Chương 2: Santiago Reyes I

"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein The world outside the reinforced, triple-paned synth-glass of the Charter Hill apartment was a grinding machine. Night City never slept; it merely shifted its weight from one bloody transaction to the next. But inside the Reyes household, time moved differently. Here, elevated seventy floors above the smog line, the air was scrubbed clean of the acidic tang of the streets, replaced by the faint, engineered scent of cedar and ozone.

It was a gilded cage, bought and paid for in blood, and it was the only world Santiago Reyes knew. From the moment he was brought home from the Platinum-tier birthing suite on the bitter, rain-slicked evening of November 26th, 2052, it was apparent that there was something unique about the child. Santiago was born with a shock of hair the color of spun frost, a brilliant white that caught the recessed lighting of the apartment.

When he finally opened his eyes, they weren't the standard brown of his mother or the hazel of his father. They were a deep, piercing violet. The corporate pediatricians at the Night City Medical Center had run a battery of genetic diagnostics, but the results were normal. There was no albinism, no melanin deficiency in his soft light olive complexion, and no DNA defects. The white hair and violet eyes were simply an aesthetic glitch in the meatspace. But the physical traits were just the wrapping.

The true anomaly lay in his relentless, exhausting curiosity. Unlike most babies, Santi was entirely alive. His mind didn't allow him to simply stare at the expensive holographic mobile spinning above his crib, it urged him to reach for it, and reach for it he did. He grabbed the projector unit with his chubby hands and yanked it down, shattering the lens against the crib railing. Once he noticed what he'd done, he cried, though it wasn't because he'd been hurt, but because the pretty lights had stopped.

He had learned about gravity and fragility in one swift motion, and he never pulled on the replacement mobile again. As he transitioned from a baby to a toddler, the Reyes household was consumed by a single, unending question: "Why?" He was a sponge, soaking up every piece of data he could find, but he constantly needed his parents to help him wring it out. He didn't magically understand the world, but he sure as hell interrogated it.

It came to a head on a freezing, torrential evening in late December of 2055, just a month after Santi's third birthday. The acid rain was lashing against the reinforced glass of the living room. Alejandro was sitting on the plush leather sofa, exhausted from a fourteen-hour shift at the Militech tower, methodically cleaning his Lexington pistol. Julia was in the adjacent kitchen area. Santi was sitting on the thick rug near the window, playing with a set of expensive magnetic blocks.

He was trying to build a tall tower, but his fine motor skills were still clumsy. He placed a block off-center, and the entire structure collapsed. He huffed, his pale brows knitting together, and started rebuilding, carefully adjusting his grip to center the pieces this time. Suddenly, a loud, concussive boom echoed from the lower levels of the city. The heavy glass of the window vibrated violently.

Alejandro's hand immediately shot to the slide of his pistol, his instincts flaring while his eyes scanned the room for a threat. Santi jumped, dropping a magnetic block on his toe. He let out a sharp yelp, rubbing his foot, his violet eyes wide and fearful as he looked at the rattling window.

"Pa! Is the noise going to come inside?" Alejandro slowly set his pistol down on the coffee table, his heart rate coming down.

"No, Santi. It's just a loud boom from down in the streets. The window is very strong. It has high structural integrity that keeps us safe from most things." Santi stopped rubbing his toe, his fear instantly replaced by curiosity.

"What's in-teg-ri-ty?"

"It means it's built tough," Alejandro explained, leaning forward.

"It won't break easily." Santi stared at the glass and then looked down at the heavy magnetic block in his hand. Before Alejandro could process what was happening, Santi wound up his little arm and chucked the block as hard as he could right at the window. Clack. The block bounced off the synth-glass harmlessly and hit the rug.

"Santiago! No!" Julia gasped, rushing out of the kitchen. Santi looked back at them, completely bewildered by their panic.

"But Pa said it was tough! I wanted to see the in-teg-ri-ty!" Alejandro let out a long, exhausted breath, pinching the bridge of his nose while Julia scooped the boy up. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

"You don't test it by hitting it, niño," Alejandro groaned. Santi blinked, absorbing the reprimand.

"Oh. Okay. No hitting the tough glass." He never threw anything at the windows again. Trial and error. Cause and effect. That incident unlocked something fundamental in his mind. Santi realized the world wasn't just a series of random events. It was governed by rules, physics, and hidden structures. He just needed to figure out what those rules were. A few months later, Alejandro brought home an antique from a high-end corporate auction, a pre-DataKrash, fully analog mechanical metronome encased in polished wood.

He set it on his desk, wound the brass key, and let the pendulum tick back and forth, a soothing, rhythmic sound. When Alejandro returned from the kitchen ten minutes later, the metronome was in ruins. In its place, sitting cross-legged on the floor, was Santi, surrounded by thin splintered wood and scattered brass. Santi had broken it in a frantic rescue mission.

