WHO: Tony Stark, Victor Mancha WHEN: Monday 10/17 WHERE: Stark Industries WHAT: Troubleshooting WARNINGS: Nope
Victor didn’t know what to expect from Stark Industries in this world. He made it through security and found himself in a less than Tony Stark esque (though still swank,) waiting room. All his internal alarms were figuratively screaming at him to get out of there, that this was about as safe as asking Ultron to just check his config to make sure he was still connecting to the network okay. Still, his options were Tony Stark or some random dude off the net. He was going with Tony Stark. If Ironman broke him, it was likely intentional and clean. He probably wasn’t going to be walking around town with his left side glitching out or his output set to Lithuanian or something. He was going to die here. Overdramatic, yeah, but still. Dead seemed like a better option than hacked and terrorizing everyone in the city. He wasn’t going to become Victorious. Whatever that version of Gert had seen in her future… It wasn’t him. He swore it wasn’t him.
He was so caught up in that worry that he didn’t even notice Tony’s arrival at first. Super embarrassing.
Very embarrassing, particularly since Tony got in closer than was probably necessary, all squinted expression and over-caffeinated (although apparently not too caffeinated, since he had a cup of coffee in one hand). “You him?” He asked, free hand reaching out to poke at Victor’s arm, curious. “The cyborg?” Hopefully not Ultron. But a creation of Ultron. Which was — well. It could be just as bad, frankly, although the guy had seemed not really down with that whole destruction of the human race thing from what he’d seen so far. Sure, he didn’t seem to like Tony, but not many people did these days, so as far as that was concerned, well. He could take a number.
Victor nearly jumped out of his skin when the poke came, though he did literally jump away from Tony, yelping in surprise. “The fuck, man?” he asked. “You don’t just creep up on a guy, poke him and ask him if he’s a cyborg.” Which was to say yes, yes he was the cyborg. He really wasn’t best pleased with being blindsided by Tony Stark...again.
Yeah, Tony sort of got that a lot. Well, not the cyborg part but the ‘don’t go creeping’ part, yeah. He couldn’t help himself, he wasn’t a creep, but he did like pushing buttons a bit more than was probably healthy.
“So you are then,” he said, and it was practically chipper. “Great. C’mon then. Office is this way. I’ve got tools. But I’m kind of assuming you’re more of a computer sort of interface so I’m not sure I really need tools beyond my own set up.” Which was decedent, and he’d certainly tweaked it a bit since he’d gotten here. Every machine was just a little better with FRIDAY on it, after all.
“Yeah, I’d rather not have anyone digging into my actual hardware,” Victor said, following him. The cutting him open alone would be a mess. He followed Tony back into the workspace, trying not to creep too much on the guy’s set up or even really interface with his machinery yet. They’d have time for all that later. He wanted to get his questions answered. After that, he could relax. “So uh, where do you want me?” Should he be laying down? He almost felt like he should just in case Tony tripped up something and his reflexes made him fall out of his chair. Standing was right the shit out.
Tony’s office, while not as big as some he’d had in the past, was still sort of borderline ridiculous - which was good, since he was carving out some workspace for himself in here as well as down in the actual lower levels of the building. It was sort of like making due with a blessing, so far as he figured. He didn’t have his Suit, or half of his tech from back home, but he had the means to make what he needed so long as he didn’t mind a bit of a delay. It was more than a lot of people had here, anyway.
He gestured vaguely to a chair that was on the opposite side of his desk before wandering around it and flopping into his own seat — his coffee not spilling even a drop with the movement. “There’s good,” he said, waving his hand to the side to summon up his keyboard. “So you want a recall of — the other day?”
Victor sat down, trying to get himself settled in such a way that wouldn’t end horribly for him. “Sunday, 11:14 a.m.,” Victor answered, taking down his firewalls temporarily so that Tony could get in, something some part of him was disgusted with and terrified of. He didn’t think a lot of people in the city had the skill to break in and even if they did, they probably couldn’t make a lot of sense of Ultron’s crazy coding to do any real harm – at least not any that his self-repair function couldn’t handle. Tony could turn him into a completely different person. This was a huge moment for him and Tony wouldn’t likely even realize the gravity of the situation. “I know I saw him, but every time I play it back, either the whole thing statics out or the parts where he should be just glitch out like friggen’ Missing No. all over the place.”
The firewall would have only kept Tony occupied for a short space of time, but it was nice that he didn’t have to worry with it at all. He went to typing, fingers quick over the silent digital keyboard, eyes on the screens in front of him even as he hummed out some sort of acknowledgement to Victor.
“Yeah, okay — Missing What? What’s missing?” There was probably no point in responding though, as it was pretty clear Tony was playing in his sandbox and wasn’t all that great at sharing. “So, cyborg implies there are human bits too. Blood? Organs? What?”
