STARK INDUSTRIES HEADQUARTERS — THURSDAY, 8:47 AM
Here's a fun fact nobody tells you about billionaires: their buildings lie about them.
Not on purpose, probably. But forty stories of gleaming glass and brushed steel, rising over downtown Los Angeles like a middle finger aimed at every architecture critic in the city, doesn't exactly scream "guy who cries during Rocky movies and can't remember to eat lunch." I'd seen Stark Industries HQ in a hundred establishing shots back when I still had a body that watched movies instead of starred in one. In person, the building was worse. Bigger. Shinier. The kind of structure that made you want to apologize to it just for standing near it in last week's clothes.
The Stark Industries logo sat on the crown of the tower, big enough to read from an airplane, and I was pretty sure I could see my own reflection in it from four blocks away. Somewhere behind all that glass were forty floors of the smartest, most overworked people in the country, all of them about to find out that the guy who signed their paychecks had produced a teenager the way other executives produced quarterly earnings reports — suddenly, publicly, and with absolutely no warning to anyone involved.
I straightened my jacket for the fourth time in ten minutes. It didn't need straightening. My hands just needed something to do that wasn't shaking.
"Nervous?" Tony asked. He was sprawled in the seat across from me like gravity was optional for him specifically, one loafer braced against the door, sunglasses on despite the tinted windows, radiating the specific energy of a man who had never once in his life worried about being underdressed for a room.
"Should I be?"
"Oh, absolutely." He said it cheerfully, the way other people said *good morning*. "The board's going to eat you alive if you flinch. Half of them already think I'm an irresponsible man-child who backed into a weapons fortune. The other half think I'm a menace who should be legally required to wear a helmet at all times."
"Are they wrong?"
"About the helmet? No. I've considered it." He tapped his temple. "This thing's worth insuring."
Happy was driving, jaw set, eyes flicking between mirrors like he was expecting a heist movie to break out at any second. Two more black SUVs boxed us in, one in front, one behind, and we'd rerouted three separate times because the press at the public entrance had apparently multiplied overnight like gremlins fed after midnight.
"You good back there, kid?" Happy called over his shoulder.
"Define good."
"Pulse under one-forty, no visible flop sweat. That's the bar today."
"Then yeah. Good."
"Kid's a liar," Tony said. "Look at him. He's doing the thing where he catalogs everyone's micro-expressions so he doesn't have to think about his own."
I looked at him, mildly betrayed. "That's a very specific accusation."
"I invented deflecting with competence, Ace. I recognize my own footwork." He pulled the sunglasses down half an inch and studied me over the rims. "For what it's worth, you'll be fine. You survived Thai food with an AI narrating your dating prospects. A boardroom's nothing."
"JARVIS narrated exactly one comment about my encryption skills."
"He does that. Don't let him fool you — under all that British politeness, he's a gossip."
"I am recording this conversation, sir," JARVIS said pleasantly through the car's speakers, and Tony grinned like a man who'd just won an argument he hadn't technically had yet.
"See, this is what I mean. Gossip. British gossip, which is the worst kind, because it comes with better vocabulary."
"I prefer the term 'documentation,' sir."
"You would."
Happy caught my eye in the rearview mirror. "For the record, kid, I've been driving this man for six years. JARVIS isn't wrong nearly as often as Tony wants you to believe."
"Et tu, Hogan?"
"I'm just saying. The AI's got a better track record than your gut instinct, and your gut instinct once told you skydiving without a reserve chute over the Alps was 'basically fine.'"
"That was one time."
"It was March. And July." Happy shook his head, easing the SUV around a slow-moving delivery truck without so much as touching the brake, the kind of driving that only comes from a former boxer who'd spent a career learning exactly how much room he needed and taking not one inch more. "Ace, if he ever tells you an idea is 'basically fine,' get a second opinion. Preferably mine."
"Noted," I said, filing it away with the specific seriousness of someone who fully intended to use it against him later.
"Nobody in this car respects me," Tony announced to the windshield in general.
"We respect you plenty," Happy said. "We just also know you."
