“Mark, how did you even do this?”
Rosalie sat frozen in her chair, replaying the last thirty seconds of *Dreamland Kids’ Park* for the third time.
On screen, a stitched-together approximation of herself walked across a sun-drenched amusement park, mouth moving in rough sync with dialogue pulled straight from the script.
“I told you, Mom.
I taught myself.” Mark shrugged, doing his best to look like an ordinary five-year-old showing off a school project rather than someone who’d just built a functioning video synthesis pipeline in a week.
“It’s not perfect.
The faces still move a little strange, and some of the backgrounds don’t quite match.
But it should still be a big help for practicing your lines.”
“A big help?
Sweetheart, this is more than a big help.” Rosalie pulled him into her lap, still staring at the screen like she wasn’t quite sure it was real.
“I can watch how the scene is *supposed* to look, over and over, instead of just guessing what the director wants!”
That was, in fact, exactly Mark’s intention.
Rosalie had never had formal training.
Every role she’d landed up to now had been small enough that raw instinct and a decent face had been enough to get by.
A lead role in a real film, with real emotional beats to hit, was a different animal entirely.
If he could hand her something close to a finished product to study, a north star to aim for, it would shave weeks off the learning curve she’d otherwise have to climb the hard way.
“Alice, pull up the scene from page forty.
The one where Mom finds out her character’s ex is trying to take the kid.”
“Right away.” Alice’s voice chimed out from the monitor, bright and eager as ever.
The footage loaded, choppy in places, the ex-husband’s stitched-together face wearing an expression that didn’t quite land anywhere between anger and desperation.
But Rosalie’s own on-screen counterpart delivered the line with a tremor in her voice that made the hair on Mark’s arms stand up.
*”You don’t get to just show up and decide you’re her father now.
You weren’t there.
I was.”*
“Oh,” Rosalie whispered, hand pressed to her chest.
“Oh, that’s good.
That’s really good.”
Mark said nothing, though privately he agreed.
Alice had pulled the vocal inflection from a database of a few dozen mother-in-peril performances scraped off old films and TV movies, blended and smoothed until it sounded like nobody in particular and everybody at once.
It wasn’t real emotion.
It was pattern-matching dressed up as feeling.
But apparently pattern-matching was enough to make his mother tear up.
*If Alice can already fake emotion this convincingly with hardware this weak, what happens once I actually get her real processing power to work with?* This chapter is updated first at g.com.
The thought sat in the back of his mind for the rest of the evening, quietly filed away next to a dozen other plans he didn’t yet have the resources to execute.
Over the next three weeks, the household fell into a steady rhythm.
Every morning, Rosalie ran lines with Alice projected onto the living room monitor, the AI feeding her cues and, occasionally, gentle corrections on pacing that Mark had coded in after watching his mother stumble over the same line for the fifth time.
“Rosalie, that reading felt a little flat,” Alice offered once, her tone carefully calibrated to sound encouraging rather than critical.
“Try landing harder on ‘was’ instead of ‘there.'”
“Bossy little thing,” Rosalie muttered, but she tried it again anyway, and the difference was obvious even to her own ear.
Mark spent his afternoons at the computer, alternating between two projects.
The first was continued refinement of Alice, patching in small improvements wherever the hardware could tolerate them.
The second, quieter and more deliberate, was a survey of the game development landscape circa 1998.
*This era’s still mostly 2D platformers and early 3D experiments.
PC gaming’s growing, but the real explosion doesn’t come until broadband and digital distribution mature.
If I want fast capital, I need something simple enough to build alone, cheap enough to sell in bulk, and different enough from anything currently on shelves to actually stand out.*
He’d narrowed it down to a handful of concepts by the end of the second week, jotting rough design notes into a text file Alice helped him organize.
None of it needed to be groundbreaking.
It just needed to sell.
He was careful, however, never to let his output move too fast.
A five-year-old single-handedly designing and coding a commercial video game inside a month would raise exactly the kind of questions he couldn’t afford, especially with SHIELD apparently already sniffing around Los Angeles for a mystery hacker.
Better to let the project unfold slowly, visibly, believably.
A prodigy was one thing.
A miracle was another, and miracles got noticed by people with badges and clearance levels.
New York, Stark Tower.
Tony hadn’t brought up the boy again since that night at dinner, and Jarvis, to his credit, hadn’t pushed.
But the file sat untouched in a folder Tony kept meaning to delete and somehow never did.
Every so often, usually late at night with a glass of something expensive in hand, he found himself pulling it back up.
*Eighty-three percent.*
He told himself it didn’t matter.
Statistics weren’t proof.
Even Jarvis, for all his growing sophistication, was still working off incomplete data, a probability model built on a birth certificate and a hotel receipt and a face that maybe, possibly, looked a little too familiar around the eyes.
And even if it were true, so what?
Tony had no framework for what came next.
He hadn’t been raised by a father who showed up; he’d been raised by a father who lectured him through home movies and left the rest to nannies and tutors.
Tony had sworn, somewhere in the wreckage of his own childhood, that he’d never inflict that particular flavor of absence on anyone else.
“Sir,” Jarvis said, breaking into the silence, “would you like an update on the boy’s activities?”
“I told you to drop it, Jarvis.”
“You told me to stop the investigation into his identity, sir.
I never received instructions to stop general monitoring.” A pause, distinctly smug for a program that supposedly had no ego.
“I find the distinction useful.”
Tony sighed, rubbing at his temple.
“Fine.
The short version.”
“He appears to be developing his own artificial intelligence assistant.
Rudimentary, by comparison to myself, but the underlying architecture shows considerable elegance for a system built on consumer-grade hardware.
He has also begun researching commercial video game development, likely as a means of generating capital.”
“A five-year-old raising startup funding.” Tony let out a short laugh despite himself.
“Cute.”
“There is one more item, sir.
SHIELD’s Director Fury has assigned a standing surveillance order on network activity across Los Angeles, specifically hunting for the hacker responsible for the incident with Ms.
Dale.
Should Mark make another mistake of similar scale, there is a non-trivial chance SHIELD locates him before I would be able to intervene again.”
That got Tony’s attention properly.
He set his glass down.
“You’re telling me Nick Fury might scoop up a five-year-old.”
“I am telling you it is possible, sir, yes.”
Tony sat with that for a long moment, arms crossed, staring at nothing in particular.
He told himself the flicker of unease in his chest was simple professional courtesy, one genius looking out for another, nothing more sentimental than that.
“Keep an eye on it,” he said finally.
“Quietly.
If Fury’s people get close, run interference.
Same as last time.”
“Understood, sir.” If an AI could sound pleased with itself, Jarvis managed it.
“Shall I also continue monitoring for any further developments regarding the boy’s parentage?”
“No.” Tony picked his glass back up and drained it in one go.
“Some questions are better left unanswered.”
He didn’t sound entirely convinced of that, even to himself.