up medical records for a treatment protocol, what they would have done if Phil had made it to the operating table. It would explain away any small differences he felt in his new body. They'd run some kind of VR to make up for the missing time, it was all beyond Marcus's understanding.
What he did know was the Avengers would never forgive him, the apparent betrayal was too big. He'd take the fall for it though, in a heartbeat. Clint would probably come around, at least. They would have Phil back, that was the important part.
The body was on a medical table, still waiting for the upload but Marcus felt less strange talking to an empty shell than he did thin air. "The story is, we pumped you full of everything we had, did some experimental treatments. That will cover the fact that you're bad elbow is brand new and why your back won't hurt when you slouch anymore. Any thing else works differently, you and Clint have to work that out on your own."
They'd replicated all his scars, plus the new one on his chest. Marcus pushed out of his chair and gave Phil's shoulder a squeeze. "You owe me, Cheese. I'm bringing you back from the dead."
Doctor Streiten was waiting outside. "Do we have a go?"
"Bring our people back."
Marcus strode out of medical looking as sure of himself as ever but when he got back to his office he sat in the dark and poured himself a drink. An hour later, someone knocked on his door. "Unless it's an alien invasion, go away."
"No aliens, sir, just me." It smiled like Phil, leaned in the doorway like Phil. "Now that they've let me out of jail-"
"Medical leave, Phil. You were on medical leave." A tropical vacation, the best fake recovery time their programs could manage.
It shrugged and took a seat across from Marcus, poured itself a drink. "I'm back now, and we need to talk. Where is Clint?"
"Phil-"
"Did you arrest him? The doctors kept telling me he was fine, but you and I both know that's bullshit, sir. If he was fine, he would have been with me." It rubbed at it's scar. "Did you give him up? Is he in a cell somewhere? Did they execute him?"
"No." It was exactly what Phil would have asked him. It made it worse, somehow, made him feel sick. He took another sip of whiskey. "He took off before I could tell him you were alive. Romanoff must have helped him go off the grid because we can't find the guy no matter how hard we look."
"For the record, sir? You're an asshole. The avenging story was for Stark and Rogers. My mind-raped husband did not need a push." It stared at him, anger in it's eyes. "I will find him and you will apologize for lying to him and whatever else manipulating crap you pulled while I was unconscious in a hospital bed. Alone."
This had been a terrible mistake. It was perfect, if he hadn't seen it lying there inactive he would really believe it was Phil. "You find him and I'll tell him anything you want."
"Sir…" Whatever it was about to say, it changed it's mind. "Marcus. Thank you. For not letting me go. I went into that room ready to die because I thought he was gone, but if he's out there, alive, I'll find him. That's enough to keep me going."
It ate lunch with Hill, jogged with Sitwell. Blake was the happiest man on Earth, to not be in a dead man's shadow any more.
It was Maria who solved it for him. "We've got to put that man back to work. The analyst pen is starting to get twitchy."
"That's not Phil." He wasn't quite drunk, but he wanted to be.
"It is." Hill poked the empty bottle with a finger. "In every way that matters, it is Agent Coulson. If you talk to him-"
"I want it off my boat." He had talked to it, for as long as he could stand it. It said all the right things, knew all the right jokes, the right stories, but it was a fake, and he couldn't ever forget that.
"Director, Phil is not an it and we need him. All hell is breaking loose out there, sir. You don't even want to know how Sitwell recruited our newest engineer. Agent Coulson is the best of the best. If you don't want him," and Maria's tone made sure he knew she thought it was ludicrous, "Then I'll take him."
She gave it a plane, a 90's style mobile command center, and Phil's car. Marcus swallowed acid, because the car should have been Clint's, and signed all the papers.
It must have known something was wrong when he wouldn't eat with it, have a beer with it, but it never said anything because Maria was piling the work on, it didn't have time to be social. It started doing the legwork to assemble a team and when it wasn't doing that it was at it's desk late into the night, using SHIELD resources to search for Clint.
Marcus would have to find him first.