Tony dodged fish for a while until Friday retook control half a mile out and guided the Iron Man suit into the welcoming claws of the Tanngrisnir’s support rig. It cradled Tony like a newborn babe while he was winched gently into the yacht’s loading bay.

  “Okey-dokey,” said Friday. “The lotion is in the basket.”

  The suit peeled back almost fluidly, panel by micropanel, until Tony Stark stood exposed in his black unitard.

  “Okey-dokey?” he said. “I don’t remember slang being part of your programming.”

  “I am an AI, boss,” said Friday. “Therefore, I learn. What did you think of ‘The lotion is in the basket’?”

  Tony stepped out of the suit entirely. “I liked it. You took a quote from one of my favorite movies and turned it into a command. Nice. You know something? I really am a genius.”

  Friday transformed herself into a glowing life-size hologram in the loading bay.

  “And humble, too,” she said.

  Tony stretched until his spine cracked. “No such thing as a humble genius, Friday. All that humility gets you in this world is stepped on.”

  “Or happiness and respect.”

  This was an unusually philosophical line from the usually bubbly AI.

  “I have all the respect I need,” said Tony. “And I’ll be happy when I’ve taken all the weapons of mass, medium, and small destruction out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.” He rotated his head. “I am so stiff. People have no idea. They think the Iron Man suit is all saving the world and being cool. And it is about those worthy endeavors, but a few hours in that thing is like riding the world’s longest roller coaster. I need to loosen up.”

  “How about twenty minutes of capoeira before dinner?” asked Friday.

  “Perfect,” Stark said with feeling. “Brazilian martial arts and a steak. Just what I need.”

  Friday stepped into the Iron Man suit, closed it up, cued Stark’s capoeira playlist through the yacht’s sound system, and faced off against Tony.

  “Take it easy on me, Friday,” said Tony, limbering up. “I’ve had a long flight.”

  The Iron Man eye sockets lit up, and Friday’s voice came from the mouth speaker. “I never take it easy,” she said. “That’s how you made me.”

  And for twenty minutes Tony Stark sparred with his own suit in the hidden loading compartment of his multimillion-dollar luxury yacht, which, along with a two-screen theater and a small nightclub, had enough tech on board to run the Pentagon.

  An hour later, Tony watched the Prototony, the android version of himself, fry up a rib eye in the yacht’s galley, which was a galley in name only, as there was nothing galley-like about it. No tight squeezes and cramped cupboards there. The kitchen had three induction rings and two double ovens, of which Tony had only ever used one, to dry out his favorite sneakers after they had fallen overboard.

  “You know what?” he said to Friday. “Maybe the Prototony is a little, you know, beefy. It’s not attractive, is it? All those muscles.”

  “No, boss. Women hate that,” said Friday mischievously from the other side of the table.

  “Maybe I’ll shave him down a few inches all around when we get back to Malibu. We can say I went on a detox.”

  “I will schedule an overhaul,” said Friday. “Now, if you’re going to eat that steak, you’d better get chewing, because we have a party to drop in to.”

  At that moment the Prototony turned from the cooktop, frying pan in hand, and said in a fake Texas accent, “Who’s hungry, pardners? If you are, stick out a plate for the best steaks this side of the Rio Grande.”

  The real Tony winced. “Ouch. That accent is terrible. I think old Proto’s speech package needs an upgrade.”

  Friday disagreed. “I don’t think so, boss. The accent is terrible. But that’s how you do Texas.”

  Tony was surprised. “Really? Well, if I ever attempt a Texas accent in public, please administer a low-level shock to shut me up before I upset an entire state.”

  Friday, being a loyal AI, promised that she would.

