Hi there! things are starting to fall into place.
This is not a game
It would be a crying shame
Honestly, what's in a name?
Tell me, what's in a name
— What's in a name by The Airborne Toxic Event
Tony is finally in. It took another week of nightly ATM hacking – and if he never sees another ATM again it will be too soon – before he was able to purchase a computer that met his standards. Bringing it disassembled inside another suitcase had definitely made the guy at the front desk of the hotel think he may be up to something shady. Still, he had put the whole thing together at last and – after a little modding because no one's ever congratulated him on his self-control – gone forward with setting up his identity. It hadn't been some incredible feat, but this government's firewalls were at least more of a challenge than what he was used to back home even though none of it had been able to hold him back for long.
It isn't a quick job, there's a lot more to being a person than having a social security number, and he knows he's likely about to spend the night as well as the following day making sure his identity is entirely bulletproof from driver's license to expired library card. It will probably be easier to set himself up as an orphan, with less of a paper trail to follow other than a birth certificate with the name of a mother who died in childbirth and no father to be found. After that, he can add his name to the fostering records of a couple of parents, the sort that took in lots of kids on rotation and wouldn't be expected to remember them after they left. There's also schooling to think about, and he can't exactly make himself enough of a genius that it would have been strange not to be noticed, but skipping a grade or two probably wouldn't raise any flags. It might explain why no one his age remembers him, and he'll make a point of making each foster house far enough that it would have required him to change schools just in case.
He's had a lot of free time to plan how to go about this and put in a remarkable effort into seeming entirely unremarkable, not wanting to raise any suspicions from known and unknown entities alike. He hasn't seen anything like S.H.I.E.L.D. so far, or any kind of equivalent, but that hardly means it's fine to let his guard down and underestimate the already known branches of the government. Building himself a believable timeline is time-consuming but relatively simple, especially after the moment he'd have technically aged out of the system. He's looked into decent but cheaper colleges than MIT – while trying not to feel like a traitor for shunning his alma mater – and will probably pick one large enough where students barely count as numbers to add to his growing profile. Hacking into a university will be much easier than what he's doing at the moment, so he's not too worried.
There's only one small issue, which he notices right at the beginning. Well, not exactly an issue, more of a decision that gives him pause. His name.
It should be easy, typing Anthony Edward Stark and moving on with the set-up, but he still stalls at the name field, typing and deleting everything after Anthony over three times before groaning and sitting back in his shitty hotel room's equally shitty chair.
Do I want to be a Stark? He ends up asking himself.
There's no history to that name, not in this corner of reality he's found himself in. No ties to war profiteering or deals under the table, no rust-red stains made with the blood of the people they were supposed to protect. The name Stark, here, will not open any more doors than Smith or Jones would, so there's no real advantage to keeping it as is besides familiarity. A reminder, maybe, of what he's done and what he needs to atone for. Except… none of it has happened here.
He should keep it, like a shackle tethering him to his mistakes, those he wronged a whole universe away, but he's so incredibly tired of holding the weight of the world on his shoulders. He nearly died for it – and to the ones back home he may as well be dead – so when will he be allowed to move forward without his name dragging him down? It's not that he hates it, he's proud of how far he's come in cleaning up his act and making Stark Industries a legacy worth having, but that's also too far to matter now, and maybe… maybe he can let himself forget, just for a while, that Stark men need to be anything but themselves.
His hands hover over the screen, hesitantly, before finally filling out the form.
Anthony Edwin Carbonell, Tony reads after a moment and doesn't give himself time to overthink it before moving on to the next task.
He's thirty-seven years old – because there's no need to entirely reinvent his identity – and his birth date is still on the 29th of May, but of 1995. Anthony Carbonell grew up in California, moving through the foster system and all over the state until aging out of it. He went through college, graduated at 20 with a bachelor's in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UCS – Tony did brush up on the necessary reading just to make sure everything he remembers is still correct in this world – and went on to work a few boring desk jobs in large enough companies that won't notice the addition of another name on their list of past paper-pushers. He had an apartment – somewhere with spotty enough records to get away with – but no vehicle and a small bank account that Tony will make sure reflects the fictional years of college graduate struggle.
