Chương 18: Growing Up Fast I

"If you want to survive the street, you have to become the street. Cold, hard, and unforgiving." - Morgan Blackhand, Solo of Fortune The late autumn winds of 2065 howled through the narrow, garbage-strewn alleys of Rancho Coronado, carrying the biting chill of the impending winter and the ever-present stench of the Arroyo industrial processing plants.

Deep within the localized subnet of the Crestmont plaza, a daemon was working overtime, completely unnoticed by the megacorp algorithms that supposedly governed the sector. [RatATax. exe]'s subtle infiltration went unnoticed, and every single time a tired commuter bought a synthetic burrito, or a 6th Street ganger purchased a pack of cheap smokes from one of the thirty-eight automated SCSMs, the daemon cloned a microscopic fraction of the transaction.

Sure, the payoff wasn't massive, being rather a slow and steady trickle of eddies.

But by the time the code washed the stolen data through a series of decentralized cryptocurrency mixers and deposited it into the untraceable cred-chip hidden beneath a floorboard in Santi's bedroom, it amounted to roughly 1, 325 eddies a month. It was a trickle of scratch, but in the poverty of Santo Domingo, it was one hell of a lifeline. Santi, however, did not touch the money.

He had no need for it and simply watched the numbers slowly tick upward on his cyberdeck, feeling a quiet satisfaction every single time a few eddies were deposited to it. He had built a system that worked, learning to manipulate the machine so that it would be the one to bleed for him and his mother. With the code functioning autonomously, Santi found his mind slowly beginning to crave new information.

The digital realm was infinite, but his physical world was beginning to demand his attention, and the company he kept was largely to blame for this shift. Leo and Jax were fifteen now, hitting the awkward, jagged growth spurts that defined teenagers. Their voices had dropped a little bit, their shoulders were beginning to broaden, and the innocent, reckless games of childhood were slowly morphing into the hardened survival tactics of the street.

Maya, at fourteen, was sharp-tongued and with a burning desire to be independent, navigating the alleys like she owned the place. The focus of their group had shifted from throwing rocks at trash drones to staring longingly at the rusted and battered vehicles that roared down Sequoia Street.

"Look at that piece of junk," Leo had said one chilly afternoon while he was leaning against the chain-link fence of an abandoned lot. He was pointing at a customized, heavily dented Archer Hella that was idling at the intersection. They could see the dark smoke that slowly escaped the engine.

"Gangoons stripped the catalytic converters, but I bet that powertrain still kicks out over two hundred horsepower. If you swapped the fuel injectors for high-flow CHOOH2 valves, that thing would absolutely delta."

"You're a gonk, Leo," Maya had scoffed, blowing a bubble with her synthetic gum.

"You don't upgrade a Hella. You boost it, chop it in an Arroyo garage, and sell the chassis for raw scrap. You could net a clean five hundred eddies for the doors alone."

"It's not about the scratch, Maya, it's about the machine," Jax chimed in while chewing on a piece of flavored plastic, a habit that had stuck with him.

"A good ride means freedom. You get a set of wheels, you don't have to stay in Rancho anymore. You can go anywhere in the city." Santi had listened quietly. He looked at the Archer Hella, his mind stripping away the rusted exterior paneling to visualize the internal mechanics.

"I don't think I'd go for a Hella since the structural integrity of the chassis is historically poor," Santi interjected.

"But Leo's right about the powertrain. The internal combustion block is preem. If you re-bored the cylinders and recalibrated the electronic control unit, you could increase the thermal efficiency by at least eighteen percent." Leo looked at him, raising an eyebrow.

"You know about cars, ghost-boy?"

"Not exactly about cars, but I do know how systems work," Santi shrugged, adjusting the oversized collar of his jacket while ignoring the nickname that had stuck with him.

"An engine is just a puzzle. You got fuel, oxygen, compression, and a spark, and it doesn't take a genius to notice that it's just physical code." That conversation had reignited a spark in Santi's mind. The obsession with his father's cyberdeck and the ethereal nature of the Net had long overshadowed the tactile curiosity he used to possess as a toddler when he dismantled metronomes and corporate drones.

Suddenly, he wanted to grease his hands again and understand the physical variables of the world with the same amount of clarity he understood the digital ones. So he began to scavenge. Unlike how Maya had suggested, Santi did not boost any rides since that would only serve to bring heat he didn't want his way. So he scoured the dumping grounds of Rancho Coronado for discarded mechanical parts while his mother was busy all day at work.

