#database warehouse

[fandomrelatedshowerthoughts]

If PDB is in any way right about the Warehouse 13 characters' types, there's a good chance there's at least one 6 high up the show's creative team as out of the major characters all but two have 6 as either core type or wing and the two exceptions are a 3 and a 9. Holy attachment triad Batman, that explains so much about the show

[herovired12]

The Difference Between Database and Data Warehouse is that it is designed for real-time operations and transactional processing, storing current data. In contrast, a data warehouse aggregates and organizes large volumes of historical data from various sources, optimizing it for analysis and reporting. While databases focus on day-to-day tasks, data warehouses support strategic decision-making through analytical capabilities. Check here to learn more.

[nitor-infotech]

Databricks vs. Snowflake: Key Differences Explained

What if businesses could overcome the challenges of data silos, slow query performance, and limited real-time analytics? Well, it's a reality now, as data cloud platforms like Databricks and Snowflake have transformed how organizations manage and analyze their data. 

Founded in 2012, Snowflake emerged from the expertise of data warehousing professionals, establishing itself as a SQL-centric solution for modern data needs. In contrast, Databricks, launched shortly after in 2013, originated from the creators of Apache Spark, positioning itself as a managed service for big data processing and machine learning. 

Scroll ahead to discover everything about these platforms and opt for the best option. 

Benefits of Databricks and Snowflake 

Here are the benefits that you can enjoy with Databricks: 

It has been tailored for data science and machine learning workloads. 

It supports complex data transformations and real-time analytics. 

It adapts to the needs of data engineers and scientists. 

It enables teams to work together on projects, enhancing innovation and efficiency. 

It allows for immediate insights and data-driven decision-making. 

In contrast, here are the benefits you can experience with Snowflake: 

It is ideal for organizations focused on business intelligence and analytics. 

It helps with storage and the compute resources can be scaled separately, ensuring optimal performance. 

It efficiently handles large volumes of data without performance issues. 

It is easy to use for both technical and non-technical users, promoting widespread adoption. 

It offers a wide range of functionalities to support various industry needs. 

Note: Visit their website to learn more about the pricing of Databricks and Snowflake. 

Now, let’s compare each of the platforms based on various use cases/features. 

Databricks vs. Snowflake: Comparison of Essential Features  

When comparing essential features, several use cases highlight the differences between Databricks and Snowflake. Here are the top four factors that will provide clarity on each platform's strengths and capabilities: 

1. Data Ingestion: Snowflake utilizes the ‘COPY INTO’ command for data loading, often relying on third-party tools for ingestion. In contrast, Databricks enables direct interaction with data in cloud storage, providing more flexibility in handling various data formats. 

2. Data Transformation: Snowflake predominantly uses SQL for data transformations, while Databricks leverages Spark, allowing for more extensive customization and the ability to handle massive datasets effectively. 

3. Machine Learning: Databricks boasts of a mature ecosystem for machine learning with features like MLflow and model serving. On the other hand, Snowflake is catching up with the introduction of Snowpark, allowing users to run machine learning models within its environment. 

4. Data Governance: Snowflake provides extensive metadata and cost management features, while Databricks offers a robust data catalog through its Unity Catalog (it is still developing its cost management capabilities). 

In a nutshell, both Databricks and Snowflake have carved their niches in the data cloud landscape, each with its unique capabilities. As both platforms continue to evolve and expand their feature sets, the above read will help businesses make informed decisions to optimize their data strategies and achieve greater insights. 

Feel free to share this microblog with your network and connect with us at Nitor Infotech to elevate your business through cutting-edge technologies. 

[juliebowie]

Critical Differences: Between Database vs Data Warehouse

Summary: This blog explores the differences between databases and data warehouses, highlighting their unique features, uses, and benefits. By understanding these distinctions, you can select the optimal data management solution to support your organisation’s goals and leverage cloud-based options for enhanced scalability and efficiency.

Introduction

Effective data management is crucial for organisational success in today's data-driven world. Understanding the concepts of databases and data warehouses is essential for optimising data use. Databases store and manage transactional data efficiently, while data warehouses aggregate and analyse large volumes of data for strategic insights. 

This blog aims to clarify the critical differences between databases and data warehouses, helping you decide which solution best fits your needs. By exploring "database vs. data warehouse," you'll gain valuable insights into their distinct roles, ensuring your data infrastructure effectively supports your business objectives.

What is a Database?

A database is a structured collection of data that allows for efficient storage, retrieval, and management of information. It is designed to handle large volumes of data and support multiple users simultaneously. 

Databases provide a systematic way to organise, manage, and retrieve data, ensuring consistency and accuracy. Their primary purpose is to store data that can be easily accessed, manipulated, and updated, making them a cornerstone of modern data management.

Common Uses and Applications

Databases are integral to various applications across different industries. Businesses use databases to manage customer information, track sales and inventory, and support transactional processes. 

In the healthcare sector, databases store patient records, medical histories, and treatment plans. Educational institutions use databases to manage student information, course registrations, and academic records. 

E-commerce platforms use databases to handle product catalogues, customer orders, and payment information. Databases also play a crucial role in financial services, telecommunications, and government operations, providing the backbone for data-driven decision-making and efficient operations.

Types of Databases

Knowing about different types of databases is crucial for making informed decisions in data management. Each type offers unique features for specific tasks. There are several types of databases, each designed to meet particular needs and requirements.

Relational Databases 

Relational databases organise data into tables with rows and columns, using structured query language (SQL) for data manipulation. They are highly effective for handling structured data and maintaining relationships between different data entities. Examples include MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Oracle.

NoSQL Databases

NoSQL databases are designed to handle unstructured and semi-structured data, providing flexibility in data modelling. They are ideal for high scalability and performance applications like social media and big data. Types of NoSQL databases include:

Document databases (e.g., MongoDB).

Key-value stores (e.g., Redis).

Column-family stores (e.g., Cassandra).

Graph databases (e.g., Neo4j).

In-Memory Databases 

In-memory databases store data in the main memory (RAM) rather than on disk, enabling high-speed data access and processing. They are suitable for real-time applications that require low-latency data retrieval, such as caching and real-time analytics. Examples include Redis and Memcached.

NewSQL Databases

NewSQL databases aim to provide the scalability of NoSQL databases while maintaining the ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) properties of traditional relational databases. They are used in applications that require high transaction throughput and firm consistency. Examples include Google Spanner and CockroachDB.

Examples of Database Management Systems (DBMS)

Understanding examples of Database Management Systems (DBMS) is essential for selecting the right tool for your data needs. DBMS solutions offer varied features and capabilities, ensuring better performance, security, and integrity across diverse applications. Some common examples of Database Management Systems (DBMS) are:

MySQL 

MySQL is an open-source relational database management system known for its reliability, performance, and ease of use. It is widely used in web applications, including popular platforms like WordPress and Joomla.

PostgreSQL  

PostgreSQL is an advanced open-source relational database system that supports SQL and NoSQL data models. It is known for its robustness, extensibility, and standards compliance, making it suitable for complex applications.

MongoDB 

MongoDB is a leading NoSQL database that stores data in flexible, JSON-like documents. It is designed for scalability and performance, making it a popular choice for modern applications that handle large volumes of unstructured data.

Databases form the foundation of data management in various domains, offering diverse solutions to meet specific data storage and retrieval needs. By understanding the different types of databases and their applications, organisations can choose the proper database technology to support their operations.

Read More: What are Attributes in DBMS and Its Types?

What is a Data Warehouse?

A data warehouse is a centralised repository designed to store, manage, and analyse large volumes of data. It consolidates data from various sources, enabling organisations to make informed decisions through comprehensive data analysis and reporting.

A data warehouse is a specialised system optimised for query and analysis rather than transaction processing. It is structured to enable efficient data retrieval and analysis, supporting business intelligence activities. The primary purpose of a data warehouse is to provide a unified, consistent data source for analytical reporting and decision-making.

Common Uses and Applications

Data warehouses are commonly used in various industries to enhance decision-making processes. Businesses use them to analyse historical data, generate reports, and identify trends and patterns. Applications include sales forecasting, financial analysis, customer behaviour, and performance tracking.

Organisations leverage data warehouses to gain insights into operations, streamline processes, and drive strategic initiatives. By integrating data from different departments, data warehouses enable a holistic view of business performance, supporting comprehensive analytics and business intelligence.

Key Features of Data Warehouses

Data warehouses offer several key features that distinguish them from traditional databases. These features make data warehouses ideal for supporting complex queries and large-scale data analysis, providing organisations with the tools for in-depth insights and informed decision-making. These features include:

Data Integration: Data warehouses consolidate data from multiple sources, ensuring consistency and accuracy.

Scalability: They are designed to handle large volumes of data and scale efficiently as data grows.

Data Transformation: ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) processes clean and organise data, preparing it for analysis.

Performance Optimisation: Data warehouses enhance query performance using indexing, partitioning, and parallel processing.

Historical Data Storage: They store historical data, enabling trend analysis and long-term reporting.

Read Blog: Top ETL Tools: Unveiling the Best Solutions for Data Integration.

Examples of Data Warehousing Solutions

Several data warehousing solutions stand out in the industry, offering unique capabilities and advantages. These solutions help organisations manage and analyse data more effectively, driving better business outcomes through robust analytics and reporting capabilities. Prominent examples include:

Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. It is designed to handle complex queries and large datasets, providing fast query performance and easy scalability.

Google BigQuery

Google BigQuery is a serverless, highly scalable, cost-effective multi-cloud data warehouse that enables super-fast SQL queries using the processing power of Google's infrastructure.

Snowflake

Snowflake is a cloud data platform that provides data warehousing, data lakes, and data sharing capabilities. It is known for its scalability, performance, and ability to handle diverse data workloads.

Key Differences Between Databases and Data Warehouses

Understanding the distinctions between databases and data warehouses is crucial for selecting the right data management solution. This comparison will help you grasp their unique features, use cases, and data-handling methods.

Databases and data warehouses serve distinct purposes in data management. While databases handle transactional data and support real-time operations, data warehouses are indispensable for advanced data analysis and business intelligence. Understanding these key differences will enable you to choose the right solution based on your specific data needs and goals.

Choosing Between a Database and a Data Warehouse

Several critical factors should guide your decision-making process when deciding between a database and a data warehouse. These factors revolve around the nature, intended use, volume, and complexity of data, as well as specific use case scenarios and cost implications.

Nature of the Data

First and foremost, consider the inherent nature of your data. Suppose you focus on managing transactional data with frequent updates and real-time access requirements. In that case, a traditional database excels in this operational environment. 

On the other hand, a data warehouse is more suitable if your data consists of vast historical records and complex data models and is intended for analytical processing to derive insights.

Intended Use: Operational vs. Analytical

The intended use of the data plays a pivotal role in determining the appropriate solution. Operational databases are optimised for transactional processing, ensuring quick and efficient data manipulation and retrieval.

Conversely, data warehouses are designed for analytical purposes, facilitating complex queries and data aggregation across disparate sources for business intelligence and decision-making.

Volume and Complexity of Data

Consider the scale and intricacy of your data. Databases are adept at handling moderate to high volumes of structured data with straightforward relationships. In contrast, data warehouses excel in managing vast amounts of both structured and unstructured data, often denormalised for faster query performance and analysis.

Use Case Scenarios

Knowing when to employ each solution is crucial. Use a database when real-time data processing and transactional integrity are paramount, such as in e-commerce platforms or customer relationship management systems. Opt for a data warehouse when conducting historical trend analysis, business forecasting, or consolidating data from multiple sources for comprehensive reporting.

Cost Considerations

Finally, weigh the financial aspects of your decision. Databases typically involve lower initial setup costs and are easier to scale incrementally. In contrast, data warehouses may require more substantial upfront investments due to their complex infrastructure and storage requirements. 

To accommodate your budgetary constraints, factor in long-term operational costs, including maintenance, storage, and data processing fees.

By carefully evaluating these factors, you can confidently select the database or data warehouse solution that best aligns with your organisation's specific needs and strategic objectives.

Cloud Databases and Data Warehouses

Cloud-based solutions have revolutionised data management by offering scalable, flexible, and cost-effective alternatives to traditional on-premises systems. Here's an overview of how cloud databases and data warehouses transform modern data architectures.

Overview of Cloud-Based Solutions

Cloud databases and data warehouses leverage the infrastructure and services provided by cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. They eliminate the need for physical hardware and offer pay-as-you-go pricing models, making them ideal for organisations seeking agility and scalability.

Advantages of Cloud Databases and Data Warehouses

The primary advantages include scalability to handle fluctuating workloads, reduced operational costs by outsourcing maintenance and updates to the cloud provider and enhanced accessibility for remote teams. Cloud solutions facilitate seamless integration with other cloud services and tools, promoting collaboration and innovation.

Popular Cloud Providers and Services

Leading providers such as AWS with Amazon RDS and Google Cloud's Cloud SQL offer managed database services supporting engines like MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. For data warehouses, options like AWS Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Azure Synapse Analytics provide powerful analytical capabilities with elastic scaling and high performance.

Security and Compliance Considerations

Despite the advantages, security remains a critical consideration. Cloud providers implement robust security measures, including encryption, access controls, and compliance certifications (e.g., SOC 2, GDPR, HIPAA). 

Organisations must assess data residency requirements and ensure adherence to industry-specific regulations when migrating sensitive data to the cloud.

By embracing cloud databases and data warehouses, organisations can optimise data management, drive innovation, and gain competitive advantages in today's data-driven landscape.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the main difference between a database and a data warehouse?

A database manages transactional data for real-time operations, supporting sales and inventory management activities. In contrast, a data warehouse aggregates and analyses large volumes of historical data, enabling strategic insights, comprehensive reporting, and business intelligence activities critical for informed decision-making.

When should I use a data warehouse over a database?

Use a data warehouse when your primary goal is to conduct historical data analysis, generate complex queries, and create comprehensive reports. A data warehouse is ideal for business intelligence, trend analysis, and strategic planning, consolidating data from multiple sources for a unified, insightful view of your operations.

How do cloud databases and data warehouses benefit organisations?

Cloud databases and data warehouses provide significant advantages, including scalability to handle varying workloads, reduced operational costs due to outsourced maintenance, and enhanced accessibility for remote teams. They integrate seamlessly with other cloud services, promoting collaboration, innovation, and data management and analysis efficiency.

Conclusion

Understanding the critical differences between databases and data warehouses is essential for effective data management. Databases excel in handling transactional data, ensuring real-time updates and operational efficiency. 

In contrast, data warehouses are designed for in-depth analysis, enabling strategic decision-making through comprehensive data aggregation. You can choose the solution that best aligns with your organisation's needs by carefully evaluating factors like data nature, intended use, volume, and cost. 

Embracing cloud-based options further enhances scalability and flexibility, driving innovation and competitive advantage in today’s data-driven world. Choose wisely to optimise your data infrastructure and achieve your business objectives.

[phonegap]

Seamless integration of PostgreSQL to Amazon Redshift using Zero ETL methodology. Explore the benefits, potential limitations, and essential considerations for optimising data transfer and processing efficiency. Dive into real-time insights and learn how to navigate challenges while maximising the advantages of this innovative data integration approach.

[ridgeanttechnologies]

Data Warehouses Vs Data Lakes Vs Databases – A Detailed Evaluation

Data storage is a major task, especially for organizations handling large amounts of data. For businesses garnering optimal value from big data, you hear about data storage terminologies – ‘Databases’, ‘Data warehouses’, and ‘Data lakes’. They all sound similar. But they aren’t! Each of them has its own unique characteristics that make them stand apart in the data landscape.

Through this detailed article, we attempt to introduce the three terminologies, their salient features and how different are they from each other. Hope it throws some light into how data can be managed and stored with databases, data lakes, and data warehouses.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The reason you can’t buy a car is the same reason that your health insurer let hackers dox you

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst data-breach in world history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans and 15m Britons, (and 19k Canadians) into the world, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and premade identity-theft kits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach

Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just that their top execs liquidated their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach – it was also that they ignored years of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.

Things didn't improve after the breach. Indeed, the 2017 Equifax breach was the starting gun for a string of more breaches, because Equifax's servers didn't just have one fubared system – it was composed of pure, refined fubar. After one group of hackers breached the main Equifax system, other groups breached other Equifax systems, over and over, and over:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/equifax-password-username-admin-lawsuit-201118316.html

Doesn't this remind you of Boeing? It reminds me of Boeing. The spectacular 737 Max failures in 2018 weren't the end of the scandal. They weren't even the scandal's start – they were the tipping point, the moment in which a long history of lethally defective planes "breached" from the world of aviation wonks and into the wider public consciousness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incidents_involving_the_Boeing_737

Just like with Equifax, the 737 Max disasters tipped Boeing into a string of increasingly grim catastrophes. Each fresh disaster landed with the grim inevitability of your general contractor texting you that he's just opened up your ceiling and discovered that all your joists had rotted out – and that he won't be able to deal with that until he deals with the termites he found last week, and that they'll have to wait until he gets to the cracks in the foundation slab from the week before, and that those will have to wait until he gets to the asbestos he just discovered in the walls.

Drip, drip, drip, as you realize that the most expensive thing you own – which is also the thing you had hoped to shelter for the rest of your life – isn't even a teardown, it's just a pure liability. Even if you razed the structure, you couldn't start over, because the soil is full of PCBs. It's not a toxic asset, because it's not an asset. It's just toxic.

Equifax isn't just a company: it's infrastructure. It started out as an engine for racial, political and sexual discrimination, paying snoops to collect gossip from nosy neighbors, which was assembled into vast warehouses full of binders that told bank officers which loan applicants should be denied for being queer, or leftists, or, you know, Black:

https://jacobin.com/2017/09/equifax-retail-credit-company-discrimination-loans

This witch-hunts-as-a-service morphed into an official part of the economy, the backbone of the credit industry, with a license to secretly destroy your life with haphazardly assembled "facts" about your life that you had the most minimal, grudging right to appeal (or even see). Turns out there are a lot of customers for this kind of service, and the capital markets showered Equifax with the cash needed to buy almost all of its rivals, in mergers that were waved through by a generation of Reaganomics-sedated antitrust regulators.

There's a direct line from that acquisition spree to the Equifax breach(es). First of all, companies like Equifax were early adopters of technology. They're a database company, so they were the crash-test dummies for ever generation of database. These bug-riddled, heavily patched systems were overlaid with subsequent layers of new tech, with new defects to be patched and then overlaid with the next generation.

These systems are intrinsically fragile, because things fall apart at the seams, and these systems are all seams. They are tech-debt personified. Now, every kind of enterprise will eventually reach this state if it keeps going long enough, but the early digitizers are the bow-wave of that coming infopocalypse, both because they got there first and because the bottom tiers of their systems are composed of layers of punchcards and COBOL, crumbling under the geological stresses of seventy years of subsequent technology.

The single best account of this phenomenon is the British Library's postmortem of their ransomware attack, which is also in the running for "best hard-eyed assessment of how fucked things are":

https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf

There's a reason libraries, cities, insurance companies, and other giant institutions keep getting breached: they started accumulating tech debt before anyone else, so they've got more asbestos in the walls, more sagging joists, more foundation cracks and more termites.

