(Barely) Controlled Chaos #3

(Barely) Controlled Chaos #3

Continues directly on from the last part.

Warnings for this part: None

October 1991, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Alright, so, Tony knew what he was going to do.  What he was going to build.  And it was going to put him on the fucking map.

One of his Professors had been talking about coding – Tony couldn’t be more specific than that because he hadn’t been listening, he could write code in his sleep – when it had come to him.  He knew what to do to prove himself.  He was going to write code.  He was going to write code for a functioning AI.  Oh yeah, this was going to be big.

If he could manage it.  It had never been done before.  With that in mind, Tony made certain not to tell anybody what he was doing.  He didn’t want to face the heckling if he failed.  Also, he was a sneaky bastard when he wanted to be, and he really wanted to surprise them all with the finished product, not present them with a prototype that may or may not do what it was supposed to.

Tony started spending a lot of late nights in the robotics lab.  None of the grad students cared, so long as he didn’t touch their work, and nobody was interested in what he was doing.  That just made it easier.

He started by building the shell – he kept it simple; it was his first time making something that could think for itself, and he figured that the less it had to think about the better.  So, one arm, three joints in the support strut so it could bend, a camera so it could sense its surroundings, and a claw so it could pick things up.  He gave it wheels to move, made sure that all the joints were working correctly and nothing interfered with anything else, and fiddled with wires to attempt some kind of pressure sensor in the claw (he didn’t want the bot picking things up and smashing them by accident), but with the materials he had available, it would be iffy at best.  He would have to improve that later when he could get better tools.  For now though, it would do.  He would just have to keep the robot away from anything fragile.

The robot itself got him some interest from a couple of the grad students and one professor; it was simple, but kind of elegant, and they were curious about the reasons for the design, but Tony was close-lipped, and they lost interest again just as quickly.  Safe once again from potential heckling, Tony turned his attention to the difficult part; writing the code.  It was frustrating, and took longer than he had anticipated, and he hit more than a few snags as he thought of things that he should have programmed in and had to keep backtracking, but he was making progress.  Even if this didn’t work, he’d gotten further to creating a functioning AI than anybody else on the planet.

God, he hoped this worked.

He’d been working on his robot for a month when he finally finished.  He rubbed his eyes, glancing at the clock on the wall (six minutes passed three in the morning), and re-read the final lines of code he’d entered.  It all looked right.  He’d done it; it was finished.  He blinked hard.

He’d done it.

All traces of lethargy left his system, shoved aside by the rush of adrenaline that accompanied the realisation.  He scrambled to his feet and read the code again, checking for any errors his sleepy mind might have missed.  Seeing none, he fumbled his way over to where the robot was lying dormant under a cloth, and fed a cable from the computer holding the precious data to a port in the bot.  Trembling fingers pressed several keys, then hit enter, and a bar appeared on the screen.  It was uploading.  Tony watched the bar inch across the screen, tapping his fingernails repeatedly against the bot’s arm.  It was a nervous tic that he had never been able to shake, not that he’d tried very hard.  It annoyed Howard, so sometimes he did it on purpose.

16% complete.

34% complete.

62% complete.

Tony stopped watching the bar and paced the lab, watching the bot from the corner of his eye.  He did one lap and returned, physically unable to tear himself away.  If this worked, he would have proved himself.  He would actually get some respect, instead of the derision that had followed him around thus far.

Maybe he’d even have a friend.

Tony checked the progress bar.  84% complete.  He sat back on his stool and rested his head on his arms, counting in his head.  85… 86… 87… 88…

----------------------------------

Tony yawned as he woke up, stretching his arms out in front of him and arching his back, making the blanket fall to the floor.  He hated falling asleep in the lab; it always made him ache all over.  He rubbed his eyes and slouched upright, wincing at the pull in his lower back.  The computer sat before him, screen black.  Tony blinked, then straightened as he remembered why he was in the lab in the first place.  He jabbed at the keyboard, waking up the monitor, and the progress bar blinked back at him.

100% complete.

Almost vibrating with anticipation, Tony turned slowly, looking at the spot where he’d left the robot.  It was still there, in the same position as the previous night.

The exact same position.

It hadn’t worked.