  The Prototony was not, in fact, a prototype. It was just that the name had stuck from Tony Stark’s first attempt to build a replica of himself several versions previously. Other trial names had included the Tonybot, the Replistark, and the Toborg, which had been Friday’s favorite, as it sounded like an insult somehow. She had even taken to referring to people she didn’t like as “total Toborgs.” In any event, android Tony swanned around the oceans on board the Tanngrisnir, giving the actual Tony a little wiggle room to fly his solo missions to remote and dangerous parts of the world, recovering and retiring stolen weaponry. Much more difficult was creating the virtual pop star Shoshona Biederbeck and making the world believe that she was a real person. Stark had written a program that analyzed the structures and progressions of all the major chart hits of the past half century, and then he’d churned out his own versions of the tunes, which were amalgamations of previous songs—close enough to sound familiar but removed enough to avoid copyright lawsuits. Shoshona’s last few videos had exploded all over the Internet, and she had hits like “Bang Boom Pow,” “Girls Got the Power,” “Oops, What’d I Do?” and the obligatory message track “You Know You’re Beautiful, Right?”

  The trouble was Shoshona had grown so popular that a music label wanted to meet her, so Tony’d had to build a convincing Shoshona-bot. It was either that or his songstress would have to go into exile due to the pressures of the biz.

  “There is such a thing as being too smart,” Friday often told him. It would have been far less complicated in every way to construct a hologram of a mysterious beauty, but Tony Stark enjoyed playing with the media, so he went the extra mile with Shoshona.

  After dinner, Tony retired to his dressing room for a quick cleanup before the evening’s party. A local rock band was throwing a launch bash in their city-center hotel, and Tony had promised to attend in the suit.

  Everybody wants the suit, he thought. It was a double-edged sword. Sure, the Iron Man suit was a marvel of technology and a thing of total virtuosity, but sometimes it would be nice to be invited somewhere where the real reason for the invite was not just to get Iron Man to the shindig.

  The lead singer, Graywolf, had been a total gent about it: “Hey, Tony, brother. Just bring yourself on Friday. No hardware necessary. After all, you have the big gig on Saturday.”

  But Tony knew that the guests would be disappointed if he didn’t at least do a DJ set in the suit. Throw a little servo into the mix, as it were.

  “Are you sure about this party, boss?” Friday had asked him. “After all, you’re speaking at the environmental summit on Saturday in front of some of the world’s most influential environmental ministers.”

  “That’s why I’m going to the party,” Tony had replied. “I need some fresh happy memories before spending the day with government ministers.”

  “I suppose so,” Friday had said. “Some of those ministers are complete Toborgs.”

  But even so, he would not go full tilt on the partying, because the summit was important for the eco-future of the planet, and his keynote speech would ensure that the world’s news outlets took notice. Besides, he had quit drinking years before.

  So he would strap on the suit for both events.

  But not the combat suit. There was zero chance he was taking that much firepower to any party. And there was less than zero chance that the security details of the various ministers would allow him into a conference wearing the equivalent of a tank on his back. So that suit had to stay behind. But not intact. There was no way he was leaving a combat suit on the yacht, even one with the Tanngrisnir’s security system. So he had a couple of jobs to do: (1) disassemble the combat suit and (2) print up a Party Pack.

  But before that, it was time to go under the laser.

  Tony lay very still on the table.

  “Lie very still, boss,” said Friday, operating two robot laser arms bearing down on his face.

  “I am lying still, Friday. Very still.”

  “Stop talking, then.”

  “You stop talking to me. You know I need the last word.”

  “The last word could cost you. These arms are accurate to a dozen or so microns, but if you keep moving—”

  “I’m not moving.”

  “Stop talking.”

  “You stop.”

  “I’m powering up now.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that, I can see the power light. I designed the system.”

  “You really need to shut your face, Tony.”

  “You really need to stop being rude to your boss.”

  “Here we go.”

  “Go on, then.”

  Two luminous red dots of concentrated heat appeared at the tips of the laser arms.

  “Say another word,” said Friday. “I dare you.”

