The next day, I woke up early. I was anticipating getting the armor calibrated. I hopped out of bed, and worked through my morning routine. Some bicep curls, some forms and of course, meditation. After a hastily scarfed bowl of cornflakes I made my way down the stairs into the basement.
I pulled out the printouts I had made of the relevant parts of the Guardsman manual. Since the Iron Monger was a juiced up Guardsman, the same procedure would apply. This was going to be a beast to do myself.
The manual was written for a two person procedure. A technician reading the terminal, an operator in the suit. I would be doing both.
I plugged the helmet into the Stark calibration unit, plugged the unit into my basement PC, and started the relevant program.
I then flipped the switch inside the chestplate, and started putting the armor on.
It was an undertaking, as my mother would have said. The telescoping arm segments were the worst of it, but I got there.
Finally, I stood up, with a gentle whirr from the armor.
The suit moved without the helmet seated on the operator through some sensor fusion I didn't fully understand, and it was worse than the neural interface. I could feel the clumsiness immediately. I had no fine control. Walking felt clumsy in a way that put me on edge. I almost went into the workbench on my first step.
I reached over to move a mug I'd left out a few days back. Might as well get a sense for my hands in sensor fusion mode. I closed my fingers around it carefully.
It cracked anyway.
At least it was only my third favorite mug.
I gingerly put on the helmet (which was thankfully more sturdy than my damaged mug),and it locked in with a click, powering on with a whirr. There were several status lights and a gauge. The eye slit was covered with glass by default. The retractable eye slits were one of the most...questionable design choices on Stark's current suits, and thankfully, the Iron Monger bucked the trend.
I sat down on the floor next to the bench,(my chair wasn't going to take the armor's weight) and very gently pressed the button on the calibration unit to start the process.
The calibration unit was plugged into the terminal I had in the basement. It could output the status to an attached machine over serial mainly to inform the tech what stage the operator was on. Today, I would be performing both roles. The drivers had been included in the Stane International information I had acquired, so I hadn't needed to roll my own for that.
Nothing practical changed. The armor hummed passively. The instructions on the Stane database said the pilot was supposed to think about "nothing in particular" while the calibration was occurring. This was easier in theory than in practice.
Finally, after what felt like days,the calibration unit chirped.
The screen of my basement terminal lit up.
It was definitely more engaging than sitting on the floor while attempting to think about nothing. I walked in place, moved my arms,and curled my fingers individually. The slight pressure of a headache developed around what I thought was the forty minute mark, but the manual said this was to be expected.
After about an hour of that, the unit beeped again.
Time for more sitting still. Joy.
Finally, with another bleep, we moved onto the fifth phase. The terminal spat another chunk of text.
With a sigh, I started curling and uncurling my fingers individually again, starting from my right hand.
After another 10 minutes of the thrills of hand movement, finally,FINALLY the armor was calibrated. I couldn't exactly take it outside, but I walked very gingerly around the basement. It felt better, more smooth, less jerky.
I tentatively picked up a screwdriver, finding myself more able to judge the pressure I was applying. The finger marks on the rubberized handle meant I still needed practice, but it felt much,much more natural to pilot the suit with the interface active.
Now, to get my HUD/AR box to pull data from the suit...
The next day I was deep in the chestplate with the oscilloscope.
The helmet's calibration port was dead in normal operation, and taking the helmet apart was dicey, so I traced the main harness until I found a capped stub connector near the left shoulder. I made an adapter over two evenings. The first version didn't work at all. The second had a level-shifting error between the connector and the serial line. The third gave me a clean connection.
The bus was packet-based. Every subsystem broadcast onto a shared line with an ID header, the main computer receiving everything. Once tapped in, I received everything too.
No off-the-shelf capture tools existed for this, so I wrote my own, which meant worrying about interrupt handling. That took a week. My workstation ran BSD and I didn't know the internals, and with no internet I had to get a book and flip through it.
Once I had a working driver, I could look at the packets. Joint telemetry, power management, helmet compute status, all of it intermixed. The hex dump looked like noise until I spotted the repeating header structure and understood I wasn't looking at one stream. Figuring out the ID scheme took most of the first day.
I filtered by packet ID and went hunting for power data, cross-referencing against my bench supply meter while I ran the suit at different loads. Found the field I wanted: two bytes, scaling worked out by watching the value drift against known draw rates over an afternoon. I also figured out how to charge the chest laser's capacitors and drain them to a car battery. Burned out a resistor doing it, but I was always better at software than hardware.
Hooking the bus feed to the HUD microcontroller was its own headache. First attempt, the charge number updated in fits and starts, freezing and jumping. Probably a polling issue. I rewrote it to read opportunistically on packet headers. The garbage stopped, but the numbers still flickered on the second attempt. Reading garbage, most likely.
The third version worked. I powered the suit on, projection unit still outside the suit, and looked at the number on my test lens. Green digits, stable, updating every few seconds. Ninety-four percent. The bench supply agreed within rounding.
I smiled. Now to start thinking about the neural interface.
