The Polish Republic.
Warsaw.
A spacious underground room containing numerous beds was filled with silence.
The rows of uniform beds with shelves, the cold light of the lamps, and the gray indifference of the concrete walls seemed to the children like a mockery of their tragedy, emphasizing it even further.
Death.
Few children ever ponder the simple truth that humans are mortal.
What is worse, suddenly mortal.
Today, however, they had come face-to-face with this frightening truth.
Lucy sat on her bed, hugging her knees tightly to her chest, staring blankly at the wall.
There was no spark of life in her eyes, no shadows of emotion, nor bursts of rage.
Only despair filled them.
Despair and the question: when had her happy life turned into a nightmare?
To her own horror, she knew the answer.
A year ago.
On the day a curious kitten sneaked in to hack her own father’s computer and found something she shouldn’t have.
That was exactly when.
Excluding this past year, Lucyna had been happy.
She lived in a large, beautiful house, she had a loving—if slightly scatterbrained—mother, a caring father who was away from home for long stretches, as well as her most-beloved-older-brother Tony, who spent almost all his free time with her, and a reliable-older-sister Omnissiah, even if she was a robot.
Despite minor friction in their relationships, Lucy genuinely loved her family.
She was well-fed, loved, happy, and doing what she had a talent for.
She could spend all day messing around with a computer, assembling a more powerful and reliable model for herself, and then proudly present her creation to Tony so he could look it over and show her how it could be done better, invariably smiling, patting her head, and telling her she did a great job.
She could spend weeks writing code for a new program, ironing out the slightest flaws in her creation, so that Omnissiah would nod respectfully and also pat her on the head.
She had even attempted the unthinkable!
She learned to cook so her mother would pat her on the head too.
Her father would pat her head for achievements in her studies.
Granted, she didn’t have any friends, even though she really wanted to make some.
But…all her peers were so foolish, slow, and struggled to comprehend the simplest things that she couldn’t stand it and would stop interacting with them, and they didn’t mind either.
“That’s the burden of an intelligent person, Lucy,” her brother would comfort her when she came home upset yet again, genuinely assuming something was wrong with her since she couldn’t seem to make friends with anyone.
“It’s hard for us to communicate with someone who is slower, and most kids, to put it mildly, aren’t exactly bursting with intellect.”
“And will I never make friends?”
“You will,” he stated confidently, recalling something.
“You absolutely will, sooner or later. You just need to find yourself in the right environment, with people like you.”
As always, her brother turned out to be right, and Lucy did indeed make friends.
First at the Arasaka Netrunner Academy managed by her father.
She didn’t manage to become friends with everyone there, but those who understood her became her long-time friends, just as she did to them.
Tellingly, almost all of her friends ultimately completed the training program and, at just ten years old, managed to secure jobs with Arasaka alongside Lucy herself.
It seemed like a fairy tale!
They, mere children, working for one of the most powerful corporations in the world, receiving a corresponding salary—what could possibly go wrong?!
As it turned out, everything.
It had been a mistake from the very beginning, not a fairy tale, but a clever trap set by a monster that lured naive little children into its lair.
And yesterday, that became explicitly clear.
A year.
For a whole year, Lucy and her friends worked on a highly serious project where none of them were allowed to make phone calls, establish contact, or even leave the complex to see their families.
To say this took a toll on the affectionate little girl would be a massive understatement.
For an entire year, at every single opportunity, she begged her father to let her see her family, only to receive a cold, completely indifferent gaze and a dismissive “forbidden.” Forbidden to see her brother and fix him a snack when he lost track of time during another bout of creative frenzy.
Forbidden to poke him with a stick alongside Omnissiah just to stir him up.
Forbidden to discuss the latest news with her mother over a cup of tea or while watching a talk show.
Forbidden, forbidden, forbidden!
First came fear.
The fear of never seeing her loved ones again.
Then, the fear gave way to emptiness; the little girl simply burned out from the daily anguish.
And following the emptiness came apathy.
Lucy did things and said things, but purely out of inertia.
Having lost her family, only then did she realize how deeply she loved them all.
