Chapter 4: Professional Interest
Doctor Pietro Polendina arrived at Project FOXFIRE in a chair Tony wanted to take apart. That was the first problem. The second was that Pietro noticed. Tony stood beside Dr. Marrow inside one of FOXFIRE's secured technical rooms while two Atlas visitors entered through the opposite door. Major Helena Ward came first, military posture, practical uniform, controlled expression. She scanned the room once and appeared to know where every camera, exit, and piece of useful cover sat before she reached the table. Tony liked competence. He distrusted it on principle. Pietro followed in a mechanical mobility chair that used four articulated limbs rather than ordinary wheels. The chair adjusted itself smoothly over the threshold, compensating for height and floor angle with small motions that would have escaped anyone less interested in robotics.
Tony watched the rear-left leg rotate through the turn. Compact actuator. Good torque distribution. Better suspension than several Atlas military platforms he had evaluated. The chair elevated Pietro slightly as he approached the workbench. Tony's gaze followed the linkage. Pietro smiled.
"Would you like the specifications now or after you pretend you weren't staring?"
Tony looked up. Marrow hid a smile. Ward did not. Tony chose dignity.
"The load-bearing geometry is unusual."
"That wasn't an answer."
"I wasn't staring."
"Excellent. We can both begin by lying politely."
Tony liked him immediately. That was inconvenient. Pietro maneuvered beside the table and extended one hand.
"Pietro Polendina."
Tony shook it.
"Anthony Voss."
"I've read your evaluations."
"I'm sorry."
Pietro laughed. Ward watched everything. Tony filed that too. Marrow completed introductions they no longer needed, then stepped back. Ward took the first half of the evaluation. That was probably deliberate. Let the military officer ask the uncomfortable questions before the charming scientist made Tony forget to be suspicious. Reasonable strategy. It would not work. Probably. Ward placed a compact industrial control unit on the table.
"Dr. Marrow says Handshake allows you to interface with machines through direct contact."
"Yes."
"Control them?"
"Sometimes."
"Define sometimes."
Tony looked at the device.
"If the machine already has an interface that accepts commands, and I have permission or access through that interface, I can usually operate it faster than normal."
Ward's eyes narrowed slightly.
"Permission."
"Machine permission, not legal permission."
"You distinguish the two."
"Computers do."
Pietro made a quiet approving sound. Ward ignored him.
"Can Handshake bypass encryption?"
"No."
"Authentication?"
"No."
"Network segmentation?"
"No."
All technically true. Handshake did not magically defeat any of those things. Tony could. Sometimes. That distinction was doing useful work. Ward tapped the industrial controller.
"Show me."
Tony placed his hand against the service port. Handshake opened. The control unit became present against his awareness. Intentionally simple. Three motor outputs. Sensor feedback. Authenticated maintenance layer already unlocked for the test. Tony moved one simulated actuator. Then another. He did it at a speed fast enough to impress and slow enough not to terrify. Ward watched the logging display.
"You're not using the screen."
"Don't need it."
"You can feel the feedback?"
"Sort of."
"Can you feel the entire machine?"
Tony disconnected.
"I can access what the interface exposes."
Ward looked at him.
"If a sensor doesn't exist?"
"I don't get magic information from the universe."
"If the motor physically cannot move?"
"Handshake doesn't turn it into a better motor."
Pietro smiled.
"A faster wrench."
Tony glanced toward him.
"Exactly."
Ward's expression suggested the metaphor had entered a permanent file. Good. That was the point.
• •
Ward escalated gradually. Industrial controls became a damaged drone. The drone became a stripped Knight diagnostic chassis. The Knight remained air-gapped. Tony approved of her caution. She was testing military utility without giving him anything important. He was testing Atlas military thinking without appearing to. Fair trade. At one point Ward connected a secure diagnostic terminal belonging to her own technical team. A.D.A. noticed through the tiny hidden interface Tony wore beneath his sleeve. The secure Handshake channel between them remained almost silent.
