[Zhongyingmei] Who is my father?

The obvious destination for Joyce is the very place where it all started.

After crossing the fire circle and stepping on the long-abandoned courtyard lawn, the former killer of Hydra looked around, his eyes fell on the familiar yet unfamiliar safe house in front of him, his expression was a little dazed.

"Actually, I don't think it's a good idea to come here."

Following him through the portal and standing in the ankle-deep grass, Doctor Strange sighed, trying to impress the other party's rock-solid determination: "You know very well, there is no need for it. You just let it go There is no more than one answer.”

"That's why I have to come."

The tone was not as bitter and bitter as Strange thought, and it was even unexpectedly calm.Joyce looked back at him, watching the circle of fire in mid-air gradually disappear in the air, and gently twitched the corners of his mouth:

"I know that today I really feel that it is indeed a good thing for you to send him back to me from the future."

When he was testing the genetic testing machine Hank gave him not long ago, he had grabbed the Zero for comparison, and found a small difference in the data.And even if they have their own physical activities at the moment, as the same person physically and psychologically, this difference should not have happened to them at all, but it is the case.

Therefore, after Iron Man's communication, Joyce has reason to suspect that this difference is probably the key to the collapse and stability of genes.His body has reached its limit, but Zero is still at its peak. If the meaning contained in this subtle difference can be deciphered, Joyce has reason to believe that he can completely solve the problem of genetic collapse with Zero itself.In this case, it becomes less urgent and important to find his biological father and obtain their paternal genes from each other.

That's why he threw Zero to Tony and Dr. Banner for sampling.

But even so-

"I don't like being kept in the dark."

Leaning over to pick a freesia from the long-untrimmed flowerbed, Joyce looked at the petals in his palm, which contrasted sharply with the cold metal in his right hand, and only desperate determination and dead silence remained in his eyes:

"I'm just here to verify my guess. No matter who lived here back then, it has nothing to do with me now."

But, can it really be done?

Probably because he felt that he had said enough, Joyce clenched his right hand tightly, and the freesia in his palm fell apart with this force, like pieces of broken butterflies.He stood there and paused for a while, then stepped firmly towards the dilapidated gate of the villa.

Looking at his back, Strange's eyes flickered, his expression seemed pity, but at the same time he couldn't bear it, and finally turned into a sigh.

He followed.

Even if Joyce doesn't actually need his company, as his first friend after leaving Hydra, Strange also hopes that, standing before the mystery of time, Joyce will not have to face the fate of fate alone. cross-examination.

……

Because the S.H.I.E.L.D. Bureau started the insight program shortly after the target's death, and it almost fell apart. The safe house was only slightly cleaned by the agents, and it was abandoned here.It seems that no one has come in these days. The living room still maintains the mess when the hydra broke in that day, the tables and chairs were overturned, and various books and materials were scattered all over the floor. The color is already very light, but the bloodstains that can still be recognized at a glance, silently tell the haste of cleaning the scene on the spot.

Apparently, that's where Zero ends up shooting.

He could recall almost exactly how the genetic engineer and his wife and daughter fell heavily to the ground, how the corpses lay horizontally, and how blood snaked out, staining the valuable Milanese carpet beneath them red.Joyce paused. Although strictly speaking, he was not the one who carried out the mission, he could still feel the strength of holding the gun in his palm.

"Where do we start looking?"

Following him into the door, Doctor Strange looked at the mess around him, and simply raised his own doubts: "S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra should have searched many times, right?"

"So what we're looking for is where they can't find it."

Picking up the scattered papers from the ground, Joyce quickly recognized that they were just some useless data, probably floating out of some experimental records.It was never a fluke that the information related to 'Z Project' would be lying at his feet so carelessly.

It is absolutely impossible for someone who can successfully escape from Hydra's control and contact S.H.I.E.L.D. to seek asylum without leaving a way out for himself, Joyce knows very well.The genetic engineer surrendered to S.H.I.E.L.D., but he wouldn't completely trust him, and the most important things to him would be kept in a hidden place.And that is most likely related to the birth of 'Project Z', or even Zero - even if he was not so sure before coming here, but seeing Strange's reaction, he should understand something.

Twitching the corners of his mouth as if mocking himself, Joyce looked up at the stairs leading to the second floor in front of him, and walked up without hesitation.

And Doctor Strange watched him walk into the innermost study room as if he was being pulled by an invisible rope, and it was hard to tell what emotion was on his face.

"Why do you think the answer you're looking for is here?"

He took two steps forward, stood beside Joyce who was rummaging through drawers one by one, and asked curiously, "Is it possible that those people in these places don't check?"

