Tony Stark.
A few hours prior.
Getting up early in the morning—an act that required a truly heroic expenditure of effort—Tony sat on the edge of the bed for a good two minutes, trying not only to stand but to actually wake up.
The task was monumental, demanding an irrationally large amount of willpower from the rejuvenated Stark, whose sleepy brain kept concocting more and more excuses to postpone his awakening for at least another two hours.
However, Tony was denied the luxury of sweet self-deception, as Omnissiah stepped into the bedroom carrying a mug trailing hot steam, which quickly filled the room with the alluring scent of coffee.
Without opening his eyes, relying purely on touch, he extended his hands.
The saving grace of a cup was immediately placed into them.
He wrapped both hands around it and slowly, savoring the moment, began to sip the divine nectar.
“Mmmm…” After emptying half the mug, the blue pools of his eyes finally graced the world again, though they were currently swirling with disappointment at the imperfection of the universe and the cruelty of fate.
“…Still total sludge, as always.”
“Synthetic coffee, mid-tier price category,” Omnissiah replied.
Over the last few weeks, this routine had become a peculiar tradition of theirs.
“We must economize if we want to upgrade my chassis in the near future rather than a decade from now.”
“And whatever possessed me to show you those blueprints,” Tony groaned, rolling his eyes in a single motion that encapsulated all of his existential dread on the matter.
Nevertheless, that didn’t stop him from taking another gulp of the coffee.
“According to conducted analyses, my efficiency will increase by a factor of two to four, depending on the operational sphere. Showing me the blueprints to analyze the new platform was a rational decision, allowing its efficiency to be raised by twelve percent.”
“And it chewed up my nerves by those exact same twelve percent,” Stark grumbled.
Ever since the death of the Stark couple, their offspring had occupied himself seriously with little else besides self-improvement.
While the technology of this new world lagged behind his own knowledge in certain areas—especially fundamental fields like robotics, energy generation, and a few other disciplines—in other respects, it actually surpassed it.
The nanotechnology applied in medicine, for instance, filled him with genuine awe, outperforming everything the Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D.
had at their disposal by leaps and bounds.
True, they had possessed more advanced analogs and methodologies, but when it came to the price-to-quality ratio, the medical nanites here—even the outdated ones—bested them multi-fold.
And that was saying nothing of production complexity, individualized application methods, and side effects.
After all, Stark had spent his past life dealing with cutting-edge tech, literally the absolute best humanity could provide, which came with its share of drawbacks alongside the perks.
For example, frequently encountered teething troubles and short operational lifespans meant many issues were simply ignored because the volume of usage required was low.
Meanwhile, the technology here had been polished by the entirety of mankind for decades, smoothing away even the smallest rough edges and incrementally driving the technology to the absolute peak of its potential.
By immersing himself in more and more new data, Stark not only distracted himself from dark thoughts, developing himself in parallel, but also drafted new designs that placed him not just decades, but centuries ahead of the current technological baseline.
One example was computing systems built upon an artificially grown crystal.
Back in the day, he had possessed one himself inside his helmet; the memory banks it provided were sufficient to copy the ENTIRE sum of human knowledge at the time…
several times over.
He had failed to create anything better up until the moment of his death.
By merging his own expertise with the knowledge of current humanity, Tony could engineer projects that would be considered possible only in poorly thought-out science fiction of the previous century.
And Omnissiah, naturally, factored into one of these projects.
Tony knew a simple truth: firepower was either insufficient or simply not enough.
The same applied to shielding.
And maneuverability.
And survivability.
Unfortunately, even with his intellect, engineering something truly universal—suited for operations across any type of terrain and capable of countering every class of adversary—was unrealistic.
Attempted concepts existed, but all of them ultimately ballooned to the mammoth dimensions of a skyscraper, making them viable solely for isolated use due to steep operational costs, maintenance complexity, and a total lack of utility within cities.
But that didn’t stop Tony from trying; it served as a hobby of sorts and an attempt to chase an unattainable ideal.
It was during one of these attempts that Tony conceived a new body project for Omnissiah.
Skipping the finer details, by acquiring such a vessel, Omnissiah would become a fully autonomous unit with exceptionally high self-repair capabilities.
Being a partially organic organism, she could easily blend into human society, but the crown jewel was an incredibly powerful server array in her head unit, outperforming her current setup multi-fold.
Yet, strange as it might seem, what attracted the robo-girl most was the chance to finally start feeling.
