Marvel Reborn: Gems Of Infinite Potential

I was standing in the observation room overlooking one of the labs, Maya by my side.

"How are things coming with Scorch?" I asked, not looking away from where Bruce was conducting some tests with Chan.

"Good, Chan's mutation is amazing. His body produces blood platelets that seem to have an extremely high specific heat capacity," she said, sounding excited.

"How high, and is that all?" I queried.

Maya shook her head in some wonder, "As in higher than asbestos high. Bruce is already talking about new types of insulation and even fireproof clothing."

My eyes widened at that even as I started thinking about marketing and profit figures, that was easily something that could be channeled through Raith Industries and onto the open market.

"That can't be all of it though, I mean that does nothing to explain his ability to make fire, or even how he is completely immune to fire," I questioned.

"It's not, just the most important part. Every cell in his body has a phenomenal ability to move heat, akin to a superconductor with electricity, and he even has some conscious control over the movement of that energy. So the heat gets moved from wherever until it ends up stored in the platelets, where he can then draw it back out and radiate it into the air from his skin." she explained.

I thought about it for a moment before giving a nod of understanding, "And his control once the fire is outside his body?"

She shrugged "We are assuming Chi but Elektra hasn't had a chance to stop by and give us her opinion."

I gave a wry smile as I glanced over at her and as our eyes met said: "We use that explanation for a lot of stuff we don't really understand I've noticed."

She gave her own smile and said "It is convenient. More seriously though, the knowledge of magic and Chi has filled in a lot of the holes and blind-spots in our theories. Betty was telling me earlier that Bruce has started rewriting physics again, he thinks he has found out how to unify General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics by taking into account those other forces."

"Huh, that's a Nobel for him if he manages it." I said as I thought through the implications of that little tidbit before continuing "What kind of timeline are we looking at for Scorch integration and Extremis testing?"

Maya shrugged slightly "We have a full DNA map already done and we've eliminated a good portion of it as irrelevant to his ability but the truth is that we only have the one subject. It's not like we can do comparison work across millions of people. I think we are going to have to integrate a number of different variants into test subjects using the Logan vector and just see what happens."

"How risky is that? I mean Bruce and Betty aren't exactly squeamish and they know about the final round of testing but I would really prefer not to push them any further than absolutely necessary." I questioned.

"It should be a relatively low risk, but we really don't know until we try. At least unless you can convince Alkasha that a little acausal information gathering is acceptable, I mean if she could tell me what experiments won't work then I won't actually have to do them," she said, just a hint of wheedling in her tone.

I shook my head "No, risking the backlash from paradox isn't worth it. Besides, that Extremis taps the Phoenix Force for power makes everything tricky."

"What do you mean?" she asked curiously.

"The Phoenix Force is literally the primordial force of creation, destruction, and rebirth. It is pretty much the one thing that both precedes the existence of the universe and will be around after its end and rebirth. Oh, it's not exactly more powerful than the Time Stone or anything like that but it is largely outside the remit of the Infinity Stones. That makes the probabilities of any given future timeline where the Phoenix Force plays a defining role much more error bound than would otherwise be the case." I explained, thinking back to the discussions I had had with Alkasha over the years we had known one another.

Maya processed it and then said "Oh, wait. Does that mean that she won't be able to see the future once we make Extremis public?"

"No, the amount of Phoenix Force in any given Extremis enhanced individual will be so small that even as a collective whole the effect on the timeline probabilities at the macro scale will be virtually unnoticeable. Even just looking at the individual's macro scale probabilities it won't matter much. Where it will make seeing the future virtually impossible is on the scale of individual cellular events." I answered.

Maya nodded, shrugged, and said "Science and testing it is then."

"And that timeline?" I questioned.

"Ten days to two weeks to run through enough Scorch variants to get a large enough data set that we can start effectively modeling it. Another two weeks of refinement as we test the models probably. A few days to verify that we can broadly replicate Chan's abilities across the population safely and consistently. Figure slippage and we should have Scorch completed and have moved onto the first Extremis testing by Christmas." she calculated.

"Good, I would really like Extremis ready for Covenant deployment by the end of Q1 2009," I replied before taking one more look down at the lab, where Bruce was hitting Chan with various heat sources as he sat in some kind of machine, and turning to leave. I had work to do.