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It starts after he comes back to life the very first time. He didn't know it then, of course, but Yinsen had watched him die on that makeshift operating table and dragged him, forcefully, back into life, and there's a lump of metal in his chest keeping him that way.
When he wakes, he's immediately aware of what's in the room. There's a car battery next to him, joined intrinsically to the something in his chest. He thinks about it, realises - an electromagnet. A big electromagnet. There's a pump of some sort behind his head. There's a primitive computer somewhere to his left, running Linux, of all things. Further away, at least a dozen military-grade missiles sit.
Tony gasps, pulls the breathing tube out of his nose - that's what the pump is for - and stretches his hands. He makes a similar motion, with his mind, and the Linux computer flickers off, then on again.
Tony wheezes, sends a mug clattering to the ground, tries to move.
"I wouldn't do that, if I were you," Yinsen says, and Tony believes him.
Over the next few days, he learns about his new abilities. He turns the Linux computer off again and on again, until he can tell that he's starting to overload it, that its poor little fans are too clogged with dust to be helping much, and then he leaves it alone for a minute.
Then, curious, he turns it on, opens Spyder, and thinks print("Hello World").
He thinks about running the program.
Spyder prints Hello World.
Tony pauses, breathes. He can't be sure that he's not, like, hallucinating this or something. He thought he could do something similar that one time at MIT when he'd had a really bad trip and Rhodey had had to carry him back to his dorm, screaming.
He looks at the pump. He knows how medical pumps like this work. He thinks about it, all the moving parts, the little chipboard at the centre of it. He thinks about where pulses of electricity will activate segments.
He thinks, like stretching a muscle, and the pump turns on.
Tony flinches.
He thinks of it turning off. It doesn't. He thinks again, like stretching a muscle, and it does.
Alright. Well. Interesting.
One trial, however, is not substantial evidence.
He does it again.
Seven successful trials is, in fact, substantial evidence.
This is new.
He could, of course, still be hallucinating the whole thing. He could be dead. He could be dreaming, back at home in Miami, having some sort of twisted nightmare.
He builds himself a tiny arc reactor. He doesn't tell Yinsen that no one has ever done this before. He doesn't tell Yinsen that he knows exactly what needs to go where and how much not only because he's a genius, but because the technology feels like it's singing to him.
Tony has never seen himself as an artist before. A mechanic, an engineer, a brute force tool of intelligence, sure. But this - this feels like an art. He's reaching out, gently, being reached out to -
It's intimate, is his point. It feels nearly holy, the way the arc reactor eventually hums into existence beneath his fingers.
He makes the iron man suit similarly. He knows when the hydraulics are connected enough to work. He knows when the load-bearing beams are angled right. He knows how long it will take to upload the code, even with him nudging it along to find its new home.
It's some cocktail of an MIT education and years and years of experience and… this. The way he can change technology without touching it.
He blows up the Linux computer on his way out. It doesn't feel right, that it may live when Yinsen is dead. It doesn't feel right, that he may live when Yinsen is dead.
He's not sure if the iron man suit moves perfectly around him because he's just that good of an engineer, or if it's because he's controlling it with his mind as well.
He thinks about it, for a second, as he blasts away from the terrorist camp, then he snorts. It's the mind thing. There's no way he built something this perfectly functional in a sand-filled cave with minimal technology. He's a genius, but no one's that good.
Well. No one except for Tony, it seems.
He can feel the wiring failing and sets them into a controlled descent. If he's not wrong, there's a helicopter nearby. He buries the iron man, staggers up the dune.
A helicopter flies over. Tony reaches out, tilts the helicopter in a way he hopes feels natural to the pilot.
They see him.
He goes home.
He tells the media he's Iron Man. It's truer than they could ever know. It's not just that he built the suit. It's that he is the suit, that parts of him run through it as surely as electricity does. He knows it, in and out.
Like he said, he's never considered engineering to be an art form before. This is.
When he greets JARVIS again, it's on a more level playing field than usual.
"Sir," JARVIS says, surprise colouring his tone. "You are in my code."
"Yup," Tony replies, busy thinking through the lines. There's a section there that feels more vulnerable - he shores it up.
"You do not have a computer," JARVIS notes.
"Nope," Tony confirms. He winks at a camera, feels how the input is registered and processed by JARVIS, his favourite of all his creations. "Our little secret."
It's something to do with neurons, surely. They're just electrical impulses, after all - charges carried down an axon, to release a chemical signal that then causes another electrical impulse. It's basic biology, the opening and closing of sodium and potassium channels in response to a change in voltage. Likewise, computers work, at their cores, on flashing changes in energy, packets sent and received.
Tony's done enough PT sessions to know about the idea of the muscle-mind connection. He wonders, a little, if this might be similar. The tech-mind connection. He knows how it all works, and now he can… flex it a little. Make his own little ones and zeros. It's fun, mostly, now that he's fairly positive he's not hallucinating.
U gets a bit of plastic stuck in one of his gears. Tony knows even before he cracks open the plastic casing to see it.
"Alright, baby," he says. "Let's get you running smoothly again."
He does.
The way electricity hums through U afterwards feels distinctly grateful.
He's not willing to brute-force control DUM-E and U. He might ease the way U's code clunks through development processes, but whenever DUM-E reaches for the fire extinguisher, he will shout and complain, but he will never brutally redirect him.
There's something in that, Tony knows. Something about humanity. He's not going to think about it, though. He might be recognising that this is closer to art than engineering, but he's not going to turn into a philosopher, thank you very much.
When his arc reactor gets ripped out of his chest, Tony turns to his bots, gasping for breath. He's dying. He tells them that, straight to the little chipboards that are their beautiful brains, and they respond. They bring him back to life, hand him the arc reactor he needs to live.
There's no way he can't be a philosopher after that.
He's decided, then. If he's this connected to his technology, it can never be used to bring harm. If he's this connected to his technology, he can never give up the Iron Man technology.
He's also never going to be able to turn any bot into scrap metal again. Ugh. That's going to be annoying. Oh well. He can play it off as part of being an eccentric billionaire engineer.
"Thank you," he says, mentally, to his bots. The magnet in his chest powers up again, dragging him back to the stable side of life. Then he gets up and chases the man who would use his new gift to hurt everyone he possibly could. That is not in alignment with Tony's new life motto, that's for sure.