Chapter 28: The Choice
In the mountains, after seeing you off,
At sunset I close the brushwood gate.
The spring grasses will be green again next year,
Will you, my prince, return or not?
~Wang Wei, "Seeing Off a Friend" From The Flowering Plum and the Palace Lady, trans. Hans Frankel
After Wanda used a great deal of her power, she would be drained of energy, physically fatigued with a strange buzzing sensation throughout her body. It would take hours, sometimes days, until she could summon her full power again.
The fact that Wanda had exhausted herself destroying the giant mind louse and mending Vision was all that would spare Doctor Strange's life about an hour later, when he so callously used the word "sacrifices."
It started when they stepped through the portal, after Doctor Strange put the ship in a pocket dimension, and emerged not in the Sanctum as she'd anticipated, but in Shuri's lab in Wakanda.
"What's going on?" she asked Strange.
"I want Shuri to look at Vision's injury. With her expertise in vibranium technology, she should be able to finish healing it."
Vision, in a confused panic, phased into his human mode.
Shuri entered her lab a moment later at a brisk walk, seemingly having been alerted to their arrival.
"You should lie down," she said to Vision. "I need to get a scan of the damage. Please drop the disguise; it might interfere with the scans."
"You know who he is?" Wanda asked.
"A double of Vision from another dimension. Doctor Strange filled me in on everything the last time you were here."
Wanda glanced at Strange, angry not so much that he'd betrayed Vision's secret so easily as that he hadn't told the rest of them.
Vision's human façade sputtered off. Wanda didn't know if he'd deliberately dropped it to comply with Shuri, or if he just didn't have the strength to keep it up.
Shuri stepped closer to him, staring at his face. "You really do look just like him. Sorry, I've just never met someone from another universe before. Not that I know of, anyway." She ushered him to a bed, and when he was situated, she ran some high-tech medical device over his torso. A 3D holographic image of the inside of his chest appeared in front of her.
"Looks like someone patched this up with paperclips and bubblegum."
"That was me," Wanda admitted. "We were...I was just trying to save his life."
"And you did," Shuri assured her quickly. "That wasn't an insult, I'm just saying it's good you brought him to me."
"You think you can fix me?" Vision asked.
"Yes. It will be a simple matter of regrowing the tissue matrix while using pressurized phonon deposition to bond vibranium to it. I have to say, you look just like him, but your voice...that's why I didn't recognize you at first. Your voice is nothing like his. Well," she pressed a bead on her bracelet and something that looked like a complex three-armed robotic sewing machine swung down from the ceiling. "Shall we get started?"
The readiness with which Vision said "Yes please" indicated how much pain he was still in.
Wanda drifted closer, watching with fascination, concern, and occasional gut-wrenching sympathy as the machine painstakingly stitched Vision back together.
"This work is much easier without an army of aliens out the window," Shuri said.
Wanda flashed a small, brief smile. "True. Thank you, princess."
"I imagine this all must be very hard for you." She sounded like she was going to add something else, but Wanda cleared her throat, indicating her discomfort with the subject.
She looked at Vision instead, hoping to stave off any more uncomfortable questions from Shuri. "Are you doing okay?"
"It feels weird. But it doesn't hurt. Not more than it did already, anyway."
"Good," Wanda said.
"Welcome back to Wakanda, sorcerers. Though your mode of arrival gives me serious concerns about our security," said T'Challa from the doorway.
Wanda put aside considering the implications of both Shuri and T'Challa knowing about Vision to greet the woman who'd walked in at the king's side. "Okoye!"
"Wanda!" She strode forward to salute her. "My battle-sister! It is good to see you safe. You seemed to just drop off the face of the Earth after Thanos. Were you with the wizards the whole time?"
"Not...the whole time," Wanda replied evasively. If Okoye knew just how low Wanda had sunk after running away, she'd be so ashamed.
"We should catch up when you have the leisure. I haven't seen you since Natasha's memorial service."
Technically, they'd seen each other less than two weeks ago, but of course Okoye wouldn't remember that.
"I know. I wanted to thank you for the things you said about Nat at the service. It meant so much to me. You said a lot of the things I wanted to say about her, but I wasn't really...able to talk at the time."
