incorporated with DeepSeek
The Shadow Librarian Crew
The Sprawl was a cancer of concrete, steel, and neon, a malignant growth that had metastasized along the corpse of the old M1 motorway. From the rain-slicked, genetically-altered dockyards of Manchester to the chemical-shrouded financial spires of Frankfurt-Rhine, it was a single, breathing entity of sin and data. And in its rotten heart, in the forgotten administrative sector of Ils-de-France, stood the Library.
It wasn't a library in any traditional sense. It was a brutalist monolith from the pre-Crash era, a fortress of data. Its official designation was Sector Archive 7, but to Neo and his crew, it was home, fortress, and temple. Its servers, cooled by ancient geothermal vents, hummed a constant, soothing mantra against the chaotic buzz of the Sprawl.
Neo, a man in his late twenties with eyes that had seen too many hours of raw code, leaned back in his worn mesh chair. The name was an affectation, a tribute to a dead-era 2D flat-film hero his data-mining had uncovered. He found the concept charmingly archaic. On the cold, static-laced air of the host, his persona was a shimmering figure in a long, code-trailing coat, but in the meat-world, he was just a man with a datajack and a dream.
"Morrigan, status on the Cicero query?" he asked, his voice echoing slightly in the vast, cathedral-like main chamber of the Library. Towering server racks formed canyons, their blinking lights like constellations. Holo-projections of ancient, leather-bound spines floated in the air, masking the raw tech beneath a veneer of analog romance.
A woman with hair the colour of spun silver and eyes that held the chill of a deep glen stepped from the shadows. Morrigan, their hermetic mage. "The wards are holding, Neo. No astral incursions. The library's 'spirit' is... content." She gestured to the air around them. To her, the constant data-stream wasn't just noise; it was a living, breathing entity, a data-spirit of immense power and knowledge that they had nurtured and which, in turn, protected them.
From a gantry high above, a low growl rumbled. A hulking figure landed with a shockingly light impact on the carbon-fibre mesh floor. Kato, their street samurai. His cybereyes glowed a soft amber, and the servos in his arms whined faintly as he crossed them. "Just did a perimeter sweep. All quiet. Too quiet. Smells like ozone and ambition out there. Makes my teeth itch."
Their business was information. Not the cheap, real-time newsfeed stuff. Their commodity was context. Their AI, which they called the "Librarian," didn't just store data; it cross-referenced, extrapolated, and wrote. It could take a thousand years of economic data, a dead poet's sonnets, and the weather patterns of the North Atlantic and write a prophetic thesis on the next shift in the extraterritorial stock market. It could generate a perfect, historically-accurate romance novel set in the court of Louis XIV for a bored corporate prince, or a tactical breakdown of a rival corp's security weaknesses based on their public architectural filings and employee cafeteria purchase orders.
This was big money. And big money needed protection.
The alert was soft, a single chime in Neo's inner ear. Then the main holotank flared to life, bleeding crimson.
INTRUSION DETECTED. BLACK ICE. PROTOCOL: HADES.
"Frag," Neo hissed, his hands already flying across the haptic interface. "They're in the secondary data vaults. Targeting the Librarian's core personality matrix."
He slammed his neural jack home. The world dissolved into the icy fire of the Matrix.
The Library's host was a breathtaking simulation of the real thing, but infinite, with shelves stretching into a digital eternity. Now, it was under assault. The elegant, wood-panelled corridors were being overwritten with jagged, aggressive code—glitching, black geometries that screamed "military grade." Demonic-looking ice programs, shaped like razor-winged gargoyles and burning skeletons, were tearing through his defensive protocols.
Neo's persona materialized, his long coat flaring as he drew his "weapon"—a custom deck that presented as a glowing, rune-etched sword.
"Kato, Morrigan, they're in the system! This is a direct assault!"
In the real world, Kato was a blur of motion. He sprinted to a reinforced blast door, slamming his palm on a biometric lock. "On it! Sealing the core chamber." The massive door hissed shut, five inches of plasteel and ceramite. He drew his heavy-duty Ares Predator, the click of the safety going off unnaturally loud.
Morrigan closed her eyes, her body going rigid. On the astral plane, the Library was a beacon of calm, ordered energy. Now, a violent, oily smear was pulsing at its periphery—the astral signature of the deckers, or something worse. "They have a mage with them. A combat magician. His aura is... vile. He's trying to unweave my wards."
Neo danced through the digital hellscape. His sword cleaved through a gargoyle, which dissolved into screaming packets of corrupted data. But for every one he destroyed, two more took its place. This wasn't a smash-and-grab; this was a systematic, professional eradication.
