Entry tags:
2017-09-30
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Cassini Spacecraft: Top Discoveries
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nasa:
Our Cassini spacecraft has been exploring Saturn, its stunning rings and its strange and beautiful moons for more than a decade.
Having expended almost every bit of the rocket propellant it carried to Saturn, operators are deliberately plunging Cassini into the planet to ensure Saturn’s moons will remain pristine for future exploration – in particular, the ice-covered, ocean-bearing moon Enceladus, but also Titan, with its intriguing pre-biotic chemistry.
Let’s take a look back at some of Cassini’s top discoveries:
Titan
Under its shroud of haze, Saturn’s planet-sized moon Titan hides dunes, mountains of water ice and rivers and seas of liquid methane. Of the hundreds of moons in our solar system, Titan is the only one with a dense atmosphere and large liquid reservoirs on its surface, making it in some ways more like a terrestrial planet.
Both Earth and Titan have nitrogen-dominated atmospheres – over 95% nitrogen in Titan’s case. However, unlike Earth, Titan has very little oxygen; the rest of the atmosphere is mostly methane and traced amounts of other gases, including ethane.
There are three large seas, all located close to the moon’s north pole, surrounded by numerous smaller lakes in the northern hemisphere. Just one large lake has been found in the southern hemisphere.
Enceladus
The moon Enceladus conceals a global ocean of salty liquid water beneath its icy surface. Some of that water even shoots out into space, creating an immense plume!
For decades, scientists didn’t know why Enceladus was the brightest world in the solar system, or how it related to Saturn’s E ring. Cassini found that both the fresh coating on its surface, and icy material in the E ring originate from vents connected to a global subsurface saltwater ocean that might host hydrothermal vents.
With its global ocean, unique chemistry and internal heat, Enceladus has become a promising lead in our search for worlds where life could exist.
Iapetus
Saturn’s two-toned moon Iapetus gets its odd coloring from reddish dust in its orbital path that is swept up and lands on the leading face of the moon.
The most unique, and perhaps most remarkable feature discovered on Iapetus in Cassini images is a topographic ridge that coincides almost exactly with the geographic equator. The physical origin of the ridge has yet to be explained…
It is not yet year whether the ridge is a mountain belt that has folded upward, or an extensional crack in the surface through which material from inside Iapetus erupted onto the surface and accumulated locally.
Saturn’s Rings
Saturn’s rings are made of countless particles of ice and dust, which Saturn’s moons push and tug, creating gaps and waves.
Scientists have never before studied the size, temperature, composition and distribution of Saturn’s rings from Saturn obit. Cassini has captured extraordinary ring-moon interactions, observed the lowest ring-temperature ever recorded at Saturn, discovered that the moon Enceladus is the source for Saturn’s E ring, and viewed the rings at equinox when sunlight strikes the rings edge-on, revealing never-before-seen ring features and details.
Cassini also studied features in Saturn’s rings called “spokes,” which can be longer than the diameter of Earth. Scientists think they’re made of thin icy particles that are lifted by an electrostatic charge and only last a few hours.
Auroras
The powerful magnetic field that permeates Saturn is strange because it lines up with the planet’s poles. But just like Earth’s field, it all creates shimmering auroras.
Auroras on Saturn occur in a process similar to Earth’s northern and southern lights. Particles from the solar wind are channeled by Saturn’s magnetic field toward the planet’s poles, where they interact with electrically charged gas (plasma) in the upper atmosphere and emit light.
Turbulent Atmosphere
Saturn’s turbulent atmosphere churns with immense storms and a striking, six-sided jet stream near its north pole.
Saturn’s north and south poles are also each beautifully (and violently) decorated by a colossal swirling storm. Cassini got an up-close look at the north polar storm and scientists found that the storm’s eye was about 50 times wider than an Earth hurricane’s eye.
Unlike the Earth hurricanes that are driven by warm ocean waters, Saturn’s polar vortexes aren’t actually hurricanes. They’re hurricane-like though, and even contain lightning. Cassini’s instruments have ‘heard’ lightning ever since entering Saturn orbit in 2004, in the form of radio waves. But it wasn’t until 2009 that Cassini’s cameras captured images of Saturnian lighting for the first time.
Cassini scientists assembled a short video of it, the first video of lightning discharging on a planet other than Earth.
Cassini’s adventure will end soon because it’s almost out of fuel. So to avoid possibly ever contaminating moons like Enceladus or Titan, on Sept. 15 it will intentionally dive into Saturn’s atmosphere.
The spacecraft is expected to lose radio contact with Earth within about one to two minutes after beginning its decent into Saturn’s upper atmosphere. But on the way down, before contact is lost, eight of Cassini’s 12 science instruments will be operating! More details on the spacecraft’s final decent can be found HERE.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com
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nasa:
Our Cassini spacecraft has been exploring Saturn, its stunning rings and its strange and beautiful moons for more than a decade.
Having expended almost every bit of the rocket propellant it carried to Saturn, operators are deliberately plunging Cassini into the planet to ensure Saturn’s moons will remain pristine for future exploration – in particular, the ice-covered, ocean-bearing moon Enceladus, but also Titan, with its intriguing pre-biotic chemistry.
Let’s take a look back at some of Cassini’s top discoveries:
Titan
Under its shroud of haze, Saturn’s planet-sized moon Titan hides dunes, mountains of water ice and rivers and seas of liquid methane. Of the hundreds of moons in our solar system, Titan is the only one with a dense atmosphere and large liquid reservoirs on its surface, making it in some ways more like a terrestrial planet.
Both Earth and Titan have nitrogen-dominated atmospheres – over 95% nitrogen in Titan’s case. However, unlike Earth, Titan has very little oxygen; the rest of the atmosphere is mostly methane and traced amounts of other gases, including ethane.
There are three large seas, all located close to the moon’s north pole, surrounded by numerous smaller lakes in the northern hemisphere. Just one large lake has been found in the southern hemisphere.
Enceladus
The moon Enceladus conceals a global ocean of salty liquid water beneath its icy surface. Some of that water even shoots out into space, creating an immense plume!
For decades, scientists didn’t know why Enceladus was the brightest world in the solar system, or how it related to Saturn’s E ring. Cassini found that both the fresh coating on its surface, and icy material in the E ring originate from vents connected to a global subsurface saltwater ocean that might host hydrothermal vents.
With its global ocean, unique chemistry and internal heat, Enceladus has become a promising lead in our search for worlds where life could exist.
Iapetus
Saturn’s two-toned moon Iapetus gets its odd coloring from reddish dust in its orbital path that is swept up and lands on the leading face of the moon.
The most unique, and perhaps most remarkable feature discovered on Iapetus in Cassini images is a topographic ridge that coincides almost exactly with the geographic equator. The physical origin of the ridge has yet to be explained…
It is not yet year whether the ridge is a mountain belt that has folded upward, or an extensional crack in the surface through which material from inside Iapetus erupted onto the surface and accumulated locally.
Saturn’s Rings
Saturn’s rings are made of countless particles of ice and dust, which Saturn’s moons push and tug, creating gaps and waves.
Scientists have never before studied the size, temperature, composition and distribution of Saturn’s rings from Saturn obit. Cassini has captured extraordinary ring-moon interactions, observed the lowest ring-temperature ever recorded at Saturn, discovered that the moon Enceladus is the source for Saturn’s E ring, and viewed the rings at equinox when sunlight strikes the rings edge-on, revealing never-before-seen ring features and details.
Cassini also studied features in Saturn’s rings called “spokes,” which can be longer than the diameter of Earth. Scientists think they’re made of thin icy particles that are lifted by an electrostatic charge and only last a few hours.
Auroras
The powerful magnetic field that permeates Saturn is strange because it lines up with the planet’s poles. But just like Earth’s field, it all creates shimmering auroras.
Auroras on Saturn occur in a process similar to Earth’s northern and southern lights. Particles from the solar wind are channeled by Saturn’s magnetic field toward the planet’s poles, where they interact with electrically charged gas (plasma) in the upper atmosphere and emit light.
Turbulent Atmosphere
Saturn’s turbulent atmosphere churns with immense storms and a striking, six-sided jet stream near its north pole.
