A powerful shock from a high voltage taser can incapacitate a person for half an hour. That did not suit my purposes, so I had reduced the output power of my device to a minimum beforehand. Even so, it was enough for Bobbi to convulse for a few seconds, then slide down the wall and take several minutes to recover.
During that time, I took her weapon, phone, and wallet. With internet access, I decided to find out a couple of facts, and by the time the angry Bobbi got to her feet and realized her situation, I already knew that no hospital in the city had a patient named Amelia Rose Stans.
«Parker...» Bobbi hissed, but I cut her off mid sentence, waving the gun's barrel in front of the girl's face.
«I ask, you answer. First question. Is Stans still in this mansion?» This was truly the most important thing I needed to know. If the Doc had been taken somewhere, then to give the cops grounds for a search, I would have to become a victim and witness myself.
Bobbi remained silent, not rushing to answer the question.
«Don't make this harder than it has to be, sweetheart. Believe me, neither you nor I will like how this develops.» Honestly, I hadn't even thought about what I would do if Bobbi refused to cooperate, but right now... where was this confidence coming from? I had never interrogated anyone before. It seemed I had forgotten some very important moments of my life.
«Yes,» Bobbi finally spat out.
«Where, exactly? Do you know?»
«No,» the girl replied quickly. Too quickly, as if she was scared for Stans.
«Come on. You were with her all that time. Don't you care that she might die here without proper medical help?» Yes, this was clearly the right approach. Surprise and fear for her friend were evident in Bobbi's eyes. «Cindy has no idea what the Doc did to herself. She needs to be examined, and doctors need data on what happened to her. She is in danger, do you understand that, Bobbi? Time is running out.»
«The Doc is on the second floor, in a room with medical equipment,» the girl gave in. «But a doctor visits her, and she said the condition is stable.»
«You kept Stans locked up. That is not a question. I know it. I will tell the cops about the double kidnapping and that Stans was essentially held as a slave. There is enough evidence in this laboratory. Be so kind as to stuff this in your pretty mouth while I make the call.» I handed the girl a rag. «What? It is clean. And I don't want you pulling anything, like giving the cops my name.»
The conversation with the police went surprisingly smoothly, except for the five times they tried to get my name. The officer who answered didn't allow herself to doubt my words. She wrote down the address of the mansion and all the other provided information.
«So, Bobbi,» I continued after the call, «you have a choice. Help me escape right now and continue living relatively peacefully, or stay here and end up behind bars with Cindy and everyone else. Keep in mind, if I cannot get out of here before the cops arrive, I will have to give testimony.»
Surprisingly, Bobbi actually hesitated.
«If you help me escape now, I promise I will personally deal with Stans's problem. You don't have much time to think,» I pressed a little more.
«Fine,» Bobbi decided, and immediately tried to start giving orders. «Then first we need to erase all our traces.»
«I already did that,» I cut her off.
The girl was surprised by this turn of events. Hesitantly, she asked, «And my accounts on the Doc's computer...»
«I trusted your prudence...» I smirked. «Now come on, stay one meter ahead of me. Let's go. Open the door.»
There was no one in the hallway. Bobbi tried to head straight for the emergency exit, but I stopped her.
«We need to lock the lock,» I explained as I fiddled with the door. «Cindy might try to destroy the evidence. We don't want that, do we?»
Done. Now, to get into the laboratory, someone would have to break down the door, and it was not an easy one.
«Move toward the garage,» I ordered, and Bobbi took the shortest route, right past the post with the guard who disliked face hunters. «No, there is a security post that way. Let's go past the shower room.»
«But there are electronic locks there. I don't know the codes,» Bobbi objected.
«No one knows,» I smirked, «except me. And we need to hurry before anyone raises an alarm about this.»
I miscalculated. Opening the second door on the way to the garage, Bobbi came face to face with two female guards who had apparently been trying to open it before her.
