AN: I was going to wait until I wrote more, but I couldn't help myself from at least publishing the first chapter!
---
Unlike how everyone had expected, the world did not end in a sudden, merciful flash of white light, nor did it end in the roaring fires of a final, glorious battle. It ended with a nuclear explosion on the 120th floor of the Arasaka Headquarters in the Corporate Plaza on August 20th, 2023. What followed was two decades of a sky the color of a scab.
The Fourth Corporate War tore the globe apart, but Night City was its grandest, most tragic casualty. When the pocket nuke detonated, it vaporized millions of tons of concrete, steel, and human flesh, but more importantly, it flatlined the illusion of control. For over twenty years, the Time of the Red choked the city. The atmosphere was an ever-present bruised crimson, stained by particulate matter, radioactive dust, and the ashes of the old world.
There's a saying that goes, "If you can make God bleed, then people will cease to believe in Him." And for the mega-corporations, the untouchable gods of the 2020s, they suddenly found themselves being quite mortal. Arasaka was banished, its reputation irradiated alongside the cratered city center. Militech, chained to the leash of the New United States of America, retreated to lick its wounds and count its remaining bullets.
But corporations are not human. If anything, they are algorithms of greed clothed in legal personhood. They adapt, they mutate, and they always return to the biz.
By the time the late 2040s bled into the 2050s, the rebuilding was well underway. It was not a renaissance born of hope, but a frantic land grab orchestrated by the C-suite. The corporate vultures didn't see an irradiated wasteland, but rather a hostile takeover of reality itself. A total market correction. The Red wasn't a tragedy to them. It was an opportunity. It was a blank ledger waiting for fresh ink. Concrete poured in oceans, filling the craters of the past. Steel skeletons pierced the thinning red smog, scraping against a sky that was finally beginning to remember the color blue.
The aesthetic of Night City shifted from the sleek, glass-paned arrogance of the old days to something brutalist, heavy, and heavily fortified. Everyone was building bunkers pretending to be skyscrapers. The corporate grip was tightening, squeezing the life out of the street-level gonks below to fuel the neon-lit penthouses above.
They were preparing for the next war, even as they smiled and pushed proactive synergy and peace treaties on global broadcasts. Down in the gutters of Heywood and Santo Domingo, the street kids breathed filtered air and dodged corporate hit squads, while up in Westbrook, the suits drank synthesized champagne and watched the city burn in controlled, profitable increments.
While the physical meatspace was being stitched back together with rebar and reinforced synth-glass, the digital world remained a festering, haunted graveyard.
Decades earlier, a rogue genius that went by the name Rache Bartmoss had unleashed the DataKrash, effectively turning the Old Net into a digital slaughterhouse. Millions of feral, self-evolving AIs, god-like in their processing power and infinitely hostile to their meat-based creators, roamed the deep architecture. They turned basic subroutines into meat-grinders, frying the synapses of any netrunner foolish enough to jack in. Humanity had been entirely locked out of its own greatest creation. The digital frontier was closed, overrun by apex predators composed of corrupted code.
Then came NetWatch. In the mid-2040s, they achieved what the greatest minds in the corporate world deemed impossible. They built the Blackwall.
Officially, the Blackwall was a masterwork of human ingenuity, a piece of "Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics," but only a major gonk would call it that. The Blackwall's ICE, as everyone called it, was so dense, so mathematically perfect, that it quarantined the Old Net entirely. It allowed humanity to build secure, localized CitiNets, free from the digital demons of the past.
The PR spin was preem. Across Night City, massive holographic billboards flickered to life, bathing the rain-slicked streets in comforting blue light, assuring the masses that the worst was over. The Net was safe again. You could jack in, check your eurodollars, scroll braindances, and communicate without the fear of having your brain flatlined by a rogue defense program from the 2020s.
The people, exhausted by decades of fear, breathed a collective sigh of relief. They bought the lie because they desperately needed to.
But the people in the shadows, the elite netrunners, the corporate espionage directors, the bleeding-edge techies, well, they all knew the terrifying truth. The Blackwall wasn't a wall at all. It was barely even a membrane. A thin, vibrating skin stretched over a bottomless ocean of digital predators. And NetWatch wasn't controlling it at all. Shit, they were barely surviving it.
In hidden server farms and encrypted outposts, NetWatch operatives lived on synth-caf, amphetamines, and sheer terror, watching localized breaches and patching them before the public ever saw the sparks. To the vast majority of people, the Blackwall was stable, yes, but it was a stability born of a constant, desperate, and utterly silent war waged by a bunch of sleep-deprived gonks who thought they could control whatever lay on the other side.
