That night, lying in his dark bedroom, the street rat facade peeled away for a bit.
Santi stared at the ceiling, illuminated by the shifting neon glow pouring through his window from the massive advertisement tower out front. His mind was accelerating, firing on cylinders he hadn't used in months. He started thinking about the things Leo, Maya, and Jax talked about when they weren't goofing around. He thought about Leo's older brother, who had gotten caught boosting a car and was now facing ten years in a corporate prison because his family couldn't afford to grease the right badges. He thought about Jax's mom, who coughed up blood every morning because she worked in an unventilated chemical processing plant in Arroyo.
He thought about his own mother, working herself into an early grave just to afford cheap kibble, keep the lights on, and to pay the exorbitant municipal taxes on a decaying house that her family technically owned. He thought about the rich Bourgies up in Corpo Plaza, safe behind their automated turrets and private security, while the Proles down here starved in the dirt.
His dad used to tell him that having power was the only way to survive. Santi was twelve now, and he finally realized just how right his father was. The system of Night City was a perfectly optimized machine designed to grind the poor into fuel for the wealthy. It wasn't going to collapse on its own as he had once thought. If you wanted to survive, you had to take from the machine before it took from you.
The desire to help his mother, to alleviate the crushing burden she carried alone, sparked like a live wire in his chest.
Santi sat up in bed and pulled his backpack out from under his mattress. He unzipped the main compartment and pulled out the matte-black offline cyberdeck Alejandro had built for him.
He hadn't touched it in over a year, and it was covered in a fine layer of dust.
He ran his fingers over the cold metal casing, remembering the grueling hours sitting in the air-gapped sandbox, cracking his father's simulated ICE. He remembered Alejandro's voice. "The Net will eat you alive if you don't harden your defenses, mijo. You have to find the redundant loops. You have to learn to use their own locks to build your keys."
Santi's violet eyes narrowed in the darkness as he thought back to those days. He wasn't a scared little boy mourning a dead man anymore. He had a specialized Neural Link installed at an early age to ensure drastic growth, along with years of foundational training, and he was tired of watching his mother suffer.
He found the silver personal link cable, took a deep breath, and slotted the jack into the socket behind his right ear.
The connection snapped into place, and for the first time in eighteen months, Santi felt the expansive rush of digital space. He didn't connect to the open Net immediately, instead booting up the local offline compiler. He needed to knock the rust off his code before he could actually try doing something.
Over the course of the next few weeks, Santi underwent a grueling process of trial and error. He spent his days acting like a normal kid with his chooms, throwing rocks, exploring alleys, and kicking the shit, but his nights were consumed by the glow of the terminal. He wasn't a master netrunner, per se. He was actually far from it. Sure, his skills were better than a beginner script-kiddie and even a level above Militech's own beginner runners, but he still lacked the practical experience of a mid-level runner. He was still making mistakes, his fingers clumsy on the digital architecture, and his syntax sloppy from disuse. He would compile a daemon, run it through the deck's internal simulator, and watch it violently crash against basic firewall protocols.
He would curse, wipe the code, and start over, attempting to find the redundant loops.
He began to study the local digital infrastructure of Rancho Coronado. But he held off from aiming for a megacorp. He wasn't a gonk and knew that with his diminished skill set, real corporate ICE would fry his synapses in half a second. He was looking for soft targets, analyzing the traffic flows around his mother's own workplaces. He monitored the data packets bouncing off the large communications and advertisement holo-tower situated out front.
He discovered that the plaza near the Crestmont and Sequoia intersection, the exact same plaza his mother had to pass to get to her two jobs, contained exactly forty-four automated SCSMs, of which only 38 worked. They sold everything from burritos to disposable Polymer One-Shot pistols to cheap electronics.
Santi mapped their network and realized that they were all linked to a localized, low-security inventory management subnet. They transmitted their sales data and banking ledgers to a central hub every night at 2:00 AM.
The security was pathetic at best. It was baseline, off-the-shelf corporate ICE designed to stop local gangers from stealing free snacks.
Santi started writing code that wouldn't brute-force its way through like a destructive virus, since that would trigger an immediate audit from the suppliers. Instead, he designed a tiny, elegant daemon that would slip into the inventory subnet's transaction ledger. Every time a machine registered a sale, the daemon would skim exactly 0.5% of the total transaction. It was a fraction that was just small enough to be written off by the corporate accounting algorithms as a rounding error or localized machine inefficiency.
But across thirty-eight machines, running twenty-four hours a day in a busy plaza, those microscopic fractions would accumulate into a steady, reliable stream of untraceable scratch.
He spent three days writing the routing protocols, ensuring the skimmed money would bounce through a dozen dummy accounts, wash through a decentralized cryptocurrency mixer, and eventually deposit into the untraceable cred-chip his mother kept hidden in the house.
He named the file [RatATax.exe]. A little street-rat tax on the corporate machine. By late September, the code was stable enough to be deployed, and on a Tuesday night at 1:15 AM, while Julia was still in the final forty-five minutes of her shift at Licores La Fiesta, Santi stood in his dark bedroom, dressed in his black hoodie and dark jeans.
