Kushinada Family House.
Morning.
A large, cozy room filled with the scent of oils and polish.
Light tones, European style, a double bed, and blueprints covering so much of the walls that the wallpaper was barely visible.
A couple of particularly large ones even hung from the ceiling.
Big clean windows were covered with heavy, thick curtains that reliably blocked every ray of light, protecting the owner’s sleep from the merciless sun.
Unfortunately, the sun wasn’t the only thing laying claim to that sleep.
The door to the room opened silently, and a woman entered.
Beautiful and young, with a stunning figure that many models would envy, wearing a light home dress with sunflowers.
She crept quietly and sneakily, a cute but mischievous expression on her face.
Once inside, she stopped beside the bed, ordered the smart optics to take a photo every three seconds, then pressed a discreet switch at the headboard that opened the curtains.
Built-in wall motors hummed softly as they did their job.
The first rays of sunlight filled the room, and the two children in the bed began to adorably scrunch their noses.
Tony woke up first, lying on his back and staring blankly at the ceiling, while Lucy only burrowed her nose deeper into his armpit, causing another wave of affection in the woman.
Alicia Kushinada loved children, and she loved cute things.
In her opinion, her little girl was the cutest girl in the universe.
She even found her daughter’s nightly “secret movements” — sneaking out of her own room to snuggle up to Tony — adorable.
“Lucius,” she said instead of a proper good morning, immediately earning a full look of reproach from the boy.
“You do realize it’s abnormal to come up with names for your own grandchildren while your daughter is still a child, right?” Tony nevertheless replied.
“Are you saying you’re not going to marry my daughter? After everything that’s happened between you!?” Alicia exclaimed in mock shock.
“Yeah, yeah, changing diapers is a very intimate process,” Stark snorted, slowly waking up.
“Exactly,” she nodded at him with exaggerated importance.
“So be a good man, take responsibility and marry my daughter like a proper gentleman should.”
“Madhouse,” Tony exhaled tiredly.
It wasn’t that he minded joking around and having fun, but not when he himself was the target — especially on this particular topic.
Having regained his memories, Stark was a convinced bachelor who sincerely considered the institution of marriage an outdated atavism and a rather dubious endeavor in the modern world.
In the past, when marriage was primarily a political tool and the union of two families into a single alliance, it required legal confirmation so one couldn’t just walk away without serious consequences.
From the mid-20th century onward, that function gradually faded.
Marriages of convenience were replaced by marriages of love, where real relationships between two people were built instead of cold calculation.
And as everyone knows, in any relationship a third party is always superfluous — especially when that third party is the state.
So Alicia’s jokes didn’t amuse him at all, even when they were relatively fresh.
Worse still, he was starting to think they weren’t jokes at all.
And in some ways, he was right.
Overall, Alicia wasn’t against such prospects and had already mentally married Tony to her daughter.
There were three reasons.
First, Tony was a genius.
Plain and simple — a Genius with a capital G.
He wouldn’t perish and would always be able to make it in life, even in unexpected difficulties.
Second, Tony was rich.
Not obscenely so, but very comfortably.
In addition to the inheritance from his parents (with six zeros), the medical equipment program he had written last year had taken off.
All corporations even remotely connected to medicine were actively using it and paying Tony his percentage on time.
Though only half of the credit belonged to Tony — the rest was thanks to his parents and the Polish government, which was actively trading his patent and advertising the program wherever possible.
Convenient, profitable, and overall acceptable, especially when looking at the steadily growing sums.
Alicia didn’t know the exact amount in Tony’s accounts, but she was sure it was more than significant.
And third, perhaps most importantly, Tony was simply a good boy.
Kind, sincerely loving her daughter (even if as a sister), and caring for her.
In short, if she could marry the two of them off, she would be at peace — which was why she hammered this into their heads 24/7.
“Mmmuuu-nya…” came an unintelligible sound from the armpit area.
“Good morning,” Lucy greeted everyone, rubbing her eyes in a funny way.
“You snuck into my room again,” Tony snorted in displeasure.
And he had reason to be displeased — he liked sleeping naked, but because of Lucy he couldn’t!
If he had the mind of a ten-year-old, he probably wouldn’t have cared, especially given the modern Polish-Japanese blended morals where attitudes toward nudity were quite tolerant.
