CORRUPTED MEMORY

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Settle in. The workshop is awake. ⚙️

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T.O.N.Y. didn't come back that morning.

The pendant still accepted power and kept the Chrysalis files intact. The interface, though, couldn't find the paths to many of the records. The diagnostic didn't measure how much of Tony, or of a personality, was left; it measured what could still be accessed without an error. Even knowing that, Morgan watched every drop as though the number could tell her how much time she had left with that voice.

She'd slept little in the bunk and returned to the console before dawn. She would open one record, check the next, and end up staring at the same error message again. At five, Leo sat down beside her and laid his hand on the keyboard.

"You're running the same commands again."

"One of them might work."

"Or it could destroy what's left of the index."

Maya set a mug of coffee beside Morgan and leaned against the workbench.

"Getting two hours of sleep doesn't mean abandoning the system."

"I can't."

"Then you don't have to sleep right now. Just step away from the screen for a bit. I'll stay here."

Morgan looked at the pendant. She knew it wasn't her father. T.O.N.Y. had kept making that distinction from the very first minute. Even so, losing the interface just days after hearing "Maguna" brought back the same emptiness she'd learned to navigate around as a child.

"I had four years with him," she said. "A lot of what I remember might come from stories people told me. Now there's something that can answer questions, and it's disappearing before I even know which ones to ask."

Morgan drew her hands back. Leo kept the keyboard between them and opened a working copy, leaving the contents of the pendant unchanged.

Upstairs, Pepper was coordinating Stark Industries' lawyers and engineers over an isolated line. She'd forbidden any connection between the pendant and the corporate cloud; if Roxxon was monitoring the company, a recovery request would give away everyone's location.

At six twenty, Maya found the first useful lead in Tony's local files: a maintenance sequence linked to an old research facility in Newark, decommissioned decades earlier. The record showed that Level Five had been updated in 2022, during the years Tony lived at the cabin.

"It's a backup image from before activation," Leo said. "It could repair the lookup paths. We just can't overwrite everything with it. We'd lose what the interface learned after you turned it on."

Morgan felt the difference. Saving the system might mean restoring a version that didn't remember their conversations over the past few days.

"We can copy the recent experiences before we integrate the matrix."

"If the sectors are intact. And if O.B.I.S. hasn't planted another trap in them."

Pepper came down when the map of the facility appeared. Her face showed she hadn't slept either.

"The sale of the property was recorded three weeks ago," she said. "Roxxon lists it as a distribution center, but they've already installed drones and isolated the internal network."

"They bought it because they knew about the backup," Morgan said.

"They may already have been looking for Stark files in the area. The purchase predates the breach at the cabin. I'm not going to base that suspicion on a timeline that's wrong."

"Either way, they're going to reach Level Five."

Pepper laid out the structural plans on the table, but not an access card.

"We look at the alternatives first. A federal team could go in with a warrant."

"Can they secure the equipment before the company gets notified?" Maya asked.

"That's what our lawyers are trying to ensure," Pepper replied. "I'm not ruling out an option just because it doesn't depend on you."

Morgan said nothing. Pepper noticed.

"You've already decided you're going."

"The controller recognizes the pendant. And the protocol might require me to be there. I want you to consider that possibility, not make the choice for me before you check."

"That doesn't make the mission safe."

"It makes it possible."

Pepper walked over to the brick wall. For a few seconds, she studied an old photograph of Tony, Rhodey, and Happy on a workbench. When she came back, she wasn't convinced; she was calculating.

"The facility has three access points. Roxxon controls the main elevator. The freight tunnel has been filled with concrete. There's a drainage conduit that reaches the old basement, but it runs below the waterline."

Maya gave a brief smile.

"That almost sounded like a plan."

"It sounded like a description of why the plan is terrible."

Morgan pulled the map closer.

"Maybe we can get to the old entrance through the conduit," Morgan suggested. "Without going through the distribution center."

"It's still just a blueprint," Maya said. "We don't know how much of that route is open."

"You check the route. Leo figures out how we stay in contact. I can test whether the suit fits."

Maya folded her arms.

"And who stays with the pumps if the water rises?"

Morgan looked back at the drawing. She'd assigned each friend a task without realizing she'd given Maya two jobs she couldn't do at the same time.

"Okay. We'll rework it together."

Leo pulled a floor plan of Level Five closer.

