The House of the Reapr welcomes Operative MadManMax to its ranks. Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
- Proverb
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The world inside the Charter Hill apartment was a sanctuary built on silence, but silence, Alejandro Reyes was learning, had a weight all its own.
Night City never slept. It merely shifted its weight from one bloody transaction to the next, trading the corporate hum of the day for the neon-drenched gunfire of the night. Because the city outside their synth-glass windows was always awake, Alejandro had to find his isolation internally. For the first five years of Santiago's life, the wall safe in his home office had been a tomb that held a ticking time bomb. Now, it was a door that he cracked open only when his family slept.
Alejandro went through a slow, methodical descent that was born of a father's desperate need to understand the beast his son would one day have to face. He had built the air-gapped terminal with the paranoia of a person suffering from schizophrenia, refusing to use off-the-shelf corporate hardware and opting to personally scavenge the components himself, buying them from black-market fixers in Kabuki, and swapping untraceable credsticks for decommissioned Militech server racks that were slated for the incinerator.
The machine sat heavily on a reinforced desk in his locked office. It was completely isolated from the CitiNet with no wireless receivers, without the capability to broadcast anything, and with a physical kill-switch wired directly to a localized EMP charge beneath the floorboards. He had integrated it just in case of the off-chance that NetWatch or some internal Militech counter-intel ever kicked the door down. All he would have to do was activate it, and it would turn the terminal and the data shard into a puddle of useless slag in a fraction of a second.
The first time he slotted the black shard into the terminal, he had kept his hand hovering over the EMP trigger, his heart hammering against his ribs. He expected the entity to reach out. He expected the screens to bleed into fragmented red vertical code that was ever changing.
But it didn't.
The data itself was dormant, being exactly what he had stolen: telemetry. It was a recording, a localized snapshot of the Old Net's topography in the exact microsecond the entity had looked through the Blackwall.
But as Alejandro began to parse the fragmented, heavily corrupted code over the course of 2058, he realized the entity hadn't just looked at them when it pressed against the membrane of the Blackwall. Its immense gravitational pull had dragged pieces of the Old Net with it. The shard wasn't just a recording of a monster, but also a microscopic net capturing the digital shitshow caught in the monster's wake.
And that shitshow was pure gold.
While Alejandro spent his nights carefully sifting through the digital ashes of the DataKrash, he spent his days leveraging his high-level clearance at Militech to accelerate his son's growth. Santi's mastery of the keyboard was progressing at a terrifying rate. The boy had progressed to the point that his fingers flew across the keys, his typing speed matching the rapid-fire compilation of his organic mind. But a prodigy needed proper tools, and the commercial software available on the CitiNet was too simplistic and far too restrictive for what Alejandro was planning to teach the boy. Not only that, it would be limiting Santi's own growth potential.
Alejandro began to quietly siphon resources from Militech's internal training divisions. He made sure to steer clear of any classified weapon schematics, looking only into stealing methodology. He acquired restricted cognitive development algorithms designed for Militech's elite netrunner cadets and pulled strings with a quartermaster in the Watson sector to secure a grey-market, military-grade logic compiler, stripping its tracking tags before integrating it into Santi's closed-loop cyberdeck.
With the new compiler, the flat, blue holographic text of Santi's early coding days vanished, replaced by a fully immersive, three-dimensional digital sandbox. By doing this, Alejandro created a place that allowed for Santi's true developmental explosion to occur.
As he approached the age of six, Santi had evolved from simple commands to building ecosystems. Alejandro introduced him to the concept of polymorphic code, programs designed to constantly change their own underlying shape and signature while maintaining their original function. To properly introduce Santi into all of this, Alejandro created a digital game of cat and mouse.
"Okay, mijo. I have built a little Hunter program for you," Alejandro explained one afternoon, bringing up a glowing red, jagged geometric shape on the holo-table. "Its only job is to scan this network, find your code, and delete it. Your job is to build a Mouse. If your Mouse stays the same shape for more than three seconds, the Hunter will recognize its signature and kill it."
Santi's violet eyes narrowed in intense concentration, and although he wanted to, he didn't complain that it was unfair. He immediately went to work, trapping himself in a loop of having his programs slaughtered by the Hunter for the first two days. Santi would write a beautiful, elegant string of stealth code, something far more advanced than anything any child his age should be capable of. However, the moment it executed its function, the Hunter would catch the residual data trail and flatline it.
"Pa, I don't understand how it keeps on finding me," Santi said, his small hands resting on the keyboard, looking at the glowing red Failure prompt. "I even changed the encryption and made the Mouse look like background static, but it still found me."
