The silence in Lab 7 of the Sentinel Complex was with the near inaudible hum of quantum computers, the soft hiss of cryogenic cooling systems, and the thrumming energy of the object at its center.
For three days, this had been Tony Stark's entire world. He hadn't slept, subsisting on a caffeine drip and the manic energy of a problem that defied all known science.
In the center of the reinforced containment chamber, levitating in a perfect magnetic stasis field, was the old wooden chest recovered from Steve Rogers' home.
The chest itself had been an interesting puzzle. Its lock had been an old fashioned tumbler mechanism, but Tony had used a micro drone to map its interior before opening it.
Inside, nestled in fabric, were the two artifacts that had consumed Tony's every waking moment. The Advanced Tech Suit and the Temporal GPS.
Tony stood before a transparent holographic display, his fingers dancing across its surface, manipulating complex data streams.
Opposite him, also in a lab coat, was the Princess of Wakanda. They were two of the greatest scientific minds on the planet.
"Run the initial material analysis again, Shuri," Tony said. "There has to be something we're missing."
"I have run it seventeen times, Tony," Shuri replied. "The results are consistent. The suit's primary fabric is a carbon nanotube weave, but it's infused with a crystallized form of Pym Particles. The technology is breathtaking. Or rather," she corrected herself, "it was breathtaking. The particles themselves... they're dead."
On the main holographic display, a complex model of a Pym Particle appeared. It should have been an oscillating sphere of impossible physics. Instead, it was a fractured mess.
"The Pym Particle suspension has completely collapsed," Tony said. "The particles have decayed into a chaotic cascade of exotic radiation. We're picking up traces of tachyons, gravitons, even some quantum foam residue. It's the fuel has turned to sludge and poisoned the entire system."
Their initial scans had been a flurry of excitement.
They had detected the lingering energy of a technology that could manipulate spacetime.
But the more they looked, the deeper they probed, the more they realized they were performing an autopsy on machine.
"We tried to power the suit's core," Shuri said. "We attempted to introduce a clean energy source directly to the primary power conduit. The moment the energy was introduced, the suit's remaining particle matrix acted like a sponge, absorbing the energy and then instantly neutralizing it, accelerating its own decay process. It's a closed loop. Trying to power it actively destroys it."
"It's a brilliant piece of engineering," Tony murmured. "Whoever built this, he didn't want anyone else playing with his toys."
Frustrated with the suit, they had turned their attention to the real prize: the Temporal GPS. The wrist mounted device was the the map to the corridors of time.
"What about the GPS?" Aryan's voice came through a speaker on the console.
He and the rest of the council had been in constant contact, observing the research from the main war room.
"The GPS is even worse," Tony said, swiping the display to a new schematic. It showed the internal circuitry of the device, a mess of corrupted data streams and broken quantum connections. "This thing worked on a principle of quantum entanglement. It would entangle a particle here with a particle at a specific coordinate in spacetime. To travel, you just had to... follow the string."
He shook his head in awe at the elegant simplicity of it. "But the entanglement has completely decohered."
Shuri brought up another visualization. It looked like a map of the stars, but instead of clear points of light, it was a chaotic mess, like a television screen with no signal.
"The core temporal database, where the 'return coordinates' would have been stored, is gone," she explained. "The quantum bits that hold the data in their fundamental state have been randomized. It's like a hard drive that's been wiped, shredded, set on fire, and then had its ashes scattered in a hurricane. There is nothing to recover from. Not a single byte."
They had tried everything. They had bombarded it with neutrinos, trying to get a reading of its past state.
They had subjected it to deep level scans from their most sensitive atomic force microscopes.
"So, what you're telling me," Aryan's calm voice said, "is that we have no way of knowing where he came from? And no way of replicating the technology to send him back?"
"That's the long and short of it," Tony sighed, finally leaning back from the console and rubbing his tired eyes. "The original design was a masterpiece.. But whatever this suit went through, or however long it sat dormant in that chest... it scrambled the very science it was built on. There is nothing to replicate, nothing to reverse engineer."
He looked at the suit, levitating silently in its containment field. "It's just a beautifully designed, and completely useless piece of radioactive junk."
A heavy silence fell over the lab and the war room.
Their one tangible link to the source of the coming incursion, their one hope of understanding and perhaps reversing the damage, was a dead end.
The seed of their destruction was a fossil, its DNA scrambled beyond recovery.
"What about Rogers himself?" T'Challa's voice came through, always focused on the next strategic variable. "Can he tell us anything?"
"We've been debriefing him for three days," Sharon's voice answered. "He's been cooperative. But his knowledge is from the user end. He knows how to 'dial a date' and 'press the button.' He doesn't know the first thing about the quantum mechanics behind it."
The situation was a perfect paradox. They had the man who was the source of the problem, and they had the machine he had used. But both were dead ends.
The man had no knowledge, and the machine had no function.
They were standing at the scene of a cosmic crime, holding the murder weapon, but it had no fingerprints, and the prime suspect had amnesia.
"So, we're back to square one," Namor's voice growled with impatience. "We know the 'what'… an incursion. We know the 'who'… Steve Rogers. But we still have no idea 'how' or 'why'."
"Not quite," Tony said. "We've learned something."
He turned back to the main console. "We've learned that time travel... it's unstable. The act of using it might be what causes the 'wound' in spacetime. And we've learned that its creator, my other self, was smart enough to build in a self-destruct mechanism that turns the tech to junk after its use."
"The vision from the future 'The seed was planted in the past.' We all assumed that meant this suit. But what if we were wrong? What if the suit isn't the seed? What if the suit was just the gardening tool?"
"What if the seed," Tony said, "is Steve Rogers himself?"
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