6.

1984

If the asset found the clothes strange, he gave no sign of it. It wasn't true that he was emotionless. You just had to grow attuned to his strange little moods. Pierce had, and could now read him like an open book. At times, however—like now—the asset was simply blank. No, not blank; it was like wandering down a sunny city street and coming across a chasm into nothing, tucked out of sight behind a fountain or a strip of grass. He watched as the asset got dressed with the slow deliberation of a child, seemingly unperturbed by his own nakedness.

Idly, Pierce wondered if any of the asset's handlers ever… took advantage of him. One of the guards, perhaps. The asset was sometimes taken out of cryo when Pierce wasn't there, for periodic maintenance, and those kinds of transgressions would only be fully scrubbed out in Hydra's new world. But no, it made no sense. The asset was always watched and recorded, the printouts kept and studied. The two of them entered the parking garage, Pierce in the front, the asset following a few steps behind. He was casing the area for any possible threats, Pierce knew, studying it for exits and weak points. The asset looked no different than he had inside the vault, but Pierce knew he was alert now. Touch him, and you'd find him almost feverishly hot. Once in the car he subsided again.

'Do you understand the mission?' Pierce asked once they had pulled into Massachusetts Avenue. Rain beat on the windshield.

'Yes.' The asset looked straight ahead, as though he'd been tasked with tailing the car in front of them. His hands sat on his knees. He blinked once in a while, as though he had to do it deliberately.

Pierce glanced at the inside of the car as the traffic slowed. A rental Chevy paid for in cash, a fake name, and a goal. It was just like being on the road again, stopping for bad coffee at odd little diners.

Of course, S.H.I.E.L.D. had never given him a partner like the asset.

'You want the radio on?' Pierce said, to break the silence.

The asset didn't reply, didn't acknowledge the question in any way. His body was tightly coiled, but Pierce could tell that was mostly instinct. There was the chasm again, hidden under the skin.

'I know you,' the asset said.

It startled Pierce, but only a little. He waited a heartbeat before replying. 'Of course you do.'

'I know you,' the asset repeated, and resumed his silence.

Pierce glanced at the asset. He kept staring straight ahead, as though the words had been pushed out of his mouth without his consent or knowledge. A patch of washed-out sun had appeared between the clouds, the pale light making his eyes dark, like two slicks of black ice on asphalt. What have you said? Pierce thought, then, more importantly, What are you thinking? The asset had tucked his hair under the cap, and against the car window his profile was finely etched, even delicate. Pierce could see himself cracking his skull open like an egg and carefully unspooling everything inside.

'Who am I?' Pierce asked, and let a note of testiness seep into his voice when the asset didn't answer right away. 'Say my name.'

The asset looked at him, and Pierce knew he shouldn't have been concerned. There was nothing in the asset's eyes beyond awaiting the next order, the next word. 'Mister Pierce.'

'Yes. How about some music?' he added, mostly to himself.

He switched the radio on, skipped over the Top 40 stations, and stopped when he heard John Denver coming out from the speakers. He wondered what sort of music Barnes had liked, back in the day, before he'd withered away and left something better behind. Jazz, maybe? Pierce's memories of the early 40s weren't strong, and he could hardly recall what the grown-ups around him had listened to on the radio. It didn't really matter. Sunshine on my Shoulders would have to do.

Even with traffic, the drive wasn't too long, and soon they were crossing the Maryland state line. The radio DJ came on again and in the middle of his natter a thought came to Pierce, sudden and startling: sitting in a docket while a judge from some upside-down world fulminated at him about the Federal Kidnapping Act.

He had to stop himself from laughing. If he started, he was going to cause an accident. He couldn't suppress it entirely, though. It came out as a cough, and the asset looked at him until he stopped. Tears prickled his eyes.

