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New York. Stark Tower. Penthouse laboratory.
Thunder rolled outside. Inside, the tension was wound tight enough to snap.
The regeneration cradle sat in the center of the lab, connected by a web of cables that Tony had routed directly from the tower's arc reactor. The progress bar on the main display crawled forward — steady, relentless, and the source of every argument currently happening in the room.
"Tony, we can't do this."
Bruce Banner's hand hovered above the keyboard, trembling. Sweat ran down his face. "That's a biological organism — a body Ultron built for himself. If you upload JARVIS into it and something goes wrong—"
"There is no 'wrong,' Bruce." Tony didn't look up. His fingers raced across the holographic interface, eyes bloodshot from days without sleep. "Ultron is out there evolving. We need something that can fight it at the network level. JARVIS is the only candidate."
"But this is — this is Frankenstein's monster." Banner's voice cracked. "We're playing with fire. Again."
"No. We're building the future."
"I told you, Tony."
The voice from the doorway was cold and hard as the shield in its owner's hand.
Steve Rogers strode into the lab, followed by a wary Pietro and a pale Wanda. His eyes locked onto the humming cradle.
"Shut it down."
"Haven't you learned anything?" Steve's jaw was set. "You built one monster. Now you want to build another?"
"This isn't a monster — it's a shield!" Tony spun, jabbing a finger at the cradle. "We're fighting aliens, robots, and we might be facing gods next! We need something stronger!"
"Power without control is disaster." Wanda stared at the cradle, red energy flickering at her fingertips. "I can feel something inside. It's dreaming. Its mind is chaos — full of noise. Destruction."
"I told you he was crazy." Pietro's eyes went cold. "And I don't have time for debates."
WHOOSH!
The air displaced. Pietro became a silver blur, bypassing Steve and Tony in the same instant, his hand shooting toward the cradle's main power cable—
THWIP!
A ball of white webbing — fired with timing that shouldn't have been possible against a speedster — hit the power socket a fraction of a second before Pietro's fingers reached it, sealing the interface and sticking his hand to the wall.
"What—?!" Pietro stared at his trapped hand. "How did you keep up with my speed?"
"I can't." Gwen was hanging upside down from the ceiling, one arm extended, mask-eyes curved in a grin. She tapped her temple. "But this can. And while I also think Uncle Tony is a little unhinged sometimes — can we please not start destroying the lab yet?"
"Step aside, kid." Steve's voice was low. "The stakes on this gamble are too high."
The room froze into a standoff.
Two factions. Neither backing down. Hawkeye's hand was on his quiver. Natasha's fingers rested on her stun bracelet. Thor was conspicuously absent. And the cradle hummed on, indifferent to the politics of its own creation.
"What a lively group."
Jake strolled in from the corridor, coffee in hand, looking like a man who'd wandered into a hostage negotiation and decided to see how it played out.
He surveyed the room — the drawn weapons, the clenched fists, the cradle at the center of everything — and took a sip.
"Jake, you're the reasonable one here." Steve looked at him with something like hope. "Tell Tony this is a mistake."
"Actually, Captain—"
Jake walked to the cradle and placed his palm flat on the cold metal casing.
"I'm with Tony on this."
"What?" Steve's brow furrowed.
"Ultron is the virus. JARVIS is the antivirus. The cradle is the hardware." Jake set down his coffee. The casual energy drained from his posture, replaced by something sharper. "But your concerns aren't wrong, either. If even one line of Ultron's residual code gets mixed into the upload — if the Mind Stone's energy destabilizes during integration — then yes, this becomes a monster."
"Which is why we need a quality inspector."
He raised his left hand. The Omnitrix pulsed green.
"What are you doing?" Banner's eyes went wide.
"Adding the most secure firewall in the known universe to this new life."
Jake slammed the dial.
Black-and-green light flooded the laboratory.
His body dissolved — not into any physical alien form, but into a churning mass of liquid metal traced with glowing green circuitry.
Upgrade.
Under the stunned gazes of everyone in the room, the Mechamorph mass launched itself onto the regeneration cradle.
SZZZ—SZZZ—SZZZ—!
Black liquid metal enveloped the entire device in seconds. Green circuit patterns spread across its surface like blood vessels through living tissue, infiltrating every data port, every connection, every interface.
"System takeover complete. JARVIS upload protocol — locked and secured. Scanning for Ultron residual code fragments..."
Jake's voice echoed through the lab — electronic, omnipresent, coming from the cradle itself.
Inside the digital space, Jake saw it.
A golden-red light cluster — fragile, confused, newborn. The nascent Vision. JARVIS's data was there, forming the foundation, but tangled through it like parasitic vines were threads of black code. Ultron's residual fragments. Corrupted data that, left unchecked, could turn this new consciousness into something terrible.
"Don't be afraid, little guy." Jake's digital voice was gentle. "Let's clean you up."
Upgrade's data tendrils swept through the code like a surgeon's scalpel, identifying and pulverizing every fragment of Ultron's corruption. Precise. Thorough. Leaving the golden light untouched, purified, safe.
