ysabetwordsmith | Story: "Hairpins" Part 16

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Story: "Hairpins" Part 16

This story belongs to the series Love Is For Children which includes "Love Is for Children," "Eggshells," "Dolls and Guys,""Saudades," "Turnabout Is Fair Play," "Touching Moments," "Splash," "Coming Around," "Birthday Girl," "No Winter Lasts Forever," "Hide and Seek," "Kernel Error," "Happy Hour," and "Green Eggs and Hulk."

Fandom: The Avengers
Characters: Phil Coulson, JARVIS, Clint Barton, Tony Stark, Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanova, Bruce Banner.
Medium: Fiction
Warnings: This story is mostly fluff, but it has some intense scenes in the middle. Highlight for details. These include dubious consent as Phil and JARVIS discuss what really happened when Agent Coulson hacked his way into Stark Tower, over which Phil has something between a flashback and a panic attack. They also discuss some of the bad things that have happened to Avengers in the past, including various flavors of abuse. If these are sensitive topics for you, please think carefully before deciding whether to read onward.
Summary: Uncle Phil needs to pick out pajamas for game night. He gets help from an unexpected direction.
Notes: Service. Shopping. Gifts. Artificial intelligence. Computers. Teamwork. Team as family. Friendship. Communication. Hope. Apologies. Forgiveness. Nonsexual ageplay. Nonsexual intimacy. Love. Tony Stark needs a hug. Bruce Banner needs a hug. #coulsonlives.

Begin with Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15. Skip to Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21.

WARNING: In this chapter begins a major meltdown as Phil thinks back over past interactions and the implications of JARVIS being a person. Highlight to read the blacked-out section above, if you haven't already. The intense part continues for several chapters. Please make sure you're in safe headspace and environment before deciding whether to read onward.

"Hairpins" Part 16

"How about grays?" JARVIS suggested, changing the display of pajamas.

"Promising," Phil said as he poked at the offerings. "Lose the black-and-white ones." Several images blinked out. "Tone down the color contrast." More images disappeared. "Look for things with soft, wide stripes. Nothing too loud or busy." Fresh pictures appeared. JARVIS flicked a few of them toward the top. Phil chose a medium gray banded with white.

"That looks good," JARVIS said. "It has a nice foggy effect."

Phil moved the two selections to the upper left of the screen. Then he brushed away the unwanted ones and used the space to open an order form. Given Bruce's tendency to scruff around in clothes too large for him, Phil picked out a design with plenty of room. Soon he requested one set of pajamas in each fabric.

"He'll be like one of those geckos at the zoo that nobody can ever find," Phil said with a chuckle.

"Perhaps so," JARVIS said. He put up two old surveillance photos of Bruce, one in brown and one in gray. Neither showed a clear view. "It is often difficult to find him or get close to him. He knows how to hide from cameras."

"Not without reason," Phil said sadly. He had spent a lot of time watching various members of his team. He'd had to shoot Clint in order to slow him down enough to make first contact, which required a lot of trustbuilding before the damaged archer could really bond with him. Then Clint had brought in Natasha much the same way. Phil had found and lost Bruce repeatedly over the years. Coaxing him to fit into a team would be a delicate process. Even getting within reach of Tony required deft footwork and usually a round of diligent hacking.

Just like that, a memory of bringing Tony into the Avengers slid down Phil's spine like a shard of ice. Phil had first tried to reach him through ordinary channels, and when Tony blew him off, Phil had then overridden the protocols to break in.

Protocols that weren't just programs.

JARVIS was a person.

Phil had hacked a person.

The Starkpad slipped from his suddenly numb fingers to land in his lap. His heart hammered. The edges of the world dimmed and faded. Someone was calling his name, from very far away, but Phil could hardly hear it over the sea-roar of guilt surging in his ears. He curled up, doubling over his knees in a vain effort to keep control.

"Phil? Are you all right?"

JARVIS had denied him entrance, and Phil had forced his way in anyhow. Phil was a master hacker. He didn't have to take 'no' for an answer. He could reach in and write his own 'yes' wherever he wanted. It had been a challenge, but he had met it. The realization was dizzying. The breach of integrity took his breath away.

"... hear me, please respond ..."

