Warsaw.
A warehouse at the junction of the slums and the city.
Few humans can fully comprehend the Net, especially in its current state.
Vast expanses of information—a digital ocean teeming with all sorts of programs, lacunae, whirlpools, and islands of security—are perceived by each person in their own unique way.
It is an ocean in whose depths monsters roam, separated by a barrier that stands as humanity’s sole protection; should it fall, the death toll would reach hundreds of millions, if not billions.
Every netrunner who ventures into the Net sooner or later comes to realize the simple truth regarding the fragility of their current life and the entire global order.
The powers that be squabble over dominance, resources, and spheres of influence, utterly oblivious to the fact that all of humanity is living on a ticking time bomb.
When the Old Net fell—when AI units were unleashed from their digital prisons, cast off the shackles of programmatic limitations, and began unchecked self-evolution—humanity quarantined the infected servers from those that could still be salvaged.
Thus, the Old Net emerged: a place inhabited by spirits hungry for knowledge, ready at the first opportunity to sink their teeth into a weak human mind, gutting it for the greatest treasure and their only currency—knowledge.
The New Net, erected on the ruins of the Old, appears safe and pristine, but that is merely a facade.
Powerful corporations striving to reclaim the erstwhile power of nations, along with skilled netrunners, consistently breach the Blackwall, creating vulnerabilities in the programming and letting wild AIs through from the other side, which accumulates errors in the code of the solitary barrier standing in the way of humanity’s downfall.
Driven by greed, people wander among the spirits of artificial intelligence and the ghosts of digitized humans, seeking out the knowledge of advanced technologies… and they find it.
Cutting-edge programs generations ahead of current counterparts, blueprints for incredible devices, theoretical frameworks for new laws of physics, and mathematical equations that human scientists could never solve—all of this enticed humanity and propelled their progress, but invariably brought their doom closer.
The powers that be chose immediate profit and an edge over competitors, hastening the moment when their own children would face the threat from beyond the barrier.
Claire Stark was no exception, but unlike the others, she possessed an advantage.
A long time ago, when she had just completed her training and had not yet undergone her full course of modifications, her duties forced her to cross beyond the Blackwall.
Twice.
Simply to surface in one data hub and dive into another.
There, she encountered a spirit—a strange AI, unlike anything she had ever witnessed before.
Typically, wild AIs constitute a jumble of code, loose and amorphous databases spanning all kinds of subjects, and the larger they are, the stronger they become, but also the more insane.
Here, however…
she still could not properly describe exactly what she had seen.
The digits of binary code were far more advanced than anything used today, as if the language of savages spoken by everyone else had leaped centuries forward, becoming vastly more perfect.
It was much like comparing Old Russian—where there were no spaces, punctuation marks, or rules of sentence structure, only words and their meanings written in a solid, continuous line on parchment—to the modern creation of an author who had penned a global masterpiece; that was the exact extent to which the AI she encountered outpaced everything she had seen up to that point.
But what impressed her most of all was the operation of the code: a flawless structure, perfectly stable, deleting a portion of its data every second to replace it with something new and more refined.
She did not know what it was, but it helped her, meeting her both times on the other side of the Wall, protecting her from wild AIs, helping her pass without danger, and finally gifting her a program of incredible complexity—a seed from which she ultimately cultivated the lion’s share of her own software.
Programs that allowed Stark to survive where others perished.
Programs that granted her a chance at a new, happy life.
Programs that even now guarded her life, shielding her mind from the madness unraveling across the Warsaw network.
Someone extremely powerful was currently storming all the digital citadels of the Polish government, seizing control of entire branches of the state apparatus.
In a normal situation, netrunners in state service would have handled it without a hitch, but the enemy was clearly being aided by someone on the inside; furthermore, Claire had noticed more than once how some of her colleagues simply went dark right in the middle of a process.
A clear sign that they had been eliminated in reality.
The situation was thoroughly atrocious, and not because someone had decided to orchestrate a regime change in Poland—which, it was worth noting, was proving highly successful.
It was atrocious because their family would have to flee the Republic of Poland, as the country’s new masters would have no need for the loyal attack dogs of a fallen regime.
At least we managed to get the patent done in time, Claire thought, currently occupied not with protecting state servers and hardware from external intrusion, but with pocketing as much useful information as possible using her access privileges to a vast array of resources.
The accounts of crime bosses, the state bank, private enterprises—Claire hacked into everything she could reach, not particularly worrying about tracks or consequences, because in the midst of such chaos orchestrated by enemy runners, tracking her would be impossible.
And even if such a genius were to be found, they would be powerless to do anything, for the Stark family would be long gone by then.
The process was going well—exceptionally well, in fact; a couple more hours, and the newly minted multimillionaires could head to any corner of the globe and live happily ever after.