Residing in a fully metallic body, Omnissiah could not touch, taste, smell, or tell if it was currently hot or cold.
In effect, out of all the senses, she possessed only vision and hearing, which deeply vexed a young lady with a streak of perfectionism in her character.
But as flawless as her new platform was, it was equally expensive, hovering on the level of Tony’s suits, which almost always carried price tags akin to the annual budget of a small nation.
And the Stark household currently possessed no such funds, nor were any on the horizon.
Heck, Tony was effectively scraping together pennies for a starting capital, which kept them in a state of strict austerity so they could accumulate funds quickly and finally start living normally.
Half a million eddies was a good chunk of change, sure, but a truly solid launchpad required at least two million, coupled with a pack of exceptionally mean and heavily armed individuals backing them up to ensure that arrogant bureaucrats and overstepping gangers didn’t try to take it away. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
In fact, it was precisely for this reason that Tony subjected himself to such horrific sacrifices as an early wake-up call.
“Morning,” he greeted Lucy as he walked into the kitchen.
Well, calling it a kitchen was a stretch: a portable gas burner, a couple of frying pans, a tiny toaster oven, an electric kettle, and that was the extent of it.
The original layout hadn’t included a kitchen; it had been replaced by a burrito vending machine hooked up to a unified delivery system that ran from the lowest floors all the way to the top.
A questionable architectural choice, but considering that finding genuine food items in modern megacity stores was becoming increasingly difficult due to rampant epidemics, soil toxicity, and mutations of weaponized viruses that had leaped over to cereal crops, it was a perfectly acceptable compromise.
Fortunately, it wasn’t difficult for Omnissiah to take a trip down to Pacifica and purchase actual foodstuffs from the locals there, such as meat, milk, eggs, and vegetables.
As for the diseases these items might harbor, a pair of bio-mods didn’t need to worry about that; their stomachs and weak venom could digest them without a hitch, and at worst, something mid-tier would simply leave them contemplating life on the porcelain throne for a while.
“Morning,” Tony nodded, taking a seat at the table.
Lucy was now the primary manager of their household affairs.
Unlike Tony, who was forced to zip across the entire city for work—both his own and assisting Lucy—she decided to take charge of the domestic front.
While little Kushinada hadn’t officially studied cooking, she was exceptionally responsible, meticulous, and attentive to details, easily following basic recipes and ultimately turning out quite tasty meals.
“What’s on the breakfast menu today?”
“Egg rolls,” the little one answered enthusiastically, wrapping the filling into a flatbread.
Tony managed to spot corn, lettuce leaves, an omelet, and some sort of sauce inside.
What kind it was, he didn’t know; it was unlikely to be mayonnaise, which had ceased production twenty years ago, but certain substitutes apparently existed to this day.
“Well… let’s give it a try,” Tony agreed, only then noticing the second mug of coffee.
“Is that for me?” Tony arched an eyebrow.
Omnissiah already made him a potent blend for his wake-up call, which was more than enough, and he never asked for seconds, even if he had pulled an all-nighter.
“Um…yes,” the back of young Miss Kushinada answered him, her head pointedly refusing to turn around.
“Lucy,” Stark groaned the name of a certain white-haired individual.
“We’ve already discussed this,” he continued in a reproachful tone.
“At your age, consuming coffee is bad for you, especially synthetic garbage like this.”
“I wanted to try it, I was feeling sleepy, so I brewed a cup,” she began to defend herself.
“And for your information, it doesn’t taste half bad, especially if you add sugar.”
“The taste isn’t the issue here,” Tony sighed wearily.
He would have never guessed that he’d turn into such a helicopter parent regarding a child’s health, yet look at him now.
In truth, Tony was fairly paranoid on this subject, but he had his reasons.
He had no clue exactly what the senior Kushinada had tweaked within Lucy’s biology during her training and conditioning phase.
Before this, the little girl’s health had been monitored by an entire staff of Arasaka physicians who were highly professional and possessed her complete medical dossier dating back to her ‘design’ phase in an incubator.
According to Lucy herself, she was sent to the facility’s medical wing almost daily to undergo tests, run through diagnostic arrays, and generally keep a meticulous eye on her system.
On one hand, it could have been Ryu’s desire to verify Lucy’s performance metrics, but on the other, he could have been scouting for errors and defects in her biology.
