Memories finally dispelled the remnants of sleep, and Stark decisively threw back the blanket, preparing for a new day. Today he had big plans: the first check of his device, the first test launch, and quite possibly, its first application on himself.
Walking barefoot across the floor to his private bathroom, rubbing his face with his hands and feeling once again the lack of facial hair, Stark analyzed himself. What did he want? What was he striving for? Why was he killing himself in training with such total dedication? For the umpteenth time, he came to the grim realization of how horribly the world was structured. Inefficient, stupid—short-term results were prioritized over everything else, accompanied by a complete disregard for consequences. Even now, without knowing many nuances, young Tony saw ways to improve the people's situation, reduce social stratification, stabilize the environment, and initiate processes to reboot a system that had ceased to obey humans. Yes, those methods were poorly refined and promised a sea of blood and death, but the ones to suffer would mostly be marginalized elements and the current power-holders who had driven the situation to the point of no return. Tony was rock-solidly certain: a quick end to the agony and the onset of a new era was better than endless suffering. He was lucky; he was born and lived in a family of Harbingers, the elite of the modern world, personal agents of the President, and simply a couple of experienced individuals who understood this world. But what about other children? Children growing up in poverty, or those whose parents, having listened to corporate propaganda, drag their children there with all their might, not understanding the horror they are condemning their offspring to? Militech, Arasaka, SovOil, Kang Tao, BioTechnica, Petrochem, and many, many other corporations—supporting the economy, providing jobs... but poisoning the planet and humanity itself. If you think about it, it's a terrifying situation when everyone realizes the coming end, but either cannot stop or lacks the strength to end it all.
Under the jets of hot water, his thoughts were filled with far from childish considerations. His brows furrowed, and his facial expression was more characteristic of an experienced adult who had seen his share of "shit" than a child. He knew this; he knew it wasn't normal and went beyond all predictable boundaries, that it simply shouldn't be, because it shouldn't. There were simply no necessary prerequisites for such behavioral deviations. All that should concern him right now were his personal desires and his parents' training... but there were the dreams. Dreams that with each passing year, every night, revealed more and more, giving new knowledge, but most importantly, gradually turning from a beautiful fairy tale about a clean world that knew no corporate wars... into a nightmare. In every dream, a new enemy, followed inevitably by another, even more horrific and terrifying, until you felt like a simple bug in armor. The previously cheerful-ironic statement began to fill with new, much grimmer meanings, the chief of which was a sense of his own weakness. But you still move forward, despising fear, inventing new technologies, thinking through plans right up to your own death—time and time again, no matter how scary or painful it turned out to be, because somewhere deep down you heard every time: "Don't waste it, Tony. Don't waste it." Deaths, killings, the loss of comrades—all of this was becoming FAMILIAR, a part of life that was rapidly changing into something terrifying, when all of civilization, humanity, and the world itself threatened to collapse into the Abyss, and only you and a handful of your comrades stood as a barrier.
"Every dream is a little death..." the boy's lips quietly whispered a quote he had recently read. For him, a dream was not one, but two deaths. When he slept, he was someone else—more experienced, stronger, more decisive, someone ready to make sacrifices and hold the whole world on his shoulders if the situation demanded it. Waking up, he was Tony the boy again, the son of his parents, whose main problem was dreams and the excessive guardianship of a piece of iron. It's hard to convey the feeling when you wake up and realize that you are not you, but just... a fragment of something greater.
Smack!
Striking his cheeks hard to drive out panic and negative thoughts, Tony abruptly turned off the hot water, standing under liquid ice. It helped. For a while. As always.
Leaving the bathroom, taking a deep breath, he once again put on the now-familiar mask of a slightly erratic child with an excessively brilliant brain. His parents wouldn't solve this problem; only he could solve it, and the technology from his dreams would help him. No need to make them nervous; they had been walking around excessively gloomy lately. Tony wouldn't become another source of problems.