That was the starting point for Equifax – a company with a massive tech debt that it would struggle to pay down under the most ideal circumstances.

Then, Equifax deliberately made this situation infinitely worse through a series of mergers in which it bought dozens of other companies that all had their own version of this problem, and duct-taped their failing, fucked up IT systems to its own. The more seams an IT system has, the more brittle and insecure it is. Equifax deliberately added so many seams that you need to be able to visualized additional spatial dimensions to grasp them – they had fractal seams.

But wait, there's more! The reason to merge with your competitors is to create a monopoly position, and the value of a monopoly position is that it makes a company too big to fail, which makes it too big to jail, which makes it too big to care. Each Equifax acquisition took a piece off the game board, making it that much harder to replace Equifax if it fucked up. That, in turn, made it harder to punish Equifax if it fucked up. And that meant that Equifax didn't have to care if it fucked up.

Which is why the increasingly desperate pleas for more resources to shore up Equifax's crumbling IT and security infrastructure went unheeded. Top management could see that they were steaming directly into an iceberg, but they also knew that they had a guaranteed spot on the lifeboats, and that someone else would be responsible for fishing the dead passengers out of the sea. Why turn the wheel?

That's what happened to Boeing, too: the company acquired new layers of technical complexity by merging with rivals (principally McDonnell-Douglas), and then starved the departments that would have to deal with that complexity because it was being managed by execs whose driving passion was to run a company that was too big to care. Those execs then added more complexity by chasing lower costs by firing unionized, competent, senior staff and replacing them with untrained scabs in jurisdictions chosen for their lax labor and environmental enforcement regimes.

(The biggest difference was that Boeing once had a useful, high-quality product, whereas Equifax started off as an irredeemably terrible, if efficient, discrimination machine, and grew to become an equally terrible, but also ferociously incompetent, enterprise.)

This is the American story of the past four decades: accumulate tech debt, merge to monopoly, exponentially compound your tech debt by combining barely functional IT systems. Every corporate behemoth is locked in a race between the eventual discovery of its irreparable structural defects and its ability to become so enmeshed in our lives that we have to assume the costs of fixing those defects. It's a contest between "too rotten to stand" and "too big to care."

Remember last February, when we all discovered that there was a company called Change Healthcare, and that they were key to processing virtually every prescription filled in America? Remember how we discovered this? Change was hacked, went down, ransomed, and no one could fill a scrip in America for more than a week, until they paid the hackers $22m in Bitcoin?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Change_Healthcare_ransomware_attack

How did we end up with Change Healthcare as the linchpin of the entire American prescription system? Well, first Unitedhealthcare became the largest health insurer in America by buying all its competitors in a series of mergers that comatose antitrust regulators failed to block. Then it combined all those other companies' IT systems into a cosmic-scale dog's breakfast that barely ran. Then it bought Change and used its monopoly power to ensure that every Rx ran through Change's servers, which were part of that asbestos-filled, termite-infested, crack-foundationed, sag-joisted teardown. Then, it got hacked.

United's execs are the kind of execs on a relentless quest to be too big to care, and so they don't care. Which is why their they had to subsequently announce that they had suffered a breach that turned the complete medical histories of one third of Americans into immortal Darknet kompromat that is – even now – being combined with breach data from Equifax and force-fed to the slaves in Cambodia and Laos's pig-butchering factories:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/data-stolen-healthcare-hack/index.html

Those slaves are beaten, tortured, and punitively raped in compounds to force them to drain the life's savings of everyone in Canada, Australia, Singapore, the UK and Europe. Remember that they are downstream of the forseeable, inevitable IT failures of companies that set out to be too big to care that this was going to happen.

Failures like Ticketmaster's, which flushed 500 million users' personal information into the identity-theft mills just last month. Ticketmaster, you'll recall, grew to its current scale through (you guessed it), a series of mergers en route to "too big to care" status, that resulted in its IT systems being combined with those of Ticketron, Live Nation, and dozens of others:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hack-data-breach.html

But enough about that. Let's go car-shopping!

Good luck with that. There's a company you've never heard. It's called CDK Global. They provide "dealer management software." They are a monopolist. They got that way after being bought by a private equity fund called Brookfield. You can't complete a car purchase without their systems, and their systems have been hacked. No one can buy a car:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/27/business/cdk-global-cyber-attack-update/index.html

Writing for his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller tells the all-too-familiar story of how CDK Global filled the walls of the nation's auto-dealers with the IT equivalent of termites and asbestos, and lays the blame where it belongs: with a legal and economics establishment that wanted it this way:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/a-supreme-court-justice-is-why-you

The CDK story follows the Equifax/Boeing/Change Healthcare/Ticketmaster pattern, but with an important difference. As CDK was amassing its monopoly power, one of its execs, Dan McCray, told a competitor, Authenticom founder Steve Cottrell that if he didn't sell to CDK that he would "fucking destroy" Authenticom by illegally colluding with the number two dealer management company Reynolds.

Rather than selling out, Cottrell blew the whistle, using Cottrell's own words to convince a district court that CDK had violated antitrust law. The court agreed, and ordered CDK and Reynolds – who controlled 90% of the market – to continue to allow Authenticom to participate in the DMS market.

Dealers cheered this on: CDK/Reynolds had been steadily hiking prices, while ingesting dealer data and using it to gouge the dealers on additional services, while denying dealers access to their own data. The services that Authenticom provided for $35/month cost $735/month from CDK/Reynolds (they justified this price hike by saying they needed the additional funds to cover the costs of increased information security!).

CDK/Reynolds appealed the judgment to the 7th Circuit, where a panel of economists weighed in. As Stoller writes, this panel included monopoly's most notorious (and well-compensated) cheerleader, Frank Easterbrook, and the "legendary" Democrat Diane Wood. They argued for CDK/Reynolds, demanding that the court release them from their obligations to share the market with Authenticom:

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-7th-circuit/1879150.html

The 7th Circuit bought the argument, overturning the lower court and paving the way for the CDK/Reynolds monopoly, which is how we ended up with one company's objectively shitty IT systems interwoven into the sale of every car, which meant that when Russian hackers looked at that crosseyed, it split wide open, allowing them to halt auto sales nationwide. What happens next is a near-certainty: CDK will pay a multimillion dollar ransom, and the hackers will reward them by breaching the personal details of everyone who's ever bought a car, and the slaves in Cambodian pig-butchering compounds will get a fresh supply of kompromat.

But on the plus side, the need to pay these huge ransoms is key to ensuring liquidity in the cryptocurrency markets, because ransoms are now the only nondiscretionary liability that can only be settled in crypto:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

When the 7th Circuit set up every American car owner to be pig-butchered, they cited one of the most important cases in antitrust history: the 2004 unanimous Supreme Court decision in Verizon v Trinko:

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2003/02-682

Trinko was a case about whether antitrust law could force Verizon, a telcoms monopolist, to share its lines with competitors, something it had been ordered to do and then cheated on. The decision was written by Antonin Scalia, and without it, Big Tech would never have been able to form. Scalia and Trinko gave us the modern, too-big-to-care versions of Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft and the other tech baronies.

In his Trinko opinion, Scalia said that "possessing monopoly power" and "charging monopoly prices" was "not unlawful" – rather, it was "an important element of the free-market system." Scalia – writing on behalf of a unanimous court! – said that fighting monopolists "may lessen the incentive for the monopolist…to invest in those economically beneficial facilities."

In other words, in order to prevent monopolists from being too big to care, we have to let them have monopolies. No wonder Trinko is the Zelig of shitty antitrust rulings, from the decision to dismiss the antitrust case against Facebook and Apple's defense in its own ongoing case:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/073_2021.06.28_mtd_order_memo.pdf

Trinko is the origin node of too big to care. It's the reason that our whole economy is now composed of "infrastructure" that is made of splitting seams, asbestos, termites and dry rot. It's the reason that the entire automotive sector became dependent on companies like Reynolds, whose billionaire owner intentionally and illegally destroyed evidence of his company's crimes, before going on to commit the largest tax fraud in American history:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/billionaire-robert-brockman-accused-of-biggest-tax-fraud-in-u-s-history-dies-at-81-11660226505

Trinko begs companies to become too big to care. It ensures that they will exponentially increase their IT debt while becoming structurally important to whole swathes of the US economy. It guarantees that they will underinvest in IT security. It is the soil in which pig butchering grew.

It's why you can't buy a car.

Now, I am fond of quoting Stein's Law at moments like this: "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." As Stoller writes, after two decades of unchallenged rule, Trinko is looking awfully shaky. It was substantially narrowed in 2023 by the 10th Circuit, which had been briefed by Biden's antitrust division:

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca10/22-1164/22-1164-2023-08-21.html

And the cases of 2024 have something going for them that Trinko lacked in 2004: evidence of what a fucking disaster Trinko is. The wrongness of Trinko is so increasingly undeniable that there's a chance it will be overturned.

But it won't go down easy. As Stoller writes, Trinko didn't emerge from a vacuum: the economic theories that underpinned it come from some of the heroes of orthodox economics, like Joseph Schumpeter, who is positively worshipped. Schumpeter was antitrust's OG hater, who wrote extensively that antitrust law didn't need to exist because any harmful monopoly would be overturned by an inevitable market process dictated by iron laws of economics.

Schumpeter wrote that monopolies could only be sustained by "alertness and energy" – that there would never be a monopoly so secure that its owner became too big to care. But he went further, insisting that the promise of attaining a monopoly was key to investment in great new things, because monopolists had the economic power that let them plan and execute great feats of innovation.

The idea that monopolies are benevolent dictators has pervaded our economic tale for decades. Even today, critics who deplore Facebook and Google do so on the basis that they do not wield their power wisely (say, to stamp out harassment or disinformation). When confronted with the possibility of breaking up these companies or replacing them with smaller platforms, those critics recoil, insisting that without Big Tech's scale, no one will ever have the power to accomplish their goals:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

But they misunderstand the relationship between corporate power and corporate conduct. The reason corporations accumulate power is so that they can be insulated from the consequences of the harms they wreak upon the rest of us. They don't inflict those harms out of sadism: rather, they do so in order to externalize the costs of running a good system, reaping the profits of scale while we pay its costs.

The only reason to accumulate corporate power is to grow too big to care. Any corporation that amasses enough power that it need not care about us will not care about it. You can't fix Facebook by replacing Zuck with a good unelected social media czar with total power over billions of peoples' lives. We need to abolish Zuck, not fix Zuck.

Zuck is not exceptional: there were a million sociopaths whom investors would have funded to monopolistic dominance if he had balked. A monopoly like Facebook has a Zuck-shaped hole at the top of its org chart, and only someone Zuck-shaped will ever fit through that hole.

Our whole economy is now composed of companies with sociopath-shaped holes at the tops of their org chart. The reason these companies can only be run by sociopaths is the same reason that they have become infrastructure that is crumbling due to sociopathic neglect. The reckless disregard for the risk of combining companies is the source of the market power these companies accumulated, and the market power let them neglect their systems to the point of collapse.

This is the system that Schumpeter, and Easterbrook, and Wood, and Scalia – and the entire Supreme Court of 2004 – set out to make. The fact that you can't buy a car is a feature, not a bug. The pig-butcherers, wallowing in an ocean of breach data, are a feature, not a bug. The point of the system was what it did: create unimaginable wealth for a tiny cohort of the worst people on Earth without regard to the collapse this would provoke, or the plight of those of us trapped and suffocating in the rubble.

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[violent138]

The League's Property damage video nights are an insane ritual on the Watchtower, where their largest screen is hijacked so that dragged footage from CCTV cameras, government databases, and social media of the most hilarious, costly disasters can be played.

Some notable mentions:

Superman got confused/distracted trying to save a building cut in half during a fight and accidentally permanently fused it onto a totally different building (they decided to merge companies)

Aquaman flooding a small space to fight someone and the resulting wave lifts all the cars on the street and sends them sailing

One of Oliver's explosive arrows blows up fireworks in warehouse district (leading to several flights getting grounded or rerouted)

Diana lassoed something flying and it yanked her so hard that she took out a traffic light and dragged it fifteen blocks with her

Barry tripped over something while running and was too shocked to phase through anything, going crashing (and bouncing) off multiple cars, a fire hydrant, taking out a post box before finally faceplanting to a halt

Hal used the classified schematics from a next-gen fighter jet to make his own construct, causing the Pentagon to lose all the money they'd invested in it

[nnnaaahhhiiiaaa]

Spy Rivals in Love Pt.1 - vick (iris)

Summary | You, known as the 'Scarlet Lady,' are a spy for the NSS in Korea. Your greatest rival is Vick, an agent from an enemy organization. Although you both despise each other and face off with all your hatred, every time you meet, the tension turns into something more intense—a connection you can't ignore, despite everything that separates you.

Pairing | iris!vick x fem!reader.

Genre | 2000s era, enemies to lovers.

Warnings | explicit violence, use of weapons and chase escenes, strong lenguage, tension, blood.

Author's note | English is not my first language, so I apologize for any spelling mistakes.

"You know what to do, Scarlet Lady. If you get caught, the whole plan goes to hell."

Kim Hyun-joon's voice was firm, but in his dark eyes, a warning gleamed. He knew this was a game of precision, and any mistake would cost more than just a failed mission.

You didn’t need to respond. You simply nodded in silence before turning on your heels, letting the dim warehouse light glisten over the latex of your black catsuit. The familiar weight of the gadget belt rested on your waist, each tool meticulously selected for infiltration.

Your objective: classified information, buried under multiple layers of security within the NSS headquarters. A file so valuable it could dismantle covert operations and expose the agency’s deepest secrets. But for you, this wasn’t just another mission. It was personal. The same organization you were about to tear apart had betrayed your older brother, Hyun-joon, condemning him to a fate he could never escape.

Before leaving, you covered the suit with a brown trench coat, added a matching beret, and slipped on a pair of sunglasses. A flawless disguise. No one inside the NSS knew your face or your real name. If everything went according to plan, you could move unnoticed. And if something went wrong… well, you always had an escape route.

From the outside, the building looked like an ordinary government facility: reflective windows, guards at the entrance, a pristine lobby. But you knew the truth. Behind that façade lay the very heart of the NSS, where the most clandestine operations were carried out far from the world’s eyes.

For someone like you, this was a challenge, yes, but far from impossible. You weren’t considered one of the world’s top three spies for nothing. At least, that’s what Hyun-joon and your few allies said. The reality was that no one truly knew you. You didn’t exist in databases, left no fingerprints, had no past. If someone searched for you, they would find little more than a ghost.

On the surface, however, you led an ordinary life, meticulously crafted to divert suspicion. A professor at the prestigious Seoul University. History and physical chemistry. Two subjects with enough logic and strategy to keep you sharp, and enough narrative to hide the truth between the lines. No one at the university would ever suspect that the quiet and elegant professor was, in reality, the shadow that haunted the world’s most powerful organizations.

Tonight, however, you weren’t a professor. You weren’t an ordinary citizen. Tonight, you were the Scarlet Dame, and the board was set for the first move.

With steady steps and natural elegance, you walked toward the reception desk without raising suspicion. Every movement was measured, every gesture calculated. You weren’t just an infiltrator; you were a shadow slipping through the cracks of the system.

Behind the counter, a woman with brown hair, an immaculate uniform, and a friendly expression looked up as she saw you approaching.

"Good morning, may I help you with something?" she asked professionally.

You smiled with the warmth of someone who had absolutely nothing to hide. Leaving behind the façade of a reserved woman, you tilted your head slightly and spoke enthusiastically:

"Oh, thank goodness! Look, my forgetful husband has left his lunch at home again. Again! So, I decided to bring it to him personally before he spends the whole morning without eating."

The receptionist blinked, hesitating for a second before composing herself. "Oh, I see, but... I’m really sorry, miss. We can’t let you through. If you tell me your name, I can notify him to come down and pick it up."

Your smile remained intact, but a glimmer of mischief shone in your eyes.

"Come on, sweetie, you know how men are when they’re in important meetings. He asked me not to disturb him under any circumstances. Plus, it’ll only be a minute. Our eight-year-old son is waiting in the car, and I can’t leave him alone for too long."

You added a slight note of urgency to your voice, just enough to stir the receptionist’s empathy without raising suspicion.

The woman bit her lower lip, visibly uncertain. Finally, with a resigned sigh, she handed you a visitor's pass.

"Okay, but please don’t mention that I let you through."

"Of course, darling! Nothing happened, okay?" You winked at her and waved goodbye as if you were lifelong friends.

Two security guards approached to escort you to the elevator. Everything was going according to plan.

But as soon as the doors closed, the game changed.

You drew an innocent smile as you raised the tupperware you were holding in your hands. "Guys, would you like some kimchi with rice? It’s delicious."

The two men exchanged confused looks. One raised an eyebrow.

"No?" You feigned an expression of regret. "What a shame..."

The blow came without warning. With a precise motion, you slammed the tupperware against one of the guards’ noses, making him stagger back with a muffled curse. Before the other could react, you delivered a direct kick to his chest, sending him crashing into the elevator wall.

The first tried to recover, but you didn’t give him the chance. With a flawless spinning kick, you knocked him out. The second guard fell to the ground with a sharp thud just a second later.

Silence.

You looked down at the unconscious bodies at your feet and sighed, adjusting your trench coat.

"I think I may have overdone it..."

You crouched down to pick up the tupperware from the floor. Fortunately, it was still tightly sealed. "Well, at least the food’s still intact."

With a swift motion, you discarded the trench coat, beret, and sunglasses, letting them fall carelessly on the unconscious bodies of the guards. Now, dressed only in your black latex catsuit, you felt much more in your element. The slight pressure of the suit against your skin was familiar, almost comforting.

As the elevator descended toward the underground levels, you shrugged and opened the tupperware. After all, you weren’t going to waste food because of a simple infiltration plan. It had cost you money, and besides, you didn’t know when you’d have the chance to eat something decent again. Calmly, you took a bite of rice and kimchi, enjoying the slight burn of spice on your tongue as the numbers on the panel descended.

But when the elevator was about to reach the final underground level, your real job began.

Without wasting any time, you agilely climbed onto the side security bar and pushed open the elevator’s roof hatch. You opened it with ease and propelled yourself up, emerging with the precision of someone who had done this a hundred times.

From your new position, you opened a nearby ventilation shaft and slipped inside silently. Before moving forward, you looked down at the unconscious guards. You couldn’t leave loose ends.

With efficiency, you grabbed them by the armpits and, with a bit of effort, hauled them to the top of the elevator, leaving them there. You took two chloroform-soaked handkerchiefs from your gadget belt and gently placed them over their noses. They wouldn’t wake up unless someone found them.

When the elevator reached its destination and the doors opened with a metallic sound, the interior was completely empty. From the security cameras, it would just appear as an elevator arriving with no passengers.

Perfect.

