Archive of Our Own

Threats are capabilities; we assess intentions in a context of threats.

We have no idea what is really going on, at a level of physical possibility. I cannot get the physics team to stop raising the hypothesis that SHIELD has been hacked by highly-capable pranksters determined to provide electronic records of superficially plausible nonsense to such an extent that we eventually go public with it. Presumably, at this point, the pranksters can point and laugh from comfortable lawn chairs situated in one of the broad selection of sites reduced to rubble by activity considered implausible by our available physics.

In this context, we cannot identify threats.

Despite the available pre-freezing records and the results of a post-thawing physical, we don't know what really happened with Captain Rogers; nothing about the "Super Soldier" formula can plausibly explain how he could survive being frozen for decades, something that requires fundamental changes to cellular chemistry. Nor would we expect anything to make Captain Rogers capable of acrobatic feats at altitudes where anyone without a supply of pressurized air should collapse of hypoxia in seconds.

In Captain Rogers' case, we at least have something to blame it on; we can say "Super Soldier" and believe there's a comprehensible cause, even if we can't find any mechanism for it and decades of scientific effort can't produce any plausible means for Captain Roger's original transformation, which, whatever else it did, unquestionably involved gaining mass, to have worked at all.

In the case of Agent Barton's similar failure to collapse, we could suppose that Loki did something. This raises the question of how, and that runs us right back into a state of total ignorance. Asgardians, from our sample size of two, are not much heavier than a similar human; floor sensors on the Helicarrier give us good estimates of their weight.[0] This makes it very hard to explain how Loki can be repeatedly beaten into a ferroconcrete floor designed by Tony Stark to resist the Iron Man suit with sufficient force to leave substantial (231mm peak depth) depressions without experiencing major trauma; nothing that light should be that strong. A human body would have dismembered if swung that hard, and a human body subjected to that much impact force would have reduced to a liquid partially pervading the broken concrete.

If Loki can endure that much violence, perhaps there is a transferable mechanism, one so simple or assumed on the part of Asgardians that it would be presumed and unmentioned. Such a mechanism then presumably corrects for minor issues like the permeability of oxygen across alveolar membranes at reduced pressure. How such fundamental chemistry is to be casually affected is something no one available to this department has been able to plausibly suggest. Various members of the biochemistry team have expressed doubt about this scenario, on the grounds that such a technology would never reach a deployable state due to the development phases inevitably transforming the test subject into "quark soup", with lamentable results.

The alternative and, in terms of Occam's Razor, preferable hypothesis, is that Agent Barton is a low-force, high-precision telekinetic. The physics group may not be able to suggest what's going on with Asgardian tissue strength, but they are emphatic that video records of Agent Barton's archery during the Incursion are flatly impossible. Double-blind detailed measurements under the guise of testing arrow effectiveness confirm that some force is acting on Agent Barton's arrows, and we might as well suppose that if it's him, he can similarly maintain the air pressure in his lungs.

For purposes of this analysis, it does not matter which of these two cases applies; the core issue is not a relatively minor trick for avoiding anoxia at altitude, but the observation that there are at least three known mechanisms for moving multi-tonne masses multi-light year distances instantaneously. All known physics would expect this to require something greater than the mass-energy of the universe to accomplish, at which point our inability to determine within two orders of magnitude the probable distance from Earth of the Asgardian sky recorded by Dr. Jane Foster hardly matters.

We can't do effective threat analysis on a culture with access to energy levels sufficient to convert the entire universe into something else. "Abruptly converting the entire solar system, Oort Cloud and all, to a rapidly expanding spherical shell of X-rays and relativistic protons" is, to the energy densities handled routinely by Asgardian technology, picayune.

It might be possible to more usefully set a threat level for the culture engaged in the actual Incursion, whose soldiers bullets kill and which tactical sophistication seems to have escaped. Despite their technical advantages, an alert conventional military force could have expected to defeat the Incursion, though with correspondingly greater costs in lives, time, and property.[1]

The observed capabilities of this culture are not consistent with an expectation of conquering New York, never mind Earth.

We are forced to ask if Loki, the supposed master-mind of the attempt to conquer Earth, is an idiot, from a relatively small artificial structure and completely unaware how large Earth actually is, or possessed of some intention other than his stated aim.[2]

Once we ask what Loki was really trying to do, we can perhaps also ask how we could tell.

If we suppose that some fraction of the surviving Norse pagan traditions describe an actual Dark Ages meeting between some Old High German speaking tribe or tribes and Asgardians, we note that animosity between Thor and Loki is not a given. Perhaps Loki's plan did not go wrong, but accomplished not merely Loki's aims, but those of Asgard.[3]

We will assume that the objective wasn't to detonate a nuclear device on artifacts of the Incursor culture; not only was the sequence of events resulting in that outcome highly unlikely, Asgard presumptively possesses the capability to do that without involving Earth. Certainly no cause of deniability is served when Thor was very obviously present during the fighting.