Peace, however, is notoriously unprofitable, and by the early-2050s, the old hunger returned to the corporate boardrooms. The Old Net was a treasure trove of lost data containing centuries of R&D, black-budget military tech, predictive algorithms, and trillions of eddies frozen in dead accounts. The corporations wanted it back, and Militech, always preferring the blunt force of a sledgehammer to the precision of a scalpel, decided they were going to be the first to secure the ultimate asset.
They launched Project BLACKGLASS.
Operated out of a heavily classified, subterranean black-site deep beneath the newly erected Militech tower in Charter Hill, BLACKGLASS was the ultimate expression of corporate hubris. The execs didn't want to break the Blackwall, after all, they weren't completely suicidal. Instead, they wanted to slip a wire under the door.
The project was designed to send a series of controlled, highly encrypted signal pulses through the barrier. It was digital sonar, a way to ping the immediate topography of the abyss, looking for salvageable data structures that hadn't yet been corrupted or consumed by Bartmoss's rabid AIs.
The man tasked with turning this suicidal theory into tactical reality was named Alejandro Reyes.
Alejandro was a terrifyingly rare breed in the corpo ecosystem. He was a high-level Militech netrunner who also possessed the real-world lethality of a solo. He understood the esoteric poetry of code, but he also understood the brutal, unforgiving geometry of a bullet in a dark alley.
He was pragmatic, cold, and entirely loyal to the immense paycheck that kept his pregnant wife, Julia, living in a pristine, air-filtered, hyper-secure apartment high above the rot of the streets. Alejandro didn't ask questions about the morality of his work. Morality didn't pay for the premium Trauma Team Executive coverage Julia would need for the delivery.
For six agonizing months, the BLACKGLASS team sat in the freezing, super-cooled sub-basement and knocked on the devil's door. It was tedious, nerve-shredding work. Six operators lay suspended in state-of-the-art deep-dive chairs, their bodies submerged in viscous, temperature-regulated coolant, while thick, fiber-optic hardlines jacked directly into the neural ports at the base of their skulls. Alejandro paced the observation deck, monitoring their vitals, while the massive, monolithic servers emitted a constant, bone-rattling hum. They sent out micro-bursts of code, intricate digital flares designed to slip through the Blackwall's ICE and illuminate a fraction of the Old Net before returning.
Most of the time, they got absolutely nothing. Just the deafening, static roar of the Blackwall's native defenses, a sound so chaotic that it was akin to a billion voices screaming in a hurricane.
Until the second week of November, 2052.
The pulse went out, a standard frequency that was heavily encrypted and designed to bounce off the nearest corrupted data node and slingshot back to the Militech servers.
However, it didn't bounce this time. Instead, it was caught.
Alejandro was staring at the primary holotable, watching the visualization of the data pulse, when the ambient temperature in the room plummeted so fast his breath plumed in the air. The massive server racks lining the walls began to whine, letting out a high-pitched mechanical shriek of overloaded processors that set his teeth on edge. On the holotable, the glowing blue line of their signal pulse didn't dissipate into static. It stopped. And then, slowly, horrifyingly so, the data began to coalesce.
Something on the other side of the Blackwall had caught the signal, and it was sending something back down the line.
Whatever it was, it wasn't a virus. It wasn't a brute-force attack from a feral AI looking to fry their hardware and burn out their nervous systems. It was structured. An act that was rather deliberate by something intelligent.
"Sir," a voice whispered over the internal comms. It was the lead operator, a young kid named Vance, who was barely a year out of the corporate academy. Even through the distorted audio of the dive chair, Alejandro could hear the wet, heavy sound of the boy swallowing. "Sir... It's looking at me."
The response from beyond the wall didn't attack the physical servers. It bypassed them completely, flowing like a digital quicksilver straight into the neural architecture of the six operators. However, the thing didn't want to destroy them. No. It wanted to dissect them. It spoke to them in a language of raw, unfiltered data that sent a torrential downpour of information that the human brain was simply never evolved to process.
Vance was the first to break. His physical body convulsed violently beneath the surface of the coolant, sending thick, black, and oxygen-starved blood rupturing from his tear ducts, spilling down his cheeks, and staining the sterile white collar of his diving suit. His cyberoptics flared a blinding, unnatural crimson, the color of the old sky, before the lenses cracked and shattered in their sockets under the immense internal pressure.
Alejandro's instincts screamed at him to act. The emergency abort switch was five feet away. A single punch to the physical kill-switch would sever the hardlines, dumping the coolant and ripping the operators out of the net. He took a step forward, his hand raising to strike the panel.
But he stopped.