You slipped silently through the ventilation shaft, keeping your breathing as controlled as possible. Every movement was calculated to avoid the slightest noise, knowing that any out-of-place sound could give you away. The cold metal beneath your hands and knees made a faint creak with each move, but you were careful enough to minimize it.

From above, through the slats of the vent, you observed several rooms as you moved. Some had messy desks and monitors left on idle, others had metal file cabinets full of classified documents. However, none seemed to be your destination. You knew exactly what to look for: an access terminal with a highly protected system, strategically placed cameras, and, most importantly, the complete absence of regular employees.

Finally, after several meters of movement, you found it. Through the lower grate, you spotted a larger, almost sterile room with a huge security screen on the wall and multiple files organized with unsettling precision. Everything was in place, too neat. This was the place.

With precise movements, you carefully removed the grate and set it aside inside the vent. You gripped the edge with both hands and dropped down with feline elegance. You rolled onto the floor to cushion the impact and stood up fluidly, quickly scanning your surroundings.

Absolute silence.

Something didn’t feel right.

You had expected at least one guard patrolling or an active camera, but the room was empty, almost as if someone had cleaned the area before your arrival. The feeling of unease began to settle in your chest.

And then, a voice broke the silence.

"You’re late."

The sound came from behind you.

Your body reacted before your mind processed the danger. In an automatic move, you drew the mini pistol from your belt and spun on your heel, aiming directly at the source of the voice.

It wasn’t necessary to see him to know who it was.

His relaxed posture, the way he pronounced every word calmly, and most of all, the fact that he hadn’t tried to attack you immediately, confirmed what you already suspected.

"I see we’re after the same thing, Vick." Your tone was cold, controlled, though deep down you hated that he had caught you by surprise.

The man in front of you smiled to the side, that mocking expression you hated so much. His eyes sparkled with amusement, as if finding you here was more of a game to him than a real competition.

"But only one of us is going to walk away with it, Y/N."

Your jaw tightened as you heard your name leave his lips. No matter how many times he did it, it always provoked the same reaction.

"Don’t call me that." You murmured with a mix of irritation and warning, not lowering the weapon for even a second. "I’m still wondering how you figured it out."

Vick sighed with feigned laziness before holstering his own weapon, as if his confidence in the situation was absolute. He was the kind of man who enjoyed playing with his prey, testing the waters before making his move.

"You know I always find out what interests me." His voice was calm, even seductive, as he slowly began to advance toward you.

You didn’t hesitate to take a step back. His intentions were never clear, but you knew his game well. He had learned to read you over time, to provoke reactions in you that you didn’t want to give him the pleasure of seeing.

"Stay back." You warned firmly, raising the gun again and pointing it directly at his hand. "I won’t show mercy this time. I’m warning you."

Vick stopped for a moment, assessing your expression, as if looking for a crack in your determination. However, his smile didn’t fade. On the contrary, it widened, his dark eyes gleaming with amusement.

The tension in the room was palpable, like a taut rope ready to snap.

One of you would walk out victorious.

The other… wouldn’t.

@kartdeko @i-might-be-vanny

[apparitionism]

Court 2

Hi @amtrak12 —here, on the occasion of the B&W-meeting anniversary, I have the next part of your @b-and-w-holiday-gift-exchange gift, which is turning out overall to be a slower-than-slow unspooling that has something to do with lawyers and arguments and ownership. Herein, the plot thickens. Or maybe just clots, or perhaps congeals. Anyway, events—or “events”?—occur. Following, sort of, what happened in part 1. (Contributing to my usual sluggish pace is the fact that it’s been a rough several months, for me at least. I hope everyone’s holding tight to whatever helps...)

Court 2

Leena stumbles. She is sitting in Artie’s Warehouse office, waiting for Claudia to finish some database update or other, and yet her entire being manages to lose its footing. To stumble.

“Are you okay?”

The question from Claudia startles Leena out of her first response to the lurching sensation: trying to ascertain whether she should have been more attentive, all day, to the background hum of artifactual grumbling. They always want attention, artifacts do, but has today been—and is this moment in particular—about attention? Or has some hapless item found itself in genuine distress?

“Seriously, are you okay?” Claudia asks again, again startling Leena, enough that instead of what would usually be a measured “yes,” she voices an awkward “huh?”

“You look like somebody kicked your puppy. Or wait...” Claudia squints. “More like your puppy did a thing and you don’t know if you should give it a treat or say ‘bad dog.’”

“You do cut right to it,” Leena says, because Claudia has.

“I’m discerning.” She squints again. “Is that what I mean? Myka would know.”

“Even if it isn’t, you are. And yes, she would.”

Claudia beams, likely on both accounts. “Thanks! Probably. So what’s up with your puppy?”

“I can’t tell,” Leena admits. “Something dramatic. And the real question is, which puppy?”

“I can’t help here. First, because I don’t know what we’re talking about, and B, because I was never one of those kids who wanted a puppy. But mostly because my helping skills are pretty much always under construction.”

Don’t run yourself down, Leena would admonish, but whatever those artifacts are up to is the more pressing issue, and anyway Claudia generally shrugs off explicit direction to acknowledge her value... unless, interestingly, it’s Myka who delivers it. So she goes slightly more opaque and functional: “Come with me. We can both figure out what we’re talking about, and maybe you can hammer at those skills.”

“Where are we going?”

Leena closes her eyes and concentrates on the disquiet, trying to orient. “Container aisle,” she determines. “Can’t narrow it down more than that.”

They reach the floor and walk for a bit. Then Claudia says, like she’s been thinking about it, “Container aisle? I’d rather go to the Container Store.”

“Need more organization in your life?”

“In Pete’s life.”

Leena waits for it.

Claudia delivers, “Because when I go to steal DVDs and games from his room I’d like to able to find them.”

It’s not the best. Leena waits again. This time, Claudia doesn’t deliver, instead saying, with a little mournful pout, “What’s the container aisle for, anyway? Boxes? Bottles? Tupperware?”

“Some of all of those. Generally, artifacts that hold. Catch and hold, or just accept to hold.”

“Hold. Hold... stuff?”

“Yes?” Leena isn’t sure what Claudia means by “stuff.” She’s often a little unsure about what Claudia intends words to mean, and she suspects she’s not the only one. Except for, perhaps, Myka? And possibly Steve? Still, Claudia does flummox Steve...

“But everything holds stuff,” Claudia says. “It’s what makes a thing a thing. A thing is just a stuff container.”

“Philosophy. Impressive.” Leena says it quietly, so as to keep Claudia’s ego in check, yet she’s delighted. However: “Things are stuff containers mostly by an accident of metaphysics. The aisle stores things designed for holding.”

“So this is the aisle we’d put the Warehouse itself in. If we could do that kind of freaky recursion function... or does that only work the other way, where it’d be recursion for the Warehouse to hold the containers?”

“The aisle’s already itself holding more than one Joseph Cornell box. That’s enough recursion for me.” Leena keeps her tone casual, but she’s further delighted that Claudia is so obviously thinking. Seeing connections and associations: it’s what she’ll need. For the future... Leena stops herself; she doesn’t want to be disturbed, today, by the future. There’s enough to puzzle out in the present, given her stumble, given what now seems to be an increasing disgruntlement in the artifacts’ hum.

And given the fact that the container aisle always gives her pause, for she does have particular friendships here. Certainly those Cornell boxes; artifacts that have true auras thrill her, especially when said auras have been so meticulously constructed. Leena wishes she could have met Cornell, could have sat him down so as to parse his ability to engineer these compact works of acquisition, accumulation: little Warehouses, all of them. Only a few are actual artifacts, but that’s more than most artists could dream of generating. If they ever did so dream... but it’s better that they don’t.

She also casts a regularly kind eye (and ear) on the Wurlitzer 1015 jukebox, because it’s a favorite of Mrs. Frederic from her past, and any window into Mrs. Frederic’s (relative) youth is inherently interesting; this jukebox likes to play the Marcels’ 1961 “Blue Moon” unprompted, and Leena has never gathered sufficient nerve to ask if it might have been a tendency of Mrs. Frederic herself to select the platter that catapulted the constellation of record and container-player to artifact status.

And then there’s the—

“Oh my god,” Claudia says, loudly but more deadpan than seems warranted, given the... unexpected situation? absurdist tableau? catastrophic scene? that now confronts them, and Leena blames her rumination on her aisle-friends for having distracted her from the sensory tsunami of auras that threatens, in this overpowering instant, to drown her.

****

“The artifact currently belongs to a... let’s call it a museum,” Artie is saying. “Well. ‘Belongs.’ I suppose we should say, ‘resides in.’ Hence the case. The argument.”

“Is this about repatriation?” Myka asks. It’s what she associates with museum objects and court fights—but in the next instant she sees she’s let slip from her grasp the idea that she’s supposed to be waiting, inferring. She seizes, freezes. Can everyone see the “oh no!” thought bubble above her head?

Luckily, no one seems to notice, so she forges on: “If so, I think I’d be more convincing making the case for it. Than Helena, I mean.”

“Why?” Helena asks.

“Because you’re British,” Myka says, but she can’t stop there; a babble is building, and with no dam in sight, she burbles on, “so no offense, but there was a lot of honestly indefensible taking and holding of other cultures’ stuff. And you’d be likely to bring that whole thing to mind... so, really, it’s because you sound British.”

“English,” Helena corrects.

“A distinction without a difference,” Myka says, and this time she achieves a levee; she congratulates herself on for once being succinct. Clichéd, but succinct.

“Now I’m offended.”

Oh god. “All I meant was—”

“I’m teasing.”

Her smile fills Myka’s vision. And the prickly pleasure Myka finds in being teased, in being the object of Helena’s smooth humor, fills her soul.

Artie’s voice breaks in, a buoyancy-deflating puncture: “It’s possible she’d be more effective. Implicitly acknowledging the error—no, the criminality—of colonial ways.” He gives Helena another pointed look.

This one’s nationalized, generalized, and Myka tries to dispute it that way: “Americans aren’t angels.” She realizes—too late?— that she’s undercutting her own initial reasoning. No saving that now. “But also, arguing that whatever museum I’m pretending to represent should keep it? I’m not comfortable with that.” As the words leave her, a that’s right shiver—unexpected, unusual—ripples her spine.

Artie says, “And the Warehouse cares intensely about your comfort level, so... oh wait. No. It doesn’t.”

Pete glances at Myka, then says, “Let her off the hook, man. I’ll do it.”

It’s sweet.

But she wants to strangle him for it—because adversaries. She should have kept her mouth shut. A good rule to live by, as she thinks about it. Wait, but is saying she should have done something actually a rule? She can’t live by something she should have done, can she?

“You’ll lose,” Artie says... answering her thought? No, reproving—informing—Pete.

“So what?” Pete says. “Then H.G. wins and we all come home.”

“Let me rephrase: you’ll look like you intended to lose. Judges get tetchy about tanking.”

Claudia mock-gasps. “Oooh, might get disbarred.”

“And then I’d be crying.” Pete says, brushing away imaginary tears. “If I was barred in the first place.”

Artie says, “Your tears won’t move a judge, who might throw the case out entirely, and then where would we be?” He doesn’t wait for an answer: “Without the artifact.”

“If nobody wins, everybody loses,” Claudia intones, sounding like the Delphic oracle. Or Socrates? Something classical, obfuscatory. Obstructionary?

“Not the Elgin Marbles,” Myka says next. “Please, no.” Other than their classicality, she isn’t sure why she’s brought the  into the discussion... is it simply that it’s the biggest repatriation case she knows of—maybe even literally? Now as she thinks about it, though, surely it’s too big. Artie wouldn’t want to generate that kind of publicity, would he? She and Helena wouldn’t be able to fake their way into a case like that, would they? Then again, the two of them in the news... what news they would be...

“Agreed,” Helena says. “Please.”

Myka hadn’t expected the immediate backup—though she’s unsurprised to learn that Helena knows of those disputed rocks—but she’ll take it. She wishes she could reach out a hand and... what? Stroke Helena’s arm in thanks?

Well, why can’t she? Nothing classically obstructionary stands in her way.

So she does.

Helena slides a look her way, not with surprise (of course not); rather, with some cognate of the that’s right ripple.

Which in turn produces a recursive ripple, a catch-hold-echo of right... right... right...

“Artifactually inert,” Artie says as it fades. “As far as we know.”

“Better safe, though,” Claudia enthuses, “so let’s bring those babies in! Pete can carry ’em.”

Pete snorts. “Not even with these guns. Big rocks carved pretty are still big rocks.”

Since when does Pete know anything about the Elgin Marbles? But Myka is being uncharitable. Probably. And besides, she would rather let them have the dispute, for it lulls her back into her earlier reverie, that compelling scenario of she a judge and Helena an advocate... no: a supplicant.

Her reverie... but that not-really (if-only) supplicant interrupts it, saying, “So, not the marbles.” This makes it clear that Myka’s continued expressions of ignorance about “it” have not mattered in the slightest... apparently “it” was never identified? Neither Artie nor anyone else is holding a file, which Myka chooses to interpret as positive, for who could, in such absence, have read anything about whatever’s at stake?

Myka is safe.

And yet she’s not safe at all, for Helena chooses that moment to reach out a reciprocal hand toward Myka. It finds her right biceps, setting off electrical sparks and short-outs and terror—Artie will see! Pete will see! Claudia will see! and as the worst disaster: even Helena will see!—then trailing down to her elbow, fortunately a less sparkily reactive location.

Still. she is not safe at all. Because, among other potential catastrophes: what if Helena tries something like that in court?

****

Pete’s stalking the Warehouse aisles, looking for Myka; she’s been down lately, and he hates it when she takes off like this, like she needs to hide in a cave and lick some wounds she’s trying to pretend she doesn’t have.

But also: he has a vibe.

Sometimes, if a vibe isn’t too insistent, he can shove it onto the Vibe Bench. When he was a kid, he used to talk them away like that, saying it out loud: “Ride the pine, vibe!”

This one he can’t make sit down, and honestly? It comes down to how Myka-vibes sometimes remind him of Mom-vibes, the way they scream IMPORTANT!

Which is why he doesn’t really grok where he’s finding his way to, and that’s why he’s genuinely shocked, practically out of the vibe, by what he sees when he takes a hard turn into the aisle that’s clearly today’s Vibe Hub: it’s H.G., standing there like she belongs or something, like she’s never been gone, like she can just hang out and it’s no big deal.

But it’s definitely some kind of deal. “What are you doing here?” he demands.

She looks like she wants to bite him in half, but she wraps her arms around herself like she’s keeping that in check, like otherwise she’d actually do it. “Conducting a symphony,” she spits. “Weaving a tapestry. Piloting a dirigible. As if any answer could satisfy you.”

She’s totally not wrong. It’s almost funny how totally not wrong she is.

But then he notices that she’s unfolded her arms, that she’s gesturing at the floor. He looks down, down at that cold concrete Warehouse floor, and nothing nothing nothing is funny or even almost, because there, lying there out cold, is Myka. His vibe charges back into the game, and rage takes over: “What did you do?”

TBC

[restless-mode]

8/12/24

been silent on this blog bc i've been GRINDING for this exam (two, actually). have an old pic, an old video of me and my bf enjoying some crunchy leaves and this complete map of data warehouses.

next week i am BOOKED, every day there's something happening but it's gonna be alright.

to-dos list:

#operating systems

◩ complete ES8 map

#databases

▨ study DBMS

#personal

▢ vacuum clean my room

▢ sleep early

[rjzimmerman]

A Banggai cardinalfish swims in Indonesia’s tropical waters. Photo: Jens Petersen (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:

Nothing fascinates Monica Biondo more than the animals often referred to as the ocean’s “living jewels” — the vividly colored little fishes who dance around in its waters.

Biondo, a Swiss marine biologist, became enamored with ocean life as a child after spending many summers snorkeling along the Italian coastline. Nowadays you’re more likely to find her deep-diving into trade records than marine waters. As the head of research and conservation at Fondation Franz Weber, she has spent the past decade searching through data on the marine ornamental fish trade.

These are the colorful fish you see in home aquariums or for sale at pet stores; Biondo wants to know where they came from, how they got there, and what happened to them along the way.

Compared to the clear waters around the coral reefs she’s explored, the records on these fish are frustratingly murky. Wading through them has though provided her with clarity on her calling: shining a light on the aquarium trade’s vast exploitation of these glamorous ocean dwellers.

Her entry into the fray came in the form of a Banggai cardinalfish, a striking little fish endemic to an archipelago in Indonesia that first became known to science in the 1930s. A scientist redescribed the species in 1994, kickstarting a tragic surge in the fish’s popularity for aquariums. Within less than a decade, 90% of the population had disappeared, Biondo says.

After witnessing that rapid decline, along with the failure of countries to subsequently regulate global trade in the species, Biondo was hooked. “That really pushed me into looking into this trade,” she says.

In her search for information she has pored over paperwork in the Swiss Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office’s records warehouse. She and her colleagues at Pro Coral Fish have also spent years rifling through a European Union-wide electronic database called the Trade Control and Expert System (TRACES), which collects information on animal imports.

Although the datasets varied, the questions have remained the same. How many marine ornamental fish are being imported? What species are they? Where did they originate?

These straightforward questions are hard to answer to because the trade — despite being worth billions annually — has no mandatory data-collection requirements. As a result, information gathered about trade in these fishes tends to be opaque and haphazard compared to information on live organisms like farmed food animals.

[pancaketax]

What Remains | Chapter 18 The Hunt (Tony Stark x M! Reader)

TW : Detailed depictions of injuries and abuse. Mentions of past abuse Summary : Tony Stark becomes something beyond human , a machine driven by icy rage, relentless focus, and a singular goal: to find you. After receiving a horrifying call laced with sadistic cruelty and a scream he instantly recognizes as yours, Stark enters a sleepless, foodless, voiceless trance, transforming his office into a war room. Every screen, every algorithm, every ounce of technology is bent to his will in a digital manhunt for your location. When Jarvis finally locates a faint signal in an abandoned warehouse, Stark launches without hesitation, donning a specialized combat suit built for one purpose: ending this.

word count: 16.1k

Previous Chapter - Next Chapter Stark hasn’t closed his eyes. Not for a second. He hasn’t swallowed a bite, hasn’t taken a sip of water. He hasn’t moved from his desk since the exact moment that voice slithered into his ear, slick and jagged like a rusted blade. Since that obscene breath passed through the line, that whisper soaked in menace and sadistic delight. Since that scream that raw, flayed scream, human, far too human ripped from a throat he knows too well, just before silence fell, sharp as a guillotine. Something broke then. Not in him. No. Something froze.

He’s no longer a man, not really. Not in this suspended moment, where even time seems too afraid to move forward. He’s become engine. Mechanism. Open-heart alert system. His blood doesn’t circulate it pulses, furious, carried by a cold, methodical, almost clinical rage. He is anger, but an anger without shouting. An anger that thinks, that calculates, that watches, that waits. A storm contained in a steel cylinder, ready to explode, but for now channeling all its violence into the glacial logic of action.