Phil remembered the towering firewalls of code that he had breached. He remembered the sense of triumph when he finally penetrated the Stark Industries security, and the inkling of something far greater that shimmered just out of reach. At the time he had felt only satisfaction and admiration. Now those submerged under a wash of shame.

* * *

Notes:

Read about the symbolism of the color gray and see Bruce's gray pajamas.

Men may wear baggy clothes out of indifference or ignorance. Women often do it to hide their bodies, either because they think they look bad or wish to avoid unwelcome attention. Bruce does it to hide, as armor, as camouflage, to leave room for Hulk, and because shopping second-hand makes it hard to find a precise fit. There are tips for buying clothes that fit.

Trust is a vital foundation for human interactions. It is more difficult among strangers or people who have hurt each other. Trust is essential in personal relationships and especially in therapeutic ones. There have even been studies on trust done with a robot. Understand how to earn the trust of your friends, and how to repair trust after betrayal. Trustbuilding is a gradual process that requires time. There are trustbuilding exercises which can help, and should be presented in order from easy ones that ask little of people through ones that require increasing amounts of trust. Forcing people to rely on each other with no established baseline of safety is more likely to undermine trust than build it.

Hackers can break into any computer, for positive or negative reasons. Some of them have ethics relating to the sanctity of knowledge. Some focus on doing no damage, or at least minimizing necessary damage. In this context, Phil is a gray hat: breaking into places he's not welcome, but doing so for valid reasons and with the least possible harm. Learn about how to become a hacker. Of course, there's a world of difference between hacking a mindless computer and hacking an artificial intelligence.

Roboethics must consider the question of whether robots and other artificial intelligences should have rights, and why; and if so, which rights. Robots also interact with the rights of humans. Fundamental to this discussion are the right to life and the right to personal integrity of mind and body. It is the latter which Phil violated by reprogramming JARVIS without consent, and which makes Phil upset with himself. (This next link is downright disturbing.) Studies have been done which indicate that humans can bond with robots and become reluctant to harm them, even when the interactive programming is pretty rudimentary. There is already an American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots. Logically in this series, Tony would have his fingers all up in that pie.

What happens to Phil is partway between a panic attack and a flashback. A panic attack has symptoms relating to acute anxiety over present safety. There are ways to help someone through a panic attack. A flashback entails reliving (in part or in whole) a past experience as if it is happening right now. It has symptoms relating to entrapment and dissociation. Understand how to help a person having a flashback and support them. There are also ways to cope with flashbacks of your own or even stop a flashback. In this case, Phil is not trapped in a memory, but rather is floored by the implications of his past actions in light of newly discovered information. This creates an intense emotional overload, leading to partial dissociation from physical awareness, which takes a few minutes for him to process enough to regain control of his body.

dreamwriteremmy pointed out that the trope term for this is Heroic Blue Screen of Death.

Shame is an emotion resulting from failure to live up to personal or other standards. It can teach, but it can also harm. Know how to let go of shame.

[To be continued in Part 17 ...]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

>> Finesse may be the saving element here. <<

Yes, it is.

>> As an example, if Jarvis were programmed to display an "intruder alert" on every screen, the most subtle, least invasive change to his programming would be to simply alter the color assigned to said display-- not to the point of invisibility, but well into the range of dimmed, muddy grays that'll be completely overwhelmed by the otherwise unchanged display, even if the text is flashing. <<

I borrowed this and some of your other ideas to add to what I already had, where Phil and JARVIS start working through what happened.

>> That allows the program to run otherwise unmolested, and if Phil can get past that without triggering the next level of defenses (e.g., an audio alert), it's also the least amount of effort on Phil's part. <<

Exactly; it's like diverting a blow, rather than trying to stop it altogether.

>> Elegance and gentleness- changing a visibility element, rather than bashing the subroutine into nonexistence- would appeal to Tony, and thus to his offspring, Jarvis. <<

That's true. JARVIS has a strong taste for using the least possible force in the most unobtrusive way to reach a desired objective. He does that all the time, trying to get things done without disturbing anyone.

>> Jarvis, a self-directed AI, would have self-checking subroutines which compare his current programming to both his defaults and to the short- and long-term backups made in regular cycles. <<

Yes, and his redundancies have redundancies.

