"It has been days, Madame healer," Thor ventured. "Is there any change?"
"No, my prince. Your brother fares the same."
...
Tony Stark leaned back in the computer chair, tension easing out of him with each articular "pop" in his spine. It had been a long day. He (along with two cranes, five humongous dump trucks, a very impressive industrial saw, and a small army of only partially constructed remote-controlled Iron Suits) had finally hauled the vast wreckage of the Hulk-smashed Chitauri leviathan off the streets of Manhattan. It was a job well-done, and Tony was glad he was finally going to be moving on to a purely supervisory role in the cleanup. Actual work was terrible.
He sat forward, twisted side-to-side with another satisfying lower back crack, and reached for the bottle of bourbon he had brought down to the lab with him. He poured a healthy measure, then booted up the computer. He had been spending the evenings working on a kind of hive-mind AI program that could coordinate spare Iron Suits without his needing to actually be there joining in. The idea had merit even beyond the current cleanup crisis, Tony had decided. The suits could be deployed for all kinds of humanitarian situations where sending humans posed undue risk. They could also be used destructively by evil governments and corporations, but Tony had already decided to thwart that risk by furiously encrypting and never, ever, ever sharing the code and making sure it was only compatible with his suits anyways.
It was still a risk, and maybe he would never put it in action, but it was a fun project to tinker with. Most of the time. This evening he was battling an encroaching migraine, and the eye strain staring at any kind of computer screen was not helping. He closed the program. He poured another shot of bourbon and grinned wryly as he downed it. That probably wouldn't help his headache either. He yawned. "Jarvis, turn the lights down."
Absently, he spun around in his swivel chair, immediately regretting it when his head started pounding. He planted his feet to stop the spinning and found himself staring straight at Loki's scepter, still resting on the workbench where he had set it after the battle. Its blue glow was quite striking in the dim light. He reached behind him to push off the desk, rolling across the room to take a closer look as his curiosity sparked. He picked up the scepter, peering at the apparatus surrounding the central stone. It looked a lot more delicate and deliberate up close, more like a machine than mere decoration. Which made sense, since the scepter was clearly a tool, not just a fancy stick. He ran a finger around the edge of the stone and felt a soft click. A giddy shiver ran down his spine as the color of the light shifted from sapphire to teal. "Jarvis, turn the lights back on," he said excitedly.
Tony set the scepter back down, then shoved all the other doodads cluttering the bench aside. He grabbed a sheaf of drafting paper, a #2 pencil, a compass, and a straightedge from the desk and started measuring. If the scepter was a machine, he could figure out how it worked. If he could figure out how cool alien tech worked (and honestly, the scepter was much cooler than most of the random Chitauri junk he had already poked at), then who knew what new toys he could invent?
...
"Erik?" Dr. Jane Foster ventured quietly from the door. She had been invited to the psych ward by some government agent to help determine whether any of her mentor's ramblings were something more than insanity...which was looking doubtful. Her longtime friend and colleague, Dr. Selvig, was sitting on the floor of his hospital room in a set of paper shirt and trousers, staring avidly at the buttons on the remote control for his television. The television was off. He looked up at her.
"Jane! So good to see you! You're just the person I needed. Come look at this..." With some trepidation, Jane stepped forward. She was only mildly reassured when he set down the TV remote and instead grabbed a sheaf of loose-leaf papers with complex equations scrawled haphazardly across them in purple crayon. She recognized some of them as pertaining to the work they had been doing in New Mexico on Einstein-Rosen Bridges, before Selvig had taken an academic leave for a government job that landed him in the middle of a disaster.
"Erik, what happened?"
"Hmm? Oh, didn't they tell you? I think was in the news, actually, or maybe it's hush? Anyways, Thor's evil brother Loki showed up at my jobsite with some mind-control device. I had to help him open an artificial bridge between Earth and some really distant asteroid field. I've been trying to compute where. I think it's somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse... I'm also not entirely sure how I did it, or even if I did it or it was all him, so I've been trying to work backwards on that as well, and I could really use your help!"
"He controlled your mind, did he? Isn't that magic? I thought you didn't believe in magic."
"Yes! It was awful! He's not human." Selvig said that matter-of-factly, not in anger, which was very confusing for Jane.
"Well, no. If he's Thor's brother, he's Asgardian."
"No, I mean he wasn't human. Thor might be an alien, but he's still basically a normal person."
"I know what he means," came a soft voice from the door. The SHIELD agent was still standing there, watching. He met Jane's eyes. "Loki controlled me too, for a time. It's hard to describe, magic if you believe the Avengers." He smiled bitterly. "Selvig's right, though. The touch of Loki's mind, if that's what it was, it didn't feel right. It was like communing with a robot."
"A really intelligent robot," Erik agreed sagely. "One that never learned Asimov's laws. Or if it did, learned ones that didn't apply to 'humans.'" He patted her hand, smiling reassuringly. "It's ok, Jane. I'm fine now. There's nothing more comforting than the knowledge that the universe is far crazier than you are. What was it that Thor said, that advanced science looks like magic? That's the assumption I'm going with for now. Now, help me figure out how to build a magical bridge to outer space. Then maybe you can visit Thor rather than have to wait for him. He's been really unreliable, hasn't he? Also..." he paused in his tirade long enough to pick up the TV remote again and show it to her. "I was taking a break from the main project when you first came in, and I trying to decide whether this might be intelligent. I mean, I tell it what to do, and it does it. It even seems to remember some things, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't like it when I touch that button, or at least the nurses here don't. I mean, it's basically the same as I was under mind-control, and I am intelligent, so... What do you think?"
Author's note: humans don't just ignore cool stuff, and Selvig has had his frame of reference severely skewed. Also contains an admittedly lame and tangential discussion of the definition of a robot: a machine programmed to fulfill (complex) automatic functions.
For reference, Asimov's 3 laws of robotics are
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
