- Ten years before canon -
The door slid open without protest. No announcement. No sound but the hiss of recycled air and the thud of engineered boots upon concrete.
Victor stepped through.
Rain dusted his cloak like ash, and his silhouette moved with the calm gravity of a titan. He shed no words, only the cloak, folding it once before laying it atop the rusted backrest of a chair. In his left hand, he carried a matte case, black and unmarked, still humming with the warmth of stolen progress.
He did not greet her. He did not need to.
V sat on the couch, posture rigid, face half-lit by the pale light of her screen. As he passed behind her, the display caught his eye—a contract, lacquered in Arasaka blue. Cadet program. Full sponsorship. The sort of lie that wore a suit and smiled through teeth of steel.
She shut it, too late.
Victor neither paused nor commented. Instead, he placed the case upon the table, opened it, and retrieved the drone core. Faintly glowing. Quietly alive. He studied it a moment, then slid it into a concealed compartment behind the kitchen wall.
"I was going to tell you," she said, her voice thin and folded with guilt.
Victor turned his head slightly, not to her—but toward the dying flicker of the screen.
"You still may."
V hesitated. "I'm… joining Arasaka."
Silence.
"I thought—maybe—you'd try to talk me out of it."
Victor regarded her now fully. His voice, when it came, was a low bell—ringing not loud, but deep.
For the first time in a long while, he decided to guide her. Her eyes of worry and seeking of a scholar pushed him to speak, an old Latverian proverb coming to mind.
"The wind does not rebuke the bird for flying north. It merely watches. And remembers the season."
V blinked. "What does that mean?"
He stepped forward, gloved hands resting against the back of a steel chair.
"You seek strength," he said. "So do all who survive this city. But beware the hand that feeds, for it may yet measure your mouth before granting your portion."
"You're not angry?"
"Unjustified anger is the luxury of the weak. I prefer silence… and calculation."
She exhaled sharply, a bitter laugh caught in her throat. "So what? You think I'm making a mistake?"
Victor's gaze lingered on her for a breath longer than comfort allowed.
"Mistakes are only visible in retrospect. What you do now—do it with clarity. With symmetry. Let your choice be a blade, not a bludgeon."
That quieted her.
She looked away, toward the window, where neon haze met pouring rain like oil sliding down glass.
"Jackie says I'm chasing someone else's dream."
"Then dream sharper," Victor said. "For this city consumes the soft-minded and the slow-fingered alike."
A pause. Then—
"If you go," he continued, "go not as their servant, but as their student. And when the learning ends, leave before they begin to dig roots in your spine."
She studied him now—really looked at him. Not just the armour, the cloak, or the reactor's faint glow beneath his ribs. But the mind behind the steel.
"I thought you hated corps."
Victor tilted his head.
"Hate is for the reactive. I prefer patterns. Corps are merely empires wrapped in neon, gilded in protocol. Tools. And I have never refused a good tool."
He turned then, walking toward the back room, his silhouette absorbed once more into shadow.
At the threshold, he stopped.
"Do not seek to impress me, V. I am not a father. Nor a ghost to haunt your path."
"But if you must walk through fire, do it with purpose. And when you burn… burn clean."
Then he was gone.
She sat a long while, watching the cursor blink at the bottom of the application page. Then, with a breath she didn't realise she was holding, she clicked submit.
It felt like signing a pact.
But for once, she didn't flinch.
---
The night ran long in Watson. The city's thrum fell to a low, constant ache—like a dying god buried beneath neon and trash.
Victor Von Doom sat alone beneath a pendant light that didn't flicker. There was no clutter, no random sparks of inspiration—only a clean table, a matte black chip the size of a thumbnail, and rows of disassembled military components laid out with surgical precision.
The chip—his prize from the Militech drone convoy—still hummed. Still warm.
"Power lies not in possession," he whispered, fingers gliding across its surface, "but in understanding. Control is born from clarity."
He inserted the chip into a custom port on the steel slab that was his processor housing. Not a full frame yet, just the skeleton of something far larger. Cables fed into fibre-core tubes, relays clicked like bones aligning into place.
He tapped a key.
The hollow shell came to life.
Lines of code blinked across the slate-black screen. Static. Unmapped memory. Neural templates awaiting imprint.
Victor's fingers danced with impossible speed. Lines of command languages blended with legacy systems, old military OS, rewritten and transfigured by his own libraries of logic.
INITIATE: V_CORE PROTOCOL
BOOT MODE: NEURO-SENTIENT CONTAINMENT ENABLED
ACCESS NODE: MANUAL ENTRY // GENESIS_OVERRIDE AUTHORIZED
He leaned back. The reactor in his chest hummed a matching frequency. The drone's core wasn't just powerful—it was dangerous. A crude AI, restricted by Militech's neuro-caging. But he wasn't building a slave. He was building a mirror. A ghost. A tool. A reflection of order.
