By the time he was seven and a half, Santi's architectural understanding of systems was eclipsing his father's. Alejandro would come home to find the boy analyzing not just code, but the physical infrastructure of the city itself. Santi had pulled public records of the Westbrook power grid and laid them out on the holo-table.
"Look at what I did, Pa," Santi said one evening, pointing a small finger at the flowing streams of blue light. "I rerouted the traffic algorithms. I was looking at the map and noticed that the standard grid prioritizes the center lanes for VIP transport, but it causes a localized bottleneck at intersection 4A. If we shift the load-bearing data to the outer rim and stagger the light cycles by a fraction of a second, the whole system would end up moving faster. But it just doesn't make sense why they didn't just do it like this?"
"Ah, my little Einstein. As you grow up, you will learn what bureaucracy is, and this is a product of it. The people who built the city are more concerned with keeping the VIPs happy than making a system that was actually efficient, mi niño," Alejandro replied. "They think like politicians."
Santi frowned, waving his hand to dismiss the city grid. He brought up a new schematic. Alejandro recognized it instantly. It was the subnet architecture for their own apartment building.
"Well then, the politicians are very sloppy," Santi noted casually. "Look at our home security grid, Pa. Militech installed it, right? But the localized camera feeds run on the same primary processing node as the environmental controls to save power."
Alejandro stepped closer, his eyes narrowing. "What are you saying?"
"Well, I'm just thinking that," Santi tapped a specific node, "if we wanted to blind the cameras outside our door, we wouldn't attack the camera's ICE because it is too thick. Instead, we could loop a false video feed through the apartment's thermostat subnet since the primary node only reads the data packet size and not its actual content. It thinks it's just receiving temperature fluctuations, but it's actually just broadcasting a pre-recorded loop to the security desk downstairs." Santi looked up, his violet eyes completely serious. "This could be a problem for us, Pa. A backdoor would let someone enter without us knowing. I think we should patch it."
Alejandro stared at his seven-year-old son, realizing the boy was beyond learning to read code and had begun to learn how to exploit the structural laziness of humanity. Alejandro felt a deep pride mixed with awe and genuine fear at the progress his son was making, but he still followed through with Santi's suggestion and patched the subnet that night.
Santi was inquisitive and relentless, too inquisitive for his own good. But as the months bled into 2060, the atmosphere in the Reyes household began to quietly, imperceptibly shift. The epicenter of that shift was the locked door of the home office.
Alejandro's late-night excursions into the shard were yielding terrifying, beautiful results. The telemetry was impossibly dense, and decrypting it required patience, ICE-breaking algorithms, and a steady stream of military-grade stimulants just to keep his eyes focused on the scrolling green text.
His first major breakthrough came in the spring of 2060, when he managed to isolate and decompress a data packet that had belonged to a defunct European ecological research firm.
Alejandro stared at his isolated monitor, his breath catching in his throat as a file labeled "Project: Aegis" had finished decompressing. It wasn't just theoretical processing data in it, but actually fully functional and proven simulations for a specific type of heavy-metal targeted nanobot.
Night City's water supply was notoriously toxic. The data on Alejandro's screen detailed a self-replicating nanite swarm constructed from hexagonal carbon structures. The simulation showed the nanites actively seeking out toxic isotopes, binding to them at a molecular level, and forming an inert, heavy shell that would simply sink to the bottom of an aquifer, rendering the water above it completely pure.
But the words self-replicating sent a cold spike of genuine dread through Alejandro's chest. He stared at the glowing green simulation, his mind immediately drifting to the oceans. He remembered the things he'd learned about the Corporate Wars, specifically the autonomous, self-replicating sea mines that had been dumped into the Pacific. Those rogue, self-propagating weapons had infested the waters, hunting anything that came close.
While a few vital global shipping lanes still existed, keeping them open required constant clearing of the endlessly multiplying explosives. Because of them, the vast majority of transcontinental transport had been forced to take to the skies just to survive.
If a nanite swarm like the one on his screen ever broke its replication limiters, the devastation would make the sea mines look like child's play. It wouldn't just clean the water, it would consume the aquifer, then the bedrock, and finally the organic matter of the city itself, multiplying endlessly until it devoured the entire coast in an unstoppable wave of grey goo.