Lucy, after all, was an extremely deeply modified individual, with a significant portion of her upgrades targeting her nervous system and higher cognitive functioning—the most perilous, complex, and erratic domain in modern genetics.
Were it otherwise, every modern corporate fat-cat would have long since put their children through similar procedures, further fracturing social inequality.
Thus, Tony worried about her health even more than his own; unlike the little girl, his enhancements were inherited from his parents and generally geared toward bolstering bodily durability and performance efficiency.
He recognized that he was overreacting a bit, and a single cup of coffee wouldn’t break her, but until he secured access to a fully functional genetic lab—even a rudimentary one—it was better to err on the side of caution.
“Alright,” standing up resolutely, Tony approached Lucy, spun her around, took her by the shoulders, looked her dead in the eyes, and spoke in the most earnest tone he could muster: “It has been proven that young girls who regularly consume coffee from an early age end up with breasts that are twenty percent smaller than they could have been.”
“I am never drinking coffee again,” came the immediate response, delivered with absolute solemnity.
Was Tony lying?
Well…he didn’t really know.
Once in his past life, he had actually stumbled upon an article claiming that girls who drank coffee at a young age had smaller breasts than their mothers, followed by something regarding coffee components that supposedly stunted breast growth, but either way, he wasn’t certain it was true.
What he did know, however, was that the concoction modern manufacturers labeled as beverages was a toxic chemical slurry, hardly beneficial even to an adult body, let alone what it could do to a child’s system.
He harbored an immense suspicion toward food in this world as a whole.
While parents had handled this before, followed by Lucy’s mother, Tony was now forced to manage it himself, because there was no way in hell he was letting Lucy wander this city alone, and he would never trust Omnissiah with grocery shopping again.
He had tried it once, and as a result, they were still eating rice for lunch to this day.
Considering that even his far more prosperous world had instant noodles that literally caused cancer…
Tony dreaded to imagine what was going on with the products here, and there was nowhere to pull data from, since all research was either bought out or simply never conducted.
“Good. Honestly, you’re better off drinking water. Did I spend all that time tinkering with the filter for nothing?” Tony decreed, nodding toward the massive iron contraption in the corner of the room whose sole function was filtering and boiling water.
Why go to such lengths?
For the exact same reason: he simply dreaded drinking tap water, and rudimentary tests of the bottled stuff showed it wasn’t much better than basic boiled water.
And yes, it might smack of paranoia, but Tony personally balked at drinking water that eroded tooth enamel, forcing almost all Night City residents to either get dental implants or grow a new set of teeth by the time they reached thirty. The source of this chapter is novelping dot com.
But this way, after passing through his baby, the water would taste like it came from the purest mountain spring.
In reality, the issue of quality food in Night City was a massive problem.
There was no actual famine here; thanks to the protein farms in the Badlands, the city received food sourced from locusts without any transport markups, which kept prices highly democratic.
But when it came to something that wasn’t just filling and tasty but actually healthy, the situation was tense.
Down in Pacifica, the city’s blacked-out district, the locals took advantage of the total lack of government oversight to use abandoned buildings for livestock breeding, converted them into greenhouses, and generally ate products from the ‘Premium’ tier.
The catch was that an epidemic could erupt there at any moment, but the poor simply lacked alternatives; only a select few could earn eddies there, while the rest relied on barter.
Yet Tony trusted them as food suppliers just as little.
Unqualified paupers could be dumping a mountain of chemicals onto their plants and animals, occasionally turning the product into indigestible chemical garbage, rendering every such purchase a genuine round of Russian roulette where fatal outcomes were entirely possible.
Omnissiah’s sensors helped with this, of course, but the AI herself had admitted more than once that meat safe for consumption in Pacifica was scarce, mostly consisting of poultry.
The situation with fruits and vegetables was no better.
Lacking his former financial streams and connections, Tony was seriously contemplating setting up a greenhouse right inside the city, where he would personally cultivate crops.
He also planned a small cloning lab to grow high-quality meat for their table, ensuring they wouldn’t have to replace their entire digestive tracts with cyberware twenty years down the line.
“Regardless, those are all matters for tomorrow. Today, I need to drop by Padre’s place; he apparently has a lucrative gig lined up,” Tony thought, practically inhaling the breakfast Lucy had prepared.
It turned out incredibly well; the eggs paired nicely with the corn, lettuce, and sauce, producing a delicate, pleasant flavor with a slightly tangy aftertaste.