  For once Tony Stark decided to forgo having the last word. He remained perfectly still while Friday shaped his famous goatee, shaving the bristles into straight geometric lines accurate to the nearest ten microns. And if the result was not perfectly symmetrical, it was only because Tony Stark’s face was not perfectly symmetrical.

  The Tanngrisnir’s 3-D printer could print things that made objects printed by other 3-D printers look like they were fashioned by a caveman with a flint ax. Which is a long-winded way of saying that the Stark 3-D Red Special, named for Brian May’s famous homemade guitar, was light-years ahead of the competition. Or as Tony himself put it:

  What competition?

  Which became the most successful marketing slogan in the history of Stark Industries.

  There were several things that set the Red Special apart from other printers. For one, it could print from a range of materials, which it could also separate from each other in its recycling smelters. It could print carbon-carbon composites, complex mechanics, liquids, microcircuits, prosthetics, nu-skin bandages, antiaging mud packs, and a very tasty pineapple-coconut flavor of Greek yogurt.

  In short, Tony’s 3-D printer was every bit the technological marvel that May’s guitar had been at the time, and it even sported a similar mahogany trim.

  He stood in front of the Red Special now, in the yacht’s lab. The lab was concealed underneath the bottom of a swimming pool that could be raised or lowered depending on whether Tony was working or entertaining. Once upon a time, the WORK/PLAY needle would have been almost permanently pointed at PLAY. But then Tony spent a little time in an Afghani terrorist camp and his perspective underwent a polar shift. Tony Stark still liked to party, but it was more occasional and often as a cover for some more covert activity.

  Tony stood before the Red Special and watched as Friday controlled the winch that lowered the long-range Iron Man suit into the printer’s smelter vat.

  “Farewell, faithful servant,” he said, always a little maudlin about destroying a creation, even though it was unthinkable to leave a fully operational battle suit lying on the yacht while he went gallivanting around the mainland. He wouldn’t have brought the suit at all had he not needed it for the extended flight. “It is a far, far greater thing you do now, and yada, yada, yada.”

  The suit slid into the large vat, which resembled nothing more than a burger joint’s deep fat fryer, and Friday, with her trademark impish humor, had the suit salute on the way down.

  Tony laughed and then said, “I shouldn’t be laughing. That suit was a part of me, Friday.”

  “Sorry, boss. Don’t worry, he’ll be up and about again in no time.”

  In fact, many of the suit’s sections were up again almost immediately, as the vat’s smart gel rejected them and they hung suspended in a servo field in the print matrix. The plates and components were not rejected due to obsolescence or defect but because they could be recycled; it would be an absurd waste of energy to melt down gear and workings just to refabricate identical parts.

  While there were many variations on the Iron Man suit, for the past couple of years the basic skeleton had stayed the same. Components such as most of the helmet, many of the superlight nitinol body plates, and the entire spinal section could be reused, along with the propulsion system and jazzy chest light.

  After that, things got radically dissimilar, as the Party Pack was a totally different animal than the Battle Suit. Where the Battle Suit had firepower, the Party Pack had bells and whistles. Where the Battle Suit could withstand a sustained barrage from heavy artillery, the Party Pack could withstand a sustained barrage from paparazzi while dazzling the crowd with a laser light show and directional fireworks.

  If the Battle Suit could be likened to a pilot’s stealth jet fighter, then the Party Pack could be fairly compared to an entertainer’s one-man-band equipment, with extra ta-da!

  There were many advantages to the Party Pack: It was light compared with the Battle Suit. It was decidedly nonlethal, which was a considerable relief to the wearer. It could never hurt anyone, even if it fell into the wrong hands, as the tiny Vibranium battery built into its chest piece had a half-life of only twenty-four hours and the suit was coded to Tony’s biorhythms, as were all his suits. It also had air-conditioning and gel packs to cool down Tony’s “poor, traumatized pores” after intense dancing. Friday’s words, not his.

