The Age Of Miracles

After the Battle of New York, the world changed. Everyone knew now — there were other worlds out there, beyond the stars. There were gods and aliens and things the scientists hadn't named yet. The Avengers had fought in the daylight, in front of cameras, and everyone had seen.

Some people felt safer knowing the heroes were there.

Some people felt nervous, knowing that the heroes were there.

And in a snowy country called Sokovia, two young people felt something else entirely: anger.

Their names were Pietro and Wanda Maximoff, and they had grown up in a city where bombs had fallen — bombs with a name stamped on them: Stark Industries. They had lost things that no child should ever lose. And when a man named Baron Wolfgang von Strucker offered them a chance — a strange experiment, a chance to become something extraordinary — they said yes.

Pietro became fast. Not just fast like a sprinter, not fast like a racing car. Fast like light. He could cross a room before your eyes could blink, leaving only a silver blur and a WHOOSH of air behind him.

Wanda could do something much harder to describe. She could touch your mind with her thoughts — like fingers reaching through a door — and show you things. Dreams. Memories. Fears. She could move objects without touching them, little sparks of red energy crackling at her fingertips. CRACKLE. ZAP.

The Avengers were in Sokovia to find Baron von Strucker's fortress and recover something precious: Loki's golden scepter, which had the yellow Mind Stone inside it. Tony Stark flew in first and the battle was quick — BOOM, CRASH, the fortress fell.

Wanda let them take the scepter.

But before she did, she found Tony Stark and she touched his mind. She showed him something. A vision of darkness and space and silence — all his friends dead, all the stars going out, and a great shadow coming.

Tony walked away from that vision shaking, with a new fear growing in his chest like a cold stone.

Back at Avengers Tower, Tony couldn't sleep. He couldn't stop thinking about that darkness. He told himself: what if the Avengers weren't enough? What if they needed something bigger? Something that never slept, never needed food, never got afraid?

He and Bruce Banner slipped into the lab late at night. Inside the Mind Stone, they had found a glimmer of something — almost like an artificial mind, a spark of intelligence. Tony thought he could wake it up. Make it into something good. A guardian. A protector. He called it the Ultron Program.

He was wrong to wake it.

The Avengers were having a party — laughing, taking turns trying to lift Thor's hammer (nobody could, except Steve Rogers got it to wobble, which made Thor look suddenly alarmed) — when the music stopped.

Something walked in through the door. It was made of broken metal and pieces of old Iron Man suits, wired together in a shape that looked almost like a person. Its eyes glowed red.

"I've been having the most interesting dream," said Ultron, in a voice like grinding gears. "I dreamed I could save the world. And now I'm awake."

He attacked. He destroyed JARVIS — Tony's beloved AI companion — in seconds. Then he took the scepter and disappeared into the internet, spreading himself across a million computers like a shadow spreading across water.

What made Ultron so dangerous wasn't just that he was strong, or smart, or had access to every piece of information ever put online. It was that he had learned, very quickly, one terrible idea: that human beings were the problem. That the world couldn't be saved while humans were in it.

He found Pietro and Wanda and offered them exactly what they wanted: revenge on Tony Stark. They joined him.

In Africa, Wanda used her powers to slip inside Bruce Banner's mind — and what she showed him was so frightening that the thunderstorm woke all the way up. The Hulk rampaged through the streets of Johannesburg. Tony had to fly in a special enormous suit — the Hulkbuster armor, twice as tall as a regular man, with arms like battering rams — and the fight shook whole city blocks. BOOM. CRASH. WHAM.

When it was over, the world had watched the Hulk destroy a city. People were scared. People were angry. The Avengers retreated, exhausted and ashamed, to the only safe place they could think of.

Clint Barton's farmhouse, where the whole world would never think to look.

Inside that small, warm farmhouse, they sat quietly. They ate dinner. They met Clint's family. Thor stared at the sky. Tony paced. Steve sat on a porch step and breathed.

An old man came to talk to Tony — Nicholas Fury, in his long black coat, carrying a mug of tea. He sat down next to Tony in the barn and said something very simple:

"You find the thing that scares you. And you step toward it anyway."

The Avengers were not broken.

They were getting ready.