The attached system has a valid route to Major Ward's military diagnostic environment.
Tony's attention did not change externally.
Do not touch it.
Agreed.
The opportunity was excellent. Which was exactly why Tony refused it. Ward might be baiting him. Even if she wasn't, exploiting a military network while under direct observation would have been stupid enough to make pre-rebirth Tony proud. No. He diagnosed the local test hardware and stopped. Ward watched the logs. Nothing anomalous occurred. Something in her posture eased. Good. She had either learned he was cautious or learned he could pass her test. Both helped.
"Could you control a Knight?" Ward asked.
Tony looked toward the stripped chassis.
"If I'm connected to a control interface that already has the authority to command it."
"And if you're not?"
"Then no."
Ward nodded. Tony did not mention FOX-CORE-02. He did not mention the growing number of retired Knights beneath a mountain. He definitely did not mention A.D.A.
• •
Pietro's evaluation began with a hand. Of course it did. The prosthetic rested on a padded tray between them. It was unfinished, more refined than Venn's current arm, with modular digits and exposed sensory routing along the wrist. Pietro adjusted his chair closer to the workbench.
"Prototype."
Tony stared.
"Whose?"
"Mine."
"I meant patient."
Pietro's expression changed. Small. Approval, maybe.
"No patient yet. General development platform."
Good. Tony leaned closer.
"The thumb is wrong."
Marrow made a noise behind him. Pietro's eyes brightened.
"How?"
Tony pointed.
"Base joint gives you opposition but not enough independent rotation under load. It'll work for holding cups and tools. It will annoy anyone trying to manipulate something small while the wrist is flexed."
Pietro stared at the mechanism. Then at Tony.
"You determined that visually."
"Mostly."
"Mostly?"
Tony touched the service contact. Handshake opened. The prototype exposed joint state, calibration values, tactile sensor routing, and local preprocessing. Tony went still. This was good. Actually good. Not polished. Not finished. But the architecture showed thought beyond making a mechanical limb move. Pietro cared about sensory latency. Local reflex processing. Not forcing every tactile input through a high-level controller before the hand responded. Tony had built similar ideas for armor interfaces and medical prosthetics on Earth. He forgot to underperform for approximately five seconds.
"You're preprocessing grip slip locally."
Pietro became very still. Tony realized his mistake. Too late.
"Yes."
"Because if you send everything upstream, the correction arrives late."
"Yes."
Tony pointed toward the thumb.
"But your lateral sensor density is higher than the motor can exploit."
Pietro stared. Tony shut up. Silence. Then Pietro smiled. Not the indulgent smile adults used when a child said something clever. Engineer. Recognition.
"Exactly," Pietro said.
Damn. Tony liked that too much. Pietro moved the prosthetic closer.
"What would you change?"
Tony looked toward Marrow. She looked surprised. Ward looked interested. Tony should have given a simple answer. He didn't.
"Depends on target use."
Pietro's smile widened.
"Good."
Tony frowned.
"What?"
"Most people start redesigning before asking what the patient needs."
Tony looked back at the hand.
"That's how you build expensive garbage."
Pietro laughed. The conversation lasted forty-three minutes. Tony forgot twice that it was an evaluation. He hated Pietro for that too.
• •
The question about safety came near the end. Pietro had shifted his chair away from the table and was reviewing Tony's Handshake notes.
"Dr. Marrow says simultaneous interface load causes neurological strain."
"Sometimes."
"Headaches. Nausea. Nosebleeds."
Tony shrugged.
"Bodies are inefficient."
"Especially seven-year-old bodies."
Tony gave him a flat look. Pietro did not apologize.
"Do you know when to stop?" he asked.
Tony's instinctive answer was yes. His history disagreed. Pietro waited. Tony looked toward the table.
"Usually."
"That's a better answer."
"Didn't say it was good."
"Neither did I."
