The House of the Reapr welcomes the following Operatives to its ranks: Erik J Johnson and Simon. Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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"The Net is just a tool. The real world is where the consequences are."
- Alt Cunningham
Picture of Santi at 9 years old here.
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For the first fourteen days following his surgery, Santi found himself extremely bored, to the point that he considered the wait time for healing as an absolute waste of optimal processing time.
Viktor had been pretty stiff with his requirements after the surgery, allowing zero room for negotiation. There was to be no Net access, no local subnets, and Santi was forbidden from even a stray wireless connection to the apartment's smart-tech appliances, forcing him into a state of total isolation. The sleek, matte-black interface socket resting flush against the bone behind his right ear throbbed with a dull ache, quickly becoming a physical reminder of the Neural Link he now possessed but wasn't yet allowed to use.
And all of this was due to Julia, who had seized the mandatory downtime with a fierce maternal grip. If her son couldn't be plugged into a machine for the time being, then she was going to force him to be a child in the real world.
She had even stripped his room of the handheld cyberdeck Alejandro had made for him and any complex schematic blueprints. She brought in physical toys to replace them, even going to the extent of buying him a crate of vintage building blocks made of imported wood. She also left him the old, bulky mechanical keyboard he had been using to learn before getting the surgery for the Neural Link. She hooked it up to a basic offline monitor, having severed the terminal completely from any network and loaded it only with elementary educational software and simple drawing programs.
Santi sat at his desk, staring at the keyboard while at a loss. He slowly reached out and pressed a single plastic key, and as soon as he lifted his fingers, a loud, mechanical sound echoed in the quiet room. He pressed another key, letting his hand fall to his side with a heavy sigh.
Julia knelt beside him, wrapping an arm around his waist. "Terminals aren't just for you to solve and create math problems, papi. You can use the software to draw and make a picture."
"But, Ma, the physical resistance of the plastic is frustrating," Santi pointed out, his brow furrowing as he pressed a sequence of keys. "My fingers cannot depress the switches fast enough to replicate the data flow in my head. Working like this is even worse than when I was using the cyberdeck Pa had made me. It's like I'm trying to squeeze water through a tiny hole when I can just turn the faucet on."
"Well, that is because you are trying to race the machine," Julia said softly, taking his small hands in hers. She guided his fingers over the keys, selecting a bright blue color on the offline painting program. "You know, Santi, not everything in life has to be about speed and optimization. Sometimes, well, many times actually, and this is something you'll learn the older you grow, but life is about making something simple and learning to slow down. Unlike what your father thinks, the world isn't going to end just because you aren't calculating something."
Santi listened to her words. He did not enjoy the inefficiency of the analog interface, especially the fact that it was even slower than the cyberdeck he had grown accustomed to. He offered a nod of compliance to his mother, who was leaning against her side. He allowed himself to feel the warmth of his mother's hands covering his own.
But, contrary to what he had initially thought, analog isolation wasn't the worst of it, because soon enough, his mother had mandated "entertainment" hours that he could not skip.
"This is called 'The Adventures of Captain Cosmos,' papi," Julia said warmly. She sat next to him on the plush living room sofa, pulling a knitted blanket over his lap as the massive wall-mounted screen flared to life, displaying bright colors and animated figures. "When I was a kid around your age, I used to watch the reruns for hours on end. It's about a space explorer who saves different planets."
Santi stared blankly at the screen where a crudely drawn man in a bright blue spacesuit was currently engaged in a physical altercation with a poorly rendered alien.
"Ma," Santi turned to Julia, his voice flat. "The orbital mechanics depicted in this animation are inaccurate. Everyone knows that to achieve the velocity to escape from a planetary body of that relative mass, his thruster pack would require a fuel payload much larger than the one he currently has."
Julia sighed softly, tightening her arm around his small shoulders. "I know it doesn't make logical sense, Santi. But it's a cartoon. It's not meant to be something you analyze, trying to see if the math behind it is true or not."
"But, Ma, if the structural foundation of the narrative is flawed, then how can the conflict hold any real weight?" Santi asked, genuinely confused. "The alien is from a completely different planet with a completely different environment. So it doesn't make sense for it to be able to breathe the same air at all."
