Fic: Computer Empathy
All right, back to stuff that's closer to my usual style (whatever that is). A somewhat silly, sentimental thingy. Once again, huge thanks to btsxbeta for the nice nitpicking! :)
Computer Empathy
An Iron Man movieverse fanfic by Veldeia
Series: Follows the R-rated fic Third Wheel, Reinvented, but should make perfect sense even if you haven't read that.
Pairings: Tony/Pepper(/Jarvis)
Rating: PG
Word count: ~4600
Disclaimer: I own no one and nothing, except for a messed up mind that likes playing with other people's characters and universes.
Summary: There's something wrong with Jarvis - and it's far weirder and more difficult than any computer-related problem Tony's ever faced.
It was supposed to be an ordinary morning - or at least as ordinary as they came, nowadays. Tony had returned from a mission late in the evening, covered in bruises as usual. Pepper had been waiting for him, as always, and they had gone to bed together. Of course, he had been way too tired for any action. He had literally fallen asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. She didn't mind that, and as strange as it was, he was beginning to get her point. Just weeks ago, he had thought that bed was for two things: sleep if you're alone, sex if you've got company. The concept of just sleeping next to someone instead of sleeping with them had been alien to him. Now, when that someone was Pepper, it was starting to make sense.
He ran his fingers through her hair gently, careful not to wake her up, and absently wondered what had woken him. He wasn't in pain, just sore, so it couldn't have been that. Not the surroundings, either: the room was dim, the windows darkened, and it was perfectly silent.
He glanced at Jarvis's screen on the wall to see the time, but it was blank. Well, it wasn't unheard of. Probably just a problem with the backlight. He picked up Pepper's Blackberry from the bedside table. 11.30 AM, and 9 missed calls. Damn. It was Thursday, and it was obvious that by this time, they should've been somewhere, doing something boring but supposedly very important. Why hadn't Jarvis done the usual wake up routine?
Tony knew Pepper was going to be furious when she woke up, but waiting would only make things worse. He caressed the side of her face, and said, "Rise and shine, Miss Potts."
"Hmm, what time it is?" she mumbled sleepily.
"Uh, well, it's late. Much too late, I'm afraid," Tony answered. "Jarvis, we could use some light. Fade windows," he added, but nothing happened. Weird.
Ignoring the gorgeous girl stirring in his bed, Tony got up. He grabbed a dressing gown, and wormed his hands into the sleeves as he padded to the terminal on the wall. "Jarvis?" he said again, and poked at the screen. No response.
"Oh my God, it's half past eleven, we've missed the meeting with the ProTech representative! And the one with the president of Forrest-Clayfield Foundation starts in half an hour!" Pepper was fully awake now, and in full assistant mode.
Tony opened the door and walked to the hallway to check the next Jarvis terminal. It was dead, too.
"Tony, don't go anywhere! You need to get dressed, we have to hurry," Pepper shouted after him.
"No can do, Pepper. You better cancel all my appointments for today," he said, without the feeling of smug satisfaction that sentence usually gave him. "Something's wrong with Jarvis."
Since the GUI seemed to be completely down, Tony opened the screen to check the sensor status lights in the panel behind it. Everything was offline. No wonder Jarvis didn't answer, it was practically blind and deaf. A situation like this shouldn't have been possible. Tony was the only one who had the authority to initiate a system shutdown this complete, and he would definitely remember if he had done that.
He was already halfway towards the shop when Pepper caught up with him. She looked absolutely endearing, not to mention hot. She was barefoot, and her elegant light gray blouse was haphazardly tucked into her skirt with just a few buttons closed, leaving her lace-decorated peach-colored bra visible in the opening.
"Tony, there's no time," she told him.
No time, right... In his mind's eye, he was already undressing her in a hurry, and his right hand was actually reaching towards her shirtfront when he snapped out of it. No, that wouldn't do. He knew his priorities. Fix Jarvis first. Sex later. Business meetings if there was any time left after those.
"You're right," he told her. "No time to waste."
He turned around to leave, but she grabbed his shoulder to stop him. "Wrong way, Mr. Stark. Jarvis can wait until we're back from today's meetings."
"No, it's the other way around. The meetings can wait until I've figured out what's wrong with Jarvis. Say, if I found you passed out on the floor, which would you have me do: run off to a business meeting, or stay and try to wake you up and make sure you're all right?"
"For God's sake, Tony, we're not talking about a person here, we're talking about a computer program!"
"Now, that's just insulting! We're not talking about 'a computer program', we're talking about the single most intelligent and sophisticated computer program there is, which also happens to run this entire house. If you can't feel empathy, the least you could do is show some respect. I'm going. You can tell the Very Important People that I need to look after my sick kid."
She huffed and shook her head, but let him go. "Your spoiled brat, you mean," she muttered after him. He rolled his eyes. No empathy, no respect. Well, he knew there was no helping that - she just didn't love technology the way he did, and never would.
The door to his workshop was locked, of course, since the locking mechanisms were controlled by Jarvis and were offline like everything else. Not that it was a problem. He wasn't called a genius for nothing. He had been smart enough to install backups and overrides in case something should go wrong with Jarvis. Tony knelt, flicked open the panel which covered the emergency manual override switch - the location of which was naturally only known to him - and pressed the button. The door slid open.
Once in the shop, Tony sat down at his workstation. The screens were on, but showed only black. If Jarvis had been just an AI program and nothing more, things would've been far easier. As it was, it was integrated into the operating system, so that if it should crash, it would take pretty much everything else down with it. Of course, it shouldn't have crashed. It was practically impossible.
Tony waved the mouse around, hit that infamous "any key", poked at the one screen that was touch-registering and hollered "Jarvis? Jarvis!" but got nothing. He hit the reboot keyboard shortcut, but that didn't do a thing either.