He had used a micro-driver he'd pilfered from a drawer to pry the wooden casing apart, snapping the antique hinges and splintering the frame in the process. Internal components such as the brass gears, the mainspring, the escapement wheel, and the pendulum were spilled across the rug in a chaotic mess. Santi was holding a tightly coiled steel mainspring, his pale brows furrowed in deep distress.

He was pulling at it with brute force, causing the spring to slip from his small fingers and uncoil violently with a sharp twang, snapping against his thumb, leaving a bright red welt. Santi gasped as fat tears sprang to his violet eyes, but he didn't cry out. He dropped the spring and immediately grabbed his thumb, glaring at the offending piece of metal with a deep pout. Alejandro knelt beside him, his eyes wide at the destroyed antique.

"Santi, what did you do?"

"Uh. Pa. I was... I was... I was trying to save the tick-tock bug!" Santi sniffled, his voice trembling as he pointed an accusing finger at the ruined gears.

"It was stuck in the box and trying to get out! I can hear the bang bang from the door. I broke it, but there is no bug! But something bit me!" Alejandro sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose before gently inspecting the boy's thumb.

"There was no bug, mi niño. It's a machine that produces a ticking sound from kinetic energy through tension. I can't really show you how it works anymore since you busted the damn thing, but when you turn the key, you wind that spring tight, and it stores the energy produced by the turning of your hand. After you let it go, it starts to release that energy slowly through the gears to make the pendulum swing."

Santi's tears slowed, and he looked from his father to the spring, his toddler mind fumbling to grasp the concept. He didn't really understand 'kinetic energy', but he understood toys.

"Like... my car?" he muttered to himself, poking the uncoiled spring cautiously.

"It not like when you squish so it bites. But when I spin..." He picked up the spring again and the winding arbor, slotted it into the center of the coil, and slowly began to twist it, winding the metal up tight instead of pushing it down flat. It took him twenty minutes of grunting effort and two more pinched fingers, but he finally seated the mainspring perfectly into its barrel.

He looked up at Alejandro, a triumphant, brilliant smile lighting up his face, completely ignoring the splintered antique wood scattered around him.

"Look, look, look Pa. I did it. It not bite me anymore. I put it back in it house!"

"You... you did," Alejandro said, caught between pride and the realization that absolutely nothing in their apartment was safe anymore. By the time he turned four, his private corporate tutor, Dr. Aris, requested a meeting with Alejandro and Julia.

"I have taught prodigies," Dr. Aris said, sitting stiffly in the Reyes' dining room.

"But Santiago is a different breed. He is a stubborn, brute-force learner who tries everything, fails spectacularly, and then relentlessly asks me to explain why until he gets it. He fumbles until the pieces fit into place. You must be prepared for the messes he is sure to make."

"Trust me, he already has," Alejandro said with a downcast look, remembering the couple of thousand eddies his son had destroyed in a few minutes of no supervision. Dr. Aris brought a physical puzzle to the apartment the very next day. It was a complex, interlocking fractal box made of slick, polished steel with the single goal of sliding twelve different panels in a specific sequence to open it. Santi sat at the table, his violet eyes locked on the box.

He wanted the shiny prize inside, so he started to poke at a panel, but it didn't move. He tried to slide two at once, and they jammed. He picked the box up, shook it violently to listen to the rattle, and then tried to pry a panel up with his fingernails.

"Force will not work, Santiago," Dr. Aris noted calmly.

"It requires sequence." Santi stopped. He stared at the box, poking it randomly until the top left panel slid down a bit, revealing a tiny gap beneath the right panel.

"Oh," Santi mumbled.

"This door made a hole." He pushed the next panel, trying to jam it into the newly opened space. It slid halfway and got stuck. He pulled the pieces back to where they started and asked, "Is the door stuck because it's sleeping?"

"What do you think happens when two solid objects try to occupy the same space?" Aris countered. Santi scrunched his nose.

"They bump." He looked at the box again, slid a different panel first, then the next one, just matching the moving pieces to the empty spaces like a jigsaw puzzle. He stubbornly forced the sliding doors into the empty gaps until they moved, and five minutes later, after several more minor resets and frustrated grunts, the fractal box unfolded completely, revealing a small, polished stone inside. He grabbed the stone with a victorious giggle after having persistently mashed the pieces together until they clicked.

And the messes were frequent, especially when his fascination shifted from mechanical toys to electronics. Alejandro came home to find a high-end corporate drone scattered across the living room rug. Santi was sitting in the middle of it, holding a pair of tweezers, looking incredibly frustrated.

"I gave him the red wire because red is the fastest color," Santi complained, holding up a frayed actuator cord.

"I wanted him to run really fast. But he just burped smoke and smelled bad, and now his leg won't move at all. Why did he break, Ma?" Julia would sit with him, pull up a schematic on her datapad, and explain the difference between a power battery and a data cord. Santi would listen, his violet eyes locked on the diagrams, pretending to understand voltage but really just internalizing a simpler rule: red wires don't make things go fast, they make things burn.

He broke a lot of expensive toys, but with every pinched finger and fried logic board, he learned what not to touch.