The gymnasium of Midtown School of Science and Technology was less a high school science fair and more a thunderous symphony of ambition. The air itself felt intelligent, crackling with a palpable energy that vibrated in your teeth. It was a cocktail of competing scents: the sharp, metallic tang of ozone from a miniature particle accelerator spitting angry violet light, the burnt-sugar smell of an over-amped soldering iron from a robotics workbench, and beneath it all, the baseline musk of teenage genius and the cold sweat of high stakes. This was the proving ground. Midtown wasn't just a top school in Queens; it was a direct pipeline to MIT, Caltech, and beyond. A strong showing here didn't just earn you a grade; it could earn you a future, with the school's administration eagerly submitting the most impressive works to the Federal Intellectual Property Council on your behalf.
That potential hung in the air, thick and intoxicating. Peter Parker felt it as he craned his neck, the knot of anticipation in his stomach twisting tighter. He watched the real players—not the students, but the adults. Men and women in impeccably tailored suits, their lapels adorned with subtle, silver pins from Stark Industries, Oscorp, or Hammer Tech. They drifted through the exhibits like sharks in a fish tank, their eyes cold and analytical, swiping through data on StarkPads as they scanned for the next big thing, the next mind they could acquire. Many times, the unbridled imagination of youth yielded brilliant, marketable fruit, and they were here to harvest it.
"See him yet?" a voice huffed beside him, yanking Peter from his thoughts.
He glanced at his best friend, Ned Leeds, whose round face was a mask of pure, unadulterated impatience. "Nothing," Peter sighed, his own hope deflating. "Maybe he's not coming."
"He has to come," Ned insisted, adjusting the hood of his sweatshirt. "He invited us. He promised we could see Adam." The name was spoken with a reverence usually reserved for saints or superheroes. "You don't just promise a kid he can see a real-life Jaeger and then oversleep!"
"Adam's not a Jaeger, Ned, the neural interface is completely different," Peter corrected automatically, his mind already whirring with schematics he'd only dreamed of. "But you're right. Aidan wouldn't forget."
How could anyone forget Aidan? Especially after he'd unleashed Real Steel on the world. The movie had been a cultural atom bomb. At first, the industry insiders had laughed themselves hoarse. A high-budget sci-fi action epic, directed, written, and funded by a high school student? Preposterous. They'd predicted a historic flop.
Instead, produced by the enigmatic new Silverwood Studios, Real Steel had risen from the muck like Adam himself. It was a word-of-mouth juggernaut, a story of a father and son breathing life into a discarded sparring bot that captured the world's imagination. It smashed box office records, became a cultural touchstone overnight, and for a solid month, the image of the gentle-eyed robot, Adam, was more recognizable than Tony Stark's goatee. For Peter, it was more than a movie; it was a revelation. For Ned, it was the coolest thing that had ever existed. And its creator, Aidan, a senior at this very school, was their god.
Just as Peter's gaze flicked back to the entrance for the thousandth time, a commotion tore through the gymnasium's hum. It wasn't an explosion or a shout, but a sound far uglier: the wet, sickening thud of a body hitting the polished linoleum floor, followed by the sharp clatter of glasses skittering across the tile.
The crowd instinctively parted, creating a cruel circle. In the center, a skinny kid with a bookish face lay sprawled on the ground, his delicate model of a mag-lev train smashed to pieces beside him. Towering over him was Thompson, a linebacker with a neck as thick as Peter's thigh, a cruel smirk plastered on his face.
"Watch where you're going, geek," Thompson sneered.
"He wasn't going anywhere, Thompson!" another student, his friend, shot back, his voice a mix of terror and outrage as he rushed to help the fallen boy. "You pushed him!"
Thompson's smirk widened. "You want some too, Morris? I've got plenty to go around for you freaks." He took a menacing step forward, and the sheer, brutal confidence radiating from him was a physical force. Morris flinched back, his friend now sitting up with a dazed expression and a smear of blood on his lip.
The crowd watched, a ring of silent, complicit faces. No one moved. Resisting Thompson was a fool's errand.
"Thompson."
The voice was quiet, yet it cut through the tension like a diamond blade through glass.
Aidan stood at the edge of the circle, his hands pushed casually into the pockets of his dark olive green bomber jacket. He wasn't as physically imposing as Thompson, but he carried an aura of unshakable calm that immediately drew every eye.
Thompson's smirk didn't just falter; it died. A flicker of something primal—fear, the ghost of a painful memory—flashed in his eyes before he could smother it with bravado. His mind, against his will, was ripped from the gymnasium and thrown back onto the muddy turf of the football field under a grey, unforgiving sky.
He remembered the challenge. Their captain, at odds with Aidan, had foolishly proposed a scrimmage: the entire first-string offense against one person. Him. Thompson, then a brash sophomore, had laughed in Aidan's face. He'd looked at Aidan's gentle smile and seen a clown. Then the whistle blew. The next twenty minutes were a blur of confusion and pain. He remembered the sensation of being lifted, not by brute force, but by a perfect, terrifying application of leverage. He remembered the astroturf rushing up to meet his face, again and again. He remembered lying on the ground, the wind knocked out of him, watching as Aidan, who barely seemed to be breathing hard, scored the final touchdown. His team hadn't just lost; they had been systematically, cruelly, dismantled. The clown had been him.