The least-implausible sequence of events need not depend on Loki's active participation; whether Loki was a conscious part of enacting an Asgardian policy or merely sufficiently predictable to Asgardian planners that they could build plans involving Loki doesn't matter. Thor could be his co-conspirator or his concerned brother or an agent of the Asgardian government, and the results are the same.

In this scenario, Loki either deliberately or through predictability functions as an Asgardian foil.

So let us consider results, predictable or achievable by Asgard.

1. Earth is now widely and publicly aware of the existence of not-always-friendly aliens. [4]

2. Individual exceptional persons of heroic character have been equally publicly seen as decisive in dealing with this Incursion.

This is an odd choice; all terrestrial historical trends involve increasingly large, organized, impersonal institutions to handle conflict. Individual heroics do not work on a scale of nations, and statistically do not often work for individuals. A modern perspective would consider the messaging associated with "a group of private citizens managed to deal with an alien invasion; government baffled and confused" to be a terrible failure. Effective deterrence, or even effective presentation of a response capability, would rest on having a co-ordinated, effectively anonymous, institutional response in place; "army units", rather than "Captain America".

One possibility is that the threat does not rise to a level where Asgard would consider a military response appropriate.

In that scenario, we should consider Thor to represent the Asgardian notion of a beat cop, or perhaps a helpful neighbour or, truly, a concerned brother. Having the Avengers respond conveys to any observers of the Incursion that, on Earth, this is also the scale of problem that eminent persons can deal with personally; there is no need to invoke public resources or armies. This is presumably preferable to exposing just how outclassed our militaries would be by a culture with comparable technical capabilities to the Incursors and a degree of tactical sophistication superior to that demonstrated by addled ground squirrels.

A second possibility is that the Asgardian trend toward individual use of massively powerful, idiosyncratic[5] and semi- or fully-sentient devices as tools and weapons results in circumstances where there is no army in the modern sense. Individuals are as powerful as anything can get, and organization has limited benefit when the individual devices are capable of destroying worlds, especially when a combination of short-range teleportation, shape-shifting and illusion-generation renders useless any attempt to make a distinction based on "uniformed formations" when defining armies for legal purposes. We have no reason to suppose that the availability of such technology is limited to Asgardians, and indeed only suppose that we know for certain what Thor looks like because he originally arrived in a powered-down, nearly human, state. This analyst would not care to base any strong conclusion on the idea that we have seen Thor's true appearance.

A third possibility is that Loki is currently in a significantly damaged state. In this scenario, an intact Loki is capable of complex, subtle plots and manipulations, but the present Loki is not. If Loki's condition is not well known, it may be, from an Asgardian perspective, useful to have Loki free for a time to provide a disinformation op against some other alien power. This would involve a risk of further damage to Loki and a risk that the other power or powers could panic if the disinformation went in unfortunate direction, but has the advantage that any other power dealing with an addled Loki is certain to become more confused, and confused in ways no sane being could plan.

In this scenario, Asgard's intent toward Earth would be to limit the damage from their disinformation campaign. Loki is taken into custody as soon as possible after he commits whatever rash communication or implausible promises Asgard desires to bring confusion to their enemies.

One supporting data point for this scenario is that, so far as we are aware, the personal weapon of the ruler of Asgard is a spear. This is presumably something after the pattern of Thor's Mjolnir, or, rather, Mjolnir is presumably after the pattern of this weapon; it's sentient, very general purpose, and acts as an identity or authentication token.[6]

Loki's chosen weapon was a spear, and one clearly not of the same order as the usual Asgardian devices. The acceptance of a pale imitation of the power he claims to have lost provides some circumstantial support to the idea that Loki is not thinking clearly.

All of these are plausible explanations for why Loki's ostensible plan for world domination—and do let it be remembered that given Asgardian technology, it is not obviously foolish for even a lone Asgardian to undertake to conquer Earth—failed. That is, either conquest was not Loki's actual plan, or Loki is sufficiently unwell as to be unable to make as effective a plan as his posited full capabilities would lead one to expect.

It is this analyst's belief that, without addressing Loki's sanity or state of mind, that there is a better explanation of the outcome of the Incursion.

In reviewing the records available, there are several anomalies.

Agent Romanov and Director Fury, similar to Captain America and Agent Barton, show no signs of anoxia or hypoxia despite engaging in exercise in unpressurized portions of the Helicarrier when at altitude. While surprising, these observations are not inherently more implausible than Agent Barton's ability, and we may simply suppose that exceptional persons able to achieve high level qualifications as SHIELD agents are more likely to possess whatever meta-human ability or abilities are involved. We might even note that this is the kind of ability that would not normally be detected and that it might even be fairly widespread in the population, much as the ability of approximately one percent of the population to metabolize methanol is not normally detected; the opportunity to demonstrate the ability is rare and the failure case is lethal.[7]

Agent Romanov we may explain as having been the product of an effective Soviet supers program, however opaque the details of that program may be to SHIELD archives.

Director Fury is harder to explain; the official explanation for his retirement age waiver is that he was a test subject for an early version of the Super Soldier Serum. Despite the waiver, no record of this event survives, and while the Director's assertion that the lack of records is to be expected under the historical circumstances, it does render the explanation more questionable than it would be if well-attested.