Saturn’s north and south poles are also each beautifully (and violently) decorated by a colossal swirling storm. Cassini got an up-close look at the north polar storm and scientists found that the storm’s eye was about 50 times wider than an Earth hurricane’s eye.
Unlike the Earth hurricanes that are driven by warm ocean waters, Saturn’s polar vortexes aren’t actually hurricanes. They’re hurricane-like though, and even contain lightning. Cassini’s instruments have ‘heard’ lightning ever since entering Saturn orbit in 2004, in the form of radio waves. But it wasn’t until 2009 that Cassini’s cameras captured images of Saturnian lighting for the first time.
Cassini scientists assembled a short video of it, the first video of lightning discharging on a planet other than Earth.
Cassini’s adventure will end soon because it’s almost out of fuel. So to avoid possibly ever contaminating moons like Enceladus or Titan, on Sept. 15 it will intentionally dive into Saturn’s atmosphere.
The spacecraft is expected to lose radio contact with Earth within about one to two minutes after beginning its decent into Saturn’s upper atmosphere. But on the way down, before contact is lost, eight of Cassini’s 12 science instruments will be operating! More details on the spacecraft’s final decent can be found HERE.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com
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squeeful: breelandwalker: ayellowbirds: sinbadism: ayellowbirds: ayellowbirds: ayellowbirds: s...
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squeeful:
breelandwalker:
ayellowbirds:
sinbadism:
ayellowbirds:
ayellowbirds:
ayellowbirds:
speaking as a Jew, i’m extra-super dubious of all that stuff that talks about cartoon witches being an antisemitic stereotype. I can get where the thing with the nose is coming from, but the claims about the hats are based on flimsy claims that require a lot of mental reaching. The hats that Jews were forced to wear were not a universal thing, and I’ve yet to see any evidence that they were part of the cultural consciousness by the time the image of the pointy-hatted witch became common.
The biggest points against the hat hypothesis:
Wrong time period: witch hats as we know them seem to have only started appearing in art around the 17th-18th century; in the period when the Judenhut was well-established, witches in art just wore whatever was common for women of the region.
Wrong region: the pointed witch hat originated in English art, as far as i’ve seen. Antisemitic laws in England mandated badges, not headwear.
Wrong gender: Jewish hats were mandated for men, not women—illustrations of witches with pointed hats very rarely included male witches, until fairly recently.
Wrong shape: there are many styles of mandated Jewish hat throughout history, but few of them are even a near match for the very specific look of the Witch hat.
You know what kind of hat does closely fit?
The hat in this painting (“Portrait of Mrs Salesbury with her Grandchildren Edward and Elizabeth Bagot” by J.M. Wright; circa 1675) was “a type worn by affluent women throughout Britain at this date”. Look at that hat. Any modern viewer looking at this painting might think it was supposed to be a character created by J.K. Rowling.
It’s a match in design, gender, region, and most importantly, time period: by the time that pointed witch hats started to appear in artwork in England and English colonies, this style of hat would have been associated in the cultural consciousness with elderly women, especially those who were clinging to decades-old fashions.
The easy, simple answer to where the witch hat came from: it’s exactly what a woman with all the stereotypical qualities of a witch would have worn in the first place, in the time and place the trope originated.
Old-fashioned but not by several centuries, severe and somber, and popular with a class of women that people would have spread nasty rumors about in the first place (so many accusations of witchcraft were directed specifically at women who were independently well-off, whether out of simple envy or else scheming).
Seemed like about time to bring this back up.
Another very obvious and often explicitly stated basis for the CLOTHING of the cartoon witch is Puritan costume from the 18th century… seeing as Puritans were famous for their witch trials.
The green skin, curly hair, big nose, warts etc are all definitely at least racialized things. Though big nose and warts are associated with age the combined picture is pretty much just a racial caricature.
The green skin is a product of old makeup practices. To make something look extra-pale on black & white film, you didn’t use white, because the monochrome film was blue-sensitive:
This is why so many classic movie monsters were rendered as green—because public appearances and the rare color image of he actors in full makeup would be a blueish-green. Filming for black & white even affected the props and scenery. This is what the Addams Family’s house really looked like:
Important input on the witchy costume debate, from a Jewish person who’s clearly done a bit of homework on the origins of pointy hats and green makeup. (And who also seems to be a pretty cool person into the bargain.)
@ayellowbirds - Thank you for this! :)
The green skinned witch comes from “The Wizard of Oz” the movie. There aren’t any depictions of witches with green skin before that and the skin color was picked probably because it was weird and otherworldly and popped on screen in Techicolor.
Frankenstein’ monster isn’t green in Classic monster films, he’s yellow. Even the black and white ones, yellow face paint. He’s described in the book as having yellow skin, probably the association with jaundice and ill-health. He’s not green in a color film until 1988 in a Scooby Doo feature.
Blue sensitive b/w film wasn’t used in motion pictures really past the early 1920s and wasn’t even made after 1930.
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squeeful:
breelandwalker:
ayellowbirds:
sinbadism:
ayellowbirds:
ayellowbirds:
ayellowbirds:
speaking as a Jew, i’m extra-super dubious of all that stuff that talks about cartoon witches being an antisemitic stereotype. I can get where the thing with the nose is coming from, but the claims about the hats are based on flimsy claims that require a lot of mental reaching. The hats that Jews were forced to wear were not a universal thing, and I’ve yet to see any evidence that they were part of the cultural consciousness by the time the image of the pointy-hatted witch became common.
The biggest points against the hat hypothesis:
Wrong time period: witch hats as we know them seem to have only started appearing in art around the 17th-18th century; in the period when the Judenhut was well-established, witches in art just wore whatever was common for women of the region.
Wrong region: the pointed witch hat originated in English art, as far as i’ve seen. Antisemitic laws in England mandated badges, not headwear.
Wrong gender: Jewish hats were mandated for men, not women—illustrations of witches with pointed hats very rarely included male witches, until fairly recently.
Wrong shape: there are many styles of mandated Jewish hat throughout history, but few of them are even a near match for the very specific look of the Witch hat.
You know what kind of hat does closely fit?
The hat in this painting (“Portrait of Mrs Salesbury with her Grandchildren Edward and Elizabeth Bagot” by J.M. Wright; circa 1675) was “a type worn by affluent women throughout Britain at this date”. Look at that hat. Any modern viewer looking at this painting might think it was supposed to be a character created by J.K. Rowling.
It’s a match in design, gender, region, and most importantly, time period: by the time that pointed witch hats started to appear in artwork in England and English colonies, this style of hat would have been associated in the cultural consciousness with elderly women, especially those who were clinging to decades-old fashions.
The easy, simple answer to where the witch hat came from: it’s exactly what a woman with all the stereotypical qualities of a witch would have worn in the first place, in the time and place the trope originated.
Old-fashioned but not by several centuries, severe and somber, and popular with a class of women that people would have spread nasty rumors about in the first place (so many accusations of witchcraft were directed specifically at women who were independently well-off, whether out of simple envy or else scheming).
Seemed like about time to bring this back up.
Another very obvious and often explicitly stated basis for the CLOTHING of the cartoon witch is Puritan costume from the 18th century… seeing as Puritans were famous for their witch trials.
The green skin, curly hair, big nose, warts etc are all definitely at least racialized things. Though big nose and warts are associated with age the combined picture is pretty much just a racial caricature.
The green skin is a product of old makeup practices. To make something look extra-pale on black & white film, you didn’t use white, because the monochrome film was blue-sensitive:
This is why so many classic movie monsters were rendered as green—because public appearances and the rare color image of he actors in full makeup would be a blueish-green. Filming for black & white even affected the props and scenery. This is what the Addams Family’s house really looked like:
Important input on the witchy costume debate, from a Jewish person who’s clearly done a bit of homework on the origins of pointy hats and green makeup. (And who also seems to be a pretty cool person into the bargain.)
@ayellowbirds - Thank you for this! :)
The green skinned witch comes from “The Wizard of Oz” the movie. There aren’t any depictions of witches with green skin before that and the skin color was picked probably because it was weird and otherworldly and popped on screen in Techicolor.
Frankenstein’ monster isn’t green in Classic monster films, he’s yellow. Even the black and white ones, yellow face paint. He’s described in the book as having yellow skin, probably the association with jaundice and ill-health. He’s not green in a color film until 1988 in a Scooby Doo feature.
