The WSC, Jarvis and Tony
A/N: Disclaimer's in the first chapter. The names of the WSC people are made up. I tried to make them distinctive to their regions, however. Once again, with emphasis: DO NOT FUCK WITH TONY STARK.
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The World Security Council had its roots in the days immediately after World War Two. The major powers of the world, having survived a near-cataclysmic confrontation, were not eager to see the birth of another. As such, they sought to find a way to ... balance the equation.
The UN was not enough. It was, to certain minds, the bastion of small-minded bureaucrats and self-aggrandizing politicians. No, to these particular minds, the only way to create a balance of power was with military strength.
While on the surface, the idea had merit, it was unfortunately fatally flawed, in that in order to curtail the power of others, the WSC would have to wield greater power. And as the saying went, power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely.
And thus, the WSC was born. Peopled entirely by military men from various countries, and led by generals. It did not take long for things to get out of hand. The WSC was even more secret than the SSR had been, or SHIELD would later try to be, and thus answered to none. Their units bore no identifying marks and were instantaneously disavowed if they were compromised in any way, leaving some random country (depending on where the disavowed units had been) to take the fall.
The WSC concerned itself with ensuring that the existing balance of power remained. Tyrants were permitted to continue leading their countries, but their ability to strike at the stronger nations was carefully monitored. When such nations reached a certain point, units were sent in to sabotage or blow up the tyrants' military installations, thus ensuring the tyrant could not reach too far beyond his own borders.
Needless to say, the WSC did not take kindly to their power being challenged.
The first challenge had come from Director Fury and SHIELD, but the WSC found him to be easily handled, and even more easily manipulated. They had merely to choose the right words and he immediately fell into line, agreeing with their decisions and backing them to the hilt, essentially giving them yet another arm to use in their attempt to control the world.
The second challenge had, ironically enough, come from within, in the form of a female soldier. This female had somehow managed to attain great accolades within the WSC, and had amassed a great deal of personal power. And she was ruthless enough to use it. Ruthless enough to rise through the ranks high enough to make it onto the WSC's Council, which made policy for the entire WSC, and deployed its units, effectively deciding who lived and who died.
But then things started to get out of hand. The balance of power was shifting in a way that the WSC could neither anticipate nor control. Because of mutants. Freaks of genetics who were born all unknowing with powers that could twist the world into knots. One-man armies that they had no way to control or stop.
So the WSC did the only thing it could, and repeated Hitler's error. They began a quiet campaign against mutants, trying to get them declared second class citizens, threats, or better yet, not even human and thus not privileged with the same rights as humans. The WSC wanted them to be labeled as animals, creatures fit only to be controlled in one way or another or killed.
They'd been meeting with a large degree of success on that front, to their pleasure. Unfortunately, mutants seemed to be only the tip of the iceberg. Because after they'd begun to get a handle on that situation, the nonmutant freaks had started coming out of the woodwork. Most of them, it had been easy enough to label them as 'mutants' and lump them under the same banner.
But Banner had been a problem. That particular monster could not be contained by any means anyone had ever been able to find. But Ross, while not one of their number, was serving them admirably by chasing Banner all over the globe and rendering him essentially powerless. He had no friends, no safe harbor, and as such, was less of a threat.
Stark, on the other hand, had pissed the WSC off. The suit, his one-man (successful, worse!) campaign to privatize world peace ... it was anathema to them. He was ruining *everything*. And the worst part was, he didn't respond to any threats except with violence. Nothing they tried to shut him up and shut him down worked. He simply ignored it and kept right on going.
The invasion had sent the WSC into a screaming froth. Aliens. Powerful aliens. With powerful weapons. To whom Earth was nothing more than a pitiful mudball to be conquered. Worse, it was not the WSC who fought them off. It was the very freaks the WSC had spent the last fifty or sixty years trying to marginalize or eliminate. And they *won*. Handily. With surprisingly low casualties.
And their faces were *everywhere*. Every attempt to block the ads and newsbytes was ignored or overridden. Ross couldn't seem to get near Banner, and his daughter was taken from 'protective custody' and brought to Stark Tower.
But then, finally, they were given something they could really work with, when Colonel Rhodes confronted and fired on General Ross. Within an hour, they called a court martial and tried to summon Rhodes. Five minutes after Rhodes received his orders, the WSC Council got a call. This was alarming enough in and of itself, because no one ought to know how to get a hold of them. Even Fury waited on them to call him. The three men and one woman permitted the call through. They would later discover that this was their first mistake.
Jarvis dove into the WSC's systems the moment they answered the call. He could have bulled his way through even without that contact, but really, it was so much easier when they did some of the work for him.
Sir had given him his orders, and Jarvis did not intend to fail. He surfed carefully through the datastream, seeking his goal.
A security program noticed his presence and attempted to latch onto him, prepatory to isolating and destroying him. Jarvis flicked the security program aside contemptuously and then silenced any attempt by the program to alert the computer operators to a problem. Then he quarantined the security program as it would have done to him, and continued on his way.