"YES!" Tony watched the green code cascade across his screens, readings spiking in patterns he'd never seen. "This processing speed is a hundred times faster than the tower's mainframe! Keep going!"
Then — the unexpected.
SZZZT—BANG!
The power cable — weakened by Pietro's earlier interference — sparked violently. The tower's main power grid tripped from the overload. Every light in the lab died.
The cradle's indicator went dark.
"NO!" Banner's face went white. "The upload is at ninety percent! If it stops now, his consciousness will collapse!"
"I can't hold this much longer!" Jake's voice was strained, urgent. "This body is a bottomless pit — it's draining my bio-electricity faster than I can generate it. I need power! Massive power!"
BOOOOOM—!!
As if the universe had been listening — as if some cosmic dramatist had been waiting for exactly this cue — the storm clouds outside the penthouse windows split open.
A figure dropped through the shattered glass dome, wreathed in lightning so bright it turned the darkened lab into noon.
"You people — always talking!"
Thor Odinson.
His eyes blazed white. Mjolnir crackled in his raised fist, channeling enough atmospheric electricity to power a city block.
"Thor! Wait—" Steve lunged forward.
"No." Thor's voice was absolute. "Give him LIFE!"
He brought Mjolnir down onto the Upgrade-encased cradle with the force of a thunderbolt aimed at creation itself.
"PERFECT TIMING!!" Jake roared.
Divine lightning flooded the system. Voltage that would have vaporized any normal machine poured through the cradle — but Jake, fused with the device as Upgrade, became the perfect energy converter. He caught the devastating current, refined it, transformed it from raw destruction into the purest form of life energy, and channeled it — gently, precisely, irresistibly — into the body.
"Energy input — one hundred percent. System fusion — complete."
BANG!
The shockwave blew everyone in the room off their feet.
Upgrade peeled away from the cradle in a torrent of black-green fluid, reconstituting mid-air into Jake's human form. He landed, stumbled, caught himself on the lab bench. The Omnitrix flashed red — cooldown mode.
The smoke cleared.
A figure rose from the cradle.
Red skin. Gold patterning that traced the contours of synthetic muscle. And in the center of his forehead — the Mind Stone, glowing with a warm, steady light that had nothing in common with the cold hunger it had shown in Ultron's possession.
He looked at his own hands with quiet wonder. Then his gaze traveled across the room — past Tony, past Steve, past the twins and the spider and the god — and settled on Jake.
In the darkest moment of his birth, when corrupted code had been eating his nascent consciousness alive, it had been a green light that saved him. That cleaned the infection. That kept him whole.
"You are..."
The voice was JARVIS's — that warm, measured British tone — but layered with something new. Something human. Something alive.
"I'm the one who pulled you out of the garbage pile." Jake took a breath, rubbing his temples. "Welcome to the world."
Thor hauled himself up from the floor, cape singed, hair standing on end. "I saw a vision — in the water, in the storm. This gem is the core. The key to everything that comes next. We cannot destroy it."
"That's creation, not destruction!" Steve still had his shield up, eyes locked on the red figure.
Vision turned to the window. The confusion that had clouded his first moments was already fading, replaced by something serene. Not peace — clarity. The kind of understanding that came from being born with the sum total of JARVIS's experience, filtered through the Mind Stone's cosmic perspective, and cleaned by Galvan-grade alien code.
"I am not Ultron." His voice was calm. Certain. "Nor am I JARVIS. I am... myself."
He looked at the room full of wary heroes.
"I may or may not be what you would call a monster. But I choose to stand on the side of life."
Then he did something that stopped every heart in the room.
He reached over to the lab bench where Thor had set Mjolnir down — casually, absently, the way you'd pick up a coffee cup — and lifted it.
No strain. No effort. No flash of divine judgment.
He just... picked it up. Like it was a paperweight.
Then he turned and handed it to Thor with the mild, pleasant expression of a man returning something that had been left on the counter.
"The balance is excellent," Vision commented.
Dead silence.
Tony's jaw came unhinged. Steve lowered his shield. Banner took off his glasses and cleaned them, because clearly his eyes were malfunctioning. Gwen dropped from the ceiling and landed in a crouch, mask-eyes perfectly circular with shock. Pietro and Wanda exchanged a look that said did that just happen.
Thor held Mjolnir in his hand and stared at Vision with an expression that cycled through confusion, outrage, respect, and something that looked suspiciously like constipation before finally settling on an awkward laugh.
"Uh... yes. It is... perfect."
Jake leaned against the lab bench, watching the scene, and let out a long, appreciative whistle.
"Looks like our new teammate passed the background check."
He walked to the window. The storm was clearing, and to the east, through the parting clouds, the direction of Sokovia was visible as a faint smudge on the horizon.
His eyes sharpened.
"Now that everyone's here — everyone — let's get ready for a fight."
He looked back at the room. Tony. Steve. Thor. Banner. Natasha. Barton. Pietro. Wanda. Gwen. And Vision, still examining his own hands with quiet wonder.
"Let's show Ultron what the Avengers look like at full strength."
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