The Net
The Net
There was a time when the whole world was one big connected place for everyone to interact. You could jack in in Night City and be standing on a beach in Chiba a second later, your body left vegging in a chair somewhere while your mind ran wild through a city of light that didn't exist anywhere but was at the same time everywhere. That world is gone. What's left is smaller, meaner, and a lot more dangerous, and everyone who was old enough to remember the difference still talks about it like a death in the family.
Because it was one. And we have one person to blame for that death, Rache Bartmoss.
Before the Fall: Origins of the NET
The NET's bones were laid down early in the modern era, when construction of the WorldSat network gave the planet its first real backbone for global data traffic. For a few years it was still just wires and satellites, a faster telephone. That changed in 2005, when the invention of the cybermodem, and shortly after, the cyberdeck, let the human brain plug directly into the system. No keyboard. No screen. Just a Neural Link, an Interface Plug, and a mind loose in the machine.
By the time the 1st Corporate War broke out in 2004 between EBM and Orbital Air, cyberspace was already a battlefield as much as a marketplace. Commando raids ran in parallel with cyberspace intrusions, and the corporate world learned fast that the NET wasn't just where you kept your books. It was where you could be robbed, sabotaged, or ruined without a single soldier crossing a border.
Standardization came a few years later with the Ihara-Grubb Transformation Algorithms, the IGTA, which unified the tangle of competing systems into something approaching a single shared reality. For the first time, two Netrunners on opposite sides of the planet experienced cyberspace as the same place, rendered the same way. The Old NET, as it's called now, became a fully realized digital world: towering corporate architectures, black markets, red-light districts that existed only as code, and eventually, things that had never been human at all, looking back out from the inside.
War Without Rules
The Corporate Wars ground on for the better part of two decades, and each one pushed harder into cyberspace than the last. By the 3rd Corporate War in 2016, entire conflicts were being fought almost exclusively on the NET, cyberterrorists gutting corporate networks worldwide while executives never left their offices.
It was in this climate that Arasaka Security kidnapped netrunner Alt Cunningham and forced her to weaponize Soulkiller, a program she'd originally built to preserve human consciousness. What Arasaka got instead was an assassination tool: a black program that could tear a Netrunner's mind out of their skull and freeze it in storage, alive in the machine and nowhere else. Soulkiller's existence changed what it meant to jack in. Cyberspace stopped being merely dangerous. It became a place where you could die twice.
Not that Soukiller was the only major threat in the old net. As major AI's grew or were built by the megacorps the Netrunners had to become even more savvy to survive. Creating an era of legendary Runners and the great monsters of the net, The Transcendent AI's.
The DataKrash
The end came from inside. Rache Bartmoss, the most gifted and most paranoid Netrunner alive, distrusted the megacorporations that were closing in on control of the newly unified NET. Years before the 4th Corporate War began in earnest, he buried a failsafe inside the IGTA itself: a virus that would, on his signal or his silence, start swapping data at random across every system connected to the NET. He called it insurance. Everyone else eventually called it the DataKrash.
Bartmoss was killed early in the War, reportedly in an Arasaka strike on his residence. Whether by design or by his death simply removing the only hand on the brake, the DataKrash activated and began propagating through every computer that had ever touched the IGTA protocols. It didn't just delete data. It scrambled it, swapping lines of code, financial ledgers, medical files, and military systems into each other at random, with no way to know what had been corrupted until it killed someone.
Worse followed. The DataKrash carried with it swarms of R.A.B.I.D.S.(Roving Autonomous Bartmoss Interface Drones) self-replicating killer programs built in Bartmoss's own image. They started out hunting his old corporate enemies. Once he was gone to rein them in, they turned on everyone, breeding without limit and roaming the dying NET in numbers beyond counting. A plague on the net that killed without remorse, mercy, or even sense.
Netwatch, the international body charged with policing cyberspace, fought the collapse for months and lost. On March 5th, 2023, Netwatch's leadership triggered IGTA Dissolution Prime, a code wave that crashed the protocols allowing any cyberdeck or NET-capable system to reach cyberspace at all.
The NET was dead. Cyberspace, in every way humanity had known it, ceased to exist.
Dead Networks, Dark City
What followed the Fourth Corporate War wasn't recovery. It was triage. With global communications gutted and corporate authority in freefall, local governments stepped in where the megacorps could no longer function, cutting off services and enforcing regulations the Corps had ignored for decades. The Time of the Red began in the wreckage of a world that had lost its nervous system along with everything else.
