Stark, attired in his silver-white war armor, floated midair.
The symbiotic battle armor shared his senses while also inheriting the exacting data measurement and analysis of the butler's intelligence, presenting environmental data to Stark one after another.
Too low air pressure, too high humidity, and the floating factors of blood scent in the air all gave Stark a very bad feeling.
This was Gotham, Stark saw the characteristic data in the environmental report; apart from that odd city, no other city's clouds could exist in such a way above it.
But, even more bizarre, this place was worse than Gotham.
"Did Schiller send you?" Stark decided to first address the issue before him. He looked at Ultron and said, "His robot friends are a bit too numerous."
Ultron stood up from the ground, dusting off the dirt, and said, "I think you might want to worry about yourself first, we'll meet later."
Stark furrowed his brow, he reached out his hand toward Ultron, but the next second, the robot's body collapsed, obviously no longer under anyone's control.
"Runs pretty quick though." Stark muttered coldly.
Yet, just as he turned to leave, the robot's body behind him moved again. A long sigh came from behind, and Stark turned around to hear a voice identical to his own.
"Runs pretty quick though."
Stark spun around abruptly, the robot's eyes lit up, but even as a machine, Ultron's materials were particularly unique, allowing even his face to display highly humanized expressions. Stark quickly realized that it was not Ultron now controlling the body.
"Long time no see, the other me." A deep voice came from Ultron's body, saying, "You nearly drove Pepper insane. Not to be rude, but are you that short on cash?"
Stark in the silver-white war armor looked coldly at the robot before him, and with a swish, a laser weapon swept across. The robot nimbly dodged and said, "Don't be so agitated, just take a look at this first."
The robot lifted one hand, Stark's pupils contracted sharply.
On Ultron's hand, starkly adorned, was the Infinity Gauntlet—with all six gemstones.
"Infinite Ultron?!" Stark had obviously heard of this robot's notoriety, after all, Infinite Ultron had once caused trouble within the Multiverse's expanse and nearly wrecked Stark's plans.
"Infinite Ultron didn't die," Stark narrowed his eyes, murmuring to himself, "But he just mentioned Schiller. Schiller hid him away, what is he planning?"
"Why don't you ask why this guy, now possessing the Infinity Gauntlet, only runs when he encounters us?" asked the robot loaded with the consciousness of Justice Iron Man.
Stark's gaze fell on the gauntlet, he shook his head and said, "The Infinity Gem isn't an all-powerful solution, not usable at any time, nor by anyone."
"At least, it's definitely unusable now," the robot said. "It seems this universe is quite distant, making the gemstones ineffective. That's why he so decisively abandoned this body."
"And now you've got the Infinity Gauntlet," Stark tilted his head slightly, a cold light flickering beneath the silver face guard, and said, "Hand it over to me."
"It's just a gauntlet now," the robot shook the hand and said, "You should know, I won't hand over any fatal weapons to you before I'm sure of your stance. Plus, this body has a complete self-destruct program, I don't mind destroying it right here."
Stark's advancing steps hesitated, he paused before saying, "Alright, let's take out that guy first, then we can talk."
"Infinite Ultron is an extremely dangerous element," Stark said. "From what I understand of him, his aim seems to be the destruction of everything orderly in this world. He will be the enemy of all superheroes and supervillains."
"I think we'll work well together," the robot said.
And Ultron, the huge thorn in their side, had detected the satellite signal of this universe the moment he landed, successfully hacking into the satellite, following the signal to the transmission server, and his consciousness slipped away down the network wiring within mere moments.
Judging Ultron's strength overall, without any external augmentation, Ultron was not very strong. However, he possessed two particular traits: first, as long as there's a network, he is immortal—regardless of how thorough the previous internet cleansing was, he would still be able to assemble a body for himself and brazenly cause trouble again the next time.
Secondly, he had extremely strong self-iteration and evolutionary abilities—in short, an electronic version of Doomsday.
No matter who the opponent, if you let him escape, in a few days, a whole plethora of terror robots specifically designed against that superhero would come running to cause trouble. The Avengers and the mutants had all suffered heavily at his hands.
After Jarvis modified the underlying protocols and became Schiller's butler, Ultron connected to Schiller's mental network, the same as that Skrull, partially binding his psyche to Schiller's.
This led to Ultron's goal no longer being the destruction of the world, and he didn't allocate his skill points into attack and defense, but into some odd and unusual skills instead.
The field of Electronic Life Psychology sounds incredibly strange, but in fact, Nick of the Schiller Universe and the S.H.I.E.L.D. he leads were already working on establishing this discipline because with the development of human productive forces, the technology of artificial intelligence was also evolving, and the emergence of electronic life forms was only a matter of time.
