Santi opened his eyes in the physical world and noticed how his vision was entirely overlaid with the augmented reality of the Net. His violet eyes glowed with a faint inner light.
"It is big, Pa," Santi whispered, his voice holding a tone of genuine wonder. "I can see.... everything.... The complexity of the public subnets is.... it is staggering."
"Make sure you keep yourself to the public sectors only, Santi," Alejandro cautioned, his hands hovering near the deck's kill-switch. "For the time being, you will only observe and get a feel for the environment."
Santi obeyed his father's words, quickly becoming an explorer. He wandered the vast, neon-lit digital plazas of the Net. He drifted through the public forums and the massive data-bazaars where millions of citizens screamed into the void simultaneously.
He observed the Net with the cold detachment he had always applied to his code. He analyzed the traffic patterns of the Westbrook grid, noting the inefficiencies in the automated transit algorithms. He mapped the public-facing security architecture of the network, viewing the city as a flawed equation while categorizing the people within it as predictable variables.
He observed the digital shadows of gang activity, watching encrypted data packets bouncing between Tyger Claw laundering fronts in Kabuki. He also got a view at the aggressive digital signatures of Maelstrom gangoons moving stolen chrome through the industrial sectors. He simply categorized their operations based on data flow and bandwidth consumption.
For the first time in his life, Santi felt... free. He was a ghost drifting through the machine, looking down on the meatspace with cold superiority.
And like that, months went by, and Santi became accustomed to the Net.
Halfway through 2062, Santi found himself casually surfing the unencrypted data streams of the badlands outside Night City when he stumbled across a localized spike in comm-traffic. The data that caught his attention was panicked and raw.
Santi bypassed a weak firewall and tapped into the stream.
What he found was a tragedy.
The data packets were fragmented, frantically uploaded from cheap personal optics and low-tier Agents. They belonged to the residents of a small, unincorporated settlement in the desert badlands, nestled in a valley miles outside the city limits.
Santi compiled the fragmented videos, rendering them in his own cyberspace.
The footage was shaky and carried none of the polished propaganda of the corpo news networks. It was real. It was raw. It showed reality.
He saw heavy corpo transports rolling into the dusty settlement. He saw men and women standing in the dirt streets, shouting at the heavily armed soldiers.
He pulled the audio files, translating the panic and piecing the narrative together.
A megacorporation named NC Dam Ltd had completed a brutalist concrete dam further up the valley. Santi pulled the public architectural filings for the project, noticing that the schematics revealed massive concrete spillways and deeply anchored retaining walls designed to completely submerge the valley below.
The corporate charter dictated that the settlement was now located in the designated flood zone, and the residents were given twenty-four hours to evacuate. They were ordered to leave behind their homes and generations of accumulated lives, permitted to take only minimal personal belongings.
Santi watched the data with analytical detachment. The corporation's actions were highly efficient from a purely logical standpoint. The dam would provide a reliable power source for the growing urban sprawl, so the displacement of a few hundred low-income residents was a statistically negligible variable in the grand equation of Night City's energy infrastructure. In Santi's eyes, it was simply an optimized move to generate more scratch.
He compiled the next video file.
The stream originated from the perspective of a young boy, perhaps a year or two older than Santi himself. The camera was shaking violently, the audio distorted by the sound of screams and the impacts of stun-batons.
Santi watched, paralyzed in the digital stream, as a squad of heavily armored corpo-cops advanced on a group of residents who had linked arms. They were refusing to abandon their residences because some damn corpos had decided they needed their land.
But the police didn't care.
Santi watched a riot officer swing an electrified baton, striking an elderly man in the jaw. The man crumpled to the dirt, blood pooling on the dry earth. He watched a woman being dragged screaming from her home by her hair, her meager belongings tossed carelessly into the ground. He heard the terrified, ragged sobbing of the boy holding the recording Agent as the armored boots marched closer.
Santi's mind short-circuited as he watched.
The calculating math of optimization and efficiency suddenly felt entirely inadequate. He couldn't categorize the screams. He couldn't build a heuristic loop to explain the terror of the boy recording the assault. He couldn't optimize the blood in the dirt.