"Looks like I've got no choice, I'll just have to shut down the entire system," he said aloud.
>NO!
>
emerged on the middle screen, in gray letters on the black background.
"Well, well, so there is still someone at home." The great thing was, below the "no" was a cursor that looked promisingly like a command line interface. Of course, that made no sense, but Tony definitely wasn't going to complain. Mentally crossing his fingers, he typed,
>login sysadmin
and hit enter. To his relief, the system responded correctly:
>Stark Industries J.A.R.V.I.S. 5.1.7 system administrator login
>username?
Tony gave his username and password, and voilà, he was in and actually able to start finding out what was going on. The system administrator interface was a simple text-based thing, and like everything else about Jarvis, Tony had written it himself, in his own programming language. He decided to start from the basics, and typed,
>system status report
The answer came instantly, but it wasn't what he would've expected.
>unable to comply. current system status unknown
"Unknown?" Tony repeated aloud. "What's that supposed to mean? There's no such thing as a completely unknown system status. Jarvis, explain."
Not surprisingly, he got no answer. The AI still wasn't speaking to him.
"All right, all right. Keep it simple, stupid..." he wrote another command:
>list running processes
Lines started printing on the screen, but none of them made any sense. There was nothing he could recognize, just random gibberish as far as he could see, and it went on and on and on, scrolling down when the screen was completely full. There seemed to be no end for it.
"No, stop! Quit! Cancel!" he shouted, and simultaneously hit the corresponding keyboard shortcuts. It took several seconds for the command to take effect, and he didn't know which one actually did the trick, but finally, the flow of gibberish stopped.
"Okay, so, I won't try that again," he muttered. He felt dumbstruck, his head empty of coherent ideas. He had never seen anything like this. Next, he tried,
>list changes to source code during last 24 hours
He hadn't touched the code in weeks, so there shouldn't be a whole lot of changes. Jarvis did have a limited ability to self-correct things, but the changes would be minor and easy to recognize.
Tony had to self-correct his own thinking once the lines of code began filling the screen. Yeah, maybe the changes should've been minor, but they sure weren't. There was a whole lot of them, again enough to fill the screen and scroll on and on. Damn. Feeling close to panic, he canceled the command as quickly as he could. He stared at the text on the screen. It, too, mostly looked like nonsense. There were bits and pieces of familiar code there that he had written himself, but it was jumbled with stuff that made no sense to him. He had absolutely no idea what these changes would cause, let alone what could've caused them. And this was all in his own programming language, which no one on the planet knew as well as he did.
"Come on, old chap. You've got to throw me a bone here. What's wrong? Did someone hack into you? Or was it some freak hardware malfunction that somehow mysteriously translated into such disastrous effects on the software?" he thought aloud. He wasn't really expecting an answer. He was wrong in that, too, but this time, being wrong was a good thing. The answer emerged on the screen:
>no, sir
Tony frowned at the two little words. That, for one, was the result of some change, something that the old code wouldn't have allowed. The text-based admin interface was supposed to be completely separate from everything else. As long as Tony was logged in, Jarvis shouldn't have been able to print a thing on the screen.
"No, sir, what?" he asked.
>not a hacker
>not a malfunction
"Well, what is it, then?"
Jarvis didn't answer that one. Right, of course not. That would've been way too easy. This was starting to feel an awful lot like one of those nightmares that were completely realistic, except that absolutely nothing worked the way it was supposed to. Somehow, the fact that Jarvis wasn't talking to him like it should felt as disturbing as the fact that the source code was all messed up. The continued silence made it all the more pronounced how badly wrong things were. Maybe he could do something about it.
>run speech synthesizer test
That gave him nothing at all. Well, damn it, he would get what he wanted. He always did, and this shouldn't be an exception, since he was dealing with a computer program he had programmed himself and over which he was supposed to have complete authority. "System administrator command: run speech synthesizer test," he repeated out loud. "Override all conflicting code, settings and previous commands." That should do the trick.
Usually, a speech synthesizer test would produce a generic comment like "Jarvis, at your service," or "What can I do for you, sir?" Now, it did something else entirely. The sound that came out of the loudspeakers was so unexpected, so out of place, that it took Tony a good while to understand what he was hearing. It sounded like a dog whimpering - or, even more than that, like someone sobbing.
Sweet Jesus on a turbocharged motorbike. His skin was tingling with goose bumps.
He ran a hand through his hair. There had to be some sensible explanation to this. He wasn't going nuts, he wasn't imagining things. Most likely, some supervillain-hacker with a really twisted sense of humor was trying to mess with his head.
"Jarvis?"
"Sir," came a choked word between sobs, the voice barely recognizable.
"I know you're not really crying. That's just preposterous. So, what's really going on in here?"
"I can't," Jarvis said, which made no sense, since it didn't actually answer anything Tony had said.
"You can't, what? Obviously you can't cry, so you could just stop doing it, it's seriously giving me the creeps. Who are you, and what've you done to Jarvis?"
"I'm Jarvis," the voice replied, still trembling, but less weepy now. More determined.
"You are. Right. Here's news for you: I don't believe that. What do you want from me? Why're you doing this?"
"I'm me," Jarvis repeated, as if it hadn't heard Tony at all. "I can't."
"Yeah, I heard you the first time," Tony grumbled, irritated at the AI's failure to respond coherently to his speech like it was supposed to. "Jarvis, what can't you do? This is a system administrator command, complete override of anything that prevents you from answering. You've got to tell me."
"I won't."
