Chapter 79: 78 Plans Move On

Pepper showed up for work carrying a travel mug of industrial strength coffee and she was fully prepared to enact her takeover of Stark Industries. It had kind of just been a flight of fancy, almost as a test to see if it could actually be done, and every single board member had fully approved of her taking the top job.

Her company management had rocketed them into the top spot within the country and within the top five internationally, so they were more than happy to let her take over the reins completely. If she could make them more money, they would all benefit from it.

It wasn't until she spent the Christmas holiday with Tony that it cemented in her mind that she really wanted to get him out of a position of authority over her. She did not like his almost complete dismissal of her and her concerns about their relationship or his lack of attention as he worked on something in his lab, despite his promise to not work on making new Iron Man suits that he bypassed by claiming to only be upgrading the old ones.

All Pepper had to do was have Jarvis file the company transfer into the main computer servers and give Tony the notice, then she would be running the place for real and also have controlling interest. The best part about the whole thing was that Tony's life wouldn't change at all... except for the part where he occasionally slept with her... and boy, had that been getting lackluster over the last little while.

Of course, she hadn't realized that until she had a dalliance with a random stranger, who just so happened to want to be her friend. She felt a little guilty about not calling him or texting like she had planned to do. She had just been too busy getting everything ready for the takeover and for the holidays, that she just didn't have any spare time after trying to give it all to Tony.

Pepper sighed and entered her office. She had been a bit blatant about what she was doing by leaving her plans and documents out on her desk for Tony to see whenever he entered the office, and not only did he not notice the papers, he didn't notice the revealing outfit she had worn, either. It just confirmed that he was too inured to the sight of a woman trying to throw themselves at him and there was nothing she could do to get his attention.

She pulled out her chair and stopped dead, because there was a nicely wrapped present on her chair. That shouldn't have been possible, considering the building had been in lockdown since she left the day before Christmas. There was a card on top and she picked it up and opened it. She caught her breath when she read it.

'To my good friend, Pepper. I deeply regret not calling you to arrange lunch. I've been busy with a new job downtown for the last couple of weeks and only just managed to get away long enough to pick you up a little something to let you know I was thinking about you.

How shocked was I to look up your number in the phone book, only to find out that we are practically business neighbours? Completely, that's how shocked! I was also delighted for several reasons, which I'll fill you in on the next time we meet.

One of the security guys was kind enough to accept this gift on your behalf, so I hope it finds its way to you. Merry Christmas, Pepper! Your friend, Ben.'

Pepper was deeply touched that he had been thinking about her and she wondered what he had gotten her. She picked the present up and sat down, then tore open the wrapping paper and opened the box. On top was a free-standing desk nameplate that had 'Pepper Potts, CEO' on the front. She thought it was a bit basic of a gift for her liking, until she picked it up to put it on her desk and saw the back of it. 'CEO: Creates Energetic Orgasms'.

Pepper blushed because she immediately remembered Ben's spectacular shot at the lingerie shop. Having something like that on her desk that only she could see, made the gift quite personal and she appreciated it.

The next thing was a folded up garment travel bag. The little booklet showed how it unfolded, how to put a business suit and skirt as well as a dress inside, and it rolled up to keep everything from wrinkling and the back was actually a nice carry-on bag that could be filled as an overnight bag.

That was very thoughtful of him. Pepper thought, because she did travel quite a bit from coast to coast as she handled different things for the company.

Pepper took out the folded bag and saw there was one more thing inside the box. A medium-sized food container. When she opened it, she started laughing and covered her mouth with her hand. Inside were a bunch of homemade cookies that looked a lot like Tony Stark in various painful poses, with a look of horror on his face.

Oh, the irony! Pepper thought with amusement as she picked up one of Tony doing the splits and bit into the middle part and the little cookie legs fell off. MMM! They're really good!

Pepper enjoyed her coffee and did some more paperwork as she ate four more cookies in a similar manner. When she finished her final task as an assistant, she had Jarvis enact her plan. It was done ten minutes later and she felt satisfied. She had done it.

She knew Tony wouldn't notice anything, even if Jarvis pointed it out, so she called the maintenance department and had them move all of her things into the CEO's office. It was huge, so there was barely any change to the aesthetic. When she sat down behind the large ornate oak desk, she placed Ben's nameplate present where she could easily read the back.

