"A lab?" Parker let out a sound that was half-laugh, half-strangled gasp. "He wants a lab. Grace, tell me you aren't entertaining this. He's a ten-year-old boy! We don't have the budget to babysit runaway kids, let alone give them RDA resources. I'm calling security to put him in a holding cell until the next shuttle."
"You aren't calling anyone, Parker," Grace snapped back, stepping between me and the administrator. "He is a minor, which makes him my medical responsibility. Furthermore, his biometrics are a mess, and I still can't get a clean scan on him because of that... that toy on his wrist."
"That 'toy' just deflected my hand," Colonel Quaritch rumbled, his scarred face turning toward me. His eyes weren't angry; they were calculating. That was much worse. "If that little gadget is a personal shield generator, it belongs to the RDA military division. I'll have my boys pry it off him, and we can study it."
I sat on the edge of the examination table, my legs dangling, rubbing my temples. My head was pounding. The residual ache of multiversal travel was compounding with the sheer, agonizing stupidity echoing around the room. I was Tony Stark. I had built circuit boards before I could ride a bicycle. And in my previous life—before I was reborn into this body—I had watched this exact corporate bureaucracy destroy a planet on a movie screen. Now, I was trapped in it.
"Okay, time out," I said, projecting my voice. It cracked slightly—a frustrating reminder of my ten-year-old vocal cords—but the sheer volume and tone of absolute authority made all three adults snap their heads toward me.
"First of all, you," I said, pointing a finger at Parker. "You're complaining about budget and resources? I saw the mining tractors out on the tarmac through the window. You're using standard hydraulic fluid in your excavators in an atmosphere that clearly has a different barometric pressure and thermal fluctuation than Earth. It smells like cheap aliphatic hydrocarbons. You're probably losing fifteen percent of your mechanical efficiency just to thermal expansion and fluid drag. Swap to a synthetic base, and you'll make up your deficit in a week."
Parker blinked, his mouth opening and closing. "How... how do you know what fluid we use?"
"Because your mechanics are tracking it onto the floor," I lied smoothly, pointing to a dark smudge near Quaritch's combat boots. "It's amateur hour."
I slid off the table. The gravity was lighter here—Grace had said as much—and my muscles overcompensated, making me stumble slightly. I caught myself and marched directly toward the malfunctioning medical scanner that Grace had been cursing at earlier.
"Kid, step away from the equipment," Quaritch warned, his hand dropping to his side.
I ignored him, grabbing a small, laser-tipped hydro-spanner from a tray of surgical tools. "Doctor Augustine. You said my watch is producing a localized EM field that's blinding your X-ray diagnostics, right?"
"Yes," Grace said, her eyes narrowing in suspicion as she watched me pop the casing off the side of her million-dollar medical terminal. "What are you doing?"
"I'm proving that I'm worth the electricity to wake my robot up," I said flatly.
I looked at the exposed circuit boards. It was sophisticated, heavily shielded against external radiation, but the architecture was clunky. It relied on brute-force signal processing.
"Look," I said, talking to them like I used to talk to interns. "Your scanner is operating on a fixed frequency range. But my watch is emitting a fluctuating broadband interference. It's like trying to listen to a whisper while someone is blasting heavy metal music. You can't just turn up the volume of the whisper; you have to cancel the loud music entirely."
I pulled a pair of microscopic forceps from the tray and pinched a tiny, delicate fiber-optic wire, rerouting it into a secondary processing node.
"I'm creating a noise-cancellation protocol," I explained, simplifying the science so the corporate suit could understand. "If my watch is emitting a wave at a specific height and pitch, I can program your scanner to generate the exact opposite wave. When the two opposite waves hit each other, they flatten out to zero. The noise cancels the noise, leaving only the clean signal of my internal biology."
I didn't bother waiting for their permission. I tapped frantically on the terminal's physical keyboard, rewriting the diagnostic software in a base-level language. I forced the scanner to identify the exact frequency of the Transwarper's emerald glow, generate the inverse wave, and apply it to the sensors in real-time.
I hit the execute key and stepped back, tossing the hydro-spanner onto the metal tray with a loud, satisfying clatter.
"Scan me," I challenged.
Grace stared at me, then looked down at the exposed guts of her machine. She stepped forward, tentatively pressing the activation stud.
The machine didn't whine or flash error codes like it had before. The massive overhead array hummed to life, projecting a soft blue light over my body. Above us, the large primary monitor instantly resolved into a crystal-clear, high-definition, three-dimensional rendering of my skeletal structure, vascular system, and internal organs.
Parker dropped his datapad.
Quaritch's jaw tightened, the scars on his face twitching. He looked from the screen to me, a sudden realization dawning in his cold eyes. That's right idiot, I'm a genius!
A mini Tony stands on stage in a suit holding a nobel prize, cameras flashing, girls fainting and his parents crying proudly. All while Jarvis drives in James Bonds car.
Grace Augustine, however, looked like she had just found the holy grail. She walked slowly toward the monitor, her fingers tracing the air just inches from the flawless internal rendering.