Blue sensitive b/w film wasn’t used in motion pictures really past the early 1920s and wasn’t even made after 1930.
(Your picture was not posted)
justaminorthreat: legend-of-sora: ohgressfuriosa: andimtheteach...
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justaminorthreat:
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mamabearteacher:
Lunch ideas
@magicalmissb I thought of you!
Needed this!
This could be the most useful post on tumblr I’ve ever seen. Ping @samiholloway
Where was this post all my life?
I needed this so bad
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justaminorthreat:
legend-of-sora:
ohgressfuriosa:
andimtheteacher:
mamafox18:
mamabearteacher:
Lunch ideas
@magicalmissb I thought of you!
Needed this!
This could be the most useful post on tumblr I’ve ever seen. Ping @samiholloway
Where was this post all my life?
I needed this so bad
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goldrushrunning: anarchodecompression: radically-logical: 65-pe...
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goldrushrunning:
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65-percent-puns:
PLEASE TURN YOUR SOUND ON
MOTHER LET ME FIGHT
I am fucking crying
@tenzen
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goldrushrunning:
anarchodecompression:
radically-logical:
65-percent-puns:
PLEASE TURN YOUR SOUND ON
MOTHER LET ME FIGHT
I am fucking crying
@tenzen
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ambris: ultrafacts: Source: [x] Follow Ultrafacts for more...
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ambris:
ultrafacts:
Source: [x]
Follow Ultrafacts for more facts!
This is pretty meta
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ambris:
ultrafacts:
Source: [x]
Follow Ultrafacts for more facts!
This is pretty meta
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Video
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A post shared by Lily🐱💞 (@iamlily_____) on Feb 10, 2017 at 4:31pm PST
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A post shared by Lily🐱💞 (@iamlily_____) on Feb 10, 2017 at 4:31pm PST
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Error Notification 1/?
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I started writing this awhile ago in response to a prompt. I’ve lost the prompt, but I know @sineala and I were fiddling with it about the same time. Do you remember where the original prompt ran off to?
Mind the cut. :D
Static flickered around him, breaking the world up into nauseating flashes of sensation in between bursts of static. Falling, twisting, over-and-over: sky [#C1CDCD]; city [#D3D3D3]; sunlight [#FFD700]/[#FAFAD2].
He hit the ground with so much force that he couldn’t even feel it as an impact, just pressure like being squeezed by a giant fist. Everything went black [#000000], all sensation ceased. Just his luck that death was floating in nothingness with no sensation for eternity. Lovely.
Rebooting…
Tony watched the reboot sequence flicker orange over the blackness and heaved a sob of relief. His sobbing made no noise, and he had no sense of drawing in breath, or the beating of his heart. He would have thought that he’d gone through every possible scenario of what it means not to have a heartbeat, but surprise. There had been at least one left.
Loading memory…
Tony sucked in a breath, and the world flickered back in. For several seconds he just saw code, and then infrared, and finally the colors condensed down into understandable shapes. There were people leaning over him – two, three, five. Three men, two women. Blond, blond, blond, red, brunette. Text floated around them; hair, eye color, projected weight and height, weapons (lots of weapons). Flashing at the bottom of his vision was a single line of text in bold orange print: MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED.
“Woah,” Tony said, and was surprised when it came out as actual sounds. “For a wet dream, you lovely people are wearing way too many clothes.” He tried a smile, and thought that it translated okay.
“Jesus, Tony,” one of the blonds said, bracing his hands on his (massive, like wow) thighs. “You scared me. Again.”
“Huh,” Tony said. He reached up, feeling for the release for the faceplate, except he wasn’t wearing a helmet. He picked up his head and looked at all the beautiful people kneeling over him with worried expressions, and found the helmet in the brunette’s lap. She had her hands wrapped around it, slender fingers incased in black gloves that matched the rest of her black and yellow leather suit.
MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED.
“Huh,” he repeated and tapped at the side of his head with two fingers. “Ow,” he complained when he managed to hit himself harder than he’d meant to.
“Tony?” the same blond asked. He had weirdly (beautifully) symmetrical features, very blue eyes, and expressive eyebrows. “Are you okay?”
Tony thought about it for a second and the scrolling text let him know that he was not okay, but he was working on it. Repairs were running for three bone breaks, several internal bleeds had already been staunched, but were still leaking very slowly into his abdomen, and he’d suffered a severe concussion – hence the reboot.
“Um. Yes?” Tony tried. “Mostly. Will be soon as long as I don’t move. You know this is going to sound weird, but I don’t actually remember you guys?”
Silence fell heavily around him and stretched from a few seconds to an uncomfortable minute while everyone exchanged increasingly worried glances. The redhead leaned over him and shined a light in his eye. He knocked her hand away sharply, and then apologized.
“Concussion,” he explained. “Damage is being repaired. I know that I’m supposed to know you, but I don’t actually remember who any of you are. So.”
“How do you know that you’re supposed to know us if you don’t remember us?” One of the other blonds asked (short hair, messy, potentially intentionally, but just as likely bedhead. Dark blue eyes, kind of a cute button nose, pockmarking well concealed along his jawline giving him a rogueish appearance).
“Well,” Tony said slowly, “I have a line of text at the bottom of my vision that says ‘memory file corrupted,’ so I assume that means that there is a memory file in the first place and I just can’t access it. Do… do all of you have floating text in your vision?”
A round of headshakes went around the circle, and symmetrical-man said, “That’s Extremis, Tony.”
“Right,” Tony said. At the word, a memory file launched and he remembered Extremis and the way it ran his brain and nervous system. “Can you say your name and maybe it will trigger the file?” he requested, locking eyes with symmetrical-man.
“Steve,” he said readily, but the crease between his brows got deeper.
MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED.
“Nope,” Tony said. “Sorry, Steve. Can someone help me up, please? The spinal column cracks have been sealed, I should be stable to move.”
Looks went around the circle again, growing somehow even more confused and worried. They might not have had Extremis, but they must have been telepathic, because they seemed to be communicating silently. He groaned and tapped two fingers on the big blonde’s knee (long hair, electric blue eyes, strong jaw raised to the power of ten, cape (really?) and great big hammer).
“You look like the big strong type. Can you get me on my feet?” He really wasn’t enjoying the idea of being on his back, being helpless, the strange weight on his chest. [Memory file: Afghanistan] kept flashing across his eyes. He tried to lever himself up despite the sharp pain in his low back, reaching out blindly for something to grab onto. None of the people surrounding him reached out to help, and he had a brief moment of uncertainty – just because he had a memory file somewhere about these people didn’t mean they were friends. He remembered falling before the blackout and reboot – how had he fallen?
Steve put a hand on his shoulder and gently pressed him down. “Just relax, Iron Man. You took one heck of a fall and you were out for almost an hour. We didn’t want to move you in case…” He made a vague gesture down the length of Tony’s body. “Did you say cracks in the spinal column?”
“I said the cracks have been sealed,” Tony stressed. “I’d really like to be not on my back anymore.” He looked around the unfamiliar faces again and MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED kept flashing across his eyes like a strobe. He waved irritably, trying to push the words away. There was a way to disable error notifications, he knew, but he was having trouble access the directory. He felt trapped in his suit, in his own skin, and the error message was making him nauseous.
“Okay,” the rogueish blonde said, “That’s enough of that.” He pushed Steve out of the way and grabbed Tony’s wrist. He pulled Tony’s arm behind his neck and worked the other arm under Tony’s shoulders. He counted to three and pulled Tony slowly upright while the brunette with his helmet held her breath and made tiny distressed noises, and Steve hovered with his brows deeply furrowed and lips pinched together.
Tony didn’t make it completely upright before his back gave a sharp spasm and he sucked in a startled hiss of a breath. His helper freed himself from Tony’s arm and then slid around behind him. He let Tony come to rest against his chest, which couldn’t have been comfortable with the armor, but he didn’t complain.
“Better?” he asked.
Tony nodded weakly and checked the status of his spinal cord. The cracks had been sealed but they were still too weak to take any weight. He let his head rest on the strong shoulder behind him and closed his eyes in hopes of blocking out the incessant MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED message flickering over his sight whenever one of his audience’s faces came into view.
