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 also wrote the Rache Bartmoss' Guide to the Net and Brainware Blowout books alongside Spider Murphy.

1990s
Rache Bartmoss started netrunning for the first time at the age of four. When he first started, he used his real name because of his inexperience, not knowing the risks, but by the time he realized his mistake, he was good enough that it did not made a difference. Throughout the years, he had experimented with everything and tried every interface that Spider Murphy had heard of.

2000s
For some time, Bartmoss tried working for companies, writing software for them, though he would always end up double-crossing them and running away before getting caught. He would then clean his record and move to other companies. In 2004, however, he worked for CCI Development for a year, since they did not deal with any wrongdoings. During this time, he created the Demon programs for them. He was later fired for dropping a political movie into the database code. Within a week, he fried their computer system and the company went bankrupt. Bartmoss later sold the source code to the Demon programs to several software houses and made enough money that he did not need to work anymore.

At the age of seventeen, he met Spider Murphy for the first time when she came to warn her about her Corporate father wiping his SIN from the system. He trained her from that moment on and they became close friends. Rache Bartmoss, along with Spider Murphy, Dog, and Edger, would run the Net for fun, lynch NetWatch hacks without profit, because they could and it was the right thing to do, and do things others thought impossible.

2010s
By early 2010s, Bartmoss moved into a conapt building on the edge of the Combat Zone, where he arranged for everyone who do not have a neural implant to leave the building, and corporate workers with neural processors to move in instead, where he installed them a hidden subconscious personality program to control them. He would use everyone in the building for surveillance and protection. After working on this secret project for a decade, it finally became operational in 2019.

2020s
In 2020, his heart stopped and physical body died for unknown reasons, though his life-support machines sensed it and super-cooled his body. Because he was connected to the Net at the time, he continued to live in there. After his physical death, he tried to contact Spider Murphy for ten months, sending her an email to inform her of his death, and told her his life memories so that they could finish compiling Rache Barmoss' Guide to the Net.

In 2021, Militech contacted Bartmoss for his help against Arasaka in the Fourth Corporate War. Being convinced by Alt Cunningham's digital ghost, he attacked Arasaka from the Net and located the master program of Soulkiller.

Bartmoss died in 2022 after getting his signal tracked, which resulted in a Corporate raid on his conapt building. Right before his death, Bartmoss contacted Spider Murphy and urgently invited her to a chat room, where he confessed his love to her before releasing the R.A.B.I.D.S. to the net and causing the DataKrash.

With the discovery of his body, it is assumed that Bartmoss quietly flatlined in 2021. Previously, he had entombed himself in a cryogenic freezer disguised to look like an ordinary refrigerator, and kept himself alive with top-of-the-line life support. Despite his physical existence withering, he managed to remain running the Net. However, he was too paranoid to trust anyone with his location or leave any means of recovering his body so when the freezer's power supply malfunctioned, life support was shut down. Bartmoss died with no one being 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.

Associated Quests (2077)

 * Kold Mirage

Associated Shards (2077)

 * Blaming Bartmoss - by 8ug8ear
 * The Undoing: Fall of the First Net
 * Spellbook
 * Sayonara Station, by Luke Steelman
 * Notice of Expiration

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.