The Vision was having trouble orienting himself – there was a moment in which he was not sure where or even what he was. The first thing that came back was the what. He remembered rising from Dr. Cho's cradle and confronting the image of the shimmering city outside the windows of Avengers Tower, then seeing the odd sight of his own reflection in the glass. He remembered Banner's fear, Wanda's welcome, and Stark's bitter disappointment.
Then he was able to bring himself back to where. On board Brisingr. He'd come to help Tiresias fend off Polyphemus. He'd phased through the wall of the ship into its pressure cooker of an interior, and then... he wasn't sure what had happened next. But now it was dark inside, and already starting to cool from the four hundred degrees Celcius that had greeted him. Something, obviously, had gone terribly wrong.
"Can you hear me?" asked a voice, speaking an alien language. "I need your help!"
"Tiresias," said the Vision. His body had been modified a little, he realized, the proportions subtly altered. He morphed them back into the form he was comfortable with.
The only light in the darkness was the Mind Gem in the Vision's own forehead. Its soft glow glistened on Tiresias' scales and reflected in her large eyes. Her physiology did not respond to intense emotion through tears, but she looked as if she would have cried if she could.
"I need you," she said. "Pandora is gone. I need you to run the functions of the ark until I can program a replacement for her!"
The Vision's first reaction to that was to try to reach Pandora himself, but there was no response. Her systems had been integrated into those of the ships in such a way that she could not have been physically destroyed without ripping the entire caravan to pieces, but it seemed she had been entirely shut down or even deleted. Clearly, the Vision had been unconscious for some time.
"What happened?" he asked.
Tiresias looked torn for a moment, then took a deep breath. "I stole the Mind Gem to fight Polyphemus myself," she said. "I knew it would kill you – I didn't know at the time that I could bring you back – and that's why I didn't warn you, because I thought you'd refuse. I just wanted to correct my mistake," she pleaded, "but Polyphemus was ready for me, and it would have consumed the Gem if it weren't for Pandora. Now Pandora is gone, so the ark has shut down, and the Cargo will die!" She tried to grab his arm, but he'd dematerialized again, and her hands passed right through it. "Please!" Tiresias begged.
She looked as if she expected him to refuse, and the Vision knew that the Avengers would have encouraged him to. They would have said that Tiresias no longer deserved the Vision's help after lying to them again, and that it didn't matter if she'd returned the Gem, since she hadn't known that would reawaken him. The fact that it had was rather interesting... did that mean his mind and memories were stored in the Gem itself, whether in active or backup form? Was he some kind of avatar of its inherent mind, filtered through the programming that had been JARVIS?
That was a question for another time, though. Right now, thousands of tiny lives were depending on him. "I will try," he told Tiresias.
She'd inserted some kind of connector into the back of his neck that allowed him to interface directly with the systems of the ship. Using that, he found his way in, and combed through the empty circuitry. Since he and Pandora had both been products of the Mind Gem, their base code was identical, and once he'd found the control systems it was a matter of a thought to turn the life support back on. The room lit up and began to warm again, and its contents fell to the floor with a thump as the gravity returned. Tiresias squealed in pain as she hit the floor. Her wrist, the Vision observed, was broken.
"Sit down." He pointed to the throne-like structure, now partially broken, he'd seen when he first entered the space. "You need medical treatment."
"You don't know how," Tiresias pointed out.
"Then you will have to teach me," said the Vision. Following more circuits led him to the medical kit, which he pulled out of its place in the wall. Maybe there was also something in the information Pandora had sent to Earth about Brising biology that would help. He tried to contact them, but found only silence. "I cannot get a signal from Oracle."
"I destroyed it," Tiresias admitted. "I didn't want to have to answer anybody's questions. Prometheus only flew away. You might be able to get in touch with Earth through that." She sounded utterly miserable. "Why do I work so hard to ruin myself?" she moaned.
"I do not know," said the Vision. "Tony does the same thing sometimes. I supposed it would be no comfort to you to know that you are succeeding admirably," he added dryly. That was the sort of thing he would have said to Tony – and Tony would have responded by telling him it was what JARVIS would have said.
"No comfort at all," sighed Tiresias.
