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Bruce Banner / Hulk Lore

Fickle Banner

Scientific inspiration, mused Bruce Banner, could come from anywhere. There were the famous stories — Newton's apple, Alexander Fleming's mold in the Petri dish — and then there were the thousands of other little revelations that would never be told because they were just part of the everyday work of scientists all over the world. Like him. He had done some important work in the fields of gamma radiation, and he had also learned more about gamma radiation the hard way.

Now, he was trying to build both on that work and the life-changing accident. Becoming the Hulk had changed his life for better and for worse, and most of the worse aspects had to do with the lack of control he had felt for years when becoming Hulk. Over time, he had gotten more control, but it was still a struggle. Eventually he'd had an insight: What if he could control the infusion of gamma radiation into his body? Would it be possible to decide how much of a Hulk he wanted to be?

The question had led to a series of experiments, and now Bruce thought he was on the verge of a real working prototype of a device that could absorb, contain, and channel gamma radiation.

If so, it would be life-changing.

So here he was, tinkering with the final adjustments to what he was calling the Gamma Belt. The fundamental idea of the belt was that it contained a reservoir of gamma energy that could be channeled into the wearer's body.

He would never let anyone else use the belt, but if he could get it working, the transformation in Banner's life would be practically unthinkable. To have full control over the Hulk, without worrying about the mindless rages that had occasionally overtaken him for decades now? Banner had always found the Hulk as much a curse as a gift. There were times when it was great to be a super hero, but when you woke up one morning and discovered that the Hulk had leveled part of a city during a fight...

Something had to change. So now, Banner was changing something.

It was late at night, and the desert outside Banner's lab was quiet save for the eerie whistle of the breeze in the spines of the saguaro cactuses. It was a strange, lonely sound, perfect to accompany the work of a strange, lonely man. He shut the window and put the belt on, testing it for fit and making sure the gamma conduits were intact and not facing out. The Gamma Belt was designed to channel energy into the wearer's body, without letting it escape anywhere else. Banner had done this by lining the belt with conduits for the energy, and insulating the conduits in every direction except a small seam where the belt was in direct contact with the wearer. In testing, with the belt tightened around a mannikin, the insulation had worked.

Now, he was going to find out if it worked on a real person.

He tightened the belt and settled it into place around his waist. Then he tested the gamma detectors he'd placed around the lab, making sure they were active. He'd arranged them to pick up any stray energy released when Banner activated the belt to become the Hulk.

It was going to feel strange to become the Hulk that way. For so many years, it had been just a sudden internal process. Now, Banner was trying to systematize it, channel it, make it not quite so vulnerable to his emotional states. In a way, putting his transformation under the control of an external object felt like losing control over it, even though the whole point of the Gamma Belt was to have better control over the Hulk.

And, possibly, to make him stronger. Banner had run the math hundreds of times, and it was possible the Gamma Belt would be able to create a stronger Hulk. What that would mean for him, Banner wasn't sure. But he was about to find out.

He hadn't told anyone about the Gamma Belt, mostly because he didn't want to have a conversation about why he was building a device to do what he could already do. And the reason for avoiding that conversation was that Banner would have to admit that he wanted the belt to give him a kind of control over the Hulk that he'd never felt he could maintain. In other words, he didn't want to have a conversation about how he couldn't control the Hulk.

Okay, he thought. Time to see if I've solved that problem.

He started a video camera set into one wall of the lab. "Banner, Gamma Belt test. First go-round with a full energy reservoir."

He stepped to the center of the lab, where he'd marked out a spot for the transformation. Earlier that day, he'd moved all the lab furniture and equipment away from it.

"Commencing..." He tapped a control on the belt. "Now."

Lights on the belt flared to life as it poured gamma energy into the conduit encircling Bruce's waist.

He felt the transition like he always did: wrenching, painful, but also filling him with a sense of limitless power. Along with that came something even more important: ease. Where Banner was nearly crippled by anxieties about how other people felt about him, Hulk didn't care what anyone thought. He was Hulk!

He looked around Banner's lab, then down at the belt around his waist. How did Banner design it so it didn't break?

"Don't need the belt," Hulk grumbled. But he knew Banner had designed the experiment to help him, so Hulk reluctantly went ahead to do the rest of the steps Banner had planned in advance. At least they sounded like fun.

