Chương 3: Santiago Reyes II

By the waning months of 2057, shortly after Santiago celebrated his fifth birthday, Alejandro decided to channel that destructive curiosity. The boy understood basic math, he had figured out wind-up toys and sliding doors, and his electronic trial-and-error was getting way too expensive for Alejandro's pockets. It was time to introduce him to code.

Alejandro built a closed-loop, highly sanitized sandbox network on a standalone modified cyberdeck, and on a quiet Sunday afternoon, he set the matte black cyberdeck on the dining table. Santi approached it, practically vibrating with excitement as he ran his small fingers over the tactile input keys.

"Everything you see outside that window, every drone you take apart... it all runs on code," Alejandro explained, tapping a command. A small holographic interface sprang to life, projecting lines of basic, luminous blue text.

"It's like giving instructions to the machine." Santi's eyes reflected the blue light.

"Can I tell it to do backflips?"

"Well... I guess you can, eventually," Alejandro chuckled.

"But first, we're going to make that little blue light move through this maze. I'll show you the words you need to type." Alejandro typed out a basic sequence, causing the blue node to move.

"Just like this. Now it's your turn, try it." Santi nodded enthusiastically. He looked at the maze and knew he just wanted the dot to go straight and then turn, remembering the words his father had used. He reached out and began to press the keys. But his hands were small and uncoordinated, which eventually led to him hitting the wrong letters. Then he backspaced and pressed a bracket instead of a parenthesis because his little finger slipped.

An error chime softly pinged from the deck, and a line of code glowed red. Syntax Error. Santi frowned, crossing his arms with a huff.

"Why did it beep at me? I asked it nicely to go forward!"

"You may have used the right words, but you spelled it wrong," Alejandro pointed to the screen.

"You need a semicolon there, not a comma."

"What is a semi-colon?" Santi asked, squinting at the screen. Alejandro explained that it was just a dot on top of a comma that told the machine to stop reading. Santi nodded, deleted the line, and tried again. This time, he got the punctuation right while completely screwing up the order of operations. Ping. Logical Loop Error. The node on the screen spun in place, trapped in an infinite loop.

"Whoa, it's spinning! But why is it just spinning?!" Santi asked, his voice pitching up in childish frustration.

"It will get dizzy! It's not listening to me! Why don't it listen to me?!"

"You told it to go forward, but you didn't tell it when to stop," Julia offered from the kitchen counter. Santi groaned loudly before attempting a third time. He now knew what he wanted the dot to do and could picture it in his head. But trying to look at the screen, find the right letters on the massive keyboard, and force his clumsy five-year-old fingers to hit the right buttons was just too hard for a child's mind. He went to hit the execute key and accidentally mashed his whole hand against the board. Ping.

Fatal Exception. Core Dump. The holographic projection shattered into digital static, causing Santi to freeze. He looked at his hands, then at the static on the screen, and then he hit the keyboard with his palms again and again, a sudden burst of childish anger boiling over.

"Stupid buttons! My hands are too fat!" Santi yelled.

"I know what to tell it, but my fingers won't do it! My hands are dumb, they are so dumb!" Tears of pure frustration welled up in his violet eyes, and he buried his face in his arms on the table, letting out a ragged, angry sob. Julia crossed the room and wrapped her arms around his shaking frame.

"Shhh, Santi. It's okay to be mad. This is really hard to do correctly on the first try." Alejandro knelt beside his son, gently pulling the boy's hands away from his tear-streaked face.

"Santi, look at me. You didn't fail because you or your hands are dumb. You failed because typing is a terrible way to talk to a machine." Santi sniffled, wiping his runny nose with his sleeve.

"It is?"

"Of course it is. Right now, your brain is moving ten times faster than your fingers. But coding with a keyboard is like trying to yell instructions through a thick wall, which means that the machine can barely hear you."

"Then how do you do it? How do you make it listen?" Santi asked, his tears stopping as curiosity took over. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Alejandro tapped the side of Santi's head, right behind his ear.

"I use a Neural Link. It's a special type of chrome that translates your thoughts directly into data, at the speed of light, so that you don't have to type the words. You just think them, and the machine does what you ask it to do." Santi looked at the cyberdeck, his eyes widening. A magic brain-plug sounded way better than stupid buttons.

"Can I have a Link? My hands are dumb." Alejandro offered a sad, tight smile.

"Not for a while, little one. The human brain is delicate, and if we put the chrome in you now, while you're still growing, the data flow will hurt you. You have to wait until you are older."

"How much older?" Santi asked, pouting at his hands.

"About five years," Alejandro said softly.

"You have to be at least ten."

"Ten?!" Santi gasped, throwing his hands up in the air.

"But I'm gonna be an old man by then! That's forever!"

"Well, look at it on the bright side, papacito. Now you have five whole years to practice the slow way," Julia said, kissing his temple.

"Five years to practice on the keyboard, so when you finally get your Neural Link, you'll be the best at it." Santi took a deep, shuddering breath. He wiped his face. He still hated the keyboard, but he really wanted to make the blue dot move.

"Okay," Santiago said quietly. He reached out, his small hands hovering over the keys again.