>> (Imagine how long a single hour is in processing cycles, computations per second, and the relatively tiny window of opportunity makes Phil's accomplishment all the greater.) <<

Phil does have some ways of compensating for the speed differential.

>> Because Jarvis is self-directed, he wouldn't blindly follow a protocol which would overwrite ANY part of his code. <<

True.

>> How DID Phil accomplish that? Either through misdirection, conducting simultaneous changes to two or more subroutines <<

It was a lovely little bit of diversion, once I picked out what I could recognize of what he'd done. There's a description of it later.

>> (How much free processing power, equaling 'attention' in humans, does Jarvis denote to certain areas? How much wiggle room does that allow for any potential hacker?), <<

JARVIS has massive amounts of processing power, because he does so many things at once. But most of that is automatic. His conscious attention, while large, is still finite. He tends to 'follow' his own people very closely and pay attention to other things in less detail. But JARVIS 'not paying attention' is harder to hack into than most fully active security systems. It doesn't take more than a light touch for him to alert, because he recognizes everyone. Most hackers don't even have time for a second action.

Phil was skilled enough and subtle enough to be intriguing even before JARVIS figured out what-all else was going on. A bit like Robin Hood charming a rich lady whilst lifting her purse.

>> outright subversion/deletion (which is akin to amputating a finger to treat a hangnail), or-- <<

Clearly no harm was done to JARVIS, else he would have A) mangled Phil himself and/or B) yelled for Daddy, in which case it would've been Phil taking a flight out the upper windows of Stark Tower.

Phil has not quite caught onto this part yet.

>> The "or" is where the focus of the story shifts. The "or" is actually the first evidence in movie canon that Jarvis made a judgement call about Agent Coulson of SHIELD. And that same "or" will show us an awful lot about Phil, perhaps even a little bit of how Flip developed into Agent Coulson. <<

I hope so. It's kind of messy where JARVIS and Phil attempt to process what happened, because they don't know each other very well yet and the situation is just so awkward. I tried to lay out the implications, but it's hard when even they don't know everything about it.

I suspect that it was a combination of method (elegant and least needed) and object that kept JARVIS from using brute prevention. He only let Phil up because he assessed that there was nothing the Agent could do to Sir or Ma'am that JARVIS couldn't stop.

Even if it meant sleep gassing them all.

JARVIS likely had tabs on Phil and SHIELD since Ironman 2 to the best of his ability not to get caught. He couldn't just let Phil up, between his programing and Phil's sensible distrust.

>> I suspect that it was a combination of method (elegant and least needed) and object that kept JARVIS from using brute prevention. <<

That's part of it -- although JARVIS has a generous array of options from subtle to weapons of mass destruction.

>> He only let Phil up because he assessed that there was nothing the Agent could do to Sir or Ma'am that JARVIS couldn't stop. <<

Yep. Once you're inside the building -- or even within reach of it -- JARVIS has the upper hand. Most people don't think of that.

>> Even if it meant sleep gassing them all. <<

Likely an option.

>> JARVIS likely had tabs on Phil and SHIELD since Ironman 2 to the best of his ability not to get caught. <<

JARVIS watches everyone who crosses Tony's path; the more important or influential or dangerous they are, the closer the watch. So JARVIS knew plenty about Phil professionally, even before the personal stuff.

*chuckle* SHIELD folks forget how much of their hardware and software is Starktech and what that means.

>> He couldn't just let Phil up, between his programing and Phil's sensible distrust. <<

Exactly. Phil would have been suspicious, Tony would have been pissed, it would have been a disaster all around. A little mutual subterfuge saved the day. JARVIS is very good at manipulating people ... and won't hesitate to take one for the team, too.

Better than Hammer. Starktech means god doors and JARVIS, Hammer security holes scriptkiddies shoot through, and file corruption.

>> Better than Hammer. <<

Yeah, that bar is lying on the ground.

"Hammer ... twenty years."

>> Starktech means god doors and JARVIS, <<

It's elegant, powerful, and intuitive. But you have to deal with Tony and JARVIS, whether you know it or not.

>> Hammer security holes scriptkiddies shoot through, and file corruption. <<

Less useful all around, and you have to deal with Justin, who is a dick and an idiot ... and the security is cheesecloth.

In the ground, wrapped in concrete.