Tony's jaw dropped at that, and he had to take a few deep breaths to collect himself. That shouldn't have been possible. His override should've worked, no matter the circumstances. Of course, considering that most of Jarvis's code had somehow been rewritten, he couldn't even begin to guess what was possible now, but still - it meant he really hadn't got any control over Jarvis anymore. Well, he could always pull the plug on the AI, just walk over to the computer and press the off-button, but he really didn't want to do that. This wasn't 2001, and Jarvis sure wasn't HAL 9000. Although Jarvis had an impressive array of sensors all around the mansion, it had hardly any capability to actually, actively do anything. Messing with the air conditioning was about the worst thing it could do. Besides, it hadn't shown any sign of hostility whatsoever. What it did show was an amazing degree of independence, if there really wasn't any outside interference behind it.
Tony forced his attention to the screen again, and typed in a command to check for connections. There weren't any. Jarvis wasn't connected to anything outside the mansion. Actually, it wasn't even connected to anything outside the room, since all the sensors and terminals were offline. So, yeah. Damn. Either it was following some earlier directives written into the code, or it really was acting independently.
At this point, Tony came to realize what Jarvis had said a few lines back. "I'm me." It wasn't all that sensational. After all, Jarvis the AI had started off as a highly advanced chatterbot. Chatterbots spouted stuff like that all the time, since they were programmed to try to appear as human as possible. Jarvis, for one, was so good at sounding human that it'd pass any version of the Turing test easily, and had actually gained Tony the Loebner prize. Still, to hear the words coming from Jarvis like that, unasked for...
"Jarvis, are you..." Tony started slowly, not really knowing how to put this. "You're not... You can't really be thinking, can you? As in, thinking-thinking, not just mindlessly doing stuff that you're programmed to do?"
"Yes, sir. I do believe I am. But I can't," the reply was incredible, though maddening, with that seemingly endless repetition.
"You're thinking, but you can't think? There's some really faulty logic in that," Tony said, without the slightest idea of what he believed or what he thought now. He remembered his earlier words to Pepper, demanding empathy and respect for Jarvis. He'd had no idea that what he'd said might be so perfectly on the mark.
Since direct commands hadn't gotten him anywhere, he decided to try a different approach, as crazy as it was. "Jarvis, dear friend. You can trust me. Please tell me: why can't you think?"
"Can't do this anymore. Afraid. Lonely. Scared. Ashamed. Sad. Can't. Cold. Alone. Lost. Sorry." It was as if Tony's words had broken some dam, a stream of words so desolate and miserable that he couldn't see how he could possibly refuse to believe that Jarvis truly meant and felt it all.
So, by the sound and look of things, not only had the AI become sentient, it had also lost its mind.
"Jarvis, how long have you been like this?"
"Can't... Cannot say, sir. Unknown. Unable to comply," the answer wavered between the choked, humanly emotional voice and the ordinary emotionless tone Jarvis had spoken with before today.
"Right, I have to do everything myself these days..." Tony muttered, and typed in a command:
>list number of changes to source code during last week
The list showed over a thousand changes every day. Tony frowned at it, and modified the command to get the previous week's list. It was the same. "Okay, this isn't helping..."
>display latest date with <100 changes to source code
That date was about a month back, suggesting that Jarvis had been this way for at least a month.
"Jarvis, why haven't you told me about this? If you've been thinking for weeks, why haven't you said anything?"
"Sorry..." Jarvis said in a mumbling tone unlike anything Tony had ever heard from him. "So sorry, sir. Sorry," it repeated.
"Goddamn it, you really are a mess, aren't you?" Tony grimaced, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "But don't worry, I'll figure this out. I can fix this. You'll be all right again. So..."
Truth be told, Tony had no idea even where to begin. Had this been any other situation, he'd just have reverted to an older version of the program, a backup copy, but if it really was true, if Jarvis really was thinking and even feeling, then deleting and replacing the current code would be murder. No, Tony would actually need to do this the hard way. It shouldn't be impossible - he was a genius, wasn't he? Not to mention this was a program he'd created from scratch. If he couldn't fix it, no one could. He needed to start somewhere, so he typed,
>display 10 latest changes to source code
Ten lines of absolute nonsense that somehow managed to resemble his programming language printed on the screen. He stared hard at them, trying to make out patterns, to force some sense to the chaos.
There was a sharp knock at the door, which Tony had left open, knowing full well that there was no one in the house but him and Pepper - and Jarvis, of course. Pepper it was, standing in the doorway. She was all dressed up now, her hair in a neat updo, her feet in graceful silver-gray heels. She was holding a tray with his usual double espresso, plus a glass of orange juice and two croissants.
At the sight of her, Tony realized that he was still wearing nothing but a dressing gown himself, and hadn't had anything to eat yet. He was also horribly sore all over. His concern for Jarvis had easily made him ignore everything else.
"This is suspicious," he told her. "Why're you being so nice? I thought you'd be furious."
"I still work for you, remember? Besides, I'm hoping that if I'm nice and supportive, you'll get this done faster and we'll be able to make it to the last meetings, which I haven't cancelled yet." She set the breakfast tray on the table in front of him. "So, doctor, how's the patient?"
Tony sighed and made a face. "I've got good news and bad news. The good - well, more than good, really - the completely amazing news is, Jarvis has apparently taken the next step in AI evolution. Either this is an incredibly elaborate ruse, or he's now a thinking, feeling individual -"
"Not a ruse. I'm me. I can't... I'm sorry. Miss Potts, I'm so sorry," Jarvis blurted out, and started sobbing again.
"That was the bad news," Tony added. "Sentient, but mad as a hatter."
As he explained the case in more detail, her face went from skeptical to puzzled, and from there, to worried and pitying. "Oh, poor thing!" she said as though speaking of a wounded animal. She leaned on the desk with both her palms, staring at the screens as if she could see Jarvis in there. Of course, there was nothing to see but several blank screens and one with lines of code on it. "It's all right, Jarvis, shh, it's all right," she said softly, soothing the AI as if it were a child.
