Rache Bartmoss

Rache Bartmoss was born in 1992, and from a young age, it was clear he was unlike anyone else. By the time he was just four years old, he had already begun netrunning—an unheard-of feat that spoke volumes about his raw genius and reckless curiosity. At that age, he was so inexperienced that he used his real name in the Net, unaware of the danger that posed. But by the time he understood the risks, he had already become so skilled that no one could touch him. Over the years, Bartmoss immersed himself in the Net, testing every kind of interface he could find, constantly evolving as a netrunner.   In the 2000s, Bartmoss flirted with corporate employment, writing code and developing software. However, he had no patience for rules or authority. He frequently double-crossed the companies he worked for, cleaning his digital records and moving on before they could retaliate. In 2004, he briefly settled at CCI Development, a company notable for its clean practices. While there, he created the powerful Demon programs, which became foundational software used by netrunners for infiltration and manipulation. His stint at CCI didn’t last long. After embedding a political film into the company’s databases, he was fired. Within a week, he sabotaged their systems, frying their mainframes and pushing the company into bankruptcy. He then sold the Demon source code to multiple software houses and earned enough money to never have to work again.   At seventeen, Bartmoss met Spider Murphy, a young and rising talent in the netrunning world. She had tracked him down to warn him that her corporate father was planning to erase his System Identification Number (SIN), effectively erasing him from existence. Instead of panicking, Bartmoss trained her. They became fast friends, forming a legendary team that included Dog and Edger. Together, they dominated the Net—not for money, but because they could. They lynched NetWatch hackers, broke into impossible systems, and redefined what the digital frontier could be.   Around this same time, he collaborated with Alt Cunningham after the creation of the Pacifica region of the Net. The two would become digital legends, running the region and creating some of the most memorable netrunning experiences of the time. Alt would later remember this era as one of the best periods in her life.   By the early 2010s, Bartmoss had relocated to a conapt building on the edge of the Combat Zone in South Night City. There, he executed one of his most bizarre and ambitious schemes. He forced out all tenants who lacked neural implants and replaced them with corporate employees who had them. Without their knowledge, he implanted subconscious personality routines into their neuralware, turning them into sleeper agents who could be activated for surveillance or protection. This program took a decade to complete and went live in 2019, becoming one of the most unsettling but impressive projects of his career.   In 2014, when the Ihara-Grubb Transformation Algorithms were introduced to standardize the interface of the Net, most netrunners disconnected to watch the transformation happen. Bartmoss, however, stayed connected. During this crucial moment, he embedded the infamous R.A.B.I.D.S. viruses into the reformed Net—a decision that would echo through history. At some point during this event, his heart stopped for ten seconds, a brush with death that he survived but never forgot.   In 2015, he had a short and regrettable romantic encounter with Kimi Tara, a media personality. They met in the Net and went on a date. Although they slept together, she quickly moved on to her next target, leaving Bartmoss disillusioned. Afterward, he rejected the idea of physical relationships altogether, preferring the purity and complexity of digital existence.   Bartmoss’s body finally gave out in 2020. His heart stopped, and while his physical self died, his custom life-support system supercooled his corpse to preserve it. Because he was connected to the Net at the time of death, his consciousness remained alive digitally. Over the next ten months, he attempted to reach out to Spider Murphy. He sent her an email explaining his death and sharing his life story so she could finish compiling Rache Bartmoss’ Guide to the Net. True to his mischievous nature, he also launched a final prank on Spider: he released the Succubus III program in the Net, which used Spider’s own Net ICON, making her the object of desire for countless perverted netrunners. He waited to release it until after his death so that she couldn’t retaliate.   In 2021, Militech approached Bartmoss’s digital ghost for assistance in their conflict with Arasaka during the Fourth Corporate War. He agreed, largely due to the persuasion of Alt Cunningham’s digital entity. Together, they attacked Arasaka from within the Net, locating the master Soulkiller program, a digital weapon that imprisoned human consciousness.   In 2022, Bartmoss’s signal was finally tracked, leading to a deadly corporate raid on his conapt building. As the assault began, he reached out to Spider Murphy one last time and invited her into a chat room, where he confessed his love for her. Then, with his final breath—both metaphorical and digital—he unleashed the R.A.B.I.D.S. into the global Net, triggering the event now known as the DataKrash. This catastrophic release of destructive code shattered the global Net, decimated systems, and created vast zones of instability across cyberspace. The old Net as it had been known was gone, forever altered by Bartmoss’s final act.   Decades later, in the 2070s, Bartmoss remained a legendary and enigmatic figure. His fate was unclear to most—many believed he had ascended into the Net itself, or had never died at all. His role as the architect of the DataKrash was undisputed, and his name became myth. In 2075, the contract for the cryogenic freezer that housed his corpse expired. Following corporate policy, the Revere Courier Services company dumped the freezer at a landfill in the Red Peaks region of the Badlands.   In 2077, the mercenary known as V picked up a strange signal from the Badlands, leading them to the discarded freezer. Inside, they found Bartmoss’s perfectly preserved body and his personal Elysia cyberdeck. Johnny Silverhand’s engram, embedded in V’s mind via the biochip, instantly recognized the corpse as Bartmoss, confirming what had once been only rumor and legend.   V brought the cyberdeck to the netrunner Nix at the Afterlife for analysis. However, Bartmoss had packed the device with deadly security measures. When Nix jacked in, one of these traps was triggered and would have killed him if V hadn’t acted quickly to save his life. Even in death, Bartmoss remained dangerous—a trickster and a revolutionary whose reach extended far beyond the grave.   Rache Bartmoss was never just a netrunner. He was a philosopher, hacker, anarchist, and digital god, a man who saw the Net not as a tool but as a living system—something sacred and chaotic, something to be broken and rebuilt. His legacy reshaped the world and continues to echo in every byte of code running through Night City and beyond