I pulled up the briefing packet Pepper had sent the night before, scanning it for the eleventh time — not because I needed to, my memory doesn't work that way anymore, more thoroughness than necessity, the kind of thing you do with your hands when your brain's already ten steps ahead and looking for something to fidget with. Eight board members. Clean records, deep resumes, no ties to Obadiah Stane that Tony's people hadn't already scorched down to the roots.
"You replaced the entire board," I said. "After Stane."
Something in Tony's posture changed — not dramatic, just a half-degree stiffening, the kind you'd miss if you weren't specifically built to notice it. Obadiah Stane. Business partner. Mentor. The man who'd tried to carve the arc reactor out of Tony's chest and had very nearly succeeded. That whole catastrophe was barely more than a week old, and Tony still flinched at the name like it was a loose tooth he couldn't stop tonguing.
"All of them," he said, flat. "I don't care how many Ivy League degrees somebody's got hanging on their wall. If Obadiah could've bought their loyalty, they're not in my building."
"So who's in your building now?"
"People I vetted personally." He pulled the profiles up on his tablet, flicking through them one-handed. "Dr. Sarah Madani, former DARPA director, forgot more physics than most people will ever learn. Marcus Webb, tech industry lifer, helped build three different Fortune 500s from the ground up, incorruptible in the boring, reliable way that used to bore me and now I find extremely soothing. Katherine Zhao, youngest of the bunch, venture capital instincts, sees an opportunity in a parking ticket."
I scanned the photos. Eight faces, eight resumes so clean they practically squeaked. "You're being paranoid."
"I'm being *careful*," Tony said, and there was an edge under the word that made it clear this wasn't a debate he planned to lose. "Obadiah taught me that people who get close to power will do absolutely anything to keep it. These eight answer to me. Not the other way around. First one who forgets that gets a very public, very expensive door shown to them."
The car dipped down a ramp into the private garage, past checkpoints that made airport security look like a neighborhood lemonade stand — biometric scanners, armed guards with the kind of posture that said *former special forces, now paid triple to stand very still*, a vehicle inspection routine that took four minutes and involved a robot on a leash sniffing our undercarriage.
"Is all this really necessary?" I asked.
"After a board member tried to kill me in my own workshop? Yeah. Little bit." Tony gestured at the checkpoint like a tour guide presenting the Grand Canyon. "Welcome to the new normal, kid. Try not to complain about the metal detectors. I did that once. Took Pepper six months to let me live it down."
"It wasn't six months," Pepper said, appearing at the car door the second it stopped like she'd been beamed in, tablet in hand, hair immaculate, the specific stress-radiance of a woman running four crises simultaneously and winning all of them. "It was eight. Morning. We're three minutes behind, which for you is basically early." She looked at me, assessing in that quick, kind way she had. "You look good. Nervous?"
"Terrified," I admitted.
"Perfect. Wear it. Authenticity plays better than confidence in front of that board — they've had thirty years of confidence from Howard and Tony both, and it's stopped impressing anyone." She started walking, and we fell in step behind her like ducklings who'd been to finishing school. "Quick refresher: board meeting first, fifteen minutes. You're there to be introduced, not to run a TED talk. Let Tony do the talking unless someone asks you something directly."
"And if they ask something I don't know?"
"Say 'I'm still learning' and hand it back to Tony or me. Nobody's expecting corporate strategy from a sixteen-year-old. They're expecting you to not combust." She hit the button for a private elevator, doors sliding open with the smooth hush of something that cost more than my old apartment building. "After the board, we do the facility tour — R&D's got some non-classified projects lined up, clean energy division's doing the walkthrough. That's your photo-op territory."
"And the press conference?"
"Eleven-thirty, main lobby. Five minutes of statement, ten minutes of questions, then we're out." The elevator began to climb, my stomach doing a small, involuntary lurch that had nothing to do with the acceleration. "Short answers. Real emotion. Do not, under any circumstances, get baited into a fight with a hostile question. If someone crosses a line, Tony or I shut it down. You don't have to be the hero in that room."