“Nice traps, my friend,” Tony breathed out as the pain in his back faded to a deep warmth that he understood was Extremis repairing the damage he’d done by sitting up.
“My name is Clint,” his helper offered, and then added with a smile that Tony could clearly hear, “And I do have nice traps.”
Tony didn’t open his eyes, but he had a general sense of everyone’s position and felt it when Steve got up and walked away. Without making a conscious effort, he found his hearing tuning out the close noises and trying to follow Steve’s progress. He was worried about how he’d ended up on the ground and who these people were. They seemed genuinely concerned for his wellbeing, but they would be if they’d tried to kidnap him and accidentally almost killed him in the process. Steve only moved a few feet away and paced for a few seconds before he started talking.
“Iron Man is seriously injured. We’re going to need crowd control now that Graviton is out of the area.”
When Steve was quiet for several seconds without any response, Tony realized that he must have been on the phone. He reached out with mental fingers and snagged onto the cellphone. He felt the connection as a buzz on the back of his neck.
-Status? The other voice asked. Immediately, memory file: Hill, Maria rose to the surface and he let out a relieved sigh. Not all of his memory files had been corrupted, but that left him uncertain of exactly how much of his memory had been corrupted and how he was supposed to repair the damage.
“He seems stable, physically – at least he says he is. Spinal injury, and a concussion that Extremis is dealing with, but he’s experiencing some kind of memory loss,” Steve answered.
Bring him to SHIELD medical and we’ll see what we can do, Hill suggested.
Alarm bells (literally) went off between Tony’s ears and he almost managed to muster up enough adrenalin to get him out of Clint’s supporting (restraining?) arms, before Steve firmly answered, “Not going to happen. There’s no way he’d ever be comfortable with SHIELD playing around in his head. We’ll take him back to Avengers’ HQ and assess from there. Anything else?”
There was a beat of silence on the other end of the line, but Hill finally said, No. SHIELD agents will be on site in ten minutes for crowd control. Let us know if you require further assistance.
The line disconnected after a terse thank you, ma’am from Steve, and Tony let his connection to the phone go. More aware of his body again, he felt Clint shifting slightly behind him, and the minutest sense of weight on his armored thigh where the brunette bumblebee girl had put her hand.
“I just need 312 more seconds to repair damage and I can get up. Promise this time,” Tony said. He still felt nauseous and his salivary glands were working overtime. There was some minor inner-ear damage that was low on Extremis’ priority list under propping up his spine and sealing up the internal bleeds.
“I’m going to start counting,” Clint warned him playfully. He moved his arms down so they were wrapped around Tony’s midsection rather than his chest.
Steve returned a moment later to crouch at Tony’s side. “That was SHIELD,” he said, addressing the group. “We’ve got crowd control incoming, but it’ll be another ten minutes. In the meantime, we’ve got some civilians getting pretty bold with their cellphones, and they’ll probably be taking selfies with us before SHIELD can get a perimeter set up. Thor, Wasp, Widow – I’m going to need you on civilian-sitting duty until we can get Iron Man out of here.”
The three of them nodded and Tony guessed that Big Blonde with the cape was Thor, and Bumblebee girl must have been Wasp, which left the redhead as Widow. He filed away the aliases in a new memory file and judiciously tested his back again. He was going to be sore as hell in the morning, but as long as no one smacked him with a steel pipe (or a firm pillow) for the next few hours, he should be okay to move.
“Okay, should be good now,” Tony said, patting Clint awkwardly on one knee.
“You sure?” Clint asked skeptically, “We’re only at 300 by my count.”
Tony blew out an exasperated breath and rolled his eyes. He counted aloud down from 10, and Clint had him on his feet by 1. Steve stepped into his side to ease a shoulder under Tony’s left arm, and Clint slid around to the right while Tony cautiously tested his weight on his legs. His left ilium had gotten a nice spider web of cracks as a souvenir from the fall, but they’d been small and were already 85% healed. All the same, he left his arms over the other men’s shoulders as they moved slowly out of the street to the sidewalk.
Tony had a scary moment when he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to lift his foot high enough to get over the curb, but the actuators in the suit kicked in to lift his legs for him. He slumped gratefully against the suit and let it carry his weigh instead of trying to move it under his own muscle power. As they approached the corner, a gunmetal gray van rocketed around the corner and screeched to a halt.
Another spike of panic shot through his chest, but he saw the stylized “A” stenciled on the door before he could direct the armor to escape. [Memory file: Avengers] presented readily, but half of it was missing – chiefly the roster, charter, and of all the strange things, the file marked ‘chore calendar’ was corrupted and wouldn’t launch.
“How is this my life?” Tony asked no-one in particular, but Clint laughed anyway.
The driver’s door opened and a man threw himself out, leaving the door open behind him as he rushed to them. His eyebrows were deeply furrowed and his eyes darted over Tony in quick, precise sweeps, assessing.
“Rhodey,” Tony breathed in relief.
Rhodey nudged Steve out of the way and slid under Tony’s arm. Steve hovered for a second before breaking away and jogging to the van to get the sliding door open and the ramp folded out. Tony frowned at the side of Rhodey’s face, noticing gray hairs and lines on his face that weren’t matching what Tony was expecting.
“You’ve gotten old,” he blurted out, realizing the problem. The memory file was incomplete, and what Tony was remembering was a cocky twenty-one year-old James Rhodes in his thick MIT hoodie, and his tightly maintained fade, with his bright eyes and his textbooks cradled in his arm. This James Rhodes with the lines inscribed deeply between his brows and in the corner of his eyes, and the speckling of gray hairs at his temple was a virtual stranger.
“You and me both, buddy,” Rhodey said, the frown lines deepening around his lips. He adjusted his grip on the armor over Tony’s ribs and tucked in closer to Tony’s side, even though the armor was doing most of the work of supporting Tony’s weight. “Exactly how much are you fibbing about your injuries?” he asked, but he kept his voice low.
“Not that much,” Tony defended as damage reports scrolled off to the side of his vision – with the life threatening injuries downgraded to merely ‘severe,’ he was left with a list of pulled muscles, sprains, contusions, and warning levels on resources. He needed water and calories in a hurry, and then he could see to solving the laundry list of minor deficiencies.
Rhodey pulled him away from Clint’s side to help him onto the ramp just as a pack of civilian bystanders and reporters made it around the corner, and broke into a collective run for the van. Startled, Tony’s vision momentarily shifted into binary, and then flickered back into full color. The electronic controls for the ramp lift practically sang to him, and he reached out to automatically to get the lift moving while Rhodey and Clint tried to head off the crowd.
The door closed automatically once Tony had been pulled into the dark interior, and it was a matter of a breath to access the van’s computer and turn the engine back on. He could have driven the vehicle from the back seat, and for a few seconds he seriously considered doing exactly that. Maybe if it hadn’t been for Rhodey, he would have. The driver’s door opened and Rhodey climbed in, quickly slamming the door shut before a reporter could get his camera into the van.
“Can’t go anywhere without making a scene, can you, Tones?”
“Scenes are my scene,” Tony answered distractedly. All of the cameras and cellphones crowding around the van were clamoring for his attention. He knew that he could fry all of them with a spare thought if he applied the attention to it, but his head was starting to fill up with cotton and he was having trouble just keeping his eyes open.
“Stay awake, Tony. You have a concussion.”
“I don’t think that applies to me,” Tony mumbled. “I need to shut down.”
“Tony, you don’t shut down, you’re a person,” Rhodey stressed, but he sounded alarmed. He twisted around in the seat just as the passenger-side door opened, letting in a flood of clamoring voices and the flash of several cameras that exploded across Tony’s eyes like miniature freight trains. He reached out with quick snapsnapsnaps to fry the cameras responsible and immediately regretted it. Fireworks went off somewhere in the back of his head, and he activated the emergency shutdown procedure.
~*~
Rebooting…
Rebooting wasn’t exactly like waking up. It wasn’t stepping out of a lesser form of a consciousness, taking stock of where the pillow was or how the blanket was falling on the bed, sometimes noticing scents first, or temperature, or the way the light hit the window, or the complaints of the joints, or that one cold spot on the shoulder. Rebooting was an exact step-by-step cascade of processes that engaged functions in a specific order. An error report scrolled up behind his closed eyelids, and every third line or so read MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED.