Victor rolled his eyes. Old people. He was tempted to just call up the moment Ultron explained it all to him. “He used human DNA to basically create a synthetic person with all the appearances of being human while very much not. Allegedly, my organs and crap are all going to take that DNA and eventually have every appearance of being organic material. I wasn’t supposed to know anything about what I am until long after that happened. He just wanted me and everyone else to think I’m a mutant. It’s complicated and I don’t quite understand the science behind it.”
Tony considered that, even if most of his attention was still on the screens. That was brilliant actually. Nanotechnology. Organic electronics and computer systems. It was beyond even him currently, but if he poked around a bit — well. He could get a head start on figuring it out. Sometimes he had to actively remind himself of how evil Ultron had ended up because he’d been a complete genius, too.
And a terrible mistake.
“Impressive,” he said, looking through all the coding, the way Victor’s everything sort of loaded and organized cleanly (sort of) memories and thoughts and files. “This is — impressive,” he said again, more to himself. “Okay, so, wow, there’s just a ton here—“ And damned if he wasn’t saving some of this. “Technically you could perfectly remember your — birth? Wait. How’d that work?” Okay, maybe he just wanted to start digging in.
“I was built like two or three years ago. Anything you see from before that is stuff Ultron planted there to make me think I was like everyone else.” It might actually give Tony a good baseline for what a real memory looked like versus a fake one. Maybe. Probably it wouldn’t since they’d been meant to trick even Victor. He just didn’t like thinking about it too much. “Please don’t pirate me to try and figure it out. I really don’t think that’s gonna end well for anyone.”
“Video files? How possibly could that—“ Tony paused, apparently not caring whether or not he finished his thoughts out loud or not, and went about opening something to watch aiming for more recent for the time being, getting as close to the time references without actually hitting the mark yet. Baseline, indeed.
“You know,” he said, ignoring Victor’s suggestion, even as he squinted at a video on mute — was this guy playing on bumper cars? — “Lots of people have been seeing weird things lately.”
It took an enormous amount of processing power for Victor to convert things on the fly for Tony’s system. His mind was doing it because the files were being requested. It was leaving him very, very groggy while it happened. “That so?” he asked a couple seconds later than he knew he should’ve. He shook his head to try and clear things. Tony’s tech was apparently working fine for Tony. It was working much less fine for Victor. “You think this is part of a pattern?” he asked.
Tony noticed the lag - and that was what it was, really. There was no other way to describe it - and wondered a moment if there was a way to fix that. This really was exciting, honestly, some of his finest work. Even if it wasn’t exactly his work. More like. The work of his work.
Oh. That was bad. Right. Ultron. No fixing that. Tony had to mentally take a step back, focus on the video playing out instead of his own buzzing thoughts. “Probability is high for it,” he agreed. “This place fucks with everything. People. Dreams. Super powers. Computers wouldn’t be out of the question.” He skipped forward in the files, looking for the actual issue. “Not that you shouldn’t be safe, Ultron’s an issue, but if he was around, we’d probably know about it by now. He’s not exactly known for his subtlety.” Which okay, maybe that was on Tony, too.
“I dunno, he built an entire other robot to try and convince me that was my father instead for a while. Pretty sure he can be subtle if he decides that fucking with people is worth it,” Victor said. “Can you hold off on the scrubbing through files for a second? It’s not like I automatically output to .mp4. I’m having to convert things on the fly for you. Unless your system can handle actual sensory output as well.” If his false memories couldn’t trigger a particular smell or physical sensation of something, he doubted they’d be nearly as convincing. That and there were things he very definitely was trying to keep Tony away from.
That didn’t really sound like something Ultron would have done in his own timeline, but Tony was already well aware that things were different in whatever world that Victor came from. Maybe he’d given Ultron more time to grow and scheme while he’d been busy stealing dinosaurs?
Tony held his hands up away from his computer from a moment, signifying that he was waiting — although the way he was frowning at the screen said that his patience would only last so long. He couldn’t help it, Victor was interesting. “My set up isn’t that good.” Yet. But mostly it just sounded like a challenge to Tony.
It didn’t take more than a few seconds for Victor to adapt and fix things properly so he could output faster for him. He probably should’ve considered Tony’s software limitations before he got there. It just seemed way easier to wait and see what he’d actually be working with. “You’re good to keep going,” he said, shaking off the lag. He was honestly surprised Tony hadn’t stepped up his tech game more. Probably it was just a matter of time. That was fine. While Tony was busy looking at him, he was getting a good look at the man of iron’s data all on his own.
This all would probably be easier with a wired connection. That’d be a whole lot of mess Victor didn’t want to deal with. “Kinda glad it’s not. It’d be weird as shit to have you experiencing exactly what I did. Useful, but fuckin’ weird, man.”
Tony was working on it. Beyond a travel friendly version of FRIDAY that he’d had on his phone though, he was starting from scratch in Salem. Which wasn’t an issue, he could work with what he had, it just meant he had to take the time to build everything back up to where he usually liked it. Which was taking longer than he’d like, really, but making a proper lab, workspace, computer system — well. Even God had needed a few days to build shit.
