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In a world filled with the din of industry, war, humanity and media, there's meant to be a guiding light, an inner voice that keeps you company throughout your life. There are many names for this voice, this connection with another. Some are far more technical than others, some clinical, some traditional, but the one that has lingered on in Western culture through novels films and television is soulmate. It's ridiculously romanticised, of course, and doesn't take into account that you might meet your supposed soulmate in person and be completely incompatible. You might even find the voice inside your head a curse, a spiteful, cruel mimicry of the comfort it's supposed to be. There's a market in neural blockers for a reason.
Tony Stark has never had to worry about his soulmate's character, or their compatibility, for a very good reason. He doesn't have one. His mind has always been alone. He doesn't disclose it, because he guesses what would follow. Pity. Revulsion.
“Maybe you should, y'know, see someone,” a girl he stupidly told in college whispered in a shocked undertone.
Tony doesn't need to see anyone. There's nothing wrong with him; it's the whole world that's mad.
And who needs a Jiminy Cricket voice in your head when there's design, and code, and hardware mode? The code, in particular, is soothing. Tony wakes up to new flights of programming fancy, and falls asleep (when he does sleep) to comforting sequences of numbers in a gentle flow.
It's the code that allows him to outstrip other kids by the time he can talk, and his father by the time his peers are learning algebra. He's churning out new patents, new designs with his name on the blueprints by the time he gets an early offer from MIT.
Dummy comes from that code. He's eccentric, clumsy and bug-prone, but the work is solid, and Dummy follows him from the MIT workshop when he graduates and comes home to his echoing, empty mansion.
Freed from school, freed from the resentment of his father, Tony takes his first steps towards taking flight. He's still making bombs, making beautiful, elegant master works of destruction on a grand scale, but that's just his meal ticket. He diversifies, stretching out into fields of bioengineering and chemistry. He gets a degree in architecture just for kicks and builds a beautiful, impossible house full of clean lines and sweeping curves on the jut of a peninsula in Malibu. It's as far as he can get from the dusty, New York mansion with its dark wood and grim paintings, both tonally and geographically while still staying on the United States mainland. He creates a charity in his mother's name, gives them an obscene chunk of capital to start up, and the mansion to operate out of, then packs everything he gives a damn about, from Dummy right down to his favourite screwdriver, and ships it across the country.
Stepping out onto the terrace at Malibu, looking out over the Pacific, feels like taking his first deep breath of clean air in his entire life. The paint is barely dry on the walls, but he doesn't care – he still has work to do. Inspired by all those ridiculous cartoons about the future he watched as a kid, he's wired the house to be smart. Electrical relays control everything, from the lights to the home security to the temperature of his rain shower down to the tenth of a degree. Trouble is, it's a system without a controller, yet. There's no one there to relay the signals; it's all just a circulatory system without a heart, a nervous system without a brain.
Tony's never designed a properly sentient Artificial Intelligence before, but he's always liked a challenge.
He's a whole country away from his company, and the board and Obie. He doesn't think the paps have got wind of his new digs yet either, so for the first time in his life, he's just as alone outside his head as he is inside.
He has the forethought to set up a five times daily delivery of coffee, a twice daily delivery of food, and gives the delivery girl the entry codes and his credit card. She's a perky looking college student with sharp, intelligent eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose. If Tony wasn't in the zone, thinking in code more than in actual English, he'd probably make a move on her, just out of reflex. Instead, he just says, “Tip yourself, I don't know, something obscene. You got student loans?”
She blinks and nods, startled.
“Not any more. Happy birthday, or Christmas, or whatever,” he says, making grabby hands.
“My birthday was months ago, and it's April.” She hands over the enormous cup of coffee with a hint of a smile twisting her lips.
“Doesn't matter, student loans, boom,” Tony says after he's chugged half the cup, utterly earnest.
The delivery girl pinks prettily, and the smile blooms properly across her face. “Thank you,”
“You're welcome, ah, what's your name? I keep calling you delivery girl in my head but that feels kinda rude, seeing as you're keeping me alive here.” Tony gestures at the disarray in his newly christened workshop.
“Virginia,” the girl says, and Tony winces.
“Wow,” he says. “Sorry.”
“My friends call me Pepper,” she confides, rather than slapping him, which proves her awesomeness even more than the second coffee she hands him without being prompted.
“Better,” he says. “Pepper. I like it.”
“Me too,” she says. “Will that be all, Mr Stark?”
“That will be all, Miss...?” he trails off.
“Potts,” she says patiently.
“Pepper Potts?” he asks. “Really?”
Pepper just smiles and disappears, and once the coffee is gone, Tony is too distracted by the code to notice. Coffee appears at regular intervals. Once or twice food is actually physically placed in his hands. He eats it mechanically, without taking his eyes off the screen.
“You need to shower,” Pepper says eventually, snapping him out of the flow he's in.
“But-” he protests.
“No, really,” she says, and she's stronger than she looks, because she easily tugs him across the room and shoves him into the workshop's shower. She twists the taps on, and Tony's mouth, which was opened to object, is suddenly full of water, and he sputters instead. Then, well, he's wet, so he might as well wash quickly once he's peeled off the layers of clothing he doesn't think he's changed since, well, huh, he can't quite remember. When the soap lathers up grey in his hands, he grudgingly concedes Pepper might have a point.
When he emerges with a towel tied around his waist, he feels almost obscenely refreshed. Pepper's standing with an armful of clean, folded clothing that she must have found upstairs, from jeans right down to underwear.
