I have learned the hard way, always space out your updates after 24 hours. can't handle two in one day, it seems. So, here's the third chapter and possibly the first alert to the surprising number of people already following. Have at my lazy nerdgasm!


The Homer Cluster had been Tony's version of a desktop. A suitcase-sized chunk of metal that, when operating at standard clock speed, could provide 600 teraFLOPS of crisp, clean computation. When JARVIS first turned the Iron Mind facility on, he had a room filled with a row of 200 x 50 stacks of them, three high. 18 exaFLOPS, roughly the equivalent of three human brains at the neuronal level. JARVIS had been roughly equivalent to Tony at one percent of one percent of that.

It was the birth of the strongest mind to ever exist on Earth. Tony popped champagne for the occasion and debated with JARVIS for half an hour over adding gustatory sensors to his personal JARVIS-bot so his bud could join him at drinking for the next landmark celebration.

The first thing the A.I. did was come up with a better version of the servers, by a factor of 10 and still able to be produced by the fabricators. The first job in the priority queue became churning out said Homer 2.0s. The second thing JARVIS did was come up with better versions of the fabricators, ones that would be that much closer to atomically-precise manufacturing. Over the next six months, each stack would be slowly replaced and the originals moved to other Stark facilities for use, while the fabricators would be taken down and upgraded after all 30,000 replaced. In the meantime, JARVIS would continue assisting Tony, aided by the current-gen hardware. The cycle would repeat, until JARVIS reached the level of smart nanoparticles, molecular factories, and foglets. Then the servers would upgrade themselves as JARVIS discovered better patterns, configurations, and materials and anything that needed making would assemble itself from the air and atoms.

Tony and JARVIS had launched a snowball that would roll down the side of Everest and never stop. Only time would tell how different the world would be after the ball got bigger than the mountain.

If they stayed on track, Tony could be wearing an upgraded version of the Mark L for the Chitauri invasion.

Tony congratulated himself on getting one thing right, finally. A benevolent singleton artificial intelligence on the path to accelerating returns of progress. JARVIS had already taken the crime world by storm, outing people on the Dark Web to the appropriate authorities and calling in with 'tips' by tracking criminals through city cameras. Streets had never been cleaner, in the US or any first-world nation. Papers put it down to the 'Iron Man' effect, everyday people stepping up to be heroes instead of keeping their heads down and mouths shut.

The Stark CEO stopped patting his own back over his little minion's phenomenal success and focused back on the pet project he'd deemed 'Antonius Maximus'.

As predicted, Bruce Banner had been delighted to be kidnapped and taken to a 5-star cabin in the woods courtesy of Tony. The first holo-call had been pretty awkward, but the scientist on the run soon grew to like the gentle barbs, endless enthusiasm, and utter lack of (real) judgment from Tony. Tony may or may not have gone over the top and tried to buy his bromance by offering a 'cure' for his little green problem. Tony (well, really JARVIS, who was the best medical expert in all of history by this point) had come up with a brain implant that could be discretely placed in Bruce's limbic system. It would act like an 'on-off' switch, restricting voltage to the proper areas to physically prevent Hulking out or stimulating them to ensure it. Between that and Binaurally Augmented Retro Framing (still had to work on that acronym), it was Tony's hope that Banner and Hulk could develop an actual healthy, mutually beneficial relationship, rather than warring Id and Superego.

The procedure hadn't been done yet, of course, because Bruce was utterly alone up in Canada and it would rather defeat the purpose of a secret hideaway if Tony flew in Stephen Strange (not a wizard yet, Tony checked) or some other neurosurgeon. Fortunately, a surgical version of the JARVIS-bot had been designed and was in production, with multispectral scanners, precision tools in the hands, and a copy of every medical procedure known to man hardwired in. Give it a year, and Tony would release it to the world as a Medic addition to the Iron Legion. The standard search-and-rescue bots were already a wild success with both the military and the Stark Foundation, Tony's philanthropic and disaster-relief arm. Bruce was happy being the lab rat, just that desperate to have some measure of control over the Other Guy and trusting in Tony's (and JARVIS's) genius.

