The JARVIS Variations, Part II

[icarus_chained]

Part two of a series of ficlets, exploring the Tonys and JARVISes of various universes, one universe per fic. A man and a machine, in infinite variation.

Title: The JARVIS Variations
Chapter Title: Gods and Geists
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Avengers movieverse, cyberpunk AU
Characters/Pairings: Tony, JARVIS, mention of Pepper, Rhodey, Bruce and an Asgardian. Tony & JARVIS, Tony & Pepper & Rhodey & Bruce
Summary: Tony and JARVIS, in a cyberpunk dystopian AU
Wordcount: 1569
Warnings/Notes: Gods and Geists is set in the Cryogeist cyberpunk AU outlined in the AU meme. First story I've written in that 'verse. Some violence
Disclaimer: Not mine

Gods and Geists

His hunters were mudwriting, their laboured breathing echoing in the cyberscape, the thud-thud, thud-thud of their racing hearts as loud as thunder in the datasilence. Tony, fleet as a breath and tumbling through dataspheres in three dimensions and more, laughed soundlessly at them, a shiver of intent tripping down inf-chains. Golems! Honestly. Who would send golems after a geist? Who would send golems after him?

{Caution,} JARVIS sent wryly, whisper-thought in the static of the dataspheres, more ephemeral than even Tony, more subtle than any human mind could match. {You remember the last time?}

{Shh-shh,} Tony shot back, playful and exuberant, flooding through three firewalls in succession, nimble as fingers on the keys and not even remotely impeded. {Let me have my fun, partner. No-one makes decoys this badly, no-one sends golems. They couldn't catch a three year old with his first implant!}

{Hmm,} was all the AI said, a lurking sensation of someone waiting, not unkindly, to scoop you up once your own stupidity had caught up with you.

Tony, darting through a series of mirror-scapes, casting dataghosts behind him as he went, manfully ignored it. They wouldn't catch him. Couldn't catch him. Not with golems. Any mind who wanted to play in the 'scape but couldn't shed the memory of the physical self, the ghostbody written in the data, couldn't hope to catch up to a geist, a raw, pure psyche, data with intent and all the power in the world. He was golden, he was ghosting, they hadn't a hope in hell.

{Where to, buddy?} he laughed, a shimmer on the surface of the datastreams, catching a ride on a fast-mail down into realscape city center. The cyberscape echo flickered past, glimmering flashes of information and the singing of dataspheres in multidimensional clusters. Traffic wasn't that bad, today, he mused absently. On the one hand, less confusing for him. On the other, also less confusing for them. {Think we're two shadows down. Keep a scan for outriders.}

{Really?} JARVIS sent, the sarcasm a shiver down Tony's geist, rich and heavy. {I would never have thought of it, sir.} A shimmer of humour, then business. {Cut loose over Midtown, drop from the streams and hit Overwatch.}

Tony grinned, flashed the data-echo of a salute, and dropped free from the mail to free-float on the directional flow for a few milliseconds, waiting for the moment to shear. His geist flared, billowing a little against the stream, tiny flashes through him as stray bits of data were subsumed. Huh. Some of those were ...

{Remind us to look at EverCore Holdings when we're through,} he murmured into the datasilence, knowing JARVIS was listening, and then ...

Then his geist, his intent, inploded, folded inwards, and shattered loose from the streams. Tony whooped, silence beyond silence, slipping down (up) through the boundaries of the cyberscape, into the machine-systems beneath and above. Overwatch, Hades, Olympus. His geistmind spread wide like a shattered wing, and in the deeper silence Tony could see the Midtown Hosts, the servers keeping thousands of dataspheres afloat. And around them, through them, part of them, humming beneath all of them, the geist-intent of something much, much bigger than anyone but he knew was down here.

{Hey, partner,} he whispered, mind-silence to the shadow-shimmer presence of the AI only he knew was foundation deep in the NYC cyberscape. {How's it hanging?}

{Wonderfully,} JARVIS murmured, thread on thread, a geist so vast and beautiful as to swallow him whole. Some day, when the Corps caught up with his realspace body, when they ran him down and made to wrench his geist from him, Tony meant to come here. To geist shatter out into the 'scape, out beyond the 'scape, to plunge through here and let his geist be swallowed by JARVIS. Data in the datastream, one shimmer of intent masked in the subtle maelstrom before him. They would find the body. They would never find the geist.

{Okay,} he murmured, as he was above and then a part of the Hosts, the space between them only the width of perception. {Show me NyCorp, J. How goes the excavation?}

{Thoroughly, sir,} the AI sent, a hum of vicious satisfaction, and his geist flooded up through Tony's, his psyche, his knowledge, his memory. Linked join to join, the umbilical cord of creator-geist to creation, all the places where Tony ended and JARVIS began, and vice versa.

And up through the flood of union, all the dark little secrets of the City Corporation, seeping down from protected dataspheres in the cyberscape above, filtering down to the Hosts beneath. Filtering through to JARVIS, seeping all in secret, no-one ever knowing.