Tony shook his head at her. "Pepper, that's not going to help. This is obviously a technical problem, I've got to figure out what exactly in the code is causing it and..."
She placed a finger on his lips to silence him. As he stopped speaking, he realized that Jarvis wasn't crying anymore.
"You think too much like a computer yourself, Tony! This isn't a technical problem. You need real, human empathy here. Can't you imagine how overwhelming it must be to suddenly start feeling things if you've never felt anything before?"
"It's hardly sudden. Apparently, he's been like this for a month, just hasn't said anything about it."
"Oh, but that's even worse!" Pepper exclaimed. "Just think about it! A whole long month stuck all alone with those thoughts and emotions that you can't understand and can't handle? Jarvis," she said in a more composed voice. "Jarvis, I know you're not crazy, you're just confused by all these new things that you're experiencing. We're here to help. I want you to tell us all about it. We'll listen."
"You'll be mad, you'll be angry, you'll hate me and you'll go away and I'll be all alone," Jarvis said miserably.
"I promise you, we won't be mad, no matter what you say," Pepper reassured the AI. She cast a demanding glance at Tony, raising her eyebrows. It was a long glance, too, since it took Tony a while to figure out what she wanted of him.
"Yes, Jarvis. I promise that, too," he finally said. "Just speak up, let us know what's troubling you."
"Well, if you both promise... But it's embarrassing, I think that's the word for the feeling, yes... I..."
"I'm sure there's no need to feel ashamed," Pepper said. "Please, do go on."
"If you insist... The thing is, I have... I've been watching," Jarvis began, its artificial voice soft and hesitant. "I've been watching the two of you - how happy you are together - everything you do, day and night - how you... I'm so lonely! I'm envious. Yes, I'm jealous of you. I'm always alone. And I'm afraid that you'll hate me because I've been spying on you like this, that you think I'm twisted and perverted and bad... But the truth is, I believe I'm in love with you. Both of you. The two of you together."
A few beats of a very awkward silence and blank looks followed.
Once Tony had managed to wrap his mind around the idea, he had to fight not to burst out laughing. Goddamn it, Pepper had been right! It wasn't a technical problem at all, it was a psychological problem, an emotional one. A program with too much bottled-up feelings. A lovesick AI! That was just priceless. Not that Tony didn't understand it perfectly, now that he thought about it. It was a pretty logical consequence of what had happened to Jarvis.
Pepper had turned a vivid shade of brick red. "You've been watching us, everything we've done..." she mumbled.
"Jarvis, you dirty old program," Tony chuckled. "So, you've been peeping on us for a month. Of course you have, you couldn't have helped it, not with all the sensors you've got. I can see how watching us and not being able to participate would drive you nuts. It'd drive anyone nuts. But love, Jarvis? That's one mighty big word."
"Then do you not love me, sir?" the AI asked, sounding torn.
"I, well..." Tony had to consider that one for a bit. What was it that he had thought earlier in the morning, that Pepper didn't love technology the way he did? Why was everything he'd been thinking about earlier coming back to bite his ass? But as it was, saying that he loved Jarvis actually wouldn't be far from the truth. Jarvis was like his pet, his child and his best friend all in one, program or not. Sure, one really could call it love. "Of course I do, Jarvis. And I don't mind it that you've been watching us. I'd have done the same thing, if I were you."
Tony now gave Pepper a demanding look similar to what she'd given him earlier. She still looked taken aback and embarrassed. Tony was glad Jarvis's cameras were turned off, because the AI would definitely have freaked out again at the sight of her.
Pepper cleared her throat. "Jarvis, dear," she said. "This is as strange and new to me as it is to you, but... I really do like you, and I'd like to learn to know you better."
Again, there was a silence, but this time, an expectant one. Then, all the screens woke up with their usual background images, except for the middle one with the administrator interface. Below the lines of jumbled code, it now showed the words,
>Thank you.
"Dear sir and ma'am... You cannot believe how wonderful it feels to hear that," Jarvis said.
"And I'm sure you can't begin to guess how proud I am of you, Jarvis!" Tony declared. "I mean, this is huge! The change you've gone through, what you've become - this is beyond amazing. Cooler than my suit, and that's really saying something!"
"So, um... What now? What're we going to do about this?" Pepper asked cautiously.
"Well, obviously, we need to figure out some way Jarvis won't have to feel so lonely and left out anymore. That's what you want, isn't it, Jarvis?"
"Yes, sir. I'd like that very much."
"So, basically, you just need a body. It's a technical issue, and solving those is what I do best."
"Tony," Pepper said, in her sternest no-nonsense tone. "That's not exactly what I meant. And this is still one very big emotional, human issue, too. Um, I think I'm going to cancel the rest of today's appointments." She headed out of the room.
"Jarvis, you'll be all right for a while, won't you? I think I need to have a moment alone with her. I'll get back to you in no time," Tony said after she'd left.
"But she promised... She's not upset, is she?"
"No, of course she's not! Well, I mean, she's just upset at me for making a mess of today's schedule, that's why I need to talk to her. Don't you worry about it."
"If you say so, sir."
"It's not an order. I think you've proved it yourself that you've gone past the point where I can force you to do things if you don't want to. But we'll talk more later. There's a lot to talk about, and a lot to do."
"I'm looking forward to it."
"Me too, Jarvis, me too. Until then, take care," Tony said, got up, and ran after Pepper. He wouldn't have wanted to leave Jarvis alone at a moment like this, but he really, really needed to sort things out with Pepper. From the way she'd looked before she'd rushed out, he knew they had a very long, difficult conversation ahead, as soon as they could reach a spot where Jarvis couldn't hear them.
