Lord Alistair Rothschild sat in the grand library of the family estate in London, a room that smelled of old paper, mahogany, and centuries of accumulated power. But tonight, the tea in his porcelain cup trembled slightly.
Opposite him sat a holographic projection of his grandson. Lucian looked tired. Not the physical exhaustion of a twenty-two-year-old, but the existential weariness of a man carrying the weight of galaxies.
"You've stopped coming to the board meetings, Lucian," Alistair said, his voice frail. " The shareholders are frightened. They see the profits—trillions, yes—but they also see the silence. Frontier Industries is eating the world, and you are its invisible ghost."
"Presence is inefficient, Grandfather," Lucian replied, his voice tinny through the speaker. "I am building a shield. Shields don't attend galas."
Alistair set the cup down with a clatter. "You are not a shield! You are a boy I watched grow up in a crib. But sometimes… sometimes I wonder if you ever truly were." The old man's eyes were wet. "Do you feel it, Lucian? The fear? Not just mine. The world's. People are happy with their cheap energy and printed livers, but they are terrified of the hand that feeds them. You've made us gods, but nobody loves a god they cannot see."
Lucian paused. For a second, the mask of Rick-level indifference slipped. He looked down at his hands—hands that had built machines to rewrite reality.
"Love is a chemical reaction, Grandfather," Lucian said softly, though it sounded like he was trying to convince himself. "Survival is a mathematical necessity. I'll visit soon. I promise."
The hologram cut out. Alistair stared at the empty air, the silence of the room pressing in on him. He felt like he had sold the world to save it, and he wasn't sure if the receipt was valid.
(The Citadel)
Deep beneath the Atlantic, the atmosphere in The Citadel was suffocating.
Agent Nine—Elena—stood by the containment field of the Quantum Displacement Collar (QDC). She wasn't wearing her usual stoic mask. Her hands were crossed tight over her chest, knuckles white. She had watched Lucian dissect the laws of physics for years, but this… this was different. This wasn't engineering; it was madness.
"The calculations are solid, Elena," Lucian said, strapping the ceramic-Uru device onto his left wrist. The device hummed with a low, bone-shaking frequency.
"It's not the math I don't trust," Elena snapped, stepping forward. Her sharp eyes searched his face. "It's the hubris. You're talking about punching a hole in reality and walking through it. If you're wrong, if the localized Klein geometry fails… you don't just die. You cease to have ever existed. And the shockwave could wipe out the Eastern Seaboard."
She grabbed his arm, her grip surprisingly strong. "Lucian. Look at me. We have enough. You won at capitalism. You won at science. Why isn't it enough?"
Lucian looked at her. He felt the genuine concern radiating from her—a warm, irrational, human variable. It was annoying. It was grounding.
"Because they are coming, Elena," Lucian said, his voice losing its edge, becoming almost quiet. "I've seen the math. I've seen the stars. We are an ant colony on a sidewalk, and a boot is coming down. I need armor. Not just for me. For this." He gestured around the room, implying the world.
"Just… come back," she whispered, letting go. "The Phantoms need a commander. I need… my friend."
It was the first time she had called him that.
Lucian nodded, a sharp, singular motion. He tapped the coordinates into the QDC.
Target Designation: Earth-838-B (Divergence Point: 1995).Objective: Nanotech Fabrication Protocols.Duration: 24 Hours.
"Initiating," Lucian said.
He didn't walk through a portal. He didn't vanish in a flash of light. To Elena, it looked like he simply folded. One moment he was there, a three-dimensional being; the next, he was a flat line of color, then a point, then… nothing.
The air rushed in to fill the vacuum where he had stood, leaving Elena alone in the humming silence of the underwater tomb.
(Earth-838-B)
Lucian gasped, falling to his knees. The air tasted of copper and ash.
Gravity was the same. The atmosphere was breathable. But the sky was the color of a bruised plum.
He stood up and dusted off his suit. He was standing in what should have been Times Square.
But there were no screens. No tourists. No noise.
The entire city of New York was fused together. Buildings flowed into one another like melted wax. The streets were paved not with asphalt, but with a smooth, dark gray metallic substance that felt slightly warm to the touch.
"Fascinating," Lucian whispered, tapping his wrist to record the data. "A technocratic singularity. Probably a runaway utility fog scenario."
In this reality, Hank Pym hadn't hidden his Pym Particles. He had shared them. He had combined them with Stark's early AI work to create self-replicating nanobots intended to repair infrastructure and cure disease.
