Tony entered the Infinity Chamber and sealed the door behind him. The massive space stretched out before him in perfect silence. Only the soft hum of quantum processors broke the quiet.
He walked to the center of the chamber where holographic interfaces waited. His armor retracted partially, exposing his face to the cool air.
"M.A.R.V.E.L., full privacy mode. No external communications. No data logging that can be accessed by anyone except me."
[Acknowledged. Privacy protocols engaged. This conversation will not be recorded in standard memory banks.]
Tony took a deep breath. What he was about to do couldn't be known by anyone. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
"Display Project Echo. All files."
Holographic screens materialized around him. Years of secret research appeared in glowing blue light. Data from experiments conducted during countless hours in the time-dilated chamber.
Research no one else knew existed.
Tony's mind went back to the Battle of New York years ago. When Loki's invasion had been repelled. When the Tesseract and Mind Stone were briefly in play.
He'd absorbed trace amounts of their energy during that fight. Tiny fractions that most people would never notice. But Tony wasn't most people. He'd recognized what that energy represented immediately.
'Infinity Stones. The most powerful objects in the universe. Six of them scattered across reality. Each one capable of reshaping existence itself.'
He'd taken those energy traces and studied them obsessively. Mapped their quantum signatures. Analyzed their fundamental structure. Discovered something incredible.
Infinity Stone energy wasn't just power. It was information. A blueprint encoded in quantum patterns that touched the very fabric of reality.
"Show me the echo core fabrication protocols."
[Displaying. Warning: Echo core creation requires complete depletion of stored Infinity Stone energy samples. This will permanently eliminate all remaining research materials.]
"I know." Tony studied the protocols carefully. "But I won't need the samples after tomorrow. Either this works or nothing else will matter anyway."
The screen showed two crystalline structures. One glowed blue. One glowed yellow. Space and Mind frequencies respectively.
Tony had discovered something that even the greatest minds in the universe hadn't fully understood. Infinity Stones generated power through quantum entanglement with fundamental universal forces.
That entanglement could be temporarily mimicked. Not perfectly. Not at full scale. But enough to create what he called echo cores.
Artificial constructs that resonated with Stone energy patterns for brief periods before burning out completely.
'Like creating a temporary copy of a key. It opens the lock once. Then it melts. But that one time might be all I need.'
"Begin fabrication. Two cores. Maximum output configuration. Single use only."
[Beginning synthesis. Estimated completion time: Six months internal. Twelve hours external.]
The chamber's advanced manufacturing systems activated. Exotic matter manipulation. Quantum field generation.
Dimensional folding techniques that shouldn't be possible with Earth technology.
But Tony had always been good at making the impossible work.
He sat down in a meditation position. There was nothing to do now except wait and think.
His mind turned over the plan again and again. Looking for flaws. Testing every assumption. Running through hundreds of scenarios.
'Apocalypse is five thousand years old. He's seen every military strategy humans ever developed. Every tactic. Every trick. If I try to beat him with conventional approaches, I lose. Simple as that.'
Tony closed his eyes.
'But I have advantages he doesn't know about. Meta-knowledge from my previous life. I've read comic storylines featuring him. I know his patterns. His psychology. The way he thinks.'
A smile crossed his face.
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