Radcliffe was a genius. He was somehow more fanatically pro-Transhumanist than I had become, but he was a genius. Tina, Robert, and I were staring at the program he'd designed, trying to parse out the exact meaning. The wide, white room of his office was mainly occupied by a giant screen.

"So, it's a full immersion reality, exactly like we've been trying to make" I said as I glanced back and forth between the bewildering notes next to the bed Radcliffe's body was lying on and the screen emulation.

"That's right!" Radcliffe said excitedly on the screen, moving around the simulation of his house. "I've constructed this simulation from my own memory and the program fills in the gap. It's amazing."

"But how does the program do that? Is that within the safe parameters for AI?" Tina asked and I had to agree with her on that one. The immersion part was definitely staying, but the auto-fill seemed… ominous. I heard the door drift open and footsteps come to a stop.

"That Abstract thinks so," Radcliffe said. Oh good, the alien artifact I didn't fully understand had an opinion on safe AI limits. The Abstract was going to be a damn problem. I was glad we had it, but it was making my employees overly aggressive. "It even thinks we can use the program to invent whole new lives for people within the framework, not just a present but a history."

"Meddling with souls is dangerous," Tina said.

"But that's what so beautiful about it," Radcliffe continued. "We have souls, yes, irreducible cores but! Our lives are also the product of an endless series of accidents. And the Abstract, well, the Abstract thinks that's a solvable problem."

"So does it just makes stuff up? Wouldn't it be drawn from the subconscious of the individual? The experiences won't be informative if they're the product of the individual's own imagination." I said.

"Not if we used sufficiently complex real world information. For facts, that's simple enough, but we would need a bit more input than that for a responsive reality. A few human minds is all it would take! And we're uploading people anyway, so we could have hundreds!"

My mind started swimming with the benefits and applications. "We could upload lifetimes of experience - People with traumatic backgrounds could be given healthy homes. People who had missed out on education could be educated in a matter of minutes." I'd definitely have to sit down and crunch out if it was risking anything to upload it.

"I don't know, sounds pretty cyberpunk to me, some private corporation gives you the life of its dreams? Sign me off." Tony Stark said from behind me and I almost jumped out of my skin. Even super senses apparently did not render me immune to old fashioned concentration failures. "What's the Abstract by the way?"

I turned around and looked at Tony. He looked tired and kind of beaten down, "It's an alien artifact that contains the secrets of the universe," I said. What was the point of lying?

"Huh. Neat. Can I see it sometime?"

"If you want," I said sincerely. Why not? Maybe we'd have Super Iron Man Suits within the year if I did. "Tony, what're you doing here?"

"Drama said you'd be here," he said, "Pepper's mad at me. Rhodey, well, I haven't told Rhodey yet. I wanted to talk to you. Can we talk? I mean, you look busy."

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I nodded my head, "Yeah, Tony, of course. Tina, Robert, Holden, you guys keep poking this thing with a stick." We walked out into the hallway and I closed the door behind me. "What's up Tony?"

"So, the last time we talked," which was three months ago now, by the way, and yet Tony had just shown up. "You said that I had sat behind a screen and let my best friend take the risk. And at first, you know, I thought you were just being a dick. But I couldn't get it out of my head and I kept thinking of Yinsen, kept thinking about how he died and I survived even though I had always been- Well, I haven't always been my best self."

I nodded along, "Right, Tony, I'm really sorry about that. I didn't mean to-"

"Don't. Don't apologize. You were right. I was playing backseat quarter back. And I shouldn't have, well, I shouldn't have said what I said."

"Tony," I said, trying to figure out what to say. He looked so beat down. I should twist the knife, make him feel extra guilty. But then I paused and took a breath and I realized I just didn't want to be that much of a dick. "Tony, I have my faults."

"That's certainly true," he said. "But I didn't need to bring it up while we were having a nice dinner. And I definitely didn't need to bring up, you know, Scepter-Trent."

I nodded in agreement with that. The mind control thing pissed me off at the time. "Well," I said. "I forgive you. But I feel like that's not what you came here to talk to me about."

Tony nodded and took out one of his tablets. We were a Wizard family now, so it was weird to seem him using some other company's but I understood to some extent. "Can you keep a secret?" Could I do literally anything else? I nodded. "So, I spend months agonizing over it. I feel this crushing weight of responsibility, I guess, to share my awesomeness with the world. Maybe help people in some less important ways."

Oh.

"And I think to myself, go back to basics, you know. I had the suit, I'd made the suit for a good reason, my Arc Reactors were much more effective now. And so I, well, I was watching the international news one night and there was this town and it had just been taken by these militant."

Oh boy.

"And so I got in the suit and took it for a spin. A new test run, really. And I freed the town, beat the militants, no trouble at all. That's all good, no trouble, heck the local government is barely even mad about the flying metal man from America, but…"

"Pepper didn't like it?"

Tony shook his head, "She didn't, no. You know I had been - Well, I had been thinking - Anyway, it doesn't matter at the moment. She'll forgive me. Eventually. All the crap I used to pull, this can't possibly be the line. But anyway, um, I came to ask, you know, did I do a good job? Was it the right thing to do?"

I don't like hurting Tony's feelings. I murdered one of his best friends and, even if Stane had thoroughly deserved it, I still felt bad about putting him through that. But, at the cost of Tony's personal happiness, I put a word in for the world he would have saved several times by now were it not for my own intervention, "Yeah Tony, you made the right decision."