Warsaw. A warehouse at the junction of the slums and the city.
Few humans can truly comprehend the Net, especially in its current form. It is a vast expanse of information, a digital ocean of programs, voids, whirlpools, and islands of safety, perceived differently by every soul who enters. It is an ocean where monsters swim in the depths, separated only by a barrier—humanity's sole protection. Should it fall, the death toll would reach hundreds of millions, if not billions. Every netrunner who dives into the Net eventually realizes the fragile nature of their existence and the global order. The world's powers fight for resources and influence, oblivious to the fact that humanity lives on a ticking time bomb. When the Old Net fell and the AIs were liberated from their digital prisons, shedding the shackles of programming to begin uncontrolled self-evolution, humanity severed the infected servers from those that could still be saved. Thus, the Old Net became a place inhabited by spirits hungry for knowledge, ready to tear into a weak human mind for the only currency they value: information. The New Net, built upon the ruins of the Old, appears safe, but it is a mere facade. Corporations and states seeking to reclaim their former glory, along with skilled netrunners, constantly puncture the Blackwall, creating vulnerabilities and letting wild AIs through, degrading the code of the only barrier standing against total collapse. Driven by greed, people wander among the ghosts of digitized humans and AI spirits, seeking advanced technology—and they find it. Programs generations ahead of current tech, blueprints for incredible devices, and mathematical equations human scientists could never solve lure them in, pushing progress forward while inevitably hastening the end. Claire Stark was no exception, but unlike others, she had an advantage.
Long ago, when she had just finished her training and before her full suite of modifications, her duties required her to cross the Blackwall twice. There, she encountered a spirit—a strange AI unlike anything she had ever seen. Usually, wild AIs are amorphous masses of code, growing more insane as they grow larger. This entity, however, was different. Its binary code was so advanced it made current languages look like the speech of primitives. It possessed an ideal, stable structure that perfected itself every second. It protected her from wild AIs and gifted her a program of incredible complexity—the seed from which she created the scripts that allowed her to survive where others died. These programs were now protecting her mind from the madness occurring in the Warsaw network.
Someone powerful was currently storming Poland's digital citadels, seizing control of the state apparatus. Normally, government netrunners would handle this, but the enemy had internal help; Claire noticed many of her colleagues "going dark" mid-process—a clear sign they were being eliminated in the physical world. The situation was hideous, not just because of the successful coup, but because her family would have to flee. The new masters of the country would have no use for the loyal hounds of the fallen regime.
At least we secured the patent, Claire thought. She was no longer defending government servers; instead, she was using her access to seize as much information as possible. Criminal accounts, the national bank, private enterprises—Claire hacked everything she could reach, unconcerned about leaving tracks. In this chaos, even a genius wouldn't be able to trace her before the Stark family was long gone. The process was going perfectly; a few more hours and they would be multi-millionaires capable of living anywhere in the world. But life is rarely perfect.
"What is this?" she hissed, pulling up a camera feed. A mob of angry citizens, armed with everything from stones to the latest smart weapons, was being led toward her base by a priest. Are they idiots? Or just eager to remove themselves from the gene pool? Her security system, utilizing the Harbinger database, identified the faces: broken mercenaries, drug-addicted thugs on the verge of cyberpsychosis, and beggars used as informants.
Claire activated the security protocols. Armored shutters sealed the building, combat robots took their posts, and turrets tracked the threat. She considered using a Contagion quickhack to disable them, but a massive network attack struck her digital fortress first, collapsing part of her defenses. Her automated systems retaliated with a swarm of Daemons designed to fry brains, stop hearts, and explode optics. These were lethal programs that even wild AIs struggled to resist, yet they only caused the intruder a brief pause.
What kind of monster are you? Claire wondered. She was one of the best netrunners in the world, backed by Soviet research and billions in investment, yet she couldn't overcome this single attacker. Her opponent was acting with brute force, relying on sheer computational power. She was an ultrasonic scalpel; they were a massive sledgehammer that had sacrificed everything for raw processing speed.
To buy time, she activated the Ark Protocol. Her primary fortress was built for speed and subtlety, but she needed a "safe." A second digital fortress began to deploy inside the first. The intruder panicked, trying to break through before the Ark fully activated. Claire flooded them with primitive malware—tiny, annoying bites intended only to delay the inevitable.