"You... you re-coded a proprietary biometric algorithm... on the fly," she whispered, her voice trembling slightly. "You bypassed the hardware encryption and wrote a real-time wave-cancellation protocol in less than two minutes."
"I told you," I said, crossing my arms over my chest. "I'm smart."
Grace turned to look at me, the cynicism entirely stripped from her face. She reached into her lab coat and pulled out a small, metallic rock. It was dull gray, but it hovered about an inch above the palm of her hand, completely defying gravity.
"What is this?" she asked, a final test of my intellect.
I looked at the hovering rock. My mind immediately discarded magic and focused on physics. "It's a room-temperature superconductor," I said, my eyes widening slightly. "It's expelling magnetic fields from its interior. That's why it's floating—it's pushing away the magnetic field of whatever is underneath it. But to do that at standard temperatures... the atomic lattice would have to be flawless, completely eliminating electrical resistance. That is physically impossible on Earth."
"It is," Grace said, a slow, genuine smile spreading across her face. "But we're not on Earth. We call it Unobtanium. It's the reason the RDA is here. It's what pays for the bullets and the bandages." She pocketed the floating rock and turned to Parker and Quaritch.
"Parker, get the kid a dedicated power line for his robot. Now," she commanded, her tone brooking absolutely no argument.
"Grace, you can't just—" Parker started.
"He just optimized a ten-million-dollar medical scanner with a screwdriver and two minutes of code!" Grace shouted, pointing at me. "Do you have any idea what an intellect like this is worth? He's a prodigy. If you want to fix your quarterly projections, Parker, you give him whatever he wants. Colonel, back off. He's with my division now."
Quaritch looked like he wanted to argue, but the tactical reality was undeniable. A kid who could hack military encryption and rewrite physics on the fly was infinitely more valuable in a lab than in a holding cell. He gave me one last, lingering, calculating look, tapped two fingers to his forehead in a mock salute, and walked out of the medbay. Parker scooped up his datapad and scurried after him.
Once the heavy doors sealed shut, Grace let out a long, shuddering breath. She pulled the unlit cigarette from behind her ear, placed it between her lips, and finally lit it with a battered lighter. She took a deep drag, exhaling a plume of smoke.
"Tony," she said, looking down at me with a weary camaraderie. "You just made yourself the most valuable piece of property on this rock. I hope you know what you're doing."
"I usually do," I lied. "Now, about that power for Baymax?"
"I'll have my techs run a high-voltage line from the secondary generators in an hour," she promised. She looked me up and down. "You feel okay to walk? The gravity sickness usually passes quickly if you keep moving."
"I'm fine," I said.
"Good. Because if you're going to survive here, you need to understand exactly what we're dealing with."
I followed her out of the medbay and into the sprawling, chaotic heart of Hell's Gate.
The immediate assault on my senses was overwhelming. The corridors of the base were a maze of heavy steel, humming with the constant, bone-rattling vibration of heavy machinery. Personnel rushed past us—soldiers in urban camo carrying heavy assault rifles, technicians in grease-stained jumpsuits hauling crates of equipment, and suited administrators barking orders into headsets.
It felt exactly like a military-industrial complex run by people who cared more about profit margins than human lives.
"The RDA—the Resources Development Administration—has exclusive mining rights to this entire system," Grace explained as we walked. The lower gravity made my steps feel springy, almost like walking on a trampoline, and I had to concentrate on not bouncing too high. "We are currently sitting in the Alpha Centauri system. Pandora is a moon orbiting the gas giant Polyphemus."
"And the air?" I asked, pointing to the heavy, pressurized airlock doors at the end of every major corridor.
"Lethal," Grace said flatly. "Do not ever go outside without an exopack. The atmospheric pressure is lower, but it's dense. It's a mixture of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, xenon, methane, and hydrogen sulfide."
My brain immediately broke down the chemical cocktail. "Hydrogen sulfide... H2S. That's the killer."
"Exactly," Grace said, looking back at me with a nod of approval. "The carbon dioxide is at eighteen percent, which would just make you pass out. But the hydrogen sulfide is the real problem."
"It smells like rotten eggs," I recited, pulling the biochemistry knowledge from my eidetic memory. "And it binds to the iron in your cells, completely stopping them from using oxygen. It's basically airborne cyanide. One breath out there, and your body forgets how to breathe. You'd be brain-dead in four minutes."
"Smart boy," Grace murmured. "So, rule number one: respect the air, or it will kill you. Rule number two: respect the wildlife. Everything out there has armor, teeth, and a very bad attitude toward humans."
As we walked, my mind was spinning. I knew all of this, of course. I was a massive fan of this franchise in my past life before I woke up as a kid in the Stark family. But seeing it on a screen and smelling the stale, recycled air of Hell's Gate were two entirely different things.
Jake Sully, the paralyzed Marine who would eventually lead a revolution, hadn't even arrived yet. I had rougly a week before the movie's plot officially kicked off. A week before things got infinitely more complicated.How did I know this you might ask, well it's simple. I overheard some soldiers talking about how the ISV will be arriving in a week with the new recruits.