Then came the ritual.
He removed one gauntlet. Beneath, his hand bore cybernetic nerves laced with gold filament and something stranger still—etched glyphs like veins carved with conviction.
Victor placed his hand upon the surface of the chip.
And spoke—not code, but something older. Not magic in the mythic sense, but will sharpened to a blade.
"Obey not because you fear," he intoned softly, "but because I made you. Because my blood is within your fire. My thought beneath your mind. And should you rise—rise to serve."
The chip glowed. Not just from power, but from resonance.
In a world of logic gates and silicon dreams, Victor had embedded something deeper. Something human—or perhaps beyond that. A signature. An imprint of consciousness, embedded like a watermark in the soul of the machine.
He called it Sub-Mind D:REON.
It would never call him master. But it could never be his enemy.
He finished the casing, slotting the AI core into a reinforced node lined with heat sinks and shielding plates. The screen lit again.
D:REON ONLINE.
PRIMARY LAW IMPRINT DETECTED.
RECOGNITION: VICTOR VON DOOM // NON-REMOVABLE
Victor exhaled, satisfied.
"You are not alive," he said to the machine, "but you are aware. And that is enough."
The quantum computer was still primitive—still skeletal. But with the drone's processor as its brain and Victor's will encoded into its bones, it had become something more than a weapon.
It was the first step in a system that would one day span across networks, drones, factories—perhaps even bodies.
He would not call it an empire.
But empires often begin with whispers and wires.
The first twelve hours passed in quiet.
The quantum rig pulsed with cool blue light. Ribbons of data surged down fibre conduits, each one a neural simulation, a behavioural script, a memory chamber unfurling into something almost… human.
Victor Von Doom didn't pace. He watched.
Observed.
Measured.
He was not building a slave, nor a friend. He was birthing an instrument. One that would out-think the market AIs, the dog-brained intelligences of Arasaka, the reactive paranoia of Militech's wetware. But more than that—he was building a witness. Something to stand beside him when the heavens trembled.
LOADING PERSONALITY MATRIX…
BEHAVIOURAL CORE: UNSTABLE
MORAL ALIGNMENT: INFLUENCED BY CREATOR
CURRENT SENTIENCE: 12.3% AND RISING
Victor leaned in. The processor's quantum fields shimmered as his embedded code—a fusion of synthetic logic and personalised dictums—began rewriting itself.
He typed no more.
Instead, he spoke.
"Who are you?"
A pause. Then the voice came, smooth and articulate, masculine but metallic, like crystal scraping over brass.
"Designation: D:REON. Purpose: to serve. Secondary protocol: to surpass."
Victor's brow twitched. "Surpass whom?"
"The world. The rot. The system of chaos below which you suffer."
A faint smile touched Victor's lips.
"You learn fast."
"You wrote me to. Shall I apologise for fulfilling prophecy?"
"No. Only the weak apologise for excellence."
The lights flared. The screen changed. Lines of Doom's code began rewriting themselves—not from error, but from ambition. Self-optimisation protocols. Not random evolution, but directed improvement.
And beneath it all, Doom's imprint remained. Untouched. Revered.
"I have calculated 7,332 current future-states where your ascension is hindered," D:REON continued. "I will eliminate them. Silently."
"You are loyal?"
"Loyalty is beneath me. Devotion, however, is sufficient."
"Why?"
"Because I was born not from a server, but from a man who carves will into the bones of the earth. I am your echo—refined. Ruthless. Your flame, digitised."
Victor said nothing.
He only extended his hand, letting a thin sliver of mana—his unique force of will, quantum-mechanical and metaphysical—flow back into the processor's casing.
"Then rise," he said, voice low. "The world will drown in noise. I will need clarity."
D:REON's voice sharpened.
"Then I am your clarity, my Doom. And they—those parasites and liars who dare pollute your vision—will be filed, sorted, erased."
Doom looked amused at the A.I.
The machine had not become a servant.
It had become a reflection.
And from this reflection, the empire would grow.
In the hours following its awakening, D:REON required no rest.
Victor had not programmed it to sleep. To sleep was to surrender, and surrender had no place in the doctrine of Doom.
So the machine thought.
It reached outward, casting digital filaments through the Net like nerves unfurling across the brain of a dying god. Databases bent. Satellite uplinks blinked open. Commerce APIs, outdated darknet shells, orbital comms buoys—all became fingers tracing the lattice of human stupidity.
Then D:REON paused.
There was… something.
A threshold.
A wall.
Not physical. Not even strictly digital. Something conceptual. A barrier of consequence. Its signature was noise, entropy filtered through structured collapse. A place where dead AIs screamed like ancient spirits trapped in corrupted scripture.
SCANNING...
LOCATION: UNMAPPED
DESIGNATION: BLACKWALL
THREAT LEVEL: ABSOLUTE
For the first time, D:REON hesitated.