"Let's see," Alejandro said, leaning against the table and examining Santi's code. "I see the problem. Your code indicates that you're thinking like a machine, Santi. You're thinking about perfection, and background static isn't perfect. It's chaotic and messy. But your code is far too clean, which means that the Hunter isn't finding your Mouse. It's finding the perfectly clean and empty space your Mouse is leaving behind. You have to learn to leave garbage data in your wake to hide your footprints."
Santi blinked, his mind absorbing the counterintuitive logic. To hide, you must create a mess. He spent the next twelve hours rewriting the Mouse's core architecture, not only making it change shape, but also programming it to actively shed useless lines of junk code that would be redundant every time it moved. In doing this, Santi allowed his mouse to perfectly mimic the natural degradation of a failing sub-processor.
When Alejandro executed the Hunter program the next morning, it roamed the simulated network for three hours, scanning, hunting, and in the end, finding absolutely nothing other than the simulated hum of a slightly inefficient system. Santi had designed a Mouse with the ability to survive indefinitely, and in doing so, he hadn't just beaten a Militech-grade search algorithm, but he had also learned the fundamental art of digital camouflage and covering one's footsteps before he was even six years old.
As Santi moved past his sixth birthday, his vocabulary underwent a radical transformation. Through the attempts to replicate the way his father spoke, his childish simplifications of "the blue light" or "the angry beep" vanished, replaced by more precise terminologies. But it wasn't just the repeating of words he knew no meaning of, since his curiosity wouldn't allow him to just absorb without understanding. His natural reaction of asking "why" until he actually understood led him to learn when and where to use their etymology, their application, and the weight of these words.
Yet, despite the precision of his intellect, he never lost the warmth that tethered him to his parents, maintaining his boyish innocence and the love he had for his parents.
One evening, when he was six and a half, Julia came home from a rare outing in the corporate plaza to find the apartment's primary air scrubber completely dismantled on the living room floor. Santi was sitting cross-legged in the center of the mechanical autopsy, his small hands covered in synthetic grease.
"Santiago," Julia sighed, dropping her bags. "What happened to the scrubber?"
Santi looked up, his violet eyes bright with accomplishment. He wiped a grease-smudged hand on his trousers, ruining them, and scrambled up to give her a tight hug around the waist. "Hi, Ma! I didn't break it, I promise. I was optimizing it."
Julia kissed the top of his white hair, careful to avoid the grease. "Optimizing it how, papacito?"
"The intake manifold's variable torque was misaligned with the primary impeller's rotation speed," Santi explained, his tone completely earnest, using the exact phrasing of an HVAC engineer. "It was creating a micro-cavitation effect in the airflow. It dropped our filtration efficiency by two point four percent. The HEPA saturation limits were compensating, but it was drawing unnecessary voltage from the localized grid."
Julia blinked. "And you fixed the cavitation?"
"I recalibrated the rotor's magnetic bearings to eliminate the wobble," Santi beamed, pulling back to look at her. "It runs quieter now, Ma. And it uses less power. Can we make tacos for dinner? I want to practice measuring the spice ratios."
"Of course, papi," Julia laughed, her heart swelling. Her child was definitely an odd one out, and it worried her for the date when he entered formal corporate schooling. His intellect was something that would most likely make him stand out amongst his peers, and if he could re-engineer a corporate air scrubber at just six years old, then just what would he be capable of achieving in the future?
Alejandro noticed the shift in how Santi discussed the digital world as well. A few months later, as Santi approached his seventh birthday, they were sitting at the dining table, the cyberdeck humming between them.
"Pa, I've been reviewing the structural logs of the CitiNet's asynchronous data fetching protocols," Santi said casually, swinging his legs under the chair.
Alejandro paused, setting down his datapad. "Asynchronous data fetching? Where did you pull that term from, Santi?"
"From the corporate networking manuals Dr. Aris unlocked for me," Santi replied, tilting his head. "It's the proper term. It's highly inefficient, Pa. When a user requests a data packet from a secondary node, the primary node holds the connection open, creating a synchronous bottleneck. If they utilized a polymorphic daemon to handle the request independently, the primary node could close the loop and save processing power."
Alejandro stared at him. The boy wasn't just parroting terms he had seen, but actually identifying systemic flaws in Night City's multi-billion-eddy infrastructure.
"You're right," Alejandro said softly. "But they built it that way for surveillance. An open, synchronous connection makes it easier for NetWatch to trace."
Santi's brow furrowed, processing the reason behind the code. "So they intentionally cripple their own architecture just to watch people?"
"Yes," Alejandro nodded.
