Tony Stark was bored.
Boredom was a physical weight, heavier than the grief he was currently trying to drown in expensive scotch and even more expensive cars. It had been a year since the accident, and the board members at Stark Industries were already acting like vultures circling a shiny, billionaire-shaped carcass.
Walking into Thorne & Associates was supposed to be another chore. Old man Thorne was a genius with a drafting pencil, but he was slow. He cared about things like "structural harmony" and "zoning laws," while Tony just wanted the new campus to look like it was pulled from a sci-fi flick.
"Thorne? You in there?" Tony called out, wandering deeper into the office.
He didn't find the senior Thorne. Instead, he found a kid.
The boy looked about twelve, sitting in front of a high-end Silicon Graphics rig. Tony was about to make a snarky comment about childcare, but then he saw the screen. Most kids that age were struggling to get a turtle to draw a line in Logo. This kid was neck-deep in a command prompt, and the lines of code scrolling by were... familiar.
No way, Tony thought, leaning against the doorframe. Is that a custom memory allocator?
He watched for a moment, fascinated despite himself. The kid wasn't just typing; he had a rhythm. It was a flow Tony usually only saw in the mirror.
"That's a lot of C++ for someone who hasn't hit puberty yet," Tony deadpanned.
The kid nearly jumped out of his skin. Standard reaction. But when he spun around, Tony didn't see the usual wide-eyed "Oh my god, it's Tony Stark" worship. The kid looked startled, sure, but his eyes were sharp. They were the eyes of someone who understood exactly what Tony was looking at.
"The BIOS is a bottleneck," the kid said after a few seconds of stuttering. "I figured if I mapped the polygons directly to the buffer, I could get a higher frame rate."
Tony felt a spark of something he hadn't felt in months. Interest. Actual, genuine interest.
"Bloated? Kid, I've been saying that since I was at MIT. Move over."
Tony pushed his way into the seat, his mind already racing ahead. He expected to have to explain the basic concepts of bitwise operations, but the kid—Julian, he said his name was—kept up. Not only did he keep up, he pushed back.
"We should bit-shift the integers instead," the kid suggested, pointing at a line of code with a greasy finger that had probably been holding a piece of toast ten minutes ago. "It's messier, but it's lighter."
Tony paused. He actually paused. He ran the logic through his head—the way the data would flow through the registers, the bypass of the floating-point unit...
Son of a bitch.
"Bit-shifting? You little monster. I love it," Tony muttered.
For the next hour, Tony forgot about the board meetings. He forgot about the lawyers. He even forgot about the empty house in Malibu. He was just a guy and a kid, screaming at a monitor because they had managed to trick a 1992 processor into doing 2010-level math.
When Julian's dad walked in, Tony felt like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He stood up, smoothing out his suit, trying to regain his "billionaire playboy" mask, but his heart was still thudding from the adrenaline of the code.
"Your kid is a freak," Tony told Thorne, and he meant it as the highest compliment he could give.
As he walked toward the elevator, Tony felt a strange sensation. For the first time in a year, he wasn't thinking about the car accident. He was thinking about a line of code. And he was thinking about a twelve-year-old kid who looked at a Silicon Graphics machine and saw "bloat."
"Jarvis," Tony said as he stepped into his car, then stopped. Right. Jarvis was his father's butler. He didn't have a digital assistant. Not yet.
He looked at his own hands, still seeing the ghost of the code he and Julian had written.
"I need to get a computer like that," Tony whispered to the empty car. "And I need to keep an eye on that kid. He's going to build something that breaks the world, and I want a front-row seat when he does."