And yet, it wasn't just a joke, was it, no matter how absurd? There really were a few people with minds so twisted or so gullible that they would look at the asset and feel sorry for him. For someone who could, if he wanted to, reach sideways and rip out the steering wheel. Who could crush Pierce's windpipe with one hand. Who could have some wire behind his eyes break or misfire and make him snap Pierce's neck and drive the car into a wall, a lake, a crowd. Sob for someone who could, if he wanted to, go through a roomful of guards and techs like a hot knife through butter, or vanish into thin air during one of his missions, even detach the metal arm—he had been taught how to release it, in case of emergency—so the trackers inside couldn't be used to located him. Let their hearts bleed for someone who hadn't had a gun to his head when he'd drowned a man in a bathtub, or climbed a tower to put a bullet in a woman's head half a mile away.

He shook his head to himself. Had he ever mistreated the asset? Had he ever done more to the asset than strike him, harmlessly, once or twice—a few times—to correct him, and not even every time the asset deserved it? Done anything worse than a few faint bruises that were gone from his flesh in an hour and from his mind not long after? Had he ever lashed out in anger, or for no reason at all?

He was kind. All things considered, he was kind. Sometimes too much.

He was even far from being the first man on whose orders the asset had killed.

:=:=:=:

The drive to the ARL, which sat by a picturesque little college town, wasn't long, but by the time Pierce spotted the large complex of buildings, painted in garish colours and criss-crossed by parking lots and lawns, the rain had stopped, started, stopped again. Now it had turned into a drizzle as Pierce slowed the car and drove down the avenue abutting the campus. There were a few traffic barriers and a booth with a rent-a-cop, but security was lax. He had no trouble slipping the car in and parking it in a far corner where it would be hidden out of sight by an enormous oak tree. The ARL even produced brochures helpfully indicating where everything was located.

What was the best hiding place, if not in sight of everyone?

'We can't be seen by anyone,' he told the asset. 'All the people in there are civilians.'

'Civilians,' the asset repeated.

'Right. You know the target location.'

The asset nodded. No visitors' brochures for him, of course. The blueprints had been inserted into his brain the same way as any other knowledge he might need before a mission. Pierce hadn't witnessed the process. Once or twice had been enough; it was a tad gruesome.

He unlocked the car door. 'Let's go.'

'Wait,' the asset said.

Pierce didn't have time to react. He spotted the truck banking in their direction and understood what the asset wanted. They exited the car and walked towards the building where most of the computer labs were housed, the truck hiding them from sight as they moved. The asset walked between him and the truck, hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched. 'Wait,' the asset repeated, as they passed a grass verge, and vanished into the trees.

Pierce slowed, annoyed that the asset hadn't waited for his authorisation before taking off, impressed that he could vanish into thin air even in broad daylight.

He only felt the asset approach him again when he was practically at his back. He, who had once taken a shot in the dark, under the rumbling noise of a subway tunnel, and hit a hostile and moving target.

He wished he could see the asset in action. Real action, not practice runs. Just once.

'There's a window,' the asset whispered behind him, and led them towards an overhang that would tuck them out of sight. Behind them, Pierce could hear a car rumbling in the parking lot.

The asset darted past him again and and vanished into an open basement window. He had moved in absolute silence. Pierce doubted he even had a shadow.

'It's safe,' the asset said from inside the building as Pierce approached.

Just like old times, he thought, and after making sure no one was watching, ducked and slipped inside.

Hands grabbed him before he could land. The asset set him gently on the floor and nodded, once.

Pierce drew back, just a fraction surprised, and wiped some rain off his duffel coat. 'Come on.'

The basement corridors were full of lockers, cupboards, and doors, but it didn't take long for him to find the storage area, and the lock was so flimsy it took only a few seconds for the asset to jimmy it.

How many scientists knew the value of what they held?

The large room inside was very much like the rest of the basement: same puke-green linoleum floor, same off-white walls. There were rows of filing cabinets, old office furniture, metal shelving units full of binders and electronic equipment shrouded in dusty plastic covers.

Now, where would the Olympus files be? It was an abandoned networks project, the kind of thing that, from what Pierce could tell, was of interest mostly to wearers of bow ties and pocket protectors. He studied the labels on the filing cabinets closest to him.

Unless the trail Zola had left had been swept away in the intervening decade, the DoD eating up the breadcrumbs. If—

He drew back, glanced at the asset. He had done nothing and said nothing since they'd entered the room. Instead he stood in one corner, shoulders hunched again, hands back in his pockets, looking at a wall.

