"satori" is the Japanese word for the state of enlightenment.

warnings: AU - Fateverse. sci-fi with technobabble. mention of mental illness. language: pg-13 (for one use of g**damn).

pairing: none/gen (a little Tony/Steve bromance).

timeline: NO 3621 (AD 6157).

disclaimer: marvel owns all the characters, i just made more alternate universe versions of them.

notes: 1) one of the less-known meanings of "prodigal" is "in overabundant amount." 2) Six's mother was a Network Theorist, and i have no idea how/when she died. as you can see, his father is a Network Engineer. 3) the brightness (and color) of light can be measured on the kelvin scale. overhead daylight is around 6000 K (room temp is around 297 K). 4) yep. resonant cryptographic schizophrenic hallucinations.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.


Prodigal

"—and now I've got the Savant breathing down my neck to get a more stable power source for some of the guns the Squad uses," Howard is saying, hastily unlocking the door of his residence and leading the way toward his personal lab. "Just because he blew off a hand while firing a weapon on an overcharge setting I specifically told him never to use. It grew back, and he was in a different body four days later, so I don't see how he has any latitude for complaint."

Steven sympathizes. He knows the Savant can be difficult to get along with. He also knows next-to-nothing about engineering or armament design, so he assumes that what the Savant has asked is actually borderline unreasonable.

"I'm rambling," Howard apologizes. "Let's just get you that prototype signal booster so you can—God damn it, Anthony!"

Steven nearly runs into Howard as the Engineer stops abruptly in the door of his lab. He bites down on a reflexive urge to scold Howard for his language.

A very young man (still a boy, really) is sitting at a workbench and writing rapidly. The floor is littered with papers, each one completely covered front-and-back with cramped writing and careful diagrams, over what looks like blueprints to several important devices.

"This was for a new air-recycler system!" Howard shouts, waving a fistful of defaced pages at the boy, who doesn't seem to notice that he's no longer alone in the room. "If your mother were still alive, this sort of wanton disrespect for technical readouts would send her into cardiac arrest!"

Steven stoops to look at some of the other pages. He spots phrases like 'chronometric dampening' and 'hyperbolic chronogeometric triangulation' and 'sympathetic resonance mutability.' "Howard," he says, awed. "Have you looked at these?"

"It's just nonsense, it's always just nonsense," Howard bites out as he tries to clear unsullied pieces of paper away from the boy (who is still writing). "Just this disjointed mess of nonsense. It seems like autism, like he's been absorbing everything he sees and hears, and he just goes on little rampages like this, purging it all like a computer dumping its cache, but he won't sit still for a diagnosis and his mother was emphatically against medicating children."

Determined, Steven practically shoves a page in his friend's face. "Howard, look. That's high-level chronometric theory, things the Programmers and Theorists are still playing with. Where would he just hear that? I know Maria never took her work home; she was very careful about it."

Howard reluctantly takes the paper and starts to read. Slowly, the red flush of frustrated anger fades from his face. "A-Anthony," he says. When the boy doesn't answer, Howard takes the pen from him.

"Ah," the boy says, looking at his hand. "My pen's gone."

"Anthony," Howard says again.

The boy turns to look at them, then looks somewhere else distractedly.

"Anthony, this is Steve. He's a Keeper."

Anthony is staring fixedly at something. "LF228-Omega," he mumbles. "Oh-three-three: Cartographer. Multi-Nodal scanning array."

Steven blinks, taken aback. "That's right, Anthony. What you wrote about on this piece of paper—it's called chronometric theory."

"Not theory. Not." Anthony flinches, eyes moving along the ceiling. "Posits. Postulates. Proofs. Not theory. It's there, the math, it's all… Point-to-point without trigonometric calculation requires locational extrapolation based on dimensional mapping, aligning resonance wavelengths to induce pockets of Fidelis, instantaneous spatial interjuxtaposition, quantum tunneling, tesseract."

"And that's all very advanced," Steven agrees. "You can't have learned that in the course of compulsory schooling. Who taught you? A Theorist? Your mother? Miss Oshima?"

Anthony squints at something high above Steven's head. "Doesn't work because the light temperature is too low, but if we increase by two hundred Kelvin, the bombardment filter will catch monatomic contaminants and normalize. Add bicarbonate injection during humidity control to speed odor dispersal, improve mood and productivity."

Out of the corner of his eye, Steven sees Howard scramble for a scribbled sheet and start squinting at it. "He…he's right," Howard says, sounding stunned. "It's an improvement on the air-recycler I was in the middle of re-designing."

While they watch, Anthony lists slightly to one side and traces something in the air with his finger.

"Anthony?" Steven says. "What are you looking at?"

"Diagram."

"For what?"

