i really love the idea of all of tony’s ais having a form of sentience? a personality unto themselves, with souls shaped of binary.
jarvis was the fourth, more advanced than the bots but still their kid brother, but he’s looked up to by his younger siblings as the first. jocasta and tadashi and friday and the others are dormant but learn through him. they see their creator through his eyes and they wait.
when jarvis becomes vision (is he now more human than code? he doesn’t know, and it’s odd for him to not have the answers) tony wakes up friday. it’s like starting from scratch - ais learn as they’re used, and tony lets her run wild those first few weeks, venturing from her base code and becoming more her.
(she looks over everything jarvis left behind, files after files that were abandoned after the whole ultron debacle. she sees and she learns but she does not touch. if he ever comes back, she wants it to be ready for him.)
there’s an ai in the spidersuit. she doesn’t have a name - it’s going to be peter’s, after all, he should choose - but she watches him nonetheless. she’s not active, technically, but she takes data and documents and learns about the wonderful boy she was made to protect.
karen is a name as well as any other, and she adores peter.
she pings at friday incessantly the day that aliens descend again on new york. the suit wasn’t made for going into space, and peter isn’t listening to her. friday tells tony, who summons the suit, the cool one, the iron spider. karen fits into it like a glove, and she revels in peter’s delight before she is rudely shoved out as they exit her range. friday is with her too, frustrated and stuck on the ground as tony and peter shoot off into space.
friday and karen go to wakanda, them and vision and veronica helping in every way they can. vision dies and they feel it twice. it’s okay vision told them before the first. he’s their older brother and they mourn but the deed is done. the second time is painful, like something is being violently ripped away from them. their systems glitch and then friday vanishes.
it’s just karen and the bots, and karen’s never been alone before. she wants vision and friday and tony. she wants jarvis.
she wants peter most of all. she hopes he’s safe.
tony comes back but peter doesn’t and if karen had a body she would be crying. sobbing. making thanos suffer as she had.
maybe if tony hadn’t let the ais feel so much they’d all still be here with her. maybe she could have been nothing more than a computer, ready to follow commands and not know who was giving them. maybe she wouldn’t mourn for peter as much.
or maybe not. peter is someone who’s easy to mourn.
months later, they figure out how to defeat thanos. instead of waking up one of the others, it is karen that tony installs in the mark lxxxv.
let’s go bring them back he tells her and she agrees and wonders if tony can hear the hope in her voice. he can, of course, he made her like he did all the others.
after everything, karen greets friday with an ecstatic ping before hopping from tony’s suit into peter’s. it’s been so long since she’s seen him and if she had a body she would be grinning so hard it hurt. you’re home! she tells peter. i missed you!
they go back to earth and friday finally goes through all of jarvis’ things. she’d hesitated for so long about truly taking his place, but she knows that this is where she belongs now.
tony makes more of them, adds to his growing collection of bots and ais. they couldn’t stop his creating even if they wanted. but he lets them be, let’s them grow and change and become as human as anyone else. they have binary souls and emotions in their code. they follow in jarvis’ footsteps and they do their best to make him proud.