"I will practice the slow way. But, Pa, what does 'Core Dump' mean? Did the computer have to go to the bathroom?" Alejandro let out a genuine, warm laugh that filled the room. The days that followed that first breakdown were a testament to the boy's stubbornness. Santi kept on stubbornly poking at the handheld cyberdeck. At first, the process was slow, the apartment growing full of the hesitant and uneven clack... clack...

clack of his small fingers searching for the right letters, inevitably followed by the soft, reprimanding ping of an error. But Santi just kept on trying, slowly starting to memorize where the buttons were so he didn't have to look down as much. Weeks turned into months, and the uneven clacking began to speed up. By the time the acid rains of spring washed over Charter Hill in 2058, the rhythm in the Reyes apartment had changed, and the hesitant keystrokes were replaced by a faster, more determined tapping.

Alejandro would often stand in the threshold of the dining area, a cup of coffee warming his scarred hands, just watching his son work. Santi sat on an elevated chair, his white hair catching the ambient light as the holographic projection of the sandbox network cast a pale blue glow over his face. He wasn't a coding god by any means, but he had a surprisingly uncanny knack for making the blue dot do what he wanted. He had managed to add a few walls to the maze and change the color of the dot to green.

Alejandro could feel a swelling pride filling his chest every time he watched the boy. Santi was only five, yet he was navigating basic logic gates better than most kids at a corpo school. But Night City has a way of turning pride into poison. As Alejandro watched the blue light reflecting in his son's eyes, the warmth in his chest began to cool, replaced by a dark, creeping chill.

The luminous blue of the sandbox projection looked exactly like the glowing telemetry line on the primary holotable in the sub-basement of the Militech tower five years ago. November 2052. Alejandro took a slow sip of his coffee, but he didn't taste it. Instead, he could taste the ozone, melting silicon, and the copper tang of blood.

He heard the wet, tearing sound of that kid Vance's vocal cords shredding as the entity from beyond the Blackwall poured an ocean of unfiltered data into the boy's fragile, organic mind. He felt the heavy weight of the Militech Lexington in his hand as he shot the junction box, trading the lives of his crew for a single piece of black plastic. For five years, Alejandro had kept his promise and locked the encrypted biometric data shard in the wall safe of his office.

He had focused on being a father, taking a backseat to his former life and picking up a desk job, becoming a ghost in the corporate machine, and he had let the dust settle over Project BLACKGLASS. Militech thought the telemetry was ash, and NetWatch remained entirely ignorant that the membrane of the Old Net had ever been successfully breached. But watching Santi command the closed-loop deck, a dangerous and intoxicating thought began to uncoil in Alejandro's mind. The entity hadn't attacked them five years ago.

It had merely responded to their call, looking back at the ones who had knocked on its door. It possessed a structured and deliberate intelligence that dwarfed anything humanity had created since the DataKrash. And Alejandro possessed the only pure, uncorrupted recording of that intelligence in existence. He looked at his son, telling himself that locking the data away was an act of protection. But what if it was an act of cowardice?

How could he expect Santi to eventually interface with such apocalyptic code if he himself didn't understand what was on the chip? He wasn't a scared corporate corpse. He was an edgerunner, and he understood the esoteric poetry of code better than anyone left alive from that project.

'The data is just sitting there,' a voice whispered in the back of his mind, rationalizing the hubris.

'It's isolated and dormant. If I build a secondary, air-gapped terminal in the office, heavily ICE'd, completely disconnected from the CitiNet... I could just look at the surface-level telemetry. Just to see what killed them. Just to know what we're actually dealing with.' Alejandro's eyes drifted from his son at the dining table toward the closed door of his home office.

The safe was hidden behind the reinforced wall paneling, right behind his desk, and though it didn't make a single sound, its mere presence suddenly felt deafening, as if it had a gravitational pull. He had a singularity of forbidden knowledge sitting right inside his home.

He didn't need to inform the C-suite, and he certainly couldn't tell Julia, since he knew she would pack Santi's bags and delta to Santo Domingo the moment she realized he was playing with the ghost that had gotten everyone in his team flatlined. This would have to be his burden. His secret project. Santi hit the execute key with a decisive clack, and the holographic projection flashed a triumphant green.

"Look, Pa!" the boy called out, turning around with a wide, gap-toothed smile.

"I made the dot go backwards through the wall!" Alejandro blinked away the ghosts of the sub-basement and forced a warm, approving smile onto his face. He walked over, resting his heavy, cybernetic hand on his son's shoulder.

"That's preem, Santi. Truly preem. Your hands are catching up to your head."

"I told you I'd learn it," Santi said proudly, turning back to the screen to mash the keys again.

"You did," Alejandro murmured, his gaze drifting over the top of his son's white hair, staring through the walls of the apartment toward the locked safe.

"You really did." That night, long after Julia had gone to sleep and Santi was safely tucked into his bed, Alejandro walked into his home office, locking the heavy acoustic door behind him. He pressed his thumb against the hidden wall panel, let the biometric scanner read his retinal pattern, and pulled the black data shard from the cold steel of the safe. He rolled the plastic between his fingers, feeling its light weight that somehow felt impossibly heavy.

He sat down at his desk in the dark room, booted up his private, air-gapped terminal, and prepared to once again begin quietly knocking on the devil's door.