He didn’t hesitate to share his praise, which elicited a pleased grin from the little master of the spatula and ladle.
“That was delicious, thanks,” wiping his lips with a napkin, Tony quickly hopped up, kissed Lucy on the crown of her head, and bolted to the armory.
What his objective would be today, he didn’t know, but he could always swing back home to re-arm, so he limited himself to a bulletproof vest, a trio of throwing knives, a high-caliber pistol, and a submachine gun.
“I’m out!” he called out to the pair.
“Bye! Be careful!” they shouted back in unison.
Lucy had some work to do today as well; she had set herself up as an information broker and had apparently even hired a tutor on the Net to show her how to better navigate the city’s digital reflection and train her as a combat netrunner.
Exiting the apartment, Tony headed straight for the elevator leading down to the garage.
As it turned out, with their skillset, acquiring a personal vehicle wasn’t exactly a difficult challenge; all you really needed to do was find a gang member, kill him, and take his ride.
Tony had hesitated at first, but after diving into the sheer horror of what the local gangs perpetrated, he quickly ceased viewing them as human, spilling their blood and seizing their property without a second thought.
They carried a decent amount of cash on them, especially those higher up the ladder—up to ten thousand eddies—but you couldn’t operate that way extensively.
Even though gangs didn’t give a damn about their individual members, if someone began systematically slaughtering them, they would initiate a manhunt, and Tony wasn’t in that weight class yet.
“Key word: yet,” he added mentally, tossing the keys to his beauty as he recalled how he had obtained his current ride.
The Quadra Turbo-R V-Tech was a fine car, retailing for around seventy thousand eddies depending on the trim.
A reliable, fast, comfortable sports car, yet it possessed a handful of drawbacks that kept it from being particularly popular in Night City.
First and foremost, it was a city vehicle, completely unsuited for off-road driving in places like the Badlands outside the city limits.
The second flaw was its exceptionally low ground clearance; while this allowed the model to attain flat-out insane speeds, it also meant any bump was synonymous with damage.
The third drawback was its lightweight nature.
Due to the use of reinforced plastic instead of metal for several components and a lightened frame, the car was justly categorized as a sports machine, but that was the core issue—it was monumentally difficult to handle due to severe oversteer.
The tires simply lacked the necessary contact patch with the surface for a stable grip, making it incredibly easy to flip the vehicle during a sharp turn.
Professionals weren’t deterred by this, but regular citizens certainly were, because given the car’s lightweight build (and subsequent fragility), such an incident meant a guaranteed hospital visit, quite possibly with a lethal outcome.
Tony had acquired the Quadra Turbo quite simply: he took it from its previous owner, since a corpse has no use for an automobile anyway.
It had happened a couple of weeks ago; they were just settling into their new home and had left the megabuilding for the first time in a while, doing a basic sweep of the area for diners, shops, and gyms.
It was now time to inspect the surroundings, and overall Tony observed exactly what he expected: a relatively decent neighborhood with a fair assortment of shops.
Of course, it would have been nice if fewer establishments offered 18+ services, and the density of bars and hookah lounges dealing in highly suspicious mixtures was a bit much, but overall it was tolerable.
Then, they had stumbled upon an armed robbery orchestrated by the Tyger Claws, who, without a second thought, attempted to gun down the pedestrians.
But before they could even level their weapons, Tony dropped two with his pistol, Omnissiah killed three, and Lucy fried another with Overheat.
That was when Tony had claimed his new ride (the rest of the gangers had arrived on bikes).
The color scheme and interior had left much to be desired, but they had remedied that quickly.
Afterward, Tony figured out how to correct the flaws of the model they had acquired, and Lucy had already started looking into where they could expropriate the necessary parts.
Naturally, preference was given to gangs, which was why the search had dragged on for so long.
They didn’t want to spend money—their net income was strictly negative at the moment—and Stark refused to steal from relatively decent people.
Sliding into his car, turning the ignition, and listening to the powerful engine roar beneath the hood, Tony smiled despite himself.
Sure, it wasn’t the absolute best car out there, but it was his car, and it had cost him absolutely nothing, so complaining would be a sin.
Furthermore, after all his upgrades, it could be resold with a clear conscience for a full hundred thousand eurodollars, and the proceeds could be used to purchase another one, also for resale.
For the time being, he could even harvest the vehicles of deceased gangsters, modify them, and flip them.
The trick was knowing when to back out before they got too pissed off.