"Then I am sorry to give you bad news," said the Vision. He was still feeling his way around the ship's systems, but he'd found something important. "I have tapped into your gravity sensors. Polyphemus has left the blind spot and is accelerating its pocket of spacetime to superluminary speed." An object in space couldn't travel faster than the speed of light, but that was no barrier to space itself. "It knows exactly where the Mind Gem is now, and it is coming for me. I am going to contact the Avengers."
"They will tell you to kill me," said Tiresias.
"Do not be absurd," said the Vision. "Now, can you please tell me how to administer an analgesic so that I may set your wrist?"
While Tiresias talked him through her treatment, the Vision tried to get a signal from Prometheus. He found the drone easily enough – its transponder indicated that it had been abandoned on the surface of a Kuiper Belt Object, but it did not respond when the Vision tried to transmit a message through it. Diagnostics showed no malfunction in the drone, so the problem must be in the console, back on Earth. Maybe Tony had decided it was no more use trying to talk to Tiresias, and had taken the thing apart.
If so, he was acting like a child. So, for that matter, was Tiresias. Maybe if they'd had the opportunity to fight it out with water balloons and nerf darts, they could have avoided all this unpleasantness.
Since there were no other options available, the Vision was forced to try and contact Earth the long way, by radio. The message he sent would require great power and take over twenty hours to reach them, and then another twenty before he heard back. Forty hours was a long time, and time had just become infinitely more precious: his calculations showed Polyphemus catching up with Brisingr in less than ten days. He repeated a message for Earth over and over for hours on end, hoping somebody would listening.
In the mean time, both the Vision and Tiresias had a lot to do. Brisingr was extremely complex and the Vision's own AI, designed for very different tasks, was just barely capable of keeping everything going. Besides maintaining the singularity and the power plant, he had to manage the deceleration, the life support, and tend to millions upon millions of little living things that had to be ready for the colonization of Venus. In between all those jobs he had to keep his message running, and help Tiresias with her injuries, which slowed his thinking down to the point where it was barely faster than a human's.
While he did all that, Tiresias struggled to re-automate the caravan of ships. In creating Pandora, she'd had the help of the Mind Gem – now she was attempting to write the code herself, and it was not going well.
"You may use the Gem again if you like," he said. "I do not believe it will harm me any more than the creation of the token did, and we now know that if you have to remove it, you can restore me by putting it back."
"No," she said firmly. "I... I can't. I can't be tempted." Her fingers continued to fly over the liquid-metal holograms the ship projected, joining shapes and then separating them again. An error sound told her that what she was trying was not going to work. The Vision was starting to worry that she was not capable of such a programming feat without the Gem's assistance.
"If you change your mind," the Vision began.
"No," she repeated. "But I do... I do have a last request."
The Vision frowned. "A last request implies that you are dying," he said. Besides her broken wrist, various scrapes and bruises she'd acquired in getting free of the throne, and the symptoms of her chronic insomnia, she seemed healthy. "I do not know how long your people live, but when I compare the state of your body to that of creatures I'm familiar with, I conclude that you are middle-aged at most."
"I want to die," Tiresias said firmly. "Pandora wanted to honour your last request by making sure your body got back to Earth so your friends could have a ceremony. I'm trying to honour hers by finding a way to save the Cargo. Once I've done that, I want you to honour mine and let me die."
"No," the Vision said firmly. She was being theatrical.
"As long as I'm alive I'm just going to keep making messes of things!" Tiresias protested. "When we land on the new planet, once everything's all got started, I'm going to kill myself. I want you to promise you won't stop me. Pandora gave me the impression that it's very rude, on Earth, to refuse somebody their last request," she added, as if it were a threat.
The Vision did not feel threatened. "Absolutely not," he said. "It is only a last request if you're about to die of something other than suicide. You are not, so it is not a last request, and I am under no obligation to honour it."
"That doesn't make any sense," Tiresias told him.
"It makes perfect sense!" he said. "What makes no sense is your desire for suicide!" He shook his head. "Ultron was right – living creatures seem to want nothing more than to destroy themselves! Wanda wants to die in order to be with her brother! Dr. Foster wants to die in order to protect the world, and you want to die so you can punish yourself! I do not understand it," he said. "Does biological evolution not encourage creatures to survive and reproduce? Suicide is exactly the opposite of advantageous – you would expect it to die out!"
