Who: Tony, Dummy +OPEN When: 9/14 Where: Stark Tower Lab What: Tony notices a few irregularities in Dummy's behavior, and cracks open the hood to have a look.
To be perfectly honest, Tony didn't quite know when it started. Dummy's behavior had always been somewhat erratic, at least in the 'young AI assistant trying to learn behaviors' way of not quite connecting all the dots that needed to be connected, like lids on blenders for the drink he knew to make. If he sometimes handed the wrong tool, that could be put down to syntax or prediction failures in language cores, given that Dummy was also now around Kaylee. The dogs had taught him how to fetch, and he trundled after Kaylee with what could only be protective hovering.
It at least made him feel better to tell himself that it started suddenly.
"Hey, Dummy," he leaned back from the bench, grounding the sodering iron and flipping up the protective goggles as movement caught his eye. Frowning, he waved to the bot. "Door's over there, champ."
Dummy gave a sad little whir, and backed away from the wall, then promptly ran forward and into it all over again. The rhythmic thumps were mechanically spaced, and had drawn his attention from the bit of wiring he was working on. "No matter how much you've been hanging around with him, you're not Vision, you don't get to go intangible, no matter how annoying a trick that is," Tony added flippantly, and almost went back to the wiring.
He heard Dummy roll back, and then the thumping started again; this time when he looked up, Dummy was thumping his claw on the side of an unused workbench, looking nothing short of miserable. "Hey, buddy, c'mere," Tony said, curling his fingers. "Bring it in."
This time, Dummy actually made it all the way to him, and thumped his claw into Tony's hands with a woebegone whirl. "What's up?" Tony asked, more to himself as he brushed his thumb over the hinges of the arm, looking for damage. "You pick up a virus somewhere? That's what hanging around with Vision and babies will do to you. C'mere, let's hook you up, take a look at the software."
It took a few minutes longer than he had thought; Dummy was old, much as he liked to gripe that he was absolutely useless as a baby-AI. "Yeah, first we're going to fix you, then we're going to hook you up with Bluetooth," he muttered as he finally dug out the right connector wire and slipped it into the almost-hidden port on Dummy's base, and plugged the other end into the mainframe. Dummy shivered, and Tony took that for agreement.
Sitting back, he propped his keyboard on his lap and with a few keystrokes, had Dummy's code holographically scrolling in front of him. It took him another few minutes, and then he rubbed at his eyes. "Okay, this actually is painful. I can't believe I wrote this." It was almost an act of will to translate what he was seeing, his sixteen-year-old self's code. But that was probably where the problem lay, in something in the code that had become tangled over the years of picking up behaviors. He still resisted the urge to rewrite everything; it wouldn't be Dummy then. He wasn't sure what it would be, but it wouldn't be Dummy.