He shuffles Carbonell around the state every few years, giving him jobs that wouldn't let him stand out until he hits his thirties, which is the point in the timeline where Tony makes sure the name is in some passenger manifest with a one-way ticket to New York. He'll explain it away as a job opportunity, and after a glance at the computer boxes on the floor of his hotel room, he gives his alter-ego a desk job at Dillon, followed by a couple more tech companies, and an internet history to match an increasing interest in the stock market. He can't really go around hacking ATMs for the entire remainder of his unplanned stay, after all, and he's more than capable of studying the current market and designing an algorithm to keep an eye on it and take care of his portfolio just as successfully as the one back home.
With thirty-five years figured out, all Tony really needs to do is decide what to do next and use the two remaining years to set it up. He definitely isn't about to work a random desk job, no matter the fact that it would be in one of the largest tech companies he'd found, but the thought of being left to his own devices day in and day out inside a shitty hotel room attempting to pull some sort of miracle out of his ass to land him back home isn't exactly appealing. At least not if he plans on staying relatively sober through it.
His brainstorming is interrupted when he catches a glimpse of the time and realizes he's been at this for over thirty hours. It's most definitely not his longest binge, but somehow the lack of JARVIS' repeated attempts to get him to take a break every once in a while makes him more self-conscious of his lack of doing so. He's not about to go to sleep, of course – he's in no rush to subject himself to the whims of his subconscious mind – but a break is probably a good idea, it might even help him decide what to do with himself instead of moping around his hotel room for the foreseeable future. Tony is many things, but made for being idle is not one of them.
He's out the door before there's time to think too hard about it, phone in one pocket and a couple of bills in the other, heading toward a small coffee shop he's spotted through the cab's windows a couple of times before. A decent – or most likely indecent – amount of caffeine would probably manage to keep him going for another six hours or so, time enough to finish setting up his background before passing out on the hotel bed for the twelve hours after that. The place he ends up at after a few minutes of walking doesn't look busy, he notices as he steps into it and scans the tables only to spot an elderly couple at one of the tables up front and a college-aged guy holed up in the back booth with a laptop and two likely empty mugs. The lady behind the counter is currently wiping it but pauses when he approaches.
"Mornin', what can I get ya?" She greets, with a smile way too bright for this early in the morning, though maybe that's just his exhaustion speaking.
"G'morning," he returns distractedly, glancing at the menu behind the counter. Standing on weathered wood, looking at a chalk-drawn menu on a blackboard over exposed brick, and listening to soft, smooth jazz pour off the speakers, he can almost trick himself into thinking he's never left home. "Uh…" he spends a moment looking through the options and mourning the fact that Irish coffee isn't one of them before answering, "I'll have a Caramel Macchiato, but double the shots," The request earns him a look and he instantly knows he's being judged for ordering that much caffeine while most likely sporting dark circles under his eyes.
"Your funeral, hun." The lady – who according to her name tag is called Theresa – tells him before motioning him over to the payment corner. A taped-on piece of paper behind the cash register announces 'help needed' but the second worst option to a desk job would be a job where he's forced to interact with and be cordial to people for an extended period of time. He's too much of an asshole for full-time customer service and isn't afraid to admit it.
He ends up ordering an omelet as well before taking over one of the tables to wait for it, figuring it would be best not to have coffee on an empty stomach and also needing to eat after the long hacking binge. The coffee shop – which Tony realizes is called Grounded after another glance at the blackboard – continues mostly empty, so he doesn't have to wait long for his order, and soon enough gets to dump and mix a whole packet of sugar into his beverage before sipping and sighing in satisfaction at tasting the sweet caffeinated goodness. The omelet also smells great and he's halfway into his first bite of it when someone else – a teen in baggy pants and a hoodie – walks into the shop, heading for the counter.
"Hi, Tess!" He hears the teen greet the barista – maybe the owner? – while humming in satisfaction under his breath from the cheesy treat he's just bitten into. He may be hungrier than he thought.
"Mornin' brat, your ma back from the graveyard shift?" Theresa replies, clearly recognizing the teen. Tony figures some of the looks he's been getting may not all be due to his rumpled clothes and visible tiredness if this is some sort of close-knit neighborhood where everyone knows everyone. It feels like a strange concept to contemplate in what is technically the future, but it's good to see that as he's usually said, technology can never fully replace human connection, just augment it.
He tunes out of their conversation for a few minutes, sipping on his coffee and scrolling through the news on his phone – it's apparently an election year, and also the AX400 has hit a record number of sales since the model's launch in early April – until the subject once again manages to catch his attention.
"Buy one second-hand then," the teen suggests.