But he had the mind of a man over forty!
And therefore, sleeping naked in the same bed with a little girl… well, it evoked, to put it mildly, questionable associations.
Questionable, shameful, and not exactly pleasant ones.
“Uh-huh,” Lucy easily agreed, not showing a single gram of remorse on her sleepy face.
She loved sleeping with Tony because he was soft and warm, and she just liked hugging him in general.
“Fine, I’m going to take a shower,” Tony sighed resignedly, accepting his fate, and shuffled off to the bathroom.
The Kushinada house was smaller than the Stark house and worse protected, but everything related to the kitchen, heating, and smart systems was state-of-the-art.
And while “worse protected” was true compared to the Stark fortress, they still had strong walls, automatic reinforced steel shutters, and three heavy turrets in the house.
More than enough for hypothetical thieves.
If serious people showed up, even the Starks’ security wouldn’t stop them.
Ultimately, the main defenders there were Robert and Claire, while Ryu and Alicia were… well, they were what they were.
One could still expect fierce resistance from Ryu — he was a veteran of the previous corporate war, even if not heavily chromed — but Alicia was a purely civilian specialist. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping(.)com.
Compared to the two modified individuals, she might as well be a child.
Once in the shower, Tony immediately turned on cold water to drive away sleep, stood there for a couple of minutes, then switched to normal.
As he washed, not-so-pleasant thoughts crept into his head again.
A lot of time had passed since his parents’ death, and much had changed.
Not necessarily for the better, but there were positives.
For example, he had become much freer in his actions.
Alicia was a loving mother but extremely irresponsible, which wasn’t surprising — all parental duties were performed by the servants.
It would be stupid to blame a young, purely domestic girl for delegating all the unpleasant aspects of parenting to hired workers when she had the opportunity.
Still, it rubbed Tony the wrong way.
Especially when Alicia, without realizing it, upset her daughter.
In the end, Tony himself hadn’t noticed how he had become Lucy’s nanny, spending more time with her than her mother and, especially, her father who was constantly at work.
The second positive was Lucy herself.
The little girl had firmly settled in Tony’s heart and had genuinely helped him out of his depression.
When he regained his memories and fully became himself again, besides depression he also suffered an identity crisis.
He simply didn’t know who he was!
As the saying goes, existence determines consciousness, but the author of that phrase clearly didn’t mean the body of a child with the mind of an adult.
Fresh feelings and impressions said one thing, while memory and experience said another, all seasoned with depression that had only worsened due to the awakened memories.
It wasn’t even so much the awareness of the friends and loved ones left behind, but the repeated loss of his parents.
In his previous life, Tony had taken the death of his father and mother extremely hard, drowning himself in alcohol for months and developing alcoholism, which he fought until his death.
Now, having experienced it all again, when the associative chain triggered and emotions from his past life resurfaced and mixed with the present, he had come dangerously close to the noose.
Fortunately, an extremely positive and empathetic ball of cuteness helped him first get distracted and then cope with the loss, finally turning the page of his life to a new beginning.
That was where the good events ended and the bad ones began.
The first of them was Ryu Kushinada.
Although he diligently played the role of a loving father and husband, in reality he was quite the sociopath, which Tony had spotted instantly.
After all, the awakened experience of a megacorporation CEO made itself known, allowing him to read people well.
Ryu was the main source of tension for Tony, because he simply didn’t know what the man might pull next.
They also simply didn’t like each other.
In principle, Tony could have coexisted relatively easily in his house — especially since Ryu spent far more time at work than at home — if not for the man’s constant attempts to brainwash both him and Lucy about the greatness of Japanese megacorps, the historical significance of Saburo’s figure, and loyalty to the Arasaka family.
Here Ryu’s own skill at reading people worked against him; he saw that his speeches had no effect on Tony, which only infuriated him and made him increase the pressure, sometimes breaking into reproaches toward the boy.
But Ryu was, so to speak, Tony’s personal problem.
The rapidly rotting Poland, on the other hand, was a problem for everyone.
Because of the events of a year ago, the government had seriously lost power and control over the situation, essentially turning from the biggest frog in the local swamp (whom no player dared to challenge) into a mere referee.
