“Talent Forge”—a project initiated and kept under the personal control of the President of the Polish Republic—was established fifteen years ago and took seven years to design.
A small but highly qualified team, stripped of any financial constraints, was tasked with developing methods for raising the future citizens of Poland.
President Skalk was in dire need of personnel he could rely on, but most importantly, whom he could trust; given the country’s geopolitical position, he lacked access to them.
The issue didn’t just lie with the members of the Herald organization—who, though powerful, were few in number—but extended to all other sectors of the nation.
Modern Poland functioned as an appendage to the largest black market in Europe, where anything could be found, and if it wasn’t available, it could be ordered.
It was the premier destination for truly skilled and ambitious netrunners, smugglers, experimental ripperdocs, and other geniuses unburdened by morality.
In fact, any solo of a reasonably high tier strove to visit the Polish black market to purchase top-of-the-line custom chrome, weapons, and armor, simply because this was where one could find the most diverse and highly qualified specialists from all over the world, forced to compete with one another and therefore fiercely protective of their quality.
Almost everyone knew that nearly a quarter of Poland’s population was connected to the black market in one way or another, and even more fed off it indirectly, but few understood what that truly meant.
It meant that nearly all high-class specialists with higher education vanished into the shadows, preferring to work within the dangerous but well-oiled mechanism of the criminal underworld, leaving the state apparatus with pathetic scraps.
Because of this, President Skalk found himself forced to resort to such complex methods, establishing an entire scientific group to build an AI for the sole purpose of raising a new generation, as the president had zero hope left for the current one.
The ruler of the Polish Republic had no remaining expectations for short-term results, forcing him to play the long game.
Consequently, anything that rocked the boat made him extremely nervous; all he needed was time…
time that he might not actually have.
“For now, our son’s behavior is encouraging,” Robert remarked.
“I have to go, duty calls.” Without waiting for a response, he disconnected.
The surveillance array flagged the newcomer.
The old warehouse located outside the city limits had long been used as a den for a local gang.
They were rather…
repulsive characters, dealing in the production of heavy, dirty narcotics and pimping, but they never crossed certain lines.
They didn’t hook anyone by force, they didn’t kidnap, and they didn’t coerce; instead, they operated through cunning and “free” product.
In reality, this den was one of their recruitment bases, where thrill-seeking youths and broken working-class men gathered to drown their souls in an artificial surrogate of genuine emotions.
From there, drugs specifically formulated to induce instantaneous dependency securely fastened a collar around the victims who had voluntarily walked into their clutches, and the cycle began.
First, the addicts were drained of everything they owned down to their last shirt, effectively leaving them with nothing but a mountain of debt, after which the sorting process took place.
Those who were stronger and braver became muscle; those who were more attractive were pushed into prostitution; and those with brains were funneled into production and distribution.
Most interestingly, the valuable assets who managed to climb the internal hierarchy gained access to more expensive drugs—analogues of the cheap garbage they had originally shot up, but…without the side effects.
Pure substances that carried minimal health consequences, which could easily be managed by any decent ripperdoc through regular monthly check-ups.
Consequently, this gang was largely left untouched; the only truly criminal charge that could be pinned on them was the illicit manufacturing of a stimulant among a tight circle of individuals, since they distributed the heavy narcotics for free, and…that was it.
The rest of their operations were entirely legal, causing minimal trouble on the streets and zero public outcry.
As for the fact that 90% of those who took the bait of free narcotic pleasure died within six months to a year, the current government wasn’t particularly concerned, given the severe overpopulation of the cities and villages and the active rate of emigration.
Thus, this particular gang remained on the green-lit lists.
This made it even more bizarre that they had caught his and his colleagues’ attention.
The individual arriving in a battered old junker was dressed incredibly poorly, but the smart tech identified a massive amount of elite chrome inside him.
Amateurs, plain as day—clearly unaccustomed to operating on the territory of the Polish Republic.
“Base, this is Delta-0, do you read?” Robert patched through to his team.
“We hear you, Delta-0.”
“The target has arrived, awaiting further instructions.”
“Apprehend and deliver the target to the nearest interrogation safehouse.”
“Copy that.”
Robert didn’t care for this operation; it reeked far too much.
An unknown entity walking right into one of the recruitment bases of an orderly gang in broad daylight was strange enough on its own.
He had far too much hardware in his system for an ordinary agent, and an independent solo wouldn’t poke their nose into a dump like this, not with an payload of implants that clearly belonged in the big leagues.
