Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE There's Always Tomorrow
━━━━━━🕷━━━━━━
A DISCUSSION QUESTION THAT often comes up for philosophers, psychologists, and drunk college students at three in the morning goes as thus: if you knew you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do? The idea is to make you wonder how many changes you would make from the life you have now if it would come to an end in only twenty-four hours. Have you been living in a loop, where every day is the same and your only respite comes from dropping into your bed? Have you been slogging through your existence on autopilot, going through the motions only mechanically, with no real thought behind it? And would this be something you wanted to change if you knew you would soon be exhaling your last breath?
Philosophical discussions aside, though, not many people are fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on who you ask) to know when their last day is going to be. They believe they have so much time they can bury themselves in it, throw it around, waste it. At least, right until the rogue car going one too many miles above the speed limit comes barreling into them while they're crossing the street, or their heart decides that this is the day their bad diet catches up to them. One minute, they're here. The next minute, they aren't.
Cecelia Olivier was one example.
The day before she (and quite a lot of other people, too; more than could be comprehended by any one individual without the magnitude or mind power of a Celestial) died, she wasn't staring at the ceiling and being consumed with the futileness of her existence (at least, no more than she usually did). She didn't hug her family members extra tight, take a day off school, or visit places she'd never thought to explore before. She didn't breathe in as much air as she could, oodles and oodles of it; didn't go for walks in the forest and surround herself completely with nature. She didn't appreciate the uniqueness of each individual that walked past her in the street, all of them with rich inner lives as vivid as her own.
Instead, she did the same thing she'd been doing most days for the past year and a half: tinkering in Tony Stark's personal lab.
Located in the Avengers Compound in upstate New York, the lab was, if Cecelia was being honest, a complete marvel. It was a far cry from the space she'd previously worked in, a gritty warehouse where everything was homemade. Here, Cecelia quite literally had anything and everything money could buy, donated by a billionaire with enough in his pocket to purchase the Moon. Robot assistants—real robot assistants, not mechanical arms that took twenty minutes to maneuver with a remote control—scurried to and from her lab station, fetching the materials she required (well... most of the time. DUM-E's name wasn't exactly a coincidence). The tools here were the real deal, not whatever her uncle could purchase for the cheapest price. The materials were practically endless—Cecelia had worked with vibranium before. She never had to worry about dumpster diving to get what she needed.
