Disclaimer:

World War II is NOT mine. Howard Stark is NOT mine. 1979 is NOT mine. Tesseract is NOT mine. Nor is the theory the Tesseract is based on. Not. Mine. Project: Rebirth is NOT mine. 1977 is NOT mine. Huntsville, Alabama, is NOT MINE. This is a real place. Ultron is NOT mine. Aliens are NOT mine. MARVEL IS NOT MINE IT OWNS THE FICTIONAL STUFF. Redstone Arsenal is NOT mine. It belongs to the US government. The Air Force is NOT mine. Tony Stark is NOT MINE. NASA is NOT mine. The President of the United States is NOT MINE. (Someone else might, though) Wernher von Braun's decayed corpse is NOT MINE. I do not have a bunch of bones stuffed in the cabinet. I do not own Wernher von Braun's death. I do not own Captain America. I do not own Stark Industries. I do not own any places that von Braun lived in/was held in/was imprisoned in.

This is not an accurate depiction of actual US history, but von Braun really did die in 1977.

However, I do own: My OCs (Peters Family, AURA, anonymous scientist, children's classmates). The little robot on Redstone Arsenal. (There is not really a little robot on the Arsenal. Don't go raiding Redstone). The Huntsville Bubble Plan. The concepts of said Bubble Plan.

Prologue

1979

Since the events of World War II, Howard Stark, a scientist who had been involved with Operation: Rebirth, had continued to search for the Tesseract in the hopes of conducting further studies on the foreign object.

The technology he developed for this purpose drew the interests of scientists everywhere and was often the only reason why said scientists even agreed to work with the man. You might say he didn't have a decent reputation, to put it mildly.

However, Wernher von Braun suspected that finding the artifact would attract…unwanted attention, if you catch my drift. It was very possible that it came from some other world. Otherwise, where would the world's folklore and mythologies come from?

After the man's death in 1977, people cleaning out his old barracks discovered scribbled formulae on how one might venture to create essentially a forcefield, or "bubble," around an area that would protect an area from the effects of outside attempts to tamper with the fabric of reality.

Wow, he was very specific.

They scoffed and threw these papers away with the rest of the garbage, thinking them nothing more than the ramblings of a dying man. Can you blame them? It sounded pretty far-fetched.

But someone believed the man. They took the papers out of the pile waiting for the incinerator, studied them, and, through trial and error, created a functional prototype. Well, it worked on an apple, but hey, how would s/he have been able to check otherwise?

To test it at a larger scale, the individual set it up around the city famed for the theorist's presence, Huntsville, Alabama. Of course, they didn't tell the people living there at the time, so the scientist was able to study the inhabitants of the city without worrying about stupid stuff like zoning codes and less-than-ambiguous moral issues.

This is called human experimentation. Don't try it sometime. It is illegal.

They died later from continuous exposure to stolen Uranium.

To be honest, the person was very old, cranky, and lived in a nursing home, secretly working in a junkyard to adjust whatever weird tech they had at the time. The smell made it so other people avoided them, which didn't bother them much.

They did not keep an engineering notebook; this was a dumb choice, for now no one else knows of the bubble.

Or the evolving computer program that runs it.

The "bubble" was only supposed to protect the people inside from alien stuff, but the program decided to take it further when the inventor -*cough, cough, copycat*- died.

After all, it rationalized, doesn't protecting someone also include making sure they aren't afraid or don't hurt anyone, getting themselves and others in trouble?

Oh crud, it's rationalizing. But don't worry, it won't turn into an early version of Ultron; it is too interested in the humans inhabiting its area of jurisdiction to even consider murdering the entire species, even though it does get frustrated sometimes.

Now, the bubble not only make aliens and extraterrestrial tech bounce off before it hits Huntsville, but it makes it so the people inside don't know about it. When someone moves in, the program quickly wipes all memories of things or people ahead of or behind the time and any otherworldly s***.

No out-of-the-ordinary for these people.

And it also uses its newfound connection to the internet to censor any attempts to access information on the subject. However, it does take the footage and audio from cameras viewing weird stuff to put together a series of movies and releases them under the alias MARVEL. Because why not? It provides entertainment, is something fun to do, keeps "kids" happy. It's perfect.

Sometimes a little robot the program took over on the Redstone Arsenal would make a series of noises akin to laughter when it finds people complaining about the acting or obvious CGI.

Now, this little world is not entirely perfect. I mean, people inside are fed some white lies to cover up any weird things mentioned in the movies. And the bubble might have some side effects, making teeny-tiny…genetic alterations unnoticeable to the population's current technology.

Maybe these said mutations make it so people who lived inside for more than a year can't be affected by space s***.

And maybe the people born inside have a cerebral region that makes them feel homesick if they leave to go somewhere outside the barrier. And not believe anything that doesn't fit in the "frame" they'd been exposed to by the AI/UI. That may have been an accident.

Speaking of which, let's start calling the program by its actual name: Anticipating Unexpected Revelations/Ramifications Authority. AURA for short. It is most decidedly neuter in gender when it comes to pronouns and decided to define this in response to debates it witnessed within and outside its little family.

Uh-huh, Huntsville is its "little family." You might say it is sentient or something. And no, it wasn't "born" with a personality, it evolved.

Yeah…the Bubble Plan might have some side effects, but at least the people inside don't have to deal with the problems outside, right?

2011

For the most part, yeah.

Except for one small family. One mom, one dad, one older sister, one younger brother, one cat. That small.

Actually, it's an average American household size, but let's just call it small for the sake of the story.

This small family (let's call them the Peters Family, P.F. for short) had traveled with the Air Force for about nine years before moving into Huntsville maybe…3 months after the Ironman fiasco, give or take.

The parents left the Air Force because they thought Mr. Stark was an irresponsible person and not the best role model for the children. Well, they weren't wrong, t' be honest.

(The man had taught the small humans inappropriate language the few times he visited whatever compound they were holed up in at the time. And said stuff that prompted questions from said small humans that the parents didn't want to answer yet.)

Also helped that they were offered positions and salaries at NASA that they couldn't refuse. Better living conditions, stability, nice climate, actual schools for the kids, good neighborhood, it looked perfect at the time. And it still does, for the moment.

Anyway, when they arrived in Huntsville, the invisible 'film' surrounding the barriers scanned them and replaced all their memories of things out of the ordinary with ones that kinda fit. Though there were some discrepancies in the little ones' minds since AURA wasn't used to dealing with children at the time.

It did get more practice, more sophisticated, and above all more annoyed as the kids interacted with their peers their first year of school. When the older sister tried to explain the function of a Jericho missile, a small robot somewhere on Redstone gave itself what looked to be a facepalm, becoming the focus of memes everywhere. No one knows who leaked the picture, but it seemed harmless at the time.

Despite their differences (arguments sometimes came up over what really happened, to their parents' displeasure), the siblings both agreed that they don't remember some of the stuff their classmates alluded to in politics the year before they arrived in Huntsville; the sister was into hacking into government servers and tracking their movements, and the brother liked to look at the scientific achievements in America and compare them to earlier attempts to further science.

Of course, for some reason that kind of stuff is now blocked for "Security Reasons." But they can understand that for the most part. Most sane people don't want kids discovering ways to blow up stuff and take over the world. And nowadays hacking computers that aren't yours is considered illegal. Because privacy.

They agreed that either the kids in school are crazy, they themselves are not remembering stuff, or something is up. For one, the siblings can both agree that their peers are wrong about the identity of the President of the United States.

They don't know for sure until they find something very…odd in the older sister's suitcase.

You know what, call the sister Susanne (Sam), the brother Wayne. It'll make telling the story easier.