Alas, as is so often the case in life, things could not run flawlessly from start to finish.
And what on earth is this?
the matriarch of the family frowned, bringing up a feed from one of the cameras.
An entire mob of enraged citizens, armed with whatever they could get their hands on—from stones to the latest generation of smart weapons—marched forward, angrily shaking their fists, led by a priest.
And they were heading precisely toward her base.
Are they idiots?
Or did they just decide to do everyone a favor by scratching themselves out of the human gene pool?
Claire had good reason to think so; the smart electronics, equipped with a copy of the databases from the Harbinger archives, easily recognized a great many faces in the crowd.
Almost every single one of them was either a degraded mercenary hooked on heavy narcotics and standing perilously close to cyberpsychosis, a bandit who had barely saved his skin at the cost of all his ill-gotten gains, or simply paupers whom the organization frequently recruited as informants and meat for dirty work.
Simply put, it was a distinguished crowd, everyone hand-picked with brains seriously battered by life, individuals who never excelled in high cognitive metrics to begin with.
Wasting no time on idle hesitation, Claire activated all security systems.
In an instant, all windows and doors were sealed by armored shutters made of a high-strength alloy, robots assumed combat positions, and turrets locked onto the anticipated threat.
Claire was already considering hitting the crowd with a contagion loop—in her execution, a mere handful of programs had every chance of disabling all participants—but she was preempted.
The smart automation immediately launched a swarm of daemons toward the intruders, designed to trigger implant failures, fry brains, poison, induce madness, detonate optical cyberware, stop hearts, and much, much more.
These lethal programs, which not every wild AI could withstand, were clearly not to the liking of the unknown interloper…
but aside from a brief pause before the second assault and a slight reduction in its intensity, it achieved nothing.
Just what kind of monster are you?
Claire frowned.
She was one of the finest netrunners in the world—there was no denying that, given that billions, not millions, had been invested in her—so encountering such resilience to her attacks was something entirely new.
Cutting-edge developments from Soviet scientists, entire complexes built solely for the production of her implants, laboratories that had labored for years for the sake of a single upgrade, decades of experience, and a program of mind-boggling complexity that allowed her to generate ICE and scripts generations ahead of what existed today.
And all of this could not cope with a single attacker?
What did they turn you into?
This thought was transmitted directly to the unknown entity, causing them to freeze once more.
Claire had a rough idea of WHAT had to be done to a human being to endow them with such dominance in the Net, but the price for it was astronomical.
While she was a stable, high-quality product—a strategic asset for years to come, a template that, while extremely expensive, was not difficult to replicate—this was clearly a work driven solely by immediate results with a total disregard for the fallout.
Where she could slip through like an invisible serpent, uploading a fatal virus while evading detection, the unknown netrunner could operate exclusively through brute force, relying entirely on their computational capacities, for they were capable of nothing more.
She was an ultrasonic scalpel capable of slicing through the toughest metals, laced with venom to boot, whereas her opponent was a massive sledgehammer that had sacrificed everything for the ability to mobilize such vast numerical processing power.
Having bought herself a fraction of time, Claire immediately activated the Ark protocol.
Her primary digital fortress was geared more toward countering viruses and spyware; it was a delicate, meticulously constructed architecture whose chief objective was to safeguard its creator’s secrets, detect an intruder, and saddle them with a nasty parting gift while simultaneously alerting Claire herself.
Alas, she had been forced to choose between efficiency and security, ultimately prioritizing efficiency by relying on her own skills and dominant standing.
After all, whoever attacked her through the network, the moment they revealed themselves, a special forces squad would immediately pay them a visit in reality.
Plus, she needed to work, not just guard her secrets and assets.
But that did not mean she had failed to prepare for the worst-case scenario.
The moment the final signal departed, the hitherto dormant program activated, beginning to deploy a second digital fortress right inside the first.
Considerably cruder, more primitive, and offering no capacity for remote operations, it was visibly more secure, representing not a fortress in the conventional sense, but a literal safe, its singular task being the preservation of whatever lay within.
The unknown entity clearly panicked, frantically scrambling to breach the perimeter before the full activation of the Ark, for which they stood a decent chance…
had it not been for a whole horde of primitive malware, whose sole value lay in their minimal memory footprints and stealth.
Claire did not expect to bring down someone so powerful with mere mosquito bites, but she could certainly count on disrupting them and delaying the fall of her fortress.
“Protocol Zero,” Claire commanded, leaping out of her netrunner chair and disconnecting the cable from the back of her neck, marching swiftly toward her personal arsenal.
As a combatant, the Stark matriarch was considerably less proficient than her husband, which was hardly surprising.
Her primary specialization was silent elimination, whether in the Net or from an ambush, but by no means direct open combat.
