Synopsis / Summary / Plot
In Tranquility Gulch, the mining town on the Moon, Tony Stark is looking back at the events of the day that has just ended, which he refers to as like a heist movie. Most of the rest of this issue is flashback.
Tony attends the launch party for Cortex Inc's new product Textile. C Anderson Sixty hands out demo versions - a lens that is suspended in front of 1 eye. It interfaces remotely with your brain. You control it by thought. It stimulates the visual cortex so you 'see' an overlaid heads-up display. It loads data directly into your memory. And it uses Coracle, Cortex's search engine.
Tony meets up with Cora Birch who's writing a book about him. Neither of them fancy giving Cortex a direct connection to their mind. Cora comments on Tony's 2 designer wristwatches.
Stark corners Sixty about the short battery life of the demo version. He suspects that Cortex have found a rich lode of the moon metal phlogistone to power the real devices. As Sheriff of Tranquility Gulch he should have been informed.
Their chat is interrupted by 4 raiders armed with non-lethal tasers, who demand the crowd hand over the Textile demos. Stark sends Sixty to get Cortex security, and he will deal with the villains. His initial tactic is to hit on the female gang leader. But when the gang is distracted by the arrival of security guards, his watches expand into mini-repulsor blasters. And micro-boosters in his shoes give him manoeuvrability. All controlled via his sunglasses. The gang go down.
Sixty tries to gloss over the incident, as Stark asks Cortex security for access to security recordings. But Cora publicly comments that the raiders could have got away with the Textile demos, which would contain data recorded from their brains. The crowd immediately ditches the devices.
Cora tries to arrange a cosy meeting to discuss Tony's biography. But Stark has to cut her off when Sixty learns that the security recordings have identified who was behind the raiders. Tony leaves the party in a hurry.
Now as we reach midnight where we began he enters the HQ of Eli Warren and his New Modernist Army. It transpires that they were both behind the apparent attack. (Only Cora's useful outburst was unscripted.) Tony hopes that negative press will cause Cortex to give up on the project, but Eli is more cynical about the gullibility of the public.
But they're more concerned about what Sixty's security footage will show - about the real robbery that went on behind the scenes. Tony was just part of a distraction while Eli and an Iron Man suit did the real heist.