Because Alejandro wasn't just a project manager. He was a survivor in a city that ground up the weak. Months ago, anticipating that the C-suite would eventually hang him out to dry if BLACKGLASS went south, he had installed a ghost-port on the primary terminal. Slotted into that port was a black-market, military-grade data chip. It was passively skimming every single byte of telemetry, every scrap of code, every raw data packet that flowed through the servers. It was his insurance policy. His golden parachute.
He looked at the holotable. The data flowing back from the entity beyond the wall was staggering. It was the holy grail of netrunning. If he severed the connection now, the power surge would wipe the servers and fry his hidden chip. He would lose the pure telemetry, and with it, he would lose his leverage over Militech.
Down in the dive chairs, the screaming started. It was the wet, tearing noise of vocal cords shredding as the operators' nervous systems overloaded.
Alejandro hesitated.
His solo instincts fought a brutal war with his corpo-rat greed, and in the end, the city won. He didn't lunge for the kill switch. He lunged for the primary terminal. His fingers flew across the sparking keyboard, fighting through the entity's rapidly encroaching ICE to safely eject his hidden shard.
The delay on his part was fatal. It was the longest, most expensive ten seconds of his life.
By the time the terminal clicked and the heavy, black data chip popped into his palm, the screaming in the dive chairs had stopped.
Alejandro shoved the chip deep into the reinforced pocket of his jacket, drew his Militech Lexington, and emptied the pistol into the primary junction box. Sparks showered the room in a blinding cascade. The heavy fiber-optic cables were severed and started whipping through the air like dying snakes.
The connection was immediately cut and eventually died, sending the room into a rushing silence that was heavier, and somehow worse than the screams had been. Five of the operators were instantly dead, their brains effectively liquefied by the prolonged exposure to the entity's code.
Alejandro had traded their lives for a piece of black plastic. Vance was technically still alive, his chest rising and falling in shallow, ragged gasps, but his mind was utterly blanked. His ruined eyes stared blindly at the ceiling, and his mouth hung open, emitting a low, looping, static hum that sounded exactly like the idle noise of the server racks.
They had tapped on the glass of the abyss, and the abyss had smiled back. All the while, Alejandro had stood by and recorded it, letting his team burn in the process.
Militech reacted exactly the way a mega-corporation always reacts to a catastrophic asset failure: they panicked, and then they buried the evidence beneath a mountain of fresh corpses.
Within an hour of the incident, the BLACKGLASS project was permanently scrubbed. The sub-basement was flooded with internal black ops teams, the physical servers were ripped from the walls and incinerated, and the official digital logs were fragmented and locked in the deepest vaults of the corporate archive.
But the suits sitting in their ivory towers in Corporate Plaza knew that data wasn't the real liability. The true liability walked on two legs. NetWatch could never, under any circumstances, discover that Militech had actively provoked an entity beyond the wall. The NUSA government, already looking for excuses to sanction the corporation, would use the incident to tear them apart.
The order came down from the C-suite, delivered to Alejandro by a faceless corporate liaison on a single, untraceable data shard.
Asset reallocation.
He had to do the fucking wetwork.
Alejandro was the highest-ranking survivor of the project, the only one with the operational skills to clean up a mess of this magnitude without leaving a trail. The liaison had simply reminded Alejandro of his generous compensation package, his beautiful apartment in Charter Hill, and the impending arrival of his first child. In Night City, choices are just illusions of leverage. Alejandro could either zero his own surviving support staff, or he and Julia would be classified as acceptable collateral damage.
He didn't have to think about it twice. In exactly one week, the purge had already been enacted. It was a week bathed in neon, synth oil, and blood.
Alejandro moved like a ghost through the torrential, acid-tinged rain of the city. He visited the homes of the mid-level techies, the data analysts who had compiled the reports, the security gonks who had merely stood outside the door of the sub-basement. He used suppressed, sub-sonic weaponry. He used untraceable, fast-acting neuro-toxins slipped into synth-caf cups. He staged elaborate, brutal cyberpsycho attacks in the dark alleys of Watson and the industrial zones of Arroyo to cover his tracks.
He looked his own chooms in the eyes before he pulled the trigger. He watched the realization settle in them, the looks of betrayal, and finally, the emptiness wash over them as they flatlined.
He didn't do it out of a misplaced sense of corporate loyalty since Militech meant nothing to him. He did it because every time he closed his eyes and tried to block out the begging, he saw Julia's swelling belly. He saw the nursery they had painstakingly painted in the Charter Hill apartment, the soft, synthetic fabrics they had imported for the crib. He did it because he was a father first, and a corpo-rat assassin second. He had already ruined a life and let five people die for a piece of data. What was a dozen more to ensure his child could breathe clean air?