"Hay Dios mío, Santi. It's not about what the alien can or can't do, it's about the good guy beating the bad guy," Julia explained gently, resting her chin on his head. "It's about learning to use our imagination. Some people read, and others watch things like these because reality is hard enough. Sometimes people just need to believe that a man in a blue suit can fix everything with a laser gun because it's not something real. It's a whole different world that you're just supposed to sit back and enjoy."
Santi frowned. He genuinely didn't understand the concept of deriving pleasure from willful ignorance of physics. He looked at his mother's face and saw the soft, hopeful curve of her smile. He also recognized the heavy exhaustion lingering in her eyes from the stress of the surgery, which made him remember just how terrified she had been in the clinic. He realized with a sudden spark of genuine empathy that his compliance was a necessary variable for her emotional stability. So he watched the cartoon to comfort her.
"Okay, Ma," Santi agreed softly, leaning his head against her shoulder. "I'll stop analyzing the inaccuracies, and we can just watch Captain Cosmos."
Julia's smile widened, and she kissed the top of his head. "Thank you, my sweet boy."
He spent the subsequent fourteen days enduring the real world only because it was something that would appease her. However, he still stacked the wooden blocks into mathematically perfect arches, analyzing their structural integrity rather than pretending they were castles.
He felt like a high-performance engine idling in neutral. But he endured it all because he loved his mother, calculating that her smiles were worth the lack of data input.
By the time the two-week mark had arrived, Alejandro was practically vibrating with pent-up energy.
"The healing window is finally closed," Alejandro announced while standing in the entryway of Santi's room. The man looked exhausted, and the dark circles under his eyes were deeper than ever. He had spent the previous two weeks diving into his air-gapped terminal while Santi slept, chasing more information, using the encrypted data chip as a guide through the Blackwall. "It's time to test your Neural Link, Santi. We'll be setting up the sandbox tonight."
Santi perked up instantly. His violet eyes flashed with genuine excitement. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. "I am ready, Pa. From what Vik had said, the Neural Link should have completely bonded with the surrounding tissue by now, and my neural synchronization feels perfectly stable."
"Alejandro," Julia stepped into the doorway, physically blocking her husband's path. Her jaw was set, and her arms were crossed tightly over her chest. The unyielding resolve she had found in Viktor's clinic had hardened even further.
"Viktor said that after the two weeks of healing, he needed to go through four solid weeks of closed-loop environments," Julia stated, her voice leaving no room for argument. "You will not be using any open architecture, and you will not push him."
Alejandro's eyes narrowed. He knew what the Net was like. Santi needed to comprehend layered architecture and multi-threaded threats simultaneously to survive the digital world.
"Jules, the boy is a genius, and his hardware is safe," Alejandro argued, his voice tight. "We don't need to treat him like a baseline gonk. The threats out there are incredibly complex, so I have to introduce him to advanced problem solving now so he will be ready by the time he steps into the open Net."
"I don't give a damn about the open Net right now!" Julia snapped back, her voice echoing in the quiet hallway. "He is my son, and you are not going to fry his synapses just because you are terrified of all the shit you found diving behind the blackwall! He still needs time to understand this new part of his body, Alejandro. He needs time to adjust."
"You don't understand what will be waiting for him, Julia," Alejandro pleaded, his tone dropping to a desperate whisper. "We know what this world is like. It doesn't give a fuck about the fact that he's a kid. Corpo runners, NetWatch agents, and rogue AIs don't have a conscience, so it is my responsibility to push him to harden his defenses."
"You listen to me very closely, Ale. You follow Viktor's parameters to the letter," Julia said, stepping closer to her husband. "Or I swear to God, I will smash that terminal in your office until it is nothing but scrap. He is not your toy soldier, he is a boy who just had his skull cut open two weeks ago."
"So had we when we got our Neural links-" Alejandro started to argue, but Julia was not going to let this slide. Not when it came to the safety of her child.
"We were both over a year older than he was, and we still had to wait just as long," Julia said, her eyes widening as she suppressed her anger. "I already told you what I will do if you don't follow what Viktor ordered."
The threat hung heavily in the air. Alejandro looked at his wife, recognizing that she had drawn a hard line in the sand between his desperate need to prepare the boy and the immediate safety of their child.
Alejandro slowly raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. "Okay, Jules, you got it. I'll keep everything to a minimum. I'll keep him in a closed loop and feed him throttled data. I promise."
Later that day, Alejandro set up an isolated physical server in the living room, severed entirely from the Net, and loaded it with sanitized architectural blueprints and simple logic gates.