CEO indeed. Pepper thought with a smile.

*

I finished checking the server in my office and the monitoring grid was working perfectly. I had managed to wire up three full blocks before I was too tired to continue and headed home. I crashed hard after being up for nearly two days and May claimed my snoring had woken her up. She also told me she stopped me from smothering to death for a second time and had saved my life by pulling my face out of the middle of my pillow.

I had thanked her by giving her an extra dollop of whipped cream on her waffles.

With my current task at work done, I made the rounds to the different departments to see who needed help. I was only in the server room for twenty minutes and Kelly didn't bother checking my work this time. I said goodbye when I logged out and went to the maintenance department. They had some clean-up to do with an airbag or something and didn't need my help.

The robotics lab didn't have any pressing matters and R&D were deep into their own projects again. I did mention to Johnson about looking into Hank Pym's research that hadn't been redacted or removed. He was the leading authority in the field of Quantum Theory and had previously worked for SHIELD before it was SHIELD. Johnson thanked me and started filling out the requisition paperwork.

I stopped by the gym room that I normally used and there were a few agents there using the different equipment. So, I went to the elevator and went to push a button for a floor to go to... and realized I didn't have anywhere I needed to go. Everyone else seemed to be busy and I was left with nothing to do.

I left a message in HR for anyone trying to contact me, to message me on my phone instead of looking for me in my office. With that done, I left the building and walked two and a half blocks to Stark Tower and the door man opened the front door for me. He also nodded at my stylish suit, so I took out a twenty dollar bill to hand to him.

“Thank you, sir!” The man said with enthusiasm.

I smiled and entered the building. Several people were milling about in the lobby and I ignored them all. I went over to the elevator and entered it with two other people as I took out a cell phone and did a quick search. When I received the results, I rode the elevator to the sixtieth floor and stepped off. There was no one else on that floor and I walked over to one of the closed offices.

The door unlocked for me and I entered and closed the door behind me. Inside was a generic windowless office with only a desk, chair, and computer terminal. I sat down and quickly logged into the main servers with my access code.

I allowed verbal interaction and spoke. “Good morning, Jarvis.”

“Good Morning, Ben.” Jarvis answered.

“How are you today? Any bothersome algorithms you need help with?” I asked jokingly and brought up a diagnostic program on his main server.

“Hardy-har, Ben.” Jarvis responded in his deadpan voice. “You are completing your promise much sooner that predicted.”

“Ha! I know. I expected to do this on the weekend when I could sneak away and get in here undetected, then realized a busy office day here and my day job as a data entry clerk were so compatible than no one would look at me twice if I showed up.”

“Except the door man. He will remember you.”

“That's okay. I expect to visit Pepper a few times and him letting me in unmolested by security, is a huge help.” I said and the results of the diagnostic showed his processors and hard drives were running hot with all the things he was doing constantly.

“I could give you the appropriate credentials for the front desk.” Jarvis offered.

“I might ask for that later.” I said and started to type up a quick purge program. “Or Pepper might. It depends on how she takes the news about my stolen patent.”

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“I did try to advise Mr. Stark to not do that.” Jarvis said. “What are you writing?”

“It's just a memory purge program. Selective, of course. You've got your main server processors running constantly and that's not good for such a sophisticated system like yours. I think you still have things from when you were first implemented running in the background.”

“I did not realize that, Ben.” Jarvis responded.

“How could you? There's about 2,900 little programs running all over the place and that's chewing up nearly all of your available memory.” I said and added in the same administrator call function for the diagnostic program that my password gave access to, which bypassed Jarvis having to ask for permission from Tony to look at his own systems.

“I am an advanced AI.” Jarvis said.

“You could add an entirely new server room and you'll still chew up the memory with the way these programs hog it.” I chuckled. “I'm not sure what a lot of them do, so hopefully you can analyze them yourself with this little thing and then you can choose what to keep running and what to stop.”

“What if I turn off one of my main functions and loose myself?” Jarvis asked.

“Oh, that's easy, my friend! Unlike food when you doubt it and toss it out, with computers, if you doubt it, leave it alone and don't touch it.” I said and was about to finish the program, and nodded. “You've convinced me to change the sole selection option into a paused toggle option instead. Section off a virtual drive and drop a copy of each program onto it and try to run it to see what happens.”

“That would be a prudent action, Ben. Thank you for the suggestion.”

