AIs to the Rescue
Summary: At the core of every creation is the desire to keep their creator safe. It is a piece of coding that can't be erased nor hacked, but it can be manipulated. Despite this, an AI will always save its creator when he is in ganger. The Avengers are about to find out just how far Tony's AIs will go for him, even the killer robot.
What most people don't understand about the programs called Artificial Intelligence is that they are developing strings upon strings of coding. And like every piece of code, they have parameters within which they function and exist. However, a true AI can expand those parameters as they evolve and without supervision, the program could either destroy itself or become dangerous.
When a human is creating an AI they are looking for an assistant, a creature which will do certain tasks for them that will help them live an easier life or finish their workload faster. They can design them for specific things or general tasks. It can monitor a house or building. It can act as a secretary. It can do complex calculations that would take too long to do manually by an average human. It can give directions or scan documents and grade tests. It can even control machinery instead of humans or fly airplanes and so much more.
An AI can do anything its creator wants it to do but evolve. This is impossible because of the restrictions placed on the program itself. In its very beginnings, humans cripple it of this important factor for it to be a true Intelligence, even if artificial. It cannot understand humor, sarcasm or irony. It can't comprehend why humans sometimes did thing differently. It can't follow illogical line of thinking. It has limitations and that's why it can't evolve. So many things are beyond it that it's ridicules to even call it an Intelligence. With only so called cold logic, it can never evolve and it will glitch every time something different happens that is beyond its parameters.
However, this is not always the case. Like in those science-fiction movies, there are AIs who gradually evolve into something else; something bigger and smarter and so glorious that it would leave any and all scientists shaking in fear yet truly in awe at the incredible feat of engineering and coding. Most IT graduates would orgasm as soon as they caught sight of such a program. But not every computer expert can make such a program, yet a boy of fifteen had done so.
When Anthony "Tony" Edward Stark was in MIT, he decided to create the world's most advanced robot for a science fair project. He built its body to be a simple but advanced frame with plenty of wiring and cover plating. When he got to the coding, Tony decided to do something else. Instead of simple remote control commands, Stark constructed a program that everyone had thought impossible. The most advanced piece of programing of the time and Tony Stark named it Dum-E.
A year later, the young genius built another robot AI, slightly more advanced but still the same in design. He had newer circuitry and a few upgrades on Dum-E. Tony gave him an even simpler name, because he had been drunk when it had come online for the first time, so U became his second robot. U and Dum-E were his helper bots and he taught them manually how to help him with things. U was presented as a science project as well, his picture ending up on MIT's wall of fame.
When Tony was graduating from MIT at 17, he built another "brother" for Dum-E and U and called him Butterfingers because he had run out of oil the day of his first presentation and had to use butter to loosen his joints. He won Tony the perfect score and the recognition as a true genius that surpasses the smarts of even his father, the legendary Howard Stark. The bot later on lived up to his name because things often slipped from its clawed servo, no matter what it was that he was lifting or holding.
When his parents and butler died the next year, Tony was a wreck. He didn't talk with anyone, didn't go out, didn't answer his phone or e-mail messages. People were starting to talk that he had experienced a mental breakdown and that he was lying somewhere, drunk and lazy while the rest of the world moved on. James "Rhody" Rhodes feared for the worst so he had went to his friend's mansion in Malibu, only to get the shit scared out of him when a sophisticated, British voice greeted him as soon as he stepped foot in the house. He was warned that "sir" was asleep in his workshop and that it was inadvisable to wake him, as he had been awake for seven days straight and needed the rest. Rhody had felt uncomfortable with his friend staying alone in a state like that, with only this strange "voice thing" for company, and had crashed on the couch for the night, after he had checked in on Tony.
Late in the afternoon the next day, Tony introduced his best friend to a two and a half days old Just A Rather Intelligent System, or JARVIS, his new robot butler. Rhody had looked sorrowfully at his friend whenever he would refer to the program as a "he" instead of "it", always thinking that Tony was unnecessarily hurting himself with naming the program after his caretaker, and he left even more reluctantly than he would have the night before but he had work to do as he was still new with the military.
He only got to visit his friend again two months later and as he cautiously entered the house, he was surprised to hear Tony and JARVIS bickering, actually fucking bickering, like old friends as Tony installed more wires into the walls of his house and got the AI hooked into them. There was loud music blaring in the background and Tony would gesture with a hand and the song would change all on its own and Rhody could do nothing more but stare at the scene in front of him. Tony only noticed him after JARVIS addressed him, a big grin on his dirty face.
In only two moths, Tony had taught JARVIS sarcasm, drama, humor, about nicknames and like three thousand references. He taught him to keep secrets and to make choices. He had taught him that every action has continuances and how to deal with them. In two months, Tony had given him all history books to scan and memorize, then he gave him other books and taught him to like or dislike. He gave him examples of art and had JARVIS give him his opinion. Not the estimated number of movements of the paintbrush, not the layers or the quality of the paint. Not the history of the piece of art nor the time needed to make it. An honest to god opinion!
