p • r • e • s • s • u • r • e

i m p a c t

Tony had two options: lie awake until morning or go downstairs and stay up. He wasn't about to freak Pepper out again. He considered the door, from under which streamed thin beams of pale yellow, a puddle of light soaking into the carpet like melted Armor Glass. 

The light over the staircase must be on.

He crept out of the bed and carefully tucked the comforter back in his place.

"Where y'going?" 

"Bathroom." Tony planted a kiss on her forehead and stepped out into the hallway, and for a moment the chandelier flooded the room. He snagged a cardigan from the hall tree on his way down to his 'office' to combat the shivers.

It was a vast room beneath their penthouse apartment that took up more than half the entire floor. It had old, basalt countertops and and suits in big display cases. There was a great big mahogany desk with nothing in or on it and one of those cheap, grey plastic fold-up tables piled high with paperwork, slippers, unwanted apples and bowing gently beneath the weight. There was a wii, the original wii, complete with homemade controllers after he lost the real ones. An easel was against the wall, along with all of the supplies he bought from Michaels and never unpacked. It was currently holding a dainty Rembrandt study of a woman, because when pepper noticed she'd freak and on occasion, he found this amusing. On occasion, he was a bit of an asshole. Not a lot, though. Just a bit.  

Another, entirely separate desk was in the corner surrounded by monitors, of which two were regularly in use and of those two, one of them had been used only once and that was six years ago, when he'd taken the trouble to type in "lava_lamp.net" into the browser, which now permanently display shitty CGI wax bubbles dancing in his periphery. He had lava lamps. He just forgot about them. All seven of them. 

The place resembled an artist's studio, a hotel lounge, a kitchen and a high school chemistry lab all at once and at different times. It was perfect. 

Tony's feet sent various bits and bobs skidding across the floor though nobody asked them to, certainly not Tony. But it was late and he was tired, and his feet were very far away from his brain. He sat to watch the lack of suspicious activity on the security monitors. It was truly riveting stuff, but last week's prototype spider suit caught his eye. He was waiting on a shipment of vibranium to get started on the real on. Peter and May were in Ireland now, visiting distant family. 

The kid had mentioned that he wanted to meet them, just in case he never got to. Of course, what he didn't say was 'in case I die before I hit twenty, since that scenario isn't nearly as unlikely as it should be'. The thought terrified Tony, who'd promptly spent the next six weeks building the most indestructible outerwear this world had ever seen. Fuck it, he'd probably give the other worlds a run for their money, too. 

SMed Inc. was a firm which provided health insurance, manufactured healthcare devices and recently, it received funding for the research and development of wearable health technology. Pacemakers, hearing aids, insuline pumps, etcetera. They were revolutionising the world of health tech, churning out sleeker, more comfortable and discreet versions of the bulky equipment in every hospital room, as well as the permanent gear people with chronic illnesses needed to carry around day-to-day. 

Meanwhile, about three months ago the Brazilian government had destabilised, and a newly-wealthy NYT journalist named Jocelyn published a shocking story about the number of assaults that were occurring in urban areas. Shortly thereafter, CNN interviewed countless women in the area and their terrifying accounts of how violent the country had become over the past twenty years. Netflix made a documentary about it, politicians made speeches about it, and a company called 'Safr' that seemed to have come out of nowhere because actually it had, flooded the markets with covert, safe-to-use personal protection devices. Safr's first line of products were all recycled from Tony's experiments. Their worldwide success allowed Safr to build research labs and begin working on their own technology.