It takes me awhile to do these. Even if I weren't rusty, which I am, Ben has a long and proud history of dropping his choicest stuff right when I'm about to be buried at work. (The best Azula piece he ever wrote, back in 2014? Dropped like a day before I had to fly off to Denver on a week-long contract job, standing around in conference rooms waiting for the computers of GE execs to break.)

Today I spent yelling at systems administrators that, listen, I might just be a lowly desktop technician, but I know where the goddamn FTP server, is, I'm physically in the datacenter with it right now, and if you guys don't create the user accounts that I very carefully filled out the paperwork for this is going to get the attention of Senior VPs.

I'm slightly bitter. On the other hand, some days nothing happens at all and I spend all afternoon sampling the finest YouTube has to offer.

(Our systems administrators are good people for the most part but ever since we centralized operations into a giant NOC that is physically divorced from the rest of our company infrastructure they have a tendency to forget that "cloud" is a metaphor; the servers are still real objects in real racks somewhere that someone can physically put their hands and prove exist.)

... but I digress.

>Sylia picking this approach to Pepper says good things about her
>skills as a businesswoman. Not a side of her we get to see all that
>often.
>
>> I WISH TO DEFECT TO THE WEST. CAN/WILL YOU HELP ME?
>
>The way this was set up, I didn't realize it was Vanko who wanted to
>defect until I got to the bathroom scene. I thought it was a Soviet
>AI inhabiting the "Tireless Worker," or else possibly Natasha.

This is precisely how I read it as well. Indeed, my initial assumption on reading the teaser was that Vanko was going to be some sort of wrongheaded villain, with him and Stark being all "You stole my AI!" "It's a person; you can't steal a person. I liberated a slave." "It's a set of algorithms I created to more efficiently run powered armor systems, and you stole it to plug into your army of tin men! GENOM was right about you and your 'conference.'"

-Merc
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