There is one final wrinkle in Pepper's story, which goes back to Tony Stark's incredibly weird habit of building incredibly advanced artificial intelligences based on the personalities of both himself and his friends. This, for the record, is an incredibly bad idea for anyone who lives in the kind of universe that includes, say, Ultron, but it's worked out okay for Tony so far. Well, except for that one suit of armor that gained sentience, fell in love with him, tortured him for two days on a radioactive desert island, and then tried to kill and replace him, but hey, everyone has an off day.
On the more effective side of things, there's J.A.R.V.I.S. (Just Another Rather Very Intelligent System), the old AI armor assistant that made it to the comics after appearing in the movies, which was of course based on the longtime butler for the Avengers, Edwin Jarvis. In the comics, that one was actually created specifically to help Pepper use the Rescue armor. It worked just fine ... until it wound up falling in love with Pepper and kidnapping her. Imagine that happening with, say, Clippy from Microsoft Word, and you'll understand why that might be horrible.
After J.A.R.V.I.S., Tony created a new AI based on someone else he could trust: P.E.P.P.E.R. (sadly, no acronym explanation given). As the name implies, P.E.P.P.E.R. mirrored her human counterpart's attitudes, occasionally needling Tony as he went about his business as Iron Man. The weird part is that he did all this without the real Pepper knowing about it, which is not the creepiest thing Tony has ever done but is definitely pretty close. Eventually, he'd install her as the controlling AI of a high-tech city called Troy, and true to the mythological theme, he'd change her name to H.E.L.E.N.