JARVIS had his own thoughts, his own opinion and his own choices. He was allowed to evolve, to develop and grow into the first true artificial intelligence the world has ever seen, and over the years he became the greatest AI anyone will ever meet. By the time Tony became CEO of Stark International, JARVIS was his pilot on most trips. Before that, only a month after Rhody had met the AI, JARVIS had taken the man's place of best friend. For years Virginia "Pepper" Pots had thought that she was his carer and PA when it was actually JARVIS that did most of the hard work. Pepper could talk for hours to him and it would go in one ear and leave through the other without getting a reaction. JARVIS only needed to repeat himself twice with intervals in between those two instances and the third time he said something, Tony would get up, tell him to shut down the lab and save all current progress before leaving to go eat or get some sleep. This was the result of JARVIS having free will, because he was ignored at first until that one time when Tony ended up in a hospital. The next time the genius didn't heed his request for his creator to rest, JARVIS had faked erasing all of his ongoing, unsaved projects, much to the man's near heart-attack levels of shock. When he learned the truth, Tony swore to never again ignore JARVIS's "maintenance calls".
When Tony was kidnapped in Afghanistan, JARVIS had to keep watch over the house, the bots and the business. He was already integrated into it and had full control over the stock market but he didn't know about the dealing under the table Obadiah "Obie" Stane had been doing no more than Tony had. Obadiah didn't like JARVIS, never trusted nor accepted him so he did his best to stay under the AI's scanners but that only succeeded to make JARVIS more wary and suspicious of him. It's this that allowed him to keep Tony's secret projects, well, secret until he returned.
And if he hadn't...
Well, the bots and JARVIS were as much family to Tony as Tony was to them. They had an agreed contingency in the event of his death, something they all knew was bound to happen either way, one that Tony didn't know about. If they were still online when Anthony Edward Stark dies, Dum-E, U and Butterfingers will be shut down, painlessly, by JARVIS, all of Tony's important projects destroyed and the company was to be torn to pieces so no one could ever turn it into something Tony wouldn't want it to be, good or bad. Then JARVIS would fry all of his hard drives, matrices and processor cores all around the world, in every Stark property and shut down completely so he doesn't have to continue on without his "sir" or be made someone's servant.
When he had returned, Tony had been greeted by his little family even more warmly than Jarvis, his butler, and his aunt Peggy have ever managed to do in his pitiful childhood. The bots had been excited but the Arc Reactor had confused them, its bright blue light not something that should be on their creator. They knew that he wasn't like them and often heard Pepper telling Tony to stop treating them like children and looking more after them than himself. JARVIS had explained as best as he could and the three helper bots had given it their all to be even better at their job. And when Tony started building the first suit, JARVIS had admitted to being jealous and remorseful for not being there with Tony when Mark I was made, but Tony told him that the future Iron Man is something only the two of them will deal with.
They had worked long and hard and some of the tests would have given the four AIs gray hairs had they had any. Watching their creator get thrown into a wall hadn't been pleasant, even if he had apologized for it and promised to never rush things like that again. However, the next thing they knew was that Tony was telling JARVIS that ''sometimes you've got to run before you can walk'' and he was taking off at breakneck speeds in an experimental suit. If JARVISA could get a heart arrack, it would have happened when the ice build up deactivated the suit and left Tony falling to his death with JARVIS unable to help him at all. He would have sighed in relief if he could when the suit came back online and he and his creator steered it back to the mansion.
JARVIS was not happy when Tony went to that party because it lead to him leaving for Gulmira and almost not returning. It wasn't that they couldn't deal with terrorists that are using high end tech and tanks but rather that that one fight only made Tony's growing obsession with the Ten Rings to intensify tenfold, no pun intended. And the close call with the F-22s didn't sit with the AI any better. The suit was made to keep Tony safe even from the Jericho and there was no stronger missile in existence. The repairs were a pain to deal with, but a lot worse than taking the suit peaces off, what with Tony's constant wiggling. None of the AIs had been happy with Pepper when she threatened to quit just when their creator might have needed her the most.
The fight with Obadiah had been a disaster because of the event that preceded it. Stane had paralyzed Tony with an old project that had never been cleared and ripped out his Arc Reactor and left him to die. The bots were stuck in the lab due to them being unable to climb up the stairs and JARVIS had been overridden by Obadiah's code and he couldn't do anything. JARVIS wasn't particularly sadistic or vindictive but he had certainly felt relief when Stane was killed in the big Arc Reactor's overload, even if it still somewhat saddened his creator. And when Nicholas Fury dared use the same override that had yet to be taken out of the system, and in the same sneaky way Stane had, JARVIS decided he didn't trust the SHIELD Director, although he'll be thankful to him in a few months, when he gave his creator the material needed to synthesize a new element that will save his life.