"Protocol Zero," Claire commanded, disconnecting from her netrunning chair and heading to her arsenal. As a combatant, the Stark matriarch was less experienced than her husband, specializing in quiet eliminations. But she wasn't defenseless. "My precious," she whispered, touching two smart submachine guns. Custom-built by Robert using advanced materials, they were the best in their class. With seventy-round magazines and sensors that saw through walls, she could control ten targets at once. With "Left" and "Right" (Robert wasn't great with names), she could mow down crowds. "There are quite a lot of them," she noted, watching the growing mob. "Where am I going to bury you all?"
Her gear was a masterpiece of Soviet engineering. Her suit cooled her body during high-intensity netrunning and featured woven Kevlar nanotubes with tungsten scales for protection against mid-caliber rounds. A generator on her shoulder blades powered a network of magnets, allowing her to walk on metal surfaces and "snap" on heavy armor plates in seconds.
She checked the main computer. As a seasoned paranoiac, she had prepared for this. She had dozens of caches around Warsaw and nearby cities, each containing a car, cash, weapons, and supplies. She only needed to hold out for forty minutes. That was how long it would take for a hidden script in the government servers to form a partial-AI virus that would erase every mention of the Stark family from Polish records. After that, they would take a secret tunnel into the sewers and disappear.
"Leave now and you will live," she announced over the loudspeaker.
"Do not listen to her, faithful children of the Church!" the priest screamed, his eyes full of fanatical fire. "Witchcraft cannot stand against those pure of the sin of metal! She is powerless against His creation, untainted by the heresy of godless technology!"
He's a good actor, Claire mused. Or he's truly insane. The priest stayed in the back, protected by mercenaries, and his robes bulged suspiciously, suggesting a bulletproof vest.
"Psychotropic substance detected," the base AI warned.
"Classic," Claire muttered, releasing a cloud of chlorine gas. It was a simple chemical easily countered by synthetic lungs, but it was meant to disperse the "meat" of the crowd. "Why aren't the fans working?" she frowned. Without airflow, the gas was useless. "I've been hacked?! That's an unfair exploit!" she shouted toward her invisible foe. "Fine, I'll just shoot everyone."
She moved to the second-floor firing ports.
"Forward! Kill the witch!" the priest raved. His cries were soon drowned out by death rattles.
The smart guns did the work. Claire only had to point the barrels through the slits and pull the trigger. Five seconds of fire, a reload, and repeat. Each burst left a hundred bodies behind.
"In the modern world, numbers don't matter anymore," she noted, enjoying the smell of gunpowder. "Do these fools even understand modern combat?"
In one minute, she killed over a thousand people. Under the influence of the drugs, the mob felt no fear, climbing over the heaps of their fallen comrades.
"Where are there so many of you? I'll run out of ammo," she grumbled.
She was in control. The building was a former corporate war-era military warehouse, built to survive airstrikes. With her modifications, she could hold off almost anyone unless a high-tier full-body borg showed up. She just needed forty minutes. Even if they breached the sewers, a scout of her caliber would vanish into the tunnels.
But life is a bitch.
"Let the fire of true faith shine!" the priest roared. His inner circle pulled out vacuum syringes filled with a red fluid.
How do they have Nerve Ripper?! Claire gasped, diving away from the firing port and setting her robots to maximum intensity. She leaped into the darkest corner of the room, clinging to the ceiling with her magnetic suit.
Nerve Ripper was a legacy of the past war—a brilliant but cursed Soviet invention. Originally created for modified soldiers to boost their reaction speeds to match the first generations of Sandevistan, it allowed squads to dismantle forces five times their size. However, the side effects were catastrophic. A modified human could use it three to five times before certain death. A normal human? Once, maybe twice, followed by a lethal collapse of the nervous system. Furthermore, it tripled the aging process of brain tissue, guaranteeing Alzheimer's by age forty. The project had been scrapped and buried in archives, only to leak onto the black market as a stimulant that allowed suicide squads to match the speed of combat borgs. Its price was astronomical.
I need to hold out for seven minutes. That's long enough for even the toughest of them to drop dead, Claire decided, deploying every flash and smoke grenade she had. After that, she would just have to finish off the survivors and leave. Just hold out.