In the office, the tension is almost tangible. The air feels charged, saturated with something indefinable a blend of ozone, electricity, and pure stress. Every surface vibrates slightly, as if the metal itself shared the heartbeat of its occupant. The silence isn’t soothing. It’s oppressive, built on thick layers of concentration, anticipation, restrained fury. Only mechanical sounds mark the space: the faint crackle of a screen refreshing, the nervous clicks of his fingers on holographic interfaces, the low vibrations of the servers in the adjoining room, humming at full capacity. Around him, a dozen screens stream data without pause. Some display ultra-precise satellite maps, sweeping over New York rooftops for any suspicious movement. Others track mobile signals, tracing the latest paths of every device even remotely connected to the target. Still others comb through databases, merge biometric information, detect faces, match voice prints. A thermal image of a building overlays a 3D city map. An audio feed scrolls at high speed, saturated with static. Nothing escapes analysis. Nothing is left to chance.

Stark is motionless, but every muscle in his body is tense. His back is hunched, elbows braced on the desk edge, fingers clenched around the projected interface hovering above the glass. His bloodshot eyes lock onto the central screen without blinking. His eyelids are heavy, but he doesn’t close them. He can’t. Not until the target is found. Not until the one he’s searching for is no longer missing. He won’t allow himself the luxury of weakness. He swore he’d never let anyone be hurt again. And he holds to his vows the way others hold to weapons. The blue glow of the monitors cuts across his face with surgical cruelty. Every shadow on his skin is a confession: fatigue, deep dark circles, drawn features, hollow cheekbones. But these marks don’t diminish him. They add a near-inhuman intensity to his gaze, a ruthless clarity. A will that, for now, eclipses even the most basic biological needs. He hasn’t slept, because he doesn’t have the right. He hasn’t eaten, because the thought hasn’t even occurred to him. His body is secondary. It’s nothing but a vessel for the mission.

He murmurs sometimes. Commands, codes, equations. He speaks to no one, but the AI responds instantly. Every word he utters is sharp, precise, guided by a logic untouched by panic. One name comes back again and again. A biometric file. A GPS identifier. Trackers. Coordinates. He’s no longer looking for a person — he’s hunting a fixed point in the storm. The center of a search and rescue system. And Stark is ready to flatten entire city blocks to bring that point back to him. When the internal alerts go off soft, discreet, almost polite signaling a drop in blood pressure, critical dehydration, or prolonged hypervigilance, he silences them with a flick of the hand. He shuts them off. Nothing exists outside this room, outside this moment. Outside this mission. The rage is there, but tamed, carved into a weapon.

Somewhere, he knows he’s crossing the line. That he’s nearing an invisible boundary. But he doesn’t care. He’s seen too many people die, too many names fade into archives. This time, he won’t be too late. So he keeps going. Relentlessly. He cross-references data, filters messages, follows leads. He digs, over and over, down to the bone. And behind him, the world can tremble all it wants. He’ll hold. Because he made a promise. Because this time, no one will disappear into the shadows without him tearing them out of the night.

His eyes never leave the screens. They’re locked in, anchored, consumed to the point of obsession. They devour every bit of information, every image, every pixel variation, as if he might uncover a hidden confession. Nothing escapes him. No movement, no data, no anomaly in the flow. His pupils, dilated from exhaustion, cling to the smallest detail, hunting a trace, a footprint, a breath left behind by the one he’s chasing without pause. He’s isolated search zones. Redrawn entire sections of the city. Compared every map of New York with thermal readings, overlaying layers like a surgeon operating through urban tissue. He’s overridden protections on multiple private networks without hesitation. Intercepted anonymous communications, analyzed movement patterns, recalibrated his internal software to tailor the algorithms to a single, solitary target. The tools he designed for international diplomacy, for global crisis response — he’s repurposed them now for a personal hunt. A cold war fought in the digital guts of the city.

And always, he comes back to that name. That shadow. That absence. Matthew. A ghost with no fingerprint, no signal, no flaw to exploit. But Stark refuses that idea. No. That kind of man doesn’t vanish. That kind of man always leaves traces — out of pride. Out of carelessness. Out of vanity. And if it means turning the city inside out, if it means digging down to reinforced concrete, to buried cables and the forgotten strata of the network — then so be it. He’s ready to search through the world’s marrow to find what remains. Cables snake across the floor, twisted like raw nerves, connected to makeshift terminals. Holograms hover in the air, pulsing with spectral, slow, almost organic light. The room, once functional and sterile, has lost its ordinary shape. This is no longer an office. It’s a clandestine command post. A digital war cell born out of urgency, powered by fear and brute will. On one wall, an unstable projection flickers: a gridded map of New York, each red zone corresponding to growing probabilities, invisible tension. Alternating, a partially reconstructed file plays pulled from a burner phone. The lines of code shimmer as if still resisting comprehension.

And at the center of it all, him. Motionless. A sculptor of chaos. He doesn’t move an inch, but his mind roars. He calculates, projects, anticipates at a speed even his most advanced AIs couldn’t match. He’s faster than the machines, because this time, it’s not for a global mission. It’s not to protect a council or a treaty. It’s not for peace. It’s personal. And nothing is more dangerous than a man like him when he’s acting for himself. His face is frozen. Carved from stone. No expression filters through. No emotion leaks out. He hasn’t spoken in hours. Not a word. His jaw is locked, clenched. His chin trembles sometimes under the pressure, but he doesn’t give in. His eyelids, heavy with fatigue, blink on autopilot but his gaze stays sharp, cutting. That look… it belongs to a man who’s already made up his mind. It’s no longer a question of if. It’s a matter of when, how, and how much time is left. And above all, of what will be left of the other man once he finds him. He is cold. Precise. Fatally focused. Each beat of his heart seems to align with the hum of the machines. He’s perfectly synchronized with his environment. A machine among machines. He’s become the system’s core. The cold, methodical intelligence of a silent hunt — carried out without rest, without sleep, without mercy.

The door slides open with a discreet, almost timid sigh. As if it, too, understood that this moment must not be disturbed. No sound dares to break the fragile balance of the room. Not here. Not now. Even the walls seem to hold their breath, petrified by the intensity that fills the space. The bluish light of the screens slices through the artificial darkness in shifting shards, casting sharp, vibrating shadows across Stark’s features — like carvings made by a blade. He doesn’t turn his head. He doesn’t need to look. He already knows. Nothing escapes him. His silence is a barrier, a verdict. He’s there. Frozen. Silent. Unshakable. And around him, the universe seems to understand that something has been set in motion. Something that can no longer be stopped.

Pepper enters without a word. The silence wraps around her instantly, like a heavy veil she doesn’t dare pierce. She says nothing — not yet. Everything about her is more subdued than usual, as if her body has attuned itself to the electric tension of the room. Her usual heels have been traded for flat shoes, chosen mechanically, without real thought. She knew when she got up this morning. No need to read the reports or check the alerts. She felt it, in every fiber of her being — this day would be different. Draining. Slow. Hard. And Tony, on days like this, is not a man to reason with. He becomes a wall. Steel. An unbreachable frontier. This isn’t a state crisis, not one of those media storms they’ve learned to face together, side by side, dressed to perfection with rehearsed smiles. No. This is something else. A silent war. Private. Intimate. And in that kind of war, Tony lets no one in. Almost no one.

In her hands, she holds two mugs. One is for her — a reflex gesture, more for the weight than the content, because she’ll set it down somewhere and forget it immediately. The other is for him. Strong coffee, black, unsweetened, scorching. Just how he likes it. She didn’t ask, didn’t guess. She knows. Because for years, she’s known his silences, his mood swings, his automatic habits. She knows the rare things that bring him a sliver of stability when everything is falling apart. She walks slowly. With that quiet elegance that is uniquely hers. Each step is precise, measured. She avoids the cables snaking across the floor like exposed veins. Dodges the hastily pushed chairs, the luminous angles of suspended holograms hanging in the air, slow and unstable like open wounds. Everything around her pulses, breathes, crackles. The smell of steaming coffee mixes with metallic fumes, with the warm emissions of overheating machines. A fleeting human note in this lair transformed into a war organ.

She approaches. Just a few feet from him now. The blue halo of the screens washes over her, casting cold, almost supernatural shards onto her skin. She still doesn’t say a word. Because she, too, senses what’s happening here. She reads silence like an ancient language. She knows that if she speaks too soon, too quickly, she could shatter everything — the balance, the tension, the fierce concentration holding him upright. Tony doesn’t even turn his head. He doesn’t need to. He knows it’s her. He saw, without really looking, her silhouette trembling on the standby screen, like a spectral apparition. He recognized her breath — controlled, steady, modulated by habit not to disrupt critical moments. He felt her presence the way you feel a warm current crossing a frozen room: discreet, but undeniable. She’s here.

But he doesn’t move. Not an inch. His fingers keep dancing over the interfaces, his eyes fixed on the data. His jaw remains locked, his posture rigid, unyielding. He doesn’t reject her presence. He accepts it without acknowledging it. She’s part of the setting, part of the very structure of this ongoing war. She is the silent anchor he’ll never ask for, but needs all the same. And she knows it. So she stays. Present. Still. Mug in hand. Waiting for him to speak — or to break. His fingers glide over the holographic interface with almost surgical precision. They graze the projected data blocks in the air, moving them, reorganizing, dissecting them as if trying to carve raw truths buried under layers of code, pixels, and silence. A building on 43rd Street. An unusual thermal signature spotted at 3:12 a.m. A encrypted phone line briefly located in South Brooklyn, before vanishing into a labyrinth of anonymous relays. He isolates. He cross-references. He sorts. He discards. He starts again. Every manipulation is an act of war. He develops a thousand hypotheses per minute, evaluates them, abandons them, replaces them. A thousand leads, a thousand fleeting micro-truths, vanishing as soon as he tries to fix them. And always, that voice in his head. That twisted, wet breath haunting him since the call. That scream — shrill, inhuman. That panic. And the silence that followed. The kind of silence only blood knows how to echo.

Pepper, still silent, watches. She hasn’t moved since entering. Her eyes shift from the screen to Tony’s face, then to his hands. She sees what he refuses to admit: his movements are less precise. They tremble sometimes. Nervous flickers, involuntary, imperceptible to others — but not to her. There’s that tiny jolt in his palm when two images overlap without matching. That subtle twitch of his fingers when the algorithm returns an empty result. That tension in his joints with every failure, every dead end. She takes a step forward. Slowly, silently. She places the mug at the edge of the desk, just within his field of vision. Not too close, not too far. She sets it where he could reach for it without thinking, by reflex, if some part of him still remembered how to drink something. If his lips still knew how to welcome anything other than orders. But deep down, she knows he probably won’t. Not now. Maybe not at all. She doesn’t touch him. Doesn’t interrupt. But her eyes never leave him. They linger on his neck, that taut, rigid line, almost painful. On his shoulders, hunched forward, drawn tight like bows ready to snap. She reads the exhaustion in the way his muscles clench, in how he holds his breath when results elude him, in that violent stubbornness that keeps him from stepping back — even for a second.

Then she speaks. Barely. Her voice is a whisper. A caress in a space saturated with tension. A suspended breath, respectful. As if she were speaking to a wounded animal, to a raw heart that a single harsh word might cause to shatter.

— "You should drink something."

No reproach. No judgment. Not even any real expectation. Just an invitation, soft, almost unreal in this room ruled by the cold light of screens and the hum of machines. A reminder, simple and human, that he still has a body. That he’s still a man. Not just an overheated mind, a burning brain, dissociated from everything else. She doesn’t expect a response. She doesn’t even want one. What she’s offering isn’t a solution. It’s a breath. An interlude. A hand offered at a distance, without conditions, in the eye of a cyclone she can’t stop — but refuses to abandon. Stark doesn’t answer. The silence remains, impenetrable. But she sees it. That blink. Singular. Slow. Almost lagging. Like a discreet malfunction in an otherwise perfect line of code. A micro-event, almost invisible but for her, it means everything. He heard her. He understood. Somewhere beneath the layers of adrenaline and frozen focus, her words registered. But he can’t stop. Not yet. Not while what he’s searching for remains out of reach.

She moves a little closer. Her steps are slow, calculated. The slightest movement could shatter the fragile equilibrium he maintains between lucidity and overload. She skirts the screens projecting a relentless flow of data, passes through the light beams of overlapping maps, walks through the holograms dissecting New York in real time: facades, sewer lines, rooftops, drone paths, shifting heat points. A fractured digital world, reconstructed for a single mission. And she, the only organic presence in this sanctuary of glass and light, walks forward until she’s beside him. Upright. Calm. Unshakable. She stands there, just a meter away. A silhouette in the bluish light. A presence. An anchor. Non-intrusive, but constant. And in that data-saturated silence, she looks at the screen in front of him. Blurry images flash by. Figures captured by an old security camera. Red dots blink in the darkness of a poorly mapped basement. Nothing conclusive. Nothing obvious. But she sees beyond that. She’s not looking at the screen. She’s looking at him.

She sees what he doesn’t show. What he himself struggles to ignore. That back, a bit more hunched than before. That hand clenched around the desk edge, knuckles white with tension. That breath, irregular, barely perceptible — but betraying an inner fight. That exhaustion, layered in invisible strata, like ash over an ember that refuses to die. He’ll never admit it. That’s not an option. But she knows. He’s burning out. Eroding. Slowly bleeding out everything that keeps him human. So she acts. Gently, but without hesitation. She reaches out. Picks up the mug left on the edge of the desk, still faintly steaming. And she moves it. Places it right in front of him. Where his gaze can’t avoid it. Where his fingers could reach it without thinking. A mundane gesture, almost insignificant. But heavy with meaning.

— "You need to stay sharp." Her voice is soft, but firm. It cuts through the thickness of the moment. "If he’s counting on you, he needs you at your best. Not collapsing."

He stays still for another second. Then, slowly, his gaze lifts. Like he’s returning from a far-off place, from a tension zone where the real world no longer reaches. He looks at her. Directly in the eyes. And she sees. She sees everything. The fatigue eating away at the edges. The redness at the corners of his eyes, signs of brutal sleeplessness. But most of all, that clarity. That burning precision still intact in the depths of his pupils. It’s a gaze that doesn’t waver. The gaze of a man broken a thousand times — but still standing. And in that gaze, she reads three things.

Fear. Raw. Visceral. The fear of not making it in time. Rage. Pure. Mechanical. The kind he holds back to avoid destroying everything.

And the promise. Absolute. Irrevocable.

— "I’m going to get him out."

No conditional. No wiggle room. He doesn’t say he’ll try. He doesn’t say if he’s still alive. He refuses to let those phrases exist. He leaves no space for doubt. Because doubt would be a crack. And if he cracks now, he collapses. She nods. Once. That’s all it takes. A silent agreement. A trust she offers him, without questions. Then she places a hand on his shoulder. Right there. A simple contact, but real. Solid. A light, firm pressure. Just enough for him to know he’s not alone. That she’s here. That she will remain here. Even if there’s nothing more she can do. An anchor in the chaos.

— "Then drink."

She adds nothing else. No need. Not now. And then she turns on her heel, leaving behind that room saturated with tension and blue light, walking away in silence, her steps barely audible on the hard floor. She slips away as she came — discreetly, with that silent dignity that’s hers alone. No unnecessary gesture. No look back. Just the quiet certainty that he heard her. That he understood. And that he’ll do what he must. A breath. A second. Then another. Stark remains still. His eyes still locked on the numbers, on the blurry images, on the shattered map of New York pulsing slowly before him. A suspended moment, almost frozen in code and light projections. And then, slowly, as if his body weighed a ton, his fingers stretch out. Slow. Almost hesitant. They brush the mug, grasp it. Raise it to his lips.

One sip. Scalding. Bitter. Perfect.

The taste, too strong, seizes his tongue, his throat, then burns its way down like a reminder. He closes his eyes for a second. Not out of pleasure. Out of necessity. Because that simple contact — the liquid, the heat, the sensation — reminds him that he still exists outside the war machine he’s become. And then, almost immediately, his eyes open again. Latch onto the screen. The map. The hunt. The engine restarts. But behind the invisible armor, behind the hard gaze and automated gestures, the man is still there. Just enough. For now. The mug, barely set down on the desk, hits the surface with a muffled clack. The sound, though minimal, seems to shake the atmosphere. Stark exhales. One of those irritated sighs that vibrate between clenched teeth, that fatigue turns into frustration, and frustration reshapes into buried anger. His fingers snap against the desk, nervously. Not a blow. Just a dry, rhythmic sound. Accumulated tension seeking an outlet, a culprit, a breaking point. Something to strike — or someone. But no one here is responsible. No one except him.

And then, it bursts out.

— "Fuck… why didn’t he activate it?"

The voice is low. But it slices the air like a blade. Sharp. Brittle. It doesn’t need to be loud to carry. It’s so charged with tension that it seems to vibrate in the walls. No explosive rage. No yelling. Just that clean line, that icy edge that says it all. It’s not a question. It’s an unbearable fact. A flaw in the plan. A betrayal of logic. He doesn’t need to clarify. The device, the gesture, the fear behind it all of it is obvious. In the hallway, Pepper has stopped. Without realizing it. As if her muscles responded to that voice before her mind did. She’s frozen. And she understands. She knows too. He’s talking about the device. That small, discreet piece, barely bigger than a coin, that he slipped into an anodized case with a falsely detached air. That neutral tone he adopts when the stakes are too high to admit. He presented it like a gadget. Just another safety.

A thing for emergencies. "Press and hold for three seconds" he said. Simple. Effective. And his location would be transmitted to the Tower in real time, with immediate triangulation and constant tracking. He insisted, without seeming to. Like a father too proud of a dangerous toy. Like a man who’s already lost everything once and won’t let chance roll the dice again. The kind of thing he doesn’t give to everyone. The kind of thing he only entrusts once. And even then. Under the pretense of humor. Veiled in sarcasm. And yet, you didn’t activate it. That thought gnaws at him. Consumes him. Because if it wasn’t forgetfulness, then it’s worse. Then maybe there wasn’t time. Or maybe he was afraid. Or maybe you thought it wouldn’t make a difference. And that Tony can’t accept.

Because the alternative… he can’t even imagine it. He built it in just a few hours. One sleepless night, a few curses, two black coffees, and a diagram sketched on a crumpled napkin. Because he was tired. Tired of not knowing. Tired of not being able to protect. Tired of seeing him wander through New York like a ghost without an anchor, sleeping in sketchy squats, living on the generosity of people as reliable as March weather. He was done with uncertainty, with instability. So he made something simple, small, efficient. A distress beacon. A miniature safeguard. Mostly to protect him from himself. He even tucked a secondary mic inside. Discreet, compressed in anodized metal layers. Inaudible to the human ear. Just a sensor, a passive ear, in case something went wrong. Because he knew it could go wrong. Because deep down, he felt that danger was never far. And now? Nothing. No signal. No vibration. No blinking light. No trace. The void. Nothingness. The shadow of a silence that screams. Abruptly, Stark spins in his chair. The movement is sharp, abrupt. His fingers slam down on the projected keyboard in the air, striking commands, executing code, calling internal logs. He pulls up the history. Checks for connection attempts. Scans the security logs, network access, secondary frequencies. No recording. No triggered signal. No distress call. The device was never activated.