Tony sighed and his shoulders slumped as he let himself fall back onto the desk.  Of course it hadn’t worked, because Tony was a failu…

Tony froze.  There was a blanket pooled around the bottom of his stool.  There hadn’t been a blanket over him when he fell asleep.  Slowly, he looked back up at the bot, which hadn’t moved.  He swallowed and reached over to unplug it from the computer.  He poked it gingerly.

“Hello?”

There was a second of inactivity, then the bot whirred and lifted its arm, the camera on top focussing in on Tony’s face.  It made another sound, higher-pitched and excited sounding, and reached forward, claw grasping Tony’s shirt and pulling his from his stool.  Tony followed, laughing hysterically.

“It worked,” he whispered, tracing the arm along to the first joint.  The bot stopped leading him around the lab (the same path he’d paced the night before; how much was the bot aware of?) and twitched, making a squealing noise.  Tony blinked and prodded the joint again.  Again, the noise and twitch, followed by a slight jerk from the claw.  Tony felt a grin take over his face.

“Is that… are you ticklish?”

The bot whirred and let go of Tony’s shirt, pulling the sensitive joint away from his questing fingers.  Tony laughed again.

“Oh my god, it worked!”

The bot clicked and circled Tony, banging off a desk and chirruping at it angrily before facing its creator again.  Tony laughed harder.

“You’re kind of a dummy, but you’re alive, aren’t you?  You can understand me?”

The robot whirred again, shrugging the arm up and down and clicking its claw together.  Tony patted the bot carefully.  It preened under the attention until Tony began tickling it again, then it reversed into the same table it had just told off.  Tony doubled up laughing.

“Ok, so, you’re Dummy.  That is now your name.”

Dummy tilted its camera to one side, then seemed to accept that and nudged Tony with its claw.  Tony patted it again, staying away from the sensitive joint so it would stay where it was.  He grinned and gave in to the urge to hug the metal arm, a feeling of utter happiness washing over him when the bot actually squirmed closer into the contact.

“Dummy,” he muttered, and the bot chirped.  It was the best noise Tony had ever heard.

(Barely) Controlled Chaos #1

So, this is part one of the first installment in the I Choose You 'verse.  (Barely) Controlled Chaos will be from Tony's pov, contains lots of angst, some humour, many many swear words and descriptions of torture and sexual scenes - nothing too explicit, and nothing worse than shown in the films, but if you don't like that, this may not be for you.  The Iron Man 1 and 2 films will come into this, as will The Avengers, so if you don't like spoilers, check the warnings at the top of each section before reading.

Warnings for part 1: mentions of physical and mental abuse, mentions of alcoholism

Disclaimer: I own nothing.  Please don't sue me.

***

Tony was not allowed Pokémon.  His father was very clear on that fact.

His mother had one, an old Persian that she’d helped to raise when she was a teenager.  Tony didn’t know if her luminous silver fur was like that because she was close to 40 years old, or if she had been born that way, but it didn’t matter; she was still the most beautiful thing the six-year-old had ever seen.  He loved the cat because his mother loved it; sometimes he thought that she favoured the Pokémon over him, but that was alright, because sometimes Tony did too.  Tony did bad things, and his father shouted at him; Persian only ever got petted and given treats.  His mother was right to like the Good Girl more than the Bad Boy.

Persian was his mother’s constant companion; that was one thing that didn’t change as he grew older.  Tony became a prodigy, which made his father behave as if he loved him, at least in front of the cameras.  At home, Howard was too busy trying to beat his son’s genius that Tony was mostly treated with indifference and sometimes he was outright ignored.  By both his parents.  Tony wasn’t a cute little boy any more, and his mother seemed to lose interest in him more and more as he grew towards his teenage years.

He’d overheard his parents argue on more than one occasion, but never about him.  They didn’t care enough to argue about their son.  No, Persian was usually the topic of their arguments; Howard Stark was of the opinion that the house was no place for pets.  Maria always countered that with ‘Pokémon weren’t pets, they were friends’.  You couldn’t just pick a Pokémon up and take it home with you; it had to choose to be with you.  These arguments were ultimately circular and ended up with both his parents drunk while Tony tried to get close enough to Persian to pet her.  The cat didn’t like Tony very much, and he was yet to get in stroking range, but he held out hope.  Pokémon have to like you to stay with you; Tony’s parents didn’t like him, but Tony thought that maybe, if he was very nice to Persian, she might like him one day.