A month later, he cracked another file.
This one was a localized schematic from a forgotten military contractor: the blueprints for an electromagnetic dampening field. It was a localized resonance emitter, tuned to exactly 14.7 Hertz. According to the schematics, this specific frequency harmlessly vibrated the synaptic accelerators and neural co-processors of any cyberware within a ten-meter radius, effectively putting the chrome to sleep without causing permanent damage. It was the ultimate non-lethal riot control tool.
The discoveries were intoxicating, and though Alejandro wasn't a scientist, he understood the sheer, world-breaking power of the information he had discovered. An obsession took root quietly, manifesting in a slow, creeping shift in his priorities, written in the hollows of his cheeks and the constant, microscopic twitch in his right eye from the stims.
But he wasn't the only one noticing the shift.
Julia knew how to read the silence coming from him, and by the winter of 2060, the internal turmoil inside Julia was threatening to tear her apart. She had noticed the small things first. The way Alejandro's hands sometimes shook when he poured his morning synth-caf, and the way his eyes looked through her, rather than at her, during dinner.
Julia handled all the bills that needed paying, and eventually, she noticed the changes in their energy consumption. There were microscopic, yet consistent, spikes in their localized power grid between the hours of 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM. As if something incredibly processor-heavy was running in the home office while she and Santi slept.
Unable to sleep one night, she stood in the dark hallway outside of Alejandro's office door. She could hear the faint, high-pitched whine of the super-cooled server racks, and pressed her hand flat against the cold synth-wood of the door, feeling the vibrations.
Her heart hammered in a frantic rhythm. She was terrified by the possible implications of what he was doing. If he was running black-ops data from their home, he was putting a target on Santi's back.
'I should kick the door open,' her mind screamed. But the paralyzing fear of the corporate wife held her back. If she pushed too hard, she would become an accomplice to whatever treason he was committing. What if he chose the dark, intoxicating secret behind the door over the quiet life in the light?
She pulled her hand away as hot and silent tears started to roll down her cheeks, praying that whatever ghosts her husband was chasing wouldn't follow him out of that room.
"Ale," she finally whispered one night, months later, finding him in the kitchen at three in the morning. "You're not sleeping. You're working yourself to the bone."
"I'm fine, mi amor," he lied, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. "Just... I have a big project that requires high clearance."
"Is it dangerous?" she asked, her voice tight.
"No," he said smoothly. "It's just data. But it's important, Jules. It... it could open an even bigger future for him."
Julia sighed, leaning her weight fully into his chest, her fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt. "He's growing too fast, Ale. Today, he explained the fluid dynamics of the auto-chef's heating coils to me. He used words I had to look up just to understand my own kitchen. I can no longer keep up with him... I'm afraid he's leaving us behind."
Alejandro wrapped his arms around her tighter, resting his chin on the top of her head. "He's not leaving us, mami. He still asked you to read him a story before bed last night, didn't he?"
"He did," Julia said, a soft, heartbroken smile pressing against his chest. "He asked for the one about the knight, but halfway through, he stopped me to correct the structural integrity of the castle walls. He calculated that a standard trebuchet payload would breach the masonry in three strikes."
She pulled back slightly, looking up into Alejandro's tired hazel eyes, her own shining with unshed tears. "Ale... he doesn't see magic anymore. He only sees math and code. I wanted him to at least have a childhood like I did. To play, to make a mess, to be a kid who doesn't understand how the world works just yet."
Alejandro sighed and gave her a tired smile. "He's gifted, Jules-"
"He's eight," she interrupted him. "If we keep feeding him nothing but schematics and code, he's just going to grow up to be another corporate drone. He's going to be a damn machine wrapped in skin, only focused on data inputs and optimization. He's forgetting how to be human."
Alejandro let out a quiet, raspy chuckle, though it lacked real humor. He smoothed a hand down her back. "That's our boy, Jules. He just understands the world differently. And I'm not trying to turn him into a drone, I'm just trying to make sure the world is ready for him when he finally steps into it."
"But you're losing yourself trying to buy him the world before he's even left his nest, Alejandro," she whispered, her voice tight with a terrifying premonition. "He- he just needs his father."
