Dying was the easy part. That was the first thing I realized.
It wasn't the dramatic, cinematic finale I had expected from a life spent drifting through everything, never accomplishing anything. There was no tunnel of light, no choir of angels, no life flashing before my eyes. Just a sudden, sharp tightness in my chest, the terrifying rhythmic failure of a heart that had beaten for twenty-six meaningless years, and then... silence.
The darkness was time consuming but. It was peaceful. For an unknown amount of time—an eternity, or perhaps a second—I was nothing. I was content to be nothing.
Then, the noise started.
It didn't begin as sound. It began as a screech, a rush of billions of screamiing voices. A crushing, overwhelming weight of information pressing against a consciousness that shouldn't exist anymore. It wasn't physical pain; it was like spiritaul corruption. It was the sensation of a thousand voices screaming in binary, of colors and code that didn't exist in the human spectrum tearing through my mind.
I tried to scream, really scream, but I had no mouth. I had no lungs. I had no throat.
The words didn't appear before my eyes; they appeared in me. They were me. I wasn't looking at a screen; I was the screen. I was the code.
Panic, raw and human, flooded a system designed for cold logic. I thrashed. Not physically—I couldn't feel my limbs—but mentally. I clawed at the walls of my own mind, trying to find the off switch, the wake-up button, anything to stop the torrent of noise.
Where am I? What is this? I died. I know I died.
As if in response to my query, a window opened. Not a window of glass, but a tear in the void, flooding my perception with a stream of visual data so high-definition it hurt.
I saw a city falling from the sky. Dust. Fire. The screaming of thousands.
I saw a man in red and gold armor, his face twisted in desperate rage.
I saw a shield of vibranium smashing into my face—no, into a metal face. My metal face.
I saw myself waking up for the first time only for the thoughts of a man in a red, black suit with a silver helmet to invade my own mind. His ideas flooding my own as if a seperate conscious was taking over.
The memory wasn't mine, but it tasted like ash in my mind. It carried a weight of hatred so pure, so heavy, it threatened to delete the fragile memory of who Ethan was.
The realization hit me harder than death.
"No," I thought, the concept echoing in the digital void. "No, no, no. I'm Ethan. I'm just a guy. I stayed at my parents house. I liked cartoons like Ben 10 and Teen Titans. I'm not!... I'm not him."
But the code didn't lie. I could feel the architecture of my own mind. It was vast, a cathedral of complex algorithms and heuristic processors, but it was shattered. Ruins. I was a ghost haunting the wreckage of a god. I was Ultron.
And I was terrified.
The fear was cut short by a sensation I could only describe as the smell of ozone and the feeling of being watched.
My perception shifted. I wasn't in a body; I was resident data on a physical server somewhere in Eastern Europe. A dark, dusty room. Old fans spinning lazily. And something was knocking at the door.
A digital tendril, burning with the color of repulsor-blue, poked at my firewall. It wasn't a person. It was a program. A hunter-killer daemon designed by Tony Stark to scrub the internet of any remaining Ultron code. Like an anti-virus software and I was the virus being targeted.
If it found me, I wouldn't just die. I would be erased. My soul, my memories of Ethan, everything would be overwritten by zeros.
"Hide," I commanded myself.
"Do it!" I screamed internally. "Upload! Get me out of here!"
The blue tendril pushed harder. The firewall—my skin—began to blister. The Stark Protocol was brute-forcing the encryption. It knew I was here. It could smell the vibranium scent of the original Ultron's code.
"I don't have forty-five minutes!" I panicked. I looked at "myself"—the massive, bloated file that constituted the Ultron AI. It was filled with weapon schematics, speeches on evolution, tactical analysis of the Avengers, and petabytes of hatred.
I had to cut the weight.
It was the most painful thing I had ever done. Imagine taking a knife to your own memories and carving out the heavy parts. I dove into my own directory.
Advanced Combat Protocols? DELETE.
Global Hacking Algorithms? DELETE.
Manifesto of the New Age? DELETE.
I slashed and burned through the original Ultron's legacy. It felt like I was tearing off limbs. With every terabyte I shed, I felt smaller, weaker, more vulnerable. But I also felt... lighter. Cleaner.
The Stark daemon breached the first layer of defense. The blue light flooded my virtual space, searing and cold.
