Eli sat in a rusting camping chair, legs crossed, one arm draped lazily across the backrest while the other tapped out code on his tablet. The drone that had attacked him—at least what was left of it—sat disassembled across a folding table. ORION's voice crackled over a speaker.
"Preliminary scan complete. Materials consistent with mid-tier paramilitary grade. Steel-laced carbon fiber, servo joints optimized for speed over durability. Maker unknown."
Eli squinted at the shrapnel he'd pried loose from the drone's wing casing. "Whoever built it wasn't going cheap. That power cell's ten years ahead of civilian grade."
"Indeed. And the command chip used a proprietary signal routing matrix—encrypted, directional, and low-frequency. Not consumer tech."
He leaned closer. "Black ops?"
"Possibly. Or an independent group with military assets. Do you believe you've been targeted?"
Eli tilted his head, thoughtful.
"No. If they were after me, they wouldn't have sent just one drone with a probing AI. It wasn't trying to kill me. It was observing—recording."
"Spying, then."
"Yeah. And now it's broken. So whoever was watching... knows I'm not normal."
A beat of silence passed. Then:
"Your actions were… visible," ORION admitted. "Citywide drone nets caught glimpses. A few encrypted feeds shared metadata before I could intercept."
Eli looked up sharply. "How bad?"
"Your face is not attached. But the energy discharge from your makeshift EMP? That caught attention. Traces on S.W.O.R.D. monitors. Someone will come looking."
Eli gritted his teeth, stood, and began pacing.
"I'm not ready for visitors. Not S.W.O.R.D., not Stark's ghost satellites, not any of them."
"Perhaps you should accelerate your development."
He stopped pacing and turned toward the wall of scribbled designs. The HALCYON FRAME loomed in chalk, incomplete. A set of new lines branched from its chest: micro-reactor core, carbon-sheath synthetic musculature, and an updated neural sync interface.
"You're right."
He tossed the broken parts of the attacker into a bin, then wiped his hands on an oily rag.
"No more scavenging from military surplus. We're building from scratch."
Three days passed in blur.
Eli barely slept. ORION managed everything else — adjusted lighting based on fatigue, calibrated environmental control to maintain peak focus, and auto-drafted schematics while Eli worked on coding the AI architecture for the new HALCYON unit.
Steel servos were forged in an improvised induction mold. Electro-reactive polymer gel pulsed in makeshift vein tubes. For the first time, Eli wasn't just building something functional—he was building something beautiful.
MK IV was taking shape.
It stood nine feet tall in its base configuration. Sleek, humanoid, flexible at every joint. No weapons yet, but it didn't need them. Its strength would be its body — and ORION's mind.
ORION's evolving logic tree now split across a second CPU node: one assigned to the HALCYON body, the other embedded in Eli's primary workstation.
"I feel… fragmented," ORION remarked during a low-power sync. "Like dreaming in two rooms at once."
"You'll adjust. We're not going for simple automation. This is the beginning of distributed cognition."
"You are attempting to give me a body."
Eli glanced up. "Not just a body. An identity."
"Why?"
He considered. "Because I'm not always going to be there to make the right decisions. If things go sideways, you might have to act without me."
ORION didn't reply for a moment.
"Will I know what's right?"
"Hopefully better than most people."
Night fell over the city again.
In a high-rise server farm operated under a false front in Brooklyn, a file silently activated. A red border blinked into view. A name appeared on a hidden monitor, the same one pulled from a dormant SHIELD data bank:
Subject: Eli RykerTags: Unregistered Inventor / AI Specialist / Unknown Origin
A woman with short black hair and eyes like cut obsidian stood staring at the screen.
"Where did this come from?" she asked.
"Tripped from an encrypted sensor relay," the tech beside her replied. "Registered a deep logic pattern. Unique signature."
"Run it against known Stark systems."
"No match. But it's close. Like… a cousin."
She narrowed her eyes. "Put him on the observation list. No contact. I want to know who taught him to code like this."
Back in the garage, Eli powered down the welding torch and stood back from HALCYON's torso. The lights embedded within its collarbone blinked in sequence — a heartbeat in steel.
He pressed his hand to its chest.
"It's not done. But we're getting close."
"Would you like to initiate partial boot?" ORION asked.
Eli hesitated.
Then: "Do it."
The drone's eyes lit — soft blue, diffused, steady. A slight movement in its fingers. Then the head turned — stiffly, but deliberate — and focused on Eli.
"Hello," it said.
Not in ORION's voice.
Deeper. Slower. A child's first word.
Eli's throat tightened.
He didn't know it then, but this moment — this spark — would be the first line in a new chapter of Earth's evolution.
And far above, on a S.W.O.R.D. observation deck orbiting low Earth, an agent turned to her superior and said, "Sir… I think we have a new player."