I’ve been afraid of this day for a while now, but it’s been a long time coming. “Truth will out,” as the Bard used to say and as I’ve come to think of you as close as friends get these days, I’d rather you hear it from me instead of possibly hearing it from someone, or something, else.
I used to fix things. I fixed a lot of things.
And then I broke everything.
My name isn’t Desmond Balthar. Hell, it’s not even close. That’s just an amalgam of names I used from some old television shows about two characters who felt like they were at fault for a lot of pain and suffering for others. And since I feel like most of the problems of the world are my fault, it seemed like the thing to do. It’s sometimes the smallest of actions that lead to the grandest of consequences.
My name is Dr. Edwin O. Chelsey. Not “Chelsea,” but “Chelsey.” It’s not my fault nobody can read anymore (well, it might be, hard to tell), but the history came down on one spelling and since I decided to kill myself off, I wasn’t in a mood to correct anyone for a long time.
I did not work at Cheyenne Mountain. Not even close. Most of my talk about the East Coast? Never spent a lot of time there. I spent most of my life in California. Everyone knows Stark was a brilliant guy, possibly the smartest ever. And invariably tinkering with something with most of his days. He liked to build and really get hands on with a lot of his personal things around his house. But he couldn’t (and didn’t want to) build everything. That’s where I came in. Myself, and a few other guys worked out of a warehouse space in Thousand Oaks kind of reverse-engineering some of his brighter ideas into commercial application products.
Marion mentioned she was one of several? A direct descendant from Stark’s Jarvis household intelligence program. Shitgo? Kind of a spinoff of the arc reactor system that he created when he had to take long trips in that suit (“Nothing wasted, gentlemen and ladies” he had said at the time).
But to jump cut to now, the White House had gotten sick of being one-upped by Stark’s artificial intelligence systems and had a guy inside StarkTech moonlighting on projects for them, Ed Chelsey. Stark paid well, but you know that part where I didn’t spend a lot of time on the East Coast? That’s because the President of the United States came calling to me. That was some pretty powerful mojo. The reason that Jarvis worked so well was that he learned, he educated himself based on databases and systems Stark had incorporated slowly to the intelligence. Unbeknownst to me, but I should have guessed it (they always said the guys in the back room at StarkTech were good with machines but had no idea about people), they hooked their version up behind the walls of the Black Gate of Mordor that is/was the NSA. Presumably to ensure that all the bad guys could be found easier or something.
Well, that little ferret had more than enough information, heaping helpings of paranoia and very little foresight to see pretty much all of humanity as bad guys. They hadn’t hooked him up to the nuclear briefcase, thank goodness, but the power he did control was more than enough to reduce us to scrabbling over the last dregs of humanity, zombies, vampires, giant mutant squid, and intelligent missile-launching cars.
So, that’s my story. Needless to say, I’m not going to be taking up any space on any Ark, not until I’ve done my penance down here. Take it or leave it, I know what a tool like Marion can get up to in the wrong hands, that’s where I need to go. That’s what I need to fix.