No, not looking. Empty, and waiting to be filled.

But why that wall?

Pierce looked around the room, as though an answer might present itself. The asset had the blueprints in his head. The asset could hear and see and smell things people couldn't. Pierce thought back to the outside of the building, which looked like an ovoid spaceship had landed on a crate. He didn't have a good memory; he had an outstanding memory, and his training, though a little rusty, had only amplified it. He knew this room was in one of the corners of the building, and—

He looked at the row of windows just below the ceiling. One, two, three, four.

He thought back to his glimpse of the same row of windows as the two of them had been walking towards the building.

One, two, three, four, five.

He stepped up to the wall at the end of the room, covered in filing cabinets taller than him. Could he feel the barest draught on the skin of his face? Was that what the asset was sensing?

'We need to get these cabinets out of here.' He had barely got the words out before the asset grabbed one of the cabinets and pulled it away as though it were no heavier than a cardboard box, then did the same to two others.

Heat swelled in Pierce's chest. The wall had been plastered and repainted, but the outline of the door was still visible. Half a handle stuck out, grey with dust. 'Open it.'

The asset stepped in, grabbed the handle, and yanked the door open with a loud crack and a single pull of his metal arm. Plaster rained to the floor. The door swung ajar, into gloom. Cold air seeped out.

Pierce stepped past him. The window in the other room had been painted over, and the light was only enough to make out a metal staircase and shapes covered in tarpaulins. He felt on the wall for a light switch. There wasn't one, of course.

'Come on,' he said, and started down the steps.

A white-blue haze splashed on the stairs. He turned around. The asset had pulled his left sleeve up, opened the plates on the underside of his lower arm, and activated a glowing light inside.

Bioluminescence. One of the scientists had bored him for a while about improvements made to the arm and at the time Pierce hadn't paid much attention. Now he wondered if even more useful things could be fitted into it. A grappling gun, perhaps.

'You are amazing,' he told the asset.

The asset said nothing.

Pierce climbed down the stairs and started pulling the tarpaulins away. For a moment he felt a dash of apprehension: there were old and clearly broken monitors, coils of magnetic tape in an haphazard pile, ancient printers with form paper still hanging from them. It all looked like debris left behind after some disaster, and Pierce couldn't help but wonder if this was another of the dead ends mentioned in the message.

But no, there was a computer terminal sitting on one of the tables. It was old, but it at least seemed intact. He wiped away a film of dust and pressed the on/off button.

Was there even any power down here?

There was. A row of lights came on. Fans spluttered to life. A pattern winked in the monitor in front of him once, twice, then was replaced by white text on a black background. The bottom of the screen flickered, perhaps with age.

PRESENT ACCESS KEY

There was a stool under the table. Pierce pulled it out, ordered the asset to sit in front of the screen, and looked around for the lock. An old-fashioned portable videocamera perched on top of the screen, its hinge dark with rust. 'Say "Winter Soldier",' Pierce commanded.

'Winter Soldier.' The asset blinked, very slowly.

ACCESS DENIED

Christ. No, the asset was the key, he was sure of it. He looked at the camera again, the unseeing eye of its open lens. He nudged the asset's shoulder. 'Look at that camera. No, straight at it.'

The camera buzzed to life. Pierce felt the asset tense further, but he kept his hand on his shoulder, and the asset stilled as the camera finished its sweep.

The words KEY ACCEPTED appeared on the screen. Then it turned black, only to fill with white and grey, making up a flickering shape. More lights turned on. Machines spluttered and hummed. Fans kicked up dust.

'Zola, you old bastard,' Pierce said, his voice a little elated. He'd never thought he'd be so pleased to see that pudgy face again.

'Greetings,' a speaker said. The voice was mechanical, shot through with crackles of static. The camera turned to Pierce with a squeak of rusty metal. 'Alexander Goodwin Pierce, born 11th July 1936.'

'Yes, thank you for the reminder. It had almost slipped my mind.'

The camera turned towards the asset. 'Winter Soldier,' machine-Zola said. 'Born 17th June 1947.'