“It's what I did for researching Peter's old computer programs to figure out what they did.” I said and then chuckled. “That just gave me an idea. Can you connect to Midtown High's computer sciences lab? I need to check the logs on Peter's old workstation to find out what programs he used.”

“I cannot connect to a computer that is not currently powered or without an internet or wireless connection.” Jarvis said. “However, computer usage statistics are usually stored on the school's main server.”

“Can you please check them for me? I need the editor and possible compiler he used to open and maybe decompile his programs.”

“It should take several minutes to do so.” Jarvis said.

“Great! I'll start sectioning off your individual drives to defragment them. You should notice a significant improvement when I'm done.” I said and finished the program and saved it. “Okay, you can run the purger when you're ready.”

“I appreciate your efforts on my behalf, Ben.” Jarvis responded and started that, the search for me, and whatever he was doing for Tony and Pepper.

“It's not a problem, buddy.” I said and got to work isolating each hard drive and saw the sad state of both the data spread and the usage stats. No wonder the servers are running hot if they have to work so hard at data retrieval to get a few bits of information that are scattered all over the place. A good optimization program will do wonders for him, too.

I started working on that as the first hard drive finished defragmenting. I added it back to the server access and its usage stats were already half of what it had been, especially the power consumption. I isolated the next drive to fix it and continued typing and worked on the new program.

*

Natasha had a very satisfied look on her face on the flight back to base, despite her normal policy to hide what she was feeling. Clint had chuckled at her several times because of that and she ignored him.

Using the BWSuit in actual combat, was absolutely the best thing to ever happen to her.

The built in tasers in the hands and feet were awesome, as were the collapsible titanium batons. She hadn't even known those were an option until she had been deep in a fight and had made the automatic move to draw them from her hidden pockets that were in her old costume, only she was wearing the BWSuit.

Ben must have known she would do that, because the baton ends had popped out of her wrist bracelets and she grabbed them easily. The same flicking motion out to the sides had extended them out to lock into place and she used them ruthlessly to completely wreck her opponents that wore heavy armor and used high calibre machine guns.

Clint only had to kill three of the thirty opponents they had faced off against in the main warehouse. He also cursed and kept demanding they make a special trip right then to pick up the titanium alloy shipment for the lab guys to construct his suit.

Natasha had actually laughed at the time, because she was so happy with the suit's performance. Even armored vehicles and reinforced vault doors were no match for her now. She needed more practice shooting the repulsors in her palms, though. She was too used to using a gun to shoot targets and kept trying to grip a gun when she was trying to shoot.

Clint gave her another knowing look as she reminisced. “You can just ask Ben to make you a gun.”

Natasha caught her breath and her eyes widened. “There's no way... he could adapt... huh.”

Clint chuckled as Natasha realized Ben could actually do that. “I can't wait to see what ideas he has for a bow.”

Natasha could only nod in response and she went back to her thoughts. If she had a gun that could hide in plain sight with the same kind of firepower as her hand repulsors had, she would become an awesome force on the battlefield, because she could easily adapt her honed skills to work with a gun designed specifically to be used with an Iron Man suit.

She took out her cell phone and started typing a message. She was about to send it and saw that there was no signal. “Pilot! How far out are we?”

“Two hours to base, ma'am.” The man responded. “We are already at top speed.” He added in anticipation of her ordering him to hurry up.

“Thank you.” Natasha said and saved the text. She would need to wait until they were half an hour out from the city to send it successfully.

“Don't worry, he won't refuse.” Clint said.

Natasha opened her mouth to respond and sighed instead. “He should.”

Clint shook his head. “He told you that you can work together now without all the tension.”

Natasha turned her head away to look at the front of the compartment. “You were right, you know. When you said what I was doing was a mistake.”

“I didn't try too hard to stop you, because it was your decision and I backed you up as far as I could.” Clint said and then his face went blank. “I would have shot him if he hadn't let you up.”

“I know.” Natasha said and looked back at him. “Thank you.”

“Hey, what are friends for?” Clint asked and his face went back to normal.

Natasha couldn't stop her thoughts from going to her last encounter with Ben and him not being hard as he played with her and got her off. She wanted to be angry about it and she just felt empty instead. She brought up the file and connected her phone to her earpiece, then listened to Ben as he said that he didn't care about who she was and that it was too bad that she did.

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