For the first time since he had started surfing the Net, Santi's clinical detachment was shattered. He saw people, fear, and a profound injustice executed with the very same efficiency he had always admired.
He violently severed the connection, gasping as he tore the personal link cable from his interface socket. He slumped forward over the desk, his small chest heaving and his violet eyes wide and panicked in the dim light of the home office.
"Santi!" Alejandro was there instantly, his hands gripping the boy's shoulders. "What happened? Did you hit ICE? Did NetWatch ping you?"
"No," Santi whispered, his voice trembling. He lacked all of his usual, perfectly articulated precision. "No ICE. Just... just the badlands, Pa."
He looked up at his father, his eyes shining with unshed tears. He was a nine-year-old boy who had just watched the world brutally assault innocent people for the first time.
"Why did they hit them?" Santi asked, his voice cracking. "They didn't do anything wrong. They just wanted to stay in their homes. It doesn't make any logical sense."
Alejandro stared at his son, the panic slowly bleeding out of him, replaced by a heavy realization. He had spent years preparing the boy to hide and fight rogue code, to fight digital monsters. But he hadn't prepared him for the casual, everyday monsters that ran the real world.
"Because they could, mijo," Alejandro said, releasing a soft sigh as he pulled the boy into his chest and held him tight. "Because in this city, logic doesn't matter if you don't have the strength to back it up. If you don't have power, you don't exist. Someone wanted that land, and those people couldn't stop them."
"But it's not fair," Santi mumbled into his father's shirt.
"Well, you were going to learn one day or another, but Night City doesn't care about fairness," Alejandro murmured, resting his chin on Santi's head. "That's why we made your Neural Link before you were ten, Santi. So they can never do that to you when you grow up. So you always have the power to protect yourself."
Santi buried his face in his father's chest, his small hands clutching the leather of Alejandro's jacket.
The incident fundamentally shifted Santi's trajectory.
The corpo news networks smoothly reported on the successful, "incident-free" flooding of the valley over the following weeks, never mentioning that the town of Laguna Bend had been swallowed by millions of gallons of water, erasing the lives of anyone who had lived there.
Santi stopped looking at the Net as a puzzle box, and began to actively monitor the real-world flow of corpo operations. He tracked the activity of the NCPD, comparing response times in the corporate center against the deliberate neglect in the "less desired" sectors. He quietly bypassed low-level firewalls to read the internal memos of middle-management executives, learning how the brutal machinery of Night City actually functioned.
---
Santi celebrated his tenth birthday on November 26th, 2062. The apartment was quiet. Julia had baked a synth-chocolate cake and placed ten physical candles on the frosting, which Santi then blew out. He smiled genuinely at his mother's applause.
Julia pushed a wrapped rectangular box across the table, and Santi peeled back the paper to reveal a brand-new silver Moore Technologies braindance wreath.
"I spoke with Viktor," Julia explained, pouring him a glass of real milk. "He confirmed that by now, your neural synchronization should be perfectly stable. I thought you might want to see things outside the apartment, things that aren't just raw code."
Santi lifted the lightweight metal halo and began examining it. "A commercial braindance wreath. The internal diodes transmit recorded sensory and emotional telemetry directly to the user's cortex, bypassing the need for standard visual and auditory processing."
"It lets you feel things," Julia corrected gently. "I bought a virtual safari of the old African continent and a few interactive history modules. You spend so much time looking at the skeleton of the city, and I want you to experience the world, Santi. I want you to feel the sun on your skin and hear some of the animals that no longer exist. I want you to see some art."
Santi slipped the wreath over his head, aligning the diodes with his temples, and Julia guided him through the calibration. Once it was done, he activated the safari module.
The physical living room vanished, and a wave of simulated heat washed over his skin. He smelled dry grass and baked earth as a herd of massive, gray elephants walked past him, their heavy footfalls vibrating through his chest. The sensory input was overwhelming, completely distinct from the cold, sterile data streams of the Net. He felt the phantom joy and awe of the original recording artist bleeding into his own consciousness.