Looking at my notes the next day I took stock of what I knew about the Stark neural interface. It used SERF to read input from the user. It needed to be calibrated per-user and if it wasn't, the side effects were generally unpleasant. My primary theory at this point was that Stark was cooking the neural interface with his neutralizer packs, but I wasn't quite sure how he was breaking it. I suspected he was just messing with the containment/cancellation field, but I'd need to get my hands on effected hardware to confirm.
The best strategy seemed to be to learn as much as I could about the neuroscience behind the helmet, as well as brush up on signal processing in general, so I'd be prepared for whatever Stark would do to brick it.
Ideally, I'd beg,borrow or steal access to something non-intrusive so I could get a better sense of the physical layout of the helmet internals for a start. Ideally, a CT scanner and sooner rather than later. I didn't want the first time I was getting familiar with helmet internals to be post-Armor Wars. The whole brain interface was going to be touchier than the rest of the suit, which I had been able to take apart and reassemble relatively easily.
The problem was...how. I couldn't exactly bring the Iron Monger helmet into a clinic or an industrial scanning business.
I'd take a break and think on it a bit. I had my nose to the grindstone on figuring out the HUD for most of today. I shut off the various units on the test bench,and made my way upstairs.
Twenty minutes later, while I was eating my lunch (rice and a chicken breast, sue me), it hit me. My tenants. I gulped down the rest of my meal,and went to my bedroom's filing cabinet, where I kept my documents.
I flipped through the files until I found the most recent tenant list. There.
My humble industrial park contained a CNC machining business, a small environmental testing lab, an electronics manufacturer who did PCB assembly, and a startup that was trying to build an improved CT scanner.
Jackpot.
Around noon the next day, I pulled into the lot of my industrial property. The lot was home to a concrete tilt-up, built hastily in the 1970's. It was in relatively fine condition.
There was a rather sad row of Italian Cypruses at the edge of the lot. The previous owner had left them in, and I didn't see any point in messing with it.
I walked in through the front door, and checked in at the front desk.
"Can you buzz for Sunny?"
The founder, Srinesh "Sunny" Patel I had met once in passing, when I dropped by the industrial building to touch base. I knew a bit about him from our initial discussions. Most relevant to me right now, his background was in applied math and he was working on a better CT scanner to pitch in a medical context. He had some decent funding to start, but I got the sense that things weren't going so well currently.
He could use some easing of his financial pressure, I could use access to his CT scanner, everyone walked away happy.
The front desk functionary turned to me. "He's ready."
I walked further down the slightly worn floor tile of the hallway and knocked at room 2000. The door had a nameplate with "Dynamic Imaging" embossed on the front.
A muffled "Come in" emanated from behind the door.
I cracked it open.
Sunny's startup took up about two adjoining rooms. One room held the lab, and the other held the office space. Since it was a Friday afternoon, it was just Sunny in the office.
The office was a mess, and that was perhaps understating the extent of the disaster area that was the office.
There were four desks, each in varying states of disarray.
The whiteboard situation was three rollable boards, all of which seemed to be in use. One had a Fourier transform next to what looked like some very dense algebra, several steps of work partially erased. Another had a circuit schematic that had been added to incrementally, the original lines in black marker and the revisions in red. The third had a timeline on it with several dates crossed out and pushed back.
On the wall above the occupied desk, pinned directly to the drywall: a printed diagram of an X-Ray tube assembly, annotated heavily in ballpoint. Next to it, a single printed photograph of what looked like a CT scan of a knee, taped up at eye level.
Sunny looked up from his desk, putting down his notepad. "Afternoon."
I nodded. "Hey Sunny. How goes it?"
He shrugged. "Living the dream."
Sunny's parents had come over from Gujarat in the late sixties and landed in Ohio, which I suspected had given him a particular relationship with understatement. In Midwestern, "living the dream" was tantamount to a suicide note.
Time to pitch him.
"Sooo, I've got an interesting bit of hardware I need to get a sense for noninvasively. I'd love to use your CT scanner for it. I'd compensate you generously of course, but-"
Sunny breathed in.
"No."
He continued, calmly.
"I appreciate the offer, especially with how things have been, but I need to have an audit trail for this machine. FDA stuff."
He paused, a wry grin cracking his face.
"Can't loan it out to someone who's obviously reverse engineering something proprietary."
I groaned."I was that obvious?"
"Oh don't look so poleaxed. You're obviously a computer guy, and when we last crossed paths you said something about planning on a startup."
He had me there. I nodded at him.
"Fair enough. Good luck with.." I gestured, encompassing the rather messy office space. "Everything."
He nodded.
"Same to you."
I walked out of the building, exhaling between my teeth. The easiest option was out.
I had an extreme contingency, which involved a different mask, latex gloves, a lockpicking kit, and a healthy disregard for property rights at 3 AM, but it would be too obvious it was me.
Plus, Sunny seemed too pleasant to screw over like that.
It was harder to countenance something criminal when you couldn't abstract the victim. I couldn't do him like that.
I'd figure something out.