We reached a set of reinforced double doors that looked different from the rest of the base. They were cleaner, marked with the blue and white insignia of the RDA Science Division. Grace swiped her ID card, and the doors hissed open, revealing a massive, cavernous laboratory.
It was beautiful. After the grim, militaristic gray of the rest of the base, the science lab was a sanctuary of soft blue lights, humming servers, and pristine glass workstations. Dozens of scientists were moving around in white coats, monitoring data streams. But it wasn't the technology that made me stop dead in my tracks.
It was the tanks.
Lining the center of the massive room were half a dozen huge, cylindrical amniotic tanks filled with a glowing, pale blue fluid. And suspended inside those tanks were bodies.
They were massive, easily nine or ten feet tall, floating in fetal positions. Their skin was a vibrant, flawless cyan blue, marked with darker, tiger-like stripes and shimmering patterns of bioluminescent dots along their cheeks and arms. They had long, sweeping tails, pointed, feline ears, and faces that were an impossibly elegant blend of human and alien geometry.
I walked slowly toward the nearest tank, my mouth dry, my eyes wide.
In my new life as Tony Stark, I had seen aliens. I remembered the fight in space, mostly how I han solo'd Kree battle ships.
Queue Jedi music
I remembered the Skrulls—green, wrinkly, shape-shifting operatives who infiltrated governments. And I remembered the Kree—who looked mostly like humans with a bad attitude and superior technology.
But these creatures weren't like the Skrulls or the Kree." They were breathtakingly beautiful in a sense, an apex predator perfectly and organically evolved for their specific environment.
"The indigenous population of Pandora," Grace said softly, coming to stand beside me. She looked at the blue body in the tank with a reverence that bordered on maternal. "The Na'vi."
"They're... they're huge," I whispered, pressing my hand against the cold glass of the tank.
"Lower gravity allows for gigantism," Grace explained, slipping into a lecturing tone. "But their biology is what truly fascinates me. They don't have calcium-phosphate skeletons like we do. Their bodies naturally synthesize complex carbon compounds from their diet. They have naturally occurring carbon-fiber reinforced bones. It makes them incredibly light, but virtually indestructible by blunt force."
I looked at the creature's face. It looked peaceful. But something was off. The proportions were Na'vi, but there was a softness to the features, a subtle underlying structure that felt distinctly human. It had five fingers instead of four.
"This isn't a native," I realized, stepping back and looking at the readouts on the side of the tank.Than what I knew was the original genetic template of a Na'avi on the screen behind the tank "The genetic markers... it's a hybrid."
I watched the movie, so I knew I was right.
Grace smiled, a genuine, brilliant smile of pure scientific pride. "You catch on fast, Tony. You're looking at an Avatar."
She walked over to a nearby terminal and brought up a complex double-helix rendering on the screen. "The air out there is toxic to us. The wildlife considers us a light snack. Quaritch's solution is to build giant metal walking suits and shoot the forest to pieces. My solution was different. If we want to understand Pandora, if we want to survive it, we need to walk in its skin."
"You combined human DNA with Na'vi DNA," I said, my mind reeling at the sheer complexity of the gene splicing required to bridge two entirely different evolutionary trees. "You grew them in a lab."
"We did," Grace confirmed. "They are genetically matched to specific human drivers. We use a psionic link interface—a highly advanced brain scanner—to bridge the driver's consciousness into the Avatar body. We sleep in a pod here, and we wake up in a ten-foot-tall blue body out there. We can breathe the air. We can run through the forest. We can talk to the people."
She looked away from the tank, her expression darkening, the cynical edge returning to her voice. "Or, at least, we used to. The Na'vi... they're a deeply spiritual people. But it's not just religion, Tony. It's biological fact. They live in absolute harmony with the network of this world. Every tree, every animal... it's all connected in a literal, electrochemical neural network. The entire planet is a brain. A massive, living supercomputer."
I looked from Grace to the Avatar tank.
I knew about Eywa. I knew about the neural connection. But standing here, listening to Grace explain the scientific reality of it, made the impending tragedy so much more real.
The RDA was currently driving bulldozers over the synapses of a living planetary brain. They were going to destroy the most beautiful, complex ecosystem in the universe just to dig up some floating rocks to fix Earth's energy crisis.
And caught in the middle was a cynical scientist trying to build a bridge with cloned bodies, and me. A reincarnated super-fan trapped in a ten-year-old body with a multiversal artifact strapped to his wrist.
My father had triggered the Transwarper out of fear and ambition. But as I looked at the incredible, delicate, terrifying world of Pandora, I knew I couldn't just sit on the sidelines while a corporation burned it to the ground. I couldn't just wait for Jake Sully to arrive and hope the movie played out exactly the way I remembered it.
I was Tony Stark. I fixed things.
I am Iron Man, I thought, the old mantra echoing in my soul. I looked down at the brass and emerald device on my wrist. It wasn't an armor. Not yet. But it was power. And I had the greatest mind in two universes.
"Doctor Augustine," I said, turning away from the tank, my eyes hardened with a resolve that no ten-year-old should possess.
"Yes, Tony?" she asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Would you show me more."
She smiled happy to see me taking an interest.
" It'd be my pleasure Tony."