While the world outside was distracted by the seismic violence in Harlem, a silent evolution was taking place within the high tech sanctuary of Tony Stark's private workshop in Malibu. The ocean roared against the cliffs below, but inside, the air was heavy with the scent of ionized ozone and the sharp tang of soldering iron.
Since the second gathering of the Tarot Club, Tony had been reinventing the very definition of "Iron Man."
The week had been a blur of high octane research and forced biological adaptation. Tony sat at his workbench, his back hunched over a localized magnetic field generator, his eyes glowing with a strange focus. He was becoming a meta human entity and the machine was a prosthesis.
Tony's week had begun with the brutal mastery of his new gifts. He had spent hours pushing his body to physical failure, testing the limits of the High Speed Regeneration. Every micro tear in his muscles from lifting engine blocks healed in minutes. He found he could work twenty hour shifts with zero fatigue, his body constantly repairing the cellular stress of sleep deprivation in real time.
Then there was Bullet Time. Tony discovered that by consciously overclocking his neural pathways, he could force his perception of the world into a slow motion crawl. He used this for engineering. He manually soldered circuits at a microscopic level that even his robotic arms, Dum E and U, couldn't match in precision. He saw the solder cool in liquid waves, he saw the spark of connection before it fully ignited.
But the most unsettling change was Eye Boy. Tony's vision had fractured into a multi spectral array. He saw the thermal bleed of the processors, the ultraviolet signatures of the welding gases and the microscopic stress fractures in the titanium gold alloy of his armor before they ever became cracks. He was his own walking diagnostic suite.
The crowning achievement of the week was the integration of his Magnetism (10m range) into the Mark III's fundamental architecture.
Tony realized early on that his ability to manipulate magnetic fields was the missing link in power efficiency. He wanted a suit that was an extension of his own bio magnetic field.
He stripped the Mark III down to its chassis. He replaced the heavy hydraulic systems and servo motors with high frequency magnetic levitation joints. This made the armor nearly silent, gone was the mechanical whine of the prototype. Now, it moved with a ghostly quiet. More importantly, it increased the suit's reaction speed ten fold. Because he could control the magnetism personally, the suit moved with his thoughts.
He found that by using his internal magnetism to "shape" the plasma discharge of the repulsors, he could create focused magnetic bottles at the emitter output. This compressed the energy beam, making the blasts more stable, longer range and precise.
To handle the massive energy drain, Tony optimized the Arc Reactor's housing, using his magnetism to keep the palladium core in a state of perfect fusion suspension, preventing any heat waste. The chest piece glowed brighter, cooler and more dangerous.
Standing in the center of the workshop was the armor, gleaming in the hot rod red and gold, humming with a low frequency vibration that rattled the tools on the nearby tables. It was a lattice of smart metals designed to respond to Tony's specific neural and magnetic signatures.
"JARVIS," Tony muttered, his voice raspy from a week of minimal talking. "Check the magnetic seal on the gauntlets."
"The seals are holding at one hundred percent, Sir," the AI replied, its voice tinged with a hint of concern. "However, I must note that your heart rate is significantly lower than usual for this level of exertion. It appears your regeneration is optimizing your cardiovascular efficiency to match the output of the suit."
Tony looked at his hands. He concentrated and a small Phillips head screwdriver lifted from the table, hovering a few inches above his palm, spinning slowly in a magnetic cradle he created with his mind.
"It's not just the suit anymore, JARVIS," Tony whispered, watching the metal spin. "It's the pilot. I'm seeing things I never saw before. Flaws in the design."
Tony spent the remainder of the week in a state of hyper focused "Technomancy." The workshop had become an extension of his own nervous system. With the Eye Boy ability, he could see the flow of electrons through the copper wiring like glowing rivers of liquid gold. He realized that standard wiring was too inefficient for his new reflexes.
Using Bullet Time, Tony manually redesigned the suit's internal bus. In the slow motion world he inhabited, he spent what felt like hours reweaving the fiber optic sensors into a neural mesh that mirrored the human nervous system.
The result was a control system that bypassed traditional software lag. The Mark III sensed the bio electric intent in his muscles the moment the thought formed. The armor was effectively a second skin, responding with the same "zero latency" he now experienced in his own body.
The most radical change came in the propulsion. Traditional flight requires control surfaces, flaps, ailerons and drag. Tony threw them out.
By using his Magnetism, he turned the entire outer hull of the armor into a variable magnetic plate. He realized he could grip the Earth's own magnetic field to provide stability or execute turns that would subject a normal pilot to lethal G forces. But with his High Speed Regeneration, his internal organs could withstand the pressure, healing micro ruptures in his blood vessels in real time as he banked at Mach 3.
Tony stood in the middle of a circle of robotic arms, his eyes scanning the room in thirty different spectrums.
"JARVIS, simulate a kinetic ambush. Ten targets, varied elevations, high velocity projectiles."
"Simulation active, Sir. Engaging training pods."
Suddenly, the workshop's training pods hissed and fired ten tennis balls, each loaded with a metallic core, at over 200 mph from different angles.
Bullet Time engaged. The roar of the ocean outside dropped to a low drone. He watched the balls hang in the air, moving like slow motion bubbles in thick syrup. He could see the fuzz on the felt, the spin of the trajectory, the heat friction of the air against the rubber.
Using his Magnetism, he seized the metallic cores hidden inside the balls. With a flick of his fingers, he altered their vectors. He sent them colliding into one another in mid air, creating a perfect geometric pattern of impacts. He caught the last one just inches from his face, his hand moving so fast it created a sonic snap.
"Time?" Tony asked, the world rushing back to normal speed as the balls dropped to the floor.
"Point zero four seconds, Sir," JARVIS replied, the AI almost sounding impressed. "Your visual processing and motor response speeds have increased by four hundred percent. You are effectively perceiving the world as a series of still frames."
Tony tossed the ball aside and walked toward the window, looking out at the Pacific. Through the layers of his new vision, he could see the heat signatures of fish deep in the water, the ultraviolet radiation of the sun hitting the waves and the radio waves of the city behind him pulsing like a heartbeat.
He looked toward the corner of the room where a holographic news feed was silently playing footage of a desert landscape, Afghanistan. The images of his own weapons being used against civilians flickered in the ultraviolet spectrum of his new eyes, burning brighter than the rest.