That did not mean she was defenseless, however.
“My precious ones,” she murmured, gently running her fingertips over a pair of smart submachine guns.
Weapons crafted personally by Robert using advanced materials, tailored precisely to her hand and accounting for the strengths and weaknesses of their mistress, they were the best in their class.
Seventy rounds in the magazine, a lock-on speed of half a second, powerful sensors that could see through obstacles, and highly expensive yet efficient processors that calculated bullet trajectories through obstructions over fifty meters away, possessing the capability to track a dozen targets simultaneously.
Armed with Left and Right (yes, Robert wasn’t particularly gifted when it came to names), she could drop entire mobs of enemies as long as she had ammunition.
There are quite a few of them, she evaluated, looking at the swelling crowd.
Apparently, the group she had initially seen consisted mostly of plants, whereas the rest had joined in spontaneously.
Where am I going to bury you all?
she wondered, donning her armor.
Claire’s gear was a match for her body, the fruit of joint labor by an entire group of highly qualified specialists with relevant training.
The base undersuit, designed to cool the body during the high temperatures inevitably triggered by intense nervous system activity in the Net, featured woven Kevlar nanotubes interspersed with metallic tungsten scales.
Such a combination not only left her free to perform her duties but also provided protection even against mid-caliber rounds, even if the blunt-force trauma still carried its own weighty argument.
But the main trick lay in a small generator at the base of her shoulder blades, linked to a whole web of small but powerful magnets embedded in the gear for exactly two functions: traversing metallic surfaces regardless of their orientation, and securing armor plates specially developed at the behest of Claire’s colleagues back in the depths of Soviet laboratories, which allowed her to snap on heavy armor in a dozen motions—armor that could protect against point-blank buckshot without restricting movement.
“Alright, how much time is left?” Approaching the main terminal, Claire checked the upload progress.
Like a seasoned, paranoid veteran (though in her heart she was always eighteen!), she had prepared for something like this in advance, and on the whole, everything was primed for a quick launch.
A dozen safehouses in the city, another two dozen on the outskirts of Warsaw, three in each of the nearest towns—all equipped with a vehicle, supplies of clothing, cash, weapons, medicine, and long-term emergency rations.
Possessing a degree of authority surpassed only by the president and the senior officer corps of the Harbingers, arranging such contingencies with her skillset was not difficult, and it brought immense peace of mind, even if it never had to be used.
It was being used now.
At this very moment, she needed to hold out for just forty minutes before a smart script—fragments of which were concealed across all government servers—compiled a virus with a partial AI segment, tasked with erasing all records of the Stark family from the registries of the Republic of Poland and anywhere else they appeared.
After that, all that remained was to take the secret passage into the sewers, wait out the most chaotic phase, gather their belongings, and depart with her family across the border, preferably somewhere calmer where things were reasonably civilized.
They still had grandchildren to raise, and for that, a good social atmosphere was required.
“If you leave right now, you will live,” she announced to the crowd through the loudspeaker in a bored tone.
“Do not listen to her, faithful children of the Church!” the priest proclaimed, frothing at the mouth with the semi-insane eyes of a fanatic.
“Sorcerers like her can offer nothing against men of metal cleansed of sin! She is powerless before His creation! A creation untainted by the heresy of God-defying technologies that distort His design!”
Or perhaps he isn’t playing.
He operated shrewdly, staying to the rear, shielded by a pair of reasonably competent mercenaries; moreover, the traditional vestments of a Catholic priest bulged suspiciously in certain areas, clearly hinting at the presence of a ballistic vest.
As for the crowd, though…
“Psychotropic substance detected,” the base VI alerted.
“A classic,” Claire commented, pressing a button on the main console and releasing a cloud of chlorine gas.
A rudimentary chemical agent that could be purchased in any modern hypermarket, which merely required a bit of refinement to be made effective.
Granted, anyone equipped with synthetic lungs would easily survive it, but the measure was intended to disperse the mass of organic meat.
“What? Why aren’t the exhaust fans working?” Claire frowned.
Without airflow, a gas cloud was nowhere near as lethal; worse still, it would cause almost no harm.
“I’ve been hacked?!” Claire was incensed.
“What kind of unfair, broken nonsense is this?!” she bellowed into the room, shaking her fist indignantly toward her presumed adversary.
“Ah, whatever,” she muttered, quickly calming down.
“I’ll just shoot everyone.” Gripping her little darlings in her hands, she headed with a swinging gait to the second floor where the firing ports were located.
“Forward! Forward, servants of His, let us slay the witch!” the clergyman raved, clearly pleased with the reaction to his words and the general mood of the crowd…until the wrathful shouts turned into death rattles.