"The concrete here blocks our radio signal," Leo observed. "I can run the signal through a thin cable to a repeater, but there has to be a route for the cable. Losing the connection can't catch us by surprise this time."

"Agreed."

"No fighting if there's an escape route," Maya said.

"Agreed."

"And Pepper monitors our telemetry," Leo added.

Morgan looked at her mother.

Pepper didn't answer right away.

"I'll check the access points with the technical team," Pepper said. "Until then, don't confuse mapping out a way in with having approval for the mission."

A faint sound came from the pendant.

"Ma... guna..."

No projection appeared. Just the voice, distorted.

"Guardian... doesn't recognize... Chrysalis..."

Then silence.

Leo noted the phrase on the map.

"There's an offline system guarding the vault. If it doesn't recognize the suit, it'll treat you as an intruder."

"Then we add that to the plan," Morgan said.

Pepper took a photo of the screen and forwarded it to the engineer assessing the facility.

"We're taking a four-hour break. I need answers, and you need to be able to read them without falling asleep over them."

Morgan looked back at the matrix's percentage.

Fifty-two.

In the bunk, Morgan heard the small noises in the space the interface used to fill. A pump started running again. Upstairs, Pepper's phone vibrated twice. Farther away, a wrench slipped from Maya's fingers and rolled under the workbench.

"It's nothing," her friend announced before anyone could ask.

Morgan turned her face toward the wall. She'd gotten used to waking up and getting an answer before she'd even formed the whole question. Now she remembered a small question she'd never asked: whether Tony liked being alone in the workshop or just forgot to leave. No backup file needed to contain that. Still, it was what she wanted to know.

Maya came over with two mugs of tea. She sat on the floor by Morgan's good arm and set a mug within her reach.

"I thought you were going to tell me to sleep."

"They already tried. It didn't work."

Morgan propped herself up on one elbow.

"I know it isn't him."

"You don't have to keep saying that every time you're sad."

The answer didn't bridge the gap between the image and the man. It let Morgan hold the mug without having to defend herself. When Maya left, she took the empty mug with her. Morgan fell asleep before she could hear where Maya set it down.

When she woke, she found Leo sorting the data onto labeled drives. The old records, the program that accessed them, and the recent conversations would be kept separate during recovery. A fourth drive sat empty on the table.

"What's that for?"

"For testing without touching what's left," he replied. "I need you to help me choose an interaction you know well."

Morgan searched for a conversation about finger calibration. She found the audio from when she'd corrected the way the controller anticipated her movements; the index attributed part of Maya's response to T.O.N.Y. She read the transcript twice and opened the original recording. The voice was intact. It was the link between files that had failed.

She marked the correct timestamps, keeping the damaged version next to the corrected one. When Leo ran the query again on the test drive, the dialogue was back in order. For the first time that morning, a result depended on something Morgan could verify, not on the hope of hearing her own name.

Another sector returned a comforting line in Tony's voice: "None of this was your fault, Maguna." Morgan let the audio finish. The same file was linked to different topics; there wasn't enough context to know what he had been responding to.

"If we fix it based on what seems to make sense, it'll sound great," Leo said.

"And we could end up attributing an answer to him that he never gave."

Morgan marked the segment as incomplete. She didn't delete it, but she didn't let it into the restoration, either.

Pepper came down as Morgan saved the annotation.

"Did you find anything?"

"A piece we can't use yet."

Her mother looked at the column of questions, then at the recovered record.

"This one looks useful."

Morgan nodded. It wasn't much. At least they could verify the result.

The break had cost them time. It had also let Leo figure out which blocks needed to remain untouched. Before trying to access the Newark facility, they would save the recent interactions separately and log every replacement. Anything still uncertain would come back as a gap, not a convenient memory.

Morgan wrote down the criterion in her own words. When she mistyped a letter, she deleted just that letter instead of starting the line over. Her hand was steadier.

At the top of the screen, the integrity reading dropped again. Morgan felt her stomach tighten, but she didn't run another command. She called Leo and waited for him to finish checking the test copy.

Pepper received the response from Newark. The maintenance entrance was still there. Beside it was a recent Roxxon installation that didn't appear on any of the old plans.

"We have a way in," Maya said, zooming in on the image.

Morgan saw the dark shadow beside the conduit. They still had to find out what the company had put there to wait for them.

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