Alejandro plugged the silver personal link cable into the matte-black socket behind Santi's ear, causing the boy to gasp.
The sensation was entirely new and utterly expansive. Santi was no longer pushing code through the physical bottleneck of his fingers and the handheld cyberdeck, nor was he typing on the old mechanical keyboard. He was simply thinking, and the machine was responding instantly. To Santi, it felt like the structural linework of the closed server as a physical extension of his own nervous system.
He devoured the throttled data streams, mapped the entire isolated network, and solved every logic gate Alejandro had thrown his way within days. It was as if he were a shark swimming in a tank. Though he was in a confined space, he was still maneuvering his way effortlessly through the water.
Alejandro had observed him with a mixture of awe and creeping terror. The boy's processing power was staggering. Alejandro had to constantly build new mazes that grew in complexity inside the sandbox. He even went to the extent of designing his own simulated ICE that utilized shifting algorithms to challenge the boy's adaptability.
"Alright, Santi. I've compiled a new defense protocol," Alejandro said as he approached Santi one day. He leaned over the boy's shoulder and uploaded it to the server. "I programmed it to adapt to your decryption methods. I want to see if you can crack it."
Santi connected his port to his handheld cyberdeck and closed his eyes. The simulated terminal flashed green within ten seconds, leaving Alejandro flabbergasted. He had not solved the puzzle, but he had rewritten the underlying architecture of Alejandro's code to make the puzzle solve itself.
"The logic of your defense was good, Pa," Santi said calmly, opening his eyes. "But you left a redundant loop in the third layer of the encryption. So I took advantage of that loop to broadcast a false positive, forcing the ICE to accept my entry."
Alejandro ran a hand down his face, chuckling in disbelief. "Wow. You used my own lock to build a key. Well done, my little Einstein."
Alejandro desperately wanted to unchain him. He wanted to strip the throttles and introduce Santi to Militech-grade encryption models to prepare him for the world. But every single time he reached for the server controls, he felt helt Julia's eyes burning into the back of his neck.
She kept him honest, forcing him to adhere to the schedule. She also forced Santi back into the real world when the server time was up. She made him sit at the dining table with his private tutor, paying extra just so that he could learn history from physical textbooks. She made him sit on the balcony and watch the rain fall over the city skyline.
Santi was officially a creature of two worlds. He was caught between the frictionless potential of the machine and the demanding reality of his flesh.
The end of the sixth week marked the end of the isolation lifestyle.
Alejandro's Agent buzzed on the desk, and he tapped the screen, accepting the encrypted incoming call.
"Alright, by now, things should be stabilized enough for him," Viktor's voice crackled over the Agent's speaker, sounding exhausted. The audio picked up the faint sound of a lighter sparking a cigarette. "The blood tests we did yesterday have come back, and they show zero microglial aggression. That means that the carbon mesh in his dome is permanent. I'm officially clearing him for open architecture, but Ale.... You keep him in the shallow end... Restrict him to public spaces only, do you hear me?"
"I hear you, Vik," Alejandro said, his hand resting on the back of Santi's chair. "Thanks, choom."
"Just watch your back, Ale," Viktor grunted. "Nothing good ever comes from the Bla- from that place."
The call ended, and Alejandro turned to Santi. The boy was sitting with his cyberdeck in hand, the personal link cable already slotted into his neck.
"Alright, mijo," Alejandro breathed, a mix of pride and fear in his voice. "We've been cleared to open the floodgates. Are you ready to see the world?"
Santi nodded before initiating the sequence. As soon as he did, his consciousness slipped the bonds of the meatspace.
Although he had mentally left the physical world, the sheer volume of the open Net hit him like a physical blow. The environment was a vast ocean of millions of overlapping streams and billions of data packets screaming across the digital sky in a blinding array of colors.
Santi felt the crushing weight of the bandwidth, his mind beginning to fracture under the scale of the infinite complexity.
The Neural Link woven into his parietal lobe fired up and seamlessly connected his organic genius with the synthetic hardware. The chaotic noise of the Net instantly found itself calming down and becoming organized. The torrent of data slowed down, categorized by his incredibly efficient mind. He didn't even need to be guided as he intuitively understood the flow of traffic and the pulsing arteries of Night City's digital heart.
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Hand over the stones!
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).