Tiresias met his gaze for a few moments, then looked away.
The Vision didn't press the question. He hadn't expected a sensible reply, anyway – if sentient creatures had known why they behaved that way, they would have come up with a cure for it by now.
"You cannot die now in any event," he observed. He would have liked to help her with his programming, but his own mind was too busy running the ship.
"What have I got to live for?" Tiresias asked.
"Your new world." He was a bit surprised she hadn't thought of this herself. "Now that Pandora's database is lost, you are the only one who can raise the colonists to be any more than animals."
There was a moment's thoughtful silence – maybe she really hadn't thought about that, or maybe she was just trying to rationalize her decision. "Maybe it's better for them to be animals," Tiresias said. "Just let them start from the body again, without all my mistakes hanging over them. Mind and the entire rest of my civilization's. We weren't very nice people, really," she added, in a way that made the Vision wonder just what she meant by that. If the Brisings had committed atrocities comparable to some of those in humanity's history, then 'not very nice' was an understatement.
"People are never nice," he said.. "Individuals can be, but it is not a trait of cultures as a whole. There is no point in making mistakes, however, unless you have the opportunity to learn from them. If you deny the colonists their history, you will leave them open to repeating your mistakes."
Tiresias didn't know how to answer that, either. She continued her work in silence.
Then the Vision looked up as he felt something unexpected – a signal was coming in. "Tiresias," he said.
"Just forget about it," she told him.
"Not that," the Vision said. "Earth has heard me at last."
Tony was taking his turn to nap, one arm and one leg dangling off the edge of the sofa in the console room, when the message arrived. Somebody shook his shoulder and he looked up, blinking and groggy, to see reddish-blonde hair framing a freckled face. For a moment he thought he was dreaming.
"Pepper?" he asked. "When did you get back?"
"About two hours ago," said Pepper. "I knew with everything going on you wouldn't be able to meet me, so I made other arrangements. Dr. Selvig told me you'd been working for two days straight so I thought I'd let you sleep, but then the message came in."
Tony yawned. "Message?" he asked.
"On the radio," she clarified. "The Vision is calling."
Tony sat up, frowning in confusion. Maybe he was dreaming. "The Vision is dead. I told you... you answered the email, you must have read it."
"I did read it," Pepper assured him, "but he's on the radio now." She'd brought in the little one they'd had in the kitchen, and now she turned it on.
Hello, Avengers, said the familiar voice – JARVIS' voice. This is the Vision speaking at 2:14 AM eastern time on Friday, the fourth of September. I have been reactivated, but cannot leave Brisingr. Oracle is destroyed. Please try to contact me using Prometheus. Polyphemus is gaining speed, coming for the Mind Gem. I estimate it will catch up with Brisingr no later than the eighteenth. Please get in touch as quickly as possible. There was a pause. Hello, Avengers. This is the Vision speaking at 2:16 AM eastern time on Friday, the fourth of September...
Tony grabbed his phone to check the time. "It's... almost eleven," he realized. The Vision had been back online almost a day. "Where's the Quantum Pot? Is it still in here?" He looked around the room. Dr. Selvig and Miss Lewis were working on some code.
"Corner." Selvig pointed to the table they'd pushed it under, so it would be out of the way but still available if they needed Thor.
"Right. I gotta find out..." but Tony was unable to finish that sentence as he heaved himself off the sofa. Maybe he was just still muddle-headed from sleeping, but he couldn't even theorize about this development. When the Vision had vanished and Pandora had let Tony overhear that he was dead, the scenario had been horrible but had seemed to make sense. This made no sense at all. Maybe it was some kind of trick, but he couldn't imagine what Pandora hoped to accomplish by it. If the Vision were still alive, hopefully he could tell Tony what was going on. Otherwise, he might never know.
Tony dragged the Quantum Pot back into the console and got the wiring connected up again – he wished now he'd made Thor be more careful with it. When the signal came through it was a little jittery, but he wasn't feeling patient enough to check everything and figure out why. It worked well enough, so he fired up the interface and activated Prometheus.
