Upon his return from the bleak wastelands of mankind’s possible pasts, Terence Lommi was the most famous man on Earth.
Every living soul knew his name, had been told how he had braved the great magnetic fields that separated the ages and changed time so that the world would not suffer the looming apocalypse. This one man, through bravery and recklessness beyond even that of the most revered hero of mankind’s past, had saved all of humanity and made the world whole again.

He had done this at immeasurable cost to himself.

“No change.”

Dr. Osborne sighed in frustration. His patient--the greatest hero mankind had ever known--stood motionless before him.

“So let’s sum up,” Dr. Osborne said. “We have no evidence of pulmonary or cardiovascular activity. No muscular response to any stimulus, only a brain wave pattern that is concurrent with that of a living human being, correct?”

“That’s right doctor.” his aide replied.

“What haven’t we tried?”

“How about an oil can?”

Dr. Osborne laughed in spite of himself. Everyone in this room had been narrowly spared death by nuclear fireball. There was bound to be some giddiness among them.

Terence Lommi heard their laughter. His passage through the great magnetic fields had changed him in ways no one could have imagined, but it had not killed him. Although his body was no longer flesh and bone, he could hear, could see, could comprehend what was happening outside of his iron prison in ways no other mortal had ever experienced.

What the doctors did not know and could never understand, was that Terence’s relationship with Time itself had been irreversibly changed. He could see Time now: could see how it surrounded him like a cocoon of brittle glass. Should Terence move the slightest, even to speak, he would disturb that careful arrangement, and alter the past and the future. The present he had given so much to preserve would be again changed.

He had given his humanity so that the final war would be averted. He dares not move for fear of disturbing what he had built at such sacrifice.

Five years passed. Nothing could be done with Terence. It was decided that what had come back through the magnetic fields wasn’t Terence at all, but some kind of simulacrum, a residue of that hero’s passage through time. Brain waves could be measured, but consciousness was impossible in a body composed of an indestructible alien iron alloy. Thought required life, and life required the motion of biological processes. The iron form, it was decided, could not have one without the other. It was clear that Terence Lommi had sacrificed his life to save humanity, and this hard truth was eventually accepted even by those slow to concede hope.

It seemed fitting that the iron echo of Terence Lommi as the world had known him should be put in a place of honor. The largest crowd of humanity ever assembled gathered to witness the dedication of the monument to Terence, with the hero’s own metal form at the center of the memorial. Terence heard the words commemorating his achievement, and his gratitude at their appreciation pushed back the fear and the madness, for a while.

A decade passed.

Terence well understood the correlation between his position in space and human history’s place in time. When sailing through the endless shadows of Earth’s possible pasts, he had made changes to the flow of time that defused the inevitability of a nuclear holocaust, but the price for the persistence of the future he had made was his own liberty. He was the only residue of the old future in this new present, and his slightest action could cause ruptures along the timeline that may well doom humanity anew.

Lost to his thoughts and the non-Euclidian madness of the universe his impossible, organic-steel senses perceived, Terence might have supposed there was some relationship between his own mental state and the well-being of humanity, but the truth was far less esoteric.

The war he had prevented had nearly happened due to the accumulated actions of all of humanity. Terence had put the train of history upon new tracks, but the engine that drove human events still ran on the same fuel and was guided by similar hands. Within ten years, Terence’s contribution had lost its meaning, and the second chance he had afforded humanity had fatally decayed.

His steel body stood atop a pillar in a square that for years had seen tens of thousands of visitors, each here to thank the man who had given all to save them. Across the decade, however, the visits became fewer as the scattered seeds of the averted war took hold and sprouted anew. Fifteen years after the experiment that had reversed six hours of nuclear exchange by 23 nations, the world was once again on the brink, Terence Lommi was all but forgotten, and he was now irretrievably insane.

A running gun battle was being fought around the monument when Terence took his first step in nearly two decades. All around him, invisible panes of space/time, two-dimensional manifestations of possibility shattered and as each broke, some part of the world changed. Cities became forests, deserts became seas, the dead rose, the living died, whole species disappeared to be replaced by impossible horrors that had no place in the settled world man had come to accept as reality.

And as Terence walked, with fury at his wasted sacrifice the only emotion strong enough to remain afloat in the turbulent seas of his madness, he served his warrior’s duty. He took a rotary Vulcan gun from a soldier who shook in impudent fear at the sight of the walking steel messiah, and Terence Lommi began killing.

There was only one sliver of identity left to Terence, and he gave it voice, loud and strong, louder even than the working gun that claimed the lives of the men and women, the children he had once saved.

“I...” he shouted with all the volume his steel lungs could give, “AM IRON MAN!”

The End