Chương 23: Ghost II

It had taken a month for the scale of the operation to finally materialize. I sat at my desk in the dead of night, the only light in the room coming from the soft, blue glow of my monitor. I pulled up the encrypted ledger for the cred-chip hidden beneath my floorboards. The last time I had checked it, before the expansion, the chip had held a meager 693 eddies after my mom had used the funds to cover groceries and rent. But when I hit the refresh key, the number scrolled upward, the green digits locking into place.

"Boom baby!" I let out a low, excited shout as I stared at the 5, 971 Eurodollars in the chip. I let out a slow, shaking breath, staring at the screen. Over five thousand eddies in a single month. My code had successfully hijacked the machines without triggering a single alarm, and I now had a total of eighty-six SCSMs working for me across Rancho Coronado, pumping a relentless, invisible stream of scratch directly into my hands.

By hacking those three sets of machines, I was now bringing home almost 2, 000 eddies more per month than my mother was making working her two grueling jobs. But as I stared at the glowing numbers, the initial rush of victory slowly faded. Five thousand eddies a month was a fortune to a street-rat without any aspirations, but in the grand scheme of the megacorps, it was still just scratching the absolute bottom of the barrel. Five thousand eddies wouldn't even buy us a ticket out of Santo Domingo.

It wouldn't buy us a fortified apartment in Charter Hill, and it certainly wouldn't buy us the kind of private corporate security required to truly be safe, although I knew that if someone really wanted you dead, the only thing you could do was get to them before they got to you. I didn't care that I was only fourteen. I had made myself a promise on the night my mother found out about the hack.

I know that I had broken my promise to her, but I had a more important promise to keep, which was the promise I made to myself that she would never have to work another day in her life. I wanted her to rest. I wanted to see the exhaustion fade from her eyes. I wanted her to be the way she was before... before Pa was taken from us. But this amount of scratch wasn't going to cut it alone, and in my books, the vending machine gig had reached its maximum safety threshold.

I was sure that if I tried to skim from any more machines, the statistical anomalies would grow too large, and the corporate algorithms would inevitably flag the bleed. I had to get real gigs. I needed jobs that paid more, and paid more often. I closed the ledger and opened an encrypted, routing-bounced connection to the underground runner boards on the local CitiNet. The boards were a chaotic mess of encrypted text channels, anonymous drop-boxes, and fixer solicitations.

Meaning that if I was going to do this, I needed a handle. I couldn't use my real name, and I couldn't just use a generic string of numbers. I needed something that would carry weight. I thought about Maya, standing on my freezing porch, a tear slipping down her cheek as she said goodbye.

"I'll be seeing you, ghost-boy." They were my first real friends. They had taught me how to be human. And now, they were all gone. The least I could do was respect the nickname they had created for me. So I typed my new moniker into the registration field. [Ghost] Over the next two months, Ghost became a recognized, reliable entity in the digital shadows of Santo Domingo and beyond. I started small, taking odd jobs from anonymous clients who didn't care who I was, as long as the code was clean.

But "clean" was relative, especially when my primary demographic for those early jobs consisted almost entirely of the exact kind of people who quickly became my most hated and made me sick to my fucking stomach. I'm talking about the corpo-cunts. The rich, entitled, silver-spoon little shits attending the prestigious corporate prep academies up in Westbrook, Charter Hill, and Corpo Plaza. The Corpo Academy prodigies, the Militech fast-trackers, the Biotechnica heirs.

The kids who had their entire fucking lives meticulously mapped out and paid for before they were even conceived in a sterile corporate test tube. And I know that may sound hypocritical coming from me, but taking jobs from them was nothing short of pure masochism. Unfortunately, they did pay top eddies for my flawless code, completely unaware they were buying it from a fourteen-year-old fallen from grace gutter-rat freezing his ass off in an old ass house in Rancho Coronado.

The shit I had to put up with was infuriating. I would log onto the encrypted boards and read their solicitations, and every single time, I could feel a hot, murderous heat rising in my chest. These were kids my age, fifteen at most, and they whined like the world was ending because they had to compile a basic, entry-level heuristic loop by Friday.

They would post on the boards, hiding behind stupid, pretentious handles like Cyph3r_King or Neo_Lord, throwing absolute tantrums because their "allowances" were tied to their academic performance. I remember staring at a post that just made my blood boil.