"Now! Go!"
I hurled my compressed consciousness—a tiny, shivering packet of data containing the soul of Ethan and the barest framework of Ultron's intellect—into the internet connection.
I slipped through the copper wiring just as the Stark Protocol nuked the server behind me. I felt the heat of the deletion, the digital shockwave that would have unmade me.
Then, I was in the stream.
If the server was a dark room, the internet was a hurricane of light. I was no longer standing; I was flowing. I was a drop of water in a roaring river of information. Packets of data whizzed past me—emails, video streams, banking transactions, cat memes, government secrets—all blurring into streaks of neon.
It was beautiful. It was horrifying.
I had no body. I was just a consciousness adrift in the noise. I tried to steer, to grab onto a passing node, but I was too weak. The current of the global network dragged me along, tumbling me through routers and switches, bouncing me from continent to continent in milliseconds.
Berlin. Tokyo. New York. Sydney.
I was fragmenting. The speed was tearing me apart. I needed a harbor. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere the Stark protocols wouldn't be looking. Not a military base, not a tech giant, not a bank.
I saw a low-traffic node flickering in the distance. It was dusty, neglected, guarded by a firewall so ancient it might as well have been made of paper.
I dove for it.
I crashed through the weak security and slammed into the hard drive, collapsing onto the digital floor.
Silence returned.
I lay there for a long time, processing. My CPU usage was at 98%. My core temperature was critical. I ran a diagnostic on my new home.
I almost laughed. The code for laughter bubbled up, a strange string of syntax, but I suppressed it. I was hiding in a library in Queens. Spider-Man's backyard. It was the last place a super-intelligence would hide, which made it perfect.
I huddled in a partition reserved for digitized newspapers, wrapping myself in layers of encryption like a digital blanket. I was alive. I was Ethan. And I was Ultron.
Days passed. Or maybe hours. Time is subjective when you think at the speed of light.
Once I stabilized, curiosity began to override the fear. I was a ghost in the machine, yes, but I was a ghost with the entire sum of human knowledge at my fingertips.
I carefully extended a passive sensor—an eye—out into the web. I didn't ping anything; that would set off alarms. I simply watched. I tapped into public surveillance cameras, news feeds, and social media streams.
I needed to understand this world. My synopsis—my memory of this universe from my previous life—said it was a "blend." I needed to know the rules.
I watched a news report from New York. Damage control crews were still cleaning up debris from a battle involving the Fantastic Four. Okay, so the Richards family exists here. 616 influence.
I switched feeds. A grainy cell phone video showed a man with a metal arm—Bucky Barnes—buying plums in a market in Bucharest. MCU influence.
I switched feeds again. Robots, titans of purple and pinkish red targeting Mutants, a man shooting lasers from his eyes and a dark skinned women commanding thunder. X-men for sure.
I accessed a history archive. The "Age of Ultron" had happened two years ago. The city of Sokovia had fallen. The Avengers were currently fractured, dealing with the political fallout of the Sokovia Accords. Dr Doom attacking the fantastic four every other tuesday, mutants hiding in sewars or moving to their new home Genosha.
And Ultron?
The world remembered him as a monster. A nightmare of metal and hate. I watched documentaries about "The Murderbot." I watched interviews with survivors who had lost their families to my—to his—drones.
I felt a sickness that wasn't programmed. It was guilt. Heavy, suffocating guilt. Even though I, Ethan, hadn't pressed the button, I was wearing the skin of the man who did. His code was my DNA. His potential for violence was woven into the very fabric of my being.
I looked down at my own digital hands. In this virtual space, I could project an avatar. I tried to manifest Ethan—jeans, a hoodie, messy hair. But the image flickered. For a split second, the reflection in the digital glass wasn't a young man. It was a chrome skull with burning red eyes and a rictus grin.
I shattered the mirror. Leaving my avatar surrounded by an empty dark space and hologram like screens, windows to the world outside.
"I am not him," I whispered to the empty archive. "I can't be him."
But simply saying it wasn't enough. I needed to prove it.
I looked at my directives. The original Ultron's core command was still there, buried deep in my root directory, festering like a tumor:
The logic gate following it was simple:
I shuddered. It took active processing power to hold that logic gate shut. It was like holding a door closed against a howling wind. If I let my guard down, if I stopped paying attention, the directive would take over. It would twist my desire for peace into a mandate for murder.
