Space AU
All in the Stars
It had been generations since humanity had taken to space. Out there, the colonization had spanned several worlds, finally bringing them into contact with other races, and humans, as anyone who has ever observed them, have the habit of being rather friendly with other species.
It didn’t always go well, but those who looked more human often ended up with results, and those results were children who had quirks. Sometimes those quirks had nothing to do with either parent race. Sometimes they had everything to do with them.
Tony’s grandfather had been one of these, the first in the family to go from simply being smart and knowing how to talk to a machine, to being the first to really be able to talk to a machine. The Starks had always been a family of tinkerers, it had been what had gotten the family onto the first star-ward bound colony ships, once upon a time, but the new ability had taken that small skill and turned it into something bigger.
It had given Tony a wealth of possibility, spread across multiple planets and races, wealth and responsibility that had been handed down to him when his father died. It had been an accident, from what anyone could tell, and that was the worst part of it because Tony hadn’t exactly been old.
No, he’d still been a damn teenager, barely old enough to take the reigns of a company that spanned planets. In more than one instance, the company had become the source of stability for entire segments of the population on a smaller planet or moon. It had been terrifying, having so much power, and he’d put all his trust into the wrong people.
That had been a mistake that he’d ended up paying for dearly.
He’d learned his lessons, and after that the power rested solely in his own hands as well as those of the AIs that he created, be they for ships, private households, or anything else people could think of. Of course, he never sent them anywhere they didn’t want to go, because they were sentient, even if that was a secret, and he suspected more than one race, humans among them, wouldn’t be okay with that. So he was careful, but that part of the business was slowly growing, leaving him more and more busy as time went on.
The exhaustion from trying to keep that secret and carry all the work of it alone is what led to him finally creating the nanites he’d fed into himself to be able to directly interface and interact with his machinery at the basest level. He’d needed a little modification, in need of an energy source that wasn’t his nervous system, which of course led to a damn glow in his chest, but he’d take that over what he’d been living before. Of course, he nearly died in the process.
Humans were not biologically capable of handling direct mental contact with machines as advanced as a ship. No, at best they could typically handle simple data storage usually without dying of an aneurysm or stroke, unlike some races which could weather being more machine than human, always without a hitch. In fact, personal modification to these ends had long since been removed from viable research on most of the human held planets, though not outlawed given that there had never been a need when it was so proven to be fruitless.
Of course, that hadn’t stopped experimentation during the wars, but nothing, so far as anyone had to show, had come of that.
In the end, however, it was the non-human part of Tony that had allowed him to take such a desperate step without dying. It let him breathe easier and think more clearly about what was before him as he idled at other tasks with whatever machine needed his attention.
Essentially the frame of this AU is space, and being in space. Tony has essentially created pretty forbidden tech and used it on himself because of Reasons, and this allows him to interact with machines of all levels through electrical tuning, and to understand them as sentient beings in their own rights. Sometimes incredibly stupid ones, but still self-aware.
One system even landed him with this clunky title: Anthony Edward Stark of the Wayfarer Starks, Empirical ruler of the outer colonies of Tharnet.
He’s a tinker and a mechanic, and he travels quite a bit. Of course, he also has enemies, so it would not be difficult to run into him in any number of ways.
This is set in the far future from the current MCU so it’s entirely possible that that is ancient history to this particular AU.