Time was short. Fury dispatched Coulson to round up materials, and the man's execution was flawless — within twenty minutes he'd hauled back five or six assorted stage lights from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s recreation-wing bar.
Daisy rolled up her sleeves and put the senior agents to work.
"Hill, pull out that wire — the one inside. Yeah, that's the one."
"Natasha, line these green lights up on the left side."
"Sitwell, blue light goes in the center position. Good..."
She made no apologies, bossing everyone around in turn. Following Professor Xavier's notes and the principles of color psychology, she reconfigured the bar's laser lights into what was essentially a mood-control array.
She built a crude controller: toggle up for emotional arousal, toggle down for low mood.
One final check confirmed everything was working. She looked at Fury. "Who wants to try it out?"
Senior agents prided themselves on cool composure. Nobody wanted to be the one caught going red-faced and excitable in front of their peers. It had nothing to do with S.H.I.E.L.D. or HYDRA — it was about dignity.
With no volunteers, Daisy turned to her current designated partner: Sitwell.
She'd lost count of how many times she'd dragged him into things. His willpower was also the lowest in the room, which made him the ideal test subject.
"Agent Sitwell, you're up." She didn't wait for consent, half-dragging him in front of the lights.
"Stand still. Don't move. First we'll test arousal — Sitwell, stop looking at Director Pierce, look at me." She tweaked a setting, noticed Sitwell's left cheek twitching as he tried to signal Pierce with his eyes, and called him out. He straightened up immediately.
Daisy positioned herself behind the modified array. Three, two, one — she flipped the toggle to maximum.
Multicolored light began pulsing in a calculated pattern. When the subject instinctively tried to find the rhythm in the flashing, his emotions were drawn along without him realizing it. The external stimulation nudged his brain further, channeling the emotional response exactly where the design intended.
The agents watched Sitwell's polite, professional smile slowly curdle. After ten seconds, the corners of his mouth twitched upward with a hint of excitement. A warm gleam flickered behind his glasses. He was fighting it, visibly.
Daisy pulled back before he lost it entirely, toggling the controller to its lowest setting.
This time the effect was instantaneous. Sitwell plummeted from excitement into a state of blank, listless detachment — like a man who'd seen through every illusion the world had to offer and found none of them worth caring about.
Satisfied the audience had seen enough, Daisy killed the power and patted Sitwell on the shoulder. "You can step down."
He blinked, disoriented. Several seconds passed before he registered what had just happened to him.
His expression turned deeply strange as he scanned the room. Did I say anything I shouldn't have? Like, say, screaming "Hail HYDRA" at the top of my lungs?
Everyone else wore expressions of deep contemplation. No disasters, then. He exhaled quietly, edged a couple of steps away from the light array, and suppressed a flicker of irritation — a leftover emotional residue that faded quickly.
Discussion broke out. Crossbones drifted to Pierce's side and murmured, barely audible: "That thing could be used for brainwashing..."
Pierce nodded. Whatever Daisy's original intent, a few modifications and this device would make an extremely effective brainwashing tool.
HYDRA's current brainwashing was exactly what the word implied — washing the brain clean with high-voltage electrical pulses to wipe the memory centers. The technique was crude; to preserve combat ability the process couldn't be thorough, the physical demands were brutal, and the survival rate sat at maybe one in ten.
Daisy's mood controller, on the other hand? Tweak the design and it could replace the whole process. Safe, painless — and judging by Sitwell's demeanor, zero side effects. A gift from heaven for HYDRA's world-domination agenda.
While HYDRA's brain trust plotted ways to leverage this for the cause, Fury was asking Coulson a different question on the other side of the room.
"How much does one of these things cost?" The Director genuinely had no idea.
Coulson blinked. He'd requisitioned the lights directly; he didn't know the price either. After a moment's thought, he ventured an uncertain figure: "Maybe... three hundred dollars?"
Fury felt a physical pain behind his sternum. That cheap? The 5.5-billion-dollar budget wasn't going entirely to the Hulk operation, obviously — but at least a tenth of it should have been spent on this. Now the money was sitting in his hands and he couldn't find a way to spend it. The thought was agonizing.
He waved Daisy over. "This thing of yours can actually take down the Hulk?"
"No guarantees, but I'd say the odds are pretty good." She left herself an out.
Fury inhaled deeply — twice — and announced the meeting adjourned. The grand mobilization was unnecessary. Everyone could go home.
Agents already stationed at headquarters took it in stride, but seven or eight station commanders who'd flown in from Asia and Europe looked distinctly unamused. Hill had even traveled from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern Hemisphere for this. You told us this was an existential crisis. You dragged us across the planet. For this?
Fury had no defense. He tasked his old friend Pierce with smoothing ruffled feathers, then took Daisy to the Pentagon to meet General Ross.
The old general — who'd been steeling himself for a last-ditch, all-or-nothing operation — was blindsided by Daisy's cheap and elegant solution.
"Impossible! The Hulk is supposed to be invincible!" Ross's mustache bristled and his eyes bulged. If a three-hundred-dollar light show could stop the Hulk, then his decades-long obsession was nothing but a punchline.
The vaunted Super Soldier project, deployed on the battlefield — and the enemy hits them with a burst of lights and everyone on your side goes limp? If his rivals at the Department of Defense caught wind of this, they'd drag him before a military tribunal and make him answer for every soldier who'd died in the pursuit.
Fury stood in the corner pretending to be furniture. Daisy had to handle this alone.
"General, the principle that color affects mood isn't some bleeding-edge discovery. The DoD has its own brain-science labs — one phone call would confirm everything I've said."
The Department of Defense had been running Weapon X programs for fifty years; of course they had brain research facilities. Ross's focus, however, had always been on physical enhancement. Brain science was a completely different lane.
Looking uneasy, the old general picked up his phone and dialed.
They didn't interact often, but Ross was a genuine general, and the lab director on the other end was warmly receptive.
The call didn't last long. He set the phone down. His face had gone ashen.