"Shall we begin the workout?" Omnissia was waiting for him outside, her head tilted to the side.
"At least let me get dressed, you perverted piece of iron!" Tony protested. He slept naked, didn't believe in pajamas, and left the bathroom naked too, but he had long since given up hope of discouraging Omnissia from staring at him while he was naked. The excessively dutiful machine scanned his body for abnormalities and muscle development, and generally compiled a chart of his growth—every month, three, six, and twelve—creating graphs from which she planned subsequent training sessions.
After half an hour of morning exercises, which made his muscles burn pleasantly and his brain start working at full capacity, Tony went downstairs to his parents. Today was his day off from studies—the only one in the week—but his parents had to go to work. However, they had time for breakfast together.
"Woken up, sleepyhead?" his mother greeted him, standing at the stove frying eggs. Everything was just the way he and Dad liked it: slightly charred, with extra sausage and cherry tomatoes. In addition, a couple of croissants with sausage and tea with milk and three spoons of sugar.
"I get up at seven AM, how am I a sleepyhead?" Tony grumbled, looking at his parents with dissatisfaction. He understood everything, but they could have let him sleep a bit later. What difference did it make if he got up at seven or eleven? Why couldn't the schedule just be shifted? He would start later but finish later too; he didn't need to go to school like other "human larvae"—he had already graduated!
"The absolute quintessential one," Claire sang out, raising a kitchen spatula to the ceiling for emphasis. "If left to your own devices, you'd snooze half the day, spend two hours waking up, and only then do something."
"Hm," Robert supported her.
"Traitor," Tony noted quietly. "What's in the news?" He changed the subject.
"The Pope. He wants to bring Poland back into the Holy See's sphere of influence."
"Again? Doesn't he get tired of it?" the representative of the odious family winced.
Tony himself didn't believe in gods; he just knew that if they existed, they wouldn't be much different from humans, but he disliked the Holy See. The Polish Church, which had broken away from it at the beginning of the century, at least gave people some island of stability and didn't allow corporations and other riffraff to lose their bearings, whereas the Vatican had long ago become a hybrid of a corporation and a media company whose main goal was to shake more money out of people.
"When should I expect you today?"
"After seven," Robert replied. "Lot of work."
"Miss Kusanagi will arrive at nine; don't cause any mischief before she arrives, okay?" his mother looked at Tony with a squint.
"What could I possibly do in one measly hour?" Tony sighed quite sincerely.
"Blow up the house?" Claire suggested.
"Set it on fire," Robert added.
"Cause a power surge in the entire district's energy grid," Omnissia contributed.
"Slander and insinuation," Tony waved them off. "And anyway, it's all Omnissia's fault," he pointed at the robot, whose processor almost short-circuited from such audacity.
"Omnissia is a good girl," Claire cut him off.
"And a cautious one," Robert added.
"Thank you, Creators," Omnissia commented, causing Claire to nod with satisfaction and glance slyly at her son and creation.
"If things don't work out between Tony and little Lucy, I'll turn Omnissia into an android with biological components," the matriarch of the family decided, while cold shivers ran down Tony's spine.
As funny (or perverted) as it might sound—a mother making a sex-robot for her son—the reason was sad. The universal decline of morality in human society hadn't bypassed any social stratum, seriously complicating the search for a worthy partner. Claire, being a netrunner and an experienced operative, had seen every possible human vice during her service, among which lust and greed were far from the most terrifying. The situation wasn't that desperate, but she wanted the best for her boy, which is why she was working through various options. In first place was Lucy, Kusanagi's daughter. The father was a former military man with many awards, the mother an experienced netrunner from an influential family with Black Market connections. The little girl was growing up extremely smart and beautiful, and thanks to the upbringing from both parents, promised to grow into if not the perfect wife, then a reliable comrade whose back it wouldn't be scary to cover. The second option was Omnissia. She was already taking giant strides toward becoming a full-fledged AI, whose main function was Tony—he was literally the purpose of her existence. Grow an empty clone without consciousness, flash the brain, add some chrome, and you get the perfect wife and bodyguard. Or even combine both options, adding a pure clone! Although it was dangerous for her and Robert to have another child due to their past—too high a risk of discovery or the birth of a child with abnormalities—that didn't apply to grandchildren!
