"Gah! There's...too...much...noise!" Thor exclaimed distantly. "Tony, call Natasha and tell her we need Loki afterall."

"What am I, your walkie-talkie?"

"Too late, they're here," Clint said.

Thor, Tony, and Steve turned about to look at Loki, Jane, and Natasha, who were indeed walking towards them, having just climbed out of the yellow vehicle Jane called a taxi. Loki's eyes were fixed on his brother, who straightened up instantly to receive him. "Loki! What's wrong?"

Loki waved a hand, and a second version of himself appeared instantly at his side, only this one was different and hellish. This Loki was no mischief-maker but a God of Lies. This Loki wore his helmet and his armor. This Loki smelled of blood and smoke (although that was probably his imagination, since illusions as a rule had no scent). This Loki was Reindeer Games; in creating Reindeer Games, Loki had discovered hatred. "Speak," Loki told... it.

Reindeer Games' eyes glinted with malice, and a wide grin nearly tore his face in half. "Enemies reunited! A pleasure, Earth's mightiest heroes." Loki heard Tony's heart develop sudden, quiet palpitations, the rapid pulse amplified by the Arc reactor in his chest enough for an Asgardian, or Jotun, to hear. Captain America stepped backwards, and the blood washed from Hawkeye's face as he fumbled for his arrows with suddenly tremulous hands.

Thor furrowed his brow and passed a hand straight through Reindeer Games. It parted and reformed like smoke in the wake of Thor's touch. "This is an illusion," Thor said. "And a deliberate one. Why do you show it to us?"

"Meet Reindeer Games," Loki said shortly. "He knows things I don't!" he continued urgently. "I don't know why. Thor, is it real?"

"Knows things?"

"Oh yes, I know much, Odinspawn," Reindeer Games answered gaily. "I know your weaknesses and will be your doom. I am the life after death, the magic born of mind and sleeping matter."

"Say something more useful," Loki growled at it.

"You will have to be more specific, Puppet."

"You called him Puppet before," Natasha observed. "Why?"

"That is the name given him...us. By the Creator."

"Who is your Creator?" Loki snarled.

Reindeer Games winked at him. "The One and the Other." It had said exactly the same before. It wasn't just remembering things it wasn't supposed to, it was deliberately antagonizing him. If the thing had any substance of its own, Loki would strangle it. He pictured it dying painfully nonetheless, smiling as the illusion crumpled to the ground and started convulsing in imagined pain, screaming silently. Jane yelped and jerked away from it.

"Loki, look at me and dissipate the illusion," Thor said. Loki obeyed. Reindeer Games stopped twitching and calmly stood back up before fading away with his silent command. It popped back up moments later, thumbing its nose at him. Loki scowled at it. Thor took the younger brother by the shoulders and gently turned him. "Loki, I am real, this thing is not, yet I see it distresses you. Why? What is it?"

Loki delicately removed Thor's hands from his shoulders, but kept hold of one hand all the same, touching his midriff with the other, trying to ground himself in a physical reality. "With the aid of Lady Natasha, I discovered I do retain extensive knowledge of the Chitauri who invaded Midgard with me, yet the knowledge feels more foreign to me than anything else I have remembered since being damaged. It was unsettling, so I created Reindeer Games with the ability to access this knowledge to be the intercessor for Lady Natasha. But then it relayed a personal history which I simply do not recall..."

"And now you want to know if that's because the spell isn't working correctly or because it's working too well or because your ears are hearing things they shouldn't be," Thor summarized.

Loki smiled gratefully at him, glad Thor understood so well. "Yes."

Thor closed his eyes for a breath then opened them again. He looked tired, Loki suddenly noticed. "I... don't know."

Loki's face fell. "You can guess, can't you?" Loki pleaded.

"No, Loki, because I'm not you," Thor said softly.

Loki's lips twisted. "You can't have it both ways, Brother. You can't prove your own existence both by knowing what's real and by not knowing."

"This is different from what you've asked of me before. You're not asking to rely on my senses. I can't just look at the spell or look at your mind to know what the problem is. I can repeat back to you what it says, but I have no way of knowing whether what it says is the truth. I can't verify a memory I don't share with you."

Loki blinked, mouth falling open. "They can't verify," Loki sputtered, pointing randomly around at the Avengers, "but you're Thor."

"I am Thor. I am real. But that doesn't make me infallible when it comes to unraveling the mysteries of your brain," Thor told him patiently.

