On the first day after All-Things Analysis went live.
Lynn spent a long time adapting to the information overload brought on by his new ability.
He stood at the clinic entrance and glanced out at the street.
Within three seconds, his mind was drowning in a sea of data.
Three of the LED bulbs on the convenience store sign across the street were about to burn out, and the roots of the London plane tree on the sidewalk were damaging the underground drainage pipes.
Twenty meters away, a middle-aged man's left knee was making a strange noise as he descended the stairs. There was a good chance it was a degenerative meniscus tear.
It was too much.
It took him the entire morning to learn how to add a filter to All-Things Analysis, using the mental control afforded by Super Intelligence to suppress unnecessary information.
He would only perform an in-depth analysis when he deliberately focused on a target. The rest of the time, it would stay in low-power mode.
The training went well.
By the afternoon, he could keep All-Things Analysis on standby while seeing patients as usual.
Something noteworthy happened the next day.
That morning, a Black man in his forties came in. He worked as a porter.
He said he'd been feeling hot lately, and small red spots occasionally appeared on his skin, only to disappear a few hours later.
A regular hospital had run a blood test and tested him for allergens, but found nothing.
When the results of the automatic scan from All-Things Diagnosis and All-Things Analysis appeared, Lynn's fingers paused on the desk.
A section of non-coding DNA on the long arm of the man's third chromosome had an abnormal methylation pattern.
The gene was normally silent, but now there were faint signs of "activation."
It wasn't a natural mutation.
The methylation pattern bore clear signs of artificial intervention and closely matched the gene-editing signature of a retrovirus.
"Have you been anywhere unusual lately?" Lynn asked.
"Just work. I live in Harlem District and work at the docks in Brooklyn. I take the subway back and forth every day."
"The subway? Which line?"
"Usually the 1 or the A. Sometimes I transfer at 125th Street."
125th Street.
The heart of Harlem District.
Lynn wrote him a prescription for an antihistamine. His symptoms did indicate a mild immune response, and ordinary medication would ease them.
But he didn't mention the genetic abnormality. He still wasn't sure what it meant.
Another similar patient came in that afternoon.
A white girl in her early twenties who lived on 116th Street in Harlem District. Her symptoms were intermittent muscle spasms and hot skin.
All-Things Analysis reached almost exactly the same conclusion: abnormal activation in a non-coding region of the third chromosome, with traces of an artificial retrovirus.
Two people, different sexes, different races, different jobs. The only thing they had in common was Harlem District.
Someone had released something in that area.
Lynn locked the two diagnostic records in a drawer.
He planned to spend some time investigating the source before deciding what to do next, but he hadn't had a chance to start.
On the third night, at seven-thirty.
The clinic was already closed.
Lynn was organizing the medicine inventory on the second floor when the encrypted communicator at the front desk rang.
He went downstairs and picked it up.
"Lynn." Fury's voice came through, half a beat more urgent than usual.
"I'm here."
"There's trouble in Harlem District, New York. In the past forty-eight hours, at least twenty civilians have undergone uncontrollable physical mutations."
"Some have grown scales. Some have bulked up until their muscles tore through their clothes. A few have transformed into completely nonhuman forms."
Lynn tapped his finger lightly against the communicator.
"Are the mutations random?"
"Random. No two people have mutated in the same way. And after they mutate, they lose their minds and attack anyone they see. The police can't contain them anymore. Three SWAT teams went in, and two were driven back."
"What's your preliminary assessment?"
"An unknown mutagenic serum. The intelligence department's preliminary analysis points to Hydra's genetic engineering methods."
"But this is cruder and less stable. From the scraps of evidence we've intercepted, it looks like one of Hydra's branches is conducting a field test."
"A test? On civilians?"
"Hydra's done worse." Fury paused.
"The situation on the front lines is complicated. The Avengers are already there, but those mutants are civilians who've been altered. We can't just kill them."
"What do you need me to do?"
"Get to the scene. Analyze the serum and find a way to reverse it. I can have a helicopter at your rooftop in twenty minutes."
Lynn thought for two seconds.
"I have one condition."
"Go ahead."
"If any of the heroes on scene are injured, I want them treated first."
Fury was silent for a second.
"Agreed."
Lynn hung up and returned to the first floor.
He opened the medicine cabinet and took out his portable medical kit.
It contained standard first-aid supplies, the base ingredients for several broad-spectrum antidotes, and the modified Stark Portable Biochemical Analyzer.
Nineteen minutes later, a S.H.I.E.L.D. Black Hawk Helicopter landed on the clinic's roof.
As Lynn carried his medical kit aboard, the pilot looked him over.
A white coat, gold-rimmed glasses, a refined face.
He didn't look like someone headed for a battlefield.
"Let's go." Lynn sat down in the cabin and fastened his seat belt.
The helicopter lifted off.
Hell's Kitchen grew smaller below as Manhattan's lights spread out beneath the night sky.
The helicopter turned northeast and headed for Harlem District.
Lynn looked in that direction through the window.
Even from more than ten kilometers away, his Super Senses picked up the sounds of chaos coming from over there.
Explosions, gunfire, metal crashing—and a host of howls at abnormal frequencies.
They weren't human howls.
When the helicopter reached Harlem District, Lynn looked down through the window and saw what was happening.
It wasn't pretty.
Six blocks between 125th and 130th Streets had been sealed off by armored vehicles.
Behind the barricades were S.H.I.E.L.D.'s tactical units and the New York Police Department's SWAT teams—at least two hundred personnel in all.
On the streets beyond the barricades, overturned cars and broken glass littered the ground. More than a dozen mutants of different shapes and sizes prowled among the wreckage.
The nearest mutant had probably been a middle-aged man.
Now he stood over two and a half meters tall, with arms as thick as telephone poles and a layer of hard, blue-gray scales covering his skin.
He was lifting an SUV over his head with his bare hands and hurling it at the barricade.
Farther in, one mutant's upper body had turned into something resembling an insect's shell. Six jointed limbs protruded from his ribs, and he crawled at great speed.
Another mutant, a woman, had steam rolling off her entire body. The asphalt melted wherever she went.
Several familiar figures were at the front lines.
Captain America's shield gleamed beneath a streetlamp as he used it to block a charging mutant, while pushing the injured people behind him toward the safety line.
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