The gangs that had previously been kept in check and periodically exterminated began to grow bolder, increasingly creeping into the city and committing outright chaos.
Beatings, robberies, and racketeering were far from the worst things on the list.
As one might guess, Tony’s active nature did its job, forcing him to go out into the city more and more often to hunt down all kinds of scum.
Even before his rebirth, it was hard to call Iron Man soft — not every billionaire would build himself a flying armored suit and fly to the East to shoot terrorists.
In this new life and new world, Tony’s already rather flexible moral principles regarding the value of human life had finally taken the form of complete indifference toward such an ephemeral thing.
After all, Claire and Robert’s upbringing had done its work, massively shaking the original “thou shalt not kill” attitudes instilled in any Christian society.
After their death, those principles had completely collapsed.
Tony didn’t know if this was good or bad, but given the state of the world, it was probably good.
He would have to spill a lot of blood simply to defend what was his, let alone fix the situation.
And yes, the current state of the world was the biggest problem in the life of the reborn Stark.
His condition after regaining his memories and assessing the situation was best illustrated by his desire to take a flamethrower and burn all the world’s elites to hell.
Stark had never harbored illusions about modern politicians — he had been steeped in their environment for years since childhood, had seen everything, and mostly felt something between contempt and disgust toward these figures.
In his subjective opinion, real politicians had died out in the second half of the twentieth century, when “people from the populace” with no obligations or foundation replaced the old clans.
Their only goal was to stay in power as long as possible, grab as much as they could, and then retire on a “well-deserved” pension.
Tony didn’t believe in democracy, and neither did the U.S.
elites, but being smart people, they put talking heads in the foreground to avoid the crowd’s wrath when necessary.
For God’s sake, what kind of democracy are we talking about when he could immediately name a dozen presidents who were related to each other!?
Some might say the U.S.
was essentially an aristocratic republic where clans decided everything — and they would be right… up to a certain point.
The point when those very clans lost a significant portion of their influence and let successful entrepreneurs into power, who ultimately derailed a system that had worked for centuries.
If what was happening in 2077 in his original world was only beginning and had little chance of realization due to the presence of strong individuals capable of opposing the state alone, here these processes had reached their logical conclusion.
The “successful businessmen” who had seized power, unable to see far ahead, had ruined all social institutions, leaving only facades.
The worst part wasn’t even that corporations had practically replaced governments everywhere, but that those corporations were literal buckets of crabs.
Arasaka itself had once tried, after gaining enough resources and influence, to subordinate Japan legislatively and replace government structures with its own.
As a result, it only united the other Japanese corporations against itself.
Logically, when one structure becomes more powerful than another, it replaces or absorbs the weaker, interfering, and unnecessary one.
But due to competition, no one let Arasaka do that.
As a result, a bunch of small corps were tearing Japan apart with their interests and rivalries, stalling in place, while the situation grew closer and closer to critical.
The situation was so deadlocked that Stark simply saw no bloodless solutions.
Moreover, his thoughts kept sliding toward the Russians and their communism.
The words “nationalization” and “expropriation” sounded especially sweet.
Simply because he didn’t want to live on a piece of radioactive dirt a hundred years from now!
The only thing he had started considering was the cowardly option of escaping to another planet.
Mars looked very promising for colonization.
After all, he wasn’t the one who created this current mess, so why should he have to clean it up!?
No, if he still had his corporation with all its resources, connections, and equipment, he wouldn’t hesitate.
But without even a tenth of his former capabilities, he simply wasn’t sure he could pull it off.
“I’ll leave these problems to my future self,” Tony decided, stepping out of the shower and heading downstairs for breakfast.
The cook — a stern woman in her fifties — had just set the table with plates of porridge.
Good, tasty porridge with nuts, raisins, and meat.
Just the thing to stock up on calories for the day ahead and grease the intestines.
As always, breakfast passed in silence with everyone staring at their plates.
Perhaps it was at this moment that the true state of affairs in the Kushinada family became clear — especially when remembering the much warmer meals at the Starks’.
Here… there was emptiness.
As if it wasn’t a husband and wife sitting at the table, but two strangers who didn’t care about each other at all.
“Quite possibly that’s exactly the case,” Tony thought.
Funny enough, he wasn’t even sure if Ryu and Alicia slept together.