On the final night of the purge, Alejandro stood on a rusted fire escape in the pouring rain of Kabuki, watching the body of his lead data analyst disappear into the muddy waters of the canal below. The rain washed the blood off his synthetic dermal plating, but it couldn't wash the cold weight from his chest. He was hollowed out, a ghost occupying his own chrome.
He pulled the data chip from his pocket. The one he had let his team die for. The pure, unadulterated telemetry of the entity.
Before he wiped his custom cyberdeck clean, destroying the last piece of hardware connected to the project, he did something incredibly foolish. He keyed the encryption algorithm of the chip not to a password, but to biology. He locked the apocalyptic data behind the unique, developing biometric and neural signature of his unborn child. It was a lock that would naturally, slowly decrypt as the boy's brain matured and his neural pathways fully formed, though he could still override this encryption.
To the C-suite execs, the chip was a death sentence. To Alejandro, it was his magnum opus, his golden parachute, and his ultimate sin all wrapped into one. He had paid for it with the souls of his operators, and now, he was passing that unbearable weight onto his son.
The week of wetwork and shadows ended in a Platinum-tier birthing suite at the Night City Medical Center in Westbrook, a room that cost more eddies per hour than most SINless in Heywood saw in a lifetime.
Alejandro stood by the edge of the bed, his hands scrubbed raw with harsh, abrasive industrial sanitizers. Yet, beneath the stinging chemical scent, he could still smell the phantom iron tang of the week's blood clinging to the seams of his cybernetics.
The suite was blindingly white, its atmosphere sterile, and the air cold. The air was continuously scrubbed through a dozen micro-filters, removing the smog, the grit, and the scent of the city outside. An automated auto-doc hovered above the bed like a chrome mantis, its multi-jointed arms whirring with quiet precision as it monitored vitals and dispensed pain-blockers with mathematical exactness.
Julia lay back against the contoured, temperature-regulated pillows, exhausted. Her dark hair was plastered to her forehead with sweat, a stark contrast to the pale, synthetic sheets. Her bio-monitor pulsed a steady, reassuring green on the display screen next to her head. Despite the clinical, almost alien perfection of the medical tech surrounding her, her eyes were entirely human. They were bright, fierce, and full of a profound, unconditional love that defied the cold, hyper-capitalist reality sprawling outside the reinforced windows.
The sharp, demanding sound of a baby crying suddenly shattered the quiet, synthetic hum of the medical machinery.
It was a jarring, primal noise. A healthy sound. It was a demand to exist, a defiant shout into a world designed from the ground up to grind people into dust for profit. The cry seemed to vibrate against Alejandro's reinforced ribs, slipping past all his mental ICE and striking something soft and buried.
The auto-doc's manipulator arms moved with gentle, fluid grace, cleaning the child with synthesized warm water and swaddling him in pristine, corporate-stamped thermal blankets. A human nurse in a crisp white uniform stepped forward, taking the bundle from the machine and gently passing him into Julia's waiting arms.
Julia let out a radiant, exhausted smile, stripping away the heavy veneer of their corporate lifestyle. She traced the tiny lines of the baby's face with a trembling finger, marveling at the sheer, miraculous frailty of him. He was entirely meat, completely un-chromed, utterly helpless in a city of wolves.
"Look at him, Ale," she whispered, her voice thick with emotion, the exhaustion melting away into pure awe. "Our son is perfect."
Alejandro looked down at the child. For a fleeting, miraculous second, the cold, heavy iron in his chest, the crushing guilt of Vance's blank stare, the sickening splash of a body in a Kabuki canal, the horrifying cost of the data chip currently resting in his coat pocket, it all vanished. He reached out with a scarred, cybernetic hand, the servos whining softly as he moved with infinite care. He let the infant's tiny, warm fingers wrap tightly around his cold, synthetic thumb.
Metal and flesh.
Death and life.
The sins of the father gripped tight by the innocence of the son.
In that singular moment, the Blackwall, the C-suite execs at Militech, the relentless, grinding machinery of Night City, it all ceased to matter. He had carved out a tiny, fragile piece of heaven in the middle of hell, paid for in blood and silence. He swore to whatever God was left that he would burn the world down to keep it safe.
"Santiago," Alejandro said quietly, speaking the name they had chosen months ago into the sterile, scrubbed air of the room. "Your name will be Santiago Reyes."
---
Shower me with your stones and join me on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/cw/Crimson_Reapr for more advanced chapters.
As of posting this chapter, my Patreon only has up to Chapter 5 available, as well as advanced chapters to my Original Novel "To Conquer The Stars" for you Sci-fi Mother Lovers.