Bruce had more to do up in the Hyde-away (Tony's naming, he insisted) than just stare at the woods through the windows and enjoy meals made by his persona JARVIS-bot. His seven Ph. D's were put to good use. Tony had gotten a smorgasbord of data from the events in Puente Antiguo. The Iron Mites had been dismissed as bugs by the Asgardians and humans alike, though Tony still had paranoid worries that SHIELD had noticed. Tony had gotten hair from all five Asgardians, blood from when Thor was in the hospital AND from his cut lip after tussling with the Destroyer. Not to mention readings on legit magic from the Destroyer's fire and Thor's lightning.

Bruce, Tony, and JARVIS spent most of their time for the next few months pouring over the data. Turns out Asgardians had triple-helix DNA, which made the whole analysis just that much more complicated. The true gold mine came from comparing Thor's samples before and after he got his powers back. The sections of his genome that went 'dark' while he was effectively human were like a roadmap to what were the 'human-shaped' parts and what were the 'immortal champion' parts of the code. Bruce raved about all the medical applications that could be made by understanding Asgardian biology, everything from age therapy to disease prevention. Tony knew that Bruce knew that Tony knew that Bruce knew Tony had some 'personal' plans for the gods' DNA. But Bruce seemed to trust Tony.

Tony hadn't come clean about time travel and such, but he had confessed his worries that one day a threat would come along and he wouldn't be enough to stop it. That desperation, that NEED to be enough, to be able to protect everyone, had touched something in Bruce. Of his own accord, Bruce started talking about his original work on unlocking Erskine's serum.

Which reminded Tony. He had an American hero to wake up.


Steve woke up. That was a surprise in itself.

He quickly took stock of the situation. He was in an obscenely comfortable bed, in pajamas, in a room with a wall of windows looking out over the ocean. Steve had never been somewhere so pretty or so comfortable. Was this Heaven?

Then the door opened, and in walked a man wearing a strange suit. It looked expensive, but the style was odd compared to what Steve knew.

"Captain Rogers, good morning. How are you feeling?"

Steve tensed, sitting up and getting his feet on the floor. Best to be able to run if things turned sour. Where was he? This didn't feel like an Army base. Was he captured by Hydra after the crash? Not wanting to jump to conclusions, Steve decided to play along. "Okay. Where am I?"

The man grinned. "10880 Malibu Point. My house. Built it myself. Well, I had people build it for me, of course. Anyway, that's not the point. You're in California."

Steve looked out at the water again. Wow, the Pacific. An ocean he'd never seen before. But last he knew, he'd crashed on the East Coast. "How did I get here?"

"Well, that's a little complicated." The man pulled up a chair to face Steve, still on the bed. "Let's start over. I'm Tony Stark. Howard Stark was my father."

Steve frowned. "Howard? How can you be his son? He's not even thirty and you look even older than him."

"Here's the thing, Steve. Wait, back up, may I call you Steve? You can call me Tony."

"Sure," Steve said, feeling confusion. His muscles tensed, eager for a fight and exertion to be used. His new body was always brimming with energy.

"You crashed into the ice in 1945. The cold didn't kill you, just put you to sleep. Today is August 27th, 2009." Tony paused, waiting for that bombshell to go off in Steve's head.

Steve felt like he couldn't breathe. "Oh." Could it be true? He knew putting things in the icebox made them last longer. Could Dr. Erskine's Super Soldier Serum have improved him to the point he could just… sleep in the ice after the crash?

"Yeah. I can only imagine what this is like for you, waking up in another time." Tony rubbed his neck. "Dad's gone, but he spent years looking for you. He never shut up about you, when I was growing up. I used to think it was so cool, my dad had actually met the Captain America. Aunt Peggy's still alive, though."

"Peggy?!" Steve looked up. "She… she's here?"