Then the Pokémon died, and Tony’s stable-ish family life went to hell.

Without her companion, Maria became depressed, and more than once Tony had returned home from school to find her unconscious in her own vomit.  He took care to never mention these incidents to his father, who drank just as much, but handled it better.  Or worse, depending on your point of view.  Locking himself in his garage or office and passing out on a desk was not Tony’s idea of a good time.  By the time Tony turned fifteen, the only member of his family he actually liked was Jarvis, the butler, and he was technically a servant.

All in all, when his school finally got sick of him and let him take his exams early, he was ecstatic for a chance to get out of the house.  MIT accepted him (who wouldn’t, with his grades?), he filled out all the paperwork himself – he put himself down for communal living arrangements, just because he knew Howard would hate it and he was feeling petty at the time – and then he was out of there.

He grew to regret his hasty decision.

Not about MIT – that was awesome, even if he did know more about his classes than most of the Professors – but about the dorm living.  His accommodation was a small room on a corridor, sharing a communal bathroom and kitchen.  At first, he thought it would be fun – sure, it was a step down from what he was used to, but he was paying for it with his trust fund and he knew that Howard wouldn’t shell out for these living arrangements, so he wanted to stretch his budget.  He was a few years younger than the other students, but that wouldn’t matter.

Except it did.

His dorm-mates were four other boys – men really, given their age – and they sneered at him when he tried to introduce himself.

“What do they think they’re doing, letting a kid in here?” was the nicest greeting he got.  Tony assumed they doubted his right to be there and promptly aced every test put before him, in one case getting a better mark than two of his dorm-mates put together.  They didn’t take it well.

As Tony was expecting, Howard threw a fit when he found out where his son was living (it took almost six weeks, and Tony thought that maybe his parents had only just noticed that he was no longer living in the mansion), but as Tony was paying himself there wasn’t much he could do about it.  He made vague comments about Tony learning his lesson and coming back for help before slamming the phone down.  Tony was almost vibrating with rage; when had his father ever given him anything, except a black eye that one time when he’d gotten very drunk and Tony had said something sarcastic?  Howard had apologised when he sobered up – the only ‘sorry’ he’d ever given anyone, Tony thought – and it had never happened again.  That didn’t mean that Tony forgave the old bastard.  Help, indeed.  Everything Tony had, he’d gotten on his own.  Sure, the money was Howard’s, but the brains and ambition were Tony’s, and he would not let his father belittle that.

That was when Tony decided that, no matter how bad his dorm-mates were, he was sticking it out.  He would not prove his father right.

Thinking back, that was probably where his stupid stubborn streak really kicked in.

ROBOTS OR DINOSAURS?

Dinosaurs, because Jurassic Park.  Robots because Tony Stark.  So, err... both?  Robotic dinosaurs.  Yeah, robotic dinosaurs.  :D

Odd Things To Happen At Work #5

It's my birthday, but I was scheduled to work tonight, so I wore a big badge on my shirt that said 'Birthday Girl', because if I have to work on my birthday, I'm going to milk it for all it's worth.

A woman saw my badge, and yelled at my manager for making me work on my birthday.  I was simulataneously very amused by his expression - and repetitve 'she didn't tell me!' that the woman didn't listen to - and concerned that he would be genuinely annoyed.  Luckily for me, he took revenge by stealing drinks I had made for his own customers, making me do them all twice.  I can deal with that.

As I was leaving, he told me to tell him next time it's my birthday.  I get the feeling that I'll never need to book it off again; he's going to give it me off whether I want him to or not.

I'm ok with that.

Halloween Shopping

Work does dress-up nights every month, and this months is Halloween themed, so I bought my costume(s) today.  They were cheap, and consist mostly of wings and a very short rag skirt, but I can make the rest up from my wardrobe anyway.  So, win, I think :)

The thing that confused and scared me was the Christmas stuff.  The sheer amount of it that is out in the shops already is ridiculous.  IT IS OCTOBER.  There are over 9 weeks until Christmas.  Enough already, people.  It is one day, do not drag it out for months on end.