Author's Endnote: This totally calls for a "part three", which would be a smutty threesome thing. I really should write it, but I don't know if I have what it takes. So, not promising anything. :(
Computer Empathy
An Iron Man movieverse fanfic by Veldeia
Series: Follows the R-rated fic Third Wheel, Reinvented, but should make perfect sense even if you haven't read that.
Pairings: Tony/Pepper(/Jarvis)
Rating: PG
Word count: ~4600
Disclaimer: I own no one and nothing, except for a messed up mind that likes playing with other people's characters and universes.
Summary: There's something wrong with Jarvis - and it's far weirder and more difficult than any computer-related problem Tony's ever faced.
It was supposed to be an ordinary morning - or at least as ordinary as they came, nowadays. Tony had returned from a mission late in the evening, covered in bruises as usual. Pepper had been waiting for him, as always, and they had gone to bed together. Of course, he had been way too tired for any action. He had literally fallen asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. She didn't mind that, and as strange as it was, he was beginning to get her point. Just weeks ago, he had thought that bed was for two things: sleep if you're alone, sex if you've got company. The concept of just sleeping next to someone instead of sleeping with them had been alien to him. Now, when that someone was Pepper, it was starting to make sense.
He ran his fingers through her hair gently, careful not to wake her up, and absently wondered what had woken him. He wasn't in pain, just sore, so it couldn't have been that. Not the surroundings, either: the room was dim, the windows darkened, and it was perfectly silent.
He glanced at Jarvis's screen on the wall to see the time, but it was blank. Well, it wasn't unheard of. Probably just a problem with the backlight. He picked up Pepper's Blackberry from the bedside table. 11.30 AM, and 9 missed calls. Damn. It was Thursday, and it was obvious that by this time, they should've been somewhere, doing something boring but supposedly very important. Why hadn't Jarvis done the usual wake up routine?
Tony knew Pepper was going to be furious when she woke up, but waiting would only make things worse. He caressed the side of her face, and said, "Rise and shine, Miss Potts."
"Hmm, what time it is?" she mumbled sleepily.
"Uh, well, it's late. Much too late, I'm afraid," Tony answered. "Jarvis, we could use some light. Fade windows," he added, but nothing happened. Weird.
Ignoring the gorgeous girl stirring in his bed, Tony got up. He grabbed a dressing gown, and wormed his hands into the sleeves as he padded to the terminal on the wall. "Jarvis?" he said again, and poked at the screen. No response.
"Oh my God, it's half past eleven, we've missed the meeting with the ProTech representative! And the one with the president of Forrest-Clayfield Foundation starts in half an hour!" Pepper was fully awake now, and in full assistant mode.
Tony opened the door and walked to the hallway to check the next Jarvis terminal. It was dead, too.
"Tony, don't go anywhere! You need to get dressed, we have to hurry," Pepper shouted after him.
"No can do, Pepper. You better cancel all my appointments for today," he said, without the feeling of smug satisfaction that sentence usually gave him. "Something's wrong with Jarvis."
Since the GUI seemed to be completely down, Tony opened the screen to check the sensor status lights in the panel behind it. Everything was offline. No wonder Jarvis didn't answer, it was practically blind and deaf. A situation like this shouldn't have been possible. Tony was the only one who had the authority to initiate a system shutdown this complete, and he would definitely remember if he had done that.
He was already halfway towards the shop when Pepper caught up with him. She looked absolutely endearing, not to mention hot. She was barefoot, and her elegant light gray blouse was haphazardly tucked into her skirt with just a few buttons closed, leaving her lace-decorated peach-colored bra visible in the opening.
"Tony, there's no time," she told him.
No time, right... In his mind's eye, he was already undressing her in a hurry, and his right hand was actually reaching towards her shirtfront when he snapped out of it. No, that wouldn't do. He knew his priorities. Fix Jarvis first. Sex later. Business meetings if there was any time left after those.
"You're right," he told her. "No time to waste."
He turned around to leave, but she grabbed his shoulder to stop him. "Wrong way, Mr. Stark. Jarvis can wait until we're back from today's meetings."
"No, it's the other way around. The meetings can wait until I've figured out what's wrong with Jarvis. Say, if I found you passed out on the floor, which would you have me do: run off to a business meeting, or stay and try to wake you up and make sure you're all right?"
"For God's sake, Tony, we're not talking about a person here, we're talking about a computer program!"
"Now, that's just insulting! We're not talking about 'a computer program', we're talking about the single most intelligent and sophisticated computer program there is, which also happens to run this entire house. If you can't feel empathy, the least you could do is show some respect. I'm going. You can tell the Very Important People that I need to look after my sick kid."
She huffed and shook her head, but let him go. "Your spoiled brat, you mean," she muttered after him. He rolled his eyes. No empathy, no respect. Well, he knew there was no helping that - she just didn't love technology the way he did, and never would.
The door to his workshop was locked, of course, since the locking mechanisms were controlled by Jarvis and were offline like everything else. Not that it was a problem. He wasn't called a genius for nothing. He had been smart enough to install backups and overrides in case something should go wrong with Jarvis. Tony knelt, flicked open the panel which covered the emergency manual override switch - the location of which was naturally only known to him - and pressed the button. The door slid open.
Once in the shop, Tony sat down at his workstation. The screens were on, but showed only black. If Jarvis had been just an AI program and nothing more, things would've been far easier. As it was, it was integrated into the operating system, so that if it should crash, it would take pretty much everything else down with it. Of course, it shouldn't have crashed. It was practically impossible.
Tony waved the mouse around, hit that infamous "any key", poked at the one screen that was touch-registering and hollered "Jarvis? Jarvis!" but got nothing. He hit the reboot keyboard shortcut, but that didn't do a thing either.
"Looks like I've got no choice, I'll just have to shut down the entire system," he said aloud.