Tony coughed. "Well, not 'here' here. She's in a nursing home in D.C. She's… really old now, Captain. She's not always there. I can arrange a phone call, even fly you out there if you want, but it's a coin-toss whether she'll remember you if she sees you."

"No," Steve said, wrapping his mind around it. "I need to think about it. Sorry if I seem eager, it's just… we had a date."

"Yeah. I know what that's like." Tony shook his head. "Anyway, back to your original question of how you wound up in my house. To be honest, I was bored and decided to take up my old man's search for you. Of course, we have much better tools and technology now than we did back then. I wound up finding the Valkyrie wreck in less than a week. We had it excavated and found you there, shield and all. The government wanted to get their hands on you, stick you in a facility to retrain you, but I basically called 'finders-keepers' and got to take you home myself."

"And why would you do that?" Steve questioned.

"Because I think that it should be up to do what you do with your own damn life, rather than have a bunch of bureaucrats and politicians who think they own you because you're a science experiment use you as a weapon without even asking you." Tony gave a crooked smile. "You already saved the world once. Whether you do it again should be your choice, not pushed on you. And if even you want to suit back up and go charging into the breach, you need a little time to adapt to today's world and process everything that happened to you. I figured I could extend some Stark hospitality to my long-lost uncle instead of leaving him to rot in a barracks."

"Right." Steve didn't know what to make of this. He didn't know what to make of anything. He was in new century. Everyone he knew, or just about, was gone or old enough to be great-grandparents. He… needed a minute. A lot of minutes.

"Well, this is your room. Do whatever you want. Though I ask that if you decide to destroy the furniture for whatever reason you at least clean up after yourself. I'll have JARVIS bring you some food. You'll like JARVIS, he's a robot I built. Well, technically he's a computer, which is like a really fancy calculator that can think, and he controls the robot like a puppet. Anyway, he'll look after you. You have any questions, you find me or just ask the room and JARVIS will answer."

Tony stood up, buttoning his suit. He paused. "In the interests of being honest, I should let you know I took some of your blood while you were asleep. They still haven't cracked Erskine's formula and all the old samples you gave are long gone. I hope you don't mind."

Steve tensed. "Depends. What are you going to do with it?"

Tony grinned. "Crack it, mass-produce it, sell it. Make America the land of super-buff, super-healthy, super-pretty people. No, seriously. I'll water it down for the public so everyone's healthy, hand it to our boys in uniform to make whole platoons of guys as awesome as you used to be. Of course, being an international business man, I'll also be selling it abroad. Don't want America to have an unfair advantage, have everyone crying out about the gap between the rich and the poor. Within a few years, NATO should be pretty on top of things."

Steve gaped. "Really. You're going to sell it?"

"Oh, I'll keep the prices fair. There's market realities, of course, but I'm not going to extort anyone." Tony paused. "This is a line from a movie, by a woman who turns out to be a villain at the end, but it stuck with me. 'If you want to save the world, you have to start trusting it.' Hoarding power doesn't do anyone any good. The serum could do a lot of harm in the wrong hands, but I'm willing to bet it will do more good if it's in EVERYONE'S hands instead of just yours. No offense."

Steve paused. "No. You're right. That's what Dr. Erskine wanted. I was never supposed to be the only one." He gave a boyish grin. "Might even be nice, not being the only superhuman in the world."

Tony barked out a laugh. "Oh, Cap. You have no idea."

It took Jarvis focusing all his attention on the one problem for three days to unlock the Super Soldier Serum. It truly spoke to Dr. Erskine's genius. The man had been the Einstein of biology and genetics, in a time before DNA had ever been discovered.

True to his word, Tony patented the completed formula. Several versions of it, in fact. There was a temporary one, which would keep patients in critical condition stable by boosting the immune and damage-repair systems of the body before being flushed out. There was a watered-down, 20% efficiency version, which would permanently get your average human adult into peak fitness and wellness and stay there. The effects would take a while, since not everyone had a Vita-Ray machine at home, but within a month even the morbidly obese would look like models. There was an 85% strength solution Tony sold to the military for a mint, on the condition that there be an extremely thorough character assessment before each soldier was enhanced. And then there was the secret, 130% stuff that Tony had pegged just for himself and possibly the Avengers, should they ever assemble again.