For a second, the women stared at each other. Then Bobbi attacked her former comrades first, before they could figure out what was happening. At that moment, I could only be glad for my foresight. If I hadn't made Bobbi open all the doors for me, our escape attempt might have ended right there. It was unlikely she would have taken my side if I were already in the guards' hands. Now, on one side were two armed security guards, and on the other was me, also with a gun. The girl simply had no choice.
A scuffle broke out. The women fought skillfully, using an aggressive style to overpower their opponent. Exactly how a real guard should act, though their mass was a bit lacking. Bobbi managed to knock the gun out of one woman's hand and pin the weapon arm of the other criminal. I didn't want to draw unnecessary attention with gunfire, so I rushed toward the dropped weapon. The disarmed woman did too.
For a moment, I panicked. I would no longer reach the gun in time, and my opponent was clearly dangerous in hand to hand combat.
The guard's first blow landed on my clumsy block. Oh, she was much stronger than me physically, but we were already too close. I didn't believe I could defeat a trained guard with such muscles as mine, but instinct took over. Grabbing my opponent by the collar of her uniform, I fell onto my back, pulling the woman with me, and in the process, shoved her with both feet in the stomach. While we were falling, she managed to punch me in the face twice. What manners these locals had.
I smoothly rolled to the side and jumped to my feet. The guard, meanwhile, was in an extremely awkward position, sliding upside down down the wall she had hit back first.
I was afraid she would get up, and I wouldn't be able to catch her off guard again. So I quickly approached and knocked her out with a blow from the gun. I really didn't want to get hit in the head again. Usually, I would have tied up criminals with webbing. With my agility, that would have been easy. However, I still knew where and with what force to strike to knock someone unconscious.
«Wow,» Bobbi whistled behind me. «The boy is so dangerous,» she sang with a smirk.
The second guard lay with a broken nose and rolled up eyes, but alive. Bobbi was twirling a captured pistol in her hands.
«Ladies first,» I nodded toward the door. Well, you have a weapon now. So what? The cops are already on their way. We are either in the same boat, or you are going to prison.
Bobbi understood that too. She only laughed, as if I had said something funny. Though maybe she just liked her own parody of a Jackson song so much that she was still amused.
We made it to the truck I had spotted without incident. Bobbi got behind the wheel, and I hid in the sleeping compartment behind her, pulling the curtain shut on my side. A fully closed sleeping compartment might have raised suspicion, though this precaution turned out to be unnecessary.
We weren't even stopped at the exit. No one cared who was driving or where the vehicle was going. Thus, we left Cindy Shaw's lair.
At the edge of the forest, a police car sped past us, racing at full speed toward the mansion.
«Wow,» I said in surprise. «That was fast. Impressive. A little more, and we might not have made it.»
«Pff, what did you expect? A report about a kidnapping from a boy, and a minor at that.»
I didn't comment on that statement. There were more important topics.
«You need to disappear. I called from your phone, after all. But don't worry, I will keep my promise. Once Stans is transferred to a regular hospital, I will help the doctors make a proper diagnosis. However, there is a chance that more... competent authorities will take an interest in the case.» Naturally, I didn't mention SHIELD. «Then they will figure this out even faster than I can.»
Bobbi looked me over suspiciously.
«You are not an ordinary teenager, are you?»
«Ordinary teenagers don't get kidnapped to work on illegal research,» I chuckled, looking at my bruising face in the rearview mirror.
I offered to split up, but she insisted on driving me home. She was strange. She should be worrying about herself. I agreed on the condition that she would drop me off in the same place where she had kidnapped me, a five minute walk from home.
The girl smirked and suggested I not take that route anymore. According to her, that alley, which practically reached my backyard, was an ideal place to ambush a lone person, even in broad daylight.
I didn't pay much attention to her words and walked home, pulling up my hood and thinking about how to explain my absence of several days and my bruises to my family. However, I had some experience with this sort of thing. My entire superhero life consisted of lying to my loved ones, and I couldn't say I was thrilled about it.