Pietro lowered the tablet.
"Anthony, if someone asks you to do something with Handshake that feels unsafe, you can refuse."
Tony looked up. Interesting.
"Can I?"
Pietro's expression tightened. He understood the question beneath the question.
"You should be able to."
"Not the same thing."
"No."
Pietro glanced toward Marrow. She did not look away.
"For anything I recommend," Pietro said, "access to your Semblance should be voluntary unless there is a genuine medical emergency. Education doesn't require control of your body."
Ward's eyes moved toward him. Tony filed the sentence. Useful. More importantly, Pietro seemed to mean it. That was becoming a pattern. Dangerous.
• •
A.D.A. disliked Ward less than Tony expected. That did not mean she trusted her. After the visitors left for the day, Tony opened a silent Handshake channel through his room terminal.
Assessment.
Major Ward tested whether you would exploit an attached military diagnostic route. You did not.
Think it was deliberate?
Probability sixty-eight percent.
Pietro?
A.D.A. paused. Tony smiled.
You like him.
His published prosthetics work demonstrates unusually strong integration between mechanical function and patient autonomy.
That's a yes.
That is an assessment.
Sure.
A.D.A. sent another file. Pietro's preliminary recommendation. Education only. Advanced technical curriculum. Voluntary Semblance access. No military tasking. No permanent transfer justified solely by research interest. Tony read it twice.
Well.
You appear surprised.
Atlas scientist says don't turn kid into military interface. Little surprised.
Major Ward's initial recommendation differs.
Of course. Ward saw strategic value. Tony did not blame her. He had spent half his life professionally evaluating strategic value. Her proposal recommended controlled systems education, secure technical testing, and an Atlas-supervised curriculum with possible temporary residential evaluation. Not conscription. Not yet. Still a cage with better equipment if handled badly. Tony closed the file.
Base.
A.D.A. transmitted progress. Water reservoir stable. Primary server cluster expanded. Food production below twenty percent of projected eight-person minimum. Medical room operational for basic trauma stabilization. Three Knights functional. One excavation system undergoing repair. No reliable transport capable of moving eight children unnoticed. Not ready. Tony hated those words.
• •
Six weeks passed. Pietro returned twice. Then FOXFIRE established remote technical lessons twice each week. Tony complained for form. He looked forward to them. Pietro never taught like Tony was seven. He taught like Tony was an engineer with missing local context. That difference mattered. Remnant metallurgy. Dust-safe component design. Aura-responsive materials. Local manufacturing tolerances. Transforming mechanisms. That last subject became a problem. Tony had already seen Remnant weapons fold. He had not appreciated how far the design philosophy went. Mass still mattered. Volume still mattered. But materials, compact actuation, Dust-assisted systems, and generations of cultural obsession with transforming weapons had produced engineering solutions Earth simply had not prioritized. Tony loved it. A rifle could collapse into a sword. A spear could become a firearm.
Armor could redistribute around moving joints in ways that made his brain itch pleasantly. Tony started sketching. A.D.A. noticed.
You have opened seven weapon-design files during an educational lecture.
Research.
Three are labeled 'folding hand cannon ideas.'
Very serious research.
Tony Stark had stopped wanting to become Iron Man again. He had not stopped being a weapons engineer. Those were different things. Remnant was going to be terrible for his self-control.
• •
Pietro gave him a rescue-drone problem during one lesson. The machine had limited lifting capacity, damaged optics, and two possible evacuation tasks. Tony immediately began redesigning it to do both. Pietro stopped him.
"Why?"
Tony stared.
"Why what?"
"Why does it need to do both?"
"Because both problems exist."
"That isn't an answer."
Tony disliked hearing his own habits used against him. Pietro continued.
"A specialized machine is not a failed general-purpose machine."
Tony looked toward the design.
"Redundancy is good."
"Yes."
"Multiple capability is good."
"Sometimes."