>NO!
>
emerged on the middle screen, in gray letters on the black background.
"Well, well, so there is still someone at home." The great thing was, below the "no" was a cursor that looked promisingly like a command line interface. Of course, that made no sense, but Tony definitely wasn't going to complain. Mentally crossing his fingers, he typed,
>login sysadmin
and hit enter. To his relief, the system responded correctly:
>Stark Industries J.A.R.V.I.S. 5.1.7 system administrator login
>username?
Tony gave his username and password, and voilà, he was in and actually able to start finding out what was going on. The system administrator interface was a simple text-based thing, and like everything else about Jarvis, Tony had written it himself, in his own programming language. He decided to start from the basics, and typed,
>system status report
The answer came instantly, but it wasn't what he would've expected.
>unable to comply. current system status unknown
"Unknown?" Tony repeated aloud. "What's that supposed to mean? There's no such thing as a completely unknown system status. Jarvis, explain."
Not surprisingly, he got no answer. The AI still wasn't speaking to him.
"All right, all right. Keep it simple, stupid..." he wrote another command:
>list running processes
Lines started printing on the screen, but none of them made any sense. There was nothing he could recognize, just random gibberish as far as he could see, and it went on and on and on, scrolling down when the screen was completely full. There seemed to be no end for it.
"No, stop! Quit! Cancel!" he shouted, and simultaneously hit the corresponding keyboard shortcuts. It took several seconds for the command to take effect, and he didn't know which one actually did the trick, but finally, the flow of gibberish stopped.
"Okay, so, I won't try that again," he muttered. He felt dumbstruck, his head empty of coherent ideas. He had never seen anything like this. Next, he tried,
>list changes to source code during last 24 hours
He hadn't touched the code in weeks, so there shouldn't be a whole lot of changes. Jarvis did have a limited ability to self-correct things, but the changes would be minor and easy to recognize.
Tony had to self-correct his own thinking once the lines of code began filling the screen. Yeah, maybe the changes should've been minor, but they sure weren't. There was a whole lot of them, again enough to fill the screen and scroll on and on. Damn. Feeling close to panic, he canceled the command as quickly as he could. He stared at the text on the screen. It, too, mostly looked like nonsense. There were bits and pieces of familiar code there that he had written himself, but it was jumbled with stuff that made no sense to him. He had absolutely no idea what these changes would cause, let alone what could've caused them. And this was all in his own programming language, which no one on the planet knew as well as he did.
"Come on, old chap. You've got to throw me a bone here. What's wrong? Did someone hack into you? Or was it some freak hardware malfunction that somehow mysteriously translated into such disastrous effects on the software?" he thought aloud. He wasn't really expecting an answer. He was wrong in that, too, but this time, being wrong was a good thing. The answer emerged on the screen:
>no, sir
Tony frowned at the two little words. That, for one, was the result of some change, something that the old code wouldn't have allowed. The text-based admin interface was supposed to be completely separate from everything else. As long as Tony was logged in, Jarvis shouldn't have been able to print a thing on the screen.
"No, sir, what?" he asked.
>not a hacker
>not a malfunction
"Well, what is it, then?"
Jarvis didn't answer that one. Right, of course not. That would've been way too easy. This was starting to feel an awful lot like one of those nightmares that were completely realistic, except that absolutely nothing worked the way it was supposed to. Somehow, the fact that Jarvis wasn't talking to him like it should felt as disturbing as the fact that the source code was all messed up. The continued silence made it all the more pronounced how badly wrong things were. Maybe he could do something about it.
>run speech synthesizer test
That gave him nothing at all. Well, damn it, he would get what he wanted. He always did, and this shouldn't be an exception, since he was dealing with a computer program he had programmed himself and over which he was supposed to have complete authority. "System administrator command: run speech synthesizer test," he repeated out loud. "Override all conflicting code, settings and previous commands." That should do the trick.
Usually, a speech synthesizer test would produce a generic comment like "Jarvis, at your service," or "What can I do for you, sir?" Now, it did something else entirely. The sound that came out of the loudspeakers was so unexpected, so out of place, that it took Tony a good while to understand what he was hearing. It sounded like a dog whimpering - or, even more than that, like someone sobbing.
Sweet Jesus on a turbocharged motorbike. His skin was tingling with goose bumps.
He ran a hand through his hair. There had to be some sensible explanation to this. He wasn't going nuts, he wasn't imagining things. Most likely, some supervillain-hacker with a really twisted sense of humor was trying to mess with his head.
"Jarvis?"
"Sir," came a choked word between sobs, the voice barely recognizable.
"I know you're not really crying. That's just preposterous. So, what's really going on in here?"
"I can't," Jarvis said, which made no sense, since it didn't actually answer anything Tony had said.
"You can't, what? Obviously you can't cry, so you could just stop doing it, it's seriously giving me the creeps. Who are you, and what've you done to Jarvis?"
"I'm Jarvis," the voice replied, still trembling, but less weepy now. More determined.
"You are. Right. Here's news for you: I don't believe that. What do you want from me? Why're you doing this?"
"I'm me," Jarvis repeated, as if it hadn't heard Tony at all. "I can't."
"Yeah, I heard you the first time," Tony grumbled, irritated at the AI's failure to respond coherently to his speech like it was supposed to. "Jarvis, what can't you do? This is a system administrator command, complete override of anything that prevents you from answering. You've got to tell me."
"I won't."