Loki opened his mouth to argue, closed it again. Thor had said something simple but revolutionary: Thor was not Loki. Thor's thoughts and memories were not a mirror to hold up to his own. Thor was a second mind. Even if he was an automata created by an internal or external Deceiver, even if he was an illusion as Reindeer Games was, even if Thor's every word and action was a mindless succession of physical and chemical reactions without the depth and complexity of Loki's thought, Thor functioned as a second mind, and that mind was not Loki's. Loki glanced around at the humans warily watching him. This could be an entire world of closed causation of his own devising and Loki would still be separate from Thor: in billions of real or simulated minds, Loki's experience was still unique, according to Thor. Thor's experience was by implication similarly unique... If they were not unique, they would be the same person, same mind, same soul. To merge that lived experience would be to merge two minds and souls and thus eliminate the unique identities in the birthing of something new. Their bodies were irrelevant, Loki thought excitedly, mere convenient containers; a mind could inhabit one or many bodies, according to Loki's new logic. Or no body, according to his experience in the Void. Reassuringly, that meant Loki and Reindeer Games were absolutely not the same person, Loki concluded. They were two minds as demonstrated by their diverging memories, the one grafted onto the other like a parasitic mistletoe. They were probably only one soul though, Loki mused. Or rather, he was ensouled, and Reindeer Games wasn't.

Thor cleared his throat. Loki smirked. "You know, I do not believe it occurred to me until this moment that your mind is so completely separated from mine, and how many vast and deeply divided minds there may well be."

"Is that a good thing?"

Loki shrugged. "I have reluctantly trusted that you are external from me for weeks; it is not so big a step to suppose that means I must be external from you, or that everyone else may be the same. That's what's wrong with Reindeer Games."

"Pardon?"

"It's me, unlike you. But it knows things I don't which means it also is not me, and it probably won't tell me if the opposite is also true, because it's evil."

"Oh," Thor said, although it was clear from the way he said it he didn't understand Loki's last statement any better than the humans did.

"Nevermind. It is an internal matter you need not concern yourself with at present. I apologize for interrupting you."

"Ah." Thor glanced back over his shoulder at the gravitational anomaly.

"Actually, we were about to call you over to try searching for the stones, Loki, so why don't you go ahead?" Tony suggested.

Loki raised his eyebrows and looked at Thor, who nodded pained acquiescence. Loki took his hand. "Anchor me, then." Without further ado, he stepped forwards, straight into the anomaly, and floated into the air. He hung suspended with his eyes closed, reaching out with his senses to listen to the great energy tides flowing around him.

Loki's experience of cosmic radiation was indescribable. He had been outside spacetime before, and that was horrific. He had never been intertwined with all of it, all at once. It was miraculous. It took several minutes to get his bearings and acclimate to the heady feeling of a contained and ordered infinitude. Yet finally, he heard. Quite quickly, he picked up the clarion calls of not one Infinity Stone but three. He traced the echoes of power back through the twists and turns of the Convergence with growing alarm: the waves were in sync. The vibrations had all traveled the same paths, from the same place. The last three stones were united. And they were quite close, astronomically speaking. "Oh, dear," he breathed. There was a tug on his hand, and his feet returned to the ground as Thor pulled him back out of the anomaly. Loki turned around to scold his brother, rather miffed to be interrupted from his surprisingly pleasant task, but he was distracted by a shimmering astral projection of Heimdall of all people.

The gatekeeper crossed his arms and bowed briefly. "My princes, the Svartalf attack has been repulsed here as well as on Midgard, but we have just received word of an attack on Nidavellir. Your father requires your presence here urgently."

Thor nodded sharply. "Understood, Lord Heimdall." The hologram vanished. Thor pulled Loki to his side and glanced around at the humans. "Stand back, my friends."

Feeling a little disoriented by the sudden change in plans, Loki nonetheless smiled at all Thor's friends and waved, vaguely recalling Midgardian farewell customs. Reindeer Games waved back and then bowed at him exaggeratedly, with many flourishes. Loki squashed the line of magic maintaining the smug illusion.

Thor lifted his left hand, and the brothers vanished into the space between the stars, going home.


There was less fanfare than there should have been. Thanos strode into his base on solar Titan to find four of his Children slouching around a table glaring at each other. He was displeased to see only four where there should have been five. He was even more displeased to see they had only three Infinity Stones among them.

Ebony was the first to rise, dark eyes glinting as he stared in undisguised rapture at the Infinity Gauntlet gracing Thanos' fist. "Sire, my humble personage bows before your grandeur. The boundless and eternal cosmos rests within your grasp. I am proud to be your acolyte and bask in the glory of your divine presence." He bowed deeply.

"You do well to prostrate yourself before me, my Ebony," Thanos murmured.

"My plan was not as fruitful as we had hoped," Ebony conceded quickly. "I did not anticipate Asgard's mobilization, because I did not anticipate Dark Elves to resurface during the Convergence."

"Dark Elves?" Thanos asked, honestly taken by surprise. That was a race that had disappeared even before Thanos could remember. He had only heard tell of them in history books so old and rare they were written on paper.

"Risen from the ashes," Ebony said bitterly.