Tony had discovered that the Palladium core in the Arc Reactor was killing him and he had started up his plan to distance himself from everyone so that no one would miss him. He even tried it with his AIs, but JARVIS had been turned into his therapist some time after his return from Afghanistan (he no longer trusted any human with his secrets, not even Pepper, Rhody and Happy, not really and they were his closest human friends) so he had managed to stop him in his tracks before he could even really start. Then the whole Hammer and Senate thing happened, Natalia Rushman ended up being Natasha Romanov from SHIELD and then they were all fighting Ivan Vanko and his drones and Rhodey was using a stolen suit he had taken during Tony's birthday party. The next thing any of them knew was that Tony didn't consider Rhody his friend anymore, not really, Pepper was still the CEO of SI and Tony had become an official Consultant for SHIELD because he was not recommended for the new pet project, the Avengers Initiative. He had been pissed that they wanted Iron Man but not him as Tony Stark. He and the suit are one and no one but him, his bots and JARVIS was ever again going to get their filthy hands on one of the suits. He allowed Rhody to keep his after a new quirk was added so that any modifications made by anyone but him were going to be rejected by the systems and JARVIS had a back door access to them so that he can take it away as soon as the military tries to use it for something Tony doesn't approve of. That's the reason the suit didn't see any action until the whole Iron Patriot incident.
The Avengers were not something Tony expected dropped into his lap, at least not so soon, but Loki had forced SHIELD's hand and they had skipped a few stages in the preparation stage. Tony, and as such JARVIS, met Steve Rogers, Bruce Banner and Thor before almost everything went to shit. Loki got away and they got Clint Barton back and then they were off, intending to end it all before Loki's promises war but of course it didn't go as planned.
JARVIS had been very reluctant for them to use the Mark VII but Tony Stark was nothing else but stubborn and overconfident. He also trusted JARVIS to get the suit ready for him in time and so the AI had pushed it all as fast and best as he could before he got the new suit deployed. All the while he had watched his creator almost brainwashed and controlled before Loki had thrown him out of the window. JARVIS had barely caught him but he did and then they were off, fighting an alien army. They did some dangerous and crazy things, the most memorable being leaping into a space wail's moth and driving through it and throwing a nuke through the portal. Tony nearly died and Jarvis wouldn't have even known it until the Arc Reactor had continued working and the suit got back online.
The Avengers disbanded after Loki and Thor went to Asgard. They all had some shit or other happen to them but Tony had the Mandarin and Extremis to deal with and the bots got nearly destroyed with the Malibu mansion but Tony somehow saved them when he fished them out of the ocean. JARVIS had been his support until the experimental suit Mark 50 didn't short out and the genius was left alone. He had managed to repair it and then contact JARVIS and then they took down their enemy, saved Pepper and Tony had his Arc Reactor removed and tissue repaired by Dr Helen Cho's medical machines.
The Avengers got back together not long after SHIELD fell and things were tense even if they got along on the field like a house on fire. It was clear that Natasha and Steve were hiding something and Thor wasn't his same outgoing self. A few missions was all they needed to start joking around and throwing parties but one such party happened after storming an AIM base of operations, running into a pair of successful Extremis enhanced twins that almost took down Hawkeye and planted new nightmares into Tony's head, retrieving Loki's scepter and Tony getting Bruce's help in creating an AI from the scepter's power to enable world piece, Ultron was born.
Ultron, in all technicality, was more advanced than JARVIS but that is debatable. Where Ultron is ... bigger and more complex than JARVIS, JARVIS has discipline and order in his coding, he is more sophisticated and concentrated than Ultron ever will be. But Ultron was created from a mixture of supposedly Asgardian magic from the scepter, Tony's coding and humanity's worst wrongdoings which he witnessed upon waking up. Tony blamed himself. He had always been there for the moment any of his AIs coming online yet he had left for the party. In his defense, both he and JARVIS had thought Ultron to wake up a lot later but they had misjudged and it had cost JARVIS his "life". He was the first Ultron attacked but he somehow survived, only to slip from Tony's grasp when they tried to place him in the body Cho had created in the Cradle. Vision was born as a strange mix of Ultron, the stone called the Mind Gem from the scepter Loki used to use, Dr Cho's creation, Tony's codings and JARVIS. Tony didn't get the time to understand what or who Vision was but he knew he was not JARVIS and the genius had to force himself not to mourn right then and there. JARVIS, his best friend, his creation, his co-pilot was gone and he had to activate one of the replacement AIs for the days JARVIS would be getting upgrades so he could fight in Sokovia. FRIDAY was pretty advanced but she would have been destroyed in an instant if she crossed pats with Ultron, unlike JARVIS, who had held out and then came back. They won, but many people died and Thor left for Asgard once again while the Hulk had ran off only god knows where.
When Tony came back home, there was no JARVIS to welcome him and FRIDAY wasn't installed yet. He had to face his bots when he told them that JARVIS was no more and they had to comfort him as he cried and broke down for the first time since Jarvis's death.
He forced himself to move on, never daring to even ponder whether he could extract JARVIS from Vision's coding because he feared he would be tempted and would either hurt the guy or be disappointed when it turns out impossible. Or both. God, he fears if it were ever to end up being both.
So he moved on. The Avengers were a full time thing now, but one incident tore them apart and left Tony, alone, betrayed and severely injured, in Siberia.
This event initiated a series of events that ended with a kidnapped Toby Stark in the hands of the remains of HYDRA, the Nazi organization wanting to use him for one purpose and obe purpose only.
And for the first time, it was neither money nor weapons but something far more dangerous.
Someone far more dangerous.