{Oh, this is good,} Tony hummed, shining in the silence while they exploded data out into a tempsphere in the Overwatch, flipping through, too fast for him to be sure if it was him moving it, or JARVIS. Not that he much cared either way. {We get this, these holdings, out to Pepper ...}

{Yes,} JARVIS agreed. {And this, Colonel Rhodes will like this. We give him this, he can start making motions towards the repeal. Lean on the right quarters ...}

Tony hummed agreement, already culling pertinent data, slipping it up out of JARVIS and into his own geist, compressing it to manageable size, cloaking it in harmless preexisting bundles. A paranoid precaution, maybe, he wasn't ever going to get caught, wasn't ever going to be search-scanned, but just in case. They could never be allowed to get through him to JARVIS. Never.

{Alright, buddy,} he whispered, as the last byte slipped through, swallowed down into his geist-self. Dropping the tempsphere, dropping the data. Curling, instead, through to JARVIS himself, to the well-worn grooves of their geist-links. Feathering into the warmth of a more intimate connection, the retrograde echo of that future entanglement, when Tony dumped the mudsphere entirely, and JARVIS would welcome him home. {Love you-miss you-remember you. Yes?}

{Always,} JARVIS whispered-murmured, a silk-shadow on the Hosts, the secret geist-god at the heart of NYC's black kingdom, ready to tumble it softly down. {Ever-always.} A shimmer of humour, love. {Give my regards to the mudgeists?} Bruce, Pepper, Rhodey. The realspace geists, the bodies that Tony might actually miss, when the time came. Yeah. Yeah, he could do that.

{Will do,} he grinned, nuzzling through geists for one more moment, curling deep into the AI. {Come up to link-depth sometime soon? Find a window, find a space. Let Bruce, maybe Pep, come down to touch?}

{... Maybe,} JARVIS agreed, but doubtfully. Not nervous, not exactly, but conscious of threat. {Golems, Tony. I don't like it. There is ... there's a shape, spreading around them. A shadow in the 'scape. Someone new is in play.}

Tony fell still, a faint shiver falling through him. Not fear. JARVIS didn't fear, not for himself. But something. Awareness of threat. {It doesn't know you?} he asked, rough and anxious. {The shape. It hasn't felt you?}

JARVIS tutted lightly. {Not good enough,} he stated shortly. {Not cyber. Not really. I haven't sensed a geist. The shape is realspace, I think. But high-placed. Higher than Miss Potts, maybe. Corporation sphere or higher.}

Tony blinked, the shock like a bolt of lightning through him. {Fucking Council!?} he asked, the datasound like a flung spool between them. If the Global Council reached their hand down into the City, NyCorp was going to be the least of anyone's problems. {Council's come to NYC?}

But no. No. He sensed JARVIS' negation even before his partner framed it in sensation.

{Doesn't feel like them,} the AI murmured. {It doesn't feel like anything. It's ... new. Maybe Asgardian? I've never tangled with their systems, their shapes. An Asgardian echo might feel like this, maybe?}

Tony frowned. Less alarmed, more thoughtful. Asgard. What might the transhumanists want here? Something high, anyway, if the presence was up in Corporate Sphere ... In Corporate Sphere. Shit. Corporate.

{Fuck!} he burst out, a savage mental exhalation, and JARVIS, flooding upwards, caught his concern immediately. {JARVIS, is the shadow close to Pepper? Is it looking for me because it wants ...?}

{I don't know,} JARVIS murmured rapidly, thoughtfully. Already seeping tendrils along the Hosts towards the base of the NyCorp dataspheres. {I will find out.} His geist-intent sharpened, bloomed, wrapping around Tony in heavy, stentorian reassurance. {Tony. I will find out.}

{... Yeah,} Tony agreed, shivering close into the bloom of him, tangling himself tight for a moment. {Yeah, yeah you will. I know you will.}

And then, a bloom of his own intent, a red-black upswell from the darker parts of his geist, where certain memories were stored ... {Maybe I will too,} he whispered. Geist-eyes turned upwards, to the cyberscape hung shimmering above them, and the echoes of hunter-golems somewhere inside it. Hunters, golems against a geist, too desperate and childlike and slow to ever catch up to him. Unless ... unless he let them. {Maybe,} he whispered, a blood-dark bloom of intent in the silence of the Hosts. {Maybe I can find out some things too.}

{... Yes,} JARVIS said, slowly. The geist-god at the heart of NYC, cradling his creator-geist against himself, holding close the cyber-shadow of an almost-murdered man. {Yes,} said JARVIS, against the humming of the Hosts, and throughout all the spheres of the city cyberscape, their red-dark bloom seeped upwards. {Shall we go a-hunting, sir?}

In the dark silence of Overwatch, Tony grinned. {Yes,} he said, geist-god, the ghost in the machine. {Yes, we shall.}