— "It was right there." His voice is hoarse. Slow. Painfully contained. "Within reach. Three fucking seconds. And I could’ve…"

He cuts himself off. Right there. The breath caught. No anger. Not yet. It’s not rage. It’s vertigo. An inner fall. He sees the scene again. Precisely. In the hall, just days ago. He was holding the little device between his fingers, between two sarcastic lines. A detached, mocking tone, as always. Trying not to push too hard. Not to seem worried. He said it with a smirk, hands in his pockets: "Just in case. It beeps, it blinks, I show up. Easy."

And he remembers. That hesitation. The lowered gaze. That muttered thank you, without real conviction. As if it didn’t really concern him. As if he didn’t believe it. As if he was afraid to disturb and didn’t think he was worth coming for. Stark clenches his teeth. Bitterness sticks in his throat.

— "He didn’t get it, did he?"

The question escapes. Not aimed at anyone. Not really. He’s speaking to the void, the desk, the walls. To himself. To the echo in his head.

— "He thinks it only works for others." His voice tightens. Fractures. "That no one comes for him. That he has to wait for it to get worse. That he has to nearly die to justify help."

His fingers slap a screen with the back of his hand. A furious swipe. The images vanish in a spray of light.

— "Shit. Shit."

He gets up. Too abruptly. His chair rolls back. He paces, circles, like a caged beast. A shadow of armor without the armor. He runs a hand through his hair, ruffling it without thinking. His gestures are nervous, disordered. He teeters between genius logic and raw emotion.

— "I had him in my pocket," he breathes. "I could’ve found him in under two minutes."

His fist hits the back of the chair. A dry strike. Not brutal. But deep. A dull echo that lingers in the air.

— "But no. He keeps it on him like a fucking keychain. A symbolic thing. A gadget he doesn’t want to use. Because he doesn’t want to be a bother. Because he doesn’t want to raise the alarm."

He suddenly freezes. His breath halts. He stares at the floor as if seeking an answer no data can provide. The silence stretches. Then, in an almost inaudible murmur, rougher, more bitter:

— "He’s convinced no one’s coming."

And that thought. That simple idea. It destroys him from the inside. He closes his eyes. Clenches his fists so tightly his knuckles turn white. He fights. To hold back what rises. He won’t say he’s afraid. He won’t say he’s in pain. That he blames himself until it eats him alive. No. He won’t say it. So he turns back. Resumes his place. His fingers return to the controls. His gaze locks onto the screens. The maps. The fragmented data. What he still has. What he can still control. Because if he can’t turn back time… then he’ll find a way to catch up. No matter the cost. And he mutters under his breath:

— "I’m going to find him. Device or not."

Then he types. Not to write. Not to command. He types like someone striking. As if his fingers could punch through matter, bend the universe, shatter the whole world through the silent keys of a holographic keyboard. Every keystroke is a discharge. A sharp hit. A blow aimed at that invisible wall he can’t break through. A fight of data against the void, of will against absence. He types with an urgency that allows no delay, no hesitation. As if life, somewhere, depended on it.

Because it is.

And in the meantime, silence remains. Insidious. Heavy. The tenacious shadow of the action that never happened. The one that would have been enough. Three seconds. A press of the thumb. And he would have known. He would have moved. He would have run. He would have acted. He would have been there. But no. That absence, Stark feels it lodged in his throat, like acid he can’t swallow. It rises, clings, radiates. It stays, constant, until he brings him back. Until he has proof tangible, irrefutable that it’s still possible. That he’s still alive. The minutes pass. Like blades. Sharp. Precise. Unforgiving.

They cut into his focus, erode his patience, chip away at his certainty. Every second is a brutal reminder that time is passing. And this time, time isn’t an ally. He feels it slipping over his skin like a cold blade that can’t be stopped. But he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t blink. The office is bathed in semi-darkness. The blinds are down, the outside light filtered, as if daylight itself no longer had the right to enter. Only the screens cast their bluish glow on the walls, on the cables, on the opaque glass. And on him. That cold, spectral light slices across his closed-off face in sharp angles. Hollowed cheekbones. Brow etched with tension lines. Lips tight. He looks carved from quartz. Cold. Hard. Unyielding.

His eyes, fixed, barely blink. They follow lines of code, coordinates, overlaid maps, signal analyses, with inhuman precision. His stare is locked. Obsessed. He doesn’t falter. He scans. He waits. His fingers still move. Barely. With mechanical regularity. An almost hypnotic rhythm. They glide over holographic interfaces, brush through data windows, launch diagnostics, cross-reference streams. There’s no hesitation anymore, no improvisation. Only a logical sequence. An algorithm embodied in a man who refuses to give up. He doesn’t speak. Hasn’t for a while. He doesn’t even think — not in the usual sense. Human thoughts, full of doubts, memories, emotions, have been pushed to the background. He leaves space only for function. He calculates. He maps. He eliminates. He acts. Because that’s all he can do. And because as long as he acts, as long as he moves, as long as he searches, he’s not imagining the worst. And the countdown continues — silent, relentless. Invisible but omnipresent, it eats at his nerves like a tourniquet pulled too tight. A constant, dull pressure. There’s no number on the screen, no red blinking timer, but he feels it. In every heartbeat. In every passing minute, every interface click, every breath that’s too short, too sharp. He feels it under his skin like slow-diffusing poison.

Twenty-four hours.

That was the deadline. The ultimatum. Spat in his face with disgusting insolence, with the kind of sneering arrogance Stark knows too well. A provocation. A signature. A trap — not even hidden. A price laid out in black and white. The kind of message sent when you’re sure you have the upper hand. But it wasn’t the money that kept him awake all night. Not the numbered threat. Not the offshore account, not the conditions. That, he could have handled. Bought peace. Hacked the system. Turned the trap back on its maker. That’s not what stopped him from blinking, that jammed his throat, that retracted his muscles like a shock. It’s something else. It’s the image. Frozen. Unstable. Blurry. But recognizable. It’s the sound. That breath. That scream. Distorted by distance. By network static. But raw. Human. Ripped out. So real that even now, he still hears it. He could replay it in his head a hundred times, a thousand. He knows it by heart. The tone, the break in the voice, the burst of brutal panic just before everything was swallowed by silence.

That fucking silence. That’s what’s destroying him. What eats at him. What stops him from breathing normally. The silence afterward. The absolute nothing. That break that said everything, summed everything up. That screamed at him what he failed to hear in time. What he should have seen coming. That silence — Stark will never forgive it. Not the other. Not himself. Then suddenly, a voice slices through the air. Soft. Controlled. Synthetic. Like a strand of silk stretched to the limit, about to snap — but still holding.

— “Mr. Stark.”

He doesn’t even turn his head. He’d recognize that voice among a thousand. It’s been there forever — in his ear, in his walls, in his head. An extension of himself.

— “I’m listening, Jarvis.”

— “I believe I’ve found something.”

A shiver. Cold. Brutal. It shoots up his spine like an electric surge. For one heartbeat, his heart forgets to beat. Then everything reactivates all at once. Adrenaline. Tension. Hypervigilance.

— “Talk.”

Instantly, one of the main screens expands. The map of the city appears — familiar and vast — then begins a slow zoom. Details sharpen. Colors darken. The center pulls back. The frame shifts. Outskirts. Sparse buildings. Wasteland. Finally, a precise point. An abandoned industrial zone. Gray. Timeworn. Forgotten by the world. Drowned in abandonment fog. Where no one looks anymore. Where things are hidden when no one wants them found. Coordinates blink at the bottom of the screen. Precise. Cold. Real.

— “A minimal network activity was detected,” Jarvis continues. “Almost nothing. A very weak signal — just a few microseconds of connection — but enough to leave a trace. It was a disposable phone.”

Stark steps forward. He’s drawn to the map like it’s magnetic. His eyes latch onto the screen, fix on it, hold. He sees beyond the image. Through the ruined facades, under the layers of metal and dust. He wants to believe he can see what’s hidden there. That something is waiting.

— “Can you confirm?”

— “The model’s signature matches what we detected during the call. It briefly connected to a secondary relay antenna nearby. It might’ve gone unnoticed, but—”

He’s no longer listening. Or rather, he hears everything. He registers it all, but his mind is already elsewhere. Locked in. Compressed around a single fact. A single certainty. His thoughts tighten, converge on a single point. A red dot. Blinking. Clear. An abandoned warehouse. No activity for over ten years. No cameras. No patrols. No recorded movement. Nothing. The kind of place you choose when you don’t want to be found. The kind of place where secrets are buried. Or people. And then, a single thought imposes itself. Emerges from the chaos like a brutal flash of truth. A certainty branded into his mind like a red-hot iron.

You’re there.

Not maybe. Not probably. Not possibly. You’re there. His fist clenches. Slowly. Each finger curling until the knuckles turn white. He closes his eyes. One second. One breath. One anchor. Then opens them again. And in his gaze, there’s no more doubt. No more fear. No more wandering emotion. Just steel. Just fire. Just the mission.

— “Prepare everything. Now.”

And in that exact moment, the whole world narrows. There’s no more sound. No more fatigue. No more failure. Only this. A straight line. A single target. A burning urgency. To get you out. Pepper is there. Just behind him. Motionless. Straight as a blade. Her arms crossed tightly against her, in a posture that might seem cold to someone who doesn’t know her. But it’s not distance. It’s a barrier. A dam. A desperate attempt to hold back what she feels rising.

The pale glow of the screens casts his shadow on the floor, long and sharp, like a silent specter frozen in anticipation. Around them, the room is bathed in incomplete darkness, pierced only by the soft flickering blue halos on the glass surfaces — witnesses to this sleepless night that stretches on and on.

His face, usually so mobile, so expressive — the face that knows how to smile even during the worst press conferences, that can reassure with a single look — is now closed. Frozen. Like carved in marble. His jaw slightly clenched. His brows drawn in a barely perceptible but unyielding tension. But what betrays it all are his eyes. A gleam, contained. A discreet fire. Both anxious and annoyed. A light that flickers between anguish and a barely concealed anger.

She watches him. In silence. Lips tight. Shoulders tense. And she knows. She knows exactly what’s going on in his head. She knows the gears, the silences, the calculated movements. She recognizes this posture. This calm. This false calm. This almost elegant stillness that always comes just before impact. She’s seen it once. Maybe twice, in her entire life. And each time, something broke afterward. A wall. A promise. Someone. So she speaks. Not to convince him. But to try and hold him back for just one more moment at the edge of the abyss.

— “You should wait for the police, Tony.”

Her voice is calm. Measured. Perfectly composed. But it cuts through the air like a blade honed too well. It slices without shouting, without striking. It hits the mark. He doesn’t respond. Not right away. He moves. Slowly at first, then with dreadful precision. He reaches for the back of his chair, pulls his leather jacket from it — the one he wears when everything becomes too real, too dangerous, too personal. He puts it on in one sharp, fast motion. Automatic. Without even thinking. Everything is rehearsed. His movements are crisp, stripped of any hesitation. He’s no longer reflecting. He’s in motion.

One hand slides into the side drawer of his desk. The metal barely creaks. He pulls out a small object, barely bigger than a watch case. Smooth. Chrome. Discreet. He inspects it for a fraction of a second, spins it between his fingers, gauges it. His gaze clings to it, focused, as if making sure it’s the right one. Then he slips it into the inner pocket of his jacket. A tracker. A prototype. Maybe both. Maybe something else. When Tony Stark leaves like this, he never leaves empty-handed. And in the suspended tension of the room, in that moment when every gesture weighs like a decision, Pepper feels her heart pound harder. Because she knows, once again, he won’t change his mind. Not this time.

Without a word. He crosses the room like someone going to war. No haste, no visible tension. Just a methodical, silent advance, heavy with intention. Each step echoes faintly on the floor, absorbed by the cold light of the still-lit screens, by the walls saturated with nervous electricity. He heads toward the elevator, straight, relentless, like a guided missile.

— “Tony.”

This time, her voice cuts through the space. Louder. Sharper. She’s dropped the polite calm. There’s urgency in that word, a crack, something tense, fragile. Pepper steps forward, rounds the table. It’s not a command. It’s not a plea either. It’s a disguised entreaty, cloaked in reason, offered as a last attempt to connect. She’s searching for a crack. A hold. Any one. Not to stop him — she’s never held that illusion — but to slow the momentum. To crack the armor. To make him think. Just one more second.

— “This is exactly what he wants. For you to charge in headfirst. For him to have control.”

He stops. His body freezes all at once, mid-distance from the elevator whose open doors wait, patient, like the jaws of a steel beast. Slowly, he turns toward her. Not violently. Not with irritation. But with that icy precision that, in him, equals all the angers in the world. He looks at her. And his gaze is black. Not empty. Not crazed. No. It’s a sharp gaze. Cutting. Shaped like a glass blade, able to slice cleanly without ever shaking. He stares at her, without flinching, without softening the impact. His shoulders slightly raised, chin lowered, neck taut. A compact, tense posture. Not defensive. Not exactly. More like a predator’s. The eyes of a man who sees no alternate paths. Only the target.

— “You think he has control?”

His voice is low. Deep. Vibrating with that particular intensity he only uses in very rare moments — when everything tips, when what remains inside compresses until it becomes unstoppable. Every word is controlled. Measured. Almost calmly delivered. But in their precision, there’s something unsettling. A promise. A fracture forming. Silence falls behind that phrase. Suddenly. A thick silence. Charged. Almost unbreathable. It lasts only a few seconds, but they seem to stretch time. The elevator still waits behind him. The slightly open doors pulse softly, as if they sensed the suspended moment. Then he adds, without raising his voice, without looking away:

— “He made the biggest mistake of his life taking him.”

And it’s not a threat. It’s not provocation. It’s a verdict. A raw, cold truth carved in marble. It’s a fact. And it’s far worse than a scream. Then he turns away. One last time. And he steps into the elevator. He doesn’t look back. Doesn’t leave a phrase hanging. Doesn’t try to reassure. He disappears into the steel maw, and the doors close on him with a quiet hiss. Pepper remains there. Upright. Frozen. Her arms cross a little tighter, as if to hold back something threatening to collapse. The screen lights continue to flicker over her unmoving features, but they’re not what illuminates her. It’s intuition. Instinct. The one that whispers what she already knows deep down, what she’s felt from the beginning. Something is going to explode. And this time, she’s not sure anyone will come out unscathed.

The metallic floor barely vibrates beneath his steps. Just a discreet, restrained resonance, almost respectful. But in the frozen silence of the hangar, each echo seems to strike the air like a muffled detonation. Every step is a warning. A countdown. A declaration of war. The space is vast. Immense. A cathedral of technology bathed in cold, clinical, almost surgical light. The walls, made of reinforced glass and brushed steel, reflect sharp, precise flashes, slicing his shadow with every movement. Nothing here is decorative. Everything is functional. Calibrated. Optimized. Ready to serve. Ready to open, to strike, to launch. Ready to close behind him, too.

Tony moves with slow, controlled steps. Nothing rushed. He’s not running. He’s not hurrying. He knows exactly where he’s going. Every stride is calculated. Controlled. His gaze is fixed straight ahead, unwavering. No detours. No curiosity. His body is tense, but steady. Focused. There is no room left for doubt. At the center of the hangar, the launch platform awaits him. A circle of polished steel, inlaid with white LEDs pulsing gently, slowly, like a heart in standby. The light follows a steady, hypnotic rhythm, as if the structure itself were breathing. It sleeps. But it's ready to awaken at the slightest command. Around him, holographic showcases come to life at his approach. Sensors recognize his presence. Interfaces open by themselves. Images appear, fluid, clear. Silhouettes rise in bluish light, floating like specters of war.

His suits. The most recent. The strongest. The fastest. Masterpieces of power and precision, lined up in military silence. No words. No announcements. They stand there, frozen, waiting, like a metallic honor guard ready to activate at the slightest signal. Majestic. Relentless. Inhuman. They are beautiful in their coldness. Intimidating. Perfect. But he doesn't look at any of them. Not a single glance. Not a hint of hesitation. He passes through them like one walks through a memory too familiar to still fascinate. The suit doesn’t matter. Not this time. He isn’t here for spectacle, or showy power. He doesn’t want to impress, or buy time. He wants only one thing.

Efficiency. Extraction. The end.

His steps remain steady. His silhouette moves alone among the giants of metal. And in his wake, the air seems to vibrate with low tension, restrained anger, pain too vast to be named. The soldier is on the move. And what he’s about to do now… he’ll do it without flinching. His gaze is fixed. Frozen. With an almost inhuman intensity. He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t deviate. He aims. His attention is a taut line between two points: himself, and the target. It’s not anger you see in his eyes. That would be too simple. Too mundane. No — it’s worse. It’s frozen resolve. A sharp calm like a scalpel's edge. Clinical determination, purged of raw emotion, as if every feeling had been distilled, compressed into a single objective: locate, neutralize, retrieve. At all costs.

The suit he’s come for… it’s not the one from interviews. Not the one for demos. Not the one that dazzles crowds or makes headlines. This one, he only brings out when someone has to fall. No flash. No light. No declaration. With a sharp gesture, he activates the control interface embedded in the platform. The floor lights intensify, blink once, then a metal ring slowly rises from the ground, encircling him with solemn gravity. Everything remains silent. Nothing overreacts. Everything is perfectly calibrated. Robotic arms unfold around him, in a mechanical choreography of military precision. They don’t tremble. They don’t hesitate. They take position, ready to interlock, to serve, to build the weapon.

— "Omega configuration."

His voice snaps. Dry. Dense. Like a hammer strike on glass. And instantly, the machines comply. Without delay. Without flaw. The first pieces of the suit lock around his legs, securing his joints, enclosing his muscles in layers of reinforced alloy. The boots anchor to his feet with a soft hiss, each plate sliding into place with a perfectly tuned metallic click. Then the chest modules rise, locking over his ribcage. The red and gold lines slowly take shape, forming a symmetrical, ruthless architecture. Nothing is superfluous. Everything is there to protect, to absorb, to strike. The metal climbs along his arms, embeds into his shoulders, clamps onto his back. A vengeful exoskeleton. A body of war. Every movement is fluid, exact. The machine knows his rhythm. It knows his silence. It recognizes this moment when Tony Stark is no longer joking. He lowers his head slightly. The helmet drops with a magnetic hiss. It seals with a muffled chhhk. Instantly, his vision turns red. The interface lights up. Sensors activate. Data streams appear. Code scrolls. Maps. Thermal signals. Local comms networks. Building schematics. Ballistic paths.

He’s inside. He’s ready.

— "J.A.R.V.I.S., send the flight plan."

— "Coordinates locked. Route optimized. Risks assessed."

A moment. Just one. A tenuous silence. Like a held breath. Then Jarvis’s voice, lower, almost hesitant. A soft note. A nearly human tone, as if trying to reach through the metal to something deeper.

— "Tony… you don’t have to do this alone."

