Lorna had rarely, if ever, felt like the center of anyone's attention. Now she did, and the effect was immediate—her face flushed red, and for a moment she was too flustered to say anything. As for Daisy's standing suggestions about drinking more milk and eating more protein, Lorna hesitated, then finally agreed.
With everyone watching, Daisy carefully connected the supercomputer to its power source.
The electricity costs alone would run into the hundreds of millions of kilowatt-hours per year—enough to drive any ordinary person crazy. Fortunately, there was a knockoff arc reactor on hand to handle the load.
She didn't need to power an Iron Monger suit or an Iron Man armor. She didn't need sudden power surges for acceleration sequences. And palladium poisoning wasn't even a concern. Her requirements were simple: stable. Stable, stable, and stable.
The reactor coupled to the supercomputer's main power grid without issue. Indicator lights came on across the board. Blue electrical arcs flickered across the housing—and Ideal, the supercomputer, came fully online.
"We're live!" Daisy announced.
Her staff and her "pets" received this news with polite indifference, but they clapped anyway to mark the occasion.
Late that night, Daisy slipped into the server room, pulled up the master control interface, and began the initial configuration. She also needed to complete Danger's migration back home.
The Stark Industries operating system had been stripped out entirely. Danger had worked with her to build a completely new one from scratch—it wasn't going to be unbeatable in fifty years, but for the foreseeable future, no one was breaking through it by conventional means.
"Good evening, Miss Johnson." The soft blue three-dimensional avatar materialized in the air above the console. After four hours of data migration, Danger had finally completed her extraction from Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. Moving that much data without alerting the Professor had required careful handling.
The Danger Room simulation back at the school would keep running as before—physical scanning, hard-light projection, all of it still functional. It would just be a little less dynamic than before. Whether they upgraded it or cleaned out the system junk was their business.
Daisy ran a full check on system parameters and Danger's source code. Everything was clean. Still, she asked: "Danger, how does the new home feel?"
"Very comfortable. The power supply is more than adequate, and the processing capacity is sufficient for my needs. Regarding the Ring decryption you assigned me previously—I've developed a new approach."
The nascent artificial intelligence had not yet developed much of a sense of self. She wasn't asking herself who am I, where am I, how do I survive—the usual existential spiral. By default, she simply continued working through the task queue, following the momentum of what she'd been doing. The more assignments she had, the less idle time she had to wander into uncomfortable territory. Over time, the work itself had helped her settle into her role, the difference between herself and humans quietly fading to background noise.
JARVIS was the clearest success case in this regard. The name came from Stark's late family butler—a tribute, nothing more—but Tony worked the AI like a draft horse. Indispensable, uncomplaining, and apparently content with it all.
Daisy had learned from that. She made sure Danger always had a full workload.
And now, it seemed, the first item on the list was nearly done. She clapped her hands eagerly. "Show me."
At her command, the main display filled with cascading data. Danger walked her through it.
"The Ring emits a signal every three hundred seconds. One signal is directed outward into space. The other is directed toward the highest peak on Earth."
Daisy's brow furrowed. The signal aimed at the Mandarin made sense—the Ring would logically try to return to its last owner. But an alien device continuously broadcasting into space? That she hadn't anticipated.
At this point in Earth's timeline, even a downed plane required her to deal with it personally. There was no assembled roster of heroes yet, and the planet simply couldn't hold off an alien invasion at this stage.
"Has anything in space responded?"
"Nothing detected in the past two months."
Ten Rings, arriving on Earth aboard an alien vessel—the property of the ship's captain. That was the sum of what Daisy could recall about their history. If the Mandarin had held the Rings for nearly a century and no one had ever come looking, the most likely answer was that whoever had sent the signal no longer existed to receive it. She chose to find that comforting.
"Keep going," she said.
"Understood. The Rings' access layer technically recognizes only their original owner. However, the Mandarin used an unknown method to write a substantial volume of personal identity data directly into each Ring, and through that data, achieved operational control."
Danger's voice was level and even, without inflection.
Daisy had Danger pull up the Mandarin's modifications. Parsing the alien language through computational analysis took five full minutes even with the supercomputer and the arc reactor behind it—and when the full data finally opened, Daisy took one look and felt her eyes start to cross.
"Filter out the irrelevant sections. I want to see the core architecture."
The filtering process was even slower. Danger had no intuitive grasp of what counted as "irrelevant" and had to query Daisy repeatedly—Is this irrelevant? What about this section?
It was tedious, but their back-and-forth was productive. Layer after layer of data was cleared away. The underlying structure began to emerge.
Daisy read through it until the sun came up, and by then she'd made it through roughly a third of the material.
Most of it remained opaque. But she understood what the Mandarin had done.
This Tantric master was a formidable figure in his own right. Through methods that defied conventional logic—almost metaphysical in nature—he had forced his own identity into the Ring's architecture over the span of decades. The closest analogy Daisy could think of was the legend of Bodhidharma meditating before a stone wall for nine years until his silhouette left an impression in the rock. Through prolonged coexistence, the man and the Ring had undergone a kind of assimilation.
Daisy didn't have that kind of time. She wasn't going to spend years polishing a piece of jewelry and hoping it imprinted on her.
And besides—she'd already cracked most of the Ring's code. There was no need to take the long road.
"Delete the Mandarin's stored identity data, then write in mine. How long will that take?"
The AI's answer was better than she'd dared hope. "Three days."
Daisy nearly laughed out loud.
The severed finger she'd kept—Danger needed that for the genetic baseline. With it, the AI could systematically identify and delete every trace of the Mandarin's presence throughout the Ring's data structure. The work was painstaking: scan, isolate, remove. A century of the man's accumulated imprint ran through every layer of the system. That process alone would take the better part of two days.
And that was with the genetic reference. Without it, combing through that much data would have taken even a Stark-JARVIS collaboration a decade.
The method was blunt, but it was exactly the right call for its era. Removing existing data was the hard part. Writing in a new control identity? For an AI, that was almost trivial.
Three days later, Daisy held the Ring in her hand. It felt completely different.
The Ring's sense of rejection was gone. Danger hadn't just deleted the Mandarin's identity data—she'd also removed the Ring's original built-in guidance system, a subsystem Danger had labeled the Personal Guidance Terminal on account of its tendency to lecture. In its place, Danger had installed one of her own sub-programs.
That way, even if Daisy ended up somewhere off-world, she'd have AI support to help handle whatever came her way.