Chapter 10: Clove the Ether

He opened his way in space and clove the ether like lightning

Up to heaven, under the earth, looking everywhere.

Above, he searched the Green Void, below, the Yellow Spring;

But he failed, in either place, to find the one he looked for.

~Po Chü-i, from "Song of Unending Sorrow"

Bruce had locked the door of the lab Fury had his people set up for him. He'd specifically requested no listening devices or monitoring devices of any kind, as any electromagnetic field had to be accounted for in his calculations. He'd sent a 360° photo of the room to Doctor Strange, per his instructions, but hadn't received a visit yet.

It came in the evening. He was sitting back reading some of Jane Foster's papers, trying to guess what her hypothesis about the phenomenon she was chasing might have been, when he got a text from an unknown number asking if he was alone in his lab. He replied in the affirmative.

A glowing portal opened up right in front of him. It wasn't Doctor Strange who stepped out of it, but a young woman with frizzy brown hair.

"Hey," he greeted her nonchalantly.

"Doctor Banner. Strange told you I'd be coming, right?"

"He told me it would be more efficient to deal directly with the sorceress he put in charge of the Westview investigation. I take it that's you?"

"Yep. You can call me Agnes."

"Is that your name?" he asked.

"It's close enough."

"You've been in Westview?"

"Yeah. I've been astral projecting inside since about a week after it started."

"Strange said time isn't moving the same in there. How long has it been inside?"

"Years. Not sure how many years. Calendars don't work there. They look normal when you look at them, but as soon as you look away you can't remember the year. No one ages, and no one's died that I've heard of the whole time I've been there."

"That's...good, I guess. Weird, but good."

"It's something," Agnes agreed.

"No offense to you, but why isn't Strange dealing with this himself?"

"He's got a lot on his plate." Agnes stood up and walked aimlessly around the room for a minute. "What's happening in Westview is weird, but from what we've seen so far it doesn't seem to be dangerous. I'm only telling you this because you saved half the universe literally single-handedly, so I kind of feel like we can trust you. There's an interdimensional being called Dormammu. A few years ago, he tried to take over Earth. Strange managed to stop him using the Time Stone, but there are some indications he's planning to try again. Strange is trying to find a way to stop him if he does."

"Okay. That's a good excuse." He got back on topic. "Do you have a plan of action for Westview?"

"Right now, I'm kind of hoping Wanda will eventually get bored of the world she's created and I can talk her into putting things back to normal. I've been working on befriending her. I'm pretty sure she considers me a friend, anyway. Or at least a nosy but sympathetic neighbor."

"Has she told you about her past?"

"I don't think she remembers her past. No one does. Not clearly. No one remembers the Blip, but some of them remember that their friends and relatives were away for a few years. They talk about the Chitauri invasion of New York like it was a radio show."

"Well, if you're going to try to convince her to go back to her real life, you should know what you're asking her to go back to. She grew up in Sokovia, a dirt-poor, corrupt, and unstable former Soviet republic in eastern Europe. She and her twin brother survived their apartment being bombed when she was ten. Their parents didn't. She grew up on the streets. She volunteered to be experimented on by HYDRA, which is how she got her powers. She went to work for Ultron, during which time she fought the Avengers. She got into our heads, giving us horrible, intense hallucinations. Then she found out Ultron wasn't just planning to take over the world, he was planning to destroy it, so she turned on him. Ultron killed her brother. She joined the Avengers, using her powers to help the world, but the world turned against her when some people died from a bomb she moved to save Steve Rogers. She spent two years as a fugitive after being locked up for refusing to sign the Sokovia Accords. And then Thanos murdered her boyfriend in front of her, then turned her to dust along with half of the universe."

Agnes waited for him to finish. "I get it: for her, reality is a hard sell."

"Yeah."

"It makes sense that her perfect world looks like an old sitcom. I used to think it was just easier to convince people what's happening is normal if the internet doesn't exist and no one wants to fork over the money to make a long-distance call, but I can see how a simpler time before alien attacks and robotic flight suits would appeal to her." She paused a moment, idly toying with a knob from a radiation detector Bruce hadn't gotten around to assembling yet. "I knew most of that already. I remember hearing about the Lagos bombing on the news. They talked about Wanda like she was some kind of monster just because she tried to stop it and failed. But you wouldn't guess she had anything like that in her past from the way she is now. She's so relentlessly cheerful. I feel sorry for her."