"Then—"
"Everything doesn't need to solve every problem, Anthony."
Tony went still. The sentence landed harder than Pietro intended. Iron Man. Ultron. Armor around the world. Every machine becoming another layer between Tony and the possibility of failure. Pietro noticed something change.
"Anthony?"
Tony looked away.
"Yeah."
"I wasn't criticizing you."
"I know."
That made it worse. Pietro waited. Tony eventually redesigned the rescue drone for one primary role and one emergency fallback. It worked better. Annoying.
• •
A.D.A. found GARDEN again during the same period. Not the horror. Not yet. A name. Dr. Elara Sen. Former medical systems specialist associated with GARDEN during its later years. Public academic record after the program shifted dramatically. Tony reviewed the abstracts. Aura trauma rehabilitation. Cumulative depletion. Pediatric assent. Induced manifestation risk. Interesting.
She learned something.
Probably.
Can we identify what?
Not without deeper archive access.
Tony stared. The temptation existed. A.D.A. sent the risk estimate before he asked.
Direct restricted access increases discovery probability.
No.
Agreed.
Passive. Slow. Tony had other problems. BULWARK remained active. NIGHTJAR remained active. A.D.A. identified a probable pediatric Faunus patient from medical logistics connected to NIGHTJAR and Sen-related records, transferred between classified facilities approximately six months earlier. Not enough to identify the person. Enough to worry.
Direct ID risk?
Nine to fourteen percent.
Tony hated it.
Track Sen travel and logistics passively.
Agreed.
He could not blow the entire operation because he wanted one answer. Not yet.
• •
The base became less hypothetical. A.D.A. repaired more Knights. Tony redesigned their hands. She produced a version he approved. Then improved it again without asking. The new hands looked capable of precision work. They also looked like they could punch something. Tony considered that vindication. A.D.A. considered it coincidence. Hydroponics expanded. Food production improved. A second hidden surface route was established. The main mountain entrance became something nobody would recognize as an entrance without coordinates and intimate geological knowledge. A.D.A. planned eight residential rooms. Tony stared at the layout one night. Eight. Not assigned names. Not yet. He still imagined every FOXFIRE child living there. That assumption had not been tested. It would be. Later. For now, capacity mattered. A.D.A. sent a new report.
Atlas has drafted a temporary transfer evaluation.
Tony's stomach tightened.
Permanent?
Not currently. Proposed duration twelve days, Atlas Applied Systems campus, supervised by Dr. Polendina and Major Ward, with medical oversight.
Tony read the terms. Better than expected. Still bad. Leaving FOXFIRE meant new networks. New security. New unknowns. It also meant proximity to Pietro's laboratories. Tony was not immune to temptation.
Can we survive twelve days without my local FOXFIRE access?
The base can. I can. Your own connection to me would become less reliable.
That mattered. Tony had built A.D.A. to survive without him. Now he was discovering how much he disliked the reverse.
My independent redundancy is currently eighty-seven percent of target.
Get it above ninety-four before transfer.
Already prioritizing.
Tony smiled faintly. Of course she was. At the end of the week, Dr. Marrow called him into her office.
"The Atlas evaluation has been approved."
Tony sat opposite her.
"Do I get a vote?"
Marrow paused.
"You can object."
"And if I do?"
"I can file the objection."
"And then?"
"Final placement authority rests with your appointed guardianship structure and Atlas child services."
Tony looked at her.
"So no."
Marrow's expression tightened.
"I'm sorry."
Tony believed her. That did not make the answer better. He stood.
"When?"
"Three weeks."
Enough time. Maybe. Tony returned to his room and opened Handshake. A.D.A. was waiting.
We have twenty-one days.
Yeah.
Tony stared toward the snow beyond his narrow window. Twenty-one days to improve food. Transport. Medical. Redundancy. Escape options. And somewhere inside Atlas's buried records, GARDEN continued waiting. Tony did not know yet that one file would destroy every plan he was making.