Only now did it occur to me that the police could easily link my tip about Cindy Shaw to the disappearance of Peter Parker. Surely Aunt and Uncle had already filed a missing person report. Damn.
Suddenly, my right shoulder exploded with sharp pain. Something pushed me from behind, and blows rained down on my head.
In shock, I jumped back and covered my face with my hands. What the hell? Was Bobbi's warning about to come true so immediately? In the semi darkness of the alley, a shadowy figure in a hood was flailing in front of me. Some damn juvenile delinquent.
My mind was consumed by cold rage.
I caught the hand holding a piece of pipe, then blocked the other fist, and headbutted the face in front of me with all my might.
The body recoiled. The teenager's legs buckled. He pressed himself against a trash can and covered his face with his hands, sobbing. I wanted to hit him a few more times, but such pathetic behavior threw me off. He wasn't attacking anymore, wasn't defending himself. He just sat there, clutching his profusely bleeding nose. Long bangs prevented me from seeing the attacker's face.
I turned around and walked on. My mind was empty. I had acted on instinct, out of habit, and so brutally. I had wanted to beat him, and I would have, if he hadn't given up so suddenly and ridiculously. At the end of the alley, I looked back and caught a last glimpse of a hunched figure walking away. It was a girl.
There was no one home. That was probably good. I would have time to prepare for my meeting with Aunt and Uncle. Why was it so empty here, like a bachelor pad? Aunt May would never have allowed this. So strange.
I opened the refrigerator. The smell of rotten sausages hit my nostrils. The milk was also expired, by about a week. No one had been living here, at least not during the entire time I had been gone. But where could they have gone?
My inspection of the kitchen and living room didn't reveal any obvious memories, but I still recognized this place. I knew where everything was. I knew where the floors had leaks, where mold had appeared on the drainpipe. I had definitely lived here, but the place didn't give me a feeling of homey warmth and comfort.
In the bathroom, I washed and treated all my cuts and scrapes with medicine. The time had not yet come when I could come home in the evening covered in bruises and wake up healthy in the morning. How stupid. The worst bruise came from that street girl. The skin had even split at the point of impact, and my entire shoulder was swollen.
After finishing in the bathroom, I went upstairs out of habit, but instead of my bedroom, I found a mix of a storage room for old, useless things and a laboratory. Strange. I would never have allowed such a mess in my workspace. Was that dirty laundry in the corner? Yet at the same time, I understood that this was where I had worked on Stans's project.
Such a thick layer of dust. No one had entered this room for several months. Yet, there was a path in the dust, trodden toward a disassembled system unit with the video card and power supply removed. This place seemed as if it had been temporarily converted into a laboratory and then abandoned again. I had nothing to do here. I needed a bed and a good night's sleep.
I found my bedroom on the first floor. But there was nothing here that I remembered from my childhood. No posters on the walls, no tools, generally no traces of my activity. Just furniture, clothes, and a computer.
The PC started up without issue. A user account named Peter with no password. What the hell? I would never have left my computer without protection.
I opened the browser. It was time to find out who I really was.
The first line in the browser history. The Three Body Problem.
I remembered.
The Three Body Problem. That damn game.
Three suns in the sky.
Ages of chaos, ages of order, age of crisis. The Trisolarian Crisis.
«Trisolaris,» I didn't say, I spat out.
How much was contained in that word. Hatred, horror, despair, fear.
I remembered.
I looked at the browser history again.
«The Three Body Problem game» was my Google search query.
Liu Cixin's «The Three Body Problem,» the two volume series «Remembrance of Earth's Past,» read online. The last open page. Just a book. «Remembrance of Earth's Past.» What a terrible title, but how accurate.
I am the last memory of Earth's past. My Earth. Nothing worked out. I didn't return to the past. This is not my universe. In this universe, Trisolaris is just a book. Which meant it had all been for nothing. Everyone had died.
I suddenly realized with utter clarity that I had lost them, those who had once lived here with me, forever. I wanted to disappear, to not exist.