"He-he-he-he-he-he..." she laughed somewhat wickedly, causing both her men to look at each other warily. "Breakfast is ready!" And as if nothing had happened, she placed the omelet before the father and son with a sweet smile.
Breakfast passed quietly, as did the preparations for work. Tony himself wasn't too worried that his parents were away for long periods; after all, he was growing up as an extremely self-sufficient and independent individual, and he had enough attention. Claire and Robert devoted a lot of time to their son during his training and education, so Tony didn't feel neglected—on the contrary, under the watchful eye of his parents, he always ended up with a pile of work, and he would have preferred less of it. But he didn't complain.
After seeing his parents off, he immediately hunkered down in his workshop, connecting a netrunning chair with a built-in braindance hoop to his computer. He needed to calculate the energy flows, stretching the charging process over time so as not to overload the power grid again, as he had during the last test run.
"What are the readings?" Tony asked Omnissia, who was assisting him, being too lazy to stand up himself while the minimum power supply was activated.
"The calculations were correct; indicators are at the lower boundary of the green zone."
"Good, then I'll slowly increase the power," Tony nodded. "Dummy 02, as soon as I say so, pull the lever. Got it?" This was addressed to a manipulator with an AI written by him personally.
Nothing special—just a claw on wheels with a pair of cameras and a primitive AI. It could hardly be called a full artificial intelligence, as all it could do was gain experience in operating its own platform, which is why he called it "Dummy." Tony was too lazy to code every manipulation for the claw, so he uploaded a self-developing program instead of standard software.
"..." it nodded with its claw, grabbing the emergency shut-off lever. Tony didn't want to assemble his prototype from scratch for a THIRD time.
"20%," he commented, glancing at Omnissia.
"Normal," she replied.
"30%."
"Normal."
"40%... 50%... 80%... 100%!" he cast an anxious glance at his robot-nanny.
"Normal. The calculations proved correct."
"So... that's it? It's ready!?" Tony looked back and forth between Omnissia and his creation in shock.
"Confirmed. However, until full verification by Creators Claire and Robert, I will not allow you to use this mechanism."
"I don't need to," Tony waved her off. He was sure his creation wouldn't fry his brains; after all, he hadn't killed so much time and attempts for nothing. The fuses were reliable, doubled, and in particularly dangerous places, tripled. "All that's left is to conduct a test run, scan my skull, and it's all set. You'll let me do that much, right?"
"I will."
But Tony didn't have time, for a small follower of Chaos Undivided arrived to fulfill her purpose of interfering with the follower of the Machine God doing his divine work.
"Tony!" slamming her white head into his side with all her might, Lucyna squealed.
"Kha!" the breath was knocked out of him. "Lucy... why?"
"Tony? Tony!" the girl leaned over the "dying" boy. "Nooooooo!" she wailed theatrically, throwing her hands to the sky.
Meanwhile, her mother stood in the doorway, trying not to laugh out loud.
Several days passed; everything was ready for the activation of Tony's invention, and he was only waiting for his parents to give the go-ahead. He had no doubt they would give it. Even if they didn't understand the principle and purpose of the installation, his father's knowledge was enough to ensure the idea was safe. In the worst-case scenario, he could always sneak into the workshop and do everything in secret from his parents and Omnissia. But Tony was in no hurry; he trusted his father and mother and wanted them to check his preparations before launching a machine meant to affect his brain.
Robert and Claire were currently at work. Claire sat in a well-hidden and protected data center, submerged in the Net and hacking the computer of an incautious fixer, while Robert was in one of the safe houses, sipping synth-coffee and ensuring the recording equipment didn't fail. However, this didn't stop them from communicating with each other.