“This the data I need?” He asked, but was already tapping into it, anyway — Tony was by no means stupid, was aware Victor was being stingy with his output. Which Tony couldn’t blame him for, but that didn’t stop him being curious anyway. “It doesn’t look corrupted.”
Victor sighed and scrubbed his face with his hands. “Alright, so if it’s not Ultron and it’s not corrupted data, then what the hell are we looking at?” It seemed like a reasonable enough question to him, right? There were probably a bunch of possible solutions. He got up to look over the files on Tony’s screen. “And is your AI always so chatty?”
Tony considered that, watching the footage one more time before looking over the data that was milling over his screen. “Human error,” he decided finally. Because robot parts or otherwise, it was clear that Victor wasn’t just that. And the place got to people and fucked them up.
“And yes, she is. Don’t sass her, because she can and will ruin your day.”
“I’m not sassing her. We’re having a very lovely conversation. Are you mad because she likes me better?” Victor teased, standing straighter behind Tony and stretching. “Except I’m pretty sure she’s using that conversation to distract me while she tries to compile more data on me and perhaps you.”
“She doesn’t like you better,” Tony said, and there was no doubt in his tone. “She’s probably just happy to have someone else to talk to, right now. It’s a goddamned pain getting speakers integrated into this place like they ought to be.” And yeah, maybe she was distracting for a reason, that’d stand to reason, particularly given it was exactly what Tony would have asked for.
“But so far as I can tell — which is, you know, a lot, it looks like Salem is killer robot free.”
Victor was really tempted to flip on the LEDs in his eyes just so they were glowing red for a moment just to freak him out, but he probably wouldn’t’ve appreciated that. Billy would’ve. So would Loki and probably Tommy. Except one or all of them would’ve also made jokes about using Victor as a flashlight. He disconnected himself from Tony’s network and put his firewalls back up before FRIDAY could get anything too juicy out of him.
“Let’s keep it that way, yeah?” he said, slipping his hands in his pockets as he moved away from creeping over Tony’s shoulder to look around the workspace more, trying to solve his speaker problem.
Maybe he didn’t get anything juicy, no, but Friday probably would have something fun for him to look over later. That’d have to be good enough for now.
Tony waved away his keyboard and half the screens on his computers before swiveling his chair to look over at Victor. “Been there, done that. Not happening again. You keep your nose clean too, and I don’t think we’ll have a problem.” But at this point they probably had just enough dirt on the other to stop it if there was.
The phrasing was off. Victor had been talking about himself and Tony potentially being Tony and breaking something he didn’t understand. But he knew how to navigate Ultron’s code and he...Victor looked at Tony critically for a long moment. “You built him,” he said. He hadn’t done it in Victor’s universe as far as Victor knew, but he’d definitely done it in his own. Tony Stark had created at least one version of Ultron. His mind was whirring with— He didn’t know what. Was he eventually going to exist in Tony’s world?
Victor shook his head and tried to move past it in conversation. “Let me help you with your speaker problem. You’re too old to be running cable through walls and at least I can do it without causing that much property damage.”
That look was — well. Not what Tony had been expecting, but he looked right back, because this wasn’t something he felt great about (at all) but it wasn’t something he was going to shy away from or make excuses about, either. “I built him,” he repeated, confirming. He’d sort of thought it obvious - had assumed that was why Victor had come to him in the first place. Was it not common knowledge in the land of dino-theft?
“I’m not old,” Tony said after a beat, because fuck you, Victor. But at the same time, it would be nice to not have to play in the air ducts and drywall. “But yeah. That’d be good, actually. I can pay you for the trouble.”
“Guess that makes us family then,” Victor said, teasing, deciding that being playful was the best kinda way to deal with the realization that there were at least two people over on that coast capable of making something like Ultron. “I’d appreciate that. The being paid for my trouble, I mean.”
“I didn’t think you meant the family part,” Tony said dryly, because that was sort of a super fucked up way of putting it and Tony was not interested in thinking of what exactly that might make him and Victor. “But sure. I’ll have my PA draw something up for you with HR. While you’re doing all your youthful maneuvering in the building, I might work up a few more things I need done.” Like proper sensors and all the rest. Getting Friday fully operational in this building would be more than a boon.
“Nope, I meant the family part, Gramps,” Victor teased. He shrugged lazily. Youthful maneuvering. More like he’d just use the metal in the wires to run everything without having to tear the whole building apart. “You’re not gonna make me wear carpenter jeans are you? Do they even make those anymore?”
Tony leveled a look at the younger man, and it couldn’t have been more unimpressed even if he’d tried harder. “No on all fronts, for a million different reasons.” No to Gramps (really, really no) and no to bad fashion (jesus).
“Go away now. I have designs to finish before you start. On Monday. Wait. What’s today? Er. Next Monday.”
Victor couldn’t help but laugh. “See you then, old man,” he said, smug as he waved Tony off while he walked away. He was absolutely going to make sure some Werther’s ended up on his desk at some point.