"But that just doesn't make sense," Santi concluded, his tone laced with a profound, innocent disappointment. He leaned over and rested his head against Alejandro's arm. "I'm glad you teach me the real way to build things, Pa."
Alejandro wrapped an arm around the boy, pulling him close. "Of course. I'll always teach you the real way, mi niño."
But Alejandro knew that teaching Santi to hide wasn't going to be enough. Hell, it was far from it. In the real Net, you will eventually run into gates and walls that don't just stand there, but actively fight back.
So, after a few months of coding, Alejandro introduced him to a simulated slice of Black ICE. Specifically, a variant known as a "Hound."
"The ICE is a defender, Santi, but it's also an offensive player," Alejandro explained, standing over his son's shoulder as a menacing, undulating mass of black and purple code materialized on the deck. "It doesn't just look for passwords. It looks for biological rhythms, tracking your keystrokes, the micro-pauses between your inputs, and the speed of your execution. It's something that identifies you as an intruder, not by what you say, but by how you say it. To beat it, you have to learn to mask your rhythm, and to do that, you have to learn to type like you belong there."
Santi's natural typing speed was perfectly optimized, every keystroke timed by his brain. He initiated the breach, his fingers flying across the deck in a blur of motion, executing a flawless decryption algorithm.
Ping.
Connection Severed.
Neural Shock Warning.
The deck flashed a blinding white, simulating the feedback loop that would have fried Santi's synapses in the real world. Santi hissed, pulling his hands back as if the plastic keys had actually burned him.
"What did I do wrong? My algorithm was right!" Santi protested, his pale brows knitting together. "Everything I did was perfect, Pa! It should have opened!"
"You're right. You did everything how you should have done it, but what gave you away was your rhythm," Alejandro corrected gently. "Authorized corporate users don't type perfectly since a lot of them are either tired or bored, which means that they hesitate, making minor corrections as they go. The Hound felt your speed and knew immediately you weren't an authorized meat-suit sitting in a cubicle because you were acting too smoothly."
Santi stared at his hands, a deep frustration brewing in his violet eyes. "Wait... You want me to be... worse?"
"Not exactly worse. I'm trying to teach you to be a chameleon," Alejandro said. "You have to inject human error into your execution to fool the biometric trackers and un-optimize your physical movements to optimize your stealth."
It was the hardest lesson Santi had ever learned. His brain screamed at him to go fast and execute the commands with brutal efficiency, something he had spent two years perfecting. Forcing his hands to pause, intentionally stuttering a keystroke, and simulating the hesitant peck of an exhausted data clerk felt like physical torture to the boy. It went against everything his prodigy mind stood for.
He spent weeks fighting the Hound program. His small face would scrunch up in agonizing concentration because he was fighting his own muscle memory. He had to calculate exactly when to fake a mistake to make it look organic.
Instead of being happy when he finally cracked it, slipping past the Hound's biometric scanners by artificially lowering his words per minute and inserting a perfectly timed, simulated "cough" into his keystroke rhythm, he found himself slumped back in his chair, completely exhausted.
"I beat it, Pa," Santi whispered, rubbing his temples. "But I hate it. It's so backwards. The meatspace makes everything so slow and stupid."
Alejandro felt a chill run down his spine at the boy's words, but he nodded. "Yeah... I guess you can say that the meatspace is a liability, Santi, but until you have a Neural Link, you have to know how to manipulate it by hand. It becomes easier once you start getting the necessary Neuralware."
Santi nodded, though the frustration lingered in his posture. Over the next six months, his communication skills evolved even further, and he began to categorize human behavior through the lens of algorithmic predictability, but applied it with pure empathy. If Julia were stressed about the monthly budget, Santi would offer a hug while simultaneously presenting a full spreadsheet demonstrating how reallocating their grocery expenditures could increase the amount of money they had left.
"I noticed a recurrent variable in your stress levels at the end of the month, Ma," he had told her one evening, wrapping his arms around her waist. "So I wrote a heuristic script to balance the ledger so that you don't have to worry about the eddies anymore."
Julia had burst into tears, caught off guard by the overwhelming wave of love disguised as a financial audit. She held him tightly, whispering, "Thank you, my little genius. Thank you."
He was learning to bridge the gap between his terrifying intellect and his deeply ingrained humanity. He understood that data without application was useless, and for Santi, the highest application of his genius was making sure his parents were safe and happy.
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I need rocks!
The infamous P@treon exists for those of you who want to read ahead.
patreon .com/Crimson_Reapr (Don't be a gonk, remove the space)
They get around 3 long-form weekly chapters (4.5-6k words each).