Error report compiled, Tony’s consciousness expanded to include his surroundings – two cellphones, a StarkTablet that was powered on, and one that was in sleep mode, and –
Good morning, Sir, Jarvis greeted.
Morning. Tony yawned and opened his eyes. He was in his bedroom, the suit was down in the workshop, his connection to Jarvis was just as strong as ever, and someone was sitting at his bedside reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the tablet.
Tony turned his head and found the blond with the symmetrical face [memory file: Steve] sitting in a chair with one ankle crossed over the opposite knee. He had the StarkPad propped up on his knee, one thumb periodically tapping the right corner to advance the page. According to his text size and the frequency of his taps, he was reading at just over a thousand words a minute. At 257,045 words, this Steve guy could get through the book from cover to cover in a little over four hours.
“Quick reader,” he said.
Steve glanced up at him, the pad tipping forward to rest on his thigh. His eyes were sharp where they flitted over Tony’s body, but he wasn’t even taken off guard by Tony speaking. “Good morning, Tony. How are you feeling?”
“Memory files are still full of holes like Swiss cheese,” Tony reported, “And I need some carbs, water, and vitamin A, but otherwise fine. Injuries are clear.” He almost asked how long he’d been out, but Extremis helpfully informed him that he’d been shut down for 12:47:16. “Also I need to piss.”
He pushed his blankets back and swung his feet around to the floor. Steve hurried to his feet, his arms hovering up at chest level like he wasn’t sure what to do with them. Tony irritably waved his hands away and stood up. There was a sharp stab of pain low in his back, but it faded to a sullen ache once he was upright.
“My memory has holes in it, I’m not an invalid,” Tony grumbled on his way to the bathroom with Steve standing awkwardly at the bedside.
Steve was striking him as a hover-y sort of guy, and Tony was not appreciating it much. He shut the door firmly behind him, made use of the toilet, and stepped into the shower. A ping of a notification showed up on the bottom left-hand corner of his vision and he swiped it open to see that his bedroom door had opened and then closed. Steve must have left. Good.
Idly flipping on his music – Green Day, why not? – he sorted through his emails and text messages while he scrubbed shampoo into hair. The further he went through day-to-day minutia, the more annoyed he got with the incessant MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED popping up in response to the contents of his daily life every few minutes. The majority of his memory loss seemed to fall in the last ten years, but it wasn’t consistent. He had no memory at all of the latest camera upgrades sent to him for approval from R&D – which the email assured him were corrections based on his recent comments – but he clearly remembered having a frittata for breakfast the previous morning.
He flipped his right hand over, brought up the controls for the shower, and swiped the temperature down sharply. Cold water smacked him across the chest and made his skin lift in gooseflesh across his entire body. He sucked in a startled breath and turned quickly under the water, letting the tiny shocks of chill dance over his skin, and then clapped his hands together. The water turned off, leaving Tony very awake. He shook hard, flicking chilly droplets against the foggy glass.
Jarvis, can you bring me up to speed on this camera from R&D?
Without asking why, Jarvis brought up the schematics and walked him through the evolution of the newest camera upgrade for the next StarkPhone while he got dressed.
Wow, these guys are idiots, he said, laughing out loud.
You said much the same when the initial schematics were proposed the first time, Jarvis replied. Shall I approve the latest version for a prototype build?
Tony paused with his shirt hanging open, and blinked twice to bring up the latest schematics. He went through a quick mental exercise of building it out into a 3D hologram projected into the middle of his field of vision. There’s going to be a latency issue, he said.
Most likely, Jarvis agreed.
Then why would we let them build this out to a prototype? Tony asked with his eyebrows drawn together. He buttoned his shirt mechanically while the hologram rotated in his vision.
To quote your last response to this conversation, sir, “how else are those idiots going to learn?”
That doesn’t sound like me, Tony protested, tucking his shirttails into his pants and threading his belt through the loops. The buckle was deep gold with red enamel on the inside and outside edges, the leather supple and glossy with precisely outlined grooves every twenty centimeters to give the illusion of armor plates. The marketing on me is phenomenal, he decided.
Indeed it is, sir, Jarvis agreed. In regards to your previous comment, I can assure that it is an accurate quote. If you wish, I can replay the conversation for your benefit.
Tony hesitated, but finally shook his head. Send it back and tell them to fix the latency issue.
The product will likely be late to production, Jarvis warned. Ms. Potts will not be pleased.
Pepper? She’s scary, I’ll grant you that, but I don’t think my PA’s opinion of production deadlines is –
[MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED]
– relevant, Tony finished lamely. He dropped his tie around his neck, took a deep breath, and pinched the bridge of his nose. Why is Pepper’s opinion of my production deadlines relevant?
An incomplete file loaded and Tony made another frustrated sound. He perked up. Have I stored memory backups with you?
No, sir. You specifically forbid any copies from ever being made of your memory in case the system were ever to be hacked.
Tony rolled his eyes, and picked the ends of his tie up and let his fingers run down the silky surface. Of course I did. Tell me then. Pepper?
You promoted her to CEO, though you retain controlling interest of the company.
Tony thought about it for a second, and humph’ed. He pulled the short end of the tie across the long end. That also sounds unlike me, but in a really… unexpectedly good way. Way to go, Past Me.
Turning his attention to his tie, and barely held in the shout of frustration when [MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED] popped up across his vision. He let the ends of the tie go, and concentrated on just counting his breaths for 120 seconds.
Load me a YouTube video on how to tie a tie, he requested wearily.
~*~
“That’s an interesting tie,” Wasp greeted with a bright smile. She bounced across the dining room and scooped the end of it up with two fingers.
Tony took a hasty step back from her, the tie sliding out from between her fingers, [Memory file: Obadiah Stane] flickering over his consciousness. Her expression shifted immediately, eyebrows curling upward and lips tugging downward. She clasped her hands in front of her chest and took a step backwards.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and then forced a giant smile. “I forgot that you don’t… remember me.”
[Loading memory file JVDBD12] A pretty girl with a heart shaped face and brunette hair in curly pigtails. She had big eyes and a bright smile, and a smear of birthday cake frosting on her cheek.
“That’s a very nice tie,” she said, clasping her hands in front of her very fashionable brown plaid dress with faux sued patches on her shoulders and elbows. The dress came to just above her knees and she was wearing thick white tights with glossy black Mary Janes. She rocked back and forth on her heels the longer Tony remained quiet. Mustering up an even brighter smile, she tried, “Thank you for coming to my birthday.”
“Sure,” Tony muttered, kicking at the ground. Dad had made him stand in front of a mirror for almost two hours knotting that stupid tie until it was imprinted with sweaty creases, saying again and again that you could tell everything you needed to know about a man by the way he tied his tie, the shine on his shoes, and the strength of his handshake.
“It’s okay you don’t remember me,” the girl said. “We were only five the last time, at the Christmas party.” She thrust her hand out, and Tony absurdly noticed that she was wearing a bright pink bow in her hair, and she had dirt underneath her immaculately painted fingernails. “My name is Janet van Dyne, but you can just call me Jan, because Janet sounds like an old lady name.”
Tony smiled at her and shoved the brightly wrapped box into her arms. “Jarvis picked it out,” he said, “It’s a Barbie Doll.”
She wrinkled her nose, but smiled at him and said, “Thanks! I like to make clothes for my Barbies.”
Tony glanced back behind him where his dad and mom were making schmoozey faces at the other adults. He pulled his backpack off his shoulders and angled his back to block Dad’s view in case he happened to look over. “I brought my erector set,” he said, opening the pack to show her. “You wanna go play with me?”
“Sure!”
Tony gasped, and abruptly the memory file [doublewinsorknot] loaded. He reached up to yank the knot of his tie apart.
“Janet van Dyne,” he blurted out. His eyes screwed shut and he pressed the base of his palm to his temple to soothe the bright burst of pain. “But call you Jan because Janet sounds like an old lady’s name. We played with my erector set behind your house for your twelfth birthday, and you got mud all over your dress. Your mom was furious.”
Jan clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh my god, I’d forgotten all about that – I hated that dress! You know I fell in the mud on purpose? Mom dragged me up to my room and made me change in the middle of the party, but she missed the dirt smear on my cheek. She commissioned an artist to repaint my birthday portrait to get rid of it!”