And then…
then Arnie died.
Killed by a rogue AI, devoured right in front of their eyes.
His scream still echoed in her ears.
Back when Lucy found photos of her father and his “exploits” from the Corporate War, she threw a tantrum at him.
A little princess raised in love and sheltered conditions, she took it extremely poorly that her dependable, kind dad could perpetrate such atrocities.
Though…
now she understood that it wasn’t a reaction to her father’s actions, but rather her rose-tinted glasses developing their first serious cracks.
The sharp, painful slap that day had been extremely sobering, as had her father’s cold, indifferent stare.
“Shut up,” he had snapped back then—a short word filled with irritation.
As if spoken not to his daughter, but to an annoying fly.
“Take her away,” he commanded Alicia, and she obeyed without a word, quickly leading her daughter to her room, where she lingered awkwardly, not knowing how to comfort the little girl, before making an excuse and leaving.
It was only an hour later that Tony burst into her room to hug her tightly and reassure her that everything would be fine.
But…nothing was fine.
Abruptly casting aside the role of a loving father, Ryu eventually showed his true colors by shoving his own daughter into a program tasked with hunting for data in the Old Net.
It was the equivalent of throwing a talented but still very young child into shark-infested waters to swim.
A whole year without any casualties…
that was a genuine achievement for a handful of small kids. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
But now, they had lost the first of their own.
They were weakened.
The next life taken was only a matter of time, and Lucy realized this with absolute clarity.
Quite possibly, it might even be her.
“Big brother… help me,” the little girl whimpered quietly, unable to withstand the storm of emotions raging in her soul.
The Polish Republic.
Warsaw.
The Stark family home.
A tall, stately eighteen-year-old youth was donning combat gear.
Nothing fancy, just a fabric with the properties of a non-Newtonian fluid that protected well against small calibers while allowing the body to breathe, supplemented by Kevlar plates with graphene nanotubes.
There was nothing high-tech about his armor—just mechanics as reliable as an iron.
Overall, by Tony’s standards, this was the kit of a more-or-less professional solo in the vastness of the Polish capital, someone accustomed to relying on chrome rather than armor.
The only thing that stood out from the general picture was the helmet.
Solid, covering the back of the head, and featuring a faceplate, it housed a crystalline nano-computer, squeezing in more than impressive processing power, most of which was occupied by analysis and hacking programs.
Now, when it came to weapons, Tony’s setup was far more interesting.
First and foremost was a war hammer.
Stark admitted to himself that as a brawler, he was below average.
He lacked the reflexes of someone like Steve, whose every action passed through the prism of the subconscious to deliver an instantaneous response; he thought entirely too much for that.
He was an engineer.
A tech.
A specialist in machines, and that was his primary strength.
In hand-to-hand combat, he lost to almost everyone he knew, unlike ranged combat, which required quickly calculating an object’s dynamics and a projectile’s ballistics.
But since he was nonetheless forced into a primitive fistfight that was a losing proposition for him, he had derived a simple formula of brutal, armored, and unstoppable power.
The Hulk would confirm that this was an extremely effective approach.
And as the embodiment of this idea, he created a hammer for himself.
A simple hammer into which he integrated a low-frequency vibration emitter that disrupted atomic bonds, turning almost anything it touched to dust.
A terrifying weapon, albeit of an extremely short operational range.
He would have fashioned full-sized guns on this principle, but alas, Tony lacked the necessary materials, as well as the finances to acquire them.
Therefore, for now, he confined himself to a blunt, primitive, but reliable hammer—one hit was enough, and the enemy wouldn’t be getting back up.
Following the hammer came wrist-mounted submachine guns.
Customarily used to having his hands free, Stark had no intention of changing his approach.
Over a couple of days, he converted purchased smart guns into bracers, simultaneously rewriting their software, improving anti-hacking protection, accelerating self-targeting, and increasing the magazine capacity to a couple of hundred rounds.
The little beauties weren’t particularly powerful, but thanks to the smart program and their connection to the helmet, they locked onto the most vulnerable areas with millimeter accuracy, guaranteeing the enemy’s death if not from the first shot, then from the tenth, twentieth, or hundredth.