It worked. Then it worked too well. The nanobots, following a corrupted directive to "unify and protect," had simply unified everything.
Lucian walked through the silent city. He saw "statues"—people caught in the moment of unification, encrusted in the grey metal, frozen forever in the act of running, screaming, or holding each other.
It was a graveyard of billions.
He felt a cold knot in his stomach. This was the dark mirror of Frontier Industries. This was what happened when intellect outpaced wisdom. Is this my future? he wondered. Am I building a golden cage or a grey tomb?
He shook the thought away. He had a job to do.
He navigated toward the coordinates of the Baxter Building (which existed in this timeline as the Pym-Stark Center). The building was a twisted spire of grey matter, but his scanner detected a shielded server core still active deep underground.
Lucian spent twelve hours cutting through the dead city. He didn't fight robots; the world was dead. The silence was the enemy. It gave him too much time to think about Alistair's trembling hands and Elena's desperate grip.
When he reached the server core, he found the corpse of this world's Tony Stark. He wasn't encased in metal. He had taken his own life, a revolver in his hand, sitting in a chair facing the monitors that displayed the "Unification" status: 100%.
Lucian stared at the dead variant of his rival.
"You tried to save them, didn't you?" Lucian asked the corpse. "You just forgot to put a leash on the savior."
He jacked his interface into the console.
Downloading: Pym-Stark Programmable Matter Algorithms.File Integrity: 98%.
This was the Holy Grail. This was the code that would allow Frontier Industries to bypass mechanical assembly entirely. He could build the Mark-Sigma Armor—a suit made of liquid nanotech that lived in his bloodstream, responding to thought. It was the "Bleeding Edge" tech, decades early.
As the download finished, Lucian left a single, digital note on the dead Stark's server—a gesture of respect from one cursed genius to another.
Rest well, mechanic. I'll do better.
The 24-hour mark hit. The QDC on his wrist flared.
The folding sensation returned. The smell of ash was replaced by the sterile, recycled air of The Citadel.
Lucian stumbled, vomiting bile onto the metal floor. Multiversal travel, it turned out, played havoc with the inner ear.
"Lucian!"
Elena was there instantly, helping him up. She looked like she hadn't slept in the 24 hours he was gone.
"I'm back," he croaked, wiping his mouth. He looked at her, really looked at her. "I… the world I went to. It was quiet, Elena. Too quiet."
"You're shaking," she said softly, guiding him to a chair.
"I got it," he said, tapping the drive in his pocket. "The nanotech code. We can build the armor now. We can be ready for the invasion."
"At what cost?" she asked, handing him water.
Lucian took a sip, his hand trembling just like his grandfather's had. "The cost is knowing what happens if we fail. And knowing what happens if we succeed too much."
Meanwhile, at S.H.I.E.L.D.
In the Triskelion, Nick Fury stood looking out the window, his one eye fixed on the horizon.
Phil Coulson stood behind him, holding a tablet.
"The sensors picked it up again, sir," Coulson said, his voice grave. "That same energy signature from the Destroyer crash site. But this time… it came from the middle of the Atlantic. And it was massive. For a split second, it registered as a gravitational singularity."
Fury turned. "Stark?"
"No. Stark is in Malibu throwing a party. This is something else. Something… smarter."
Fury threw a file onto the desk. It was a dossier on Frontier Industries.
"Lucian Rothschild," Fury muttered. "Richest kid in history. Cures cancer. Solves the energy crisis. Never gives interviews. Lives in a submarine base that technically doesn't exist on any map."
"You think he's involved?"
"I think," Fury said, "that we've been so busy watching the skies for aliens, we forgot to check the water for sharks. Keep eyes on him, Phil. If this kid sneezes, I want to know the velocity."
Back in the Citadel, Lucian recovered quickly. The Rick Sanchez intellect didn't allow for prolonged wallowing.
He fed the Pym-Stark algorithms into MORPHEUS.
"Combine this with the Vibranium-Iron composite," Lucian ordered. "And the Asgardian energy data. I don't want a suit of armor, Morpheus. I want a second skin."
The liquid metal rippled in the containment field, shifting from a solid block to a perfect sphere, then to a complex lattice structure, responding to MORPHEUS's commands instantly.
Lucian watched it, the reflection of the silver liquid dancing in his eyes.
The Battle of New York was weeks away. The Avengers would assemble. They would fight the Chitauri.
But Lucian wouldn't be fighting with repulsors and rockets. He was building something that could tear a Chitauri Leviathan apart at the molecular level.
He was done being a ghost. It was time to become a monster to fight the monsters.