Marvel Reborn: Gems Of Infinite Potential

The rest of 2004 was largely both peaceful and quiet, at least for me. My team was kept quite busy though.

While the Kilgrave team completed their vaccine - take it every two weeks, and you were quite thoroughly immune to that little mind control virus - they had moved on to figuring out a permanent genetic immunity to it. Maya had been co-opted into helping them, and those teams were busy trying to figure out how to copy Erskine's work, in a much more limited manner, using technology. The issue with genetic alteration had always been propagating the needed changes throughout the body, and while Extremis solved that problem, it was not viable until the explosion issue was solved. The Logan cells could do the same thing naturally, if in a more limited manner.

Blake and Anton were making good progress on stabilizing Nitramene but, while it would make a decent explosive, I considered that to ultimately be a failure. The increased stability was being achieved by coming up with ways that the reactants could be bonded to inert carriers until those bonds were broken with a catalyst, at which time you got a boom. Much safer to handle, but it also only produced Chi when it went boom, as opposed to the slower and continuous, if very temperamental, original process. Explosives were cool and all, but safer Chi generation was much more interesting. We did create a Vita Ray healing room though, even if it was kept very far away from anything else because of the boom potential inherent in the tons of liquid Nitramene that were flowing through its walls and floors.

Those experiments were fun, and it turns out that you can overload a living thing on life itself. Many animals went boom after too long in the chamber, but on the plus side, it would keep subjects with even the most horrific of injuries alive and even heal them. Even the relatively recently dead could be raised, so long as the body was mostly whole, and the brain was intact, although that made the people we tested it on go bug-f.u.c.k nuts. Considering that we were using criminals for those tests, imagine that base line, increase all emotions to extremes otherwise only reachable with very strong drugs, and remove any impulse control. It was like an unholy combination of every mind-altering street drug.

Over time, the subjects would settle down as the excess life energy was depleted, but that didn't make things much better, given that the extreme mental imbalances that they experienced rewired the brain and altered neurotransmitters much like many drug users experience. They kept wanting the next high, and their brains were still f.u.c.k.e.d. I knew that the Hand used a Chi-based method to resurrect people and that while it tended to cause mental issues, they were nowhere near as extreme as my process, so I figured I was missing some stabilization method that they knew.

In the end, the chamber was relegated to basically fixing minor ailments and as the ultimate coffee break. Productivity across my teams had skyrocketed as ten minutes in the chamber at the end of the day seemed to have the same rejuvenating effects as eight hours of sleep and a nice meal. I couldn't use it with the Kilgrave recipients, as it would purge the virus from their systems, but for everyone else, it ended up almost doubling their productivity, at least on the days when I was around to open the needed portals. Well, fixing minor injuries and serving as a meditation room for me.

Thanks to my training in the mystic arts, I could feel energies inside my body much more precisely, and in the Chi room, my Chi was flooded to such an extent that I could identify an energy that had always been underneath my conscious notice before. Progress on trying to harness my Chi was slow, as I had no teacher, and the Ancient One's only advice had been to go and find a Chi master, not a magic master if I wanted training in the art. But progress was made, millimeter by millimeter.

My project to understand vibranium was going even slower. We had hit a brick wall when it came to finding out how to extract energy from it, and until that was solved, there was only so much we could do. Oh, we had gotten much better at using the metal and doing practical tests to figure out what the various alloys were capable of, but real understanding was still elusive. Where success was had was in vibranium bone enhancement. Pym had completed the needed lab upgrades so that we could take someone down small enough to walk around in the human body without real issue. From there, it was kinda like carefully mining out a given bone, building an entire network of tunnels throughout it, and then filling those tunnels one by one with vibranium molecules. Bonding to the bone was accomplished by using titanium as a medium; you had one molecule of Vibranium inside a molecule-thick shell of titanium, which was itself bonded to the bone. The procedure took forever to complete, almost a thousand hours on the table, but it was safe and very effective.

Having a skull that could bounce anti-material rifle rounds at point-blank range was very cool, even if that particular experience would still probably cause your spinal cord to end up torn. Natasha and I were very happy with our upgrades though. I was still looking forward to the future phase of the project where we rebuilt the entire skull to include an integrated Ant-Man helmet and a Pym Particle distribution network throughout the whole body so that you could safely shrink without a suit, but progress was slow on that front. Some factor that we hadn't identified was interfering with the process, and so the mind didn't end up shielded.

Ivan Vanko had proven himself to have a rare flair for arc reactor technology and had managed to produce a miniature arc reactor using the starkium core after almost a year of dedicated effort. Once he had the first example and the team knew how to build them, improvements came fast. Pym-based molecular manufacturing allowed a degree of precision engineering and production tolerances that just weren't possible at any other scale, while vibranium shielding allowed for components to be environmentally isolated, even when only a few molecules distant from one another. We had replaced all of our facilities' power generation with arc reactors, which had both saved me money and time - no more having to buy and transport the massive amounts of diesel required for the generators - and increased our available power budgets to effectively limitless levels.

With the arc reactor tech having been improved to the point where anything better was liable to be fairly minuscule gains, I had moved Ivan onto figuring out repulsor technology. Given that his father had worked with Howard Stark for years, he had a good starting point, but the technology that Anton knew was nowhere near the weaponized state that Stark Industries had advanced it to today.

Once I had the arc reactors, I had taken the time to redesign our armored suits to integrate the new and improved technology. The ability to operate on an even smaller scale than had previously been possible let me actually make relatively limited nanites. The outer shell was vibranium with a hollow core, and in this core was stuffed an arc reactor, computing equipment, pathways for Pym Particles to flow through, and all of the other bits and pieces of tech required to make the suit function. The individual cells locked together using adamantium locks, mere molecules in size. It was cool, massively so, and it made the wearer the next best thing to invincible but ultimately it was still effectively un-powered armor for all that it had enough power generation to keep the lights on across a continent. The problems were numerous but came down to the fact that working around vibranium's energy absorption abilities was a bit of a bitch, and that making artificial muscles that operated at this scale without massive negative trade-offs was beyond my tech. If the whole suit was pure vibranium, then it pretty much wouldn't be able to interact with the environment on a macro-scale, as the kinetic energy the user's muscles exerted was all just absorbed into the vibranium. So, instead, there were also the adamantium nanites that created a framework to move the whole edifice.

All in all, the super-strength, much less many of the other more exotic ideas I wanted in the future, had to wait. Still, Natasha was very happy with the Widow Mk. 2, and I quite liked my own Exalt armor.

Not that we had much use for our new toys. I got much more use out of the vibranium-alloy under-suit I had made for daily civilian wear and assassination protection, while Natasha was busy spending her time building up our criminal empire. With her skills alone, she could have made the Kingpin look like a joke, but giving her the technology I had made her a threat so far beyond even the top-tier criminals that it was cheating. Which was fine with both of us; a win was a win, and fair fights were for suckers.