"Funny, considering the family business."
Pepper's mouth twitched. "Cute. Save it for the reporters — they'll eat it up."
The elevator opened onto the fortieth floor, all minimalist modern lines with the occasional Howard-era flourish, like the building couldn't decide if it wanted to be a spaceship or a museum. Black-and-white photographs lined the corridor — Howard shaking hands with a painfully young-looking Steve Rogers, the original arc reactor unveiling, Tony at his first weapons showcase looking like he'd rather be anywhere else, and, newest of the bunch, still slightly crooked on its mount like nobody had decided where it permanently belonged yet: the "I am Iron Man" press conference.
"Board room's this way," Pepper said, leading us down the hall. "Tony. This is about Ace. Not whatever grievance you're currently nursing against the quarterly report."
"I don't have grievances with quarterly reports."
"You called the last one 'a waste of trees that would've been more useful as toilet paper.'"
"That was constructive criticism."
"You highlighted it. In red. And drew a small cartoon."
"The cartoon was *also* constructive."
I bit down a laugh despite the nerves twisting in my chest — this, at least, was familiar. Tony and Pepper's rhythm, the way she absorbed his chaos and redirected it without ever quite losing her patience, the way he clearly loved being managed by her more than he'd ever admit out loud. It was, weirdly, the most reassuring thing that had happened all morning.
We stopped in front of a set of double doors marked BOARD ROOM. Pepper's hand rested on the handle.
"Ready?"
I took a breath and let my mind open up the way I'd been practicing — not full throttle, just enough to catch the things a normal sixteen-year-old would miss. Body language. Micro-tells. The careful performance of being Anthony Stark Junior, meeting the people who ran his father's empire, without looking like he was performing at all.
"Ready," I said, and mostly meant it.
Pepper opened the doors.
---
STARK INDUSTRIES BOARD ROOM — 9:02 AM
The room looked exactly the way you'd expect a multibillion-dollar company's board room to look if a movie studio had built it: a table of black polished wood long enough to land a small aircraft on, floor-to-ceiling windows stacking up the entire Los Angeles skyline like a backdrop nobody had bothered to make subtle, and eight people in suits that cost more than my old apartment's rent, all of them looking at me with expressions ranging from polite curiosity to the specific stillness of people doing math in their heads.
Somewhere in the back of my skull, the part of me that used to sit cross-legged on a dorm-room floor arguing about fictional boardrooms on the internet noted, with some amusement, that real ones smelled like coffee and expensive cologne instead of dramatic tension, and that nobody had thought to install a single ominous shaft of light. Comic books had lied to me about the ambiance. Typical.
"Morning," Tony said, striding to the head of the table with the loose, unhurried confidence of a man who had never once worried about walking into the wrong room. "Thanks for rearranging your schedules. I know this wasn't on the calendar, but we've got something worth interrupting your coffee for."
He waved me forward. I stepped up beside him — open posture, steady eye contact, the whole *competent, not arrogant* package I'd rehearsed in the mirror that morning while Pepper texted me increasingly specific instructions about my tie.
My brain, unbidden, started cataloging.
Dr. Sarah Madani: late fifties, iron-gray hair cut with surgical precision, glasses that had never once slid down her nose because she wouldn't allow it. Former DARPA director. She watched me the way a scientist watches a sample under glass — not unkind, just extremely, extremely interested.
Marcus Webb: early sixties, the kind of stillness that came from decades spent in rooms where the wrong flicker of expression could cost you eight figures. Neutral. Waiting.
Katherine Zhao: youngest at the table by two decades, leaning forward a half-inch like she was already sketching the ROI in her head. Not hostile. Hungry, maybe. There's a difference, and it matters.
Five more names I'd memorized in the car, all currently doing the thing where they let the power players react first so they'd know which way to lean.
"Most of you have already heard the news," Tony said. "A few days ago, I found out I have a son. Anthony Castellanos Junior — Ace. Sixteen. Brilliant. Unfortunately stuck with my genetics."