He brought home shattered alternators, fried optical sensors, and broken hydraulic actuators, laying them out on his bedroom floor and slowly attempting to rebuild them with his limited knowledge. Julia noticed the shift, thinking that it was another welcome change. On her days off, she would watch her son tinker with physical, tangible objects, something that gave her peace of mind since it was infinitely safer than watching his violet eyes glaze over as his mind vanished into the dangerous currents of the Net.

By mid-December of 2065, the winter cold had settled deep into the concrete bones of Night City, and Santi had already turned thirteen. Christmas was approaching, a holiday that the megacorps had completely commodified into a neon-drenched spending frenzy, and one they used to be able to celebrate when Santi's father was still alive.

However, Julia no longer seemed to care about the holiday of corporate consumerism, but she desperately wanted to give her son a shred of joy after not being able to buy him gifts for a while now. She wanted to encourage this new mechanical fixation that had awakened within him.

She had spent the last two months quietly saving whatever physical tip money she earned at Licores La Fiesta, intending to buy him a set of high-end, magnetic micro-drivers and a comprehensive mechanic's diagnostic manual she had seen at a pawn shop. The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. It was a Thursday night when Julia was standing behind the bulletproof glass of the liquor store, the neon signage buzzing aggressively above her head.

The store was relatively quiet, the freezing rain keeping the worst of the 6th Street gangoons off the streets. She pulled the untraceable cred-chip from the hidden pocket of her cargo pants. It had been over six months since she had last checked the balance of the chip. When Alejandro had died, the chip held exactly ten thousand eddies. But over the past three and a half years, she had been forced to dip into it to cover emergency expenses.

Things like new furniture, a blown water heater, a sudden spike in municipal taxes, or a week of sickness where she couldn't work were all covered by the eddies in the chip. By her own meticulous calculations, the chip should still have held a little over two thousand eddies, and she planned to transfer a small portion of her physical cash onto the chip to make the purchase at the pawn shop electronically, avoiding the risk of carrying too much hard currency on the street.

She slotted the chip into the secure terminal beneath the cash register and brought up the ledger. But she froze as the glowing green text on the screen burned into her retinas, displaying a balance that wasn't two thousand eddies. For some reason unknown to her, the chip now held 6, 108 Eurodollars. Her breath caught in her throat, and a sudden, icy wave of sheer panic crashed over her. She stared at the numbers, her mind racing on the impossibility of them.

The chip was untraceable and unconnected to any corporate banking grid. The only way money could enter the ledger was through a direct, physical transfer, or some highly sophisticated, encrypted crypto-wash. Driven by her confusion and her curiosity, she pulled the transaction history. There were dozens, maybe hundreds, possibly even thousands of them. Tiny deposits of eddies varied in the range of 0. 05 to 0. 2.

They were flowing into the chip constantly through a restless, automated stream of untraceable scratch that bounced through multiple decentralized proxies. Julia may not have been a netrunner or someone important in Militech, but she didn't need to be one to understand what she was looking at. There was only one other person in the world who had access to this chip and possessed the terrifying intellect required to build something like this.

Julia extracted the chip from the terminal, her hands shaking so violently she dropped it twice before shoving it back into her pocket. The rest of her shift went by in a blur of mounting terror. She wasn't seeing customers when they were coming in, expecting the ghosts of her past to be the ones to walk through that door. When she finally unlocked the front door of their house at 2: 30 AM, the silence of the living room felt explosive.

Santi was sitting at the kitchen table while dismantling a toaster, having some of its components spread out before him as he held a small screwdriver in his hand. He looked up, his violet eyes bright despite the late hour.

"Hey, Ma," Santi said, his voice light.

"The heating coils in this unit were totally zeroed, but I managed to bypass the primary relay, and if I bridge the connection, we can-""Stand up," Julia commanded. Her voice wasn't loud, but it was laced with a trembling severity that instantly silenced the room. Santi blinked in confusion, the screwdriver slipping from his fingers to clatter against the table.

The smile on his face vanished as his mind immediately registered the defensive posture of her shoulders, the dilated pupils of her eyes, and the sheer, unadulterated fear radiating from her. He stood up slowly.

