Susanna Quinn
Susanna Quinn positioned herself as someone who had seen it all, someone hard to surprise. A troubled childhood, a military career, leadership of a small gang in the ocean called Night City, teeming with predators—all of this had hardened her character, forced her to see many different kinds of crap, and generally brought her to a point where, if aliens landed in the middle of Corporate Plaza, she would just raise an eyebrow and calculate what the Moxes could gain from it. However, when a young man, barely out of his teenage years, who had come to her office no more than five days ago, brought her to an old "no man's land" warehouse district in Watson and showed her a sophisticated still brewing a ton of booze—a still he had built by killing a hundred people—let's just say, she reconsidered her stance on surprise.
"Very..." Taking a sip of the sample brewed right before her eyes, the head Mox tried to find words to express her feelings. For the first time, the not-so-rich vocabulary of a street girl failed her.
"F*ing awesome!" came a comment from behind, where the rest of the Moxes from the escort were also trying the drink. But they were judging the taste, while Quinn... she was judging the prospects.
Susanna Quinn had no education. None at all. She didn't attend school, and her entire life foundation was built on what she learned on the streets and in military school, plus the knowledge bases she acquired upon joining the Moxes. But she had a decent mind, a ton of life experience, and her position as a leader forced her to look further and see more. Her girls only noticed the taste, but she noticed the production speed. The machine shown to her by Stark produced liquor in a mere ten minutes, in a quantity of thirty liters, without waiting for the fermentation of ingredients and other processes. Essentially, she wasn't drinking the product of fermenting certain products, but pure chemistry with the taste of alcohol and its effect... extremely tasty chemistry. Consider it a full-fledged barrel of chemistry, which could be found on any city street in vending machines. It might seem like a small amount, but the taste... the taste changed everything. Rich, natural, with a pleasant soft aftertaste.
"Cognac," Susanna understood. Her deceased fiancé had once brought a bottle of cognac made before the First Corporate War to their date. Well, Stark's swill was extremely similar to that very cognac... only tastier.
"How much... how much of this alcohol can you produce?" Trying to distance herself from the prospects flashing before her eyes, she asked the question that most concerned her at the moment.
"About three hundred liters a week," the guy replied with a slight shrug.
"Okay, and how much will one such batch cost?" She pointed to the plastic bucket under the machine's spout.
"Depends on what kind we make. Cognac... one and a half eddies per batch," the answer instantly turned the amber liquid into gold in the Mox's eyes.
The Moxes ran about a dozen establishments, which were their main source of income. Yes, there was also prostitution, but it was more of a supplement to their establishments rather than a full-fledged activity. There were also street girls, but they preferred to work either alone or with someone from the Claws, simply because there wasn't much faith in the Moxes on the streets. So, in all their establishments, they sold alcohol, and if they started selling this beauty under the guise of high-quality elite drinks in the elite segment... they could increase their income by one and a half to two times, which would automatically pull the gang out of the hole it was hanging over.
"What are the health consequences?" She asked a new question.
"Like alcohol," Stark replied, looking confused. And then, clearly realizing what she was thinking, he smiled slightly at the corner of his mouth and explained: "This is real cognac. It's just that instead of natural chemical processes with natural ingredients, everything is replaced by the reaction of chemical components. Essentially, it's just an optimization of traditional processes that haven't changed much since the High Middle Ages."
The answer stunned the head of the Moxes. Of course, not literally, but the very fact that some kid could create such a device for producing a truly ELITE drink could change the entire alcohol market.
"Stop," she shook her head slightly, taking another sip of her portion. A pleasant warmth and taste spread from her stomach throughout her body, slightly clouding her mind and giving her calmness. What she needed right now. "If it was so easy to do, why hasn't anyone built something like this before?"