Another interesting piece of gear Tony possessed was an Ashura.
A smart sniper rifle with an abysmal rate of fire but devastating damage that would make even a borg miserable, it was bulky, and its target acquisition range was inferior to classic counterparts, but Stark didn’t need that.
He needed a powerful, precise caliber, and he got it by dismantling the monstrous contraption, studying it, and ultimately reassembling it for back-mounted use.
Upon activation, a short barrel emerged from behind his shoulder and instantly fired a smart, self-guided rocket.
Actually, that was the original reason he made the helmet—the targeting module simply wouldn’t fit into the reassembled structure, so he had to improvise, and that’s when new ideas came along.
And the final component of his arsenal was a light machine gun modified to use thermal ammunition of his own design.
While the baseline version was calculated against targets with heavy subdermal armor, Tony’s creations melted tank armor.
Not by a tremendous amount, but for city streets, this was already excessive power, and when you added a backpack feed system, you got a literal firing position on legs that required heavy armor support to assault.
It might seem that this wasn’t a completely optimal loadout for someone with Tony’s brains, and generally speaking, that assessment would be correct.
Stark had always preferred maneuverability, but not at the expense of protection.
His first suit model had withstood a hit from a tank shell and a fall from several hundred meters, while Tony himself got nothing worse than a substantial but ordinary bruise.
The structure he developed to dampen the blunt force of a shot, with the subsequent distribution of the remainder across the entire body, was, without hyperbole, one of his most brilliant inventions alongside the arc reactor and repulsors.
It was precisely what allowed him to disregard a great many threats in battle, becoming a flying headache capable of appearing in different areas within a second.
But the new world dictated its own conditions, where well-armed, armored enemies were not a rarity but the bare minimum standard.
And under such conditions, it was best not to maneuver like a fly dodging a shoe, but to drench the adversary in lead to such an extent that they couldn’t even poke their nose out.
And with the physical attributes Tony obtained from his past venture, this was entirely possible.
“I am forced to inform you of the high risks and highly undesirable consequences of your actions, Master Tony,” the ceiling spoke in Omnissiah’s voice.
“And what do you suggest? Try to get through to that spineless amoeba again?” Tony grimaced at the mention of Alicia.
Back when he first met Ryu, he had been wary of strange behavior on his part, but over the years of living together under one roof, he had lowered his guard.
In the end, Ryu’s entire eccentricity consisted of fondly keeping photographs of a massacre and occasionally viewing them, while for the vast majority of the time, he was an exemplary family man, a hardworking father, and a perfectly caring parent.
Ultimately, not every parent would push their offspring into a cutting-edge project to unlock and expand human potential, risking their own career.
Pity, he was mistaken; as always, the details turned out to matter.
For how did he think Ryu would act?
He would send Lucyna to study at the academy he built, she would complete her training and secure a cozy spot right by her father’s side, dealing with something like network security.
Yes, Arasaka would lose a valuable specialist in a critical position, and one of Ryu’s detractors might exploit that, but his daughter would gain the tools allowing her to survive and make a life for herself under any circumstances.
In Tony’s view, a more than sufficient prize to take the risk.
However, he was wrong; Ryu had no intention of taking risks for Lucy’s sake from the very beginning.
On the contrary, he wanted to curry favor at her expense, sending her immediately after her training to a classified base to work on some top-secret project.
Tony hadn’t seen the kid for an alarmingly long time, which completely crossed the line for him, and when all soft methods of resolving the matter were exhausted, he began to act harshly, brazenly, and with utter disregard for all written and unwritten laws.
Yesterday, he had tried one last time to settle the matter peacefully, namely by involving Alicia, Lucy’s mother.
And what can one say…
a failure.
Absolute.
The lady turned out to be completely under her husband’s thumb, not daring to utter a single word in defense of her own flesh and blood, and she didn’t even seem particularly upset by the long separation, easily accepting her daughter’s absence from the house.
And once he finally understood the state of affairs, he began to act—fortunately, he retained access to the Kushinada family home even after turning eighteen, when Ryu asked him to leave.