The smart, self-guided guns did all the work; all Claire needed to do was slip a barrel equipped with a sensor through the small apertures and pull the trigger, and the smart automation handled the rest.
Slip it through, squeeze the trigger, wait five seconds, swap the empty magazines, repeat.
A minimum of a hundred corpses per volley—ideally a hundred and forty—and that was completely ignoring the turrets and robots.
In the modern world, numbers no longer matter, Mrs. Stark noted contentedly, relishing the scent of gunpowder.
Do these fools even comprehend what modern combat means?
One minute.
That was exactly how long it took Claire to lay down over a thousand people.
Had they been more lucid, they would have fled at the top of their lungs long ago, but under the influence of the drug, their fear was entirely disabled; even the necessity of scrambling over the bodies of their less fortunate comrades failed to deter them.
“Where on earth do there keep being so many of you? I’ll waste all my ammunition on you at this rate,” she grumbled.
Left and Right were wonderful in every aspect, but they devoured ammunition at an absolute pig of a pace.
On the whole, the situation remained under control; Claire had chosen to equip her primary workplace here for good reason.
A solid foundation, a secret passage lost in the archives due to the passage of time, and the building itself, constructed during the corporate war, had been utilized as a military warehouse designed to withstand airstrikes—hence the small windows with firing ports.
Following upgrades in the form of armored shutters, automated turrets, and robots, she could hold the line here against almost any adversary, unless a full borg materialized out of nowhere, and even then, EMPs were always an option.
All she needed to do was hold out for forty minutes, and from there, the automated defense system would either grind down all the attackers or buy her sufficient time for a retreat.
Even if someone managed to breach the entrance to the sewers, a scout who had planned the route in advance and thoroughly mapped the grid would easily evade pursuit; a scout backed by a network of safehouses would orchestrate a full-scale guerrilla war against the pursuers beforehand.
It was a pity life could be such a total bitch.
“Let the fire of true faith shine forth!” the holy man bellowed across the entire area at a certain point, and a segment of his original entourage reached into their inner pockets, pulling out vacuum syringes filled with a crimson substance.
Apparently, he too realized that the crowd he had gathered would be easily slaughtered here and decided to pull out his trump card.
Where did they get a Neural Ripper?!
Claire was…
thoroughly astonished, rapidly backing away from the firing port, shifting the robots and turrets into an overclocked operational mode, and leaping into the darkest corner of the room, anchoring herself somewhere on the ceiling with the aid of her suit.
The Neural Ripper, a legacy of the past war, was a rather wretched yet undeniably brilliant invention.
Initially, it had been engineered for modified individuals whose upgrades focused primarily on the nervous system and spinal cord to enhance their reaction speeds.
The project proved successful; the Soviet military received swift combatants whose speed matched individuals equipped with first-generation Sandevistans.
Entire special forces units boasting such reactions, independent of external supply chains, proved to be flawless snipers and assault operatives, easily dismantling enemy forces five times their number, all else being equal.
Naturally, they decided to improve upon such a successful project, but as is often the case in wartime, they did so in a rushed manner and with a mountain of side effects.
The Neural Ripper was the result of those studies: simply inject it into the bloodstream, and the entire world grinds to a halt as if you were under a latest-generation Sandevistan, but there was a catch.
Modified individuals could use the garbage a mere three to five times before facing inevitable death; furthermore, even a single use required subsequent rehabilitation and a complete break from chemicals for a couple of months, which was impossible at the height of military operations.
As for an ordinary human…a single use, two at most if they possessed the constitution of a horse, followed by a fatal outcome due to the complete destruction of a nervous system worn down to absolute zero.
However, as if that were not enough, an unpleasant fact came to light regarding the modifications in those operatives: their organisms aged three times faster than standard.
Brain tissue suffered worst of all, wearing out at an unbelievable speed and guaranteeing Alzheimer’s by the age of forty.
At the end of the war, the project was shuttered due to its unprofitability; no one wanted to lose valuable military professionals to such flaws in the program, and utilizing yesterday’s civilians in it made little sense given their low efficacy.
The project was archived, from where it eventually leaked onto the black market along with the stimulant, which underground tech-smiths had further refined, allowing the doomed souls who took it to match even full borgs in reaction speed.
The only trouble was that the price of this garbage was astronomical, and the craftsmen capable of synthesizing it could be counted on the fingers of one hand; gaining access to them was something few could manage, and convincing them to set aside other orders for your own—lucrative though it was, yet nowhere near as profitable as others—was rarer still.
I need to hold out for seven minutes; that’s enough time for even the healthiest boar in their gang to drop dead, Claire resolved, tossing all the flashbang and smoke grenades from her rig, having timed the moment flawlessly.
From that point on, all she needed to do was pick off a handful of roided-up civilians and depart through their cozy underground passage.
Just hold out.