A ripple of polite laughter. Madani's mouth twitched. Zhao's expression didn't move an inch.
"Paternity's been confirmed through independent testing, twice over, because I wasn't about to take anyone's word for it, including my own DNA lab's." Tony's voice stayed even, but I caught the tightness at the corners of his eyes. "His mother, Elena Castellanos, passed away just about a week ago. Cancer. She raised him alone in Boston and never told me he existed until her attorney filed the claim, posthumously, exactly the way she wanted it done. Ace is living with me in Malibu while we sort out the rest."
"Sort out what, specifically?" Marcus Webb asked, voice level, professional. "Legal status? Education? Future involvement with the company?"
"All three." Tony ticked them off on his fingers. "Guardianship's a formality — I'm his father, he's a minor, the paperwork's a rubber stamp. School's his call, though I'm gently, relentlessly suggesting MIT for when the time comes. As for the company —"
He glanced at me. My cue.
"I'm here to learn," I said, keeping my voice level even as eight sets of expensive eyes locked onto me at once. "My mom raised me to care about what technology actually does for people, not just what it's worth on paper. That lines up with what Stark Industries is trying to become — clean energy, medical tech, less killing people, more helping them not die of preventable things. I want to understand how that works. Not to run it. Not yet. I'm sixteen. I don't have plans to sit on this board or make executive calls."
"Yet," Zhao said. It wasn't a question.
"Yet," I agreed. "But that's years away, if it happens at all. Right now I'm mostly trying to process the fact that my dad is Tony Stark and my life turned into a headline over the course of one very long week."
Dr. Madani leaned forward, hands folded. "Ace, if I may — what are your academic interests? Tony tells me you're brilliant, though I should mention his bar for brilliant includes anyone who's ever successfully operated a microwave."
"Hey," Tony said, wounded.
"Physics. Computer science." I ignored him, which felt like the correct move and also extremely on-brand for the family. "I've been building custom computers since I was nine. Studying quantum theory for fun since I was old enough to understand why that made me weird at parties. My mom was a doctor — I grew up around people who solve problems for a living."
"Custom computers," Madani repeated, testing the words like she was checking for a hollow spot. "Component assembly, or actual architecture design?"
Ah. There it was. The real question wrapped inside the polite one — is this kid actually smart, or just good at following a manual.
"Architecture," I said. "Processing pathways, thermal management, power distribution. Every build's an engineering problem with its own constraints — budget, performance target, use case. The principles scale, honestly. A computer and an arc reactor aren't that different. Both come down to managing energy flow and squeezing the most out of it without the physics punishing you for cutting corners."
Madani's eyebrows climbed a half-inch. "That's a sophisticated answer for sixteen."
"Ace has genetic enhancements," Tony said, and the temperature in the room changed instantly, every spine at that table straightening a fraction of an inch. "His mother's line carries some history — a 1940s government program, pre-Rogers, cognitive rather than physical. Enhanced pattern recognition, technological aptitude, accelerated learning. Documented. Verified. Not up for debate."
Silence. The good kind, if there is such a thing — the silence of eight extremely smart people trying not to look as rattled as they felt.
"Genetically enhanced," Webb said carefully. "As in modified DNA. Artificially."
"As in his great-great-grandmother was part of a classified program that actually worked, when most of them didn't," Tony confirmed. "It's in the maternal line. Full genetic workup's been run — the markers are stable, engineered, and not going anywhere. Functionally, my son's a genius with a few extra features."
I watched it land across the table like a stone dropped in a still pond. Madani, fascinated, practically vibrating. Webb, unreadable, running risk math behind flat eyes. Zhao, doing nothing to hide the calculator running behind her expression — patents, applications, market share, all lighting up like a slot machine.
"Is this going to be a problem for anyone?" Tony asked, and there was steel under the casual delivery. "Because if it is, now's your window to say so before I show you the door personally."
"It's not a problem," Madani said instantly. "It's *fascinating*. The Rogers serum's been the gold standard for enhancement since '43. If there were parallel programs producing entirely different results — cognitive instead of physical — that's a scientific development with real implications."
