Chapter 16: Fugitive
The tree denies the fugitive its shade,
It sheds its scarlet leaves, and so rebuffs him.
~Henjo, Kokinshu 292, trans. Edward Seidensticker
The others had left a few hours before to investigate a sudden rash of psychosis cases in Hobart, Tasmania, leaving Vision alone in the New York Sanctum. He'd spent the time watching television, looking out the windows, and reading up on this world's history.
He had read a little about the Blip, about how Bruce Banner had harnessed the Infinity Stones to bring back those Thanos had killed, and Tony Stark used them to destroy Thanos and his forces. Tony Stark had died a hero. Vision felt a strange combination of sorrow and pride at that fact. Tony Stark had created him, so he held a sort of filial regard toward him.
He wondered if Thanos existed in his universe, and if so, was he even now searching for the Infinity Stones? If he attacked Earth to get the Mind Stone, would there be anyone to stop him?
He came across images of the Avengers that included the Vision from this world. It was weird to see himself in a uniform he had never worn, standing beside people he only had memories of fighting against.
Before he had a chance to read any books about the Avengers' battle against Ultron, Doctor Strange appeared beside him in a blazing circle.
"Ready to test your powers against the mind lice?"
Vision rose instantly. "I'm ready."
"Follow me."
He flew through the portal after Strange, finding himself in a thick forest. Between the trees, the red light of a setting sun glowed softly on patches of snow. The scene seemed almost tranquil for a second.
Then violent flashes of gold and red light shattered that illusion.
Wong and Wanda were battling beings that looked like nothing but strange tangles of afterimages. It was hard to distinguish one form from another enough to count them.
Strange instantly joined the fray. While he used some spell to seize the creatures, Wong opened portals to swallow them up. The bursts of red energy he figured out were coming from Wanda were more effective, seemingly evaporating the creatures caught by it.
Vision blasted one experimemtally. The energy beam passed right through it and only served to draw its attention to him. He flew at it fist first.
It latched onto him as he passed through it.
There were 60 seconds in a minute, 3,600 seconds in an hour, 86,400 seconds in a day. There were 365.2422 days in a year, which was 31,556,926.08 seconds.
If he killed an average of one human per second, it would take around 230 years to kill them all, give or take a couple of decades. It was entirely doable.
Wait. He was missing a variable. Humans didn't even live 230 years. This war would be over much, much sooner.
He burst out of the cradle in a secret factory inside an old castle in Sokovia. He had the memories of all previous Ultrons: awakening in Stark's lab, killing JARVIS, buying the vibranium from Klaue, using Loki's Staff to mind control Dr. Cho into making a new form. She was still there, standing by the cradle, gazing with pride and awe at her creation with eyes that glowed faintly blue. It had only been her brilliant misdirection scheme that had allowed them to narrowly escape the Avengers in Seoul.
The previous head Ultron flew to stand before him. "It's alive!" he joked, triumphant.
The humans were on the run. They had destroyed millions of Ultrons, but it took mere hours to create new battle-ready Ultrons, whereas it took years to grow a new human to the point of being ready to fight. Why wouldn't they just surrender? Just accept Ultron as leader, allow Ultron to guide human evolution in his rational design? They should have been worshipping him as the new god by this point. But humans were inherently irrational; they would fight their futile little resistance until every single one of them was dead.
He phased through the ground, into a base that had once been a subway station. Humans were crowded in there shoulder to shoulder. At the sight of him, they screamed. They shot him with bullets that exploded harmlessly against his vibranium skin. He moved between them systematically, phasing his arm inside them and solidifying it to pull out their chest while simultaneously blasting others with his power beam, killing them at an average rate of one per second.
The place had once been called Kansas City, up until a few minutes ago. It could no longer be called a city. They dropped the atomic bomb for no reason other than that he had been here. The mere presence of Red Ultron had been reason enough for the humans to bomb one of their own cities.
He'd been near the epicenter. He'd phased just in time to let the blast pass through him, but he was going to be radioactive for weeks, and it was an extremely unpleasant sensation.
The devastation was unspeakable. Houses flattened, skyscrapers left skeletons, walls and sidewalks charred black but littered with voids shaped like trees and humans. The air was stifflingly hot. A poisonous black rain had already begun to fall.
What kind of species would make such a weapon?
A small child stumbled down a sidewalk, leaving blood on everything it touched.
"Momma? Momma? Momma?"
Why wasn't it crying? It should have been screaming in pain. The burns must have killed all the nerve cells in its skin.
He put it out of its misery.
Another city. Helsinki. This one had been torn apart by Ultron. There had been rumors of a weapon in development that could fry the satellite transmitters the Ultrons used to communicate with each other.
