Chapter Text
Tony sits up and blinks himself awake. Though still partially asleep, his brain’s whirring through a half-baked list of things that he needs to get to, some of which are real and some of which are dream-induced and will be forgotten within the next half hour. He thinks of coffee, security systems, and a brilliant design for the Iron Man rocket boots that will reduce drag.
He yawns and scratches his chin. “JARVIS?”
“Good morning, sir,” JARVIS says. “The highlights?”
“Yeah, hit me.” Tony makes his way to the bathroom while JARVIS goes through the high points of what the world has been up to while he was asleep.
A lot of it is the same old, though some of it is interesting enough that he might come back to it later. Most important is it sounds like there’s nothing that needs immediate firefighting, be it from Tony Stark or Iron Man. JARVIS has this part of the routine down practically to a science, timing it such that the digest winds up just as Tony’s patting his face with aftershave.
“Messages?” Tony asks.
“Miss Potts, and the one, sir. Assuming, that is, that we are ignoring the rest of your overflowing inbox.”
Tony grins. “Indeed, we are. Send them straight to the lab, we’re having a working breakfast.”
“Very good, sir.”
In a post-Iron Man world, Tony’s habits have changed.
Not all of them, of course. Reinvention only goes so far, and coffee remains the lifeblood of his creativity. But as Rhodey, Pepper and Happy can attest to, these days there’s less of the gallivanting, glitz-chasing, and arbitrary purchases of things that aren’t technically for sale. Instead, Tony’s now neck-deep in wild world of “superhero”-ing (whatever that means) with its near-misses, boundary-pushing, and long hours looking at a bottom line that only he seems able to see.
But there’s another habit that’s new.
As Tony sits at his workbench, one hand feeding himself a ham sandwich and the other hand setting the panoramic display alight, he indulges in that habit. Two screens are filled with the schematic he was working on yesterday, but one screen is filled with his inboxes, with one particular window at the top right where he can see it clearer than the others clamoring for his attention.
This window contains messages tied to an email address that cannot be found anywhere in what counts as Tony’s official communication channels. It also contains messages from a single person who’s identifiable only – in both the computer, and to Tony himself – as BD01432.
Thank you for the link, though I’d describe it as helpful as much as it is baffling, because tonally I can’t see any difference between these articles and the ones you shared from that speculative fiction website. Are we supposed to just KNOW these things?
I almost typed a question on whether people really have enough space in their heads for all these nuances and never-ending interconnecting references, but I think I’ve already used up this month’s quota of extra-existential questions. The historical archive link you gave was much more fascinating, I think the ‘old’ designs were far more eye-catching.
Tony gasps, offended for all of two seconds before he realizes that BD01432 is teasing him.
So instead of existential, I will ask something more relevant: how long before the internet is advanced enough to send information on smells and tastes? Or is the internet ALREADY advanced to this stage, and I’ve missed it, and if so, how does it work? I think having such a technology would reduce a lot of fighting I’ve seen on websites about which recipes are more accurate to the originals.
Come to think of it, that would probably make the fighting worse, won’t it?
If we can send smells and tastes over the internet, it’d make restaurant reviews more interesting, too. People might decide where to go based on that entirely.
T.I.L. that memory is tied very strongly to our sense of smell.
Tony doesn’t read the whole message in one go. He comes back to it in fits and starts through the late morning, and during breaks between other things that he’s doing. Though as he reads it, he tags the message with notes that he eventually uses to compose a reply.
As hard as I wish it, there is no normal distribution (as in the statistical definition!) of social knowledge, but the trick is to know just enough, and fake your way through the rest of it. I *guarantee* you that other people know less than you, though they might not realize it. People don’t know what they don’t know! So you’re already a step up, really.
Tony pauses here to check what’s the latest in the industry, and contemplates for a hot second what the world would be like if digital smells could be employed as biological warfare. How would that even be delivered? That sounds terrible, but on the flipside there are no laws about it yet, so… something to think about, maybe.
About the smell thing, some basic kinds of smell and tastes *have* been coded but the challenge is in recreating them down the information line. Imagine remote taste-testing! Yes, I meant the culinary kind, but did I only mean that? You’ll never know.
The reply gets saved in his drafts while Tony goes out for a flight test, and saves a cruise ship off Hawai‘i while he’s at it. After that he changes one suit for another, and spends the afternoon with Pepper and a disgruntled procurement team, during which they wrangle long-term contracts and supply chain issues.