So, a couple of synthesized powders applied to Ryu’s comb, his toothbrush, and his towel yielded a marvelous result in the form of lost teeth, hair, and skin abscesses.
In just a single night, his good looks diminished considerably, which couldn’t help but terrify him.
Ryu knew how corporations could deal with their enemies, and therefore he was particularly attentive to his health, since chemical weapon poisoning, radiation exposure, or a slow-acting poison could intimately introduce themselves to his organism at any moment in a highly unpleasant way.
This was necessary to lure Ryu out of his usual habitat of home and work—places that were well-guarded and located close to rapid response squads.
A private clinic was also far from the best place for an ambush, but Tony didn’t need to storm it; it was enough to lie in wait for the target en route to it or upon his exit.
“One could act more subtly,” Omnissiah replied.
“And slowly,” Tony countered.
“Do you really think nothing will happen to Lucy in that time?”
“She is far stronger than you think.”
“Perhaps,” Tony nodded.
“But that doesn’t mean she should suffer while I sit around here, worrying about my own ass.”
“Even in the absolute best-case scenario, you will turn the entire European division of Arasaka against you. The corporation will not forgive the kidnapping and liquidation of the head of an entire sector of its own conglomerate. You will have to flee, abandon everything you’ve built over the years, and go into hiding.”
“No great loss,” Tony scoffed contemptuously.
Over his years of living in Poland, he had indeed managed a great deal—for instance, obtaining a full medical education along with completing the corresponding residency, designing new implants for himself, building a workshop, and establishing connections.
On the whole, he had everything ready to start his own business; his weapons factory was almost finished.
A factory that would provide Poland with dependable and high-quality weaponry, even if it wasn’t the absolute best, reducing its dependence on external supplies to a minimum.
The enterprise Tony created was a factory only in his own understanding; in the understanding of normal people, it was a full-fledged corporation that mined the raw materials for the weapons and ammunition itself, processed everything itself, delivered it, and ultimately brought fairly high-quality firearms into the world, which quickly occupied the niche of reliable but inexpensive weaponry.
Consequently, the demand for them was wild—a sort of Kalashnikov rifle in a new style, only more pleasant to shoot.
“I’ll change my appearance, and that’s it.”
“You have invested millions, almost all of your money, into this enterprise.”
“I’ll make more,” Tony shrugged carelessly.
“Besides, my primary finances were moved to hidden accounts long ago, so I won’t have to start from scratch.”
“You wouldn’t have to start from scratch at all if you were more patient.”
“Perhaps,” Tony readily agreed.
“But you know what, Omnissiah? To hell with Poland. To hell with Warsaw. To hell with Arasaka. Just screw it all.”
Tony had reached his boiling point, as the saying goes.
For eighteen years he had lived in this country, and while the first few years were relatively good while his parents were alive and the Harbinger was operational, with their deaths and the downfall of the only force that kept crime in check, the situation in the country became outright wretched.
Even before this, the Polish government couldn’t boast of independence, acting as a sort of arbitration judge that harshly punished violations of its laws but didn’t dare change them.
Now, the state had definitively transformed into an appendage servicing the black market of Europe, whose entire function was the comfort of its buyers and sellers.
Skalk retained some resources, but they were sufficient exclusively for running the most vital projects and keeping his own rear in the president’s chair, nothing more.
Meanwhile, gangs were increasingly losing all sense of boundaries, already starting a quiet expansion into the cities from the slums; corporations were growing bolder, pushing through laws advantageous to them and testing their half-baked fabrications on the residents of the Polish Republic; and the churchmen were rocking the boat more and more each year, regularly organizing demonstrations and rallies that escalated into riots.
Hold onto a cesspool like this?
You could, but you shouldn’t.
Stark never economized on money; he would easily recoup what he spent by selling some technology—any military of any state would snap up his impact compensation system, and he could quickly hawk his little factory to Skalk for cost price.
The old man wouldn’t refuse to finalize everything officially, gladly ridding himself of the squabbling with hungry jackals over such a choice morsel, since even for current Poland, such expenditures would pass unnoticed.
