The crimson ripples on the holographic display swelled and contracted in midair like something alive.
The fluctuations were wildly irregular, yet carried a strange rhythm. Every time a crest reached its peak, the expensive mahogany conference table gave an almost imperceptible resonant hum.
Tony froze with his half-full glass of sparkling wine suspended in midair. The wine sloshed over the tilted rim and dripped onto the wool carpet.
"These are encrypted records we dug up from Nick Fury." Coulson braced his clasped hands on the tabletop, the cuffs of his dark gray suit tightening with the movement. "At first, we thought they were aftershocks caused by alien energy leaking during the Battle of New York. But recently, the geological bureau picked up identical frequency spectra along several deep fault zones. This isn't a natural phenomenon."
Bruce Banner pulled his swivel chair forward half a meter, bringing himself almost flush with the display. He took off his black-framed glasses, fished a soft cloth from his shirt pocket, scrubbed the lenses twice, and set them back on his nose.
"The source is more than fifty-one hundred kilometers down... that makes no sense." Banner traced the crimson crest with a finger in the air. "At that depth, we're already in the outer core of the Earth's Core. Temperatures there exceed five thousand degrees, and the material is entirely liquid iron-nickel alloy. Fluid dynamics simply doesn't allow for a high-frequency, directional gravitational wave beam like this."
"Unless there's a higher-dimensional pacemaker bigger than Manhattan hiding down there." Tony set down his glass and tapped rapidly on the table's touch controls.
The waveform on the holographic screen was instantly stretched out and dissected, with more than a dozen complex comparison algorithms appearing beside it.
"JARVIS, filter out the high-frequency noise in that band and convert