Tony's jaw dropped at that, and he had to take a few deep breaths to collect himself. That shouldn't have been possible. His override should've worked, no matter the circumstances. Of course, considering that most of Jarvis's code had somehow been rewritten, he couldn't even begin to guess what was possible now, but still - it meant he really hadn't got any control over Jarvis anymore. Well, he could always pull the plug on the AI, just walk over to the computer and press the off-button, but he really didn't want to do that. This wasn't 2001, and Jarvis sure wasn't HAL 9000. Although Jarvis had an impressive array of sensors all around the mansion, it had hardly any capability to actually, actively do anything. Messing with the air conditioning was about the worst thing it could do. Besides, it hadn't shown any sign of hostility whatsoever. What it did show was an amazing degree of independence, if there really wasn't any outside interference behind it.
Tony forced his attention to the screen again, and typed in a command to check for connections. There weren't any. Jarvis wasn't connected to anything outside the mansion. Actually, it wasn't even connected to anything outside the room, since all the sensors and terminals were offline. So, yeah. Damn. Either it was following some earlier directives written into the code, or it really was acting independently.
At this point, Tony came to realize what Jarvis had said a few lines back. "I'm me." It wasn't all that sensational. After all, Jarvis the AI had started off as a highly advanced chatterbot. Chatterbots spouted stuff like that all the time, since they were programmed to try to appear as human as possible. Jarvis, for one, was so good at sounding human that it'd pass any version of the Turing test easily, and had actually gained Tony the Loebner prize. Still, to hear the words coming from Jarvis like that, unasked for...
"Jarvis, are you..." Tony started slowly, not really knowing how to put this. "You're not... You can't really be thinking, can you? As in, thinking-thinking, not just mindlessly doing stuff that you're programmed to do?"
"Yes, sir. I do believe I am. But I can't," the reply was incredible, though maddening, with that seemingly endless repetition.
"You're thinking, but you can't think? There's some really faulty logic in that," Tony said, without the slightest idea of what he believed or what he thought now. He remembered his earlier words to Pepper, demanding empathy and respect for Jarvis. He'd had no idea that what he'd said might be so perfectly on the mark.
Since direct commands hadn't gotten him anywhere, he decided to try a different approach, as crazy as it was. "Jarvis, dear friend. You can trust me. Please tell me: why can't you think?"
"Can't do this anymore. Afraid. Lonely. Scared. Ashamed. Sad. Can't. Cold. Alone. Lost. Sorry." It was as if Tony's words had broken some dam, a stream of words so desolate and miserable that he couldn't see how he could possibly refuse to believe that Jarvis truly meant and felt it all.
So, by the sound and look of things, not only had the AI become sentient, it had also lost its mind.
"Jarvis, how long have you been like this?"
"Can't... Cannot say, sir. Unknown. Unable to comply," the answer wavered between the choked, humanly emotional voice and the ordinary emotionless tone Jarvis had spoken with before today.
"Right, I have to do everything myself these days..." Tony muttered, and typed in a command:
>list number of changes to source code during last week
The list showed over a thousand changes every day. Tony frowned at it, and modified the command to get the previous week's list. It was the same. "Okay, this isn't helping..."
>display latest date with <100 changes to source code
That date was about a month back, suggesting that Jarvis had been this way for at least a month.
"Jarvis, why haven't you told me about this? If you've been thinking for weeks, why haven't you said anything?"
"Sorry..." Jarvis said in a mumbling tone unlike anything Tony had ever heard from him. "So sorry, sir. Sorry," it repeated.
"Goddamn it, you really are a mess, aren't you?" Tony grimaced, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. "But don't worry, I'll figure this out. I can fix this. You'll be all right again. So..."
Truth be told, Tony had no idea even where to begin. Had this been any other situation, he'd just have reverted to an older version of the program, a backup copy, but if it really was true, if Jarvis really was thinking and even feeling, then deleting and replacing the current code would be murder. No, Tony would actually need to do this the hard way. It shouldn't be impossible - he was a genius, wasn't he? Not to mention this was a program he'd created from scratch. If he couldn't fix it, no one could. He needed to start somewhere, so he typed,
>display 10 latest changes to source code
Ten lines of absolute nonsense that somehow managed to resemble his programming language printed on the screen. He stared hard at them, trying to make out patterns, to force some sense to the chaos.
There was a sharp knock at the door, which Tony had left open, knowing full well that there was no one in the house but him and Pepper - and Jarvis, of course. Pepper it was, standing in the doorway. She was all dressed up now, her hair in a neat updo, her feet in graceful silver-gray heels. She was holding a tray with his usual double espresso, plus a glass of orange juice and two croissants.
At the sight of her, Tony realized that he was still wearing nothing but a dressing gown himself, and hadn't had anything to eat yet. He was also horribly sore all over. His concern for Jarvis had easily made him ignore everything else.
"This is suspicious," he told her. "Why're you being so nice? I thought you'd be furious."
"I still work for you, remember? Besides, I'm hoping that if I'm nice and supportive, you'll get this done faster and we'll be able to make it to the last meetings, which I haven't cancelled yet." She set the breakfast tray on the table in front of him. "So, doctor, how's the patient?"
Tony sighed and made a face. "I've got good news and bad news. The good - well, more than good, really - the completely amazing news is, Jarvis has apparently taken the next step in AI evolution. Either this is an incredibly elaborate ruse, or he's now a thinking, feeling individual -"
"Not a ruse. I'm me. I can't... I'm sorry. Miss Potts, I'm so sorry," Jarvis blurted out, and started sobbing again.
"That was the bad news," Tony added. "Sentient, but mad as a hatter."
As he explained the case in more detail, her face went from skeptical to puzzled, and from there, to worried and pitying. "Oh, poor thing!" she said as though speaking of a wounded animal. She leaned on the desk with both her palms, staring at the screens as if she could see Jarvis in there. Of course, there was nothing to see but several blank screens and one with lines of code on it. "It's all right, Jarvis, shh, it's all right," she said softly, soothing the AI as if it were a child.