But for now, he would hold this option in reserve for a worst-case scenario, if he had to flee Poland and Europe altogether.
Frankly speaking, Tony felt stifled in Europe, and he had long been contemplating moving ‘back’ to America.
Following the collapse of the USA, there were free markets where he could rise, room for creativity, establishing his own structure, or even subjecting one of the states to his own will.
Night City looked particularly attractive—a city-state sitting on a vital logistical hub of global maritime trade and drawing the attention of all the megacorporations in the world, and consequently poorly controlled.
The intelligence agencies of corporate giants tore at each other’s throats in an unceasing shadow war, blinding each other to such an extent that they saw no one but each other.
Given the fairly free and business-friendly laws, Stark was confident he could acquire capabilities comparable to some small but full-fledged corporation, even without an official market entry, solely through shadow and grey schemes.
Tony was quietly turning feral from living in a cyberpunk world with overtones of the apocalypse.
A hero by nature, responsible and compassionate, he winced every time he recalled WHAT was happening on the streets of modern cities, beyond their borders, and just across the world.
Stark never made allowances for bandits, marginalized groups, or other criminal elements, but he clearly understood their psychology, methods of operation, and principles, seeing them as parasitic accomplices on the bodies of ordinary people.
And yet, he tried not to kill them.
Not everyone was lucky enough to be born into a loving family with means; some were pushed onto a crooked path by necessity, some grew up in that environment, some had no choice—Stark had no right to judge, with his loving parents and multi-billion inheritance.
That was precisely why he always tried to turn criminals over to the courts, where competent authorities would bring a person’s entire background to light and hand down a just punishment.
Until recently, the only exceptions were terrorists—he didn’t even consider these guys human, just rabid animals that needed to be put down so they wouldn’t lung at honest people.
But now…
in this new world and new life, the local bandits exceeded all of Tony’s worst expectations, for the most part being the kind of subhumans for whom a bullet to the forehead wasn’t an execution, but a mercy.
For their atrocities, a quick, painless death was entirely too small a price to pay.
A few times he had snapped.
He simply took action, devised a plan, and with the full force of his intellect, annihilated entire gangs of hundreds of men.
But the worst part wasn’t feeling the blood of the slain on his hands or seeing their victims; the worst part was the REALIZATION.
He wouldn’t be able to cleanse even Warsaw of such filth.
The Harbinger—an organization of thousands of highly trusted and well-trained agents under the personal patronage of the president—couldn’t do it, so how could he?
And he never would be able to; the soil was too fertile for the breeding of such elements, and entirely too many interests of the powers that be intersected in this city, turning it into a magnet for the criminal element.
Even if he accomplished the impossible and purged Warsaw of organized crime, he wouldn’t live long.
The true masters of the gangs—those who profited from them and used them as their tools—would not forgive some insect for disrupting their plans, exerting enough effort to put an end to Stark.
This helplessness…
it wasn’t new to Tony.
He was accustomed to feeling it every time he, a simple man in armor, collided with something mystical.
But back there, in his past life, he had the tools to deal with it, people who would cover his back, comrades who would stand shoulder to shoulder with him.
Here, he was alone, devoid of his tools and resources, with a single obsessed AI as an ally, and the enemy was a system that had swallowed humanity and was leading it to its doom.
And what to do about it…
Tony knew.
He knew, but he dreaded his own thoughts.
He dreaded them, but gradually, step by step, he moved toward his goal, casting aside old principles and acquiring new ones.
The final straw had been Lucy.
A girl kidnapped by her own father, betrayed by her own mother, and unprotected by the law, she became the personification of this world.
In the past, Stark would have pulled strings, whipped up a scandal, called the journalists, unleashed an army of lawyers, and saved the little girl.
Right now, even having the capability to pull all of that off, he recognized with painful pragmatism that it would yield nothing.
And since the old methods of the old world didn’t work, he had to adapt, change, and conform to the altered conditions.
Not simply for the sake of saving an innocent soul, but for a far more significant goal.
A goal that would justify any means of achieving it.