Tony felt a smile stretch across his face. “My father tanned my hide so hard I couldn’t sit right for three days.”
“I knew you couldn’t forget me, Tony Stark,” Jan said, lightly smacking his chest. She reached up for his tie. “Here, let me get that for you.”
Tony gently nudged her fingers away. “I can do it,” he said, and his fingers slid through the tie with the confidence of more than thirty years of repetition. He smoothed his hand down the length of the red silk and let her straighten out the triangle of the knot against the collar of his shirt.
“I still don’t remember anything about you past your twelfth birthday,” Tony warned her, but she didn’t seem upset about it in the least.
“You’ll figure it out,” she said confidently, leaning up to kiss his cheek. “You always do.”
(Your picture was not posted)
I started writing this awhile ago in response to a prompt. I’ve lost the prompt, but I know @sineala and I were fiddling with it about the same time. Do you remember where the original prompt ran off to?
Mind the cut. :D
Static flickered around him, breaking the world up into nauseating flashes of sensation in between bursts of static. Falling, twisting, over-and-over: sky [#C1CDCD]; city [#D3D3D3]; sunlight [#FFD700]/[#FAFAD2].
He hit the ground with so much force that he couldn’t even feel it as an impact, just pressure like being squeezed by a giant fist. Everything went black [#000000], all sensation ceased. Just his luck that death was floating in nothingness with no sensation for eternity. Lovely.
Rebooting…
Tony watched the reboot sequence flicker orange over the blackness and heaved a sob of relief. His sobbing made no noise, and he had no sense of drawing in breath, or the beating of his heart. He would have thought that he’d gone through every possible scenario of what it means not to have a heartbeat, but surprise. There had been at least one left.
Loading memory…
Tony sucked in a breath, and the world flickered back in. For several seconds he just saw code, and then infrared, and finally the colors condensed down into understandable shapes. There were people leaning over him – two, three, five. Three men, two women. Blond, blond, blond, red, brunette. Text floated around them; hair, eye color, projected weight and height, weapons (lots of weapons). Flashing at the bottom of his vision was a single line of text in bold orange print: MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED.
“Woah,” Tony said, and was surprised when it came out as actual sounds. “For a wet dream, you lovely people are wearing way too many clothes.” He tried a smile, and thought that it translated okay.
“Jesus, Tony,” one of the blonds said, bracing his hands on his (massive, like wow) thighs. “You scared me. Again.”
“Huh,” Tony said. He reached up, feeling for the release for the faceplate, except he wasn’t wearing a helmet. He picked up his head and looked at all the beautiful people kneeling over him with worried expressions, and found the helmet in the brunette’s lap. She had her hands wrapped around it, slender fingers incased in black gloves that matched the rest of her black and yellow leather suit.
MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED.
“Huh,” he repeated and tapped at the side of his head with two fingers. “Ow,” he complained when he managed to hit himself harder than he’d meant to.
“Tony?” the same blond asked. He had weirdly (beautifully) symmetrical features, very blue eyes, and expressive eyebrows. “Are you okay?”
Tony thought about it for a second and the scrolling text let him know that he was not okay, but he was working on it. Repairs were running for three bone breaks, several internal bleeds had already been staunched, but were still leaking very slowly into his abdomen, and he’d suffered a severe concussion – hence the reboot.
“Um. Yes?” Tony tried. “Mostly. Will be soon as long as I don’t move. You know this is going to sound weird, but I don’t actually remember you guys?”
Silence fell heavily around him and stretched from a few seconds to an uncomfortable minute while everyone exchanged increasingly worried glances. The redhead leaned over him and shined a light in his eye. He knocked her hand away sharply, and then apologized.
“Concussion,” he explained. “Damage is being repaired. I know that I’m supposed to know you, but I don’t actually remember who any of you are. So.”
“How do you know that you’re supposed to know us if you don’t remember us?” One of the other blonds asked (short hair, messy, potentially intentionally, but just as likely bedhead. Dark blue eyes, kind of a cute button nose, pockmarking well concealed along his jawline giving him a rogueish appearance).
“Well,” Tony said slowly, “I have a line of text at the bottom of my vision that says ‘memory file corrupted,’ so I assume that means that there is a memory file in the first place and I just can’t access it. Do… do all of you have floating text in your vision?”
A round of headshakes went around the circle, and symmetrical-man said, “That’s Extremis, Tony.”
“Right,” Tony said. At the word, a memory file launched and he remembered Extremis and the way it ran his brain and nervous system. “Can you say your name and maybe it will trigger the file?” he requested, locking eyes with symmetrical-man.
“Steve,” he said readily, but the crease between his brows got deeper.
MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED.
“Nope,” Tony said. “Sorry, Steve. Can someone help me up, please? The spinal column cracks have been sealed, I should be stable to move.”
Looks went around the circle again, growing somehow even more confused and worried. They might not have had Extremis, but they must have been telepathic, because they seemed to be communicating silently. He groaned and tapped two fingers on the big blonde’s knee (long hair, electric blue eyes, strong jaw raised to the power of ten, cape (really?) and great big hammer).
“You look like the big strong type. Can you get me on my feet?” He really wasn’t enjoying the idea of being on his back, being helpless, the strange weight on his chest. [Memory file: Afghanistan] kept flashing across his eyes. He tried to lever himself up despite the sharp pain in his low back, reaching out blindly for something to grab onto. None of the people surrounding him reached out to help, and he had a brief moment of uncertainty – just because he had a memory file somewhere about these people didn’t mean they were friends. He remembered falling before the blackout and reboot – how had he fallen?
Steve put a hand on his shoulder and gently pressed him down. “Just relax, Iron Man. You took one heck of a fall and you were out for almost an hour. We didn’t want to move you in case…” He made a vague gesture down the length of Tony’s body. “Did you say cracks in the spinal column?”
“I said the cracks have been sealed,” Tony stressed. “I’d really like to be not on my back anymore.” He looked around the unfamiliar faces again and MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED kept flashing across his eyes like a strobe. He waved irritably, trying to push the words away. There was a way to disable error notifications, he knew, but he was having trouble access the directory. He felt trapped in his suit, in his own skin, and the error message was making him nauseous.
“Okay,” the rogueish blonde said, “That’s enough of that.” He pushed Steve out of the way and grabbed Tony’s wrist. He pulled Tony’s arm behind his neck and worked the other arm under Tony’s shoulders. He counted to three and pulled Tony slowly upright while the brunette with his helmet held her breath and made tiny distressed noises, and Steve hovered with his brows deeply furrowed and lips pinched together.
Tony didn’t make it completely upright before his back gave a sharp spasm and he sucked in a startled hiss of a breath. His helper freed himself from Tony’s arm and then slid around behind him. He let Tony come to rest against his chest, which couldn’t have been comfortable with the armor, but he didn’t complain.
“Better?” he asked.
Tony nodded weakly and checked the status of his spinal cord. The cracks had been sealed but they were still too weak to take any weight. He let his head rest on the strong shoulder behind him and closed his eyes in hopes of blocking out the incessant MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED message flickering over his sight whenever one of his audience’s faces came into view.
“Nice traps, my friend,” Tony breathed out as the pain in his back faded to a deep warmth that he understood was Extremis repairing the damage he’d done by sitting up.
“My name is Clint,” his helper offered, and then added with a smile that Tony could clearly hear, “And I do have nice traps.”
Tony didn’t open his eyes, but he had a general sense of everyone’s position and felt it when Steve got up and walked away. Without making a conscious effort, he found his hearing tuning out the close noises and trying to follow Steve’s progress. He was worried about how he’d ended up on the ground and who these people were. They seemed genuinely concerned for his wellbeing, but they would be if they’d tried to kidnap him and accidentally almost killed him in the process. Steve only moved a few feet away and paced for a few seconds before he started talking.
“Iron Man is seriously injured. We’re going to need crowd control now that Graviton is out of the area.”
When Steve was quiet for several seconds without any response, Tony realized that he must have been on the phone. He reached out with mental fingers and snagged onto the cellphone. He felt the connection as a buzz on the back of his neck.