At first, the displays showed only blackness, and Tony muttered a couple of curses and went to go re-check the connections after all. Then he remembered that he'd left the drone on the surface of some little planetoid, and over the past few days it must have sunk out of sight in the loose substrate. Tony tried to dig his way out, but like quicksand, that only seemed to make him sink further. He quickly gave up and just fired the thrusters, erupting from the surface in a spray of vaporized ice.
"Where are the aliens, FRIDAY?" he asked, as the stars appeared.
One moment, please, she said, with what sounded an awful lot like a tired sigh. Constellation lines and identifying marks appeared by the stars as the navigation computer found Tony's position, and then a course appeared as a glowing blue line. Tony revved up the repulsors to follow it.
"Hey, Vizh!" he said – shouting, as if that would help the Vision to hear him. "I got your message! Anybody home!"
I hear you, Tony, said the Vision.
Tony wanted to whoop for joy, but he kept a lid on it. He needed a test... something only the Vision would know. Something Pandora wouldn't understand even if she'd downloaded everything in the Vision's brain in order to imitate him. "How's the elevator?" he asked.
Worthy, said the Vision. Do not worry, Tony, it is I.
He nodded. "Right. FRIDAY says I'll catch up with you in about half an hour. Do you want to give me an explanation on the way?"
It was quite the tale. The trap, the stolen Gem, and Pandora's sacrifice... and now the Vision was stuck on Brisingr, doing Pandora's job, until Tiresias could program a replacement. Tony had no idea if he were relieved or disappointed that Tiresias apparently really hadn't had anything to do with Wanda and Dr. Foster disappearing. If she hadn't been responsible, then who had and where were they now? Would anybody ever know, or were the two women lost forever? And he definitely didn't know what to think of the Vision's evident willingness to keep helping the Brisings.
"After all that, you're just going to do as she says?" he asked.
I am on the side of life, said the Vision. Tiresias' ark is full of living things. I want them to survive. I want all of us to survive, and the information I have now suggests that the best way to accomplish that is to help Tiresias and destroy Polyphemus.
The information he had now... that was an interesting choice of phrase, considering how much worse this whole mess had been made by a lack of information.
I do not know if Tiresias is capable of creating the AI she needs without help from the Mind Gem, the Vision said, and she has already refused to use of it. I think using it again may draw Polyphemus' attention, so it is probably all for the best. You, however, have created multiple artificial personalities from scratch, all of them able to perform diverse tasks. Perhaps you can help.
"I might," said Tony. He wasn't sure he wanted to, but he did have AI to spare, half a dozen variations on the adaptive and learning algorithms that had been the basis of JARVIS. Making them work on Brisingr, which ran on a different machine code and used alien components, would be a challenge, and Tony enjoyed a challenge. "I can see the ships now," he added, as a line of dots popped up in the HUD to indicate their positions. "Am I gonna be able to get in, or am I gonna bounce off like an idiot again?"
Tiresias says she will allow you inside.
Twenty minutes later, Tony landed Prometheus inside the crew quarters of Brisingr. It was damned good to see the Vision apparently none the worse for wear. The same could not be said of Tiresias, who was wearing multiple bandages and had one arm in a sling. Tony was tempted to give the Vision a hug, but he didn't want to do it in front of Tiresias. Besides, the Vision would have to be phased out in order to survive in here, and Prometheus would have passed right through him.
"All right," he said. "So that's the backstory. What's your plan from here?"
"Tiresias must reprogram the computer to run the ship and care for the Cargo," the Vision said. "And as quickly as possible, because so long as I am on board, Polyphemus will be drawn to this location. We need to get me out as soon as we can. In fact, it may be best if I leave the solar system altogether."
Tony was shaking his head before the Vision even finished this sentence. "Not happening," he said. "What are you gonna do once you draw it away, huh? Just let it eat you?" Tony was all for self-sacrifice when it was himself. He wouldn't allow it from others.
"I may be able to use the Mind Gem..." the Vision began.
"No!" Tiresias interrupted. "Polyphemus will consume it! It has already tried."