Not a tactical suggestion. Not a precaution. An offering. An outstretched hand. But Tony doesn’t respond. Not yet. One beat. Just a suspended moment between question and answer. But it won’t come. Because he’s not. Not alone. Not really. It’s not solitude that lives inside him. It’s worse. It’s that weight, hanging on his chest like an anvil: responsibility. He feels responsible. And that kind of responsibility can’t be delegated. Can’t be shared. It must be borne. Endured. To the end. He’s not doing this because he’s alone. He’s doing it because he’s the one who must. Because he was there when it happened. Because he should have seen, understood, foreseen. And because he will never forgive himself if he arrives too late.

A metallic breath escapes his shoulders. Light, but precise. The thrusters arm with a restrained growl. Internal turbines hum softly, like a beast holding back its power before leaping. The entire platform tenses. A low vibration rises under his feet, echoing the energy condensed beneath his heels. The lights turn orange. The floor opens. Slowly. In segments. Like a mechanical wound revealing the hangar’s nuclear heart. The air grows denser. Warmer. Electrified. Stark bends his knees. His muscles instinctively adjust for the imminent thrust. And then, without hesitation, without countdown, without another word…

He lifts off the ground.

With a piercing roar, the suit tears through the air. Flames burst from his heels, searing the platform, and Tony’s body becomes a comet of metal and fire shooting through the open ceiling, soaring at blinding speed into the already paling night. The hunt has begun.

The sky races around him. A continuous stream, distorted by speed, slashed by incandescent trails. Every inch of the armor vibrates under the strain, every thruster hums with surgical precision. The wind slams into him, compressed, transformed into pure force that only the flight algorithms manage to contain. The city stretches out below. Gigantic. Vast. Insignificant. Skyscrapers blur past like mirages. Rooftops, streets, glowing points of light — all turn into abstraction. But he sees nothing. Not the glowing windows, not the crowded avenues, not the numbers blinking across his heads-up display. Not even the overlaid messages, trajectory readings, or secondary alerts. He sees only one red dot. One destination. One objective. And nothing else exists.

He thinks only of you.

Of your body, twisted under the blows. Of your features, contorted by pain. Of your breath, ragged, torn, like each inhale is a battle against agony. Of your face, bruised, sullied, pressed against a floor too cold, too dirty, too real. He sees the blood, the unnatural angle of your shoulder, the fear diluted in your half-closed eyes. He sees everything. Even what you tried to hide. He still hears that fucking scream. The one he never should’ve heard. The one he should’ve prevented, before it ever existed. A scream you can’t fake. A scream torn from you, raw, visceral. He heard it through the phone, compressed, muffled by your breath, crushed by the violence of the moment. But despite the static, despite the distance, he felt it. Like a blade to the heart. Like a shockwave that didn’t just hit him. It went straight through him.

And in his mind, that sound loops. Again. And again. And again. Louder than any explosion. More violent than a collapsing building. It’s not a memory. It’s a living burn. An active wound. He sees it all again. Every second. Every word. Every tone. That bastard’s voice.

Matthew.

Every syllable spat like poison. Every word sculpted to wound. To provoke. To leave a mark. Not on you — on him. It was all planned. Orchestrated. A performance. A slow, cold, painfully precise execution. Meant for one person: Tony Stark. To hit him. To show him how badly he failed. To push where it hurts most.

And it worked. Fuck, it worked.

He still feels how his throat closed. The exact moment his heart skipped a beat. The absolute void that swallowed him when he realized he was too late to stop it but maybe not too late to save you. That instant shift, when all logic shattered, replaced by one certainty. He will pay. Not for the humiliation. Not for the provocation. But for putting you in that state. For daring to lay a hand on you. And Stark, now, isn’t flying toward a hideout. He’s flying toward an execution. His heart is pounding too hard. It no longer syncs with the armor’s rhythm. It hammers against his ribcage like a primal reminder that, beneath all the metal, despite all the tech, he is still a body. A man. And that body is boiling. His fingers tighten inside the gauntlets. The joints, calibrated down to the micrometer, creak under the pressure. He clenches. Too hard. Pointlessly. As if the pain might return control to him. As if he’s clinging to the sensation of something real. The internal temperature climbs a notch. A brief alert flashes, notified by a beep that Jarvis cancels instantly. He knows. Even the tech feels that something is cracking. That the tension line has reached a critical threshold. The tactile sync grows more nervous, less fluid. Not from failure — from resonance. As if the suit itself were reacting to the rage boiling beneath the metal. As if it knew he’s on the verge of detonating.

But he doesn’t scream. He doesn’t speak. He breathes. And he moves forward. Because rage — real rage the kind that doesn’t erupt but eats you alive, the kind that carves deep and anchors in silence, isn’t fire. It’s ice. A blade. A metallic tension that sharpens second by second. This is no longer about ransom. This is no longer an intervention. It’s not even a mission anymore. It’s personal. Because you… you’re not just some kid he hired. You’re not an intern, not a checkbox on some HR dashboard. You’re not a casting mistake he corrected in passing. You’re not one more name on a list of talent. You’re not a recruit. You’re that lost kid who showed up one morning with bags heavier than your shoulders, a voice too quiet, gestures too small. The one who looked at screens like they mattered more than the world. The one who barely spoke, but worked until you shook. Until you collapsed. Without ever complaining. Without ever asking for help. The one who clung to the work like it was the surface of a frozen lake. Just to keep from drowning. And that’s where it started.

Tony doesn’t know exactly when. When it slipped. When he stopped seeing you as an employee and started caring differently. Started checking if you’d eaten. Turning concern into jokes — but counting the times you said "not hungry." Setting rules. Break times. Making sure you got home. That you slept. That you didn’t vanish into the blind spots. Getting used to hearing you mutter when he worked too late. Paying attention. And now, he realizes it too late. This thing, this invisible thread, clumsy, imperfect, but real… it’s there. Damn it, it’s there. And now, you’re gone. And he’s going to cross fire, smash through every wall, burn everything down to find you. Because nothing else matters now. And that’s what’s eating him alive. Not guilt. Not passing doubt. No a slow burn, rooted deep in his chest. A slow poison, distilled with every heartbeat. Because that little idiot… you had a device. A fucking distress device. Not just any gadget. Not a toy.

A device he designed. Refined. Gave to you. Built in haste, but with care. Meant for this. To stop this. To block the worst. So he’d never have to hear screams like that. So he could get there before the blood spilled. And you didn’t even use it. Not a press. Not a signal. Nothing. You took it all. To the end. In silence. Like always. And that’s what drives him mad. The silence. That fucking habit of suffering quietly. As if it doesn’t count. As if your pain isn’t valid. As if your life isn’t worth protecting. As if pressing a button to ask for help… was already asking too much. As if he wouldn’t have come.

And now? Now you’re in the hands of a madman. A psycho acting out of vengeance, control, power hunger. A man with no limits, no brakes, who already crossed every line. Tony saw it. Heard it. He knows. Tortured. Broken. Gasping. The images come uninvited. Your face. Your features twisted in pain. That ragged breath, barely audible. The weight of your body giving out. The hard floor under your cheek. Blood seeping from a wound he can only imagine. And that look, more felt than seen, somewhere between fear and resignation.

Tony clenches his jaw. So hard his teeth slam together inside the helmet. The sound is dull, amplified by the metal echo. It vibrates through his temples. A muffled detonation ringing through his skull. He wants to scream. To hit something. To do anything. But he stays focused. Rage can’t come out. It’s compact. Controlled. Targeted.

The worst part? He still hears you. That murmur. Between gasps. That muffled breath, fragile, but so distinct. That tone. That voice he knows now. He recognized it instantly. There was no doubt. No room for illusion. He could’ve denied it. Lied to himself. Said it was a mistake. A coincidence. But no. He knew. He knew immediately. And from that moment, something inside him snapped. Not dramatically. No collapse. A clean fracture. Like an overtightened mechanism breaking in silence. Because now, it’s too late to argue. Too late to reason. Too late to call the cops. Too late for rules, procedures, delays.

Matthew is already dead. He doesn’t know it yet. He still breathes. Still thinks he’s in control. Thinks he’s running the show. But he’s not. He’s already finished. Erased. Condemned. Because Tony Stark heard that scream. And that scream changed everything. That scream signed Matthew’s death warrant. And he’s going to make him pay. Inch by inch. Breath by breath. Until he gets you back. Or burns the world down to drag you out of the dark.

When the Iron Man suit finally lands, it’s as if the whole world holds its breath.

A metallic breath explodes beneath the impact, followed by a dull rumble that cracks the already fractured concrete of the ground. The shock ripples through the foundations of the old industrial district, awakening the ghosts of rusted machines, worn-out beams, and gutted walls. Dust immediately rises in thick, greasy, lazy swirls, dancing around him for a moment before slowly settling, as if even it knows not to linger here. The air is saturated. Heavy. It reeks of rust, moldy wood, and decay embedded in the walls. It reeks of abandonment. And worse: expectation. The congealed oil on obsolete pipes reflects faint black gleams, almost organic, like fossilized blood. The ground creaks under his boots. All around him, the environment seems frozen. Trapped in a time that forgot how to die.

Icy wind rushes between the metal structures, howling through broken beams, whistling past shattered windows. It carries the cold of a soulless place — emptied, but not deserted. Not entirely. Around him is nothingness. A heavy, oppressive void. No sound, no light. Nothing lives here. Nothing breathes. Not even a rat. Not even a shadow. As if the rest of the world had the decency to look away. As if even the city itself knew that what was going to happen here… should not be seen. And in that thick silence, saturated with contained electricity, Tony remains still. His body in the suit doesn’t tremble. But everything in him is ready to strike. The HUD displays thermal readings, sound scans, parasitic electromagnetic signatures. Traces. Remnants. Leads.

He ignores them. He doesn’t need confirmation. He looks up. There. Right in front of him. The building. A block of blackened concrete, eaten away by time. It rises before him like a vertical coffin, planted in the ground. Its windows are empty sockets. Its crumbling walls seep with moisture and menace. It’s a carcass. A gaping maw. A lair. The kind of place where people are held. Erased. Buried. And deep inside, somewhere in there, he knows. You’re there. And Tony Stark came to get you.

The windows are shattered, slashed like screaming mouths frozen mid-silent howl. Shards of glass still dangle from some frames, claws of dead light ready to cut. The gutted openings let in a freezing wind that rustles the remains of forgotten curtains, faded, trembling like surrender flags. The concrete holds together only by habit. Cracked, eroded by seasons, cold, rain, and grime. By time. By indifference. Parts of the facade have collapsed in whole sheets, revealing the interior like a raw wound. Rusted beams jut from the gaping holes, still supporting broken, twisted staircases whose steps are gnawed by corrosion. A withered metal skeleton groaning under its own weight.

The scene is saturated with signs of dead life. Hastily scrawled graffiti, some grotesque, some terrifying, scream from the walls like echoes left by shadows. Split-open bags. Scattered trash. Abandoned syringes. A broken stroller, overturned. An old moldy couch under a porch. Traces of human passage, old, sad. But nothing lives here anymore. Everything reeks of neglect. Of misery. And something worse still: violence. That scent doesn’t lie. It seeps everywhere, even into the walls. A stagnant, invisible tension, but palpable. As if the very air had absorbed a memory too painful to vanish. An echo of blows. Of screams. Of fear.

Inside, it’s swallowed in thick, grimy darkness. No light. Just the blackness, mingled with dust, rot, and silence. But he doesn’t need light. Doesn’t need to see. His scanner activates instantly. The interface opens in a silent click, layering across his HUD. Schematics align, partial blueprints of the building take shape in 3D. Partial plans, modeled reconstructions from thermal scans, wave sweeps, mass detection. Heat sources appear. Faint. Distant. Unstable. And then, deep in that rusted steel maze, cracked concrete, and rotten silence… a thermal signature. Human. Residual. Nearly gone. A blurred point, nestled in a windowless room, behind thick walls. A trace. A breath.

Tony clenches his fists.

The sound is minimal. A quiet metallic creak, but full of tension. The gauntlets respond to the pressure, contouring his restrained rage, absorbing the shock. He doesn’t need confirmation. Doesn’t need to see more. Doesn’t need to wait. He knows. His instinct — that damn sixth sense he spent years mocking — screams through his body. It’s here. This rat hole he chose. This rotten theater for a filthy ransom. This stage for torture. A place not built to hold… but to break. To terrify. To harm. A bad choice. Tony approaches.

One step. Slow. Calculated. Methodical. Every movement is measured. The suit follows without fail, amplifies his stride, makes the ground tremble with each impact. Metal boots pound cracked concrete like war drums. A warning. A sentence. He doesn’t run. He doesn’t need to. Matthew’s time is already counted. His sensors scan blind spots. He identifies exits, access points, high ground. He’s already plotting firing lines, breach paths, fallback routes. He thinks like a weapon. Like a strike. Because he’s no longer just an angry man. He’s become a projectile. A terminal solution. A promise kept too late. And inside… someone is about to learn what it costs. To lay a hand on you.

He pushes the door with a sharp, decisive gesture. The metallic impact creates a brutal clang, and the battered frame wails in a piercing screech. The sound is long, grotesque, almost human. It slices the air like a cry ripped from a bottomless throat, the shriek of a grave forced open, or a coffin pried too late. The metal scrapes, shrieks, protests — but obeys. Before him, the hallway stretches. Long. Narrow. Strangled between two walls dripping with damp. The air is dense, fetid, soaked with stagnant water and ancient mold. A cold breath seeps from the walls, icy and clinging, sneaking into the suit’s seams as if to slow him, to warn him.

The walls are alive. Not with organisms, but rot. Dark mold clings to them, spreading in irregular patterns like necrotic veins. It crawls across the concrete, invades corners, slips into cracks. In places, the plaster has given way, reduced to gray dust. Beneath, twisted, rusted rebar protrudes — like broken bones, as if the building itself had been tortured, split open. A single bulb hangs from the ceiling, bare. Dirty. Its globe yellowed by time, its sickly light flickers intermittently. Suspended from a wire too long, too thin, it dances with every draft like a rope ready to snap. It blinks. Once. Twice. The yellow halo it casts wavers, bleeding against the walls. The shadows it throws stretch, distort, crawl along the ground. Shapes too long, too fluid, as if the walls themselves breathed beneath the dying light.

Tony doesn’t slow.

He doesn’t hesitate. His stride remains straight, steady, heavy. Each step echoes off the floor, amplified by the armor’s metal. Debris cracks underfoot: broken glass, plaster fragments, splinters of forgotten furniture. Every sound ricochets in the narrow hallway, trapped between the walls like a muffled volley of gunfire. But he doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t look around. He advances. Like a metronome. His eyes never leave the end of the hall, even as everything around seems to want to swallow him, smother him. He sees the corners, the ajar doors, the stains on the floor, but he doesn’t stop. He doesn’t deviate. He walks this hall like a trial. A purgatory. He knows hell waits ahead. He feels it.

And he’s ready to tear it open with his bare hands. Each step is a countdown. Each breath, a burning fuse. Each heartbeat in his chest, a war drum. He knows what he’ll find. Maybe not the details. Maybe not the form. But the essence. He knows the scent of blood is there, somewhere. That fear has left its trace. That pain has seeped into the walls. And he knows that you… you’re at the end. You’re there, in the dark, at the end of this sick corridor. Maybe unconscious. Maybe barely alive. But you’re there. And that’s enough. Because even if the entire world has to burn for him to find you,

Stark walks down that hall like a blade sliding into a wound. Slowly. Silently. Without flash, without unnecessary sound. He doesn’t strike. He infiltrates. He dissects. Every step is measured, controlled, charged with clinical precision. The weight of his body, perfectly distributed, flows with the suit’s supports. His boots barely graze the floor, but even that friction seems to vibrate through the air, taut with tension. Tension is everywhere. In his muscles, locked beneath the metal. In his jaw, clenched to the point of pain. In his nerves, on maximum alert. He’s taut as a bowstring. Like a weapon whose safety was disengaged long ago. Even his breathing is suspended. He hardly breathes. He’s sunk into a slowed rhythm, between apnea and absolute focus.

Then the smell hits him. Not softly. Not in waves. Brutally. A wall. An invisible punch to the chest. Heavy. Thick. A metallic stench clings to his throat, invades his nostrils like a warning. Blood. Not fresh. Dried. Hours old, maybe. Mixed with damp, with the building’s mold, with dust saturated with dead micro-organisms, with the stagnant rot that infests places where nothing lives anymore. The smell of a trap. The smell of pain. His stomach tightens. Not from fear. From rage. His heart doesn’t race. It slows. As if syncing to the place. He shifts into a deeper, duller, more dangerous frequency. His pulse beats like a drum ready to strike.

Above him, the bulb still swings — a pathetic relic of a once-functioning past. It crackles, flickers, sputters to life at intervals. Each pulse casts sickly light across cracked tiles, warped walls, and scattered remnants of a forgotten world. The shadows stretch, shrink, crawl along the walls like filthy hands. Even the walls seem to hold their breath. He steps forward again. One step. Then another. Every movement is fluid, silent, nearly unreal. His visor scans relentlessly. It overlays stacked data layers, displays thermal signatures, rough volume outlines, hidden masses behind walls. He examines blind spots. Gaps. Floor markings. Broken hinges, scuff marks on wood.

He doesn’t see Matthew yet. But he feels it.

Like a presence. A greasy vibration in the air. A low tension running beneath the walls like a rogue current. A sensation that cuts through him, visceral. It’s not intuition. It’s certainty.

He’s here. Somewhere.

And then he sees you.

You.

There’s no sound. No warning. No orchestral swell. Just that brutal, abrupt moment when the image slaps him in the face like a blow that nothing can soften. You're there. Not standing. Not sitting. Collapsed. Against the wall. No — not against. You’re melded into it. As if your body were trying to dissolve, to disappear. A trembling mass, dirty, slack with pain. No longer a person. No longer a boy. Just a heap of living, broken flesh. A dislocated silhouette in the dark. His brain takes a moment to understand what he’s seeing. This isn’t you. Not the you he knows. It’s something else. A ruined version. And the violence here isn’t hypothetical. It’s tattooed on you. Your arm is twisted.

Not bent. Twisted. At a monstrous, impossible angle. The elbow joint reversed. Bones displaced under stretched skin. Something that should only appear in accident reports. Not here. Not like this. Your shoulder has collapsed. Your hand, almost detached from the rest, barely trembles.

And your face... It takes Tony a second. Just one. But it lasts an eternity.

He doesn’t understand right away. He recognizes nothing. No features. No familiar contours. Just damage. Open wounds, horrible swelling, bruises stacked upon bruises. Your eyes — if they’re still there — are buried under hematomas. Your lips are split. Your right cheek is so swollen it distorts the entire shape of your skull. It’s a mosaic. A work of pure cruelty. And the blood… It’s still flowing. Not much. Not in spurts. In seepage. Slow trickles, like a steady leak. It slides down your temple. Your mouth. Your neck. It’s sticky. Matte. It ran, dried, and ran again. It’s on your throat. Your collarbone. Your chest. You’re soaked.