"Lack of brains," Stark snorted proudly. "And knowledge," he added mentally.*
As mentioned, the Net Crash seriously impacted humanity's scientific base, including its chemical branch. A huge amount of knowledge, transferred even from paper media of the early 20th century, was lost. Essentially, due to the virus launched by Bartmoss, humanity was left only with the knowledge base found in school textbooks and rare specialized literature from institutes and universities... which had also almost universally switched to digital and seriously messed up their archives. Things didn't get much better for science from the pursuit of knowledge in the Old Net and fishing it out from rogue AIs, with the holy certainty that they, freed from morality and the limitations of flesh, would definitely come up with something genius. To be fair, there was some truth to this; in programming, the mad spirits of the Net were ahead of humanity by decades, if not centuries... which was also a lot for the digital segment, where a new, more efficient and multifunctional programming language appeared every five years. But everything else... was pure theory. Super-efficient nuclear reactors, space stations, mining equipment that could drill as deep as humanity had never gone—all of this was pure theory without real test trials and was often unrealizable due to an imperfect material base. And if they lived in a healthier society, this wouldn't have been a problem; states would have started funding scientific institutes, opened their laboratories, and in ten to twenty years, they would have fully restored the scientific base, since reverse engineering was still a thing. But! Wild capitalism prevailed in society, corporations stood above governments, and any long-term solutions were pushed aside in favor of short-term ones that could bring profit here and now. The necessary projects and research simply didn't receive funding; the state barely found funds for its own existence and spent everything on fighting corporations... or was completely absorbed by them, becoming their branches and extensions, including in terms of methods. And the same shareholders, the only alternative in the current situation, without delving deeply into the problem, simply hearing that there was knowledge in the Net that surpassed all current knowledge, brushing aside the details as unnecessary garbage, invested their money anywhere but in restoring past knowledge. But it was the details that made up the whole.
In fact, because of this, things were so bad with products now. Not only because of combat viruses that had wiped out an extremely large amount of flora, and with it fauna, not because of poisoned seas and oceans, but because of the damn gaps in knowledge. Modern corporations cared much more about short-term investments that would quickly pay off, free up capital, and help in competition with other such corporations. The animal world getting poorer year by year? A desert growing in the middle of the American continent? More than half of the uneducated population dying like flies from synthetic drugs? Why solve these problems when you can release another soda, make some money, and come up with a new flavor to spite competitors. And the fact that the consumer will die from its use, either from a liver failure or cancer, well, new ones will be born, the main thing is to pay the PR people properly.
When Tony delved into the affairs of modern industry, he was simply baffled. Locals had full-fledged cloning and genetic correction technology; they could make supersoldiers better than Rogers. And no one, no one thought to invest money in research on growing meat in test tubes, literally the dream of any farmer, although the technology allowed it. No, instead, we'll eat crickets and poison ourselves with extremely dubious chemistry, and the fact that a company that freed farmers from hooves, horns, bones, heads, and offal of livestock would literally capture the meat food market, becoming a global monopolist, we'll dismiss as too risky and generally dubious. If this wasn't proof of a broken modern system, Stark didn't know what could be more illustrative.
"Also, corps simply find it easier to work within an established system than to get approval for selling products from 'unverified sources'," added one of the Moxes who had come with Quinn. "You know, an established corruption network, mutual cover-up, sources of shadow finance, where no newcomers are simply allowed to the common trough," she continued, drawing more and more attention to herself. "What? Before joining the gang, I got a law degree. By the way, I graduated with honors," she added proudly. "True, without connections, they don't even take free lawyers now," she finished much more sadly.
"So, this thing is innovative and could interest corps?" Susanna asked again.
"Unlikely," Tony objected. "The production of elite alcohol varieties has long been established by them and generally doesn't require any cosmic costs; it's all about the advertising nonsense. We know that this bottle with a pretty picture falls into the elite category, so we pay, say, ten thousand for it, although its actual cost is twenty to forty bucks."
"Let's hope you're right." The head Mox decided. After all, she wasn't a fool and perfectly understood the simple ugly truth: a treasure could bring happiness only to someone who could master it; the weak... well, at best, it would simply be taken from them, at worst, taken from their still-warm corpse. "Is this all you wanted to show me?" She decided to change the subject.
"No," he shook his head. "I also took care of the delivery of goods. Just so that various greedy freaks don't reach out for our joint venture."
"Ours already?" Quinn asked just for form's sake.