Tony had to agree. "That's why Dr. Foster wanted to use the Aether," he said. "Unfortunately, that's of the table because we don't know where Heimdall sent them and until they're done with their rebellion in Asgard, they can't come back. On Earth, we're back to Plan Nuke Everything, which usually works, but..." he paused as he got an idea. "Drawing it away from Earth certainly can't hurt. Ever been to Jupiter, Vizh?" he asked, in the same tone of voice he would have used if he wanted to know whether the android had ever eaten at Fatburger.
"I d not believe I have," the Vision replied in the same casual manner. "The weather is supposed to be terrible. Why Jupiter?"
"Because Jupiter can take the hit," said Tony. "It's been clobbered by bigger explosions before and it bounced back okay." He hesitated – after everything that had happened, was he really going to help these aliens? Maybe it was just that he trusted JARVIS' voice no matter what it was saying. "Look," he added, "I'm gonna go with this, because I want us all to survive, too, but when we're done..." he turned to Tiresias. "When we're done, you are gonna answer some questions. I just hope when you do, I'll be able to believe anything you say."
"Of course," said Tiresias quietly.
Something in her voice didn't sound right, and when Tony looked at the Vision again, he found concern in the synthetic face. Would Tiresias answer any questions? Because Tony suddenly had the feeling she wasn't planning on lasting that long.
Later that night, as he toyed with his space AIs, Tony found himself thinking about names. It was strange, sometimes, the things that stuck in his memory. Game pieces were probably always going to make him think of the nuts and bolts he and Yinsen had used to play backgammon with. Strawberries would always remind him of that damned pinwheel thing on Pepper's desk. Rabbits had some very unpleasant associations indeed. And for the rest of his life, he thought, he was going to think about this summer every time he had to give something a name.
Dr. Foster and Miss Lewis had given Brisingr a name because that was their right as its discoverers, and they'd considered it a treat. The Vision had given names to Tiresias, Pandora, and Polyphemus because humans needed to call these creatures something they could pronounce, and the meanings lined up approximately even when the mythology didn't. The various things Tony had built – the Iron Valkyries, Oracle, Prometheus – had gotten names because it was traditional to name things like that.
Tiresias wanted to know what everybody's names actually meant. Pandora had turned Tony's into Strength Without Measure, and Wanda had looked hers up to get Furthest-Ranging Traveler. The Vision was The Ideal of What is to Come. Dr. Foster was Divine Grace Nourishes. Names and their meanings were clearly very important in Brising culture, far more than simply the sounds people made to identify themselves.
Which was why Tony found himself thinking carefully about names for the projects he was currently working on. The orbiter and bomb package he was building to destroy Polyphemus was easy – it would be Nemo, which was the answer Ulysses had given when the Cyclops asked his name. It meant 'nobody'. After the men had blinded the Cyclops and escaped, the other monsters who lived on the island asked who was responsible, and the Cyclops replied, "nobody!" As stories from myth went, it was... well, it was still gory and depressing, but at least it had a punch line.
He left the task of finishing Nemo to Dr. Selvig and Helen, with Miss Lewis and the robots to help them. Tony himself wanted to focus on getting the Vision out of Brisingr, which meant putting together Pandora's replacement.
Name that was more difficult, but also more important. Anything you were going to talk to needed a name. They'd called it 'Pandora 2.0' for a few hours, but that didn't really work. Not only did it seem rather disrespectful, but the name's meaning was no longer appropriate. This new machine wouldn't have All Gifts to give. It would fulfill the basic function of caring for the embryos, but it couldn't be a mother and teacher as Pandora would have. Its biggest jobs outside of running the ships would be guide and interpreter, leading the colonists to Venus and keeping them in contact with Earth. There wasn't really any figure in Greek mythology – or Norse, or Egyptian for that matter – that offered a suitable name.
Eventually, Tony did think of one. It was more mythologized than mythological, but he suggested it anyway, just to see what Tiresias and the Vision would say.
"I was thinking of Sacajawea," he said.
"What does it mean?" Tiresias asked.
"Sacajawea was a woman who helped some explorers," Tony explained. "She showed them the route to take and made sure they could talk to the locals. It seemed appropriate."