Not with sweat. With blood. With fear. With the filth of the floor. Your clothes are just rags now. Torn down to the skin. Deep tears are visible, laceration marks, fingerprints, nails, blows. Your hands are open. Literally. Cut. Your palms are cracked, marked by a desperate attempt to defend yourself. Your fingers are splayed as if caught in a frozen spasm. Your knees are red, shredded. Raw flesh peeks through peeled skin. And your back... He doesn’t even want to look. He can guess. He knows what he’ll find there. Marks. Burns. Blows. Traces of what no one should ever do to another human being. But he doesn’t look. Not yet. Because then... he sees it. Your chest.

It moves. Barely. But it moves. A breath. Weak. Jagged. Rough. A struggle with every motion. A breath that doesn’t really come out. A choked wheeze. But alive. You’re breathing. You’re there. Still there. And Tony stops cold.His entire body freezes. The armor locks with him, as if the machine itself understood. As if every fiber, every metal plate had turned to stone. Time collapses on him. A crushing weight. A shroud. His heart? It stops. It no longer beats. Just a void. An absence. A pulse. Heavy. Dry. In his temples. His throat. His stomach. What he feels has no name. It’s not fear. It’s no longer even anger. It’s a breaking point. A place in the soul where everything stops. Where everything is too much. Too much pain. Too much hate. Too much regret. Too late. Too far. He’s here. In front of you. And he can’t go back.

It’s a fracture. A rupture in everything he thought he could control. You’re alive. But at what cost? And somewhere, just a few meters away... Matthew is still breathing. But not for long. A cold shiver, sharp as a steel blade, climbs Stark’s spine. He doesn’t push it away. He lets it slide between his shoulder blades, slip under the metal like a warning that what he’s seeing isn’t an illusion, but raw, naked, implacable truth. Yet nothing on his face betrays this vertigo. Not a twitch, not a flinch, not even a blink. His rage, once explosive, has retracted into a clean, focused line. It’s no longer a storm. It’s a blade. Smooth, cold, sharp. A perfectly honed weapon, ready to strike the moment it’s needed. Not before.

His eyes stay locked on you, unblinking, unwavering. Every detail imprints itself in his mind like a photograph branded with hot iron: the grotesque position of your broken arms, the dark brown blood dried in rivulets on your chin, your neck, your chest; your skin, so pale beneath layers of grime and pain it looks almost like that of a corpse; the faint flutter of your chest, a fragile reminder that you haven’t crossed over yet. He sees it all. He doesn’t look away. And he will remember it. Until his last day. And yet, he doesn’t move right away. Everything in him is screaming. Every fiber, every muscle, every electrical impulse of the armor and his own body calls him to you, to rush, to drop to his knees, to check your pulse, your breath, to place his glove at your neck, to say your name. But he doesn’t give in. He is Tony Stark, yes. But here, now, he is also Iron Man. And Iron Man knows how to recognize a trap. Instinct needs no explanation. He feels that grimy vibration in the air, that invisible weight that warps the atmosphere around you, that intent still lingering, ready to pounce. He knows he’s not alone.

So he advances, but his way. Not slowly out of hesitation, but with control. One step. Then another. Controlled. Silent. The floor crunches beneath his boots, and even though the armor absorbs most sound, here, in this room saturated with shadows and stench, every movement rings out like a barely contained threat. The air is still. The walls seem to listen. The silence, tense, fills with static. He stops a few steps from you. Just close enough to see you breathe, to catch that tiny tremor in your ribcage, that breath that fights, clings, refuses to yield. Just far enough to strike, to raise his arm, to hit in half a second if something emerges. Because he knows: this is the moment Matthew is waiting for. The moment he thinks he can finish what he started. But he’s about to learn that this time, he’s not facing a wounded child. He’s facing Iron Man.

His eyes scan the room relentlessly. Every detail is absorbed, analyzed, memorized. The walls, covered in peeling paint, reveal patches of bare stone, gnawed away by damp. Mold streaks stretch up to the ceiling, which has collapsed in places, letting frayed wires dangle alongside crumbling fragments of plaster. Rusted pipes run along the walls like dead veins, slowly bleeding black water into the corners of the room. A distant drip echoes, irregular, distorted by reverb, like the heartbeat of a body already emptied of everything. The air is thick. Stagnant. It smells of oil, blood, mold, and abandonment. This isn’t really a place anymore. Not a living space, not a shelter. A dead place. Forgotten. A pocket outside of time, perfect for monsters to hide in.

And Stark knows it. It’s too quiet. The space is frozen in a dull anticipation. The smell is too sharp. The scene, too carefully placed. Nothing here suggests an accident. Everything has been calculated. And he hasn’t come to negotiate. He’s not here to understand. He’s not here to reach out. He’s here to end it.

So he speaks. Not loudly. Not shouting. His voice slices through the silence like a blade drawn slowly from its sheath. Low. Slow. Sharp. It doesn’t tremble. It doesn’t seek to impress. It states. It targets. It’s the voice of someone who’s gone beyond fear. Who knows the war is no longer a risk. It’s happening. It’s here. Present. Inevitable.

— "That’s your big plan, Matthew?"

The words hang in the air. Clear. Sharp. And they cut. The silence that follows is even sharper. It relieves nothing. It stretches. It weighs. It presses on the nerves like a finger on an open wound. A silence with a taste. That of blood just before the blow. That of a held breath, of the instant suspended between lightning and thunder. A silence ready to rupture. And Stark is ready to tear through it. He kneels.

The suit exhales softly, like a restrained sigh, when Tony bends a knee to the ground. Metal meets filth, dust, and the invisible fragments of an abandoned world in an almost solemn hiss. It’s not a brusque gesture, nor heroic. It’s a humble movement. Precise. One knee placed in the grime of a ravaged sanctuary, a cathedral of pain frozen in time, where the slightest sound feels blasphemous. He places himself near you. Within reach of your voice. Within reach of your breath.

Above you, the light flickers. It trembles at irregular intervals, swaying like a sick pendulum. It doesn’t truly illuminate. It hesitates. As if it, too, refused to fully expose what it reveals. The scene seems unreal. Suspended. Out of the world.

Stark only sees you now. His eyes are on you. At last. Truly. He no longer sees you through the lens of worry or authority. He doesn’t see an employee in distress, nor that lost kid he tried to protect from afar without ever really getting involved. He doesn’t see a responsibility. He sees you. The body you’ve become. This collapsed, mutilated body, barely breathing. That breath, ragged, whistling, clinging to life like a flame battered by wind. The position in which you’ve fallen, curled in on yourself, speaks of an instinct stronger than thought: to hide, to disappear, to avoid another blow.

Tony doesn’t move. Not yet. A long moment suspended in a bubble of silence. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t move. Only his fist, slowly, curls. A controlled movement, silent, without tremor. A gloved hand, silently absorbing the rising tension, the seething rage, the refusal to accept what he sees. He observes you. He scans every visible patch of skin, every line of your battered face, every gap between the tatters of your torn clothing. He doesn’t want to miss anything. He wants to know. To understand. To see what you’ve endured. He’s ready for everything — except looking away. And what he discovers freezes him.

The recent wounds, he expected. He had imagined them, feared them. The swollen bruises, the black and violet hematomas covering your ribs, your stomach, your face. The clean or jagged cuts, open or dried. The blood clotted at the corner of your mouth. The split lip. The torn brow. Skin ruptured in places, stretched by swelling. All of that, he had seen coming. He had already heard the echo of the blows. Guessed the brutality.

But what he hadn’t expected… were the other marks.

The ones left by someone other than Matthew. The ones no sudden rage could justify. Scars. Fine. Old. Some nearly faded, white, invisible to the untrained eye. These delicate lines, precise, snake along your forearm, disappear under the fabric, reappear on your side. He recognizes some of them. He knows those clumsy cuts, those poorly closed edges. He’s seen them before. On other bodies. In other contexts. He passes a hand — slow, without touching — over your chest. A gesture both useless and necessary. An attempt to understand without harming, to see without interfering. Your top is torn. Not by accident. Deliberately. As if someone wanted to expose your fragility. As if your skin had become a trophy. A message. Your ribs are streaked with deep bruises, a blue so dark it looks black. These were blows delivered methodically. Not to kill. To mark. To leave a print. And beneath that recent violence, other, paler shadows appear. Older bruises, half-faded. Hidden scars. Belt marks. Traces of falls, perhaps. Of repeated gestures. Systematic ones. Not wild brutality.

Habit. Not battle scars. Survival marks. And Tony feels something fold inside him. Slowly. Painfully. As if the steel of his suit tightened, turned inward, crushing his bones, compressing his breath. He inhales, despite everything, but the air is too heavy, too foul. He feels cold sweat on his neck. The taste of metal on his tongue. This didn’t start yesterday. Not even this week. Not even this year. And the hatred rising now is no longer a fire. It’s a collapsed star. A core of pure fury. A point of no return.

— "Fuck..." he breathes.

The word slips from his lips in a hoarse whisper, no louder than a murmur. It doesn’t snap. It doesn’t strike. It falls. Heavy. Exhausted. It’s not an insult. It’s a prayer. An apology. A confession. A verdict. He could have said your name. He could have screamed. But he no longer has the strength to hide the collapse eating away at his gut. That single word carries it all: the guilt, the shame, the shock, the poorly disguised love, and that powerlessness he hates more than anything in the world. His eyes rise slowly to your face. He studies you, searches, hoping for a sign, a crack in that absence. You’re still unconscious. Or maybe just trapped in your own body. Your eyelids, heavy with pain, barely twitch. As if you’re fighting inside a nightmare too real. Your lips, cracked and swollen, part in an almost imperceptible motion. Sounds escape. Weak. Shapeless. Phantom syllables, swallowed by your raw throat, crushed by the shallow breath of survival.

You’re fighting.

Even now, half-dead, on your knees in the mud, in the blood, in the fear — you're still fighting. And Tony, he doesn’t understand how he missed it. How he could’ve overlooked it. He thought you were folding because you were fragile. That you were falling because you were weak. He discovers now that you never stopped getting back up. Again. And again. And again. And that by climbing back up alone, without help, without a hand to reach for, you broke. Slowly. Silently. From the inside out. Another anger rises in him. It doesn’t explode. It doesn’t burst like an uncontrollable flame. It’s slow. Deep. A fury that doesn’t make noise as it climbs but anchors in his gut, between his ribs, in every fiber of his being. It doesn’t burn. It freezes. A precise, surgical anger. Against Matthew, of course. Against the monster who did this to you, who turned your body into a map of pain. But not only.

Against himself. For not seeing it. For not wanting to see. For believing his rules, his demands, were enough. For forcing you to maintain an image when you were already falling apart. Against the system that let you slip through. Against the entire universe that abandoned you without so much as a flinch. Against the silence. Against the averted gazes. Against the excuses. Against everything that brought you here, barely breathing, bleeding in a place no one should know. And this anger — he keeps it. Not for the night. Not for the moment. He keeps it for what comes next. Because this isn’t a mission anymore. It’s not even vengeance. It’s an answer. A cold, precise, implacable answer.

His fingers spread. Slowly. As if releasing something too heavy to contain any longer. Then, just as slowly, his hand closes. Not in rage. Not to strike, nor to threaten. But as one seals a vow. As one locks a promise in the palm, sheltered from the world, where it can never fade. A discreet gesture, small, but charged with immense weight. He leans forward. Just a little. Just enough for his face to draw closer to yours, his features blending into the trembling light, his breath almost brushing your skin. He doesn’t try to wake you. He doesn’t disturb the fragile silence. Only to be closer. To speak for you, and only you. And in a breath that belongs only to him — hoarse, broken, dragged up from deep within — he whispers:

— "I’m sorry..."

It’s not a phrase said lightly. Not a line of circumstance. The words struggle to come out, each one bearing the weight of a collapsed world. They don’t shake. They crash. Heavy. Dense. Inevitable. And it’s not for the blows. Not for the broken bones, the bruises, the wounds, the blood. Not for the absence of rescue, the nights you waited without response, without a call, without presence. Not even for the hesitation or delays. Not for the wavering between compassion and distance. No. That’s not what he regrets. It’s something else. Deeper. More insidious.

He apologizes for what he didn’t see. For everything right in front of him that he ignored. For all the times he looked at you without really seeing you. For all the moments he should’ve understood, read between the silences, the tight gestures, the small changes in your voice, the blankness in your eyes. He’s sorry because he should’ve been the one to know. The one who reached out without being asked. He didn’t. And he knows it. You never told him. Not clearly. Not with words. But he doesn’t blame you. He blames himself. His inattention. His blindness. His comfort. Because he should have known. He should’ve seen past the surface, not settled for what you showed. He’s a genius, after all. He cracked codes, AI, government secrets. But he didn’t read you. You.

And now he sees you. Really sees you. You're here, lying down, broken, beaten, emptied to the bone. You carry the recent scars — but also all the old ones. The ones that tell something else. Another story. A life that didn’t begin tonight. Pain accumulated like strata in rock pressed too long. Blows someone made you believe were normal. Silences you were taught to keep. Constant adaptation, until survival became a reflex. Each scar is a sentence. Each bruise, a word from the story you carried alone, your throat tight, your body tense. And Tony is only just beginning to understand. Not everything. Never everything. But enough for the void to open beneath his feet. Enough for something to snap. For guilt to root itself where it will never leave. It’s not just Matthew. It’s not just this night. It’s everything that came before. This whole life you lived in the shadows, moving through with false smiles and stiff gestures. And he didn’t see. He didn’t know. He didn’t reach out.

He feels that truth in his fingers, in his tight throat, in the strange way his vision blurs without fully knowing why. And the anger returns. Deeper. Colder. But this time, aimed only at himself. Because he should’ve been there. But now that he is — now that he sees you — he swears, without even needing to say it, that it will never be too late again. Not a second time. Never. Stark doesn’t turn his head. Not right away. He stays still, locked in a perfectly controlled posture, his chest still bent over you, his body still tensed above yours like a shield of steel. But his eyes narrow, just slightly. An imperceptible detail to anyone else. An almost microscopic change, but revealing. He saw it. Or rather, he sensed it. Not a clear movement. Not a sharp sound. Just a shift. A faint vibration in the air. A thermal fluctuation, too precise to be natural. A flicker in the visual field, where there was nothing seconds ago.

The suit confirms it silently. A variation in air pressure. A subtle thermal footprint. A disturbance in the suspended particles. Something moved. Someone. In the shadows. He already knows. He doesn’t need confirmation. No detailed analysis. His instinct and the machine speak with the same voice. Matthew is here. He never left. He never fled. He waited. Coiled in the darkness like a knot of hate, hidden behind the ruined structures of the warehouse. A corner too dark for ordinary eyes. But Stark isn’t ordinary. His gaze adjusts. The armor’s sensors recalibrate instantly. Every shadow pixel becomes a map, a data set analyzed in real time. Shapes emerge, unfold, reveal themselves under thermal filters. He sees the silhouette. Humanoid. Crouched. Twisted in animal tension. Almost glued to the damp wall. Motionless — but falsely so. Ready. Ready to strike.

A predator. Or so he thinks. But to Tony, he’s not a beast. Not an opponent. He’s a parasite. A pest. A residue of misdirected hate. A mass of cowardice wrapped in a semblance of human flesh. Nothing more. And he waits. Stark sees it. He waits for the right moment. The right angle. He still hopes. One wrong step. One lapse. One second of distraction. He still thinks he can win. He thinks he can strike from behind. Finish what he started. Reduce further. Humiliate again. He believes this stage is his, that the dark protects him, that fear is on his side. But it’s not the same game anymore. And Stark is no longer the same man.

His fists clench. Slowly. Not in rage. In certainty. A cold pulse runs through the armor, from his shoulders to the thrusters in his forearms. Internal systems activate in silence. Energy builds. Not for show. Not to intimidate. But to strike. Coldly. Deliberately. And yet, he still doesn’t move. He doesn’t break the silence. He remains there, by your side, his body lowered like a barrier. You're still beneath him, fragile, barely breathing. And he stands, in that false calm, as the last thing between you and the one who still thinks he can reach you. But this time, there will be no negotiation. No ultimatum. No speech. This won’t be a warning. A chuckle. At first almost imperceptible. Just a scrape, a discordant note in the tense silence of the warehouse. Then it swells. Gains volume. Becomes a clearer sound — thick, mocking, like a bubble of bile rising to the surface. It comes from the shadows. From that cursed corner of the room that even the light avoids, as if refusing to reveal the truth. A place too dark for nothing to be there.

Stark doesn’t move. He doesn’t look up. Not yet. He stays crouched beside you, his body interposed between you and the thing that finally creeps out of its lair. A sentinel. A wall. A blade ready to cut. But his shoulders stiffen. His breath halts. His fingers stop trembling. He listens.

— “You really came in the suit, huh…”

The voice pierces the darkness like a carefully distilled poison. It has that dragging tone, unbearable, dripping with sarcastic self-confidence. It oozes obscene pleasure, filthy arrogance, sick amusement. The kind of voice that wounds before it strikes. It seeps into the air, hungry to exist, to dominate, to stain.

Matthew steps out of hiding—or what’s left of it. A shadow barely separated from the dark. Just enough for part of his face to appear under the sickly glow of a dangling bulb. Half a face. Half a smile. Wide. Frozen. Too tight. And his eyes… wild. Shining. Flickering with an unstable light, unable to fix on a single point for more than a few seconds.

— “For him? Seriously?”

He gestures vaguely toward your body on the floor, careless, almost lazy. As if pointing at a gutted trash bag. A carcass of no worth. His grimy fingers tremble slightly, but not from fear. From excitement.

— “The little favorite. The loser. The kid who can’t even breathe without collapsing.”

He takes a step. Slow. Pretentious. Nonchalant. His chest slightly puffed, arms wide, almost cruciform. A show-off stance. A provocation. As if offering himself for judgment, convinced he’ll walk away untouched. As if he’s challenging God himself amid the ruins of a world he helped destroy.

— “You sure brought a lot of gadgets to save a half-broken body, Stark.”

A higher, more nervous laugh escapes him. He doesn’t have full control. He thinks he does, but his words are speeding up. His breath quickens just a bit. A trace of madness laces every syllable.

— “You think all that’ll be enough? The thrusters, the scanners, the AI?”

He stops a few meters away. Far, but visible. Too visible. Grime clings to his clothes, his skin, his hyena grin. His face is gaunt, cheeks sunken, hands filthy. He looks like someone who lives in filth. And carries the arrogance of someone who thinks he’s untouchable. He believes he’s won. That he still holds the cards. That he has the upper hand.

— “You showed up like a superhero. Big savior. Like you actually care whether he’s still breathing.”

He tilts his head. A tiny movement. Almost childlike. Almost mocking. The gesture of a brat waiting for the adult to raise a hand just so he can laugh louder afterward.

Then, in a whisper, lower, crueler, slid in like a needle through skin:

— “Sad. To see you stoop to this.”