I made it to the bed and collapsed into a merciful sleep. I was no longer glad that I had remembered. On the contrary, I wanted to forget everything again, just as I had a week ago. But I couldn't. Instead, my brain kept feeding me memories of those events.
The conflict between Earth and Trisolaris had been one sided from the very beginning. All attempts by Congress and the UN to organize a defense were doomed to fail. We had four hundred years to prepare for the invasion, but this war was lost even before the first Trisolarian ships left their home planet.
Traitors. The ETO, the Earth Trisolaris Organization. They gave the aliens all the information about humanity. The Trisolarans used it. They understood the threat posed by rapidly developing humanity. The technological explosion. That was what they feared. By the time the Trisolaran fleet reached Earth, who knew what heights Earth science would have reached.
They created their main weapon. Sophons. Supercomputers inside a proton.
Just a proton. A tiny particle with no real power, but by interfering with particle accelerators, it destroyed fundamental Earth science.
Tony Stark was the first victim of the Sophons and the ETO. Initially, Trisolaris considered other people to be Earth's most dangerous scientists. Reed Richards, whose space time theory was far ahead of not only Earth science but even Trisolaran science. Bruce Banner, whose research into gamma radiation was simply incredible. Hank Pym, who had come closer than anyone else to mastering technology based on the strong nuclear interaction. However, the leaders of the ETO convinced Trisolaris that all these brilliant minds paled in comparison to the threat posed by Tony Stark. No, he was not the most brilliant scientist on the planet, and his greatest creation, the cold fusion reactor, though ahead of Earth science, did not exceed the development timeline Trisolaris had predicted for our civilization. But Tony Stark possessed two other qualities that were much more important than the genius of the other people on the list.
Psychological resilience and the rational thinking of an engineer and weapons designer. Tony was not obsessed with fundamental science like the other scientists on the list. Even his reactor, he had designed out of necessity. The collapse of fundamental physics theories that the Sophons were meant to bring about would have affected Iron Man far less than other scientists. Tony had many other interests in life. He was already a superhero. He already had a damn iron suit. In the end, he simply knew how to enjoy life. It was highly unlikely that such a person would commit suicide because of the Sophons' actions. As for the second quality. In the context of the stagnation of all fundamental research, already mastered technologies would come to the forefront, along with people capable of applying them with maximum efficiency. It was precisely Tony Stark's engineering and weapons designing talent that made Trisolaris look to the future with caution. If all the planet's resources fell into the hands of such a person, it was not certain that during the doomsday battle four hundred years later, Trisolaris's technological advantage would be as undeniable.
The Sophons attacked Tony immediately upon arriving on Earth. They sabotaged his research first. While other scientists were looking for errors in their calculations or equipment malfunctions in the accelerators, Tony Stark had already progressed to understanding humanity's place in the hypotheses of the Shooter and the Farmer.
A couple of days later, the press once again captured the eccentric billionaire during one of his drunken escapades. That same night, shocking footage of Iron Man's death became public knowledge. The ETO had struck. Tony Stark was a superhero. His death did not need to be disguised as an accident. Those who wanted revenge on him could have formed a line from Stark Tower to the Statue of Liberty. And even the subsequent destruction of Stark's laboratories, though raising questions, still fit the Avengers' legend. The ETO, guided by the omnipresent Sophons, systematically purged all samples of cold fusion technology.
Other scientists followed Stark. In most cases, the Sophons did almost all the work themselves. A wave of mass suicides by leading scientists swept the world. Otto Octavius, Hank Pym, Amadeus Cho, and many other less famous scientists could not handle the pressure. Bruce Banner was also psychologically broken, but he didn't have the means to end his existence. However, his mental state was such that he no longer posed a threat as a scientist.
Reed Richards nearly followed his colleagues. The collapse of his space time theories and the inconsistency of the fundamental laws of physics became an unbearable burden for him. I managed to prevent his suicide at the last moment. And then I defended Reed from ETO assassins many times.