-Status? The other voice asked. Immediately, memory file: Hill, Maria rose to the surface and he let out a relieved sigh. Not all of his memory files had been corrupted, but that left him uncertain of exactly how much of his memory had been corrupted and how he was supposed to repair the damage.
“He seems stable, physically – at least he says he is. Spinal injury, and a concussion that Extremis is dealing with, but he’s experiencing some kind of memory loss,” Steve answered.
Bring him to SHIELD medical and we’ll see what we can do, Hill suggested.
Alarm bells (literally) went off between Tony’s ears and he almost managed to muster up enough adrenalin to get him out of Clint’s supporting (restraining?) arms, before Steve firmly answered, “Not going to happen. There’s no way he’d ever be comfortable with SHIELD playing around in his head. We’ll take him back to Avengers’ HQ and assess from there. Anything else?”
There was a beat of silence on the other end of the line, but Hill finally said, No. SHIELD agents will be on site in ten minutes for crowd control. Let us know if you require further assistance.
The line disconnected after a terse thank you, ma’am from Steve, and Tony let his connection to the phone go. More aware of his body again, he felt Clint shifting slightly behind him, and the minutest sense of weight on his armored thigh where the brunette bumblebee girl had put her hand.
“I just need 312 more seconds to repair damage and I can get up. Promise this time,” Tony said. He still felt nauseous and his salivary glands were working overtime. There was some minor inner-ear damage that was low on Extremis’ priority list under propping up his spine and sealing up the internal bleeds.
“I’m going to start counting,” Clint warned him playfully. He moved his arms down so they were wrapped around Tony’s midsection rather than his chest.
Steve returned a moment later to crouch at Tony’s side. “That was SHIELD,” he said, addressing the group. “We’ve got crowd control incoming, but it’ll be another ten minutes. In the meantime, we’ve got some civilians getting pretty bold with their cellphones, and they’ll probably be taking selfies with us before SHIELD can get a perimeter set up. Thor, Wasp, Widow – I’m going to need you on civilian-sitting duty until we can get Iron Man out of here.”
The three of them nodded and Tony guessed that Big Blonde with the cape was Thor, and Bumblebee girl must have been Wasp, which left the redhead as Widow. He filed away the aliases in a new memory file and judiciously tested his back again. He was going to be sore as hell in the morning, but as long as no one smacked him with a steel pipe (or a firm pillow) for the next few hours, he should be okay to move.
“Okay, should be good now,” Tony said, patting Clint awkwardly on one knee.
“You sure?” Clint asked skeptically, “We’re only at 300 by my count.”
Tony blew out an exasperated breath and rolled his eyes. He counted aloud down from 10, and Clint had him on his feet by 1. Steve stepped into his side to ease a shoulder under Tony’s left arm, and Clint slid around to the right while Tony cautiously tested his weight on his legs. His left ilium had gotten a nice spider web of cracks as a souvenir from the fall, but they’d been small and were already 85% healed. All the same, he left his arms over the other men’s shoulders as they moved slowly out of the street to the sidewalk.
Tony had a scary moment when he wasn’t sure he was going to be able to lift his foot high enough to get over the curb, but the actuators in the suit kicked in to lift his legs for him. He slumped gratefully against the suit and let it carry his weigh instead of trying to move it under his own muscle power. As they approached the corner, a gunmetal gray van rocketed around the corner and screeched to a halt.
Another spike of panic shot through his chest, but he saw the stylized “A” stenciled on the door before he could direct the armor to escape. [Memory file: Avengers] presented readily, but half of it was missing – chiefly the roster, charter, and of all the strange things, the file marked ‘chore calendar’ was corrupted and wouldn’t launch.
“How is this my life?” Tony asked no-one in particular, but Clint laughed anyway.
The driver’s door opened and a man threw himself out, leaving the door open behind him as he rushed to them. His eyebrows were deeply furrowed and his eyes darted over Tony in quick, precise sweeps, assessing.
“Rhodey,” Tony breathed in relief.
Rhodey nudged Steve out of the way and slid under Tony’s arm. Steve hovered for a second before breaking away and jogging to the van to get the sliding door open and the ramp folded out. Tony frowned at the side of Rhodey’s face, noticing gray hairs and lines on his face that weren’t matching what Tony was expecting.
“You’ve gotten old,” he blurted out, realizing the problem. The memory file was incomplete, and what Tony was remembering was a cocky twenty-one year-old James Rhodes in his thick MIT hoodie, and his tightly maintained fade, with his bright eyes and his textbooks cradled in his arm. This James Rhodes with the lines inscribed deeply between his brows and in the corner of his eyes, and the speckling of gray hairs at his temple was a virtual stranger.
“You and me both, buddy,” Rhodey said, the frown lines deepening around his lips. He adjusted his grip on the armor over Tony’s ribs and tucked in closer to Tony’s side, even though the armor was doing most of the work of supporting Tony’s weight. “Exactly how much are you fibbing about your injuries?” he asked, but he kept his voice low.
“Not that much,” Tony defended as damage reports scrolled off to the side of his vision – with the life threatening injuries downgraded to merely ‘severe,’ he was left with a list of pulled muscles, sprains, contusions, and warning levels on resources. He needed water and calories in a hurry, and then he could see to solving the laundry list of minor deficiencies.
Rhodey pulled him away from Clint’s side to help him onto the ramp just as a pack of civilian bystanders and reporters made it around the corner, and broke into a collective run for the van. Startled, Tony’s vision momentarily shifted into binary, and then flickered back into full color. The electronic controls for the ramp lift practically sang to him, and he reached out to automatically to get the lift moving while Rhodey and Clint tried to head off the crowd.
The door closed automatically once Tony had been pulled into the dark interior, and it was a matter of a breath to access the van’s computer and turn the engine back on. He could have driven the vehicle from the back seat, and for a few seconds he seriously considered doing exactly that. Maybe if it hadn’t been for Rhodey, he would have. The driver’s door opened and Rhodey climbed in, quickly slamming the door shut before a reporter could get his camera into the van.
“Can’t go anywhere without making a scene, can you, Tones?”
“Scenes are my scene,” Tony answered distractedly. All of the cameras and cellphones crowding around the van were clamoring for his attention. He knew that he could fry all of them with a spare thought if he applied the attention to it, but his head was starting to fill up with cotton and he was having trouble just keeping his eyes open.
“Stay awake, Tony. You have a concussion.”
“I don’t think that applies to me,” Tony mumbled. “I need to shut down.”
“Tony, you don’t shut down, you’re a person,” Rhodey stressed, but he sounded alarmed. He twisted around in the seat just as the passenger-side door opened, letting in a flood of clamoring voices and the flash of several cameras that exploded across Tony’s eyes like miniature freight trains. He reached out with quick snapsnapsnaps to fry the cameras responsible and immediately regretted it. Fireworks went off somewhere in the back of his head, and he activated the emergency shutdown procedure.
~*~
Rebooting…
Rebooting wasn’t exactly like waking up. It wasn’t stepping out of a lesser form of a consciousness, taking stock of where the pillow was or how the blanket was falling on the bed, sometimes noticing scents first, or temperature, or the way the light hit the window, or the complaints of the joints, or that one cold spot on the shoulder. Rebooting was an exact step-by-step cascade of processes that engaged functions in a specific order. An error report scrolled up behind his closed eyelids, and every third line or so read MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED.
Error report compiled, Tony’s consciousness expanded to include his surroundings – two cellphones, a StarkTablet that was powered on, and one that was in sleep mode, and –
Good morning, Sir, Jarvis greeted.
Morning. Tony yawned and opened his eyes. He was in his bedroom, the suit was down in the workshop, his connection to Jarvis was just as strong as ever, and someone was sitting at his bedside reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on the tablet.
Tony turned his head and found the blond with the symmetrical face [memory file: Steve] sitting in a chair with one ankle crossed over the opposite knee. He had the StarkPad propped up on his knee, one thumb periodically tapping the right corner to advance the page. According to his text size and the frequency of his taps, he was reading at just over a thousand words a minute. At 257,045 words, this Steve guy could get through the book from cover to cover in a little over four hours.
“Quick reader,” he said.
Steve glanced up at him, the pad tipping forward to rest on his thigh. His eyes were sharp where they flitted over Tony’s body, but he wasn’t even taken off guard by Tony speaking. “Good morning, Tony. How are you feeling?”
