[There's a long, Thoughtful pause following the gradual progress of Skye crossing the floor and screwing up her courage and recounting the highlights of her rather colorful career as a hacker. Tony watches the whole thing from where he's standing at the end of the obsidian-black pulpit, the shrunken code barely glittering reflections around his feet.]
No, [he says.] I haven't heard of. that.
[There's a deliberate touch of caustic humor to that statement. Sometimes Tony Stark isn't very nice, even when he doesn't mean to be particularly mean.] But I have heard of HYDRA, and they definitely set the bar-- somewhere. [:)] All right, let's skip preschool and see if you can read. [A gesture of his hand, and the code maximizes again. It's like watching (a self-appointed) God gesture, unfurl the full-depth luminosity of the universe like shaking out a tarp.
Hundreds of lines of code propagate into view, hundreds of feet deep and high at full magnification. Tony gestures at the nearest glassy column of slow-rotating text.] It isn't written in kanji.
[It isn't. It is of course, a programming language of Earth as she knows it. More advanced than anything HYDRA wrote, but it wasn't impossible for Coulson to override once or twice upon an elevator; it won't be impossible for her to decipher it now. Innumerable layers of security, protocols of conduct, voice activation, a vocabulary more complex than the vast majority of humans to have ever lived; the ability to think, albeit in a carefully, rigidly limited way.
She can see why he didn't want just anyone to know what he was playing at.]
no subject
No, [he says.] I haven't heard of. that.
[There's a deliberate touch of caustic humor to that statement. Sometimes Tony Stark isn't very nice, even when he doesn't mean to be particularly mean.] But I have heard of HYDRA, and they definitely set the bar-- somewhere. [:)] All right, let's skip preschool and see if you can read. [A gesture of his hand, and the code maximizes again. It's like watching (a self-appointed) God gesture, unfurl the full-depth luminosity of the universe like shaking out a tarp.
Hundreds of lines of code propagate into view, hundreds of feet deep and high at full magnification. Tony gestures at the nearest glassy column of slow-rotating text.] It isn't written in kanji.
[It isn't. It is of course, a programming language of Earth as she knows it. More advanced than anything HYDRA wrote, but it wasn't impossible for Coulson to override once or twice upon an elevator; it won't be impossible for her to decipher it now. Innumerable layers of security, protocols of conduct, voice activation, a vocabulary more complex than the vast majority of humans to have ever lived; the ability to think, albeit in a carefully, rigidly limited way.
She can see why he didn't want just anyone to know what he was playing at.]