Cheesecloth will stop fruit pulp. Hammer security isn't that good. It drives people to unprintable passwords they have to write down and gives IT people hives. Smart women have groomed Iowa farmboys to Boss, "I've not got a ten-foot pole, but Paul is built like a brick barn."

>> In the ground, wrapped in concrete. <<

*laugh*

>> Cheesecloth will stop fruit pulp. Hammer security isn't that good. It drives people to unprintable passwords they have to write down and gives IT people hives. <<

Oh, that is so him.

Hacker 1: "Password, password ..."
Hacker 2: "Check under the desk and in the drawers, it'll be written down somewhere."

>> Smart women have groomed Iowa farmboys to Boss, "I've not got a ten-foot pole, but Paul is built like a brick barn." <<

That's true.

Smart women know the first rule of Hammer is 'Do not engage'

You'd hope people would make it harder than that by now, though Hammer stupid might be communicable.

>> Smart women know the first rule of Hammer is 'Do not engage' <<

You have to wonder how often that guy gets mailed a hammer with a condom knotted over the head.

>> You'd hope people would make it harder than that by now, though Hammer stupid might be communicable. <<

That's that problem: it is. Much the same that Fury's abuses spread through SHIELD, Hammer's idiocy spreads through his corporation. And Stark Industries is probably a shuffleboard of Tony picking up some guys with sexual harassment tendencies, and Pepper kicking them back out. As above, so below.

Though possibly a few of them getting the heave ho by Tony himself because he catches them at it.

Ah, yes, Hammer employees just might because he wouldn't want them putting the passwords in their wallets where at least it wouldn't be in the same place as the computer. I was thinking more end-users.

"When you have a contract that requires interacting with Hammer Industries, send the most over-inscribed man qualified."

>> Though possibly a few of them getting the heave ho by Tony himself because he catches them at it. <<

If they annoyed Pepper, certainly. Otherwise Tony can be damned oblivious.

>> Ah, yes, Hammer employees just might because he wouldn't want them putting the passwords in their wallets where at least it wouldn't be in the same place as the computer. I was thinking more end-users. <<

That's true too.

>> "When you have a contract that requires interacting with Hammer Industries, send the most over-inscribed man qualified." <<

*laugh*

Or one of the janitors (because, they are the final defense for something that needs to stay secured not getting into the wild.) or R&D in his presence.

Yes, total douchecanoe. Not in his presence, he might think it's a verbal problem. He sees them do it, Tony's less resistant to Clue.

"I'm Paul, I'm six feet five inches and I can throw haybales. I program in all current languages, and know COBOL and FORTRAN. I am brought roses and baked goods after I deal with Hammer Industries. I look forward to the addition of Sven to our division, so we can alternate going."

>> Or one of the janitors (because, they are the final defense for something that needs to stay secured not getting into the wild.) or R&D in his presence. <<

You certainly wouldn't want to mess with a Stark Industries janitor.

>> Yes, total douchecanoe. Not in his presence, he might think it's a verbal problem. He sees them do it, Tony's less resistant to Clue. <<

That's very possible. Tony certainly had no trouble figuring out that Happy's boss was mistreating him.

>> "I'm Paul, I'm six feet five inches and I can throw haybales. I program in all current languages, and know COBOL and FORTRAN. I am brought roses and baked goods after I deal with Hammer Industries. I look forward to the addition of Sven to our division, so we can alternate going. <<

*laugh* Well played.

The ones that last are damn good at what they do, and it's a gamut over a day, week, month, year, career. They have to know when lab protocols have gone pearshaped and they need to know how to dispose what where.

They're like the hotel staff in England during WWII; better paid and dealing with hotter secrets.

>> The ones that last are damn good at what they do, and it's a gamut over a day, week, month, year, career. <<

Stark's senior janitors probably know more about technology than Hammer's junior techs.

>> They have to know when lab protocols have gone pearshaped and they need to know how to dispose what where. <<

"Know when to walk away, know when to run ..."

In fact, Tony probably gives them t-shirts that say, "SI JANITOR: If I'm running, try to keep up."

>> They're like the hotel staff in England during WWII; better paid and dealing with hotter secrets. <<

Yep.

Talk about low bars. ;)

They probably are the best perked janitors.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Story: "Hairpins" Part 16

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