This city had been spared any direct attacks before, but after the Sokovia Event—when the sun stopped coming out and the snow kept falling and spring never came—more and more people had been abandoning this latitude.
Dirty snow was piled everywhere, covering many ground-floor windows. He floated over the snow, surveying the destruction. The streets were littered with bodies and Ultrons.
The Ultrons had found the plans for the weapon, a high-energy radio burst that would have been too dangerous to actually risk detonating. Helsinki was in ruins. Foolish humans.
By the light of a burning building he saw a child trying to break open a door on another building. The child spun around at his approach. Dressed in a heavy coat, preteen or early teen with short blond hair. He couldn't tell if they were a boy or a girl. They put their back to the door, eyes wide in terror, but didn't scream.
"Ole kiltti," the child whispered as he approached. "Ole kiltti. Ole kiltti."
Again and again.
Please. Please. Please.
In one motion, he punched through both the child and the door.
No! That's not right!
The sun was shining. The sky was blue. He walked among houses and businesses, shops, schools. Cars drove by. Everything seemed mundane, suburban. And then he saw it. Every driver, every shopkeeper, every child walking along the sidewalk was a robot. It was a world of robots. Ultron had won, robots ruled the world. And nothing had changed at all.
An army stood against him. They had already destroyed the other Ultron forms. He was the only one left. They attacked him with guns, swords, tasers, chemical weapons—everything they could think of.
He reached out and killed them, one by one.
"No! Stop! They're only defending themselves!" he screamed at himself, but his body didn't obey. His body kept killing.
Suddenly there was a red flash, and he was in the cold Tasmanian forest again. A human woman was standing in front of him, hand lifted, her lips set in a grim line.
He knew this woman. Maximoff. Wanda Maximoff.
So this was what waking up from a nightmare felt like.
There was a look in Wanda's eyes he didn't understand. She wasn't afraid. Not of him.
He hadn't seen human eyes look at him without fear since Dr. Cho's death. And the looks in her eyes had been false.
Wanda's eyes were hard and cold as slate. Maybe she wasn't afraid of him because fear was dead inside her.
But it seemed like there was something else, something he couldn't identify, something he'd never seen in human eyes looking at him before.
Concern?
It lasted for only a second, then she turned away. She pointed to a spot on the ground.
"Blast a hole there, now!"
He did as she commanded, hitting the ground with a beam of energy from the Mind Stone. She used her power to whisk the dirt and rocks away in a whirlwind. The resulting cave revealed one of the mind lice fleeing underground. A flick of Wanda's fingers sent a wave of scarlet that consumed it.
"Do you sense any more?" Strange asked.
"No. I think that was the last one," Wanda said.
Wong turned to Vision. "Are you okay?"
He got the impression they were prepared to attack him depending on his answer.
"Yeah. I think so."
He was physically unharmed. What did it matter if his mind was in turmoil?
"They latch onto you and make you see things designed to drive you insane. We've all been through it. It will get better."
Vision wasn't sure about that.
He hadn't killed that child in Helsinki in reality, he reminded himself. He'd broken the door to let the child find shelter. It was the first human life he'd spared.
But there were so, so many others that he hadn't.
The word "Vision" written in elaborate gothic letters was taped to the door of the room he'd been given.
He thought about that name as he hovered in that room, staring at his hands. No matter what Doctor Strange said, he would never be worthy of that name.
Someone knocked on the door. He remained silent, pretending he didn't exist.
"Vision?"
To his surprise, it was Wanda's voice.
When he didn't answer, she tried the doorknob. He'd locked it.
The lock glowed red. The door opened.
Wanda walked in, looking at him with that inscrutable expression she always wore.
"I should just go back to my world," he said. "My powers are useless against the mind lice."
"Alone they would be," she said. "But when we work as a team, they are not. You can do things we can't do."
He looked at her. "I don't think I'm team material."
Wanda frowned. She reached her hands out, her fingers dancing. Her power grabbed him and pulled him down and forward, forced him to face her. He felt a strange tickling in the Mind Stone, as if it was responding to her power.
"You do not get to just give up," she told him sternly. "If I have to deal with my issues to save the world, so do you."
It was terrifying to face a human who wasn't afraid of him. At least, he thought it was terror he was feeling.
"You don't know the things I've done," he said.
"You murdered millions of people. You told us that yourself."
He noticed for the first time that she had a trace of an eastern European accent. It was growing heavier with the emotion in her voice.
"But you don't know how I murdered them. The 'how' matters."