By the time the spring of 2061 rolled around, Alejandro had pulled genuine miracles from the abyss of the Old Net. He had uncovered hydroponic algorithms detailing a way to grow nutrient-dense crops in irradiated soil. He had found a bio-vault containing the pure DNA sequences of genuine Bos taurus and Gallus gallus domesticus, simply put, cows and chickens, perfectly preserved in the digital amber of a dead net.
But while Alejandro was hoarding the past, Santi was hitting a brutal, physical wall in the present. It was exactly the kind of frustration Julia had feared.
By the autumn of 2061, Santiago was almost nine years old. His typing speed was a blur of motion, pushing the absolute physical limits of human dexterity. But the closed-loop cyberdeck was no longer a playground, having transformed into a prison made of plastic and meat.
Alejandro watched him one evening. Santi was running a grueling simulation, a mock NetWatch ICE gate designed to dynamically shift its encryption keys every 1.2 seconds. Santi's small hands were flying across the deck, his violet eyes locked on the screen, unblinking. He had calculated the decryption sequence flawlessly in his head, but his physical execution was failing him.
Ping.
Latency Warning.
Key Shift.
Santi let out a sharp, frustrated sigh, dropping his hands and aggressively rubbing his aching wrists.
"What's the bottleneck, Santi?" Alejandro asked from the doorway.
Santi looked at his father, the childlike innocence in his expression replaced by the bitter exhaustion of a veteran runner. "It's the meatspace, Pa. My algorithm works, I know it does, but the physical transfer of data from my fingers to the keys is creating a latency gap of zero-point-four seconds. So by the time I finish typing the command, the encryption key on the simulation has already rotated. I'm too slow."
He looked down at his hands with a quiet, profound resentment. "I can't type any faster, Pa. I need the Neural Link."
Alejandro felt a sharp pang of sympathy. You can't get even the safest neural implants until you are at least ten years old.
"You're eight, Santi," Alejandro said gently, stepping into the room.
"I know the standards," Santi interrupted with, sounding exactly like the corporate drone Julia feared he was becoming. "The corporate pediatric guidelines state that introducing a neural processor before the age of ten runs a 42% risk of micro-hemorrhaging in the frontal lobe due to incomplete myelin sheath development. I've already read all about it."
"You read the corporate medical literature?" Alejandro asked, his brows furrowing.
"Dr. Aris gave me access," Santi stated simply. "I know it's dangerous. But Pa... I can see the code in my head. I can feel it. But when I try to push it through my fingers, it feels like I'm choking. I need a Neural Link... I'm ready for a Neural Link."
That night, Alejandro went into his office and booted up the air-gapped terminal. He ran a targeted search through the Old Net data, specifically pinging for buried medical research regarding early-stage cybernetic integration.
It took him three weeks of relentless, sleep-deprived diving to find it.
It was a classified, heavily redacted clinical study from a defunct Swedish bio-ware firm named Kjellberg Neurogenetics, dated late 2021. The file was labeled "The Chrysalis Protocol."
The corporate standard of Night City in the 2060s was entirely based on liability. Megacorps waited until a child was ten because the myelin sheath was thick enough to accept the harsh electrical signals of standard copper-wired implants without burning the white matter. It guaranteed a 99.9% safety rate.
But "The Chrysalis Protocol" painted an entirely different, awe-inspiring picture.
According to the lost data, integrating a low-level neural processor between the ages of eight and nine did carry a massive risk since the standard copper wiring caused micro-strokes. But the Swedish firm had swapped out the copper for a microscopic mesh of carbon-nanotube threads.
The study detailed that at eight years old, the human brain is still in a state of hyperactive neuroplasticity, meaning that if you introduce a biological-synthetic Neural Link made of carbon nanotubes during this specific window, the brain doesn't just adapt to the hardware. It treats the synthetic mesh as a new, organic lobe. Astrocyte cells would physically bind to the synthetic webbing, requiring a highly specific chemical cocktail of synthetic cortisol and neuro-inhibitors.
The results were staggering. Subject 4, an eight-year-old girl who survived the integration, experienced a total latency collapse. By age twelve, her neural response threshold operated at zero-point-two milliseconds. She didn't need to slot into an external cyberdeck; her organic mind boasted a synaptic bandwidth capable of channeling dozens of terabytes of raw data per second directly through her frontal lobe. This allowed her to effortlessly execute and maintain hundreds of complex, heavy-duty daemons simultaneously without frying her nervous system.
