The world outside the reinforced, triple-paned synth-glass of the Charter Hill apartment was a relentless, 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.
Santi wasn't an eerily silent baby. He was entirely, violently alive. He didn't just stare at the expensive holographic mobile spinning above his crib. He reached for it, grabbed the projector unit with his chubby hands, and yanked it down, shattering the lens against the crib railing. He cried not because he was 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.
"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 Thorne, requested a meeting with Alejandro and Julia.
"I have taught prodigies," Dr. Thorne 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. Thorne 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. Thorne 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?" Thorne 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.
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.
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.
---
Pretend you are Zeke and launch those stones at me, baby!
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