  “Okay, Big T,” said Friday. “She’s ready to par-tay.”

  “That all sounds so wrong in an Irish accent,” said Tony, stepping onto a raised dais at the rear of the lab. “Never say any of that again. Especially the Big T part.”

  He raised his arms and allowed Friday to assemble the suit around him. The entire procedure took almost five minutes, as one of the boots was a little bit off and had to be recast.

  “I need to realign the nodes,” said Tony as Friday manually shaved the second boot.

  “You could print new ones,” said Friday.

  “Which would also be off.”

  Friday laughed. “That was a joke, boss.”

  “I don’t know, Friday,” said Tony. “I think you’re a little giddy. Big T? Jokes? You might need an upgrade yourself.”

  “That hurts,” said Friday. “I’m an AI; we have something approximating feelings. I’m not just some toaster who doesn’t take things personally.”

  “Yeah,” said Tony. “Those toasters are heartless beasts.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I do,” said Tony, flexing his fingers inside the gauntlets, enjoying the power that the tiny servomotors bestowed upon him. “I wouldn’t change a thing about you.”

  “Glad to hear it,” said Friday. “Now, calibration.”

  Tony groaned. “My favorite.”

  And for the next ten minutes he performed a number of increasingly complex actions in a set checklist to make certain that the fresh suit was accurately adjusted. To an observer it would seem as though Iron Man was trying to pass a particularly challenging drunk-driving test, which started off with a simple finger on the nose and ended with a triple tuck and roll in midair.

  Once that was completed, Tony selected a shortcuts package from the display menu so he could command the suit to perform various maneuvers by making a simple gesture. His favorite Party Pack shortcut was a double finger click, which would set the suit moonwalking and blast disco classics through the speakers. Always brought the house down, and in a less destructive fashion than Iron Man usually brought houses down.

  “Can we please go now?” he asked Friday. “Those turntables won’t turn themselves.”

  “That’s a roger, Big T,” said Friday. “We are good to embark on mission DJ.”

  “What did I say about Big T?”

  “You said to call you Big T at every opportunity?”

  Tony smiled. Friday was way more fun than his previous OS had ever been. “Yeah, that was it. How could I forget?”

  Friday opened the internal sea doors. “All set, boss. Could I recommend an early night? We have a long day tomorrow. Not that it matters to me; I’m immortal. You, on the other hand, are aging as we speak.”

  “Early night it is,” said Tony, ducking into the air lock. “Three a.m. max. Four at the absolute most.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Friday, opening the external doors and flooding the chamber.

  There was no need for a stealth exit, as Iron Man was expected on the mainland, but Tony had long before learned that it paid to be sneaky where the press was concerned. So he peeled away from the yacht underwater and ghosted the surface for a few hundred yards. A quick glance at the heads-up readouts told him that the internal temperature was a comfortable sixty-five degrees, but darned if the Party Pack didn’t always feel a little chilly underwater. He didn’t bother mentioning it to Friday, as she would undoubtedly tell him that it was all in his head.

  Something else on the heads-up caught his attention: a small screen that was constantly active, cycling through various input sources.

  “What was that?”

  “What was what?” asked Friday, with exaggerated innocence.

  “Come on. You saw it before I did. There was an alert on the weapons scan. Not only that, but we’re in the area.”

  “It’s possible, but we’re busy tonight, boss.”

  “Cycle it back, Friday. I want to take a look.”

  “I don’t recommend taking a look.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because of your borderline obsessive personality, boss. You can never just take a look.”

  Tony’s voice took on a harder edge. “Take us to a thousand feet. Put the suit in a holding pattern over the city and give me a look at that report.”

  Friday literally could not disobey Tony’s angry voice or even waffle a little, as its register was flagged as imperative in her systems. When the audio sensors picked up this tone, the suit went into battle mode—not that battle mode meant a whole lot in the Party Pack, which was armed with fireworks, Mentos, and a seltzer hose.