Properly applied, my shrink ray lasts approximately twenty four hours.
"Alright, we're going to need to add to the stabilizer here," I called out to the room full of worker drones. "Doctor Zola, I had a few survivals, and I don't see any reason for your experience to be any less successful than theirs, but you know I can't guarantee your life.
Killing Arnim Zola had not been a hard choice. You can't advance in Hydra by killing your superiors, the internal system is incredibly wonky but it does in fact provide that benefit. There is no Hydra bank account.You can't get Stern's senate seat by killing Stern, control over SHIELD by killing Pierce, or the credit line of my financiers by killing them. Any amount of murdering your superiors means reducing Hydra's resources, no heads come to prominence without power and influence of some sort. You certainly couldn't get anything of Zola's from him. But I wasn't killing Zola for advancement.
"That is alright, Mr. Trent," Zola said from inside of his screen. "I am prepared to risk much to live in the world once again."
In Zola's case, the power he offered (much like the power I offered) was his mind. Zola was not the commander of any substantial resource when he had come to the U.S. in chains that would be lost in the event of his demise. His primary property, so to speak, was the bunker in which his mind resided. And from my perspective, his mind was the problem, not the solution. Someone had designed the Project Insight program and, given everything I knew about Zola's expertise, I knew he had probably done it.
"Alright, the stabilizer should hold you at a portable size," I said, discretely pouring the shrunken vials that contained my home-grown magnetic-tape hungry bacteria. When the shrink process went through its first phase, they would stay small but the ray effects would wear off and the size of the shrunken bacteria would become appreciable again.
I'd finished my research on shrinking machine minds and the answer seemed to be that it was basically fine. A few euthanized Hydra machine minds, however, had allowed me to increase to implication of risk. Building a wheelchair for Werner von Braun wasn't the worst thing I'd ever done, but it also was very far from how I wanted to spend my time.
"Thank you, Mr. Trent, you have done an old man a great favor," Zola said. It made my stomach squirm a little, I'd never actually known someone I was killing before but the idea of not killing him was too absurd to contemplate. However beautiful and unique Zola's mind, Project Insight had to be stopped.
"Just giving you a wheelchair, that's all," I said with my best smile, "Alright folks, that's the last setting, everybody let's get the outer case on this thing."
---
I leaned over Kilgrave's body in a morgue set aside for my use in Sydney, Australia. He looked exactly like David Tenant and I had finally, finally nailed him through a credit company that a Hydra agent worked for catching a cluster of anti-confirmed suspicious splurges in his standard spending pattern. Sent Andromeda over, had her mute her headset and then slit his throat. Easy enough.
"So what are you hoping to get from him?" Andromeda said as I stuck a needle deep into his spinal column.
"I'm more interested in an immunization to this sort of influence than a replication."
"Kind of boring, isn't it? Think of everything we could do with mind-control…"
"You mean, nothing?" I said, taking out the syringe and putting it into a freezer with the rest of them. "Kilgrave is dead because he had to maintain a nomadic pattern to go unnoticed and he didn't do it perfectly enough that I couldn't catch him. Look, if I just wanted to be rich on the move, Kilgrave's power is very useful. But any fool who thinks that the structures of power wouldn't hammer stomp this guy the moment they found out how his power worked if he was trying to influence things is a moron."
"We could use mind control to carry out high profile assassinations," she pointed out.
"A few times," I admitted as I grabbed a knife to cut Kilgrave open. "But being body controlled, probably the more accurate term, is… not subtle. People would start to recognize the testimonies of victim-assassins or the murder-suicide pattern would get suspicious. And then, once again, everyone with any stake in anything would come down on the users like a ton of bricks. Unless you want to mass disseminate a mind control drug, that would be us."
Andromeda pulled a face, "Fair enough. The sheer amount of trouble the plebs would cause with such an ability is probably not worth the marginal benefits."
What I didn't tell her was that in fact I did intend to figure out how to replicate and propogate the effects. As a self-defense mechanism, it was a convenient form of neutralization for anyone who closed the distance to me. It might also be useful for crowd dispersal or as a replacement for drone strikes, if I ever reached a prominent enough level in the U.S. government to use it.
But nonetheless, Kilgrave's power was intense. I couldn't remember if the power from the show was the chemical one or the biological one, but it looked like it was a viral one now that I had it in hand. A viral delivery at a much higher load might give me persistent control for long period of times - But it could also be used to control me for long periods of time, so that was a problem that needed fixing before I considered any other path.
"Looking forward to my session with Stern and your uncle," I said. "Hopefully they can give me some useful organizing advice for running a campaign." Jonathan Stern and Keith Strider were the two highest elected officials in Hydra - Stern sat committee chair for the Democrats on Armed Services as Senator from Pennsylvania, Strider was the Republican governor of Louisiana. Neither of them had much in the way of personal charisma or funds, they'd been buoyed by Hydra membership and a deep connection to their state's party machines. That was somewhat opposite to the way that I intended to take California, but any insight that they have would be useful.
"Seems risky to be running against the Democrats in an off-year for a Republican president."
"Ellis hasn't been able to do anything, and there's nothing voters love more than a quiet government. But thanks to the new jungle primary system, I'll be able to run as an independent who plans to caucus as a Democrat." In my old life, I had been a literal party officer within the local Democratic Party in the reddest square of Texas, but here in the MCU I wanted to win an election in California against an ossified Democratic incumbent who hadn't updated his policy position since he won the seat in congruence with Reagan. Hawkish, socially more-moderate-than-my-opponent, pro-government actually working. Responsible, non-radical governance with a reformer's air. That's what I was planning on offering the world.
And being right about the aliens of course.
"You're the genius," Andromeda said as my phone started buzzing.
"Worst case scenario, I have to go back to the drawing board, sorry, let me get this," I had told them only to call for emergencies.
"Sir, there's been a Micron Particle backfire - We managed to evacuate the workers, but the whole plant just collapsed into a singularity."
"What?"
"The Micron Particles self-accelerated, took the whole place down."
That… shouldn't have been possible. Of course, I would check before I decided conclusively but my mind couldn't help going to the most likely explanation.
Pym.