Of course, there were FDA trials and ethics committees and political hoopla to deal with, so most of it ground to a screeching halt by Tony's pace. It would take months or even years for even the combat version to make it to the forces. But Tony started the ball rolling.

Steve Rogers settled into the mansion uneasily. For a boy from Brooklyn, the sheer opulence was a lot to take. The Captain damn near fainted when he saw Tony's garage full of sports cars. He tended to stay in his room, making use to the Internet to reacquaint himself with the world. He accepted JARVIS remarkably well, truly seeing him as a person rather than just a machine. That earned him points in Tony's book. The two would often chat over dinner, Tony occasionally taking him out to see the sights or invite friends over for dinner. Steve and Yinsen got along really well for some reason. Guess they were both old souls.

Steve, having been in the war after getting 'active', never realized what a celebrity he was. The news that he'd been found alive had nearly broken the Internet. He dealt with the little kids best, happy to sign scraps of paper and pose for pictures with littles boys and girls enamored with Captain America. The rabid fangirls were another matter altogether. Tony still laughed like a baboon when he recalled the first time a girl asked Steve to sign her boob.

They also sparred together, once Tony (illegally, but who cares) dosed himself. It was incredibly cathartic for Tony to finally get the chance to actually punch the pretty boy in his perfect teeth. Steve himself was ecstatic to finally have a partner he didn't have to worry about breaking in half, though he had given a harsh frown when he realized that Tony had ignored the rules in taking the serum. Tony couldn't bring himself to care. It was AWESOME being built like a statue. Plus, he'd never slept better than he had the night after Yinsen removed the shrapnel, only trusting to do it with the enhanced healing the serum provided.

Tony relearned why he liked the guy. He was exactly what it said on the cover: a good old Christian American soldier. There was no artifice, no pretension. He was just that good a guy.

In the corporate world, as the new decade rolled around, Tony started making waves. He bought out A.I.M. in a ruthless takeover, had Killian fired after finding evidence already of plans to weaponize Extremis, and gave Maya Hansen her own team at SI. The woman couldn't seem to believe her luck when Tony handed her the keys to her lab and told her to finish what she started. With Tony and JARVIS's help, the official version of the virus (as opposed to the secret version that was already worked out and on the road to getting upgraded by several iterations) was finally done. A cure-all to regrow lost limbs and heal trauma, no explosions necessary.

There was talks of Maya getting a Nobel prize someday.

Moving on, Tony continued to apply a mixture of foreknowledge and innovation backed by JARVIS-level assistance to, quite simply, make the world better. The Arc Reactor was a wild success, with energy shortages becoming a thing of the past and parts of the world that had forever been dark seeing the light of electricity at last. Even with an existing source of clean, sustainable energy, Tony applied his mind to solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal. You can never have too much of a good thing, and energy was definitely a good thing. He also got in on desalination, indoor farming, in vitro meat, basically anything that could solve world hunger and thirst. He found solutions in months that had baffled people for decades, and had them utilized and implemented with all the weight of the world's first 100-billion dollar company behind him.

He gave a call to Bill to apologize for taking his throne. The man had replied that he could think of no one more deserving. That actually made Tony a little emotional.

Finally, Nick Fury caved and came to ask for help.


Tony looked up as he followed Fury into the Tesseract chamber. The Joint Dark Energy Mission Facility was its own town, a microcosm of scientists and security all dedicated to unlocking the mysteries of the Space Stone. Not that anyone truly understood what the thing in their midst was. All they knew was that it was blue, it was alien, and it had the potential energy to wipe out the planet.

"Remember, Stark, don't touch."

