I ended up having to stay in the hospital. To be fair, as much as I wanted to get up and do stuff, I was in no condition to do so. I was essentially at my limit. My body has been pushed to its limit, and even then, I pushed it further.

But then again, it ain’t so bad. I will probably have to deal with the fact that I can only do so much in a day at some point.

Pepper was still in a coma, but had been moved out of the ICU. Apparently the only injuries she had sustained were pretty light, with the exception of the head trauma. The doctor had told me that she was perfectly fine and that the injury to her brain was healing. It would just take some time for her to wake up.

I was relieved, to say the least. If it had been any worse, the moment I was well enough, I would probably storm AIM and get my hands on Extremis. Though I'm not all that inclined towards biology, I would probably need Banner's help.

Until now, I had simply thought about preventing the majority of things that had hurt Tony in the original timeline. But now things are different. In a split second, I almost lost them.

Something had to change.

Earth-1218 had the same troubles as Earth-616, or whatever earth this was. But there was one key difference between the two. This universe had technologies straight out of science fiction within my grasp.

You see, humanity will always have that darkness looming behind it. And I didn’t see anything wrong with that. In fact, the civilization that we live in now was built upon the ideal of escaping that meaningless state of existence. So, I had a plan.

It would take time to implement properly, and people would probably fight against it. In fact, I would probably have to use force to achieve it. But I was confident that within two to three years, I could gain enough of a technological edge wide enough, to unite humanity and move forward into the post-scarcity age, mostly non-violently.

I was hesitant to use the word utopia, since that was an unachievable concept. And I would undoubtedly become the villain in millions of people’s lives. But I could save billions. I would just have to put up some contingencies against myself.

Jeez, am I turning into Batman or something?

A few days before the time I was cleared to leave the hospital, Pepper finally woke up. They wanted to keep her in for a few more days, so after saying hi, I left the hospital. I don’t know why, but it was almost like I was afraid to be near the people I cared about.

Now, let's get to designing a few sets of armour.

Over the next few days, I immediately began work on the first Ironman Suit. I immediately used a gold-titanium alloy. I also incorporated an airtight undersuit, an air supply, a parachute, extra capacitors, and several other things I would have lacked when I originally built the suit.

I then looked at the schematics of the suit from my wheelchair. It was weeks away from being properly finished, but the actual design was down. I then said, “Don’t you think the pure gold is a bit much?”

“And you are not in any way ostentatious." Jarvis responded snarkily. I then said, “Throw some hot rod red in there.” I looked at the iconic colour scheme before me and said, “I like it; apply it to the Mk.2, but stick with black for the Mk.3, and let’s have a look at Gunmetal Grey with hotrod red for the Mk.4. For the Mk.3, please run some simulations on the shape of the plates and try to shape them enough to reduce the radar cross section and the intensity of a sonic boom. Also throw some of the new nano-polyme ceramic coating from the F-22 on top.”

After a few minutes, I looked at the design, which looked sleeker than the original but was now a dark, ominous grey with charcoal black accentuation. “That’ll do. Start fabricating the exterior for the Mk.3 since I need that one first.” I then got to work building a few new and improved palladium-based Mk.3 arc reactors.

The Mk.1s were the ones designed by Howard Stark and Anton Vanko. (Mk.2s were the ones designed in the cave.)

I stared into the gently thrumming core of the reactor as the bands of energy looped around it. I was lost in its simple beauty, but soon shook myself out of it and started work on the electrolyser. It would use a small amount of energy to split the carbon and oxygen I breathe out back into air I could actually breathe, and it meant I would not need to carry an oxygen tank. I would, however, need a way of storing some nitrogen in case my suit depressurized since I couldn’t breathe pure O2.

I turned on the electrolyser, and it immediately exploded in my face. I brush the singed hairs off the top of my head, creating a sparse cloud of ash drifting inside the room. ‘Fuck.’ I cursed under my breath as I decided I should just move on to something else for now.

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I put on the base of the helmet that would not only support my neck, but I would also create a nerval implant eventually for better control of the suit. I added a thin layer of absorbate foam, which would take in sweat from the back of my neck and stop me from bruising a lot when I started doing high-G manoeuvres in the suit.

The next day, I looked at the suit of armor. A smirk appeared on my face as I saw the sleek grey design. It was less armoured than what the original design would have been, but I needed to be untraceable since I didn’t intend on being known as Ironman yet. While I wanted to, I understood that my public acknowledgement of being Ironman would cause a lot of problems, from Vanko to the US government. I would eventually come completely open to the world. But for now, I would have to remain in the shadows.

