“Okay,” he says slowly, “Okay, so something was happening. And you think it had to do with J?”
“No,” he says at first, and then changes it to a confused, “Yes? I’m not sure. But there’s no way JARVIS would have missed it. And there’s no way he wouldn’t have noticed my blue eyes. And ULTRON! What the hell, Rhodey? You know for a fact I would’ve never made ULTRON. I was the one that told Pym not to in the first place!”
“Wait,” Bruce interrupts, ducking down to be at face level with Tony. “What? Pym? As in Pym Technology? What does ULTRON have to do with Pym, Tony?”
He winces, holding his head as the whispers grow louder – a voice sings hauntingly about strings (uLTroN- “no sTRinGS oN ME-”), and a golden visual of code floats in tatters in front of him (SiR?). The whispers turn to screams (a quiet part of him screams-) and the mind stone pulses within the head of the sceptre, pulls him closer, pulls him under bLuE BluE blUE-
“I never made ULTRON,” he grits out, forcing the words past clenched teeth. “Hank Pym had the bright idea of using his own neural pathways to create an AI for peacekeeping purposes, and came to me for the coding part. I told him it was a stupid idea, that AI’s were unique in the fact that they didn’t think like humans, and wiring one with a human brain as the basis was just asking for trouble since humans fucking sucked. I told him no.”
“But-” Bruce goes, “-but you had the code. You said it was your idea. You said you saw-”
“‘A suit of armour around the world.’” He quotes quietly, the words suddenly there. “But here’s the thing,” he looks up, eyes tight from the pain and the jarring voice still singing in his ears, “Why would I make a brand-new AI for that?”
Bruce doesn’t get it. His expression says that completely. His eyes are wide, his eyebrows furrowed, and he just doesn’t get it. But Rhodey- Rhodey’s expression breaks, grief and the sudden realisation of the truth dawning on him, and even FRIDAY’s eyes glow brighter as recognition sets in.
“Why would I go out of my way to build ULTRON, a brand new AI, one that would have to learn everything from scratch, for the express purpose of something as huge as world peace?” Tony continues, trying to explain it to Bruce, but also feeling the need to defend himself, to defend the idiot Stark who’d been unable to drag his dumb ass out of the blue to not do something that had destroyed a country. “Why the hell would I even bother when I already had an AI that knew exactly how to pilot my suits, that knew exactly what to do in any situation because they’d already grown and become their own person? Who I trusted with my life- hell, fuck that, who I trusted with Rhodey’s life. And I’ve looked at stuff too! I had VERONICA up in orbit! Why wouldn’t I just extend her responsibilities? Put up a couple similar in orbit and have her control them? Deploy Iron Man suits from space to hotspots that needed them? Why the hell would I create a brand new AI with alien tech I didn’t understand for something that I could have easily done already?”
He’s shouting now, voice raised. His head’s up, his eyes are still squinted against the pain, his head is pounding and his ears are drowning in the whine of repulsors powering up. He can see flashes of things – a party, a hammer, a broken down bot and a city being laid to siege. He can see a farmhouse, Rogers’ snapping a log clean in half with his bare hands, Fury looking old and weary, and-
Everyone looking at him. Judging him. Blaming him for creating a killer robot.
He’s on his feet – when did he get on his feet? The other Avengers, the ones that disappeared because they were considered criminals worldwide, are suddenly staring at him, pulled in by his voice. The hands slide off him – he misses their warmth for a split second before he forgets that too – and-
“Why the hell,” he hears himself demand, angry at Bruce, at Rhodey, at Thor and the damn criminal Avengers, at his own damn self, “would I even bother when I already had the means to manufacture a suit and stick it anywhere I damn well wanted! Why the hell would I suddenly create an AI that malfunctions when I’ve been making AI’s since I was seven! When I already had four functioning AI’s and two more in the works! Why would ULTRON be the AI that suddenly turned evil? Did any of you even stop to think about that or was it too fucking convenient to just blame stupid, arrogant, Tony fucking Stark?!”
It shows how idiotic the entire idea was on the storyboard when they made that movie, but because they don’t analyze their own stories, the movies they make, don’t try to understand what they already established about the characters, MCU comes off as a jumbled mess with no logic to it.