"Ma? What's wrong? Did someone at the store-" Julia crossed the kitchen in three rapid strides, reached into her pocket, pulled out the cred-chip, and slammed it down onto the wooden table with a sharp crack.

"What is this, Santiago?" she demanded, her voice cracking, tears of panic already welling in her eyes. Santi looked at the chip as his heart performed an irregular thud against his ribs. He had expected her to find out eventually, but he hadn't predicted or accounted for the sheer terror in her reaction.

"It's the emergency scratch, Ma," Santi said, keeping his voice as level and calm as possible, a stark contrast to her panic.

"Do not play games with me!" Julia shrieked, the dam finally breaking. She grabbed him by the shoulders, shaking him slightly.

"There are over six thousand eddies on this chip! Four thousand more than there should be! You will tell me right now where they came from!" Santi swallowed hard.

"It's nothing much Ma. There's no need to worry about anything."

"Santiago," Julia said, mentioning his full name.

"Tell me where it came from." Santi looked away from his mother's eyes as he spoke.

"I just wrote a daemon, Ma. It was a small executable file that I slipped into the inventory subnet of the SCSMs in the plaza. It just skims a small percentage of the transactions. But it's totally untraceable, bouncing through a dozen crypto-mixers before it hits the chip. It's barely even enough for the corpos to pay attention to, and on the off chance they did, they would just toss it up to being a rounding error." Julia stared at him, horror draining the color from her face.

She let go of his shoulders and stumbled backward, pressing her hands over her mouth.

"You're stealing from the corporations," she whispered, her voice breaking up.

"You hacked a corporate grid... My son is a thief."

"I'm just trying to help us get by, Ma!" Santi countered, his own voice rising defensively.

"They stole everything from us! They took Pa, they took your job, they took our home! They owe us this scratch! It's practically nothing to them!"

"It may be nothing to them, but it is a death sentence for us!" Julia screamed, tears streaming freely down her face.

"Do you think they won't notice?! Do you think the NetWatch algorithms won't eventually flag a constant bleed of funds?! They are going to trace it back to this house, Santi! And when they do, they will kick the door down and put a bullet in your head just like they did to your father!"

"They won't!" Santi argued, stepping forward.

"The code I wrote is perfect, Ma! I scrubbed all of the entry logs and masked the routing protocols-""You are thirteen years old!" Julia sobbed, her hands gripping her hair in sheer frustration and despair.

"You are just a boy! Why are you doing this?! Are you trying to be an edgerunner? Are you trying to be a gangoon?! Is that it?! You're hanging out with Leo and Jax, watching them talk about boosting cars and running the streets! Are you going to put on a 6th Street bandana next?! Are you going to start carrying iron just to end up bleeding in the gutters?!"

"No!" Santi yelled as the accusation stung. His violet eyes filled with tears, the cold logic of the netrunner cracking under the emotional weight of a son accused by his mother. He closed the distance between them, grabbing her rough, calloused hands in his own.

"I'm not a ganger, Ma!" Santi cried, his voice breaking.

"I don't care about the street cred or the gangs! I care about you. Look at your hands, Ma! Look at them!" He held her trembling hands up between them. They were rough, the skin cracked and peeling from harsh chemicals, the joints swollen from sixteen hours of manual labor a day.

"You are killing yourself!" Santi sobbed, the tears tracking down his cheeks.

"You come home smelling like exhaust and cheap beer, and you can barely walk because your knee hurts so bad! You eat kibble so I can have real synth-meat! I did it because I saw you dying, Ma! I did it so you could rest because I already lost Pa, and I don't want to lose you too!" The words struck Julia like a punch to the gut, and the anger she had instantly evaporated, replaced by a crushing, overwhelming wave of heartbreak.

She looked at her brilliant son, seeing the desperate love that had driven him to commit a corporate felony. She collapsed to her knees, pulling him down with her, and wrapped her arms around him in a desperate embrace. She buried her face in his shoulder, sobbing uncontrollably.

"Oh, my sweet boy," Julia wept, her body shaking.

"You shouldn't have to carry this. You shouldn't have to worry about me. I am your mother, and I am supposed to protect you. Not the other way around."

"I just wanted to help," Santi whispered into her hair, his arms wrapped tightly around her neck.

"The money is clean, Ma. I promise they won't find us. Just let me help you."