"Don't know. Five milliamps across eight point six nanometers to activate, reaction disruptable by plasma injection or quark destabilization. Can I have that pen? I was almost caught up. I don't want a backlog. I hate backlog. I can't think when there's backlog. There's too much."

Steven looks at Howard.

"No!" the Engineer says petulantly, clutching his salvaged papers. "Let me get some blank paper. Or a personal tablet and stylus."

When Howard has left the lab, Anthony gets up and starts digging through drawers.

"Anthony, what are you doing?"

"Need to write, need to write," the boy mutters, flicking through rulers and straightedges and protractors. "My notebooks are full. My pens are empty. Need paper. Need pen. Dad has big paper, lots of paper. I just need…a pen, I just…"

"Anthony, I'd like to show some of these to a Programmer. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

"Gravitic angle of interference," Anthony tells him, gesturing to the bottom of the sheet in Steven's hand. "Fidelis Network Programmers. Coding taskforce. Artificial intelligence. Artificial sapience—questionable ethical implications, questions of controllability, of volatility, of personality degradation and data corruption. Software improvement."

Steven tries to sort that out. "Yes?" he hazards.

Anthony suddenly straightens. "That's it! Personality inextricably tied to moral code, representable by series of priority arrays like decision-making web of Nodes, can be programmed with more intricately weighted system customizable per AI leading to AI that learns moral set applicable to its occupation. Then the question of sentience features such as instinct or intuition, subliminal data interpretation possibly linked to Fidelis Effect, sensitive to leyline movement and resonance factors to…crap, crap, CRAP, I can't see it! Need a pen!" And he dives back into the drawers with renewed urgency.

Steven is fascinated. This is the youngest Tony Stark he's ever met, talking so easily about things that stump some of the older ones. He realizes abruptly that Howard has no idea how brilliant his son is, under this thick layer of—of whatever it is.

"Anthony, what's…" He doesn't want to ask 'what's wrong with you,' because he isn't sure there is something 'wrong' with Anthony. "Do you know why you're seeing these things? What they are?"

"It's," Anthony says, yelping as he cuts his finger on the edge of a sheet of paper. The blood wells up brightly, and he starts to move his hand, instinctively ready to stick his finger in his mouth. He stops. He stares at the fat red droplet. Then he scrambles for paper and starts to write.

Steven moves without meaning to, an instinctive imperative of child and hurt and protect. He catches the boy up in his arms, skinny little wrists trapped in his strong hands. "Good Lord, Tony," he gasps.

"Anthony," the boy corrects. "A-N-T-H-O-N-Y."

"Anthony, stop. You're bleeding."

"No, no, I have to," Anthony insists, twisting like a snake and almost getting free. "This is good, this is fine, this way I don't need a pen."

"Anthony, look at me."

Slowly, Anthony stills, staring. "Hi," he says, like he's only now seeing Steven.

"Hi," Steven replies, worried and exasperated but smiling. "You can write it down later, okay? I promise. Just wait a little longer. Just let me put a bandage on your cut, and then I'll find you a pen and you can write all you want with that."

"Hallucinations," Anthony tells him. "Visual hallucinations. Sometimes printed like on a monitor. Sometimes handwritten. The frequency makes me think it's schizophrenia. Some of it's true. Some of it's fiction. Some of it's science. By now I can usually tell when it's just something made-up. It's like…my brain is the epicenter of a powerful Fidelis Effect. Collecting things that are written down. And they stack up, like snowflakes, until I can't see and I can't think and I can't breathe. But if I write them down, they vanish. They go away, and I don't see them again unless I concentrate."

And Steven doesn't know what to do with all that, with a fourteen-year-old self-diagnosing a debilitating mental illness. So he just rubs Anthony's bony little arms and nods and says, "Okay. Okay, Anthony. Just let me fix up your finger, and I promise I'll go get you a pen."

He finds the first aid kit and tends Anthony's paper cut in silence.

By the time he finishes, Howard gets back with a tablet, flicks it on and quickly opens a word processor before handing it to Anthony, who sits abruptly on the floor and starts writing again.

"What happened?" Howard asks.

"Paper cut," Steven says numbly. "Howard, you need to send the boy through the Academy. Give him a pseudo-pen so he can write out whatever happens to be crowding his thoughts, let him get some more formal education to fill in the cracks. We need Programmers."

"Don't tell me like I don't know," Howard snaps. "It's been hundreds of years since we found someone who could do it, and before that we only had what we started with thousands of years ago. I'll put him in the Underprogrammer curriculum. Here, the signal booster." He goes to a workbench and plucks up a coin-sized little prototype device, which he hands to Steven.

"Thank you. Good night."

With an urgent sound of padding bare feet, Anthony jumps up and grasps Steven's sleeve. "Are you going?"

"I'll see you again," Steven tells him. "I promise."

"I believe you," Anthony replies, and sits back down.

.End.