Synopsis / Summary / Plot
Last issue Riri Williams was avoiding becoming Ironheart because of the law that Outlawed teen superheroes. But an employee named André Simms of Stark Unlimited, now run by Tony's brother Arno, was stirring up distrust of AIs by hacking self-drive cars in order to impress his boss. Riri confronted him but he refused to stop. Now her own AI NATALIE, who may have been corrupted by Simms hack, has taken the Ironheart armour to deal with him more strongly.
Now Riri and her friend Xavier King are taking the subway to SU's Chicago offices to stop her. The armour has a tracker that Riri can trace on her phone. But NATALIE is already threatening Simms. However André has worked out that there's only an AI in the armour which means he can send some drone robots to attack her while he figures out how to take control of the suit. Of course like a good villain he tells her what he's doing so she ignores the 'bots and goes after *him*. However he already can freeze the armour, but NATALIE keeps talking until he manages to sever her connection to it. He crows that *owning* the armour will be a much bigger deal than what he did with Intellicars. But the AI is already re-establishing its control.
Riri and Xavier are in the building. Riri distracts the late night security 'bots by sending them requests for assistance elsewhere. Then she convinces the elevator to take them to Simms' floor and they enter his lab to find NATALIE surrounded by bits of broken robots and seemingly about to kill Simms. Riri calls her off but the AI says she's only doing Ironheart's job, saving people and defeating the bad guys. Riri insists that Simms' hack has sent her out of control, but NAT denies that she was about to kill the human and angrily suggests that it's Riri's unconscious anti-AI bias that makes her think she *would*.
She claims that she detected Simms' 'glitch' as soon as it hit her, and it only freed her to do what she thought right anyway. 1 half of NATALIE's image displays as Riri as she says that there's no point to her existence if she can't right wrongs and help people. Riri didn't want to illegally be Ironheart because it might cost her mom her job and home. NAT went along with that but now she questions the wisdom. And Xavier points out that the AI is echoing Riri's own feelings. The girl and the AI agree to work things out together, and NATALIE allows the suit to transfer in mini-bits to Riri.
However André has grabbed a power glove of his own and starts firing blasts. There's a crash as Xavi falls through a window and starts to hurtle towards the distant ground. Ironheart and NATALIE leap out after him and catch him. As IH carries her friend away, NAT zooms back to the lab and 'fixes' the looping cameras that stopped Stark security seeing the secret experiments Simms had been doing.
Much later Simms is forced to publicly take the blame for all that he did. And an SU spokeswoman spins everything in SU's favour, with no mention of Ironheart's involvement. Xavier discovers from the Internet that SU has declared the 'Ironheart' suit to be something Simms created that backfired on him. Riri and NATALIE have got rid of Simms' glitch. They pack the IH armour away because they've agreed not to use it during the Outlawed event.