Dum-E
The first time Dum-E made a smoothie for Tony it was in the weeks following his parents dying, just after he’d decided he had enough of college for the moment and really didn’t want to be anywhere that was going to make him think about the fact his parents were gone.
Sure, his dad was a douche, but he wasn’t the one he was really grieving, and he was just a little bitter that his mom was just a footnote applied to his dad’s news stories. She wasn’t perfect, but she’d been around. He just refused to think about it. Done was done and he was just going to have to live with it.
But, because of that, he’d been doing his level best to thoroughly distract himself, to make sure he had his hands busy at all times and his attention fixed somewhere that wouldn’t make him want to break anything.
That didn’t lend itself to good eating habits.
Honestly, he couldn’t say when, exactly, Dum-E had made it his priority to try to help. Maybe it was the breaking up of an established pattern since he’d been made that did it, or maybe it was that Tony had been running more or less on smoothies for over two weeks and he’d observed the process enough times to figure it out.
He was a learning AI after all.
But, the first time it happened, it was a surprise. Tony had just wanted him to stop poking at him and had told him to make himself useful.
In return, he’d gotten a smoothie that had way too much vegetable to be strictly awesome but was perfectly edible.
It had been enough to get him actually thinking again, at least enough to focus on something bigger. It was enough to give him ideas, ones that would take a while, but he didn’t regret a thing about that.
He was proud his first AI had learned what he could only see as concern and that was more than enough for him.