The suit was then disassembled by my robotic arms and slowly reassembled in front of me. My eyes roamed over the sleek plates, perfectly intersecting—an almost perfect balance between stealth, protection, and mobility. I then said, "Jarvis, are you in here?”

“Affirmative. All digital systems are complete.” I then started to walk towards the exit. As I headed outside, I heard him say, “Sir, there are petabytes of information that are yet to be processed before a manned flight is advised. Due to your erratic behaviour recently, I would highly advise you to seek psychiatric help and would advise against flying an ultralight aircraft, and due to your injuries, I would doubly make sure of such.”

I stopped and let out a sigh, knowing he had a point. I headed back into the circle that slowly took off the suit and then reassembled it in front of me. “Jarvis, you said 'manned flight’ right…?”

“You know that’s not what I meant.” He responded almost immediately. I just shrugged and asked, “How long before the calculations are done?”

“Due to the increased processing power I have gained from the server farm you’ve purchased, I will finish the calculations in a few hours.” I just smiled as he said that.

I then got to work, tinkering with random projects I had decided to start that I would need to invent for my plans. Most were actual inventions made by 2025 on earth-1218 or based on inspiration I had gotten from movies or stories. Firstly, it was my father’s element. While I would love to call it Badassium, no one else would accept that. I decided on Howardite in the end. Since I didn’t have access to the model, I decided to go with the planning permissions instead of having to get the model, and it was suited well enough for me to look at the structure of the atom and start theorising how to synthesise it.

This was essential for several reasons, but primarily because I wanted the palladium out of my chest as soon as possible. I decided to buy a warehouse in the middle of the Nevada desert.

There were several other things I did over the course of the next few days.

Firstly, I activated Friday and had Jarvis start to train her neural networks a bit. I intended for her to take over what Jarvis did for stark industries. It also meant Jarvis could have a friend.

I then applied for several dozen patents, all for technologies that I was going to 'invent', and by that, I meant steal the inspiration from Andy’s timeline.

Firstly were the laminated led screens, which would come in handy with the rise of smartphones in the coming decade; graphene fabrication and manufacturing methods; carbon batteries; variable turbo-scramjet hybrid engines; micro-biome protein harvesting; protein synthesis; bio-molecular solar cells; quantum diodes; CarbiCrete; Slime Mould Bio-Chips; Rotating detonation engines; GRCop Alloy; Agnilet 3D printing; carbon disc drives; and dozens of other technologies that are going to exist by about 2030 anyway; I intended to get them before others did. All the good stuff that won't exist at all unless I invent it, I’m going to keep for myself anyway.

(Google it; these are all truly epic technologies that are all very much making their move out of the lab at the moment.)

Andy had watched several YouTube videos about all these technologies, and while they would need some time to actually become usable, I could understand the basic principles well enough from memory to apply for patents before they were created by other people.

As for the stuff I wasn’t going to patent, well, that was where the fun came in.

In other news, I had reached out to several companies I intended to buy, either in part or in whole. Namely, Epic Games (founded in 1991, with $875 million offered for 100%). Lucasfilm ($7.9 billion offered for 51%) Tumblr (founded in 2007; $60 million offered for 100%) Marvel Comics ($7 million for 100%) and DC Comics ($30 million for 100%).

I also invested in several start-ups that were recently founded: Uber, WhatsApp, AirBnB, and Instagram. In order to spend what essentially amounted to about 15 billion dollars, I had to sell most of the stocks outside of Stark Industries that my father had used to diversify our portfolio. It didn’t really matter since most of it was either in banking or real estate anyway.

Using the chaos, I had managed to acquire 13% of the shares of stark industries, and along with my 42%, I had a majority of 55%. Hopefully, that would be boosted by the seized stocks, making me have at least 75% of the company in my own hands.

All in all, I had about $2 billion in liquid funds that were not put aside to purchase stuff, so I also set Jarvis loose on the world stock market and currency exchange, and he was wrecking havoc while keeping my name out of it. Jarvis had a major advantage over normal trading algorithms.

He could look outside the stock market and things like the internet and news to interpret how people viewed certain stocks. Predicting the stock market had nothing to do with how much a stock was worth but with how much someone thought it was worth.

For my plans, I needed about a trillion dollars. My entire net worth was only 74 billion, but with a start of only 2 billion, Jarvis has already ballooned it to 9 billion over several thousand accounts, and while he was trying his best not to, it didn’t really matter if he did cause a crash since the housing crash was coming anyway. 9 billion, however, was nothing compared to the money I was going to need. And to be fair, compared to the coming mega corporations—Apple-Disney, Amazon, Guanxi-Chase, Blackrock, and Microsoft—who, basically, by 2030 were going to have a combined income higher than the GDP of the United States and Europe, a few billion dollars was nothing.