"Of course they will."

Moving away all the useless books, Joyce groped every inch of the bookshelf bit by bit.Although he doesn't know SHIELD, he knows exactly what Hydra is. It's like a swarm of locusts crossing the border. It is estimated that anything related to them has been searched out long ago.

It's just that no matter how detailed the search is, there will always be omissions.

Hydra may be afraid of the data in the hands of the target, and take away all the other party's network and database cloud, but only Zero knows that that person is not so dependent on electronic technology for recording.

"I... no, when Zero was monitoring this safe house, he saw the target re-record the key data that had been destroyed in the cloud on paper."

His fingers touched a strange depression somewhere, and Joyce's expression remained unchanged. He clenched his right hand and slammed it hard against the bookshelf.Surprisingly, under such force, the entire board did not break, and the sound was not the muffled sound of wood, but the crisp roar of metal plates.

"After recovering my memory, I sneaked into Hydra's database and searched for this mission. Among the trophies they counted out, there was no notebook that Zero had ever seen... From then on, I knew that it It must still be there, I must come back here once."

It was rare to give a detailed explanation to the other party. Joyce's mood seemed very calm, even with a softness that was easy to talk about.But it was this kind of calm that made Strange tense up, because it just meant that the other party had to spend a lot of effort to pretend to be able to hide the abnormality.

Like the dead silence before the storm.

Clean out the wood slag smashed by yourself to reveal the hidden interlayer.Joyce reached in and touched it, and quickly pulled out a stack of bound materials and a black leather notebook, nothing else.

Joyce glanced at the stack of documents, and it was no surprise that it was the most original data of Project Z, most of which were about the transformation of Zero, which might be useful for Tony and his research.But now, this is not what he cares about, all his attention is attracted by the not-so-big notebook, as if he has been cast some kind of enchanting magic, twisting its spine repeatedly as if possessed.

"Shall we make a bet?"

Just when Doctor Strange thought that the other party was not ready to open it, Joyce suddenly raised his head and said in a relaxed tone:

"How about a ten-dollar bet? Do you think I'll regret it after watching it?"

"……you will not."

With a serious and serious expression, Strange stared straight at his face, and said slowly word by word.

"I don't think I will either." Joyce shrugged: "It's meaningless to bet like this."

…Actually, if you don’t want to read it, you don’t have to force yourself.I will not laugh at you.

I really want to speak like this, but there is no way to get the words out of my mouth.Strange could only watch helplessly as the other party slowly turned over the somewhat loose pages and the story that should have been buried in the darkness forever. The only thing he could do was not to disturb the silence of the other party at this moment.

It was a diary that looked old enough.

Joyce flipped through it carefully, and found that there was a photo that was quite old on a certain page.The place photographed above is obviously in a laboratory, a culture chamber filled with nutrient solution.The black shadow inside is not clear, but if you distinguish carefully, you can still see the outline of the human body.

And on the page with the photos, it is the diary written by the target that day. I don't know if he encountered some exciting things, and every stroke seems a little unstable.

"Today, I finally fulfilled my long-cherished wish. On the premise of changing the genetic sequence, I tried to clone a better experimental body based on my biological data... This is my first step in deciphering the human genetic code. "

And this is also the initial prototype of 'Project Z'.

Without changing his eyes, Joyce turned a few pages back and found that most of them were the records of the target's training of the experimental subjects.Hydra may not have understood the value of such research at the time, but when the target submitted the experimental report, they quickly worked out the best solution for applying this technology.

"...The organization is going to launch a plan to artificially complete the genetic modification of the human body. They want me to calculate the method of transplanting excellent samples, but those experimental bodies are too fragile, and I can't carry out my next research."

"...I tried to experiment with that child. As expected, it is the most perfect experimental subject born on the premise of genetic modification."

"...Those people, they're going to take him over. Before he grows up, I have to work out a way to actually transplant the genetic sequence...I can't let the half-headed snakes get my hands on my perfect finished product, they don't know how to cherish it at all What's more, that's my child."

"..."

Joyce turned a few pages back, most of which were records like this.He looked down at the blurred shadow in the photo, and his eyes suddenly felt a little sore.

He turned the diary to the end, as if flipping through a crazy and twisted world, until his fingers stopped on the last words of the date.

"They completed the creation of the experimental product. I went to see him once, and the child has been trained by Hydra to become an obedient machine... That is obviously my most perfect work. They have defiled him and wasted All the hard work I've been doing."

"They called him Zero, as if proudly showing off what they thought was a perfect result, and regarded other experimental subjects as defective products..."

"But I know that in the whole 'Z project', he is actually the only one who failed the most."