Three other events from the Incursion render the explanation less than satisfactory.

The first is that Loki, immediately after arriving on Earth, directly confronted Director Fury, and, oddly, did not attempt to take control of Director Fury by the same means used to take control of Erik Selvig or Agent Barton. The suriving monitor camera footage gives no indication that the possibility so much as crosses Loki's mind, which is very strange; control of Director Fury would have greatly increased the odds of success for Loki's plot, almost irrespective of what the actual plot was.

The second such event is Agent Coulson's survival. Medical cannot explain this; Coulson arrived in an exsanguinated condition with no heartbeat or detectable blood pressure. The medical literature is emphatic that reviving a patient in an exsanguinated condition does not work. In Agent Coulson's case, trauma care was attempted because Director Fury ordered it and because Agent Coulson inexplicably retained normal brain function, clearly detectable via EKG, normal blood oxygen levels, and other evidence of metabolism including a normal body temperature. Wound closure including stent-and-suture of his damaged pulmonary arteries and transfusion to minimum blood volume took more than twenty minutes, well beyond the time frame Agent Coulson's brain could possibly have survived the oxygen deprivation inherent in having no circulating blood volume. Despite this, he is making a full recovery with no indication of impaired cognitive function.

The third event is Director Fury's assertion that the Avengers would certainly be recalled if they were needed again.

Director Fury's record is not one of perfect veracity, but for him to lie directly to his chief of staff about a significant capability to be used as the basis of long-term planning would be highly unusual.

The combinaton raises the possibility that Loki's plan did fail, and that it failed because Loki was facing a more capable plotter.

Director Fury is clearly recorded forbidding Agent Coulson to die. This analyst would like to note that one of Odin's titles in myth is "chooser of the slain", with a strong positive component to the expected working of the function: if he does not choose you, you do not die.

Whether Loki did not attempt to control Director Fury because he was, himself, subject to much more subtle control preventing him from thinking of the possibility, or because he recognized that it would be unwise to attempt such a feat against the disguised ruler of Asgard is scarcely material.

And certainly however far away Thor has gone, his father and King does have the ability to recall him as well as the other Avengers, should their services be required.

This conclusion is disadvantageous in failing to render the threat-analysis problem more tractable. Indeed, we must now consider precisely when Director Fury was replaced by

Analyst M'Zangwe has been remanded for treatment of situational psychosis at a secure facility.

[0]
This should be considered a weight range; Loki's changes as his clothing changes, and, despite the tortured screams of the physics team, the simplest explanation for Thor's weight readings is that Mjollnir can change mass and inertia independently.

[1]
Though we note that the nuclear device intended by the council to close the portal was not especially high yield nor intended for vacuum use; any headquarters facility built by a culture with personal anti-gravity vehicles would be expected to have sufficient counter-measures to deal with such an attack, and yet oddly did not.

[2]
We cannot casually dismiss the possibility that Thor and Loki are the Asgardian equivalent of bored students, or biologists conducting some sort of ethology study, or characters in an Asgardian reality TV series, but as the goal of this analysis is to reduce planning uncertainty, we will not needlessly multiply entities with possibilities we have no way to dismiss, and instead suppose that the Asgardians with which SHIELD has interacted are being at least moderately forthright about their nature and goals.

[3]
Treating the useful scope of analysis as being Asgardian or other xenoculture intentions is a much smaller threat basket than the possibility of having the solar system converted to an expanding shell of plasma, but it's a threat more plausibly within our means to address.

[4]
The Incursor culture are almost comically hideous by terrestrial standards. If an Asgardian wanted to make the point that not all aliens look like attractive high-status humans, this culture, or at least this culture's troops, serve admirably; they are sufficiently hominid in form for comprehensive revulsion rather than being so alien they lack emotional impact.

[5]
Mjolnir's track to Thor's hand through the helicarrier makes an interesting study; it's the minimum distance, minimum angle change track provided one accepts that the hammer recognized the need to miss persons, pressure barriers, and plumbing. This track is discontinuous across three pressure barrier bulkheads. If Loki can in fact teleport, we are required to suppose that the hammer can, too, though in this case we must ask why it did not teleport directly to Thor's hand, rather than narrowly missing various crew members or choosing to execute a 110 degree turn in an occupied shower.

[6]
No matter how personally strong Thor is, it's clear that he can pick up Mjolnir and no one else can budge the thing because he has permission to do so from the point of view of the hammer, rather than because he is personally transcendentally strong. On that basis, any Asgardian can be certain that the being carrying Mjolnir is Thor, and, similarly, that the being carrying the royal spear is the ruler of Asgard.

[7]
We can be sure the ability is meta-human because 1960s space program studies of the effects of depressurization make it clear that some kind of internal oxygen storage would not work; human lungs cannot withstand even minor pressure differences and if the partial pressure of oxygen is greater than that in the lungs, the transfer works from blood to air, rather than air to blood, for reasons of basic chemistry.