“You didn't shave?” she asks, and Tony can sense the minor disapproval.
“I'm thinking of growing it out,” he half-lies. To be honest, he just can't be bothered shaving every day when that's time he could be spending coding.
“Right,” she says, like she's judging him, just a little. She hands over the clothing. “Will that be all, Mr Stark?” she asks.
“Yes, that will be all, Miss Potts,” he replies automatically.
He thinks it's a mark of his great respect for her as a person who he somehow has not yet tried to bone that he waits until she's up the stairs before tugging the towel away.
Rejuvenated from his shower and an impromptu nap that he ended up accidentally having on his desk, the last few thousand lines of code come pretty easily. Tony throws the Asimov Laws of Robotics in for shits and giggles, and then takes a deep breath before typing c:\JARVIS\jarvis.exe.
The progress bar and commands seem to take an age to open and unfurl, like a gorgeous, digital flower. He's biting his lip hard, with the anxiety he's only just realised he's feeling. He can hear the high pitched whining of the server from across the lab, a sure sign that it's being pushed to its limit, and it's only going to take one thing failing for this whole thing to cascade into a mess of errors and wasted time.
“Please,” he whispers under his breath, “Please.”
When the bar is full and the number is flashing 100% at him like a strobe, it hangs. It hangs for the longest time, and Tony's let his eyes close against his disappointment, when the speakers give a cheerful little electronic chirp. WELCOME MR. STARK appears in adorable ascii.
“Good day, sir. I am JARVIS, Just A Rather Very Intelligent System. I await your command,” types itself across the screen.
“Voice protocols,” Tony says and types, and watches the blinking cursor while the server whines up another note of intensity.
“Voice protocols activated,” JARVIS says in a generic, synthesised voice while the words appear.
“Oh,” Tony says suddenly. “Say that again,” he asks, his heart pounding fast.
“Voice protocols activated,” JARVIS repeats, identical to the first time, and Tony can hear the echo of them in his head, with the code still rushing, always rushing through his mind, but now it's more organised, now it makes sense. There's a glorious symmetry between what's been filling his head his whole life and what's currently actually existing, as a distinct digital entity. He's taken the jumbled noise from his mind and given it form and though Tony really loves explosions, though he takes a great deal of professional pride in his work and appreciates the craft he's been born to make, this fragile digital creation is beautiful in a way that he's struggling to comprehend.
“Access granted, front door,” JARVIS says, and it's enough to jerk Tony out of his daze, to orient himself enough to focus.
“Show me,” he says, and JARVIS immediately switches the screen to a view of the entryway, of Pepper letting herself in with a cardboard tray of coffee and a bucket of what Tony's pretty sure is fried chicken.
To say that Pepper's startled when she descends and Tony's waiting for her, alert and smiling, is understating things. She peers at Tony like she's not sure he's well. Tony's too busy divesting her of both coffee and chicken to care.
“Are you all right, Mr Stark?” she asks, when he plunges a hand into the bucket and starts to gnaw on the deep-fried goodness the moment it's in biting range.
“Peachy,” Tony says, with a sunny smile. “JARVIS, say hi,” he commands.
Pepper jumps when JARVIS says, “Welcome, Miss Potts,” and he just grins all the wider.
“You made a talking computer,” Pepper says once she composes herself.
“I made a talking, thinking, learning computer that is technically this entire house,” Tony corrects, pointing a drumstick at her.
“Haven't you ever seen any science fiction?” Pepper asks.
“I saw enough to know I could do it better. And JARVIS is my honey, he'd never ice me,” Tony says.
“Thank you, sir,” JARVIS replies, and Tony laughs.
“This is going to go horribly wrong,” Pepper says.
Tony feels the code running through his head, listens to the whine of the overtaxed server, and already, he's thinking about upgrades. Quantum processors, grids of sensors, and a voice modulator that sounds like an actual person, something that'll match the personality JARVIS will develop the longer he's alive, the more he learns and adapts.
“Maybe not, maybe it'll go right for a change,” Tony says sincerely, quietly, and Pepper settles a little, looking less hunted and judge-y already. “Hey, how'd you like a job?”
“I already have a job,” Pepper says ruefully.
“Let's make it official,” Tony says. “Stark Industries does great dental.”
“Give me a car to drive around to pick up all your meals with, and I'll think about it. My Beetle's just about fit for scrap,” Pepper says shrewdly.
“Give me your Beetle, and I'll soup it up to take anything on the road,” Tony says.
“No, thanks. Something new, with a factory warranty,” she says, her eyes narrowing.
“Deal,” Tony says, grinning.
He suspects she's thinking about something cheap and economical and boring, but when Tony has a brand new A5 delivered outside her apartment building with a big red bow tied around it, she doesn't complain, and she greets JARVIS politely the next time she turns up with coffee and Thai food.
“I think that went well,” Tony says, tucking in. “Don't you, JARVIS?”
“Indeed, sir,” JARVIS says. His voice isn't yet what Tony feels is right, but it's a little less robotic, a little BBC-English, and Tony thinks he likes it. He reaches out to touch the side of the monitor absently, like he's stroking a pet, and oh, that's an idea – physical interaction. Gestures. Holographic interfaces.
In the back of his mind he knows the bubble won't last, that any day now, Obie will descend with a list of demands from the military and the board and he'll have to go back to being a merchant of death, but right now, in his new house, in his new space, he's created life, a life that's waited inside him all his life to emerge, and that's remarkable.
I'll never be alone again, Tony thinks, and starts dictating notes between bites that JARVIS dutifully records.