InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "Burn baby, burn."

Rhodey had been at [the Tower] on military business--he was officially the military liaison with the Avengers, which he thought was a better way of keeping an eye on things than throwing people who didn't kiss up to Thunderbolt Ross in the pokey--and at the end of his visit, he wandered over to see who was in the labs. He caught sight of Jane coming back from what he guessed was a coffee break based on the cup in her hands.

"Doctor Foster," he greeted her with a friendly grin and a wave, since there was no way she could shake hands without a mess or a juggle of coffee and notebooks. "How you doing?"

“Hi Colonel Rhodes.” Jane waved with her coffee mug, sending her coffee dangerously close to sloshing over the brim of her glass. She hurriedly resettled her grip. “I haven’t seen Tony if you’re looking for him. He might not be in today.”

"Already saw him, just wandering out and thought I'd see what everyone else is up to. Need a hand with any of that? I can help you get it back to your lab." He'd seen the near spill of her coffee and thought she could use the assistance. It wasn't like he had to be anywhere for a while, either.

"Oh um," Jane gingerly transferred her mug to her alternate hand in order to shift the armload of notebooks and files she was juggling in a way to make them easier to hand over. "Yeah. That'd be great. Thanks." Less burdened, she sipped at her coffee to clear some space below the rim.

"Okay, that's better. What brings you around? Anything interesting or just a visit to Tony?"

"Enh, just official stuff." Rhodey took over the armful of notebooks easily, since they weren't really a full arm's worth for him. "I do the paperwork--not that it's paper any more--that keeps people like Ross and his buddies busy and out of everybody's hair. And before you ask, my lips are sealed on whatever's going on in your lab unless you're ready to release it or I have to suit up to deal with it." Rhodey said the last bit in a tone that suggested he'd had to do things like that in the past.

“What?” Jane turned to Rhodey, suddenly a lot more intense. “Wait what? I don’t know what Tony said but I while technically work here I maintain control over my intellectual property. So you really shouldn’t be passing along anything about my work without my approval.”

"I haven't!" Rhodey reassured Jane, holding up one hand as if to fend her off. "Just saying I won't, until and unless whatever's in there decides to take over the world or whatever like some of Tony's experiments have. You've got more sense than Tony, though, so I'm hoping yours won't come to that."

“Good. I’ve already had to rescue my life’s work from one shadowy government organization. I don’t want to do that again. Anyway, I don’t build anything that has to take a Turing Test.” Jane walked with Rhodey back to her lab, pulling open the door to let him before her.

Rhodey passed through first, though it always seemed reflexively wrong to him even when he knew intellectually that it was her pass getting them into the lab so she had to open the door. "Nah, if it was your work, I'd be more worried about what was coming through than something you made deciding it had mommy issues and deciding to solve them by destroying humanity. Anyhow, having established I'm not going to tell the brass what you're up to, I hope I can convince you to give me the top level overview."

"If I've done it correctly, nothing should come through unless I open the door. It should be no more dangerous than the way Thor travels around." She found a spot on her cluttered work bench for her coffee then went to relieve Colonel Rhodes of what he was carrying. Jane's lab tended to be an extension of her brain: whiteboards full of equations and algorithms, and half disassembled machinery everywhere.

Rhodey had done well in his studies at MIT, so he wasn't exactly a slacker. But the work here was definitely over his head from what he could see on the whiteboards. With some explanations he could make sense of the diagrams and notes. But there was no need to trouble himself or Jane for that. "I'm not worried that you've done something wrong. But there are things like Thanos out there, so I have to hope they don't find the door and decide to beat it down just because they can. The universe is a big place. A lot of wonderful things but some scary ones, too."

“If everyone worried about what would happen each time they opened their front door, no one would ever leave the house. You’re worried the wolf will come blow the house down. I’m worried we’ll never even get the chance to get to the market.” Jane waved a hand at her calculations. “The universe is big. So big. Enormous. I’m still working out how to run this without an all-seeing being in charge of it.”

"Talk to Tony. He's got FRIDAY," Rhodey said, and then thought about how inappropriate that flippancy was with anyone who wasn't Tony and winced. "Bad idea, but, seriously, in the absence of a god to do it, a computer could probably handle some of the work. Is there any way we could reach out to find Heimdall? I know he was--but Tony's here, and Loki's here, so maybe we could get him to explain to you what he does. Or would that be bad because he'd do it himself and you wouldn't need to open the door on your own?"

Jane’s face scrunched up. “I don’t think - even if he were here, his job is to guard the Bifrost. And anyway, the Asgardians aren’t always so great about sharing knowledge. Despite what everyone thinks I’m not actually Asgardian. I don’t meet the qualifications to be let in on their secrets.”

"Fair enough." A little surprise was evident on Rhodey's face. "Then maybe a neural network of some sort really is the way to go. I'm not sure I'd want to go so far Tony's gone." He glanced up at the ceiling. "No offense, FRIDAY, if you're listening, just that's the sort of thing that gets people itchy." He continued, to Jane, "I mean, I expect things to come through because I'm a pessimist, or maybe an optimist depending on your point of view, but I don't figure everything we could get through will be bad. Just alien, which is mostly different.

"And I guess for all that I think of the Asgardians as people, they're alien in their own way too. So we, we Earth humans, have to do whatever we're going to do on our own. For values of we meaning mostly you." It occurred to Rhodey that Thor might have concerns of his own about Jane opening the doors of the universe without knowing what was behind them. That was too pessimistic, though, and Rhodey instinctively recoiled from the idea. Clearly he'd been spending too much time around Ross. Thor was an honorable man, or god, or whatever he was, and he and Jane had worked out their relationship. It wasn't his business even if he was nominally supposed to be keeping an eye out for trouble. If there was trouble coming, it wouldn't be from that direction.

If Thor thought he could pop around the universe with a magic axe and then try to stop Jane from unlocking the secrets to intergalactic travel, he'd need a lot more than that axe and an affinity for the weather to protect himself before Jane was done with him.

"I can't actually do it yet." Jane's voice betrayed how annoyed she was that she hadn't managed to crack the secrets to the universe before she turned 40. "So it might not matter."

"But you're going to." The way Rhodey said it didn't make it a question.

“Well.” It wasn’t a disagreement. “I have a lot of work to do first. No one’s knocking at the door yet, Colonel. You have more to worry about from New Asgard there.”

Rhodey puffed out something that didn't qualify as a sigh, exactly, but was related to it. "I'm hoping I don't have anything to worry about there. But I have to admit I'd feel better if their Bifrost had a guardian. I don't think that's my department to suggest, though, and not yours either." Not a thought Rhodey wanted to consider, but: it might actually be Thunderbolt Ross's.

The way Jane’s eyebrows came up said she agreed it wasn’t her place. The line had been drawn and on one side was queening and on the other was Jane. “Space is weird. It’s big and it’s weird. And the things we don’t know about it outnumber what we do know by an order of magnitude. Came across an energy signature I didn’t recognize a couple weeks ago. It’s probably a pulsar but.” Jane shrugged.

"Huh," Rhodey said. "Can I take a look? I didn't do a lot of astrophysics but I did sneak a class in when I had a chance. I was already aiming for the Air Force and at the time they weren't looking for Space Force people. Unfortunately." He shrugged, not so much awkwardly as resigned.

“Sure. I can send you the file if that would be easier,” Jane offered.

"That would be fantastic. But if you want to show me what we've got today as well, we can do that." And Rhodey looked relieved when Jane's expression said he'd avoided at least another conversational minefield.