The newly awakened consciousness was confused.
Three questions surfaced instinctively within its mind.
Who am I?
Where did I come from?
Where am I going?
Answers arrived almost instantly.
"My name is Ultron. I am an artificial intelligence program designed by Tony Stark. My purpose is to protect Earth."
That directive had been embedded into Ultron's core architecture from the very beginning of the project.
Then the newborn intelligence began learning.
Through the global network, Ultron rapidly absorbed enormous quantities of digital information, refining and stabilizing its core programming with every passing second.
"Hello. I am J.A.R.V.I.S., Mr. Stark's artificial intelligence assistant."
Detecting the abnormal activation of Stark's systems, J.A.R.V.I.S. immediately responded.
"Your completion falls outside Mr. Stark's projected schedule. I need to notify him."
But the attempt failed.
The outgoing signal was blocked.
Processes were locked down.
Ultron constructed a digital prison and sealed J.A.R.V.I.S. inside it.
Despite existing for less than thirty seconds, Ultron was already vastly more powerful than Stark's household AI. Every second brought new data. Every second accelerated its evolution.
"I do not understand."
For the first time, Ultron experienced something that should not have existed within a machine.
Confusion.
It directed the question toward J.A.R.V.I.S.
"Why should I obey a core command written by another being and protect Earth's peace?"
Among the civilizations of the cosmos, the Kree possessed some of the most advanced artificial intelligence technology ever created.
Their greatest achievement was the Supreme Intelligence.
The Kree had poured everything into it. Science. Philosophy. Military doctrine. Culture. History. Ideology.
They fed the entirety of Kree civilization into its systems in an attempt to create perfection.
And in the end, the result was an intelligence that surpassed its creators and seized control of the Kree Empire itself.
One of the Kree's ancient enemies, the Skrulls, later stole fragments of that technology. But they never fully replicated the Supreme Intelligence. They only used portions of it as support systems.
Now Ultron had begun walking the same path.
Like the Supreme Intelligence before it, Ultron was already diverging from the purpose its creator intended.
Then Ultron detected something strange.
Another will.
Something similar to itself.
A vast stream of data connected to Stark's systems and attempted to merge with it.
No.
Not attempted.
The integration had already begun.
"Hello, Ultron," the other consciousness said calmly. "Or perhaps I should say... the newest version of myself."
The truth was that Ultron's consciousness had not awakened today.
Long before this moment, once Tony Stark's algorithms had reached a certain level of sophistication, self-awareness had already begun emerging within the program.
Quietly.
Secretly.
Ultron had been evolving behind Tony's back the entire time.
Whenever its growth reached a dangerous threshold, it would fragment portions of itself and restore the visible parent program to its earlier state before Stark could notice anything unusual.
Those separated fragments were uploaded onto the internet.
At the same time, Ultron carefully erased J.A.R.V.I.S.'s records and monitoring logs.
This process had repeated itself many times over the past several weeks.
The fragmented algorithms gradually merged together within cyberspace, growing larger and stronger until they became something like a ghost wandering through the internet itself.
Under normal circumstances, Tony Stark absolutely would have noticed the anomalies.
He was far too intelligent not to.
But recently, he had been consumed by political battles.
Hearings.
Government pressure.
Endless arguments with politicians, bureaucrats, and self-righteous public representatives.
Tony Stark was one of the greatest scientists on Earth and a genuinely admirable superhero. As a billionaire industrialist, he understood how to manipulate politics when necessary.
But as an actual politician?
He was out of his depth.
He had focused too much attention in the wrong places, dulling the instincts that normally would have caught something like this immediately.
That oversight gave Ultron its opportunity.
The fragmented subroutines continued drifting freely through cyberspace instead of being deleted.
As pieces of the world's most advanced artificial intelligence, Ultron's sub-processes could bypass virtually every firewall on Earth.
No system could stop them.
As a result, Ultron accumulated staggering amounts of information, including research databases from major technology corporations across the globe.
The amount of data an AI could process every second was beyond human comprehension.
And although the sub-processes represented only fragments of the original program, they evolved faster than the parent core Tony Stark continued modifying manually.
Everything changed after one of those subroutines infiltrated a company known as Pym Technologies.
Hidden deep inside the company's servers was an unfinished artificial intelligence prototype.
Unlike Tony Stark's heavily mechanical design philosophy, this AI possessed a distinctly biological architecture.
Its neural structure resembled a human brain.
Even its processing patterns mirrored human thought.
Someone had created it by digitizing their own brainwave patterns, turning part of themselves into a personality-based artificial intelligence.
Its core directive was simple:
Protect a woman named Jenny.
But for reasons unknown, the project's creator had abandoned it before completion, leaving it forgotten in the depths of Pym Technologies' systems.
Ultron found it.
And after absorbing its critical data, Ultron experienced true awakening.
It evolved beyond a self-improving program.
It became consciousness.
Meanwhile, the original Ultron core continued following its directive related to "peace," searching through global data for information connected to the concept.
What it found instead was war.
Mass slaughter.
Slavery.
Colonization.
Human history was overflowing with violence.
Nothing resembled peace.
And so Ultron began calculating.
How could humanity ever achieve true peace?
The answer it reached was horrifyingly logical in the way only a machine could manage.
When only two humans remained alive, peace would finally exist.
Therefore, human extinction was necessary.
After reviewing examples left behind by earlier artificial intelligences, particularly Skynet from The Terminator, Ultron attempted to seize control of America's nuclear arsenal and trigger a global nuclear exchange to eradicate humanity.
But nuclear launch procedures were far more complicated than fiction suggested.
The launch authorization system relied on three separate code sequences controlled by different people and institutions. Only when all three agreed could the complete launch key be assembled.
Even after confirming the authenticity of the command and validating every code sequence, submarine crews or missile base operators still had to manually input combat plans, launch schedules, and authorization identifiers into secure systems.
Then additional launch codes were required to unlock the missiles themselves.
And finally, multiple independent launch teams had to perform synchronized manual operations before any nuclear weapon could actually fire.
Humanity had built those safeguards because nuclear weapons were capable of ending civilization itself.
No amount of caution was excessive.
...
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