"I understand. You meant so much to her. She couldn't bring herself to talk about you very often during those five years, but when she did I could tell how much respect and affection she had for you."
Wanda tried to swallow down the sudden lump in her throat. She really did want to sit down with Okoye and share memories of Nat over drinks some time. But that would probably have to wait until after the mission.
"Done," Shuri said, retracting the machine from Vision's chest. "Stretch and move around a little bit. Let me know if you feel any pain or tightness in your chest."
Vision sat up, stretched his arms, and swiveled back and forth. "No. It feels completely normal. Thank you."
"My pleasure."
"So I take it you've told T'Challa everything," Strange said to Shuri.
"I couldn't have done the tests to see if the engram transference was possible without him knowing about it. Besides, I don't keep things from my brother."
"And I don't keep things from my general," T'Challa added. "But no one else. Outside this room, no one knows he's here."
"Were the tests successful? Is it possible?" Strange asked.
Shuri nodded.
"What tests? What are you talking about?" Wanda asked.
T'Challa looked startled. "You haven't told them?"
"I didn't see any point in bringing it up until we knew if it could work," Strange replied.
"If what would work?" Vision asked, frowning. Wanda picked up a flicker of fear from his mind.
"An engram transference," Shuri said with an annoyed glance at Strange. "Here. I'll explain." She walked over to a wall, pressed her hand to a bioscanner, and pulled out a slab. There was a body on it.
"When Doctor Strange was here, when we were discussing neurology, he asked me if it would be possible to transfer memories from one brain to another brain if the brains were identical..."
She folded down the cover.
Wanda turned away with a gasp.
As strongly as the image of Vision's lifeless gray body was burned into her memory, it was a different thing to see him in reality, looking the same he had the day he died.
"Why is he here? He's supposed to be..."
Doctor Strange answered. "Vision saw the source of the mind lice in Antarctica without knowing what he saw. He didn't note the coordinates in his report, but he would have it in his memory."
Vision—the living one—stared at the corpse of his counterpart, rising from his bed and taking a slow step closer.
"When Thanos killed Vision to steal the Mind Stone, he destroyed his prefrontal cortex, but the amygdalae and hippocampi are all intact, and his neurons haven't degraded the way a biological organism's would," Shuri explained. "The engrams will still be encoded in his synapses."
"His memories are still there," Strange said. "We just need a way to retrieve them."
"We can't just read a memory from graphing synaptic connections," Shuri added. "Brains are too idiomatic, to start with. But if we can polarize the synapses of one brain to exactly match someone else's brain, we would be essentially mapping the memories of one person into another person's mind. It's not something that I would even try with a human—the process would literally fry their brain—and I can't even begin to describe the computational power it took to record Vision's synaptic connections, but it very well might work."
"You're saying," Vision said slowly, "you could take his memories," he glanced back down at the dead Vision on the slab, "and put them in my head?"
"Yes," Shuri answered.
Wanda couldn't focus. Everything seemed to be happening too fast. Nothing made sense. Doctor Strange and Shuri thought they could give Red Ultron Vision's memories? How was that possible? Her heart was pounding so loud it filled her head. Could her Vision come back? Her beloved Vision...
But what about the one who was still alive?
"Would it be dangerous?" she asked instead. "Could it...could it hurt him?"
Shuri took much too long to answer. "I don't know. Nothing like this has ever been attempted before, and no one else like Vision has ever existed. It's impossible to know for sure what would happen."
"What are the risks?" Wanda asked insistently.
"Like I explained, it's hard to predict. There's a possibility that once Vision's brain patterns are implanted in...I need something else to call you to simplify this..."
"You can call me Red Ultron," he said.
"Red Ultron, it's possible that if we do this transference, Vision's consciousness will be in your head. Vision might be able to communicate with you, see the world through your eyes, basically be a passenger in your brain."
"That would take some getting used to," he said.
"It's also possible the opposite would happen, that his brain patterns would take over, and you would be the passenger, seeing everything that's happening while someone else takes control of your body."
"That sounds like it would be an absolute nightmare," Wanda said.
"My ex-boyfriend actually had that exact nightmare once," Okoye commented.