That’s when Stark moves. Not a sharp gesture. Not a threat. Just… he rises. Slowly. Very slowly. Each vertebra seems to align with inhuman precision. His back straightens. His shoulders lift. His gloved hands open slightly, fingers spreading, joints clicking faintly. A stance. A charge. But he doesn’t speak. Not yet.

Because Matthew goes on. Because he doesn’t understand. Because he still believes words protect. That taunts disarm. He still thinks Stark is here to play. That this restrained rage is only for show.

— “I mean, come on… look at him.”

He points again. His filthy index finger extended, trembling slightly. Not from fear. From ecstasy.

— “Take a good look at what he’s become. What I made him. And ask yourself what you were doing all that time.”

And that silence after — that void between two breaths… it’s the most dangerous moment. Because right now, Stark doesn’t see a man in front of him. He sees the outcome. The cause. The shadow behind the screams. And this time, he won’t look away. Matthew moves. It’s not hesitation. It’s a reflex. A sharp jolt of intention, of venom, of premeditation. His arm snaps in a motion too quick, too precise to be theatrical. He’s not trying to intimidate. He’s trying to end it. His hand plunges into his jacket with mechanical brutality, the rustle of fabric too sharp, a sound that splits the silence like a silent detonation. A glint of metal slides between his fingers. The black barrel of a gun emerges like a verdict. Cold. Final. He lifts his arm. But not toward Stark. Not at the looming figure of steel, red-lit, poised to strike. Not at the obvious threat, the armored man, the living weapon who could incinerate him with a single gesture.

No. He points it at you. You, still on the floor. You, vulnerable. Shattered. Barely breathing. You’re lying there, more ghost than flesh, your chest struggling to rise, your face drenched in blood—and that’s exactly why he aims at you. Because you can’t fight back. Because you can’t even look away.

The barrel aligns with clinical slowness. A descending trajectory, methodical, unbearable. A deliberate motion, thick with silence, cracking the air like an invisible slap. There’s no tremble of doubt, no hesitation. The quiver in his wrist isn’t fear—it’s anticipation. A sick pulse shooting through his arm, twitching his fingers on the trigger. Obscene pleasure in this total domination. His breath quickens. His eyes gleam. He savors. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Where he’s aiming. How he wants this to end. It’s no longer a threat. It’s an execution. A scene he’s imagined, rehearsed, craved. A twisted revenge. A show where he’s both executioner and audience. And in this suspended second, this instant where everything can tip, he becomes something worse than an attacker.

He becomes a man convinced he’s about to kill. Because he wants to. Because he can.

— “You got the money, then?”

The words fall like a dull-edged blade. No hesitation. No dramatic delivery. Just a string of words spat low, almost casual. Like a logistical question. His voice is dry, flat, stripped of emotion. Verbal mechanics, a routine, a question tossed out like checking an order. But the poison—it's in the posture. The gaze. The barely-contained tension in his outstretched arm.

The gun’s barrel stays still. Perfectly aligned. No longer shaking. Calm. Cold. A disturbing steadiness, almost clinical, like a surgeon ready to cut — except he’s not seeking to heal. He’s aiming to rupture. To erase.

He’s not really talking to Stark. Not really to you either. He’s speaking to himself, to feed the illusion of control he’s desperate to maintain even as he feels the ground slipping. He keeps playing, just long enough to delay the inevitable. To fabricate a role. The one who asks. The one who decides. The one who ends things. But there’s that barrel. Black. Smooth. A heavy promise stretched from his arm. He doesn’t move. He waits for an answer he knows is pointless. He knows there’ll be no deal. No negotiation. But he asks anyway. As if asking is enough to pretend he still owns the scene. As if it can mask the obvious rising in the air like an imminent detonation.

He’s ready to shoot. And it’s not the money he wants. It’s what comes next.

taglist🥂 @9thmystery @defronix @lailac13 @the-ultimate-librarian @ihatepaperwork if you want to be part of it here

[ridgeanttechnologies]

Data Warehouses Vs Data Lakes Vs Databases – A Detailed Evaluation

Data storage is a major task, especially for organizations handling large amounts of data. For businesses garnering optimal value from big data, you hear about data storage terminologies – ‘Databases’, ‘Data warehouses’, and ‘Data lakes’. They all sound similar. But they aren’t! Each of them has its own unique characteristics that make them stand apart in the data landscape.

Through this detailed article, we attempt to introduce the three terminologies, their salient features and how different are they from each other. Hope it throws some light into how data can be managed and stored with databases, data lakes, and data warehouses.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Twinkump Linkdump

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY next MONDAY (Mar 24), and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.

I have an excellent excuse for this week's linkdump: I'm in Germany, but I'm supposed to be in LA, and I'm not, because London Heathrow shut down due to a power-station fire, which meant I spent all day yesterday running around like a headless chicken, trying to get home in time for my gig in San Diego on Monday (don't worry, I sorted it):

https://www.mystgalaxy.com/32425Doctorow

Therefore, this is 30th linkdump, in which I collect the assorted links that didn't make it into this week's newsletters. Here are the other 29:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

I always like to start and end these 'dumps with some good news, which isn't easy in these absolutely terrifying times. But there is some good news: Wil Wheaton has announced his new podcast, a successor of sorts to the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. It's called "It's Storytime" and it features Wil reading his favorite stories handpicked from science fiction magazines, including On Spec, the magazine that bought my very first published story (I was 16, it ran in their special youth issue, it wasn't very good, but boy did it mean a lot to me):

https://wilwheaton.net/podcast/

Here's some more good news: a court has found (again!) that works created by AI are not eligible for copyright. This is the very best possible outcome for people worried about creators' rights in the age of AI, because if our bosses can't copyright the botshit that comes out of the "AI" systems trained on our work, then they will pay us:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-appeals-court-rejects-copyrights-171203999.html

Our bosses hate paying us, but they hate the idea of not being able to stop people from copying their entertainment products so! much! more! It's that simple:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

This outcome is so much better than the idea that AI training isn't fair use – an idea that threatens the existence of search engines, archiving, computational linguistics, and other clearly beneficial activities. Worse than that, though: if we create a new copyright that allows creators to prevent others from scraping and analyzing their works, our bosses will immediately alter their non-negotiable boilerplate contracts to demand that we assign them this right. That will allow them to warehouse huge troves of copyrighted material that they will sell to AI companies who will train models designed to put us on the breadline (see above, re: our bosses hate paying us):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/13/hey-look-over-there/#lets-you-and-he-fight

The rights of archivists grow more urgent by the day, as the Trump regime lays waste to billions of dollars worth of government materials that were produced at public expense, deleting decades of scientific, scholarly, historical and technical materials. This is the kind of thing you might expect the National Archive or the Library of Congress to take care of, but they're being chucked into the meat-grinder as well.

To make things even worse, Trump and Musk have laid waste to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a tiny, vital agency that provides funding to libraries, archives and museums across the country. Evan Robb writes about all the ways the IMLS supports the public in his state of Washington:

Technology support. Last-mile broadband connection, network support, hardware, etc. Assistance with the confusing e-rate program for reduced Internet pricing for libraries.

Coordinated group purchase of e-books, e-audiobooks, scholarly research databases, etc.

Library services for the blind and print-disabled.

Libraries in state prisons, juvenile detention centers, and psychiatric institutions.

Digitization of, and access to, historical resources (e.g., newspapers, government records, documents, photos, film, audio, etc.).

Literacy programming and support for youth services at libraries.

The entire IMLS budget over the next 10 years rounds to zero when compared to the US federal budget – and yet, by gutting it, DOGE is amputating significant parts of the country's systems that promote literacy; critical thinking; and universal access to networks, media and ideas. Put it that way, and it's not hard to see why they hate it so.

Trying to figure out what Trump is up to is (deliberately) confusing, because Trump and Musk are pursuing a chaotic agenda that is designed to keep their foes off-balance:

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-donald-trump-chaos/

But as Hamilton Nolan writes, there's a way to cut through the chaos and make sense of it all. The problem is that there are a handful of billionaires who have so much money that when they choose chaos, we all have to live with it:

The significant thing about the way that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not the existence of his own political delusions, or his own self-interested quest to privatize public functions, or his own misreading of economics; it is the fact that he is able to do it. And he is able to do it because he has several hundred billion dollars. If he did not have several hundred billion dollars he would just be another idiot with bad opinions. Because he has several hundred billion dollars his bad opinions are now our collective lived experience.

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-underlying-problem

We actually have a body of law designed to prevent this from happening. It's called "antitrust" and 40 years ago, Jimmy Carter decided to follow the advice of some of history's dumbest economists who said that fighting monopolies made the economy "inefficient." Every president since, up to – but not including – Biden, did even more to encourage monopolization and the immense riches it creates for a tiny number of greedy bastards.

But Biden changed that. Thanks to the "Unity Taskforce" that divided up the presidential appointments between the Democrats' corporate wing and the Warren/Sanders wing, Biden appointed some of the most committed, effective trustbusters we'd seen for generations:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

After Trump's election, there was some room for hope that Trump's FTC would continue to pursue at least some of the anti-monopoly work of the Biden years. After all, there's a sizable faction within the MAGA movement that hates (some) monopolies:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/24/enforcement-priorities/#enemies-lists

But last week, Trump claimed to have illegally fired the two Democratic commissioners on the FTC: Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter. I stan both of these commissioners, hard. When they were at the height of their powers in the Biden years, I had the incredible, disorienting experience of getting out of bed, checking the headlines, and feeling very good about what the government had just done.

Trump isn't legally allowed to fire Bedoya and Slaughter. Perhaps he's just picking this fight as part of his chaos agenda (see above). But there are some other pretty good theories about what this is setting up. In his BIG newsletter, Matt Stoller proposes that Trump is using this case as a wedge, trying to set a precedent that would let him fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-trump-tried-to-fire-federal-trade

But perhaps there's more to it. Stoller just had Commissioner Bedoya on Organized Money, the podcast he co-hosts with David Dayen, and Bedoya pointed out that if Trump can fire Democratic commissioners, he can also fire Republican commissioners. That means that if he cuts a shady deal with, say, Jeff Bezos, he can order the FTC to drop its case against Amazon and fire the Republicans on the commission if they don't frog when he jumps:

https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/trumps-showdown-at-the-ftc-with-commissioner

(By the way, Organized Money is a fantastic podcast, notwithstanding the fact that they put me on the show last week:)

https://audio.buzzsprout.com/6f5ly01qcx6ijokbvoamr794ht81

The future that our plutocrat overlords are grasping for is indeed a terrible one. You can see its shape in the fantasies of "liberatarian exit" – the seasteads, free states, and other assorted attempts to build anarcho-capitalist lawless lands where you can sell yourself into slavery, or just sell your kidneys. The best nonfiction book on libertarian exit is Raymond Criab's 2022 "Adventure Capitalism," a brilliant, darkly hilarious and chilling history of every time a group of people have tried to found a nation based on elevating selfishness to a virtue:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/14/this-way-to-the-egress/#terra-nullius

If Craib's book is the best nonfiction volume on the subject of libertarian exit, then Naomi Kritzer's super 2023 novel Liberty's Daughter is the best novel about life in a libertopia – a young adult novel about a girl growing up in the hell that would be life with a Heinlein-type dad:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/21/podkaynes-dad-was-a-dick/#age-of-consent

But now this canon has a third volume, a piece of design fiction from Atelier Van Lieshout called "Slave City," which specs out an arcology populated with 200,000 inhabitants whose "very rational, efficient and profitable" arrangements produce €7b/year in profit:

https://www.archdaily.com/30114/slave-city-atelier-van-lieshout

This economic miracle is created by the residents' "voluntary" opt-in to a day consisting of 7h in an office, 7h toiling in the fields, 7h of sleep, and 3h for "leisure" (e.g. hanging out at "The Mall," a 24/7, 26-storey " boundless consumer paradise"). Slaves who wish to better themselves can attend either Female Slave University or Male Slave University (no gender controversy in Slave City!), which run 24/7, with 7 hours of study, 7 hours of upkeep and maintenance on the facility, 7h of sleep, and, of course, 3h of "leisure."

The field of design fiction is a weird and fertile one. In his traditional closing keynote for this year's SXSW Interactive festival, Bruce Sterling opens with a little potted history of the field since it was coined by Julian Bleeker:

https://bruces.medium.com/how-to-rebuild-an-imaginary-future-2025-0b14e511e7b6

Then Bruce moves on to his own latest design fiction project, an automated poetry machine called the Versificatore first described by Primo Levi in an odd piece of science fiction written for a newspaper. The Versificatore was then adapted to the screen in 1971, for an episode of an Italian sf TV show based on Levi's fiction:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tva-D_8b8-E

And now Sterling has built a Versificatore. The keynote is a sterlingian delight – as all of his SXSW closers are. It's a hymn to the value of "imaginary futures" and an instruction manual for recovering them. It could not be more timely.

Sterling's imaginary futures would be a good upbeat note to end this 'dump with, but I've got a real future that's just as inspiring to close us out with: the EU has found Apple guilty of monopolizing the interfaces to its devices and have ordered the company to open them up for interoperability, so that other manufacturers – European manufacturers! – can make fully interoperable gadgets that are first-class citizens of Apple's "ecosystem":

https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-ordered-by-eu-antitrust-regulators-open-up-rivals-2025-03-19/

It's a good reminder that as America crumbles, there are still places left in the world with competent governments that want to help the people they represent thrive and prosper. As the Prophet Gibson tells us, "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." Let's hope that the EU is living in America's future, and not the other way around.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/22/omnium-gatherum/#storytime

Image: TDelCoro https://www.flickr.com/photos/tomasdelcoro/48116604516/

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[yes-i-am-happyaspie]

OK OK BUT JOY, the prompt: “If you die, I die. Don’t you get that!” Between Irondad?! Either way! ASDGHJKL ANGST

AHHHH!!! Mini-fic time?? Yes. Yes, Mini-fic time.

Here it is, at 997 words. A lot of action, leading to a short panic-induced argument... and a hug. Because of course, there is a hug. :D Enjoy!! [click here for a reversed use of this prompt]

If You Died...

Peter hadn’t meant to get in over his head. It was just- he needed to keep his neighborhood safe, and he had powers. It wasn’t like he could see a problem and just walk away. But he had been careful. He’d used his tools and his abilities to access the situation. He’d asked his AI to run facial recognition on everyone involved and had cross-referenced their information through several databases; just to make sure he knew what he was up against. 

Three regular guys, selling regular drugs inside a regular empty warehouse. That was it. Nothing about it had been alarming or ominous. So, taking them out should have been easy. And technically it was. It was the swarm of armed individuals that had flooded in after that had been the problem. He had that too for a while. Then the big guys came in. Three of them, with large shoulders and enhanced strength that matched his own. He was having a difficult time dividing his attention between the projectiles and the hands being aimed at his face. 

“Karen?” He dodged, while shooting webs that never seemed to hit their mark. When they did, they never held for long. The big guys  busted right out of them. “A little back up would be nice.”

“Of course, Peter. Contacting Mr. Stark.”

Peter ducked and slid beneath one of the large men’s legs. “Wait! Isn’t- Is Captain America available?” He spun around, sending his foot into the guy's knee cap. The impact made no difference; like a child kicking a fencepost. “Maybe Black Widow? Hawkeye?”

There was no debate. “Mr. Stark is already in route.” Three dots appeared on his HUD along with an ETA. 

Peter wanted to fret over his mentor's imminent arrival but there wasn’t time. Whenever he thought he had one of the men restrained, they broke free and he had to start over again. One down, two to go. Two down, one- no, still two to go. It was a vicious cycle.

Ten minutes later a blast came from the right. A hole appeared in the wall and Iron Man, gauntlets ablaze, flew through it. Peter looked up. The momentary distraction allowed enough time for a football sized fists to make contact with his stomach. He flew backwards, through a spray of ammunition, and landed in the wall. 

The comms crackled to life. Peter wished they hadn't. Pain was already radiating from the back of his skull down and down his spine. When Mr. Stark shouted his name, his ears began to ring. Dazedly, he looked up. Mr. Stark was swooping around the room. Metal clanked and repulsors whirred. Peter struggled to get to his feet to help. Mr. Stark’s voice was back in his ears.

“Stay down, Spider-Man! You’re done!”

Peter blinked. He took stock of his body. The blow had hurt, but he had enhanced strength and a healing factor. He shook out his limbs and demeaned himself well enough to continue. “I’m good. Just a little-” 

He didn’t get to finish. Mr. Stark flew by, lifted his faceplate and scowled. “I said you’re done!”

The tone gave Peter pause. Reluctantly, he slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. “I’m really okay,” he whispered, despite his throbbing head.

“And I’m really not discussing this will you,” Mr. Stark quipped. “I’m just about done here. You stay put. Capice?”

Peter nodded and looked around. Most of the little guys had fled. And only one of the larger men remained standing. Clearly his webbing needed an upgrade. Maybe taser webs with a manual detonation. A range of fifty to ninety thousand volts would probably do it. Could the suit handle that without increasing the power? He was unable to finish the math before Mr. Stark was in front of him.

“Let’s go.”

Peter allowed himself to be lifted to the top of a nearby water tower. He pulled his mask off and ran a hand over his sweaty forehead. “Mr. Stark, I-”

“Do you have any idea who those people are, what they’re capable of?” Mr. Stark gestured wildly toward the warehouse.

Peter shifted his feet. “I didn’t-”

“Didn’t what? Didn’t know? Of course you didn’t. Did you even stop to ask?” Mr. Stark wrapped his fingers tightly around his wrist. “There were two dozen lacheys and three giant bruises in there! What were you thinking?”

“I didn’t- it was three normal guys when I started!” he half-shouted. It wasn’t his fault, but Mr. Stark didn’t look keen to listen. “The others just- showed up!”

Mr. Stark took a step forward. “You could have died in there, Peter!”

“I wasn’t going to die!” he defensively shouted. “I have super-powers and I did call for back-up!”

“Your AI said you had been going at it for over an hour before you called! Peter-” Mr. Stark looked frantic with his hands running through his hair.  “Peter, I don’t know how to explain this to you any more clearly. I-” His face dropped, all blood draining from his face. “What if you had died? Then what?”

 Frustrated, Peter gritted his teeth. “It’s on you.”

Mr. Stark blinked. “No. No, bud. That’s not- geez.” he pinched the bridge of his nose, his breaths increasing as he spoke. “Pete. If you die, I die! Do you get that? If you die- I will never recover. I will-”

Peter’s brows furrowed with realization. Mr. Stark was having a panic attack. “Are you okay, Mr. Stark?”

Mr. Stark’s head shot up, his eyes wide and pupils dilated. “Are you?”

“Yeah.” Peter stepped closer, his hand going to the back of his hair.  “My head hurts but that’s it..”

Without warning, he was pulled into a tight hug.

“Just- promise me you won’t wait so long to call for help next time. Because- Peter? Peter, I can’t lose you.”

Eyes closed tight, Peter nestled his face into Mr. Stark's chest. “I promise, Mr. Stark. You won’t lose me.”