First, Hulk went outside the lab, trudging down a dirt road that led into a box canyon. Banner had set up instruments along one wall of the canyon. Hulk was supposed to stand at the other wall and clap. Banner thought he could measure Hulk's strength this way. Hulk just wondered what the belt would do.

He stood by the canyon wall and looked at the instruments maybe twenty yards away. It was a narrow canyon. He took a deep breath, narrowed his eyes, and spread his arms wide.

Hulk's clap usually caused a shockwave strong enough to break windows, flip cars, and send Hulk's enemies flying. But when he brought his palms together and heard the ear-shattering CRACK, he knew right away that this clap was different.

The shock wave crashed against the far canyon wall like a bomb had gone off, collapsing the wall into a rockslide that buried Banner's instruments like they were never there. Then the wave rebounded and knocked Hulk into the wall at his back, hard enough to stun him — and bring thousands of tons of rock slabs crashing down on his head. Dazed, Hulk shook his head and flexed to push the rocks away...only to find that none of the rocks was touching him. A glowing sphere of gamma energy had surrounded him, projected from the belt. When Hulk moved, the sphere moved, shifting the rockfall so he could stand. Then it faded away.

Hulk looked down at the belt.

Its reservoir was partly full.

Hulk looked across to the far wall. One of the instruments had survived the rockslide. Its microphone stuck up between rock slabs, and attached to it was a camera. Hulk walked to the camera and pointed down to the belt. "See that?"

Then he decided to do another strength test and see what happened. He went outside, looked up to make sure no planes were going overhead, and jumped. He peaked a few thousand feet in the air, coming back down a short distance from his jump point with an impact that shook the windows in the lab. The arms of the saguaro cactuses waved.

The belt was two-thirds full.

Hulk grinned. "Heh."

Now he was going to try something even harder. He picked up a car parked near the lab and threw it into the air in a high arc. Before it could land, he thundered after it, leaping as it fell and smashing a fist into it before it could hit the ground. The car exploded into hundreds of pieces, its gas tank rupturing in a ball of flame that Hulk fell through back to the ground. He roared as he landed, an exultant roar that echoed out over the empty desert.

This was something Banner hadn't thought of. Becoming the Hulk, he had essentially given off enough gamma radiation to refill the belt...which in turn had fed the new radiation back into him.

The dose would have killed him...if he hadn't already survived a larger dose of gamma radiation years ago. Instead it made him...well, Hulkier.

He was a different Hulk. The real Hulk. The pure monster. He didn't care what Banner thought. Banner was weak. Hulk would rub Banner's face in it once and for all.

"Gonna show Banner," he growled to himself. "Show him how puny he is when Hulk gets bigger!"

Hulk stomped back into the lab and looked at the camera. Inside he felt Banner's fear and worry, deep inside his mind. He bared his teeth in a grin. "See, Banner? More gamma, more Hulk. Gonna do it again!"

That's not really a good idea. It was Banner's voice.

"Shut up, Banner."

No, you don't understand, if too much gamma radiation builds up, it could —

"SHUT UP!" Hulk punctuated the roar with a double-fisted blow to the floor, coming down with all his strength.

The blast wave tore the concrete slab under the lab building to pieces and shattered equipment in every room. Sparks flew and cables tore out of the wall a moment before a row of lab tables smashed into the far side of the lab, breaking the window Banner had carefully shut before beginning the experiment. The roof started to come down, and Hulk roared as it destroyed itself over his head and shoulders.

Hulk, no—!

Humiliating Banner felt good. Hulk wasn't done. "Watch, Banner!" he snarled, picking up a steel beam from the ceiling and smashing it to the ground, feeling bolts and fragments of concrete ricochet up from the floor off his invulnerable skin. Yes! He would tear the lab to the ground, and then —

Banner collapsed to the floor among the smashed remains of his instruments, feeling the Hulk recede like a great tide of rage in his mind. He was breathing hard and saying "no, no, no," until he realized he was saying it. When he stopped, the only sound in the lab was the whistling of the saguaro spines in the night breeze. Out in the desert, pieces of the car were burning slowly down.

In his hands he held the broken remains of the Gamma Belt. Ricocheting fragments of the lab table had punched through its electronics, returning him instantly to his Banner state. "Interesting," he said. He hadn't considered that possibility.

He looked from the smashed remains of the Gamma Belt to the smashed remains of the lab, then out to the dirt track leading to the canyon. The remains of the car still burned at the edge of the desert.

There were a lot of things he hadn't considered. It was time to get back to work.