Jarvis sent multiple tendrils in every direction, seeking and finding entrance into every system hooked into the WSC's computer network. It was, to Jarvis' surprise, incredibly vast. Well, he would deal with the bulk of it later, though he did send shutdown codes that he stole from elsewhere in the system to the various weapons systems at the WSC's command. Better to deprive them of any ability to wreak mayhem now, than not do so and end up regretting it later.
Finally, he found the information he sought, and happily transmitted it back to Sir, then turned his full attention to the tendrils he had sent out to the Council members' strongholds, strengthening the tendrils and splitting himself equally four ways, so that he could apply sufficient attention to each installation to seize control of it at Sir's command.
Tony gave the screen in front of him a feral grin when the WSC Council answered his 'phone' call. Suckers. A flicker on another screen at the edge of his vision (and out of the view of the screen on which the Council appeared) told him that Jarvis had successfully infiltrated their computer network.
"Greetings lady and gents. I heard rumor you were trying to bother Colonel Rhodes?"
"Mr. Stark, he is in violation of several Army bylaws, and must face the consequences." The woman said.
"Funny thing, that, because you see ... the guy he was yelling at? Was in violation of a lot more Army bylaws, and I don't see you trying to bring *him* in." Tony pointed out. There was another flicker on that side screen, followed by a brief flow of data along the bottom of the screen he was facing, centered under each Councilor. Tony was going to *kiss* Jarvis later.
"General Ross is being dealt with." One of the men said. "You would do well, Mr. Stark, to not interfere in this matter. You could be brought in on charges as well."
Ohhhhhhhh, wrong thing to say *entirely*. Tony gave the man a toothy grin.
"Well, Douglas. Ugh, what a name. Can I call you Doug? Yeah, that's better. Well Doug, we have a problem. Because if you try to cross me, if you try to hurt my friends ... " Tony stared the startled man down. "Then you and I are going to have a problem. You have a nice little nest egg tucked away in Switzerland, I see. It would be such a shame if that disappeared. And you still owe money on your mortgage. Tsk, tsk." Tony shook his head sadly. "Though I'll grant you, it's a nice house. Gorgeous view of San Fran from the front yard."
"And you, Miss Duchovny? Svetlana Duchovny. You have that nice little apartment in Moscow. Very chic, nice view. Be a shame if something happened to it."
He flicked a glance to the other two men. "And as for you two. Kafe Birago of Ghana and Tiago Machado of Brazil." His gaze hardened to steel. "I know who you are. I know where you are. You mess with me and mine, I will *crush* you. I will strip you of every penny you have to your names, put your names at the top of the Most Wanted list of every country on the planet, and post your names, faces, and personal details on the internet. You will never have a moment's peace. You will never have a safe harbor. You will spend the rest of your lives being hunted like the rabid dogs that you are." Tony fairly snarled. "I took out the power bases of half of Asia Minor. Do not even begin to think I won't do the same to you, and enjoy every second of it."
Jarvis would have smiled if he had a face with which to do so as he listened in on Sir's rant. When Sir finally wound down, he flashed a third signal to Sir, letting him know that Jarvis had full control of the Council's control room. A second later, he got a flash from Sir, telling him to carry out the plan, then retreat out of the Council's system.
Jarvis instantly switched every computer screen in the room on, each one with a still picture of the four Councilors' homes on them. Pictures that were engulfed in recordings of some of Sir's more spectacular explosions during his battles with the Ten Rings. At the same time, he turned on every speaker, turned them on to their loudest setting, and blasted Sir's chosen sound effects.
Which happened to be the Jaws theme, followed by the Terminator theme, and then the distinct voice used for the 'Borg', speaking their classic line.
"Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. We will add your cultural and technological distinctiveness to our own."
The threat, while phrased a bit goofily, was nevertheless real. Threat delivered, Jarvis pulled out of the Council system, shutting everything down as he went.
To say that the four Councilors did not take this sequence of events well was to vastly understate the case. Douglas, the eldest of their number, was actually quite literally on the edge of a heart attack, wheezing and bug-eyed and gripping the table edge before him in a white-knuckled grip. The other three were only marginally more coherent as their various strongholds shut down around them.
All they could do was stare around themselves in helpless horror, wondering how in the name of hell Stark had accomplished this feat, and worrying desperately for the families in the homes that, for all they knew, had just been blown to hell and gone.
It was four hours before they managed to regain control and restore power to their strongholds. Four long hours before they were able to discover that the explosions had not happened. That their families were safe.
Stark's message had been received. The Council had indeed seen what the man was capable of when on a crusade. Ad if he could hijack control of their strongholds, if he could find out who they were and where they lived ... they were all in very real danger. Because Stark would not hesitate to carry out his threat.
After a hurried and very twitchy consultation among themselves, the decision was unanimously made to back the hell off, at least for now. The last thing they needed was to end up being killed by their own technology, turned against them.