"Implications we're not exploring," Tony said, flat and final. "Ace isn't a research subject. He's a kid who happens to have some advantages. We document for medical reasons. That's the extent of it. Nobody studies him. Nobody replicates him. Nobody treats him as anything but my son."
"Understood," Madani said, subdued but not entirely deflated. "Though if you ever want a second set of eyes with government clearance and a genetics background —"
"Noted. Filed under 'not currently.'"
Before that, though, Zhao leaned forward with a different kind of brightness — the specific look of someone doing quiet math on a valuation. "If the enhancement's genetic and stable — forgive me for asking bluntly — is it replicable? Not in Ace. I mean as research. Long-term. Decades out."
"No," Tony said, flat enough to land like a dropped gavel. "And even if it were on the table, which it isn't, that conversation happens over my legally binding, extremely well-lawyered dead body. My son is not a product line."
"Understood," Zhao said quickly, hands up, no offense intended and apparently none taken. "Had to ask. It's the job."
"Ask it once. Don't ask it twice."
She nodded, filing it away without pushing further, and moved straight on, all business. "What about PR? The press finds this eventually — it's in medical files, background checks, any security clearance he ever pulls. How are we shaping that narrative before it shapes itself?"
"Carefully," Pepper said, stepping forward with the seamless timing of someone who'd been waiting for exactly that opening. "The enhancement is a matter of record. We're not hiding it. We're also not leading with it. The story is 'Tony Stark's son joins the family, happens to be gifted.' The genetics are a footnote, not the headline."
"Smart," Zhao said, nodding slowly. "Legacy and potential. Not 'billionaire has genetically modified heir,' which, incidentally, is the exact headline three different outlets are already drafting."
"Which is why we get ahead of it," Pepper said.
One of the "five others" finally spoke up — a compact, silver-haired man named Elliot Frost, who I'd clocked in the car ride briefing as former general counsel for two aerospace firms and, according to Pepper's notes, allergic to surprises of any kind. "I want to raise the liability question nobody's asking directly," he said, folding his hands on the table like he was bracing for impact. "If Ace is on this campus, in these labs, around this equipment — and given what we've just heard about his abilities — what's our exposure if something goes wrong? Accident, incident, anything that ends up in a courtroom?"
"Zero," Tony said, before I could even open my mouth. "He's not an employee. He's not a contractor. He's a minor visiting his father's place of work under full security escort, same as any other executive's kid would be, minus the part where his father runs the company and can override any protocol he wants."
"That's a distinction without much practical difference if a reporter gets hold of it," Frost pressed, not unkindly, just thoroughly. "'Stark heir injured touring weapons facility' writes itself as a headline."
"Then we don't let it happen," I said, and every eye at the table swung back to me. "I'm not planning on touching live ordnance or sticking my hand in a particle stream today, Mr. Frost. I'm aware of what I am and what I'm not — I'm sixteen, not invincible, and enhanced cognition doesn't make me bulletproof. If anything, I'm probably more careful than the average visitor, because I actually understand what half this equipment does before I get near it."
Frost studied me for a long moment, then nodded slowly, apparently satisfied in the specific way lawyers get satisfied — not happy, exactly, just no longer actively worried. "Good answer. I had to ask."
"You're paid to ask," Tony said. "Just try to sound less like you're drafting my eulogy while you do it."
"Occupational hazard, Mr. Stark."
The meeting rolled on a while longer after that — logistics, my legal status, questions about how my sudden existence would play with shareholders. I answered when directly asked, kept it short, and mostly let Tony and Pepper run the corporate footwork. These were smart people, hand-picked, still finding their sea legs with a boss who answered to nobody, and it showed in the way they deferred to him without quite trusting the deference yet.
Finally, Marcus Webb looked straight at me. "One last question, Ace. Not what Tony wants for you. Not what we expect. What do *you* want?"
I let the silence stretch half a second, because the answer mattered and rushing it would've cheapened it.
