Legacy update is live.
Settle in.
The workshop is awake.
⚙️
✦
The boat shed looked abandoned because Tony Stark had spent a fortune making it look abandoned.
Aboveground, there was corroded roofing, the smell of salt air, rotting boats, and an office with furniture too cheap to draw attention.
Behind a rusty press, a hydraulic elevator led down beneath the floor to a lab of exposed brick, old beams, and technology hidden from view.
Maya stood at the bottom of the stairs for several seconds.
“I take back everything I said about this place being a tetanus trap.”
Leo was studying three robotic arms suspended from the ceiling.
“None of this is listed in any Stark Industries inventory.”
“It was a private lab,” Morgan explained.
“My dad used it during the years we lived at the cabin.
My mom knew it existed, but not that it was still operational.”
Morgan switched on a workbench lamp.
Beneath the dust, there were deep scratches in the wood and a screw stuck in a joint that had never been repaired.
It was easier to recognize her father in that little bit of neglect than in the expensive equipment.
T.O.N.Y.
appeared above the console.
Maya walked right past him: she wanted to inspect the supports before powering up any machines.
Morgan touched the pendant to the central console.
The screens displayed the status of Project Icarus: twenty-four dormant satellites, one of them responding intermittently to external commands.
The O.B.I.S.
signature appeared like gray smudges among the lines of security code.
“Before we go after Voss, we need to know what this suit can do,” Maya said.
“And more importantly, what it can’t.”
She pointed to the burn on Morgan’s shoulder.
“That already answered part of the question.”
Over the next two days, the lab became a makeshift workshop and testing space.
Morgan didn’t learn to fly in an afternoon.
On her first attempt, she rose a meter, tilted her right ankle too far, and crashed through a stack of boxes.
On the second, she managed to hover, but heat from the actuators traveled up her legs and forced her to shut down.
On the third, she lost contact with T.O.N.Y.
for eleven seconds and panicked before she even touched the ground.
Maya didn’t sugarcoat the diagnosis.
“You’re trying to control the entire suit at once.
Feet, hands, balance, vision, comms.
Your brain locks up because it’s getting five problems as if they were one.”
“Then split them up,” Leo said, studying the suit’s mesh.
“The material responds to muscle signals.
We can limit each region to one main function until she gets the hang of it.”
He set up zones: legs for stability, forearms for protection, palms for thrust.
Morgan practiced one at a time.
Leo also installed a text receiver separate from T.O.N.Y.’s projection.
It displayed brief messages without executing commands.
During testing, Morgan would learn to find it even with the main interface shut down.
T.O.N.Y.
served as an instructor, not a pilot.
Tony had left an explicit lockout in place: the interface couldn’t take full motor control of the suit.
The decision irritated Morgan until she understood why.
“This lockout keeps the armor from using your body without your consent,” Leo said.
“After Ultron, he didn’t trust autonomous systems anywhere near weapons,” T.O.N.Y.
replied.
“One of the few things he was entirely justified in being paranoid about.”
On the second morning, a maintenance vehicle delivered toolboxes and Dum-E from the cabin at Morgan’s request.
She signed for the delivery and kept the copy that listed the boat shed’s address.
She could put off talking to Pepper; she couldn’t pretend she wasn’t leaving a trail.
Maya knelt in front of the mechanical arm.
“Dum-E.
It really is you.”
The robot raised its claw, got it caught in the packaging, and needed her help to get free.
“Keep this off the robotics forums,” T.O.N.Y.
said.
Leo laughed.
Morgan did too, until she raised her arm and felt the pain in her shoulder.
She cut the laugh short.
Maya noticed and swapped the next flight test for a bench test.
The change irritated Morgan more than it should have.
She stood in front of the screen while her friends adjusted a calibration dummy in her place.
“I can keep going.”
“You can help from here,” Maya replied, handing her the controller.
Morgan activated the dummy’s palm.
Its hand closed into a fist before the command, just as hers had at MIT.
She replayed the movement in slow motion and found the error: the program was also using forearm contractions to estimate finger position.
“It’s finishing the movement it thinks I’m going to make.”
Leo pulled his chair closer.
“We need to separate the readings, not increase the force.”
Morgan redesigned the sequence.
Where Tony’s code combined signals to speed up the response, she added a pause to wait for a confirming muscle signal.
The first test was slow.
The second, hesitant.
On the third, the dummy opened its fingers and waited.
“It’s slower,” T.O.N.Y.
observed.
“But it stopped making decisions for my hand.”
Maya set the controller on the workbench and offered her a fist bump.
Morgan returned it with her good hand.
For the first time, a major improvement hadn’t required her to put on the armor.
By the end of the second day, in short tests with a safety cable, Morgan could stay airborne for twenty-three seconds and land without knocking anything over on half her attempts.