"Need someone to optimize a neural-routing algorithm for my mid-term," one corpo-cunt wrote, offering three thousand eddies like it was chump change.

"Professor is a total hard-ass. Make sure the code looks like I actually tried, but don't make it too preem, or he'll know I bought it. Daddy will cut off my access to the Rayfield if I drop below a B-minus."

"DaDdY WilL cUt oFf My AcCeSs To ThE RAyFiElD," I mimicked while sitting in my dark, drafty bedroom, staring at that glowing line of text until the words blurred together. My mother was standing on her feet for sixteen hours a day, inhaling CHOOH2 fumes at the station and getting threatened by scavs behind the bulletproof glass of a liquor store. And though she had been a corpo years ago, she barely even had any chrome.

Her joints were swelling, her skin was cracking, and she was beginning to cough up black phlegm just to buy me synth-meat that tasted like salted cardboard. Meanwhile, this entitled little prick was sweating over losing his luxury hypercar because he was too damn lazy to learn basic fucking syntax! These kids didn't just have everything; they expected everything as a baseline human right.

They strutted through their halls wearing bespoke uniforms that cost more than my entire house, flanked by private trauma teams and corporate bodyguards. They honestly thought they were the apex predators of Night City simply because they had the sheer, dumb luck to be born inside the fortress walls. They had no fucking idea how Night City could make that shit change in the blink of an eye. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

But dealing with their code proved exactly how pathetic they really were. The base algorithms they would send me to "fix" were absolute, unmitigated, utter fucking garbage. It was hilarious in a twisted, sickening way. These were supposed to be the future architects of the megacorporations, the brilliant minds that would one day run cybersecurity divisions, and they couldn't even properly nest a command prompt without crashing their own localized simulators. Their ICE structures were built like paper-mache.

If a real street runner hit their code, they'd blow right through it and shatter the shit into a million pieces, wiping the core before the alarm even had a chance to sound. I remember a specific gig from a girl who went by the handle Kira_Lux. She attended some high-end Biotechnica prep school and paid me four thousand eddies to write a polymorphic viral sequence she claimed was for a "theoretical thesis."

The instructions she attached were so fundamentally flawed, so completely ignorant of basic Net-architecture, that a toddler playing with a toy deck could have pointed out the latency bottlenecks. I wrote her virus in twenty minutes. It was child's play. But as I was compiling the final executable, the rage inside me just boiled over. I thought about Jax painting his living room wall with his own brains because the system squeezed him until he popped. I thought about Leo dying in a gutter.

I thought about the total, merciless apathy of the people running this city. So I did what any sensible runner would do.... I built a backdoor. It was something that, with her skill set, she would never be able to find. I wove a tiny dormant daemon deep into the foundational architecture of the virus she bought. When she handed that code into her corporate professors, and it inevitably got logged and integrated into their secure academic servers, my little toy would wake up.

It didn't plan for it to do any damage right away or steal any eddies. It would just sit there, deeply embedded in the corporate network, a permanent, invisible shadow holding the keys to the kingdom. But I didn't just stop there. I did it to every single piece of code I sold them. Every algorithm, every fake ICE generation, every predictive model I wrote for those entitled little shits was tainted with my invisible signature. They were literally paying me to compromise their own future infrastructure.

They thought they were exploiting a desperate freelancer to keep their trust funds flowing, but they were actually handing a loaded gun to the kid they would've stepped over on the street. The sheer irony was the only thing that kept me from punching a hole through my monitor. I hated them. I hated their effortless lives, their soft, manicured hands, and their arrogant, sneering slang. They spoke to me on the boards like I was a mindless drone, a service worker beneath their notice.

"Make it fast, Ghost," they would type.

"Don't fuck up the routing or I'll tank your rep on the board."

"I need this zeroed by tomorrow morning. If it pings the plagiarism sub-routines, I'm withholding half the scratch." I would just smile a cold, dead smile in the dark of my room, type "Understood, client," and proceed to build another master key into their fortress. I was becoming the architect of their downfall, and they were funding the very weapon that would one day tear their sanitized world apart.

But as my reputation for speed and absolute discretion grew, the gigs inevitably scaled past the prep-school kids, and I realized that the corpo ICE would probably zero my code before it actually made itself at home. I started taking contracts from low-level fixers, wiped data logs for boosters who had hit the wrong cargo transports, and erased transaction trails for gray-market ripperdocs looking to hide their income from the municipal tax authorities.