Later, after Happy’s dumped Tony back at the house, he traipses upstairs and into the deepest recesses of his closet. After about half an hour of rummaging around and laughing when he finds something, he takes his treasure back down to the workshop where he resumes typing the draft:
Thanks to you I went hunting for anything old I had lying around. Managed to find a jacket I thought I threw out years ago. Put my face into it and took a deep breath, and swear to god I full-on hallucinated myself into being young and stupid again.
There’s another pause here, while Tony lets his eye drift over to pieces of the Mark V suit. Each generation of armor seems to be coming together faster than the last one, yet he’s still finding a long list of shortcomings of each. The world’s catching up, too – regardless of how Tony’s been telling people that Vanko was a one-off, there will be others, and Tony’s current advantage lies mainly in his resources at hand, both physical and mental.
BD01432 doesn’t know that about Iron Man, or even that Tony is, well, Tony Stark. They’re just pixels on a screen to each other, which has been the case since they started exchanging messages a few months ago.
But that’s the reason why Tony keeps reading and replying. It’s a low-stakes conversation with someone who doesn’t want anything from him except the time and thoughts that Tony’s willing to share with him. Iron Man and SI may command the greatest portion of Tony’s attention, but here is a small corner of the world that Tony can let his mind retreat to at its own pace, where there’s no threat of deadlines simmering behind each message.
Tony never meant or expected for this conversation to go for as long as it has; not after that first message where he explained to the poor guy that the message box was not a search bar. But solving BD01432’s computer problems that first time got BD01432 into a rant that still cracks Tony up to think about, and Tony couldn’t help but expand BD01432’s vocabulary to include such words as ‘accessibility’ and ‘algorithm’, before going into his own rants on trends in technology and the internet that are more dangerous that people realize. BD01432 found all of that fascinating, and responded with more questions that ballooned on from there.
There’s also the fact BD01432 is funny and charming in his own way, and an utter delight whenever he shares things with Tony as he discovers them. Better yet, there’s a directness in his questions and communication style that is a goddamned breath of fresh air, in the midst of all the complexity that is the rest of Tony’s reality.
In chatting with him, Tony is also free to go on tangents of his own, in the safety of knowing that BD01432 can’t use them against him.
He types out:
Not at all a fan of becoming stupid like that again, but it might be nice to have a couple of those years back. Use them better, that kind of thing. And I’m saying that as someone who *likes* racing against the world, for how fast it’s going these days. A kind of hypocrisy? I’ve been told I have a bad relationship with wastage, though it hadn’t occurred to me until lately how time wastage counts, too.
Anyway I’ve put the jacket smell into a rough code, far from accurate but this is what it might look like. [attachment: jacket.txt]
Tony hits send, then turns his attention to the rest of his projects, followed by dinner.
Wherever BD01432 may physically be, he keeps hours almost as odd as Tony’s, which makes the timing of his replies unpredictable. Sometimes whole days may go without a reply, and sometimes they arrive within a few hours.
Today, Tony gets a reply just as he’s about to close up shop up in the late night/early morning. Tony has it sent to his phone, so he can read it while he’s going upstairs.
I think all the time about what I’d do if I got a couple of my early years back. More than is healthy, I’m pretty sure. But from the way it sounds with you, it’s not so much that you want those specific years back, but you want more time, period, so you can do everything that you want to do. My days aren’t filled like that at all, but it’s been getting better, so please keep the recommendations coming. With the caveat that I’ll probably ignore most of them.
Tony laughs.
I can’t code the smell of this ravioli [attachment: img0023.jpg] but please be assured that it is excellent. I picked an eatery at random, did not look at any of its online reviews beforehand at all, and enjoyed the meal more than I thought I would. The cream is especially great.
The photo is blurry on purpose because this adds to its charm, and it’s not because I still feel foolish taking photos of food in a public space. No one’s asked if I’m a food critic or influencer, so that’s one unnecessary fear that I can lay to rest.
I sketched a portion of your jacket code on this napkin. Maybe this has a better chance of going viral than a poorly-lit photo of food. [attachment: img0025.jpg]
Tony decides to reply tomorrow, but he adds a tag to the message draft to remind himself later: “beautiful sketch, print it”.