"Our son is a genius," Claire stated for the umpteenth time that day.
"We knew that," Robert noted.
"But not to this degree!" she exclaimed emotionally. "Creating a technology of this scale from scratch is something beyond limits! It won't just give humanity new opportunities; it will allow people to reach a new level of development! And that's without any genetic or cybernetic enhancements, simply by optimizing what is already there!"
"Are you sure about the program he wrote?" Robert asked, taking a sip from his cup.
"The program is excellent; I couldn't have done better myself," Claire assured him. "Moreover, it is also revolutionary."
"Hm?"
"If it's integrated into a biomonitor, it will radically improve its operation. While current high-end models track physical damage and advanced diseases, Tony's program will start tracking illnesses and developmental deviations at the earliest stages, seriously easing the doctors' work."
"Maybe we should patent it?" Robert suggested. "Tony could use an external source of income."
"I was going to suggest that too," Claire nodded readily. "But we'll have to go 'on the carpet' to the Big Man himself."
"Why? It's not advisable for us to stand out."
"You just don't understand the scale of the program Tony created. As soon as it hits the market, it will immediately attract the attention of EVERY corporation that produces biomonitors and medical equipment. Without a strong patron, we are guaranteed to start having problems, but with the support of the head of an entire state, all this will be easily resolved."
"Mm," Robert was forced to agree. "Plus PR and attention for Poland."
"Exactly!" Claire confirmed. "For Skalk, Tony's patent costs pennies, and he won't rob a young talent who was born, grew up, and will live and work in his country. A partnership will be more than enough for him."
"Tony will get less money," Robert frowned.
"In exchange for being rid of sales problems and gaining state protection," Claire countered. "Whoever wins the upcoming confrontation, they won't touch the goose that lays golden eggs, and Tony will become exactly such a laying hen. An influx of foreign capital is needed by any government, especially ours."
"Especially if part of the flow settles directly in the budget," Robert understood his wife's plan. "And what about the technology itself? Will we patent it?"
"That's... more complicated," the mother noted. "On one hand, it's not very interesting for the powers that be, because it's designed for children. Of course, adults will get nice bonuses too, but children will be able to realize the technology's potential best of all. Essentially, Tony has solved the problem of early implant installation, which is, in a way, a breakthrough..."
"But corporations weren't stopped by that before," Robert nodded.
Children can only have a limited range of cybernetic implants installed, with strict specialization and replacement every one to three years depending on the model; otherwise, in adulthood, problems and early wear of the organism begin. This looks more than gruesome in itself, even without considering the consequences. Those same top-league football players who undergo such procedures from early childhood invariably have disproportionately long legs that fail after thirty and are replaced by implants. And that's assuming their nervous system wasn't destroyed; otherwise, installing such powerful chrome is deadly for them, and they remain legless cripples forever. Unfortunately, there were enough places in the world where such practices were legal, so the ban on early implantation didn't stop any serious players.
"True," Claire agreed. "But even the program he wrote is enough to seriously ease such procedures and increase their efficiency. If we release the technology itself, we will essentially open a new market for implants for infants and older, as the main problem regarding their unprofitability will become a thing of the past. And I don't want to deprive our son of such a trump card for the future."
"Do you think he can open his own company?" Robert was surprised. Who, if not them, knew how cruel and dishonest modern competition was? Any even slightly interesting and promising newcomer is swallowed by the old players, either becoming part of their corporation or being turned into a disenfranchised satellite.
"Under the protection of the state? Quite possibly," Claire agreed easily. "Of course, the terms of cooperation will be quite different than just with a patent, but Skalk has been looking for a way out of Poland's complete dependence on smuggling for decades, and his own corporation that will corner the domestic market and eventually become part of the country will more than suit him. A sort of Arasaka 2.0, but initially under the patronage of the government."