"They're not here to steal a file," Neo grunted, his real-world body sweating. "They're here to zero the Librarian. This is a corporate hit. Probably MCT or Ares, wanting to eliminate the competition."
A new presence entered the host. It was a decker, his persona a sleek, chromed samurai, moving with an efficiency that was terrifying. He didn't speak. He just attacked. His katana, a manifestation of a top-tier attack program, met Neo's sword in a shower of sparks. The impact sent a feedback shock down Neo's spine.
//WARNING: BIOFEEDBACK DETECTED. NEURAL INTEGRITY AT 85%//
In the core chamber, the air grew cold. The lights flickered. Morrigan gasped, blood trickling from her nose as she fought an unseen battle. "He's breaking through! Kato, the eastern ward-stone!"
Kato didn't question. He moved to a specific server rack where a piece of carved obsidian, inscribed with Celtic knots, was pulsing erratically. He saw nothing, but he trusted Morrigan. He raised his gun.
"Don't shoot the hardware, you idiot!" Neo yelled from his trance, his voice strained.
Before Kato could decide, the eastern blast door groaned. Then, a section of it glowed white-hot and melted inward with a terrifying hiss. A figure stepped through the molten slag, clad in full combat armour, a spell shimmering around his fists.
The mage.
Kato opened fire. The Ares Predator roared, its heavy rounds sparking off the mage's armour and a shimmering barrier spell. The mage gestured, and a concussive wave of force threw Kato back against a server rack. Metal shrieked.
Neo was losing his fight. The samurai decker was too fast, too strong. His defenses were crumbling. The gargoyles were now swarming the core code of the Librarian, tearing at its foundational algorithms.
//WARNING: CORE PERSONALITY MATRIX CORRUPTION AT 40%//
//WARNING: BIOFEEDBACK DETECTED. NEURAL INTEGRITY AT 62%//
They were going to lose. Everything.
Then, an idea, insane and brilliant, flashed in Neo's mind. The Librarian didn't just store information; it created. It could write a story. It could write a ending.
With a mental command, he diverted all remaining processing power. He wasn't fighting the ice anymore; he was feeding it. He was feeding it a story.
To the samurai decker, the host suddenly changed. The infinite library vanished, replaced by a stark, black-and-white grid. Rain began to fall, not of water, but of streaming green code. Neo's persona changed, his coat settling, his weapon vanishing. He stood, waiting.
The samurai hesitated, confused by the paradigm shift.
And then the Librarian, using the logic of a thousand action films, every historical account of guerrilla warfare, and every text on psychological operations ever written, generated a new decker persona. It was a perfect, lethal simulation of a character that had never existed, built from the archetypes the invading decker's brain would recognize and fear. A digital ghost, a phantom of the code.
It attacked the samurai from behind, its movements a flawless, brutal ballet.
In the real world, the mage was advancing on Morrigan, his hands crackling with mana. Kato, dazed, was struggling to his feet. Suddenly, the mage screamed, clutching his head. The astral link to his decker teammate had just been violently severed, sending psychic backlash through him. Morrigan didn't waste the opening. She spoke a single, guttural word in Sperethiel, and the air around the mage solidified, trapping him in a cage of invisible force.
The assault was over.
Neo ripped the jack from his temple, gasping. Smoke curled from his deck. He looked at the main holotank. The corruption was receding, the Librarian's core integrity slowly climbing back to safe levels.
Silence descended, broken only by the hum of the servers and Kato's laboured breathing.
"They knew our weak points," Morrigan said, wiping blood from her lip. "This was a targeted strike. They weren't just random gangers."
Neo nodded, his body trembling with adrenaline and feedback. "They were sent by someone who knew the value of what we have. Someone who doesn't want us selling our stories to their competitors."
He walked over to a terminal and typed a command. The AI, its voice a calm, synthesized baritone, echoed through the chamber.
"Query: The attack vector utilized corporate-level military code, signature: Ares Macrotechnology 'Warmonger' suite, variant 7. The team composition suggests a deniable black-ops unit, 'Scarlet Zero'. Cross-referencing with recent procurement requests and social media leaks from Ares executives indicates a 94.7% probability the order originated from Director Thorne, head of their Market Prediction division. He recently lost a major contract to a bid informed by our research."
Neo smiled, a cold, hard expression. They had survived. They had protected their kingdom of data. But the war wasn't over. It had just begun.
"Okay, Librarian," Neo said, his voice steadying. "New priority. I want everything you have on Director Thorne. His finances, his habits, his secrets. It's time we wrote a new chapter. A short, brutal one. For his eyes only."
In the heart of the Sprawl, within a fortress of forgotten knowledge, the Decker, the Mage, and the Samurai began to plot their revenge. Their currency was truth, and their weapon was a story waiting to be told.