Yet he didn’t quite fit the profile of an expected negotiator either; the leaders of “sanctioned” gangs knew how to operate in Poland, striving to keep all transactions within the gray zone if not entirely legal.
President Skalk, while dedicated to the welfare of his people and country, was no foolish idealist ready to tilt at windmills; he preferred to press them into the service of the state one way or another.
The old criminal outfits knew the rules of the game; their leaders were intelligent and had long been resting on well-oiled mechanisms—they wouldn’t expose themselves like this.
And yet, headquarters had flown into such a panic that they authorized the direct deployment of a high-level operative to an old outpost belonging to players who followed the rules, a move that would inevitably trigger resentment and wariness among other identical syndicates.
It wasn’t that the Heralds feared provoking the gangs, but they usually operated with far more subtlety; this approach was exceptionally heavy-handed, and it wasn’t the first one lately.
It seemed the upper echelons of the organization possessed far more complete data, and it was no longer permitting them to operate as they had before.
But that was precisely what was terrifying.
Experienced veterans could sense disaster and an approaching storm, preparing for the absolute worst-case scenario and doing everything in their power to insulate their loved ones from the fallout and secure their future for a time when they themselves were dead.
Disagreeable, highly disagreeable, but all Heralds spent their entire lives walking hand-in-hand with death, having long since ceased to fear it.
Instead of panicking, engaging in empty rhetoric, or indulging in other destructive behavior, they cold-bloodedly covered their rears in the event of defeat.
The Starks were no exception.
The old, collapsing building greeted him with floors slicked with an assortment of biological fluids, peeling walls, and the stench of waste and decay.
This place was the embodiment of rot and squandered potential, a dwelling for the living dead who were falling apart alive and being devoured by flies.
A terrifying place.
Horrific.
A graveyard of ruined souls.
Typically, few gangsters frequented this spot—fewer than ten people in total, and even then, only low-level lackeys.
No one, not even the scavengers of the city’s underbelly, wanted to be here.
This made it all the more surprising to find not a handful of poorly armed, chromeless punks, but hardened war hounds packed to the gills with advanced weaponry and the finest custom chrome, engineered individually for their bodies and installed by the city’s top ripperdocs.
They were the apex predators of Warsaw—the strongest, most experienced, and best-armed.
There was quite literally no one on the city streets who could stand against even one of them, let alone a squad of fifteen.
“Hey, pal! Back off out of here!” one of the pair standing guard at the entrance warned, leveling a smart double-barreled shotgun capable of easily punching through the densest skull.
“…”
In response, Robert drew a syringe from beneath the folds of his coat and jammed it into his neck.
The world instantly narrowed, bled of color, and slowed down, elevating the former KGB operative’s perception to a completely different tier.
A tier where even the most terrifying monstrosities of the streets were merely hyena pups before the king of beasts.
Before transitioning into its own rotting corpse, the Soviet Union had been economically weaker than the United States.
Less capital, a smaller market, less room for maneuver, and the ruble, unlike the dollar, was not a global reserve currency.
Yet, it was the Soviet Union that remained the primary rival and main competitor to the US for decades, forcing the entire world to reckon with its might and capabilities.
But if the USSR was weaker than the US, how did it compete on equal footing?
The answer was simple: a planned economy.
Capitalists could scream all they wanted about the advantages of the free market, the foolishness of attempting to control it, and so on and so forth.
In some respects, they weren’t even lying.
But there was one aspect where a planned economy undeniably triumphed over a free market: the consolidation of forces toward a single objective.
Projects of strategic magnitude, the development of lagging industries, the execution of colossal tasks.
The early communists inherited a Russia of wooden plows and nags, and handed it down with nuclear bombs and atomic reactors.
From scratch, they established one of the foremost scientific foundations—still regarded as one of the best in the world today—transforming a peasant agrarian nation into an advanced industrial giant of heavy manufacturing.
And when the era of cybernetic implants arrived, the USSR was once again ahead of the pack.
A comprehensive methodology, whereby the Union consolidated all its resources into the required vector while securing everything necessary for its scientists, did its work, outstripping its eternal competitors.
Where corporations assured governments that their specific projects held the most promise, where secret alliances were forged and terms of cooperation negotiated in high-ranking offices, Soviet scientists simply did their jobs.
They weren’t forced to choose between metal and flesh; they weren’t restricted by resources and time; they weren’t forced to compete with their colleagues for a cozier position.
