Snowman {Bucky Barnes}

32

Ana checked in on Clint later to make sure he was okay before she followed Tony back into the lab. She had her hair pulled up in a ponytail and out of her face. She grabbed her phone and checked her messages from Sam. She basically put a whole firewall system that would take Tony a long time to hack into just to keep him out of her stuff.

"What's the rumpus?"

"Well, the scepter. You see, we were wondering how Strucker got so inventive. So, I've been analyzing the gem inside-" Tony's words seemed to have gotten Ana's attention, "You may recognize-"

A 3D image of Jarvis' consciousness is brought up and Bruce greets him, "Jarvis."

"Doctor."

"Started out, Jarvis was just a natural language UI. Now he runs the Iron Legion. He runs more of the business than anyone besides Pepper."

Ana's phone pinged and she read the message with a scowl. It was another cold lead. Ana didn't know whether she wanted to find Bucky for Steve's sake or for her own now. She felt like she had been obsessing over finding him. For the first year she had been revisiting the kiss in her head. How could she forget something like that? He was so passionate about it but his mind was scrambled. He thought she was Ana. She didn't even know what she would do if she saw him again. After a couple more years, Ana started to push that memory aside. She didn't need to think of it anymore and they had begun to hunt down the Hydra rats that got out. Ana had a reminder of Bucky hanging around her neck. She tried to give it to Steve again but he made it very clear that it was something given to her and it would be rude to give it away so easily.

But did Bucky kiss you thinking you were Tiffany, Steve? No?

"Meet the competition." Tony brings up another 3D image of what's inside the scepter.

"Holy crap..." Ana walks closer to it and compares it to Jarvis. It was far larger than Jarvis and seemed almost human.

"If you had to guess, what's it look like it's doing?"

"Like it's thinking." Bruce answers and focuses on it, "I mean this could be a... it's not a human mind, it-" He was so baffled, "I mean, look at this! They're like neurons firing."

"Down in Strucker's lab I saw some fairly advanced robotics work. They deep-sixed the data, but... I gotta guess he was knocking on a very particular door."

Ana looked through the 3D image and at Tony, "Artificial intelligence."

"This could be..." Tony walked around so he was standing beside the two, "This could be the key to creating Ultron."

"I thought Ultron was a dream, Tony." Ana eyed him. She remembered having this conversation with Bruce and Tony a couple years ago. Of course, Ana wanted peace on the planet but that just seemed impossible.

"Yesterday it was. If we can harness this power, apply it to my Iron Legion protocol."

Bruce raised a brow to him, "That's a mad-sized if."