We took many frantic actions during that period. In fact, all of humanity fell into a global hysteria. In the end, Reed and I decided to sleep for two hundred years using cold hibernation technology. We would wait for the completion of the space elevator.
But humanity exceeded our expectations. When we woke up, people had already built a huge space fleet and mastered gamma lasers and thermonuclear fusion technology. Alas, not cold fusion. Moreover, people were confident of victory over Trisolaris. The ETO had been destroyed. Society had gone through the Great Raveling and the Second Renaissance. Superpowers had disappeared. Now, the Golden Age was in full swing. Only fundamental science had not advanced at all. Universities were still teaching awakened professors from my time using two century old textbooks. To my shame, we also believed in the power of our race. It was like a dream, a sweet dream that had become reality. By a lucky chance, Reed and I found ourselves aboard the Blue Space at the very moment when another recently awakened contemporary of ours captured the fleet's flagship, the Natural Selection. He was sure that Earth had no chance of victory and was trying to give humanity a chance to survive. I sincerely admired this man.
The Blue Space and three other ships were sent to intercept. Then came the shocking news. A single Trisolaran probe that had reached the Solar System fifty years ahead of schedule, a Drop the size of a truck, had destroyed Earth's entire space fleet. An alloy based on strong nuclear interaction technology and an engine beyond human understanding. Nothing in the Solar System could destroy the Drop. No one could outrun it. But by that time, we had already left the Solar System.
The Natural Selection was heading toward a star whose system contained a gas giant planet. It could be used for refueling. The journey would take only a couple thousand years. Our fleet of five ships was capable of making such a trip.
But the calculations were wrong. We had not accounted for the braking effect when passing through gas and dust clouds. In reality, the fleet would have to spend fifty thousand years in transit. There were not enough spare parts or fuel for such a journey.
I don't know the name of the ship that attacked first. Thermonuclear bombs detonated fifty kilometers from all the ships simultaneously. For twenty seconds, the flames of the thermonuclear explosions pulsed at infrasound frequencies. When the powerful electromagnetic pulses reached the ships, their hulls vibrated, generating monstrously powerful infrasound waves. Everything was shrouded in a bloody haze. The crew died, but the fuel and spacecraft remained intact.
I foresaw this attack. The Captain of the Blue Space and I decided not to strike first. Instead, the crew donned spacesuits, and all the air was pumped out of the ship. Thus, we protected ourselves from the infrasound bombs. Afterward, we destroyed the last enemy ship, recovered fuel and supplies, and continued our journey.
Reed and I, we enjoyed the crew's trust. Everyone relied on our intelligence. People thought we could invent new technologies using the captured resources, since the Sophons had finally left us alone. Some even believed that thanks to our inventions, they would live to see a new home. Faith was all these people had left.
But Reed and I didn't believe. We knew it was impossible. We had other plans. Within six months, Reed completed his space time theory from two hundred years ago and built the first time machine in human history. We were going to go back in time and prevent the catastrophe. Stop the Red Coast from sending a radio transmission to Alpha Centauri. Prevent Trisolaris from learning about Earth's existence. But we were not allowed.
Probably, the Sophons had been watching us all along and ultimately decided to interfere. Instead of traveling to the past, I ended up in some parallel universe where the history of the conflict with Trisolaris was just a science fiction novel. As for Reed, I can't even imagine what happened to him.
Notes:
The Shooter Hypothesis states the following. A shooter shoots at a target, putting a hole in it every ten centimeters. Now, imagine that the surface of the target is inhabited by a race of intelligent two dimensional beings. Their scientists, observing the universe, have discovered a great law. «Every ten centimeters in the universe, there is a hole.» They took the shooter's momentary whim for a law of nature.
The Farmer Hypothesis has something of a horror film about it. So, every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer feeds the birds. A turkey scientist, observing this phenomenon for nearly a year, concludes, «Every morning at eleven, food arrives.» On Thanksgiving morning, the turkey announces this law to her comrades. But that day at eleven, instead of feeding, the farmer slaughters all the turkeys.
Here, Avengers in the original sense.