"I agree regarding Skalk. But what about his successors?"
"That won't be our concern anymore," Claire chuckled sadly.
"Is it that bad?" the father asked, frowning.
"The stakes are getting higher," they answered him. "The Cardinal is distancing himself from the President's block, clearly receiving support from somewhere outside, and Skalk is cozying up to the Vatican more and more in response, which irritates Lewandowski considerably. Instead of returning to the previous course, he is only escalating. I don't think I need to tell you about his actions regarding the Harbingers in case of victory?"
"A total purge," she was answered grimly.
"Exactly. Fortunately, the Cardinal is a deeply religious man and won't touch the families of employees. Rather, on the contrary, he will allocate a decent allowance, free education, and housing for the families of the deceased. He may be a fanatic, but precisely because of that, he won't touch the children under any circumstances, for they are 'innocent'."
"Mmm... most likely he is supported by SovOil. If they can take control of Poland, they will gain access to the largest black market in Europe with all that entails."
"Or Militech. Still, inviting Arasaka and so actively sympathizing with it was stupid; Saburo dislikes the USSR only slightly less than the NUSA."
"Stupid," Robert agreed. "But a project of strategic importance is more valuable than possible risks."
"I know, I know," Claire rolled her eyes. "'Next-generation netrunners will allow a decisive battle against crime'—I've heard it, more than once."
"You think it won't work?"
"Why wouldn't it?" Claire was surprised. "It will work very well, but that's the problem. The criminal world isn't run by fools, whatever anyone says, and they perfectly understand the threat that is brewing over their heads. And unlike the netrunners, who still need to be raised, the criminals are here and now. Hiding a project of this level won't work; all the significant players are already wondering what Arasaka is doing in Poland, and a leak is inevitable."
"As is a preemptive strike."
"Exactly. That's why we must secure Tony's future in advance and take care of the consequences of our death."
"That's grim; I don't want to talk about it. We've already discussed everything."
"Yes, yes, appoint the Kusanagis as guardians, I remember. The idea is good; after all, people won't risk picking a fight with them, but I'm worried about Ryu. Do you know what he keeps on his computer?" and without waiting for an answer, she continued. "Photos from the Corporate War! and I'm not talking about photos with comrades-in-arms, some beautiful landscapes or something else, but of corpses! Entire fields of bodies—killed either by him personally or with his participation! I don't understand at all how such a person was entrusted with the leadership of such an important project!"
"Security," Robert replied. "Too valuable to risk, therefore, a security specialist must be appointed as the leader. And Ryu Kusanagi is a hereditary corporate with good connections and a second degree in genetics."
"Yeah, except such a person has every chance of raising not loyal Arasaka netrunners, but monsters embittered against them."
"Everything has been worked out; the test batch doesn't have much value. The main task is to organize the processes for mass training and protect the results."
"I know, I know. Repeating a streamlined process is always easier than starting one from scratch, but I still don't like it. Moreover, I'm almost certain that little Lucyna will be sent to study in the front rows so her daddy can prove himself. And to trust our son to such a person? Even hypothetically?"
"The main thing is security," Robert countered. "With him, the biggest threat to Tony is working for Arasaka. Given his intelligence, he will become the head of one of the corporation's leading laboratories under Saburo's personal patronage."
"Or he'll run away," Tony's mother countered. "Our boy values his independence and creative freedom too much, not tolerating boundaries. Do I need to remind you what he threatened to arrange and almost did arrange when we tried to forbid him from working after the fire?"
"In any case, he will be a wealthy adult with combat experience by then. The 'Cadre Forge' calculations show favorable forecasts."
"If we ignore the anomalies in Tony's behavior, capable of affecting his behavior in the most unexpected way," Claire countered. "Out of the two of us, I was one of the project leads. Such anomalies are unique, and there are no statistics on them, which is why the AI is unable to create an accurate forecast."