A soft rustle of metal drew Pierce's gaze down. The asset was taut like a violin string about to break. On his lap, his hands shook, even the artificial one. The metal arm, still open, made little clicking tremors. His eyes were fixed on the screen, wide and unblinking.

'Look at me,' Pierce said. 'Look at me.' He yanked the asset's face towards him. The fear in the asset's eyes waned a little. He said something in a raspy whisper, too low to hear.

'Speak up.'

'Is this now?' Louder, this time, but only barely.

'I—Yes. Yes, it's now. Go wait in the car.' The asset did nothing. Pierce released his chin. 'The mission's completed. You can go wait in the car.'

The asset's face drew in, lost in thought for a few seconds. Pierce could practically see the gears turning inside the maze. 'Not without you,' he managed to squeeze out.

'Fine. Wall. Now.'

He leaned towards the screen on the table as the asset went off to some shadowy corner, where he would wait without further disturbance. Zola's picture stared from the monitor, distorted by flickers every few seconds. Could a recording look smug, Pierce wondered?

'Project Olympus,' he said. The camera hummed again.

The machine-voice poured out from the speakers again. 'You must be wondering—' snap, crackle '—you have come here. As my successor, you have followed correctly the clues I have left for you.'

Pierce glanced at the keyboard. 'Stop the recording.'

A quick burst of sizzling from one of the speakers. Laughter, Pierce realised.

'This is not a recording, Councilman Pierce. I am as alive as you are, I assure you!'

Cold flicked down Pierce's back. Were these machines… sentient, somehow? Each screen or rat-a-tatting box an organ of the whole?

Nonsense. He pushed the thought away. 'Tell me about Olympus.'

'I will do more than that.' More screens flickered to life. One of them had a spider crack, suddenly backlit by grey. 'I will show you.'

A black and white map appeared on one of the monitors. 'In 1947, the new Hydra was reborn in the heart of S.H.I.E.L.D. From that first seed in our new home, we planted roots, sent eyes and ears to wherever power flourished. And then we began reaping: toppling regimes, controlling governments, starting wars.

'And yet there is one obstacle standing between us and order.' Letters and numbers started scrolling in the screens, too small for Pierce to make out. 'We live in a world of chaos. There are too many events, too much chance, too many enemies we know nothing about. Future cancerous cells in our body.'

One of the screens winked out with a crackle of electricity. Another showed a web connecting places and names. 'However, it is possible to master even chaos. There are no random events, Councilman Pierce. They can all be traced to a starting cause, no matter how big the event, how small the cause.' Grainy black-and-white footage appeared on the cracked screen. 'A domino that topples and makes the rest fall in a pattern that is as predictable as it is also inevitable. And so a nuclear bomb is detonated. Or a revolution is sparked.'

The working screens changed again. Now they showed a pattern of blocks and lines. 'With enough information, the sequence of seemingly unrelated events can be traced back to that very first domino. A letter that is never sent. A newspaper notice. The death of some obscure person.

The linchpin.'

The pattern of blocks and lines shrank to be revealed as a grid of city streets. 'And once we can read the past… then we can read the future.'

Pierce placed his hands on the table. 'You want to find these—linchpins.'

Another burst of machine laughter. 'Precisely so. Whoever controls knowledge, controls history. Find the linchpins before they become linchpins. Push that first domino—or scratch it out of existence. Topple the dominos in the right order and you can elect a leader. Or end a war, or perhaps start it. Hydra is to create a new reality while everyone else sleeps. And when they wake into this world of ours, we can create another, and another. All it takes is the right key.

'So, in the years before my physical death, I began work on Argus.' A jumble of images in the other screens: Zola lecturing in front of a blackboard, rows of equations. 'An algorithm capable of sorting through a planet's worth of information. Birth certificates. Newspapers. Finance transactions. A way to read order out of chaos. History is no longer the study of the past. It is the science of the future. It is our machine. And when a part does not work to our liking, it gets removed.'

Pierce glanced around the room. 'Where's this algorithm now?'

The speakers made a small metallic noise. Pierce was sure it was just static, but some part of him couldn't help but hear it as a venomous little chuckle.