"Are you against it?" Stark didn't take the bait.
"I'm not stupid, and I understand when fate throws me a valuable fruit," she objected.
"Then the question is settled," Tony simply waved it off, heading to the adjacent room where there was a descent downstairs.
And it was clearly new, as the metal gleamed with fresh polishing without a single spot of rust or scratch. Below were several charging stations, currently holding several strange rectangular structures in their embrace, resembling small one-and-a-half-meter-high trucks, but instead of a driver's cabin, they had cameras with a pair of light machine guns on the sides.
"And here's my second creation," Stark patted the side of one of the stations with his hand, producing a dull sound that demonstrated its strength and durability.
"Are these... robots?"
"Delivery drones," he grinned, pulled a remote from his jacket pocket, pressed something on it... and in the middle of the room, instead of the usual concrete floor, a crack formed, which began to slowly widen, opening a passage... into the sewer, judging by the smell.
The paradox was that the sewers of Night City were uninhabited; there weren't even rats there. And it was all because of the toxins and waste that many corporations dumped into the sewers, the sea, or buried in the ground, poisoning the groundwater. Meanwhile, even the municipality of the city itself paid attention to the sewers only once every ten years, and even then purely formally, sending inspectors to the central nodes while ignoring tunnels, secondary routes, and technical branches of industries. In other words, if there was anywhere to hide, it was in the sewers... the only problem was that without a gas mask, a chemical protection suit, and a good cylinder with air reserves, it was better not to go there. But soulless machines didn't care, especially when they had tracks instead of wheels, capable of grinding stone.
To be fair, such neglect of the administration for the lowly affairs of its own city was not only a result of incompetence, low professional suitability of many employees who had been sitting in their positions for decades due to corruption, and simple laziness, but also the merit of the creator of Night City, businessman Richard Night. Night City was one of the youngest cities and was built as a future utopia, which is why its creator didn't skimp on funds and advanced technologies, including the use of special powders in the city's foundation and its pipes, radically increasing the durability of the structure almost to infinity. Concrete and alloy, created under the inspiration of Roman concrete capable of self-repairing and strengthening over time, were reproduced purely scientifically in a more perfect form, which is why the city's infrastructure didn't need to be worried about... formally. In fact, the city's sewer project didn't even consider parameters that could withstand all the crap that corporations dumped into it, which is why it, although very slowly, was wearing out. Things were so bad there that even smugglers preferred any other route but the sewer. The only exception was the storm drains and tunnels close to them; things were more or less decent there, and after installing additional ventilation, you could arrange a club or casino, or even live there.
"So, you're suggesting delivering alcohol from here to our points?"
"Not just alcohol," Tony shook his head. "The main problem of gangs without their own land is logistics problems. You simply can't properly provide for your people and productions, centralize resources, and organize processes because for all this, you need to cross the territories of enemy groups. And if for small, irregular groups this is still acceptable and more or less safe, in the case of regular trips, an attack becomes exclusively a matter of time. With these little ones, we can fully supply all Mox enterprises, the main thing is to hold this district..."
"Which no one needs anyway, not even the Scavengers," Susanna Quinn nodded.
"Exactly. We're far from financial flows but close to corpo territory, the population is the lowest of the low, even the Scavengers disdain them, and retired veterans on the verge of cyberpsychosis—that is, not only unprofitable but also dangerous."
"Maelstrom often hangs out here," objected one of the Moxes, a former resident of this very district.
"We'll retrain them," Stark confidently countered, addressing not her but Susanna. "If you accept my offer, I'm ready to equip three squads of five people with top gear at cost, even at the price of the material, within two weeks, and we'll clear this district."
The leader of the Moxes didn't think long. The position of her gang was far from optimistic or even acceptable. The girls didn't realize it, but the Moxes had non-illusory chances of being crushed by the Claws or disbanded, and here was a fairly risky but extremely profitable venture, promising huge financial injections with high maneuverability throughout the city. The question wasn't even whether to agree or not; the question was on what terms to accept Stark into their ranks. Fortunately, the former military woman had thoughts on this.
"Welcome to the gang."