Rache Bartmoss

Rache Bartmoss was a legendary netrunner in the early 21st century who became notorious as the man who caused the DataKrash and killed the Net. He invented the Demon and Hound series of programs. He was also the "narrator" of the Guide to the Net and Brainware Blowout sourcebooks (posthumously edited by his rival/colleague, supreme hackerette Spider Murphy).

Biography
Described as "the most brilliant (and paranoid) hacker in the Net", Rache Bartmoss became the archtype for the rogue netrunner and made himself an enemy of the corporations. Consequently, he lived the life of a wanted man, but was crafty enough to give the corpos the slip time and time again. Bartmoss took advantage of I-G's 2014 redesign of the Net, planting a virus into it.

He was reported dead on multiple occasions. He was said to have suffered "true death" in the beginnings of the Fourth Corporate War in 2021 when an Arasaka mass driver cannon in orbit vaporized his conapt with a direct hit with a meteor. In 2022, Rache was also allegedly killed in a corporate raid, triggering a dead man switch for his DataKrash virus two weeks after his death. This virus crippled the Net, infecting 78.2% of the Net later in the year. By 2045, his legacy lived on and he was rumored to be the man responsible for the crippling of the Net.

In truth, Bartmoss quietly flatlined in 2021. Previously, he had entomed himself in a cryogenic freezer disguised to look like an ordinary refrigerator, and kept himself alive with top-of-the-line life support as his body withered, but he still managed to be one of the best hackers in the Net. Unfortunately, he was too paranoid to trust anyone with his location or leave any means of recovering him. When the freezer's power supply malfunctioned, the life support failed. Bartmoss died with no one the wiser and faded into legend.

2077
By 2077, Bartmoss was widely accepted as the mastermind of the DataKrash, though his ultimate fate was still a mystery. That year, V received an odd signal directing them to a set of coordinates in the Badlands. Deep in the junkyard, V found Bartmoss's fridge, confirming his death and putting to rest decades of urban legends and conspiracy theories. Johnny Silverhand immediately recognized Bartmoss despite the rot setting into his corpse, and had V salvage his cyberdeck. Upon taking the cyberdeck to the netrunner Nix at Afterlife for analysis, Nix sprung a trap inside and would have fried his brain if not for V's quick thinking. Nix found nothing of value in the cyberdeck except some mildly interesting chat logs, but gave V some epic demons as a reward for saving his life.

Cyberpunk 2027
In the CyberGeneration timeline Rache's body was recovered by the Eden Cabal. They couldn't revive him, but upgraded his hardware so he could communicate through the Virtual Net. He serves as a tutor and mentor to young hackers, teaching them how to use the Virtual Net as their combination playground and abattoir.

Cyberpunk 203X
In the alternative timeline, Rache left behind boobytrap and attack programs all over the net. When his body was vaporized, his life-support stopped sending the delay codes. The programs went off, crashing systems and frying any netrunners jacked-in at the time.