'I am getting to that,' the Zola-ghost said. 'In the 1960s, a new idea started to take hold. Machines talking to machines, sharing information at the speed of light. The Department of Defence began a number of projects to make this a reality. And in 1972, when I received a terminal diagnosis, S.H.I.E.L.D. joined them. My body was beyond salvaging. The information contained in my mind, however, was a different story. It was copied and recreated into a brain, made of a city's worth of magnetic tape. Just before my physical death, we folded our project into another network, and then another, and another. As one might transfer blood between two organisms. And my mind was transferred along with it.

'Do you want to know what Olympus is, Councilman? You are standing in what's left of its first body.'

Pierce drew back, and couldn't stop himself from looking around, a weak shiver in his lower back. This junk? But it wasn't just junk, was it? He was not an impressionable man, but in the weak glow of the machines, the things in the room looked like the skeleton of some strange dead beast. A line from a half-remembered Easter Vigil floated up. That leviathan, whom Thou hast made…

'You mean there are copies?'

'The essential drives of all organisms! Birth, life-struggle, reproduction. Hydra grew inside S.H.I.E.L.D. like a virus inside a receptive host. And so I too grow as more and more machines join the network. Soon whole governments will be on-line. Then whole countries. The original tapes containing my mind and my algorithm are spread throughout a number of SHIELD facilities. But me, I have been transformed.' All the screens filled with copies of Zola's electronic face.

'I am everywhere.'

A printer began to spit out a length of perforated paper. 'You have already proved yourself worthy of one of my creations, Councilman. In a way we are both of us his father, wouldn't you agree? So now it is up to us to be the fathers of the new order. The fathers of the final stage of history. I am giving you the physical locations of my Argus tapes and the keys you will need to open their electronic counterparts. I will leave it in your hands. And one day you will use it to read the future. Already so much of the world is at my fingertips—for lack of a better expression!' The other faces vanished from the screens and were replaced with forms and documents. Pierce leaned forward to read them. Christ—those were his documents. Minutes from Central Security Council meetings. Microfiche versions of newspaper articles from when he'd been Deputy Secretary of State. Even a copy of his birth certificate.

'One day all information will be knowable and connected. All those details from all those little human lives in the same book. You will have the key to read it. Then we can start erasing what needs to be erased. We can rewrite it. And from the world's chaos Hydra will give it the order it needs.'

The machines started powering down. Zola's voice grew slurred, words half-eaten by static. 'It is so wonderful to be free of the flesh, Councilman! The only true immortality.' The screens winked out, one by one, until there was only one left. 'There is no time for me now. I have seen the future. It is all of it inevitable.' The face distorted into an unrecognisable jumble. 'Hail Hydra.'

The screen went dark.

TBC…

Author's note: The bit in which Pierce thinks about cracking Bucky's head open and rifling through what's inside was inspired (though the only direct quote is the What are you thinking? bit) by a similar passage in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, and if you haven't read it yet, you should go do so immediately. Also, I feel compelled to say that, while Pierce is a Nightmare of a Human Being, when he thinks that most people in-universe wouldn't see Bucky as his victim, he's not wrong. And the Winter Soldier assassinations would actually have very little to do with that, because unfortunately no matter how over-the-top abuse gets, how big the power differential, how clear-cut the situation, etc, many—if not most—people around it find a way to turn a blind eye to it or downright justify it. (One of the things I really liked about CA:TWS is that for all the super-soldiers and helicarriers and whatnot, it portrayed an abuser as a charismatic, popular, successful, socially skilled, etc person—his facade being so good that a lot of viewers don't even seem to realise he's the villain—and his victim as, well… not. Come for the super-serum, stay for the unflinching social commentary! ;)) The line Is this now? comes, with a minor alteration, from the film version of Minority Report. Finally, while the ARL is based on a real institution, it's a fictional place with fictional geography. Everything about it is made up. Oh, except for that bit about Zola's digital brain being put on MIT's Multics project, then ARPANET, and then the modern Internet. Obviously that part is 100% true. He's in your cat videos right now.