- The Mind Stone does not have morality. It was never a malignant thing, in itself. However, if Dr.Selvig’s words to Loki while hiding out from the Avengers, or Tony Stark’s findings about and reactions to the Stone twice-over…or indeed the very nature of its ultimate embodiment, the Vision…are any of them indicators at all, they are of the fact that the Mind Stone causes those under its sway most prominently to feel as if a revelatory experience is taking place. As if the cosmos are open to them…the veil lifted…and the truth of things (i.e. reality) witnessed. Before the Mind Stone’s imprinting upon the Ultron program and then its final, purer attachment to Vision, this euphoria seemed for any organic beings it directly contacted to result in their dreamlike subservience to greater purposes and the leaders of such purposes, even those by our perceptions nefarious and harmful. To what end the Mind Stone would stimulate such subservience, perhaps we will never fathom…
- …yet what is clear from all this is that the Mind Stone was always finding its way into the minds of any sentient being surrounding it, most especially those belonging to a human race least prepared to sense and comprehend just what primordial thing lay in their presence to begin with. From the moment it arrived on our beloved terra firma, it had been beckoning, signaling, imperceptibly if no less powerfully, and all the stronger after Loki’s capture when it first came to rest under the ever curious attentions of a certain Tony Stark and Bruce Banner aboard the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helecarrier. Yet later when it was meant finally to cloud Tony’s mind at the behest of Loki atop Avengers Tower as it had every other mere human before him…nothing. Why? Did this ancient ‘proto-mind’ suddenly sense something in Tony, some fortuitous spark of affinity or potential for recognition that it did not need to sully so completely? Did this recognition also cause to re-surface the Stone’s long-dormant awareness towards the concept of, and then a kind of naked impetus to be, ‘born’? After all, if the Stone is thought made manifest on our plane of existence, how could a corporeal form not be a natural end or natural want, for lack of a better terminology, of this primordial force so as to fully interact with said existential plane?
- In point of fact, given the demonstrated power of such an object it seems wise to presume this was not necessarily the first occasion the Mind Stone had been drawn towards its own awakening and that neither Ultron nor Vision were in fact the first coporeal embodiments of the Stone in its eons’ long existence. Which ancient entity bears a too striking resemblance to the Stone’s preliminary effects and manifestations in our reality then? What if, in the unwitting service of one of the Stone’s inexplicable purposes, the Kree used it to create the very first Proto-Inhuman known to this universe: Hive? The same euphoric subservience, the same expositions of seeing truth and feeling peace, beauty and harmony unending are exhibited by all of Hive’s followers. Yet we eventually learn that the Kree had desisted in creating any others like Hive once they fully realized the untold potential of the entity they had birthed. The Stone, as with all the Infinity Stones, was a spark of creation that need not have been trifled with…at least not so unceremoniously. And the result of its first transfiguration had hence terrified its creators just as the Stone’s eons distant reiteration, Ultron, horrified and turned upon its own creators in kind. In other words, Hive was too dangerous, too potentially cataclysmic a weapon-as-consciousness even for the Kree to wield, although they would not deign to destroy their experiment outright. Hence, exile. The Kree knew that Hive would only bring ruin to any ‘lesser’ sentient species with the misfortune of coming into contact with their First Child. So they left it…buried it…and hoped it remain forgotten until the day it could perhaps be adapted or reined in by its progenitors.
- Much as the Mind Stone itself would be lost to myth and the corners of our cosmos for those same eons uncounted…until, that is, its power is usurped by whatever unknown actor was capable of encasing the Stone in a scepter. Until said scepter falls into the covetous hands of the Chitauri and Loki and is put to use towards their hopeless bid for rule by force. Until Von Strucker claims the scepter and the Stone therein as herald of an ‘Age of Miracles’ and uses it to transform mortal beings Wanda and Pietro Maximoff into something other than, if still spiritually descendant of, Hive and the Inhumans to follow. Until the Stone is encountered once again by the very same mortal man, Tony Stark, whom it had spared subservience but a few years previous and that man is compelled to create from the raw stuff of the Mind Stone a new, painfully alien intelligence. And until, just as with the Kree before us, that creation very nearly brings about our own destruction…indeed, near extinction.
- In the end, Ultron was as much the result of Tony’s hubris and misdirected, if still genuine, super-heroism as it was another flare up in the Mind Stone’s fractured, violent and recurrent awakenings. Years after its first encounter with that rarest of sentient beings who it had sensed could both conceive of and accomplish its ‘rebirth’ so expediently, the Stone took that rarest of second chances at nudging this very same man towards its own nascent ends in Von Strucker’s base…and still, even after all this, Ultron was destroyed as the flawed and radically failed inevitability that it was. However, Stark never stopped recognizing the one truth that had always guided him as unwaveringly as the Mind Stone had influenced surrounding reality towards each of its inevitable rebirths: work had to be done. So what then of the Vision and his sentience: is he the last step in the Mind Stone’s universal evolution – again corporeal, yet this time an extension of the Mind Stone at its most fully realized and at a kind of peace never before now sensed or understood? Is the cycle ended, the Stone’s ultimate purpose fulfilled by the foreboding courage of a mortal genius (after all) and an Asgardian demigod? Or is Vision merely the most successful in a long line of heralds – an Avatar – of that Age of Miracles poised to shake nothing less than the very foundations of reality as we know it for our heroes and all of humankind alike…?
Eclogue of Five Worlds 