Later, in the locker room, he'd confronted their captain. The captain had looked at him with a haunted expression. "Don't provoke him," he'd warned, his voice low. "Even if it's a fight, don't do it in the school. That's all I can tell you." Thompson finally understood. Aidan's gentle face was just a mask to hide the body of a rhinoceros.
Now, looking at that same gentle face, Thompson felt a cold dread pool in his stomach. But the eyes of the crowd were on him. His pride, that fragile, stupid thing, forced him to stand his ground.
"Stay out of this, Aidan," Thompson grunted, the name tasting like ash in his mouth. "Playing football isn't the same as fighting. I advise you not to meddle."
Aidan took a slow, deliberate step into the circle. "He's a student at this school," he said, his voice dropping into a dangerously calm register. "That makes it my concern." He pointed a chin at the two boys cowering behind Thompson. "Apologize."
Thompson bristled. "Apologize? To these freaks?" he spat, the disgust in his voice thick.
Aidan sighed, a soft, theatrical sound of weary disappointment. "You know, I really don't like violence," he said, shaking his head. "It's so... inefficient." A wry smile touched his lips. "Luckily, I brought my work today." He raised his voice just enough to carry over the renewed whispers of the crowd. "Martin, would you mind coming in?"
From the main entrance came a sound that silenced every whisper. A heavy, hydraulic hiss-clank. A shadow fell over the crowd, vast and immediate.
Every head swiveled. The rhythmic clank-stomp, clank-stomp grew louder, each footfall vibrating through the floor. A figure emerged, ducking its head to clear the massive doorframe. It was a robot, a full head taller than any adult in the room, its chassis a mosaic of burnished steel and reinforced plating. A mesh guard covered its head like a fencer's mask, and behind it, two optical sensors glowed with a soft, steady, orange-yellow light.
It was Adam. Real, tangible, and standing right there.
A collective gasp sucked the air from the room, followed by an explosion of pure, unadulterated noise. Shouts of "NO WAY!" and "IT'S ADAM!" erupted as a hundred phones were raised, their flashes turning the area into a strobing, chaotic wonderland.
Walking beside the giant was the little boy from the movie, Martin, who broke into the film's iconic, quirky dance. Instantly, the robot mirrored him, its heavy limbs moving with impossible, synchronous fluidity. It was a scene burned into the minds of every teenager there.
Martin jogged over to Aidan. "Here you go, Aidan."
"Good work, Martin," Aidan said, ruffling the boy's hair affectionately and taking a simple remote bracelet from his wrist. He turned back to Thompson, whose jaw hung open, his tough-guy act shattered into a million pieces.
Adam took a single, ponderous step forward. Its metal hand clenched and unclenched with a soft, powerful hum that seemed to vibrate in Thompson's very bones.
"Now," Aidan said, his voice once again a gentle murmur that was somehow the loudest thing in the gym. "You can apologize, or you can have my exhibit personally escort you out of the building." He held up his hands. "Your choice. But I do have people waiting."
Thompson swallowed hard, the lump in his throat feeling like a rock. He looked from the unmoving, silent robot to Aidan's calm face. It wasn't a choice. He shuffled his feet, his gaze locked on the floor as he mumbled towards the boy he'd assaulted. "S-sorry."
"Excellent," Aidan beamed. He gestured grandly towards the robot. "Now that that's settled, I'm sure you're all curious. Come on, get a closer look. He doesn't bite. Usually."
As the crowd surged forward in a wave of excited awe, Aidan felt a moment of quiet detachment. The weight of the remote on his wrist was a familiar anchor. He watched Peter and Ned, their faces alight with a joy so pure it almost made him smile. In moments like this, the strangeness of his reality felt distant.
But then a camera flashed, the bright, incandescent pop of light searing his vision for a second. It was just like the dazzling light that had burned his eyes after he'd clawed his way out of that dark alley, a lifetime ago. A lifetime that had started in a dumpster, with a body broken and remade.
Before this, he was another man, on another Earth, a geologist chasing data across an arctic wasteland. Then, a fall. A chasm of darkness and crushing ice. Waking up wasn't a gentle process. It was the sharp, grinding pain of a starving child in a heap of trash. If he had fainted from the hunger, he knew he would never have woken up. He had forced his broken body on, towards a sliver of light, and collapsed. When he woke again, he was in an orphanage, the kind face of the old dean looking down at him. And there was something else, a new presence in his mind, cool and abstract. The System.
It was an impossible engine that drove his new life, offering him worlds to experience—movie worlds—and rewarding him based on the impact he made. The success of Real Steel, his first project, pulsed at the back of his consciousness: a quiet hum of available technology, of schematics and resources he could now access. Adam was just the beginning. Adam was the proof.
He pushed the thoughts away. Today was not about cosmic systems or past lives. It was about a promise to two kids, a science fair, and a fighting robot. And for now, that was more than enough. He nudged Peter and Ned forward, towards their hero. "Go on," he said, a genuine smile finally reaching his eyes. "Meet Adam."