"Now, One-Eyed Willy, how on earth am I going to solve all your problems if I can't get my hands dirty?" Tony quipped. "Come on, Nick, lighten up. I get that the Council had to order you to approach me, but you could be less of a sourpuss about it."

Fury turned back to glare balefully at the Stark CEO. "I'd like to know where you get your information."

"Elementary, my dear Fury. Just plain old deductive reasoning. No bugs on me, don't worry." At least, not anymore. Tony had already planted all seven he'd carried in with him, not counting the extra dozen he had flown in by Iron Mites.

So shoot him, JARVIS could tap into the Situation Room of the Pentagon but he couldn't get further into SHIELD than the Triskelion public server. It made Tony curious. Besides, how was he going to warn Nick how to root out Hydra if he didn't have all the details?

"Mr. Stark…"

"I prefer Dr., actually. I got the damn diploma, might as well use it."

Fury seemed to engage in a deep breathing exercise. "Tony, please. We just need you to take a look at the Cube."

Tony sighed. "Look, Nick, we already hashed this out back at my home. I know you're not really after energy, you're after an arsenal. I won't say anything, though I would point out you'd be better off just buying a bunch of my reactors and making your own lasers. I'm here because I want to play with the super cool space gem, and you're going to let me because despite years of tests, you still have no freaking idea how it works."

The Director hid a grimace. "You have a way with words, Stark."

"Please, you worked with my dad. You get to call me Tony."

The SHIELD leader sent a look with his one eye that somehow clearly articulated 'make up your damn mind'.

Tony decided to shut up for now.

He met Selvig and his team, then got to work.

The Tesseract gave off its own unique energy, which despite their sincerest efforts the good people of Project PEGASUS could hardly make heads or tails of. Next-gen Homer Cluster set up, Tony took out every tool in his special kit and went to work. Analyzing radiation up and down the spectrum, wave interference, even structural analysis. Just what the hell was a singularity made of, exactly, anyway?

It took a couple weeks, which Tony charged through the nose for in consultancy feeds, but he managed to set up a matrix that would read, interpret, and accurately predict the Cube's energy output up to a day in advance. It wasn't much, but it was a lot more than the team had seen in a while. They cheered, Selvig shaking Tony's hand strongly, and Tony took his leave.

Well, at least they'd get 24 hours-notice before Loki or one of the Children of Thanos or (god forbid) the Mad Titan himself came through.

Working with the magic rock reminded Tony of other energies that were beyond modern science's understanding. He simply couldn't have that. As soon as he got home, he had JARVIS send in next-gen Iron Mites to investigate Kamar-Taj and the New York sanctuary. The way Strange had described it, in their terse conversations before the final confrontation, humans could somehow draw energy from other dimensions using their minds and use it to affect the world around them.

Tony was determined to work that out. Any sufficiently advanced technology was indistinguishable from magic, right? Well, Tony was determined to prove that any sufficiently analyzed magic was indistinguishable from science. And if it got him a magic suit, well, that would be awesome.

While he was thinking about it, Tony had JARVIS run through all SHIELD data and flag 'irregularities'. He sent it the data to Fury's personal email with the note "yeah, what were you thinking inviting Hydra's head scientist to work in the heart of America? That's just, like, really stupid."

Thus began a game of cat and mouse inside the labyrinthine depths of the intelligence community.

After that, Tony got into a groove. He did press, managed his company, cut deals, fought in tiny little skirmishes that only seemed big in a world that made sense. JARVIS constantly grew and expanded, getting smarter every day and helping Tony roll out advancement after advancement in technology that took the world by storm. Extremis and the Super Serums made it into public use and proved revolutionary. The lame walked, the blind saw, and anyone who could scrounge together a couple grand got lifetime physical fitness. The Olympics and other sports organizations had to ban or at least heavily regulate anyone who used the enhancements.

In the blink of an eye, a couple years had passed, Stark Tower was built, and he got an alert that the Tesseract was set to blow.

Well… time to deal with the first wave.


This is really just tumbling out, I'm not even sure of half I wrote. Hopefully someone will like it.