He slipped the cyberdeck into a sling bag he had traded Leo for, and pulled the hood up over his white hair. He didn't want to risk a wireless transmission from his bedroom in case local NetWatch sweeps would occasionally monitor the airwaves for unauthorized data spikes, and he couldn't have anything tracing back to their router. To deploy [RatATax.exe] directly into the plaza's subnet without triggering an external firewall alarm, he needed to hardline into the network and plug directly into the communications tower out front.
Santi quietly unlatched his bedroom window and slipped out into the humid night air, dropping softly into the narrow dirt path on the side of the house. He moved with silent steps, creeping toward the front yard to avoid the crunching glass and rusted metal that littered the back.
He stuck to the shadows of the rusted chain-link fences that divided the front properties, stepping out onto the cracked sidewalk. The neighborhood was dead quiet, save for the distant wail of a police siren miles away in Arroyo. The streetlamps flickered, casting long, distorted shadows across the pavement.
Santi kept his head down, jogging lightly across the street and reaching the base of the communication and advertisement relay. At the base of the structure was a heavily secured maintenance access panel.
Santi knelt in the damp dirt and pulled a small, specialized multi-tool from his pocket, something he had klepped from a careless scav a few weeks ago. He jammed the tool into the physical locking mechanism of the panel, feeling for the tumblers. It was an old physical lock that could be easily bypassed with a sharp twist. After a few seconds of trying, the lock popped, and the heavy metal panel swung open, revealing a maze of fiber-optic cables and blinking data ports.
He pulled his cyberdeck from his sling bag and took a deep breath, his heart hammering against his ribs. This was the real world. If he screwed this up, he would trigger a security response that could bring badges right to his front door.
Santi unwound his silver personal link cable, plugged one end into the deck, and slotted the other directly into his neural socket. He grabbed a heavy data cable from his bag and connected the deck directly to the tower's primary maintenance port.
"It's showtime," Santi whispered to himself.
He closed his eyes and initiated the dive. Santi's consciousness was thrust into the sprawling, neon-drenched architecture of the local Net. It wasn't the sanitized, public observation deck he had explored as a nine-year-old in Charter Hill. This was the raw, administrative underbelly of Santo Domingo's infrastructure.
Data streams rushed past him like rivers of liquid light, the heavy raw bandwidth pushing against his senses, but his Neural Link quickly adapted, ensuring his organic mind could process the flow and organize the chaos into a navigable environment.
He projected his digital avatar, a featureless silhouette composed of shifting violet code, and moved rapidly down the local data-lines. He bypassed the heavy traffic of the residential grids, zeroing in on the specific commercial subnet of the plaza.
After a few seconds of searching, he found the hub. It was visualized as a glowing, blocky fortress of green data, surrounded by a thin, pulsating wall of digital ICE. It was the inventory management server for the thirty-eight SCSMs that were currently active.
Santi didn't attack the wall as he knew that his code wasn't strong enough to smash through. He remembered his training, observing the shifting patterns of the ICE, waiting for the brief, microscopic windows when the firewall opened to receive external ping requests from the physical machines in realspace.
As soon as he saw it, he moved with precision and slipped through the gap right alongside a legitimate inventory update from a burrito machine, bypassing the perimeter ICE completely undetected. He was sweating in the meatspace, but his avatar remained calm.
He was inside the ledger where millions of lines of transaction data scrolled endlessly around him, documenting every single eurodollar spent by tired workers and gangoons in the plaza.
He compiled [RatATax.exe], the daemon materializing in his digital hands as a small, complex sphere of jagged red code. Santi identified the root directory of the transaction routing protocol and carefully unwove the existing code, creating a seamless splice before inserting the red sphere directly into the core logic loop, and watched as the daemon immediately engaged.
It was a beautiful piece of biz. Every single time a new line of data appeared, indicating a physical purchase in the real world, the red code subtly cloned 0.5% of the transaction value, encrypting the skimmed data and firing it out through a backdoor Santi had built into the maintenance port.
Routing established.
Bouncing through Proxy 1...Proxy 4...
Cryptocurrency Mixer...
Destination reached.
The money was flowing, and though it was a trickle, it was a permanent and untraceable trickle of jack that would slowly fill his mother's accounts.
Santi didn't linger to admire his work as the golden rule of netrunning was to never stay plugged in longer than necessary. He scrubbed his entry logs and erased his digital footprints from the maintenance port to ensure no corpo suit could trace the anomaly back to the relay before pulling himself backward through the data stream and severing the connection.
Santi gasped, his eyes flying open in the dark, damp street. The neon lights of the ad tower flickered violently above him as he ripped the cables from the port and from his neck, his chest heaving with the sheer adrenaline of the successful run.
He closed the maintenance panel, ensuring the lock clicked back into place before stuffing his gear into his bag. Once he did, he delta'd out of there, melting back into the shadows while retracing his stealthy route across the street, down the side of the house, and back through his own bedroom window.
He stripped off his dark clothes, shoved his deck under the mattress, and climbed into bed just as the sound of the front door unlocking echoed through the quiet house.
Santi lay perfectly still, controlling his breathing as Julia's exhausted footsteps moved down the hallway. Her silhouette paused in his open doorway, and she stood there for a long moment, watching his chest rise and fall in the dim light, before moving on to her own room.
Santi smiled into his pillow, his violet eyes glowing faintly in the dark. After this stunt, he couldn't be considered a street rat anymore. He was finally stepping into the biz, and he was going to take care of his mother.
---
Spare some 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).