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In all the iterations of Tony’s suits, his own flesh had always been the weakest link. Since integrating nanite technology, the suit could repair itself on the fly, but his flesh needed weeks to repair. Never one to leave a weakness in a design, he contacted the korean scientist Helen Cho for help, and together they’d found a way to incorporate her regeneration cradle technology into his design. Tiny injectors and instruments on the interior could stitch him back together with the suit's reservoir of artificial, lab-cultured cells. The nano-molecular bonding was instantaneous.
It had come in use months later when trying to restrain a rampaging Hulk. Stark had been beaten half to death. Actually, technically, he’d been beaten 51% to death. Working to replace his damaged tissue with cellular replicas as the fight dragged on, the artificial, lab-grown flesh now constituted a majority.
‘Foreign tissue detected. Coverage - 49%. Eradicating foreign genetic material,’ announced the HUD.
Stark knew something was wrong as the regeneration cradle began to work overtime, the interior of the suit turning into a makeshift iron maiden as thousand of microneedles began prickling him all over. Still reeling from the fight, it took him a moment to run through the code and determine that the machine had flipped its designations, the artificial cells considered the majority and thus the norm, with his real cells now labelled as foreign.
“Remove suit!” Stark demanded.
‘Denied. Medical emergency in progress - suit cannot be removed until foreign material has been purged. Coverage at 46%.’
“Jarvis, set a course for Seoul.”
By the time he arrived at Helen’s laboratory, the ‘foreign tissue’ was down to 3%. He could feel the needles probing deep inside his abdomen as they sought out the last remaining cells of himself. She was in her laboratory. Stark ripped at the armor, which had finally downgraded his ‘medical emergency’.
“There’s a problem with the cradle,” Stark said as he desperately wrenched off the upper chest plate. “Whose DNA did you use for the synthetic tissue?”
“Yours of course.” she said, running to help. He was yanking at the face plate but his movements were awkward, like he was rattling around inside the oversized armor.
“Mine and who elses?”
“My stem cells were used as the initial substrate. Your DNA was then integrated into your cellular batch to prevent rejection. Why? What’s happened?”
The faceplate came loose. Helen gasped.
“How bad is it?” Tony asked. He clutched his throat as a soft, female voice emerged.
There wasn’t horror on her face. She was staring at him only in adoration. Their relationship had always been professional, actually he’d found her attitude rather frosty, yet suddenly she flung her arms around his neck.
“Dr… Cho?”
“I’m sorry,” she blushed when she finally broke the hug. “It’s just that I always wanted a daughter.”