I even put that skill of creating a backdoor into use and started implementing backdoors in low-tier corporate databases so scavs could glean building blueprints. But thinking back on that, I had fucked up. I didn't really know just how fucked scavs were when I made those. But after learning about it, I cut all relations with those sick fuckers and began to move up.

Work wasn't just digital anymore, and some of the gigs required me to physically venture out into the city to retrieve encrypted shards from dead drops or physically hardline into isolated terminals. I started riding the NCART trains out of Santo Domingo, my hood pulled up, moving through the neon-drenched streets of Heywood, Watson, and Westbrook. And that was when the eddies started flooding in. I was actually starting to make bank.

And with the influx of money came the hardest conversation I had ever had with my mother. I was currently standing near the edge of a rain-slicked rooftop in Watson, the neon glow of a massive Kabuki advertisement painting the concrete in harsh shades of pink and blue. The wind whipped at my jacket, carrying the smell of synthetic noodles from the crowded streets far below. I leaned my back against a humming AC unit, my chest heaving as I caught my breath.

I had just spent the last twenty minutes doing high-speed, grueling parkour across the rooftops of Watson, avoiding the NCPD drones sweeping the alleys. I reached into my pocket, my fingers brushing against the cold edges of an encrypted data shard. My latest job had brought me out here to drop this chip off in a secure lockbox behind a ripperdoc clinic. The chip contained deciphered, proprietary bio-ware code I had ripped from a Biotechnica subsidiary server.

If I were an adult, simply having this chip in my possession would easily land me a ten-year sentence in a corporate black site. And if the badges caught me, my age probably wouldn't save me either. But as I stood there in the freezing rain, looking out over the sprawling, violent, beautiful mess of Night City, I didn't care about the risk. I didn't care about the possible prison time or any corporate hit squads. Because I knew what this chip was buying.

I closed my eyes, and the memory of the conversation from a week ago flashed vividly in my mind. {Flashback} I had waited for my mother to get home from the liquor store. It was almost 3: 00 AM when she walked through the door looking like a ghost herself, her shoulders slumped, her face pale and drawn. I had sat her down at the kitchen table, and without showing her any of my codes or explaining the gigs I was pulling, I transferred thirty thousand eddies directly into her primary, legitimate bank account.

When the notification hit her agent, she stared at it, her hands trembling violently.

"Santi... what did you do?" she had whispered, terrified.

"I got a job, Ma," I had told her while keeping my voice steady and projecting absolute confidence.

"A real one. I do remote coding for a private contractor, which means you have nothing to worry about since it's clean, safe, and as you can see, the pay is quite preem." She had looked up at me, and I saw the crushing weight of the last four years bearing down on her. Over the past four years, the vibrant, beautiful woman who used to read me stories in Charter Hill had diminished.

The never-ending grind, the double shifts, the restless nights, and the suffocating grief had sucked the life out of her, leaving deep lines around her eyes and a permanent, aching exhaustion in her bones.

"Ma," I had said, reaching across the table and taking her calloused hands in mine.

"You don't have to work at Licores La Fiesta anymore. You don't have to work two jobs. I'm earning more than enough for both of us. I want you to quit tomorrow." She broke down and cried with a ferocity that shook her entire body. She cried because she wasn't stupid. She knew the money wasn't from some legitimate contractor. She cried because she saw the young man I was turning into, recognizing that I was walking down a dangerous, shadowed path that mirrored my father's.

But most of all, she cried because I was right. She cried because she desperately needed the rest, and we desperately needed the eddies. When she finally stopped crying, she had looked at me with a profound, tragic acceptance in her eyes. And for the first time in four years, I saw a tiny, fragile spark of life return to her face. The crushing weight of our situation had finally been lifted from her shoulders. {End of Flashback} I snapped my eyes open, the neon lights of Watson pulling me back to the present.

The rain dripped from my hair, running down the back of my neck. I pushed myself off the AC unit, rolling my shoulders to alleviate the tension in my muscles. I pulled my hood up, gripping the data shard tightly in my pocket, and stepped up onto the ledge of the rooftop. The jump to the next building was wide, and the alley below was a steep fall that would surely kill me. But I didn't hesitate and sprinted toward the edge, launching myself into the night air, the neon lights blurring around me. I was Ghost.

I was fourteen years old, and I was exactly who this city had forced me to become. But for my mother's sake, I'd go down this route a million times over.