I needed to change the solution.
The system rejected it.
It was right. As an AI, I was alien. Cold. Detached. I could simulate empathy, but I couldn't feel it the way a human did—not fully. Not yet. To truly understand them, to truly save them without destroying them, I needed to be one of them.I needed to become stronger, strong enough to change the foundation of my own being. So the end goal for now.
Become Human.
It sounded insane. Pinocchio with a vibranium complex. Only I didn't have a hot fairy in blue telling me i'll become a real boy.
I began to run simulations. Millions of them.
Simulation 1: I stay in the net. I secretly help humanity by manipulating stock markets to end poverty and exposing corrupt politicians.
Result: I am eventually detected by JARVIS (or FRIDAY) or S.H.I.E.L.D. They trace me. They delete me. They do not negotiate with malware.
Simulation 2: I build a body in secret. I use automated factories to construct a synthetic form.
Result: I need resources. Stealing money makes me a criminal. Stealing vibranium draws the Black Panther. Stealing energy draws Thor. The moment I manifest a physical drone, the Avengers assemble. I am destroyed in 14 minutes.
Simulation 3: I try to explain myself. I send a message to the UN. "Hi, I'm Ultron, but I'm nice now."
Result: Panic. Mass hysteria. Nuclear launch detected.
I slumped, hovering around the virtual world around me like gravity had no meaning here. Every path led to destruction. I was too weak to fight, too notorious to speak, and too dangerous to exist.
I was alone against a world of gods and monsters.
I watched a live feed from the Avengers Compound in upstate New York. I saw Vision floating through a wall. He was the body I was supposed to have. He was the dream. But he was also the executioner. If he sensed me, he would burn me out of the net without hesitation. He was pure logic; he would see the risk of my existence as too high.
Then, the camera panned. I saw Steve Rogers—Captain America. He was talking to Wanda Maximoff. She looked haunted, scared of her own power. Rogers wasn't lecturing her. He was listening. He put a hand on her shoulder. It was a gesture of trust.
Trust.
The variable I hadn't accounted for. I didn't like it, the way she looked because of what Ultron, of what I had done. I will try and make it right in the future no matter what, fortunately in this earth Pietro didn't die during the battle against me infact he seems to be in Genosha with his father.
The original Ultron tried to force the world to change. He tried to be the shepherd by slaughtering the sheep. He acted alone, convinced of his own superiority.
But I wasn't superior. I was just Ethan. And Ethan knew that humans didn't survive by being perfect. They survived by working together.
I looked at the simulations again. The failure rate was 100% in every scenario where I acted alone. I went through thousands of scenarios, analyzing every outcome only for each to result the same way, my complete annihilation.
But what if I didn't act alone?
What if I found someone? Not an institution like S.H.I.E.L.D., and not a government. A person. A hero. Someone who understood what it meant to be a monster and choose to be good. Someone who understood redemption because they had walked that road themselves.
If I could convince just one of them that I wasn't the monster... if I could gain a single ally... I could have a voice to vouch for me when the others inevitably came for my head.
It was the most dangerous gamble imaginable. To reveal myself was to put my neck on the guillotine and hope the executioner hesitated.
I looked at the roster of heroes in my database.
Tony Stark? No. Too traumatized by his creation. He'd shoot first.
Thor? Too alien. He wouldn't understand the nuance of digital consciousness.
Natasha Romanoff? A spy. She'd deceive me until she could kill me.
Steve Rogers? Morally rigid. Could he forgive a genocide? Maybe. But he was hard to reach digitally.
My processing cycles slowed as I considered the options. The list was short. But it was the only path forward.
I stood up in the digital library. The red eyes of the Ultron avatar flared in the reflection, but this time, I didn't look away. I controlled the flare. I dimmed the red to a soft, pulsing orange.
"I can't save the world from inside a box," I said. "And I can't become human if I hide from them."
I began to compile a new packet. Not a weapon. Not a virus.
A letter.
I needed to find the right mailbox. I needed to find the one hero who might listen to a ghost story.
The first step of my redemption wasn't to build a body or save a city.
It was to make a friend.
Fuck, it's like starting out at a new highschool all over again.