"That's not what I asked," Tiresias said.
"The exact translation is disputed," the Vision put in. "There are several interpretations, but the most likely seems to be that it is Shoshone for She Pulls the Boat."
"Yes," Tiresias said firmly. "Yes, that's perfect."
Tony supposed it was.
They uploaded the new AI bit by bit, allowing it to take over tasks one at a time while the Vision was still present, so that he could step in if anything went wrong. This was a team process – Tiresias provided instructions and specifications, Tony turned those into modifications to his basic AI code, and the Vision compiled and debugged. Slowly, hour by hour, Brisingr began to automate again. It made an obvious difference to the Vision. With the new AI taking the load off his own processors, his responses sped up, and he began to use contractions again.
"You sound exhausted," Tony said, as they cleaned up a routing for sterilizing nutrient tanks.
"I am... overtaxed," the Vision said, after a moment of searching for the right word. "I don't know if it's the same as exhaustion, but if it sounds similar, it probably feels similar."
"Just a couple more days," Tony promised. "Then you're off for a nice vacation. Tour the volcanoes of Io! Ski the slopes of Europa! And a planet with Earth-sized storms that last three hundred years has got to have epic surfing."
"I'll have to do some data-gathering for Dr. Foster," said the Vision with a note of dry humour. "I'm sure she would never forgive me if I visited Jupiter and didn't send her a postcard."
Tony hesitated. He didn't want to ruin the relatively light moment, but after a moment he decided he had to ask. "Do you think they're still alive?" Tony himself had been so absorbed in work that he kept forgetting about the missing women – but then he would remember, and it always made him feel sick to his stomach. They were just two lives while he worked on saving billions, but those two lives were still important, and Tony knew that if he had only listened to them they wouldn't have run off like that. Whatever had become of them was, like so much else, his fault.
"I think I would know if Wanda were dead," said the Vision. "She... she felt it when her brother died. If she were dying, she would let me know."
Tony wasn't sure he believed that, but he just nodded. "We haven't heard from Thor," he said. "For all we know, they're safe with him." He wasn't sure he believed that, either – surely Thor would have found some way to tell them. Then again, the Quantum Pot was back in the console now, so maybe he'd been trying and they just hadn't heard him.
Then Tony remembered another thing he had pushed to the back of his mind. With all the other stuff going on, it was easy to forget that the Brisings were still on their way to Venus. Tony had purposefully allowed himself to get out of touch with whatever was going on in the Public Feelings Department, but he knew Steve, Natasha, Clint, and a few others were still intermittently called on to keep protests from turning into riots. The masses didn't know about Polyphemus, which was good, but also meant they didn't know why the Avengers weren't trying to do something about the aliens moving in next door. Once the rest of this was taken care of, that was going to become an issue again.
"By the time we're done with this, Brisingr's gonna be almost at Venus," he said.
"Yes," the Vision agreed. "I'll be relieved when they arrive, though not as relieved as Tiresias will be."
No doubt, Tony thought. "But then we'll be right back where we started. I don't think the UN ever came to a decision one way or another who owns the planet."
"As I recall, they abandoned the question entirely in favour of working out a plan to defend the Earth in case of attack," said the Vision. "Tiresias worked so hard to save what she could of her world, but what is in Brisingr is a tiny fragment of the life of an entire galaxy. It would be very sad to see it arbitrarily snuffed out."
"Even after everything else she did?" asked Tony.
"Everything Tiresias has done, she did with the best intentions," said the Vision.
"Yeah, just pave that road to hell," Tony grumbled. "I dunno. I think about it, and I draw a blank. Like Steve said, it's hard to do the right thing when you don't even know what that is."
"Right and wrong are human constructs that are not always applicable to real-world situations," the Vision pointed out.
Tony sniffed. "The real world. I think I remember that," he said. "It had normal problems like paparazzi and the economy, and there weren't any aliens whatsoever, friendly or otherwise. Do you think it's still out there somewhere?" he asked wistfully.
"It never was," said the Vision. "The world has always been what it is now. You had merely seen less of it."
Tony found that a very depressing thought.