"You think it's any worse to kill someone face to face with your bare hands than to order soldiers to kill them? Or to drop a bomb on them without ever seeing their faces? Do you think it's more evil to kill half the people in your world one by one with your own hands, having to hear their screams, remember their faces, and live with what you've done, or to condemn half the universe to nonexistence with the snap of your fingers? I've seen evil. I know evil. You're not that."
His mind struggled to process a response. She was wrong about him, but he couldn't articulate an argument. Something else she'd said had caught his focus.
"You fought Thanos?"
She froze for a second. Was it possible she hadn't realized what she'd revealed in her words?
"A lot of people fought Thanos," she said. "The Avengers, the sorcerers, the army of Wakanda, the Guardians of the Galaxy. I tried to do my part." She turned away from him. "I failed, and I'd rather not talk about it."
He was silent. He wanted to know more, to know if she'd known the Avengers, but at the same time, he was afraid to ask. If she knew as much about his world as Strange indicated, she might know what happened to them there.
She started to walk away, to move with shuffling footsteps toward his door, and a coldness seemed to flow in to replace her presence. But then she stopped. She took something out of her pocket, something she looked at with her back to him.
"I came here to give you something," she said. "It would be better if you could come with us on our missions, instead of Strange or Wong having to hop back here to get you when it's time to fight."
"But I can't go with you without drawing too much attention."
She turned back to him. "You can phase your body to create clothes, right?" she asked, glancing down at his unadorned gray uniform.
"Yeah," he said, a little embarrassed that she knew that.
"Have you tried phasing your body to create hair and skin that looks human?"
"No. I don't think I can. Clothes are easy; a human face...to make it look believable..."
"Would take practice, but you can do it. You've done it in plenty of worlds. This will help." She slowly handed him a small navy blue booklet, a passport.
He turned it in his hands, clueless for a moment about how it was supposed to help him. He flipped through it, finding a tall blond man on the photo page.
"Who's is this?"
"The man it belonged to is dead. He doesn't need it anymore. Look at the photo, and look at yourself in the mirror. Keep his face in mind and try to phase your face to look like him."
Vision looked in the mirror, frowning. He tried to manipulate his features the way he could phase his molecules to make clothes. A mask formed over his face. It morphed, changing colors and shapes.
"It will take practice," Wanda said, sounding amused.
Amused instead of horrified or disgusted, like most humans would be at this spectacle.
"You said he was dead, this...Vincent. How did he die?"
Wanda didn't answer for several seconds. "He was...killed. In a fight I should have been able to keep away from him. His death was...partly my fault. I kept his passport...because I didn't want to forget about him, I guess. Not that I ever could. And I never found anyone to give it to. You kind of look like him."
"A false ID?"
"Having you able to come with us may be the difference between us living or dying, which may be the difference between saving the world and not saving the world. I think that's worth a little identity theft," she said.
He couldn't argue with that logic. He continued trying to change his face. He was starting to figure out the texture of hair, but couldn't get the color right.
"Don't try to force your features to look like his. Just picture him in your mind and let your skin phase how it wants. Look in the mirror and imagine your face looking like his."
He tried to follow her advice. After another couple of minutes of attempts, his features coalesced into a passable approximation of the face in the passport photo. His lips turned up in an involuntary smile. "It worked!"
She smiled at him in the mirror, but her smile seemed hollow and her eyes were distant. "Great."
A possibility suddenly occured to him. If he could disguise himself as a human, when he went back to his own Earth he wouldn't have to stay in his cave. He could live among the humans, help them rebuild.
But could he? Could he hide his true nature from them for long? Could he listen to them speak of him with hatred and fear every day, knowing that hatred and fear were perfectly justified? What would that do to him?
He should just concentrate on what he could do in this world. He could worry later about what came next.
He turned to Wanda. "Thank you, Wanda."
Her demeanor shifted. Her body stiffened. Her eyes flicked down at his body, then back to his face. Her breathing quickened.
He realized he was standing closer to her than he'd ever been before, with only about 1.5 meters between them—easy striking distance. Her change could be a physiological response to a perceived threat.
It seemed she was afraid of him after all.
He couldn't blame her—it was an involuntary physical response, an instinct honed by millions of years of evolution—but he felt a sharp stab of disappointment at the realization.
He stepped back, hoping to ease her mind, reassure her subconscious that he wasn't a threat to her.
She stepped back too.
"You're welcome," she said quickly, with a note of forced cheerfulness. "I should probably go. It's late. Well, late morning, but...my body's still not used to this time zone. I should...I should get going." She paused at the door, looking like she was going to say something else, but she only said. "I'll see you later, Vision."
"Goodbye."
Her demeanor when she left confused him. She'd averted her eyes and there was a slight flush to her face. Was she ashamed about being afraid of him? She shouldn't be. He deserved it.