"Four Dark Elf ships were engaged with the Asgardian prince when Cull went to try to retrieve the Mind Stone. He was killed in the crossfire, as far as I could tell when I caught up to him," Nebula said tonelessly. "It's safe to say the Asgardian has the other stones. I couldn't detect them on him though, so he might also be delegating the guardianship to his human allies."

"Did he wear the ancient Gauntlet the Puppet told us of?" Gamora asked curiously.

"No." Nebula rose and knelt before Thanos, holding up the Time Stone to him. "Father, accept my offering." Thanos smiled then, forgetting his dead soldier in the light of his prize. He reached out with his gauntleted hand. The metal pendant encasing the magical stone rusted and fell away as the stone itself floated up from Nebula's palm. It touched the setting over his middle knuckle and briefly burned with brilliant green light so bright it overwhelmed the lights of the other two stones and left a shining after-image across Thanos' vision. A moment later, the stone merged with the gauntlet, and an eddy of power washed over him. He felt outside of normal time itself. He perceived the massive age of the universe, a duration so great it made his own "immortal" lifespan seem but a few heartbeats. He looked down at Nebula and found himself smiling; she was the youngest of his Children, her life so short it was almost incomprehensible that she should mean anything at all, yet she did. As soon as he returned to himself, it was clear the heady sensation had lasted barely any mortal time at all, but in that moment, he had gained everything he needed to know about the Time Stone to master it.

Gamora followed next, kneeling beside her sister. "All is not lost. Father, we have successfully recovered the Power Stone. Accept my offering." He reached out eagerly for this stone, as it was the one he had needed and desired the most. Violent purple light flashed and dimmed as the Orb encasing the stone shattered into dust and the stone itself flew to its rightful place on the dorsum of his hand. Thanos stiffened, eyes and jaw clenched shut against the shock of this foreign energy. This rush of power was far greater than that of Time. Electrified, Thanos could only marvel at the comparison of two infinitudes. This was raw, wild energy surging through his arm and into his thoughts. This stone had no fixed nature and no purpose other than to bring about the will of its master. After moments of straining, the energies ebbed and settled into his hand, ready and waiting.

He opened his eyes to see Proxima drifting towards him. She knelt and held up her own glowing stone. She did not bow her head but rather met his gaze with eyes shining with unspilled tears. "My offering, my lord," she whispered. Touched by her obvious pain, Thanos reached down and took her face in his bare hand, tracing her cheek with his thumb.

"Thankyou, daughter. Know I do not lie when I tell you how sorry I am for your loss, how sorry I am to bear it with you."

"My husband would rejoice in this moment, my lord," Proxima said, voice breaking.

"He would, yes, and we should rejoice and be glad in it as well, even though we would have wished for him to join us in our celebration."

Proxima's expression hardened. "I will see him again soon enough, when your victory is won. Take the Soul Stone, my dread lord, and remake the universe as it should be." She stood up and pushed the Soul Stone towards his hand. It leapt from her fingertips to the setting over the knuckle on his thumb. This time, the sensation that crested over him was that of presence, as if he were crushed in a crowd of untold millions, or else alone except for one being infinitely greater than himself. It was an eerie feeling Thanos had never experienced before and one he quickly forced down. The stone bowed to his desire, lying quiescent in its setting.

Ebony laughed softly, staring up at Thanos' bejeweled hand. "Oh ye unhappy people, stop imagining poor endings for the world... a very real one is coming soon."

Author's note: Philosophy zombies! That's what Loki has been suspecting Thor and everyone else of being all this time. A philosophy zombie is a creature that looks, speaks, and acts exactly like a human but isn't conscious. It's what theoretically exists if you take physicalism to the extreme: all the universe is just physics, all human activity mere chemical reactions, without the summative emergent property of consciousness (I'm pretty sure I nattered on about emergent properties early on in this story). There are a couple philosophical arguments against the existence of zombies. The first is verificationism, basically the scientific method - there's no way to prove they exist or don't exist, so the question is moot. That's the easiest argument and the one Loki has been grappling with before this chapter with his unmet desire to prove that external things like Thor exist or not. The second argument is functionalism, which is where he lands this chapter. Say you take as writ that Thor and everyone else is a philosophy zombie...they still physically function as people (ie external minds from Loki), so practically speaking, they aren't zombies afterall. There are many, many more technical objections to the concept of philosophy zombies, and if you are interested, I suggest reading about them elsewhere. :)

"Imitation Man" is an older term for philosophy zombies, presumably from before mainstream western philosophy grew cultured enough to know about the revenant folklore of the African diaspora. It's also a nice reference to the Imitation Game, a thought experiment from Alan Turing (hence normally called the Turing Test) about how artificial intelligence could mimic human thought, as determined by a blinded and impartial judge. The question of consciousness in both machine intelligence and philosophy zombies is after all essentially the same, since philosophy zombies are essentially machines that to all outward appearance exactly mimic humans.