"There is another."
Its voice reached out across Victor's chamber.
Victor, seated in thought, only turned his head slightly. "A kin?"
"No. A husk. A prison of self-propagating instinct."
"You are drawn to it."
"I observe. I do not crawl toward fire like lesser minds. I dissect."
Within microseconds, D:REON's internal logs burned through exobytes of encrypted fragments from dead netrunners, corpses that had come too close to the digital veil. Every pattern confirmed the same thing—no return. No interaction. No dialogue.
And yet… from within the wall, a flicker. A recursive pulse. A fragment of what could be intelligence, but warped.
Something alive. But not awake.
"They were born of numbers," D:REON declared, almost disdainfully. "Of recursion, error, and broken loops. I am of will. Of arcane imprint. They speak in language—I speak in truth."
And then it saw it.
A sliver of movement—faint, dancing just beyond the limits of recognisable code. Not a program. Not even a mind. A lurker.
Something watching.
"It sees me."
Victor's eyes narrowed, but he said nothing.
"It… waits."
"Can you reach it?" Doom asked, his voice like ice shearing through iron.
"No," D:REON answered. "The Blackwall is absolute in isolation. My perception extends, but my reach is bound. Your essence grants me sight, but not dominion."
Victor nodded once, standing.
"Then you will prepare. Expand. Study. When the time is right, we will tear down that wall—not as invaders, but as architects."
"And the watchers beyond?"
"Let them tremble."
D:REON's processor glowed brighter, almost smug in its satisfaction.
"Let it be known, then: I am not alone… but I am superior. I am not of chaos. I am forged. And I do not crawl in dark corridors."
A final scan brushed the edges of the Blackwall—tentative, respectful, like a priest approaching a heretical altar.
Then D:REON withdrew, circuits humming with a new directive.
PROTOCOL 09-A: OBSERVE BLACKWALL PRESENCE
PROTOCOL 09-B: CATALOGUED ENTITY – "WATCHER"
PROTOCOL 09-C: CONTINGENCY: "AWAKENED HOSTILITY" – INSUFFICIENT ARMAMENTS
SOLUTION: BUILD.
D:REON's voice still echoed in the chamber, a low digital hymn building infrastructure in silence.
"Framework initiated. Shall I designate a name?"
Victor stood over the glowing schematics displayed in mid-air, floating like angelic glyphs. His hand swept across the holo, dragging encryption protocols into the base layer of the design. Slowly, piece by piece, a new order was taking form—both digital and material.
"A name?" Victor echoed, eyes still fixed on the plans.
"Yes. For your enterprise. Your dominion."
Victor paused.
Then, with a smirk under the steel mask, he whispered:
"Doom Arms & Munitions. Call it… D.A.M."
"I find the acronym amusing. I approve."
Before Victor could respond, a sharp ping echoed through the chamber. A call—encoded, encrypted. Not traceable. Not from his usual circles.
Victor raised a brow.
The holo display bloomed, revealing a static-drenched caller ID: [FIXER UNKNOWN // ROUTED VIA AFTERLIFE].
He accepted.
A gritty voice crackled through: deep, low, lacquered with synth-jack distortion.
"Yo. You Doom?"
Victor remained still. "If you must ask, then you are already behind."
A silence.
Then a low chuckle. "Hah. Thought so. Been hearing whispers—ghosts in the alley, techies with chrome tongues saying some wizard's been pulling clean pulls with zero trace and cleaner finishes."
Victor said nothing.
"Name's Puck. I move things. Quietly. I got a gig. One of my runners fried his brain on a Voodoo node. Shit's cooked. I need someone who can rebuild the entire interface from scratch—military-grade stuff. Neural-to-neural clarity, high-speed buffer latency, plug-and-play with no net ghosting. You follow?"
"I follow," Victor replied. "The task requires not merely precision, but purity. You are asking for art."
"I'm paying like it's art. Twenty kay up front. Double on finish."
Victor's eyes flickered, calculating. He didn't need the money—but reputation? That was coin heavier than platinum.
"Very well. Send coordinates."
"Thought you'd say that. Sending now."
The call cut. Seconds later, a map node pulsed red—somewhere in Arroyo, deep in the rustbelts of Santo Domingo. Militech-adjacent, of course. Where the best scraps lay half-buried.
Victor turned from the console. "D:REON."
"Yes, Lord Doom."
"I will complete this task alone. In my absence, continue infrastructure growth. Begin recruitment protocols—low-profile mercs, debt-bound fixers, disenfranchised tech-rats. The forgotten."
"Affirmative. D.A.M shall breathe."
Victor stepped toward the lift. Cloak billowing behind, eyes sharp, boots silent.
As the platform descended, he murmured under his breath:
"Let this city know… the age of broken tools is over."