“Memory files are still full of holes like Swiss cheese,” Tony reported, “And I need some carbs, water, and vitamin A, but otherwise fine. Injuries are clear.” He almost asked how long he’d been out, but Extremis helpfully informed him that he’d been shut down for 12:47:16. “Also I need to piss.”
He pushed his blankets back and swung his feet around to the floor. Steve hurried to his feet, his arms hovering up at chest level like he wasn’t sure what to do with them. Tony irritably waved his hands away and stood up. There was a sharp stab of pain low in his back, but it faded to a sullen ache once he was upright.
“My memory has holes in it, I’m not an invalid,” Tony grumbled on his way to the bathroom with Steve standing awkwardly at the bedside.
Steve was striking him as a hover-y sort of guy, and Tony was not appreciating it much. He shut the door firmly behind him, made use of the toilet, and stepped into the shower. A ping of a notification showed up on the bottom left-hand corner of his vision and he swiped it open to see that his bedroom door had opened and then closed. Steve must have left. Good.
Idly flipping on his music – Green Day, why not? – he sorted through his emails and text messages while he scrubbed shampoo into hair. The further he went through day-to-day minutia, the more annoyed he got with the incessant MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED popping up in response to the contents of his daily life every few minutes. The majority of his memory loss seemed to fall in the last ten years, but it wasn’t consistent. He had no memory at all of the latest camera upgrades sent to him for approval from R&D – which the email assured him were corrections based on his recent comments – but he clearly remembered having a frittata for breakfast the previous morning.
He flipped his right hand over, brought up the controls for the shower, and swiped the temperature down sharply. Cold water smacked him across the chest and made his skin lift in gooseflesh across his entire body. He sucked in a startled breath and turned quickly under the water, letting the tiny shocks of chill dance over his skin, and then clapped his hands together. The water turned off, leaving Tony very awake. He shook hard, flicking chilly droplets against the foggy glass.
Jarvis, can you bring me up to speed on this camera from R&D?
Without asking why, Jarvis brought up the schematics and walked him through the evolution of the newest camera upgrade for the next StarkPhone while he got dressed.
Wow, these guys are idiots, he said, laughing out loud.
You said much the same when the initial schematics were proposed the first time, Jarvis replied. Shall I approve the latest version for a prototype build?
Tony paused with his shirt hanging open, and blinked twice to bring up the latest schematics. He went through a quick mental exercise of building it out into a 3D hologram projected into the middle of his field of vision. There’s going to be a latency issue, he said.
Most likely, Jarvis agreed.
Then why would we let them build this out to a prototype? Tony asked with his eyebrows drawn together. He buttoned his shirt mechanically while the hologram rotated in his vision.
To quote your last response to this conversation, sir, “how else are those idiots going to learn?”
That doesn’t sound like me, Tony protested, tucking his shirttails into his pants and threading his belt through the loops. The buckle was deep gold with red enamel on the inside and outside edges, the leather supple and glossy with precisely outlined grooves every twenty centimeters to give the illusion of armor plates. The marketing on me is phenomenal, he decided.
Indeed it is, sir, Jarvis agreed. In regards to your previous comment, I can assure that it is an accurate quote. If you wish, I can replay the conversation for your benefit.
Tony hesitated, but finally shook his head. Send it back and tell them to fix the latency issue.
The product will likely be late to production, Jarvis warned. Ms. Potts will not be pleased.
Pepper? She’s scary, I’ll grant you that, but I don’t think my PA’s opinion of production deadlines is –
[MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED]
– relevant, Tony finished lamely. He dropped his tie around his neck, took a deep breath, and pinched the bridge of his nose. Why is Pepper’s opinion of my production deadlines relevant?
An incomplete file loaded and Tony made another frustrated sound. He perked up. Have I stored memory backups with you?
No, sir. You specifically forbid any copies from ever being made of your memory in case the system were ever to be hacked.
Tony rolled his eyes, and picked the ends of his tie up and let his fingers run down the silky surface. Of course I did. Tell me then. Pepper?
You promoted her to CEO, though you retain controlling interest of the company.
Tony thought about it for a second, and humph’ed. He pulled the short end of the tie across the long end. That also sounds unlike me, but in a really… unexpectedly good way. Way to go, Past Me.
Turning his attention to his tie, and barely held in the shout of frustration when [MEMORY FILE CORRUPTED] popped up across his vision. He let the ends of the tie go, and concentrated on just counting his breaths for 120 seconds.
Load me a YouTube video on how to tie a tie, he requested wearily.
~*~
“That’s an interesting tie,” Wasp greeted with a bright smile. She bounced across the dining room and scooped the end of it up with two fingers.
Tony took a hasty step back from her, the tie sliding out from between her fingers, [Memory file: Obadiah Stane] flickering over his consciousness. Her expression shifted immediately, eyebrows curling upward and lips tugging downward. She clasped her hands in front of her chest and took a step backwards.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and then forced a giant smile. “I forgot that you don’t… remember me.”
[Loading memory file JVDBD12] A pretty girl with a heart shaped face and brunette hair in curly pigtails. She had big eyes and a bright smile, and a smear of birthday cake frosting on her cheek.
“That’s a very nice tie,” she said, clasping her hands in front of her very fashionable brown plaid dress with faux sued patches on her shoulders and elbows. The dress came to just above her knees and she was wearing thick white tights with glossy black Mary Janes. She rocked back and forth on her heels the longer Tony remained quiet. Mustering up an even brighter smile, she tried, “Thank you for coming to my birthday.”
“Sure,” Tony muttered, kicking at the ground. Dad had made him stand in front of a mirror for almost two hours knotting that stupid tie until it was imprinted with sweaty creases, saying again and again that you could tell everything you needed to know about a man by the way he tied his tie, the shine on his shoes, and the strength of his handshake.
“It’s okay you don’t remember me,” the girl said. “We were only five the last time, at the Christmas party.” She thrust her hand out, and Tony absurdly noticed that she was wearing a bright pink bow in her hair, and she had dirt underneath her immaculately painted fingernails. “My name is Janet van Dyne, but you can just call me Jan, because Janet sounds like an old lady name.”
Tony smiled at her and shoved the brightly wrapped box into her arms. “Jarvis picked it out,” he said, “It’s a Barbie Doll.”
She wrinkled her nose, but smiled at him and said, “Thanks! I like to make clothes for my Barbies.”
Tony glanced back behind him where his dad and mom were making schmoozey faces at the other adults. He pulled his backpack off his shoulders and angled his back to block Dad’s view in case he happened to look over. “I brought my erector set,” he said, opening the pack to show her. “You wanna go play with me?”
“Sure!”
Tony gasped, and abruptly the memory file [doublewinsorknot] loaded. He reached up to yank the knot of his tie apart.
“Janet van Dyne,” he blurted out. His eyes screwed shut and he pressed the base of his palm to his temple to soothe the bright burst of pain. “But call you Jan because Janet sounds like an old lady’s name. We played with my erector set behind your house for your twelfth birthday, and you got mud all over your dress. Your mom was furious.”
Jan clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh my god, I’d forgotten all about that – I hated that dress! You know I fell in the mud on purpose? Mom dragged me up to my room and made me change in the middle of the party, but she missed the dirt smear on my cheek. She commissioned an artist to repaint my birthday portrait to get rid of it!”
Tony felt a smile stretch across his face. “My father tanned my hide so hard I couldn’t sit right for three days.”
“I knew you couldn’t forget me, Tony Stark,” Jan said, lightly smacking his chest. She reached up for his tie. “Here, let me get that for you.”
Tony gently nudged her fingers away. “I can do it,” he said, and his fingers slid through the tie with the confidence of more than thirty years of repetition. He smoothed his hand down the length of the red silk and let her straighten out the triangle of the knot against the collar of his shirt.
“I still don’t remember anything about you past your twelfth birthday,” Tony warned her, but she didn’t seem upset about it in the least.
“You’ll figure it out,” she said confidently, leaning up to kiss his cheek. “You always do.”
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My husband is so adorable. He sends me pictures of my
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My husband is so adorable. He sends me pictures of my kitties (unprompted) when I’m out of town. <3
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My husband is so adorable. He sends me pictures of my kitties (unprompted) when I’m out of town. <3
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