Chương 16: [RatATax.exe] I

"You don't do this for yourself. You do it for the people you care about." - Panam Palmer August 2065 The suffocating heat of the summer months baked the cracked asphalt of Rancho Coronado until the air itself seemed to ripple and distort over the streets. It had been exactly eighteen months since the doors had closed on Alejandro Reyes's life, and eighteen months since his family had been erased from the corporate registry. Santiago Reyes was twelve years old now.

He sat on the rusted, groaning wood of their back porch, his legs dangling over the edge, kicking rhythmically against the crumbling brick foundation. He wore an oversized, faded t-shirt that had once been bright red but was now a dull, washed-out rust color, along with a pair of cheap denim shorts with frayed edges. His striking white hair had grown out into a tangled mop that he occasionally pushed out of his eyes with a grime-stained hand.

He was staring directly across the garbage-strewn backyard and Sequoia Street at the brutalist concrete wall of the NC Center for Behavioural Health. The security cameras mounted on the razor wire slowly panned back and forth, their mechanical whirring barely audible over the distant hum of Arroyo's factories. A year and a half ago, Santi would have sat there and obsessively counted the oscillation speed of the camera motors, trying to map their blind spots just to test his own cognitive processing.

But now he just watched them sweep because he was bored out of his skull. When he turned his head and looked toward the front of the house, the sky was dominated by a humming obelisk of steel and glowing neon. It was a towering holographic advertisement relay situated across the street from their front door. Its massive circular screens cast a permanent, shifting neon glow over the neighborhood, constantly reflecting off the four surviving solar panels bolted to their home's roof.

Life in Santo Domingo was a routine of survival. The initial shock of their eviction and Alejandro's death had slowly hardened into the calloused reality of working-class poverty. When they had first arrived, Julia had scrubbed the house of its rot, ripping up the stained carpets, throwing out old mattresses, and bleaching the floorboards until her hands bled, transforming the decaying trap house into a meager but clean home.

But a clean house didn't put food on the table, and it certainly didn't pay for the exorbitant cost of decent SCOP-meat or clean water. Julia was working herself to the bone just to keep the lights on and the air scrubbers running. She had managed to secure a morning shift as a cashier at a sprawling CHOOH2 gas station just beyond the plaza past the Crestmont and Sequoia intersection.

It was a miserable, soul-crushing job, and she would spend eight hours a day standing behind a reinforced counter, dealing with frustrated commuters, exhausted truckers, and local 6th Street gangoons fueling up their rusted beaters. When she finally clocked out of the gas station at four in the afternoon, she had exactly one hour to walk home, eat a bowl of cheap, heavily processed kibble or soy-noodles with Santi, and then walk back across the street from the plaza to begin her second shift at Licores La Fiesta.

The liquor store was a dingy, dangerous little box encased in bulletproof glass that was constantly threatened by scavs and drunks. Julia wouldn't get home from that shift until two in the morning. And as life in the lower echelons of society dictated, there was absolutely no scratch left over for schooling. Private tutors were a luxury of a past life, and the local public education modules required subscription fees that Julia simply couldn't afford.

So, Santi, like many of the neighborhood's kids, was left to his own devices. For the first few months, he had stayed inside, locked in a paralyzing cocoon of grief and fear. He had read his father's old data that had been kept in his cyberdeck until he had memorized every single line of code, and stared at the peeling wallpaper until the patterns blurred.

But a boy, even one with a specialized Neural Link woven into his brain, could only isolate himself for so long before he needed to step outside and experience realspace. And so Santi had started wandering. The unnamed residential street they lived on was packed with working-class proles crammed into decaying homes. With parents in almost every household working double shifts just to survive the Time of the Red's crushing aftermath, the neighborhood kids effectively raised themselves in the streets and alleys.

He remembered the first time he had approached a group of them playing a crude game of kickball in the alley behind the Behavioral Health Center. There were three of them: Leo, a tall, scrawny kid with a chipped front tooth and a hand-me-down jacket. Maya, a loudmouthed girl with dirt constantly smudged across her face. And Jax, a heavy-set boy who was always chewing on a piece of flavored plastic.

The ball had rolled over to Santi's feet, and he had picked it up, feeling the uneven weight distribution of the cheap, deflated rubber.

"Hey, ghost-boy!" Maya had yelled, putting her hands on her hips and glaring at him.

"Throw it back!" Santi had stepped forward, winding his arm back.

"You guys are kicking it too hard right at the apex," Santi had said, genuinely trying to be helpful and apply his foundational knowledge.