"Jer, those cost an arm and a leg to fix, and y'know how it is 'round here," Theresa replies in the tone of someone who's had this conversation before, "Folks are so busy protestin' 'bout droids takin' their jobs, they ain't got time to work. I'd be findin' it in pieces in no time."
"Just don't leave it alone," the boy insists, but Tony's thoughts are already moving away from the overheard conversation and toward the subject of androids, specifically wondering what it takes to fix them.
There's got to be some sort of Cyberlife-certified repair shop, and maybe a couple of non-certified ones too, so it shouldn't be hard to find one looking to hire. Sure, he'll have to spend some time figuring out the credentials needed and learning all the basic skills necessary for android repair, but out of every option presented so far, this feels like the most appealing one. Hopefully, it will include very little customer interaction and a lot of chances to look into various android models' codes and biocomponents, enough to keep his brain engaged and avoid spiraling about how to return home while he gathers the resources to even be able to think about planning a possible attempt.
The thought follows him home once he's warm and fed, much like the mochaccino he's carrying in a to-go cup just in case he needs a couple more hours of alertness, and he faces the computer screen with a much clearer objective before starting on another research spiral. It's not like the information is particularly hard to find, but filtering the useful parts from the ones simply trying to sell him an overpriced online course – which he'll probably get back to later – or get him to sell his supposed defective android and buy a second-hand one of his own is a time-consuming process. As suspected, there is a Cyberlife certification exam – much like there is an SI one and he remembers Apple having one as well – though theirs is divided by branches, not unlike those of medicine. One can attain a Cyberlife certification to read and correct an android's basic programming, to alter their appearance through their code – which really just reads like skin modding – and small chassis modifications, to fix and replace biocomponents, and to correct or replace faulty wiring. Anyone with a valid certification can be hired by official Cyberlife stores or work independently, though lack of association with either an official or Cyberlife-certified store naturally voids the warranty of any android they may end up fixing on their own.
Tony barely remembers the last time he'd been this invested to learn something. It's not the same as hurriedly reading through the S.H.I.E.L.D. package and pretty much absorbing all he could about thermonuclear astrophysics overnight, but there is some of that same urgency there, not quite on the level of dealing with a national threat but still somewhat present. This is something new and concrete, which he'll eventually be able to get his hands on and hopefully take the experience home. The idea is faint but there, of offering to make JARVIS a body of his own, or even DUM-E, since the helper bot may be the oldest but his rudimentary AI makes him more of a toddler than his younger siblings. It's not something he can afford to think about for long but nonetheless keeps him motivated to move forward, a small amount of hope he just can't let go of.
Once he finally returns to fleshing out the last two years of his backstory, they end up filled with as many Computer Science – especially ones that dealt with AI – and Engineering online certificate courses as he can believably hack into and grant himself in that period of time, at least after making sure it's mostly information he's already learned or can brush up on later. According to Carbonell's work history, he's been unemployed for the last six months after one too many desk jobs, with his address registered to a newly set-up P.O. box instead of an apartment – justified by his current residence – and bank transactions showing mostly grocery expenses and cab fares while paying for all the ongoing distance learning courses with his saved-up money and moderate earnings from the stock market. Tony doesn't quite manage to stop himself from signing up for a Nanotechnology online course offered by MIT and figures he may as well start getting on with the times as soon as possible.
There's a phrase I never thought I'd use in relation to myself.
Once the grunt work is done, Tony has to go over everything with a fine-toothed comb in search of any cracks in the facade, any digital details that may point out Anthony Carbonell as a made-up entity. There's nothing he can do about his lack of past physical presence besides hacking a couple of security cameras from his alleged workplaces and corrupting the footage enough to sow doubt about whether he may have been there or not, and maybe try and be seen more in public from that day forward. He puts in a request for a new – though technically the first – credit card and plans out how to store his remaining ATM earnings somewhere safe and nowhere near a bank just in case he feels the need for a more incognito form of transaction later on. He's not about to delude himself into thinking he'll manage to get himself home working entirely above board.
A packet of instant noodles and his mochaccino are both eventually consumed for the sake of continued alertness as he puts the finishing touches on his new identity, dotting the i's and crossing the t's as necessary to introduce an entirely new person into society while keeping himself safe enough to make use of said identity. In the end, it's almost perfect if not for the gaping hole in his chest, currently filled by an ARC reactor and entirely omitted from Carbonell's medical history. He figures that as long as he covers it up and steers clear of metal detectors, it should be fine. He doesn't really plan for anyone to get close enough to notice it, after all.