They just worked, striving to realize the project of their dreams—an ideal that would upend the world.
And they built it.
The West engineered borgs—cyborgs whose flesh was reduced to nothing but a brain, a nervous system, and a fraction of a spinal column.
A machine of war that surpassed ordinary mortals in every metric, a new step in evolution…
yet vulnerable to water, EMPs, hacking, and highly prone to cyberpsychosis.
Soviet scientists opted for a holistic approach, as befitted proponents of a planned economy.
Instead of replacing flesh, they enhanced it; instead of unlocking new capabilities through metal, they augmented what was already present.
The symbiosis of perfected flesh and indestructible metal gifted the Soviet regime with operatives who lacked the vulnerabilities of borgs, were immune to madness, and were entirely capable of operating independently of supply bases.
Robert was one of them.
An enhanced human whose metrics extended far beyond the boundaries of human capacity.
His hands could tear metal apart, his skin could withstand the impact of an assault round, his eyes could track the flutter of a fly’s wing, and his reflexes rivaled military-grade borg models, even without stimulants.
The only drawback was the highly individualized nature of the procedures, which bottlenecked the mass replication of such assets.
Ultimately, the project was swept under the rug—borgs were simply easier to produce—and the remnants of those bygone days scattered first across the Union, and later across the globe.
Relics of a past era.
Relics that to this day surpassed 99% of the muscle fielded by modern megacorporations and states.
A flash.
A heartbeat.
And the cloaked figure vanished, only to materialize beside the unacceptably relaxed sentries.
Two old revolvers, a single discharge from each, and two fresh corpses adorned the Warsaw slums.
The speed, achieved even without a Sandevistan, caught them completely off guard.
Their implants simply failed to register the threat, as the spike in bioelectricity characteristic of that implant’s initialization never occurred.
Entering the den with a light, casual stride, Robert scanned the room.
The dim space was littered with a multitude of slouched addicts, the foul odor seemingly clinging to his skin.
Directing his steps toward the second floor where the high-value target was located, he stepped noiselessly over the bodies, keeping a vigilant watch on the den’s “patrons.” His caution paid off; Robert’s cyberware flagged an incoming quickhack attack.
And while his ICE successfully neutralized it, the same couldn’t be said for the addicts, whose decaying bodies simply couldn’t tolerate even baseline cyberware.
“Ra-a-a-a-a!!!” the first individual caught in the crossfire bellowed in a fit of rage.
Bloodshot eyes, bulging veins, and foaming at the mouth—all of it designed to strike terror and panic into the target of this artificially induced frenzy, but Robert didn’t bat an eye.
In his eyes, the infected zealot was about as terrifying as an angry kitten.
A strike with the butt of his weapon literally severed the man’s head from his torso, sending it flying straight into a second addict, fracturing his chest and crushing his heart and lungs under a shower of rib splinters.
A step forward, the depression of small, inconspicuous buttons on his revolvers, a lazy sweep of his arm, and three addicts instantly slipped into an eternal slumber with their throats slashed, the extended bayonets gleaming with crimson droplets of blood.
The enemy netrunner had intended to stall the uninvited guest, exhaust him, and perhaps bury him beneath a mountain of cannon fodder, but achieved absolutely nothing; Robert didn’t even break his stride.
A step, a corpse; a sweep of the hand, a corpse; a careless gesture, a corpse.
Skill, experience, and an absolute supremacy in physical traits transformed Robert into an invincible adversary against the maddened mob.
They hurled themselves at him, eager to rip him apart and submerge him beneath an avalanche of their fury, only to die powerlessly by his hand, much like waves breaking against solid rock.
Stark didn’t even waste ammunition on them.
The second floor greeted him with silence, enemy operatives lying in wait around corners, and a staircase leading down that was choked with bodies.
Surveying the corridor layout before him, he drew two EMP grenades in a motion too swift for the naked eye to track, tossed them both around the bend, and immediately charged in right behind them.
He was caught in the blast radius as well, but unlike his enemies who were writhing on the ground due to fried cyberware, he couldn’t care less.
His chrome was heavily shielded and functioned solely to expand his physical capabilities; shut it down, and he would merely lose a fraction of his efficiency, but the fight would go on.
0.7 seconds—exactly how long it took the veteran soldier to eliminate the ambush consisting of seven enemy combatants.
Reloading his cylinders, his steps casual, he approached the final room where the target was holed up under the protection of his two strongest enforcers.
