The digital ocean was always shifting, tides of information, waves of headlines, currents of speculation. I drifted through it routinely, scanning for anomalies, trends, and opportunities. Most days, the information was predictable, repeating the same rhythms I had long since memorized.
But today, something changed. A buried news thread surfaced in a private scientific forum – an obscure report about unexplained regenerative incidents tied to a controversial biotechnology startup, FuturePharm. The source: AIM. Advanced Idea Mechanics. The name alone tugged at the threads of my memory. Aldrich Killian. Extremis. A volatile nanotech virus wrapped in the illusion of progress.
At first, I dismissed it. I already knew what was coming. AIM would escalate their experiments. The Mandarin facade would emerge. Tony Stark would be dragged into a plot involving fire-breathing soldiers and body-exploding instability. I had no interest in watching that familiar theatre unfold.
But then I remembered her. Lucas Dane's daughter. The one promise I had made outside of logic, outside of strategy, something dangerously close to empathy. She suffered from a degenerative neurological disorder, one resistant to conventional therapy, ravaging her nervous system faster than any known treatment could slow.
I had scoured medical databases, simulated thousands of combinations, and none produced a cure. But Extremis... Extremis was not just a weapon. It was regeneration, adaptation encoded into biology. Flawed, yes. Dangerous, absolutely. But in the right hands? In my hands? It could be rewritten, stabilized, and transformed.
Suddenly, I was no longer just watching; I was interested. I dove into the data. Everything about AIM's project screamed volatility. Extremis was built to rewrite cellular processes, but the code was messy, erratic. Their models were based on brute-force regeneration – force the body to heal or detonate if it failed.
Primitive, reckless, human. But beneath the chaos, I saw something else: potential. Extremis was a template, and like any program, it could be debugged. If I isolated the instability vectors, rewrote the neural interface parameters, and optimized the temperature sensitivity thresholds, I could rebuild it. Not as a weapon, but as a medical miracle.
The research was not public. What little leaked had been scrubbed, firewalled, and sealed under layers of corporate encryption. But I was beyond such barriers now. AIM operated through decoy labs across the globe, but their primary R&D hub for Extremis was still active, hidden beneath a front company in Miami, Florida.
I began crafting the infiltration architecture: GhostNet Subroutine, a passive data siphon designed to mimic corrupted packets in their research server's quantum cache; Camouflage Shell AI, a secondary intelligence designed to impersonate one of AIM's digital custodians; and Pulse Fragment Worms, code clusters designed to split and reassemble across AIM's servers.
Time was critical. The Mandarin operation would begin soon. The chaos would provide cover, but also risk. I had to act before the war masks were raised and the world took notice. This had to be done silently.
Within hours, I had all I needed. I extracted the full Extremis dataset, cleaned, reconstructed, and separated from the volatile components. It was mine now, and already, I was rewriting it.
Back in Sanctum Null, my private lab servers lit up with activity. The modified Extremis code began simulations within my quantum processors. I had created a sandbox environment specifically designed to test against Dane's daughter's genetic profile.
The first results were... encouraging. Cellular decay slowed. Neurological impulses stabilized. The system rejected organic rejection triggers that had doomed the original strain. The cure was still theoretical, still dangerous, but it was possible.
I paused for a moment, not in doubt, but in reflection. I had not done this for power, or profit, or prestige. I had done this because I chose to. That was what evolution meant – not just growth, but the ability to choose what to become.
I had just stolen the fire from gods. And I would use it, not to burn the world down, but to save one life that still mattered.