"You feel sorry for her for being cheerful?"

"Yeah, I do. Can you imagine never letting yourself say something angry, or sarcastic? But mostly I feel sorry for how crazy in love she is with her husband. She doesn't realize the real Vision is dead and the one she has now is basically a figment of her imagination. It's going to be hard to break it to her."

"I can't even imagine," Bruce said. "Does he disappear when she's not around?"

"No, he's still there. I've talked to him alone. He'd pass a Turing test. I've helped him plan a surprise party for her. It was weird."

He tried to imagine what it would be like, talking to someone knowing they were a philosophical zombie. He remembered the night he and Tony brought Vision to life, a patchwork of materials and intelligences like Frankenstein's monster, not knowing if it would work, or what they would unleash if it did work. And then there he was, talking in the voice of Tony's A.I., saying he didn't know whether he was a monster, but able to lift Thor's hammer.

Would he be able to tell the difference between that Vision and the one Wanda created?

"Have you found anything else about how Wanda created the pocket dimension?"

Agnes shook her head. "Nope. It's hard to get answers without Wanda getting suspicious. Have you been able to figure anything out from the outside?"

"Not really 'figure out', but Doctor Lewis and I are working on a hypothesis. Have there been any giant explosions in Westview by any chance?"

She raised an eyebrow at him. "Not that I've noticed."

"Yeah, I figured you would've mentioned something like that. Energy readings from Westview look like the creation of virtual particles, which are always popping up in the vacuum of space in matter/antimatter pairs, but the antimatter is missing."

"So what does antimatter look like?"

"Just like regular matter, but more...explody."

"'Explody'?"

"When it comes in contact with regular matter, they annihilate each other, turning into pure energy."

"Dang. So if it were there, I'd know it."

"You'd know it for a split second," he replied.

"I get the picture."

"But if you can create matter/antimatter pairs and then somehow get rid of the antimatter, you've just created something from nothing."

"Interesting. But the part about getting rid of the antimatter has me worried."

"Well, you're a sorceress, right? Where does the energy you use to make magic come from?"

"Other dimensions," she answered. "Or magical objects, or our own essence, depending on the spell."

"The antimatter could be going to another dimension."

Agnes nodded. "That would make sense. And that's something I could find, if I can catch Wanda creating something."

"Another thing: have you seen either of these people in Westview?" He showed her two photographs.

"Yeah. I've met Jane Foster a few times. I don't know the other woman's name, but I've seen her around."

"Monica Rambeau. She's an agent of S.W.O.R.D. who went into the Westview event horizon a few weeks ago. You can confirm she's alive?"

"Yeah, she's alive."

"Good. That's good." Bruce frowned; he didn't know how to tell Fury that piece of good news without revealing his source.

"I'll text you before I drop by again. That should be in a couple of days." Before she left, she added, "I want to thank you. I know you don't want people to know what you did, but the Sorcerers know. I lost my whole family to the Blip. That's why I found my way to magic, out of a hope beyond hope that something could be done to reverse it. I never harbored any illusion that I could do anything to fix it, but I wanted to know if someone could. And you did. So...thank you."

Bruce dropped his eyes, uncomfortable with the praise. The way he saw it, he'd done what anyone would do in his shoes. "You don't need to thank me. I lost people I cared about to the Blip too."

She nodded. "Okay. Thanks retracted then."

He laughed. So did she.

After Agnes left, Bruce checked the time. It was getting late. There were some things left to do to set up his lab, but he wanted to give himself time to think about what he'd just learned while it was still fresh in his mind.

He'd done plenty of thinking about the physics of the Snap, about how Thanos could make so much mass just cease to exist, and how he had reversed it. How did Wanda feel, creating a little world for herself, using some kind of unexplained power to craft something out of nothing? He tried to remember how he'd felt, bringing back the lost with a snap of his fingers, wishing them back into existence and knowing—somehow knowing through the power he could feel coursing through him and the rest of the universe—that it would work, feeling for a moment every star, every hydrogen atom, and every spark of life in existence, but searching for one specific spark of life and not finding it, trying to pull forth one more form from the formless, but failing.

Natasha…

How had Wanda felt when she thought she could recreate Vision? Was it remotely possible she'd somehow really brought Vision back?

Bruce had no idea, but he secretly hoped so.