Shuri continued, subdued, "There's also a risk that rewiring the synapses in the brain regions associated with memory would erase Red Ultron's. He would have Vision's memories, but lose some or all of his own. I designed the ionic probe to exert enough power to create new synaptic connections without destroying existing ones, which I hope will allow new memories to be added without wiping out old ones, but I can't guarantee it will work. It's also possible it won't work at all, that the electrical surge will destroy all existing connections without creating new ones, and he won't remember anything."
"You would kill him," Wanda said, rage beginning to bubble up as she realized the implication of the procedure. "You would wipe out Red Ultron to bring Vision's memories back."
"It's a risk," Shuri said. "I didn't think you would have objections to it. This is a way to bring a part of your Vision back."
"My Vision would never want someone else to die for him to live. He would never agree to this!" She turned on Wong. "Did you know about this?"
The look on his face gave the answer even before he said, "This was always the plan. We need to find the Source to destroy it. It's why we recruited Red Ultron in the first place."
"You said I might change my mind," Vision said to him. "You meant that literally."
Wanda looked at Doctor Strange. "You recruited him just so you could destroy him? Just to use him as a vessel for Vision's memories?"
He stepped forward. "You agreed that we needed to do whatever we could to stop the mind lice, to save the world. This falls under that rubric. To save the world, sometimes sacrifices need to be made."
"Sacrifices?" She figuratively and literally saw red as her power flared up around her. "You... dare... talk to me... about sacrifices?"
Her power overflowed, bursting out of her and engulfing Doctor Strange, slamming him against the wall.
From the corners of her eyes, Wanda saw everyone tense or tighten their hands on a weapon as they prepared to choose sides in what would be a terrible fight. But Vision flew forward, putting himself between her and Doctor Strange.
"Wanda, stop, please." He held his hand up to her, his eyes imploring. "I want this."
The word what? sprang to her mind, but the one that escaped her lips was, "No."
"I want to go through with the engram transference. I want to try it."
"It could erase you."
"It could erase my memories." He actually smiled at the thought. "All the evil I've done, all the horrors I've witnessed...could be gone, and I could give a second chance at life to a better version of myself, a version of myself who was always a hero. This is... This is my chance at redemption. At a real redemption."
It hurt to hear him say that. "You deserve to live, too. You deserve to exist."
"And part of me will exist. If not my memories, it will still be my body, my prefrontal cortex."
She was crying, and didn't know when that started. "But your memories. I know they hurt you, but there must be good ones you don't want to lose."
He paused. "I can write them down before the procedure. But honestly, most of my good memories are favorite musical pieces, favorite books I read, favorite works of art I viewed. And those are things, if I lose my memory, I'll be able to experience for the first time again." He walked toward her, stopping just in front of her. "From my perspective, there isn't a downside to this."
He was determined to undergo the transference no matter what she said, she realized. He knew the risks, but didn't care about them like she did.
Behind him, Wong was helping Doctor Strange to his feet. The Sorcerer Supreme looked stunned but unharmed. T'Challa, Okoye, and Shuri were looking on, waiting to see what Wanda would do.
She felt like she was trapped in a nightmare. If she didn't stop this, she would lose this Vision, just like she'd lost everyone she ever loved, because that's what the world did to her: it made her love people just to rip them away. What did she ever do to deserve this?
"Please don't do this," she begged him.
"I have to. This could be what saves your world."
"You'll die."
"Possibly. But this sounds like it could work, that the real Vision could live again through me."
"The risk is too big."
"It's my risk to take, and my mind's made up. Please don't make this more difficult. And please..." He hesitated. "The only memories I'd truly regret losing are the ones involving you. And I hope that, when I go through with this...I won't lose you."
She swallowed, feeling sick, feeling like she was being asked to sacrifice the person she loved most to save the world for the third time in her life. She could stop it: she could destroy Shuri's lab, make sure they couldn't perform the transference...
And maybe consign the world to doom.
It was Vision's choice. And Vision would choose to save the world every time.
"This is wrong," she said. "It's a crazy, stupid risk to take. But...I won't stop you. And...and I'll be here when it's over. Whatever happens, I'll be here."
Relief flooded over his face. He turned to Shuri. "What do we have to do?"