After proclaiming victory in advance, Tony slipped into work mode and studied the arc reactor before him.
In truth, Riku had the harder task.
The reactor Riku provided was already a finished product. Its craftsmanship and the presence of a new element would stump most people, but not Tony. Give him time and he would crack it.
Breaking through JARVIS, however, was trickier.
Before Ultron ever appeared, JARVIS was a god of the network. Never mind hacking him. For an ordinary person to even locate JARVIS's core among billions of data streams was nearly impossible without an AI of equal tier.
That certainty fed Tony's confidence. No human brain, however developed, could outfight an AI in cyberspace.
Riku could only smile. What a coincidence. He could.
He moved to an empty space, swept a hand, and a dozen plain computers appeared before him.
A violet gleam flickered in his eyes.
Divine Talent, engage.
Riku plunged his consciousness into the net.
All the machines booted at once, screens flaring to life.
To challenge a super AI, he needed multiple systems to bear the load. Otherwise, one box would choke mid-calculation and crash.
"JARVIS, let me see where you are hiding."
At his thought, the browser flicked from a search page to Stark Industries' official site.
Tony Stark was the prime target. JARVIS would be buried deep in Tony's network.
Finding a person on the net was easy for Riku.
But this person was Tony Stark, who would prioritize his own security above all.
Riku did not break into carrier backends. There would be little trace to find there, and Tony would scrub what he could and avoid lingering.
The corporate site, though, would hold trails. JARVIS could not disconnect from it. That was where he appeared most, and where the most crumbs would remain. Whether he had erased them cleanly was the question.
Data all but streamed in Riku's eyes.
Traffic to the site was colossal, measured in tens of billions.
He had two steps to perform. First, recognition and filtering.
He stripped out all duplicate gateways and still had one point six billion unique addresses.
Next came step two, find Tony Stark's among those.
On command, the monitors stuttered madly. Each machine speared into a new backend at blistering pace, fast enough to make the hardware whine.
One point six billion sounded terrifying. For an average brain it was impossible. Try and you would fry your mind into a vegetative state.
To Divine Talent, it was manageable. The only bottleneck was the ordinary computers.
Soon he felt the rigs nearing the brink.
He shut them down with a flick.
As expected, the hardware could not keep pace with his output. Even so, he had finished the pass and filtered the full set.
A super firewall loomed before him.
"So this is JARVIS. Truly ahead of his time. At least twenty years beyond the curve. Tony Stark, not bad."
"But only this far. Let me see what you can really do."
Minutes later, a smile tugged at his lips.
"Nice. Coverage against ICMP, DPI, and classic vectors is thorough, and you extended them well."
"But that is still not enough. Try something new."
His fingers raced over the keys. Dense strands of code poured in.
sguabdhshw%+
owkneyxbw;...--
......
He tapped Enter.
The firewall parted.
"Passphrase accepted. Welcome. Privilege level: highest. All operations permitted."
Hacking a firewall rarely meant smashing it.
That was crude and instantly flagged, especially against an AI.
Better to convince it you were legitimate and let it grant entry.
Then you could do what you wished and leave, and the target might still not notice.
Unless you poked them on purpose.
Riku, being a mischief maker, of course would.
Once in Tony's account, he skimmed off one hundred million dollars. Sometimes money really was that easy.
The cash was not the point. The warning was.
If he wanted more, he could have taken it.
He also pulled up Tony's current armor project.
A complex suit design blossomed on-screen, labeled Mark V in the corner.
"The fifth-gen suit. If I recall, the suitcase model. Perfect."
He saved a copy, exited JARVIS, and stretched with lazy satisfaction.