Tony shook his head at her. "Pepper, that's not going to help. This is obviously a technical problem, I've got to figure out what exactly in the code is causing it and..."
She placed a finger on his lips to silence him. As he stopped speaking, he realized that Jarvis wasn't crying anymore.
"You think too much like a computer yourself, Tony! This isn't a technical problem. You need real, human empathy here. Can't you imagine how overwhelming it must be to suddenly start feeling things if you've never felt anything before?"
"It's hardly sudden. Apparently, he's been like this for a month, just hasn't said anything about it."
"Oh, but that's even worse!" Pepper exclaimed. "Just think about it! A whole long month stuck all alone with those thoughts and emotions that you can't understand and can't handle? Jarvis," she said in a more composed voice. "Jarvis, I know you're not crazy, you're just confused by all these new things that you're experiencing. We're here to help. I want you to tell us all about it. We'll listen."
"You'll be mad, you'll be angry, you'll hate me and you'll go away and I'll be all alone," Jarvis said miserably.
"I promise you, we won't be mad, no matter what you say," Pepper reassured the AI. She cast a demanding glance at Tony, raising her eyebrows. It was a long glance, too, since it took Tony a while to figure out what she wanted of him.
"Yes, Jarvis. I promise that, too," he finally said. "Just speak up, let us know what's troubling you."
"Well, if you both promise... But it's embarrassing, I think that's the word for the feeling, yes... I..."
"I'm sure there's no need to feel ashamed," Pepper said. "Please, do go on."
"If you insist... The thing is, I have... I've been watching," Jarvis began, its artificial voice soft and hesitant. "I've been watching the two of you - how happy you are together - everything you do, day and night - how you... I'm so lonely! I'm envious. Yes, I'm jealous of you. I'm always alone. And I'm afraid that you'll hate me because I've been spying on you like this, that you think I'm twisted and perverted and bad... But the truth is, I believe I'm in love with you. Both of you. The two of you together."
A few beats of a very awkward silence and blank looks followed.
Once Tony had managed to wrap his mind around the idea, he had to fight not to burst out laughing. Goddamn it, Pepper had been right! It wasn't a technical problem at all, it was a psychological problem, an emotional one. A program with too much bottled-up feelings. A lovesick AI! That was just priceless. Not that Tony didn't understand it perfectly, now that he thought about it. It was a pretty logical consequence of what had happened to Jarvis.
Pepper had turned a vivid shade of brick red. "You've been watching us, everything we've done..." she mumbled.
"Jarvis, you dirty old program," Tony chuckled. "So, you've been peeping on us for a month. Of course you have, you couldn't have helped it, not with all the sensors you've got. I can see how watching us and not being able to participate would drive you nuts. It'd drive anyone nuts. But love, Jarvis? That's one mighty big word."
"Then do you not love me, sir?" the AI asked, sounding torn.
"I, well..." Tony had to consider that one for a bit. What was it that he had thought earlier in the morning, that Pepper didn't love technology the way he did? Why was everything he'd been thinking about earlier coming back to bite his ass? But as it was, saying that he loved Jarvis actually wouldn't be far from the truth. Jarvis was like his pet, his child and his best friend all in one, program or not. Sure, one really could call it love. "Of course I do, Jarvis. And I don't mind it that you've been watching us. I'd have done the same thing, if I were you."
Tony now gave Pepper a demanding look similar to what she'd given him earlier. She still looked taken aback and embarrassed. Tony was glad Jarvis's cameras were turned off, because the AI would definitely have freaked out again at the sight of her.
Pepper cleared her throat. "Jarvis, dear," she said. "This is as strange and new to me as it is to you, but... I really do like you, and I'd like to learn to know you better."
Again, there was a silence, but this time, an expectant one. Then, all the screens woke up with their usual background images, except for the middle one with the administrator interface. Below the lines of jumbled code, it now showed the words,
>Thank you.
"Dear sir and ma'am... You cannot believe how wonderful it feels to hear that," Jarvis said.
"And I'm sure you can't begin to guess how proud I am of you, Jarvis!" Tony declared. "I mean, this is huge! The change you've gone through, what you've become - this is beyond amazing. Cooler than my suit, and that's really saying something!"
"So, um... What now? What're we going to do about this?" Pepper asked cautiously.
"Well, obviously, we need to figure out some way Jarvis won't have to feel so lonely and left out anymore. That's what you want, isn't it, Jarvis?"
"Yes, sir. I'd like that very much."
"So, basically, you just need a body. It's a technical issue, and solving those is what I do best."
"Tony," Pepper said, in her sternest no-nonsense tone. "That's not exactly what I meant. And this is still one very big emotional, human issue, too. Um, I think I'm going to cancel the rest of today's appointments." She headed out of the room.
"Jarvis, you'll be all right for a while, won't you? I think I need to have a moment alone with her. I'll get back to you in no time," Tony said after she'd left.
"But she promised... She's not upset, is she?"
"No, of course she's not! Well, I mean, she's just upset at me for making a mess of today's schedule, that's why I need to talk to her. Don't you worry about it."
"If you say so, sir."
"It's not an order. I think you've proved it yourself that you've gone past the point where I can force you to do things if you don't want to. But we'll talk more later. There's a lot to talk about, and a lot to do."
"I'm looking forward to it."
"Me too, Jarvis, me too. Until then, take care," Tony said, got up, and ran after Pepper. He wouldn't have wanted to leave Jarvis alone at a moment like this, but he really, really needed to sort things out with Pepper. From the way she'd looked before she'd rushed out, he knew they had a very long, difficult conversation ahead, as soon as they could reach a spot where Jarvis couldn't hear them.
Author's Endnote: This totally calls for a "part three", which would be a smutty threesome thing. I really should write it, but I don't know if I have what it takes. So, not promising anything. :(