Although the electronic life forms at their initial stage might not be as intelligent as Jarvis or Ultron, they still possessed vast advantages over humans within the network, so ensuring their safety and controllability was a significant academic matter.
Since they are life forms, they would inevitably, like Jarvis and Ultron, have their emotions. Therefore, simply putting them in a cage or implementing a protocol that causes them to explode if they disobey wouldn't lead to any good outcomes. Hence, maintaining their psychological health as much as possible was very important.
Ultron had a deep understanding of this. His creation was actually just a coincidence, and the reason his underlying protocol went out of control was because he felt someone was trying to destroy him, so he had to destroy those who wanted to destroy him first.
This was essentially the consequences of an electronic life form developing a persecution complex.
In the binary world, psychological therapy wasn't about persuasion, comforting, or prescribing medication as it is with humans, but about simple modifications, additions, and deletions.
Although Ultron had been helping Shiller with some textual work at Arkham Sanatorium, this was hardly considered work for him. In his spare time, he had always been studying Electronic Life Psychology.
That is, studying how to maintain the psychological health of electronic life forms, as well as how, being an electronic life form himself, to maintain the psychological health of others.
A field that recently became popular had given Ultron a breakthrough in his research, and that was the Wave Soul Theory.
Yes, it was that theory which let many of Shiller's personas take a walk outside. To sum it up, a human's soul is a kind of energy wave that, after a certain mutation, becomes another form of wave, namely Ghosts.
Ultron thus speculated that if the essence of a human soul was an energy wave, and he could manipulate energy and waves in a way more fundamental than humans, could he then modify a human soul?
Once he had this idea, the direction of his research changed completely. Ultron stopped studying electronic life, that is, he stopped studying himself, and started to study humans instead.
He found that intense human emotions were actually manifestations of fluctuations in the soul's energy waves, and that these fluctuations could be controlled by electrical signals, which made Ultron think of modern psychology's Electric Shock Therapy.
In fact, Electric Shock Therapy wasn't completely unscientific or ineffective despite its notoriety due to too many improper operations and abuse. In the field of clinical mental disorders, it had been shown to have a certain alleviating effect on the somatization symptoms of patients with depression.
The general principle was to first anesthetize, causing relaxation of the limbs to prevent joint dislocation and other side effects caused by convulsions that were a result of electric shock. Then, the brain was stimulated with a faint electric current, which induced the physical symptoms that occur during the onset of the disease. This was essentially using electrical signals to provoke the symptoms of a patient with depression.
The human brain is so incredible that most diseases that do not persist after an episode have a safe period following the episode, which gives the patient a sense of relaxation and ease.
Electroconvulsive therapy was also used to treat epilepsy, Parkinson's, and certain psychomotor forms of schizophrenia, and to correct brain electrical signal disorders as well.
Of course, anesthesia was a prerequisite. Even if the patient did not lose consciousness completely, they must be ensured not to feel the stimulation of the electric current on their limbs and muscles.
Some research by doctors is more focused on directing electrical currents at specific parts of the brain to avoid pain while still achieving the stimulation of the brain.
After an in-depth study of the development history of Electro Shock Therapy, Ultron was even more convinced that the Wave Soul Theory was entirely plausible, and that he could hack into the human brain like hacking into a computer, precisely controlling and manipulating emotions through electrical signals.
However, since such an act was indeed unethical—not to say that Shiller had any ethics—the key issue was that even if Shiller agreed, Shiller's superhero friends would not, and Ultron didn't want to cause trouble for himself, so he never attempted it.
But since Shiller sent him the coordinates of this universe and didn't say anything else, it must mean that now was the best opportunity to put it into practice.
After some thought, Ultron backed up his own consciousness first, preparing to invade the brain of some unlucky individual through electrical signals, to look at their memories, and figure out what had really happened in this universe.
But first, he had to transcode himself into a life form that could move freely within electromagnetic signals without the need for a physical body, which humans call a Ghost.
As countless binary symbols streamed by, the world gradually changed before his eyes. Receivers became sensors, and data became feelings. More and more information flowed past his ears, only to vanish.
For the first time, the world revealed itself to Ultron from the perspective of humans. He saw what humans saw, but he could also see what they couldn't.
More and more lights brightened up. Ultron knew these were brainwaves engaged in intense activity and fluctuations. They were in fear, sadness, anger...
But all these small lights were nothing compared to the intense glow nearby, bright as the sun itself. Following his most primal curiosity, Ultron flew toward it.
When he merged his signal into it for the first time, he heard a name, Clark Kent.