He knew about the process of growing Lucy in an incubator, so considering the separate bedrooms of the husband and wife…
“Thank you for the meal,” Tony said the standard thanks as he rose from the table.
“Uh-huh,” only Alicia reacted at all.
Lucy said nothing — she simply quickly devoured her portion, after which Tony heard the patter of little feet behind him.
“Coming with me again?” he asked the rather obvious question.
“Uh-huh,” the little girl nodded seriously.
Lately she had become fascinated with engineering.
Her enhanced brain and memory allowed her to grasp everything on the fly, making Lucina a confident hobbyist already.
“Well, alright then. Let’s go,” Tony said, stroking the child’s snow-white hair, which made her look like a displeased kitten.
He smiled slightly.
Teaching the little rascal was genuine pleasure for Stark.
If before regaining his memories he hadn’t exactly loved it, now he sincerely enjoyed it, because little Kushinada truly understood what he was saying and demonstrated intelligence comparable to his own.
This was extremely valuable to Stark — in both his lives, he could count on the fingers of one hand the people who were on his level, and a good portion of them wanted him dead.
Here he had not only an active listener but also a conversation partner who sometimes asked genuinely interesting and difficult questions, forcing Tony himself to rack his brains for answers.
“Greetings, Master Tony,” Omnissiah greeted him as soon as he crossed the threshold of his house.
Since both houses were next to each other — literally a ten-minute leisurely walk — Tony spent a lot of time here.
Over the past year he had seriously remodeled the interior, essentially turning the house into one large workshop.
The living room was now a storage area, the kitchen a chemical laboratory, two of the three bathrooms were servers, the guest room was a relaxation zone, and Robert’s office had been given over to blueprints.
The only rooms Tony hadn’t touched were his own and his parents’.
“Hi, Omnissiah,” he smiled at the significantly taller piece of hardware.
At two hundred and ten centimeters (up from the previous one hundred and eighty), the robot stood out from standard models even without the design, which hadn’t changed much over time — unlike the internals, which Stark had radically reworked using all his knowledge.
Unfortunately, without repulsors, nanites, or an arc reactor, because… well, the necessary technological chains for the first didn’t exist, and without them Tony would spend five years assembling them by hand.
The second were too expensive, and no one would sell him the materials for the third.
Besides, he didn’t want to risk giving the locals a powerful clean energy source, especially a scalable one.
So he limited himself to goods already available on the market, which the geographical location helped with in every way.
As one might guess, Tony worked in his house.
At the moment he was simply setting up his personal workshop, trying to bring it into some semblance of reasonable order by modifying ordered machines, equipment, and other nice things.
Money allowed it.
He was also slowly teaching Lucy, who had shown considerable talent in programming and drone construction.
Though today he had slightly different plans.
“Everything ready?” he asked Omnissiah, heading toward the brain activity corrector.
“All preparations are complete,” she confirmed.
“Good,” Tony nodded to his own thoughts.
“Well, Lucy, shall we upgrade that brain of yours?” he smiled.
“Will it hurt?” she asked a little nervously.
“Just a tiny bit,” Tony replied, showing with his fingers how tiny, and smiled encouragingly.
Seeing doubt on his young ward’s face, he decided to sweeten the pill.
“And afterward I’ll make your favorite ice cream. Deal?”
“Deal!” the cunning little thing immediately forgot all her fears, climbing into the chair and making Stark narrow his eyes suspiciously.
“Well? What are we waiting for? Start it already! The sooner we finish, the sooner I get my ice cream!” She only strengthened his suspicions.
“Yes, yes,” Tony sighed resignedly and activated the device.
Why was he putting Lucy through the same procedure he had gone through?
The answer was simple: he had grown attached to the little girl and wanted the best for her.
That was all.
He couldn’t perceive her as his bride simply because of his preferences, which clearly pointed toward meat-and-dairy products larger than average, preferably on long beautiful legs (with an ass to match).
He simply wanted to help Lucy, to make his contribution to her future.
And what could be a better contribution than optimizing her body with bonuses like longevity and accelerated regeneration?
Given Lucina’s future profession as a netrunner, such improvements could one day save her life, which, in Tony’s opinion, justified any expense.
Here it was just a slightly higher electricity bill.