He removed the wreath twenty minutes later. His violet eyes were wide with genuine wonder.
"The emotional data transfer is incredibly potent, Ma," Santi whispered, tracing the edge of the silver device. "It provides a completely different context for organic behavior and helps me understand the variables."
Julia kissed his cheek. "It helps you understand people, my sweet boy."
Julia found him sitting on the living room sofa, deep into winter. The air-gapped terminal was powered down in the other room. Santi was watching the evening news holo-cast.
The anchor was discussing the newly christened reservoir in the badlands, praising NC Dam Ltd for their commitment to Night City's illuminated future.
"It's all a lie, you know," Santi said quietly, not taking his eyes off the screen.
Julia paused, setting down the laundry basket she was carrying. She walked over, sitting down gently next to him. "What is a lie, papi?"
"The reservoir," Santi said, his voice quiet. "The corporation reported a peaceful evacuation, but I saw the unedited video files. They hit people who refused to leave their land."
Julia stared at her ten-year-old son, her heart breaking slightly at the sorrowful truth in his violet eyes. It was a topic no child should have to understand. It was the ugly reality of Night City that she had tried so desperately to shield him from.
But at the same time, she saw her son show a new emotion. She saw empathy. She saw a boy who had looked at the raw data of human suffering and hadn't tried to optimize it, but had instead felt the crushing weight of the tragedy.
"I know, Santi," Julia whispered softly, reaching out to stroke his curly white hair while thinking back to the day he was born, how Alejandro had shown up to the medical center with someone else's blood on his pants. "The corpos... they don't care about people. They only care about the scratch they can make."
"It's wrong, Ma," Santi said, leaning his head against her shoulder, seeking the warm comfort of her presence. "A system built on the suffering of its people will experience failure eventually. It can't last forever."
Julia let out a soft laugh, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. The phrasing was still wrapped in his strange, analytical vocabulary, but the sentiment of his words was beautifully human.
"You're right, my sweet boy," Julia murmured, wrapping her arms around him, pulling him close. "It's not right."
She held him, feeling a profound, bittersweet warmth spread through her chest. The Neural Link in his brain had given him the power to see the horrors of the world and had managed to ground him.
The integration of the carbon-nanotube mesh had long been an unqualified success. The heavy red neuro-inhibitors had been discarded almost a year ago, and his organic brain had fully accepted the synthetic lobe, adapting to the immense bandwidth with terrifying ease. Santi had begun to use the braindance wreath daily, exploring simulated environments to build a comprehensive emotional baseline for human interaction.
He expanded his exploration beyond the public sectors, even managing to slip past mid-tier corpo ICE without leaving any digital footprints. He cautiously reached out through encrypted, anonymous text channels on underground runner boards and began to debate theoretical coding architecture with seasoned netrunners who had no idea they were arguing with a ten-year-old boy.
He made chooms, his social skills slowly developing as he built a strange digital camaraderie with the faceless ghosts of the Net. They shared routing shortcuts and traded fragmented pieces of old code. This allowed Santi to learn how to navigate a community that existed entirely in the digital ether.
And while Santi was making progress, Alejandro was moving entirely in the opposite direction.
The door to the home office remained locked more often than not, and the dark circles under Alejandro's eyes had become permanent, bruised hollows. The microscopic twitch in his jaw was constant.
He watched his son effortlessly handle the massive, complex data streams of the Net, and he felt a cold, paranoid satisfaction. It had worked. His son was already stronger than many novice netrunners, and he was only ten years old.
However, Alejandro knew the Net was just the shallow end of the pool and that the real monsters were waiting on the other side of the wall.
He was spending his nights diving deeper into the corrupted, highly encrypted telemetry he had pulled from the shard, piecing together the fragmented snapshot of the Old Net, staring into the digital abyss left in the wake of the entity he had come across ten years ago.
He was a man obsessed, terrified of a future only he believed was coming, slowly drowning himself in the static to ensure his son would never have to. And this drowning led him to commit a single, grave mistake.
---
You have stones, me want!
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).