Man Out of Time - A Captain America / Avengers Fanfiction

Chapter 48

Chapter 48

Bernice stared at the clock. Three forty-five. Ten minutes since the last time she had looked at the clock. She looked at her watch, hoping the clock in the laboratory had stopped and it was really time to go home, although she wasn't looking forward to that, either. Where was home? Her old apartment, which Steve had made obstinately clear he did not wish to live? Or the sterile flat he'd carved out for himself, only the red, white and blue of his down comforter giving the place any color? She looked at the clock again. Three fifty. One hour and five minutes until she could blow this joint and go home to stare at the clock, instead. Waiting for Steve to call her.

She checked her cell phone to make sure it hadn't rung when … when she had sneezed? No missed calls. He'd warned her he might not be able to call until they got the mission finished, but waiting was killing her!

"Look look look look!" Huojin laughed. "Look. Here it is again!"

"Brain fart!" the engineers cheered.

Every engineer in the Stark Industries advanced weapons development group huddled around Ralph and Huojin, throwing in their two cents while they searched alien videos for 'flinches' and 'brain farts.' Flinches were when something triggered a deeply rooted survival instinct that caused an alien to suddenly cast off whatever program was controlling it and, just for a second, act confused. As though it had suddenly woken up and didn't know where it was. Flinches tended to happen more often with the lower brain function Leviathans. As though the animals had only been needed to be trained to act as warships and not have their higher brain functions completely overwritten.

Brain farts, on the other hand, were when a higher functioning Chitauri drone got conflicting information, often because one human came to the aid of another. Something in their program didn't seem capable of processing that act. Brain farts were accompanied by the peculiar two and a half second delay. It was as though their brains seized up with conflicting commands until some baseline function hit the CTRL+ALT+DEL button inside the creature's heads.

It wasn't foolproof, of course. Sometimes Leviathans had brain farts, and sometimes Chitauri drones flinched. But overall, it did seem like there was a quantifiable pattern to the alien's behavior now that they knew what they were looking for. They even had one incident where a Chitauri flinched when a mother turned on a drone that had been about to attack her young son. The mother hit the alien with a taser, shocking it. After overcoming the jolt of electricity, the alien had gotten down on one knee and reached towards the child.

The others swore the alien had been reaching to finish the child off, but Bernice was the only one who knew of Steve's attempts to reach out to Count Rugen through his art. She could swear to god the creature had recognized the child was, well, a child. Was this what had happened with Count Rugen, Steve's alien friend? Unfortunately, a passing National Guardsman shot and killed the alien, so they would never know what the creature's intention had been. But it made Bernice wonder. Given the right set of circumstances, instead of killing the drones or triggering whatever kill feature caused them all to drop dead, maybe they could somehow simply awaken them?

She looked at her watch again. Four fifteen. Forty five more minutes until she could bow out of this three ring circus. Although Ralph and Huojin had given Bernice credit, the conversation amongst the engineers was now so technical it surpassed her capacity to follow it. Ralph and Huojin were disheveled and wearing the same clothes they had been wearing when she'd left Friday afternoon.

Had it really only been three days? God. In three days she had gotten married, known more bliss than she had ever felt in her life, known more sorrow than she had felt since the day her mother had died, and now felt so anxious it felt as though she were about to burst.