"The rubber is old and cracking. If you keep hitting it like that, it's gonna pop before you finish your game." He had thrown the ball back, landing it perfectly at her feet with calculated precision. The three kids had stared at him in complete, baffled silence.

"What the hell did you just say?" Jax had asked, his face scrunching up in utter confusion.

"I just meant the rubber is old," Santi tried to clarify, realizing immediately that he had misstepped.

"The structural integrity-""You sound like a busted dataterm, choom," Leo had interrupted, bursting into loud, obnoxious laughter.

"Who talks like that?

'Structural integrity'? What are you, some kind of corpo-bot?" Maya had laughed too, kicking the ball away from him.

"Come on, leave the leadhead alone. He's probably just got a glitch in his chrome or something." They had run off down the alley, leaving Santi standing alone in the dirt, his cheeks burning with the sudden and unfamiliar sensation of profound embarrassment. In Charter Hill, his large vocabulary and precise way of speaking had been praised. His father had understood him, and his tutor had given him props. But out here in the dirt of Rancho Coronado, it was a giant neon sign flashing the word TARGET above his head.

Out here, sounding like you swallowed a textbook didn't win you any friends. As a matter of fact, it had the contrary effect, effectively making you an outcast. It made you a weirdo. Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work! But Santi had common sense and knew that isolation in an environment like this was extremely dangerous.

A kid wandering alone was easy prey for scavs looking for spare parts, for 6th Street initiations, or for simple, random street violence. He needed to find a way to blend in. To survive the Net, Alejandro had taught him how to camouflage his digital signature. And now, to survive the streets, Santi realized he needed to camouflage his vocabulary, or change who he was entirely. At first, it started off as a conscious and deliberate effort.

He had begun by shadowing Leo, Maya, and Jax, sitting on the periphery of their group on the rusted car hoods in the alleys, just listening. He paid close attention to their slang, the way they spoke, and the structure of their sentences. He noted how they dropped certain syllables, how they leaned heavily on curses for emphasis, and how they used specific slang to identify belonging to the street. He studied them the same way he used to study the intricate network schematics on his old offline monitor.

The next time he approached them, a few weeks later, Jax was trying to pry open a jammed Spontaneous Craving Satisfaction Machine, better known as an old, battered SCSM, on Sequoia Street with a rusted piece of metal piping. Santi walked up to him, suppressing the urge to lecture Jax about leverage angles and metal fatigue. He took a deep breath, forcing his analytical mind to take a back seat.

"Yo, Jax," Santi said, stepping up to the machine. His voice felt strange and clumsy trying to mimic their speech patterns, but he pushed through it.

"That pipe's gonna snap, you gonk. The lock's too heavy for that rusted junk." Jax paused, looking at Santi over his shoulder, and blinked, clearly surprised that the 'corpo-bot' knew how to speak like a normal person. Jax looked down at the bending metal pipe, then back at Santi.

"Yeah? Well, how the hell are we supposed to get the NiCola out, then? I'm thirsty as hell, and I ain't got the eddies." Santi walked up to the machine and looked through a small gap in the side panel, intuitively mapping the primitive circuit board inside and instantly locating the primary power coupling.

"Just gotta short the circ," Santi said, slipping into the slang a little easier this time. He pulled a small, stripped piece of copper wire from his pocket, jammed it into the gap, and bridged the connection. The machine sparked and groaned loudly before spitting out three cans of warm and overly sweet NiCola. Leo and Maya cheered, rushing forward to grab the cans before they rolled into the gutter. Maya tossed one to Santi, grinning widely.

"Nova trick, ghost-boy. Guess you're not totally useless."

"Thanks," Santi replied, cracking the tab and taking a sip of the carbonated syrup, the taste almost making him gag due to the saturating sweetness. And from that day on, things began to change for Santi. Slowly and over the course of a year and a half, the forced slang became his default setting. The quiet, awkward kid who used to over-explain everything was buried deep beneath layers of street-smart grime. Santi learned how to just be a kid. It was a messy and wonderfully irrational process.

He began to spend his days running wild with the pack. They would roam the alleys of Rancho Coronado, finding trouble wherever the adults weren't looking. Santi learned that doing stupid things was an integral part of social bonding, a necessary variable for friendship, and a really fun one. When Leo dared him to jump the four-foot gap between the roofs of two abandoned garages, Santi knew the crumbling roof tiles on the landing zone were sketchy.

If it had been a year ago, he would have refused the jump because it was an unnecessary risk that offered no tangible reward. But now? At twelve years old, with Maya watching and Jax hyping him up? He had to put on a show.

