A Spark of Creation
This is a fill for today’s @flashfictionfridayofficial [#FFF354 What is the prompt?] along with my @marvelousyahtzee Sixes prompt combo: Night, Alarm.
Fandom: MCU/Marvel Pairing: Tony Stark & his robot, Dum-E Rating: General Tags: Young Tony Stark, MIT Era, Robots, Self-Reflection Summary: An exhausted Tony discovers that maybe his dream of a robot companion isn’t so far-fetched. Word count: 208
A loud beeping noise roused Tony from where he’d apparently fallen asleep after another late night in the workspace he’d carved out for himself in the basement of Building 31. “Wha’zit?” he mumbled, scrubbing a hand over his face as he looked around. The cursor blinked on the screen in front of him, waiting for his next command.
That’s right - Tony had been working on the latest iteration of the programming instructions for his robot. Well, ‘robot’ might be stretching the definition a little. Right now it was just an articulated arm on wheels connected to his computer, combined with kilobytes of code that just wasn’t coming together.
Maybe he was setting his sights too high, but having grown up with examples like R2-D2, C-3PO and Twiki, the possibility of creating an autonomous artificial companion was just too tempting. Coding a natural language interface, along with environment and object recognition was a lofty goal, he knew… and maybe even out of reach, at least with current technology.
That said, Tony couldn’t resist being just a bit whimsical, typing ‘goodbye’ at the prompt instead of the standard exit command. To Tony’s astonishment, the claw at the end of his creation’s articulated arm twitched slightly, as if waving him farewell.