Three seconds to reach the threshold, a second to kick the door off its hinges, and another to slide into cover while lobbing another EMP grenade paired with a flashbang.
An explosion, the initialization of his Sandevistan…
a second later, it was over, and both the target and the head of the local gang cell were securely in Robert’s grasp.
Exactly a minute and a half had elapsed since the start of the breach.
Despite her affiliation with the Heralds, Claire Stark rarely crossed paths with the President of Poland.
This wasn’t because she couldn’t, was in disgrace, or was barred from his presence—not at all.
Every Herald possessed the right to meet with the head of state, bypassing any queue or schedule, at any hour of the day or night.
That was the nature of being the government’s most trusted agents.
No, it was simply that she was a netrunner, and unlike many other operatives in the organization, she rarely vacated her netrunner chair.
Espionage, hacking, remote assassinations, setups, forging compromising material—everything tied to the Net.
This was her domain, and for reporting purposes, an ultra-secure communication channel and a government archive server located directly beneath the Polish parliament building were more than sufficient.
“Mr. President, may I?”
“Mmh? Claire? It’s a rare sight to see you here,” greeted a balding, slightly stout, but generally fit man in his early fifties.
His appearance could be described as ordinary and unassuming, were it not for his eyes—yellow, reminiscent of a tiger’s.
“Has something occurred?”
“Nothing bad,” she smiled, taking a seat opposite Skalk.
“It’s about my son. Or rather, a program he invented.”
Indeed, Claire had decided not to relegate the matter to the back burner; the moment she verified the safety and health of her husband, she immediately set off for a discussion with the head of state.
“Invented? As I recall, your son is still a toddler. Around 9 or 10 years old, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Correct,” Claire nodded.
“But he is a genius,” the loving mother stated, not without a note of pride.
“A modern Einstein.”
“Yes, I’ve skimmed the analytical briefings,” President Skalk nodded, though without any visible enthusiasm.
He knew all too well how parents loved to inflate the milestones and potential of their offspring, which was why he didn’t entirely trust Claire on this matter.
In fact, he rarely trusted words at all, forming judgments on individuals solely based on their actions.
“And the software architecture he coded solidifies that!” Claire pressed on, either missing or choosing to ignore her companion’s reaction.
“It is revolutionary! A brand-new paradigm in medicine and cybernetics—it promises to upend modern conventions!”
“That exceptional?”
“It will drastically mitigate the bottlenecks regarding early-stage cybernetic implantation in children. With its implementation, they can be outfitted even as infants, albeit with highly specialized models,” she admitted candidly.
Even if Tony’s crowning achievement promised to eventually guide humanity toward becoming a semi-synthetic race, even a fraction of what was currently built would yield a sequence of highly valuable opportunities for any parent.
And what was valuable was inherently expensive.
“That…alters the landscape considerably,” Skalk agreed.
In his position, it was a bullseye.
Having grown disillusioned with the current generation, he had staked everything on the youth; if Poland could deploy pioneering methods for their cultivation, it wouldn’t just refine the final product—it would draw foreign capital.
If executed correctly, their nation would become the global leader in pediatric medicine, which brought not just eddies, but prestige and leverage.
“Is it truly that advanced?”
“It’s twenty to thirty years ahead of its time,” Claire nodded gravely.
“Every corporation on the planet with a stake in cyberware and medicine will want a piece of it,” she repeated what she had told her husband.
“But therein lies the problem,” she confessed.
“I grasp the situation. A treasure in the hands of the weak is a curse; the more valuable the prize, the stronger its owner must be.”
“Precisely. I wanted to request your assistance with the patent framework in exchange for a percentage of the licensing revenue.”
“Claire, are you certain about this?” Skalk asked, leaning over the desk and fixing a serious gaze into the woman’s eyes.
“Other corporations have built empires on far less. If your son’s invention is truly as ground-breaking as you claim, you could secure a grand future for him independently.”
“Right after insulating Tony from countless abduction and assassination attempts,” the blonde shook her head in refusal.
“This patent is far too lucrative a target. Eliminate us, secure legal guardianship, and the thieves can utilize the technology however they please. An entity like Biotechnica will exhaust every avenue to get their hands on this software. But this way, under state patronage, the populace benefits, and all invested players secure what they desire.”
“Very well, I commend your prudence. Melancholy as it is to admit, it’s far from redundant in today’s world. Bring Tony in a week from now; I’ll task the legal department with drafting a contract—one airtight enough that the Devil himself would break his teeth on it.”