The result seemed small until Maya turned the limitations into a list displayed on the wall: six minutes of cumulative thruster use, self-repair limited to small punctures, no chemical filtration, insufficient protection against heavy rounds, and a risk of overheating when the material concentrated in one area.
Morgan read it all twice.
In the public footage of her father, she mostly saw the flights that worked.
Her own recordings were beginning to show another side of the work.
“This list isn’t meant to discourage you,” Maya said.
“It’s to keep you from confusing courage with ignoring the manual.”
“We don’t have a manual yet.”
“Then we’re writing one with your bruises.”
Leo added one last line: THE SUIT DOES NOT REPLACE HUMAN DECISION-MAKING.
Morgan didn’t comment, but she left the line in the center of the screen.
“Statistically modest progress,” T.O.N.Y.
assessed.
“I heard pride in that.”
“Audio glitch.”
The most useful development, though, wasn’t flight.
During a rescue test, Morgan had to reach a suspended weight without using thrusters.
The nanomaterial extended from her palm as it had in the MIT lab and formed an adhesive cable.
Maya changed the anchoring setup; Leo reinforced the fibers with flexible polymer.
After six broken prototypes, the original anchoring function had gained tension control and breakaway points.
They called this version the Quantum Whip, though Morgan preferred “rescue line.”
“‘Quantum Whip’ sounds like something that would sell toys,” Leo said.
“That’s exactly why it’s better,” Maya replied.
The line could latch onto structures, pull objects, transfer data through direct contact, and redistribute energy.
It wasn’t indestructible.
Under extreme tension, it snapped.
If it carried too powerful a discharge, it fed some of it back into the suit.
Morgan recorded every limit.
At the start of the third night, the four of them gathered around the table.
Maya was still wary.
Leo asked too many questions about file security.
Morgan answered them all, even the uncomfortable ones.
“We need rules,” she said.
“No missions unless everyone knows the risks.
No accessing anyone’s personal data without permission.
T.O.N.Y.
stays out of your devices.
And anyone can walk away from this at any time.”
Maya rested her elbows on the table.
“Even you?”
Morgan hesitated.
“Even me.”
“Then my first condition is that you don’t get to decide on your own that ‘protecting us’ means hiding information.”
“Agreed.”
Leo raised a finger.
“My condition is that nobody uses my polymers as explosives.”
Maya looked at him.
“That was one time.”
“Once was enough.”
“I agree to that one too,” Morgan said.
T.O.N.Y.
opened a digital document.
“Unofficial team contract.
Clause one: nobody dies.
Clause two: if anyone dies, they’ll be required to fill out the paperwork.”
“You don’t sign,” Morgan said.
“You advise.”
The hologram raised his hands.
“Healthy boundaries.
I’m touched.”
An alarm cut the moment short.
The screens switched to a map of the Maine coast.
An old Stark Industries assembly plant, shut down for decades, was drawing as much power as a small city.
“That’s not possible,” Maya said.
“The plant was disconnected from the grid.”
“It’s running on its own generators,” T.O.N.Y.
replied.
“O.B.I.S.
located a Project Icarus ground terminal buried in the complex.
The transmission began nine minutes ago.”
A satellite’s targeting reticle appeared over Massachusetts.
Leo went pale.
“What’s the target?”
“No fixed target yet.
But the test axis runs through Boston and Cambridge.”
Morgan felt her chest tighten.
She didn’t try to turn the feeling into fuel.
She simply recognized it: fear, responsibility, urgency.
She took one breath and looked at her friends.
“Before we decide, we need to talk about ways out.”
Maya was already packing tools into a box.
“Good.
I’d hate to waste time answering.”
Leo closed his laptop.
“The suit needs someone monitoring the mesh.
And the rescue line still has a problem with electrical backfeed.”
Morgan tried to argue, but stopped.
She was the one who’d made the rule.
Shared information.
Shared choice.
“Then we’re going together,” she said.
T.O.N.Y.
zoomed in on the factory.
“Something’s wrong.
The complex is hot, but I’m not detecting anyone inside.”
“A trap,” Morgan concluded.
“Almost certainly.”
Leo sent the terminal alert to the facility’s emergency channel and saved the acknowledgment.
That was no guarantee a team would arrive in time.
Morgan added the coordinates and left a copy on the table; someone would need to know where to look for them if the van didn’t come back.
Maya chose an escape route separate from their way in.
Only then did she start the engine.
Morgan gripped the pendant.
The suit began to form, more slowly and more steadily than it had at MIT.
“Great,” Maya said.
“This time we know what we’re walking into.”
The van left the boat shed shortly before midnight.
Behind them, Dum-E raised the fire extinguisher in farewell.
On the dashboard display, the transmission from Maine reached forty-two percent.
✦
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Ready for the next breakthrough?