Final??? Hank Pym has reviewed the data Wolverine just brought back. His greatest shame, the robot Ultron, went crazy and destroyed civilization, but Wolverine traveled back in time to prevent it, and after a false start through an equally dark timeline, the robot was stopped, but Hank is facing what his friends always feared - he is slipping into insanity.
Hank thinks back over his life, starting with him, age 3 in his parents' home in Nebraska. Watching a show about blue aliens, he took all the coloring in the house, mixed up a shade of blue, then ran a bath and jumped in, staining himself blue. His parents realized that he was too smart to be distracted by what they could provide, but lacking the money to get professional help, they called on Hank's paternal grandmother, Angela Pym, a writer interested in science fiction. His parents pushed him towards practical need and learned science, but his grandmother pulled him towards creativity and flight of fancy. As a result, the house was soon full of strange devices, like a typewriter that typed in fourteen colors. Hank's father, a factory foreman, once remarked bitterly that what he really wanted was a new carburetor, but he immediately regretted it.
Hank thinks of his childhood, a wondrous time of wires and chemistry sets... and of the day his childhood ended, when he heard that his grandmother was going to die. Working at a mad pace, he built a box his childish mind told him could cure her, but to no avail, He was seven when she died. He built his first carburetor the day after her funeral.
Supporting himself through university and beyond on a string of patents that bored him to tears, Hank Pym was constantly told that without this work, he would amount to nothing. This reached a head one day, when the twenty-two-year-old Pym snapped at his professor and walked out of a Roxxon-sponsored research program. In a fit of manic creativity, he mixed up an experimental compression formula based on his "Pym particles" and doused himself in the stuff. The resulting experience was shocking, but also alluring, and he built himself a costume and joined the world's super-heroes as Ant-Man. Joining the Wasp, he helped form the Avengers by planning how they captured Loki.
Afraid of looking small in front of his team-mates and his girlfriend, he formed a series of new identities. Giant-Man. Goliath. Yellowjacket. And when he realized that trying to keep up with the other heroes was too difficult, he rededicated himself to labwork, where he built Ultron, the machine that almost destroyed the world.
Now, fresh off the disaster he just saw, he has sat in his lab for four days straight. Not one but two apocalyptic timelines were shown in Wolverine's data, and neither would have happened if he had acted differently. He is considering suicide.
A sudden thought occurs: the other timeline was worse because it lacked Hank Pym. Not just Hank Pym the scientist workaholic, but Hank Pym, the ant-commanding, size-changing, second-guessing, science-adventurer. Hank Pym has had a positive effect on the world, and can again.
In Queens, a criminal flees a police with a witness he intends to kill. A six-inch tall man enters the car trough the sunroof, jumps into the criminal's nose and punches him in the brain.
On a bank roof, a group of robbers try to flee in a helicopter. A giant appears, blows them down with his enlarged lungs, then ties them up with strands of his giant hair.
At Roosevelt Station, a platform has collapsed. A man in red shows up, summons a group of ants, enlarges them, and gets them to clear the track. Looking for survivors, he shrinks down small and walks into holes, then expands to giant-size to get people free.
Hank Pym is going to save lives by doing what Hank Pym does best: heroics and science, with a strong theatrical flair. Because Hank Pym's opinions on what he does next are the most important.