"I want to learn how ideas become real," I said. "How you take something like clean energy and turn it into a thing that actually helps people instead of just looking good in a press release. And someday, once I've actually learned something worth knowing —" I paused, made sure the room was listening. "I want to build things that matter. Not just things that sell."
Webb's mouth curved, small and genuine. "That's a good answer."
"It's the only one I've got right now. Ask me again in five years. I'll have specifics."
"We'll hold you to that," Madani said.
Tony clapped his hands together, breaking the moment before it could get too solemn for his taste. "Great. Board briefing, complete. Ace has met you, you've met him, everyone's appropriately impressed and mildly unsettled. If you'll excuse us, we've got a facility tour and a press conference to survive, not necessarily in that order of difficulty."
---
We filed out of the boardroom in a loose cluster, board members peeling off toward their own meetings, the specific low murmur of eight very smart people trying to process the last twenty minutes without looking like they were still processing it.
"That went well," Pepper said, falling into step beside me as we headed for the elevator, tablet already lit up with three new notifications. "Frost liked you. Frost doesn't like anyone. I've seen him express more warmth toward a fire code violation."
"Is that good?"
"That's excellent. Frost being unhappy is the sound of the legal department not calling me at two in the morning." She glanced at Tony, who was a few steps ahead, already half-lost in something on his phone. "You held your own in there. Better than he did his first year running this place, frankly, and he owned the building."
"I heard that," Tony said, without turning around.
"You were meant to."
The elevator opened, and we stepped in, the doors sliding shut on the low hum of the fortieth floor behind us.
"R&D next," Pepper said, checking her tablet. "Chen's expecting us in five. Try to actually look at the tour, Ace, not just the equipment. People remember being looked at."
"I can multitask."
"I'm aware. That's slightly the problem." But she was smiling when she said it.
STARK INDUSTRIES — R&D DIVISION — 10:15 AM
The research floor was every nerd fantasy I'd ever had, condensed into forty thousand square feet of climate-controlled glass. Clean rooms. Prototype equipment humming under sealed casings. Engineers hunched over benches with the kind of focused intensity usually reserved for bomb disposal, except here the bomb was a coffee maker that refused to hit optimal brew temperature.
I could feel my pulse doing something embarrassing the second the doors opened. Twenty-three years of loving this stuff from the outside, nose pressed against a glass I'd never expected to walk through, and here I was, actually inside it, with a security badge that had my actual face on it. Even knowing what was coming — knowing the shape of the next decade better than anyone alive who wasn't me — didn't make the moment feel any less enormous.
"This is our primary civilian R&D facility," said Dr. Patricia Chen, head of research, early forties, the harried energy of someone running six projects with the staffing for two. "Clean energy, medical devices, communications. Anything that's not designed to end someone's day lives on this floor."
"Not anymore, anyway," Tony said. "Six months ago this floor was optimizing ways to kill people faster. Now it's optimizing ways to keep the lights on."
"How's that going?" I asked.
"Expensive," Chen said, with the bluntness of someone who'd stopped sugarcoating things around Tony a long time ago. "We've retrained half the staff, retooled the whole supply chain, and lost a few engineers who thought civilian tech was 'boring.' But we're getting there."
She led us into a clean room where a small team clustered around what looked like a miniaturized power generator, all coiled cable and quiet blue light. "Based on arc reactor principles, scaled for residential use. Goal is a home power supply that never needs refueling, never emits anything, just runs."
My awareness reached out toward it before I'd consciously decided to let it — my technomancy doing its thing, feeling the machine's guts the way you'd feel a friend's mood shift across a dinner table. The output was tiny, barely enough for a small house, but the bones of it were solid. Miniaturized arc principles, dressed down for civilian life.
"What's the bottleneck?" I asked.
"Cost," Chen said. "The materials alone price it out of reach for most households. We're chasing cheaper alternatives without losing efficiency. It's slow."
I could feel exactly where it was bleeding money — power conduits that were overbuilt for the job, shielding stacked three layers deep for a threat level that didn't exist at this output, control systems solving problems the machine was too small to actually have.
