Future Past

Nick Fury's office was visited by none other than Coulson, who had just set out to escort Wei Xiuming and Blade Warrior to the Osborn Industries base.

But compared to the Coulson Nick knew, this one looked older, his face weathered, his hairline farther back, and his left hand no longer his own. In its place was a high-tech mechanical hand.

To conceal his physical impairment, this Coulson wore a black deerskin glove, but when he walked, the join between his sleeve and glove still revealed the texture of machinery.

"What's your assessment of this Clark Kent? Is he really on our side?" Nick Fury took out another glass, topped off his own drink, then poured one for Coulson.

Coulson picked up the glass without hesitation and took a sip. Then, as gentle as ever, he said, "Director, I can't answer that. In the past of my world, there was no one named Clark Kent. And there was no sign of the Insects, Shocker, Fang Vampires, or Amazon Cells, either."

Nick Fury said, "But those things have appeared in my world. They're real."

"That's why I think Iron Man's theory is wrong. Time travel is fundamentally impossible. The place we reached through the quantum tunnel wasn't the past of my world, but another parallel timeline—or perhaps several," Coulson said. "Clark Kent's world, or the future of this world, is far grimmer than things were in my world. So grim that they were willing to disrupt the order of time itself to do what they did."

This Coulson had suddenly appeared before Nick Fury a few days earlier. At first, Fury had thought he was an impostor, a mimic created by the Insects or the Skrulls. But Coulson had produced evidence proving who he was, leaving Nick Fury no choice but to believe he had come from the future.

"Thanos, a powerful enemy from space, waged war across the universe for the sake of his laughable notion of balance. He gathered the six Infinity Stones, then used the Infinity Gauntlet to wield their power. With all six stones, Thanos could make a wish come true with a snap of his fingers. His wish turned half of all life in the universe to dust. Countless heroes who tried to stop him and save those lives fell along the way. Even Captain Marvel was powerless to stop him."

"After achieving his goal, Thanos returned to the planet he had chosen for his retirement, destroyed the six Infinity Stones, then died alongside them as a martyr."

"Five years later, Ant-Man, who had escaped the catastrophe by entering the Quantum Realm, returned to the real world and proposed the theory of using quantum tunnels to travel through time. Hulk and Iron Man then worked together to make it a reality."

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"To save the half of all life that had vanished, the Avengers decided to collect the Infinity Stones from points in the past, then snap their fingers again and bring back those they had lost."

At the time, Nick Fury had asked one question: "Did they succeed, or are they still carrying out that plan?"

Even the veteran agent Coulson had wept at the question. Grief-stricken, he said, "They failed. Otherwise, I wouldn't be standing here before you."

"The time travelers were somehow discovered by the Thanos of the past. He used one of their time-travel devices to reach the Avengers' era, then led his army in completely destroying the Avengers' base before the heroes could return. Everyone left behind was slaughtered. When the heroes returned with the Infinity Stones, all they saw were ruins and the bodies of their friends and family."

Nick Fury had never seen his trusted right-hand man so grief-stricken. A tear glimmered in his own single eye as he imagined the despair of that scene.

"The heroes who had gathered together were no match for Thanos and his army. The Avengers, few as they were, inevitably lost." Coulson wiped away his tears, his gaze firming once more. "But we haven't lost hope. Back then, S.H.I.E.L.D. provided the Avengers with plenty of support. We had backup technical files for the time-travel machine, so we built another quantum time machine and went back to change the future."

Nick Fury said, "Why are you here?"

"One of the Infinity Stones—the Space Stone. It's now called the Tesseract. I need to take it with me, so I can gather all six and destroy Thanos and his army."

Back in the present, Nick Fury believed Coulson had come from a parallel world, but the Tesseract wasn't something he could simply let him take. Fury might be S.H.I.E.L.D.'s director, with immense authority, but S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn't his personal fiefdom. Even siphoning funds required a plausible pretext, and the World Security Council kept a close eye on S.H.I.E.L.D., that bottomless pit of an agency. The relevant U.S. agencies wouldn't let S.H.I.E.L.D. keep such a devastating weapon as the Tesseract to itself, either.

The compromise was that research on the Tesseract would proceed as usual, conducted by S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel, but at an underground research facility belonging to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The U.S. would oversee security.

According to the theory of time travel, whenever Coulson activated the device to return to his own era, he would arrive at the very next second after he had left. So Nick Fury had kept him on as an adviser.

Coulson had said from the outset that time travelers couldn't reveal too much to people in the past, or they would disrupt the order of time. That matched what Wei Xiuming had said at first, so Nick Fury hadn't questioned him.

But the more Coulson learned about this world, the more he realized how great the differences between their worlds were. Many people and things had counterparts, but this world had several things his world hadn't at the same point in time. That made him suspect this was a parallel world.

Coulson took another sip of his drink and said, "There's one thing I can confirm, though: Clark Kent really is from the future. He didn't say it outright, instead obscuring the people involved and using metaphors. But certain events really did happen in my time. Anyone who knows enough and compares the details will find the corresponding events."

"The man who fell from a great height after his energy system failed and broke his thoracic vertebrae—I spoke with him while the Time Machine was being built. But the differences between our worlds meant there were some variations in the details. His fall didn't end too badly. After surgery, he regained the ability to move. With assistive devices, he could walk normally, and he could still take to the battlefield in his armor. Turning him into a cyborg wasn't his only option."

Nick Fury nodded slightly, but his thoughts turned to something Wei Xiuming had once mentioned: time travelers who crossed through time and plundered the past. How similar was their story to Coulson's!