She processed binary and hex code as naturally as spoken English. The hardware became fundamentally interwoven with her organic brain matter, bypassing standard translation layers entirely. This granted her an intuition for the Net that allowed her to slice through Black ICE like a ghost, eclipsing the most elite, heavily chromed adults on the planet.
But the human mind, even one in a state of hyper-plasticity, was never meant to be hardwired to the abyss.
The study detailed her eventual, horrifying decline. By age fourteen, Subject 4 began to fracture under the weight of her own bandwidth. Unable to filter the overwhelming, ceaseless ocean of data she was constantly pulling from the CitiNet, her humanity simply eroded. She stopped sleeping, stopped speaking English, communicating only in bursts of encrypted machine code. Her meatspace consciousness dissolved into a state of pure digital dissociation until she was completely lost to the static.
The final log from Kjellberg Neurogenetics was chillingly brief. They officially listed her as Terminated due to critical asset destabilization, a clinical, sanitized way of saying corporate security had put a bullet in a fourteen-year-old girl's head when she finally lost her mind to the machine.
And the short-term integration wasn't much better. The study explicitly stated there was a 42% chance of a localized, fatal stroke during the initial 72-hour window.
Alejandro sat back in his chair, his solo mind coldly dissecting the horrific odds, desperately searching for the variables he could use to justify his choice.
Subject 4 had failed, yes. But she had been a baseline child, an ordinary mind overwhelmed by the infinite. She wasn't Santi. Santi's organic brain was already processing data at a terrifying rate, rewriting simulated city grids and outsmarting Militech-grade ICE before he even had a shred of chrome. He already possessed the mental architecture to organize chaos. He wouldn't shatter under the weight of the data. If anything, he would categorize it.
More importantly was the biology. The Swedish scientists had integrated Subject 4 the very week she turned eight, pushing the absolute youngest, most fragile edge of the neuroplasticity window. Santi was eight years and ten months old, almost nine. His myelin sheath was ten months thicker, his neural pathways significantly more robust and mature, yet still pliable enough to accept the carbon-nanotube mesh.
To Alejandro's calculating, desperate mind, those ten extra months of physical maturity meant the 42% stroke risk had to be significantly lower. It had to be safer.
He thought about the entity waiting in the encrypted shard and the unfathomable malice of the Blackwall. Santi wouldn't just need to be good. He would need a mind seamlessly integrated, capable of processing an ocean of apocalyptic data without drowning. The Swedish scientists had failed Subject 4 because they treated her like a lab rat, letting the data consume her without a tether. Alejandro arrogantly told himself he wouldn't make that mistake. He would be his son's anchor. Santi was stronger, and he wouldn't lose himself to the machine because Alejandro wouldn't let him.
If Alejandro waited until the boy was ten, Santi would be physically safe, but he would be trapped in the very meatspace he currently despised. He would always just be a human using a tool.
But if Alejandro took the risk now, utilizing the lost technology, Santi would become the tool.
A calculated risk of death now, to ensure a 100% chance of survival against whatever he came across later. It was a twisted, horrifying logic, born of Alejandro's paranoid love and a corpo obsession with optimization.
Alejandro made his decision, shut down the terminal, locked the safe, and walked out of the office. The sun was just beginning to rise over Night City, casting long shadows across the living room floor.
He contacted an old friend, sent him the files for the Neural Link, and he got a response that he could have everything ready within a week.
A week later, he walked into Santi's room. The boy was asleep, his white hair plastered to his forehead. He looked so small. Just a kid.
Alejandro knelt by the bed and gently brushed the hair out of his son's face. Santi stirred, his striking violet eyes fluttering open.
"Pa?" Santi mumbled, his voice thick and soft. "Is it morning?"
"Yeah, mi niño. It's morning," Alejandro whispered, a resolute smile touching his lips. He reached out and gently tapped the side of Santi's head, right behind his ear. "Get up, Santi. We need to get ready."
Santi rubbed his eyes, confused. "Ready for what?"
Alejandro's hazel eyes hardened with a terrifying resolve. "We're going to build your Neural Link."
---
STOOOONNNESS!
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).