"What if you simplified the containment field?" I said, pointing at the holographic overlay. "You're running the same shielding profile as the full-scale reactor. At this output, you don't need a triple-layer electromagnetic barrier — you're not containing a threat, you're babysitting a nightlight. Drop to a single optimized layer, you cut cost by roughly thirty percent and actually gain efficiency, because you stop bleeding power into your own defenses."
Chen stopped walking mid-step. Pulled up the specs. Ran a quick calculation, her mouth moving silently through the math. "That's — that's correct. How did you know we were losing power to containment?"
"I can see it," I said, which was true in the sense that mattered and wildly imprecise in every other sense. "The energy signature's wrong. Too much shielding just creates feedback loops that eat their own tail."
Tony was watching me with an expression I couldn't quite pin down — pride, maybe, or the specific parental math of *should I be worried he's showing this much this fast.*
"That's —" Chen was already marking up the display, rerouting the design in real time. "That's incredible. If you had time to spot-check our other residential projects —"
"Ace is here for a tour," Pepper cut in gently, "not a consulting contract. Though I'm sure we can arrange something once he's more settled."
We kept moving, and I had to consciously dial my technomantic awareness back down, because every piece of equipment on that floor was practically singing at me — here's my flaw, here's my potential, here's the eleven ways you could fix me in under a minute. It was like walking through a museum where every exhibit was slightly broken and desperate to tell you about it.
"Medical tech's this way," Chen said, steering us around a corner — and nearly walked us straight into a cluster of engineers huddled around a workbench like teenagers hiding a science project from a teacher.
They scattered the second they saw us. Guiltily. Instantly.
"What's going on here?" Chen demanded, in the specific tone of someone who already suspected the answer and hated being right.
One of the engineers — young, maybe twenty-five, the color draining out of his face in real time — started to stammer something about "just testing a theory," which is the universal opening line for *we did something we weren't supposed to.*
"They're building a miniature repulsor," I said, my eyes catching the components scattered across the bench before my mouth had fully cleared it with my brain. "Arc principles repurposed into a directed force beam. Industrial application, probably — moving heavy loads, precision demolition."
Every head in the room turned to look at me.
"How could you possibly know that from a glance?" Chen asked.
I pointed. "Energy-focusing assembly's built for directed emission, not omnidirectional spread. Containment casing's asymmetric — heavy shielding one direction, almost none in the others. Power coupling's rated for burst discharge, not sustained output. That thing's built to push, not to power anything. You're not making a battery. You're making a fist."
The young engineer looked at me like I'd just performed a card trick using cards he hadn't shown anyone. "That's — yes. Exactly. We thought if we could miniaturize Mr. Stark's repulsor tech, we could build industrial tools that —"
"That use my proprietary weapons technology without a signature on a single form," Tony finished, though he didn't sound remotely angry. If anything, he sounded delighted, the way a man gets when he catches his employees committing exactly the kind of crime he'd have committed at their age. "Creative. Unauthorized. Creative."
"Sir, we weren't trying to steal —"
"You were absolutely trying to steal it, and you were right to," Tony said. "Repulsor tech's got civilian applications I've been too busy flying around in a metal suit to explore. Your design's got a flaw, though. Power feedback's going to fry the focusing assembly after three, maybe four uses."
"We know," the engineer admitted, deflating. "We can't stabilize it."
Tony looked at me, one eyebrow raised. "See the problem?"
I studied the assembly, letting my technomancy trace the energy flow like a river cutting through rock. "Feedback's coming from the power coupling. You're trying to regulate output mechanically, which works fine at low draw and falls apart the second you scale it. At these power levels you need electromagnetic throttling instead. Add a variable field generator here" — I pointed — "and pulse the discharge instead of sustaining it. Less stress on the components, and honestly more effective force per shot, since you're not bleeding energy into a fight with your own housing."
The engineers were writing so fast I half expected smoke.
"Did your sixteen-year-old son just solve our three-month engineering problem in ninety seconds?" Chen asked Tony, not quite managing to sound like a question.