"Watch this shit, chooms," Santi yelled, sprinting across the tarpaper roof and launching himself into the air. He cleared the gap easily, landing in a clumsy roll that scraped the skin clean off his elbows. He stood up, laughing breathlessly as the adrenaline flooded his system, ignoring the stinging pain. They threw rocks at the automated corporate trash-collection drones until the machines beeped in distress.

They snuck into the backlots of the Arroyo industrial parks to steal discarded, broken cyberware parts, pretending they were high-end ripperdocs operating on each other. They ran screaming from angry bodega owners when Jax inevitably tried to klep a handful of cheap chocolate bars or a pack of stale gum. Santi became a bona fide street rat. His vocabulary shifted entirely, and things shifted from being 'highly efficient' to 'preem.' A bad idea wasn't 'statistically dangerous,' it was a 'gonk move.'

If they needed to leave in a hurry before a badge rolled around the corner, it was time to 'delta.' The memory of his father's strict training regimen faded into the background, replaced by the loud, vibrant noise of just trying to fit in and survive. And of course, Julia noticed the change in her son. How could she not? It was 2: 30 AM on a Tuesday, and the neighborhood was suffocating under a thick blanket of humid heat. Santi was sitting at the small, rickety kitchen table, eating a bowl of dry kibble.

He was supposed to be asleep, but he always waited up for her to get home from Licores La Fiesta. The heavy deadbolt clicked, and Julia walked in through the front door, looking exhausted. Her shoulders were slumped beneath the weight of her damp jacket, and she smelled faintly of CHOOH2 exhaust, cheap stale beer, and sweat. She locked the door behind her and shuffled her way into the kitchen, dropping her agent on the counter with a heavy sigh that rattled her chest.

"You're up late, mijo," Julia murmured, walking over and kissing the top of his unruly white hair.

"Couldn't sleep, Ma," Santi replied, shoving a handful of kibble into his mouth.

"Too loud out there tonight. 6th Street goons were blasting Chromatic Rock down the block until like, an hour ago. Totally messed up my sleep." Julia paused, pulling a glass from the cupboard and filling it with tap water. She leaned against the counter, taking a slow sip as she studied her son. She looked at his dirty t-shirt, the fresh scrapes on his forearms from climbing a chain-link fence, and the way he slumped comfortably in his chair.

"Lately, you've been sounding different, Santi," Julia said softly as a tired, bittersweet smile touched the corners of her mouth. Santi looked up in confusion, wiping a crumb from his chin.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean the words you use and the way you talk," Julia laughed quietly, shaking her head in amusement.

"You sound like... well, you sound like a normal kid from the neighborhood." Santi shrugged, looking down at his bowl.

"Gotta learn to blend in, Ma. Can't be walking around sounding like a Corpo suit out here. The other kids would eat me alive. Plus, it's just way easier and better to say things are 'nova' instead of explaining how they actually work." Julia walked over and sat down in the chair opposite him. She reached out, placing her hand over his. Her once smooth hands were rough now, heavily calloused from pumping gas and hauling heavy crates of liquor.

"I like it. It's good to see you making friends and acting your age, instead of acting like you carry the weight of the world."

"I never thought I was carrying the world, Ma," Santi protested mildly.

"I know, baby," Julia sighed, her eyes drifting toward the dark hallway, losing focus for a moment as the memories surfaced.

"Your father... he loved you so much. But he put so much pressure on you. He wanted you to be ready for something that he never really knew would come to be, forgetting the fact that you were just a little boy." Santi squeezed her hand. The mention of Alejandro still caused a dull ache in his chest, but the sharp, agonizing edge of the grief had dulled over the last year and a half.

"He was just trying to protect me. To make sure I wouldn't get flatlined out here."

"I know," Julia said, pulling her gaze back to him. Her eyes were sad, ringed with deep exhaustion.

"But I'm glad you're finding a way to just be Santi. Even if it means I have to deal with you coming home covered in dirt and scraping your knees every day." Santi offered her a wide, genuine grin.

"Dirt builds character, choom. At least that's what Maya told me." Julia let out a genuine, exhausted laugh, standing up to clear his empty bowl.

"Alright, Mr. Character, it's time for you to go to bed. I have to be back at the station in four hours." Santi watched her walk to the sink and noticed the way her spine curved under invisible weight, the way she favored her left leg because her knee ached from standing on concrete for sixteen hours a day. He saw the crushing fatigue that she tried to hide behind her smiles.