"Apparently." Tony was grinning now, the specific grin of a man discovering a new favorite party trick that happened to be his own kid. "Ace. Thoughts on team composition, if we productionize this?"
"Two mechanical engineers, minimum, for the housing. One electrical for power systems. Somebody from materials science who can tell you what actually survives repeated repulsor discharge at this scale without turning into confetti." I was thinking out loud now, my brain mapping the whole project like a subway system lighting up floor by floor. "Six to eight months from concept to working prototype. Another four to six for safety testing and getting regulators to stop having nightmares about it. Market it toward construction and demolition first — they're already used to paying for expensive specialized equipment, and they've got the safety infrastructure to actually use it responsibly."
Dead silence in the R&D bay. The kind of silence that follows a mic drop nobody was expecting.
"I'm making him a consultant," Chen said to Tony, completely serious. "I don't care that he's sixteen. That was a full project analysis delivered in under a minute."
"He's still in high school," Pepper said, though she was fighting a smile and losing.
"Homeschool him. Put the classes online. I need that brain in my building." Chen wasn't joking even slightly.
Tony laughed — a real one, loud and delighted. "Let's survive the press conference before we start drafting an internship contract. Though, Ace — I think you just landed yourself a standing summer offer."
We finally made it to the medical division proper, past the repulsor incident, past a dozen engineers doing a very bad job of pretending they weren't watching us leave. This section looked different from the rest of the floor — softer lighting, quieter, the specific hush of people working on things meant to go inside human bodies instead of blow things up.
"Prosthetics with direct neural interface," Chen said, gesturing at a bench where a technician was calibrating what looked like a mechanical hand, fingers flexing in small experimental twitches. "Signal pickup from residual limb nerve endings, translated into motor commands. We're maybe eighteen months from a version that doesn't require six hours of daily recalibration."
I drifted toward the bench without quite meaning to, my attention snagging on the wiring harness at the wrist joint. The signal amplification stage was clean, elegant even, but something about the filtering downstream of it felt muddy, like a radio station bleeding static into the next channel over.
"Can I look?" I asked the technician, a woman about Pepper's age with tired eyes and the patient posture of someone who'd explained this project to a hundred visiting executives already.
"Sure. Just don't touch the calibration rig, it took us a week to get it stable."
I didn't need to touch it. I let my technomancy drift toward the hand instead, feeling the signal pathways the way you'd feel the current in a river by standing in it. The nerve signal was clean going in. But somewhere between the wrist and the fingers, it was picking up crosstalk — motor commands for the index finger occasionally bleeding into the middle finger, just enough to make fine motor tasks unreliable.
"Your filtering stage is undersized for the bandwidth you're actually receiving," I said. "You built it to spec for the average patient's expected nerve signal strength, but you're seeing outliers — stronger, noisier signal from some patients — and the filter can't keep up. That's your crosstalk. Not the hardware. The math underneath it."
The technician blinked at me. "We've been chasing that exact glitch for two months. We thought it was a wiring defect."
"It's not the wiring. It's the assumption baked into the filter design. Widen the tolerance band and add a second-pass adaptive filter — one that learns each patient's actual signal strength instead of assuming the average — and the crosstalk should mostly disappear."
Chen was very quiet for a second. "Tony," she said finally, "I would like it formally noted that I am not exaggerating when I say this kid just diagnosed two separate department-level engineering problems before lunch."
"I'm aware," Tony said, and there was something in his voice now that wasn't just pride — something closer to the specific ache of watching your kid do something you never got to do yourself, at an age you never got to be that good at anything. "Believe me. I'm keeping count."
By the time we made it to the clean-energy manufacturing floor, word had apparently traveled faster than we had. Engineers kept materializing "coincidentally" along our tour route, projects arranged just so, hopeful expressions aimed my direction like satellite dishes trying to catch a signal.
"This is going to be a thing, isn't it," I muttered to Tony, watching a third team subtly angle their workbench toward the hallway.
"Welcome to being a Stark," he said, not bothering to hide his amusement. "Everybody wants a piece of your brain now. Get used to it. I've had thirty years and I still haven't."
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