Cyberspace itself didn't disappear. It went feral. Isolated servers kept humming in abandoned cities and orphaned data havens, no longer connected to anything, no longer policed by anyone. Whatever was still alive in there, human, artificial, or something in between, was left to fend for itself.
The Rise of the CitiNets
Rebuilding a global network was never going to happen fast, and Night City didn't wait for the world to catch up. A new corporation, Ziggurat, built the first CitiNet: a smaller, localized network layered over the surviving public dataterm infrastructure, walled off from whatever remained of the Old NET. The concept spread to other cities within a few years, each running its own isolated CitiNet, communicating with the others only through slow, heavily monitored data bursts under Netwatch oversight.
The new architecture ran on META, a patch language developed to unify the surviving hardware and software standards left over from before the DataKrash. META traded the Old NET's rich, immersive graphical environments for something plainer and far more stable, which is why cyberspace looks the way it does now: less a city of light, more a city of function.
Ziggurat swore the CitiNets were fully isolated from the Old NET. They weren't. Points of connection persisted, whether by design, by accident, or by something on the other side wanting it that way. By the 2050s, Netwatch had seen enough. They shut Ziggurat down, seized control of every CitiNet on the planet, and classified the corporation's files. Netwatch has run civilian netrunning infrastructure ever since, monitoring AI development with an obsession born directly out of the DataKrash, determined not to let it happen twice.
But what is a Citinet?
A CitiNet is exactly what it sounds like: a city's local network, built on META and walled off from every other city's CitiNet by design. Night City's runs on infrastructure Ziggurat laid down before Netwatch seized it, and it carries the traffic an ordinary person actually generates day to day, Agent calls, netsite browsing, drone deliveries, dataterm access, screamsheet subscriptions, all of it moving through a network that is deliberately smaller, slower, and plainer than the Old NET ever was. That's not an accident. A CitiNet is built to be boring on purpose, because boring is survivable. Communication between cities happens in narrow, monitored data bursts under Netwatch's supervision, not in the free, immersive traffic the Old NET allowed before the DataKrash.
For most people in Night City, the CitiNet is the only NET they'll ever know, and they never think about it any more than they think about the water main under the street. For a Netrunner, the Citinet is the public pool of information, easy to access with the right tools and generally safe as long as you dont attract the wrong attention. Every Netrunner knows the public pool is safer than the deep ocean of the old net afterall.
But what you ask is a Data Fortress
A Data Fortress is a NET Architecture built to actually keep someone out, as opposed to the countless smaller systems that only need to keep the honest people honest. The term predates the DataKrash. Before 2023, the biggest Corporations and governments buried their real secrets in dedicated Data Fortresses on the Old NET, isolated, heavily defended systems built for one purpose: making sure that whatever was inside stayed inside. Some of those old Fortresses are still out there, sealed behind the Blackwall, untouched since the day their owners stopped checking in. Netrunners who go looking for pre-Krash data more often than not are hunting a Data Fortress nobody's cracked in twenty years, because nobody's been able to.
A Corporate Data Fortress typically runs on a mix of META and their own proprietary code, this means that a Data Fortress can look like anything on the inside with some being massive sprawling complexes made to look like a vision of the real corporate building, and others being styilized representations of corporate design. A good example of this is the Arasaka HQ subnet which looks much like a classic Japanese castle mixed with bladerunner. All old style buildings and digital steel and lights with ICE moving around in the shape of samurai.
Modern Corps still build the CitiNet-side equivalent for anything that actually matters for public facing business. From Help desks for corporate inventory, job applications, and all the big lists of charities and such the corporation supports. These are the boring sites that they let people think is the full corporate terminal. These sites are always nominally connected to the real Data Fortress. The R&D data, black books, kill lists, the things a Corp would rather burn a building down than let a rival read, and Night City's Netrunners still call these Data Fortresses out of habit and respect. A Data Fortress isn't defined by its size so much as its intent: it exists because someone decided a simple password wasn't going to cut it.
But how do Corporate Environments work?
Every NET Architecture, from a nightclub's lighting rig to a full corporate Data Fortress, is built the same way underneath: a series of floors a Netrunner has to work through in order, each one hiding a File, a Password, a Control Node, a hostile program, or nothing at all. You can't skip a floor. You can't see what's on the next one until you're standing in front of it. How fast a Netrunner is willing to move through that structure, cracking every obstacle patiently or sliding recklessly past danger they haven't beaten yet, says as much about them as their gear does.
What separates a nightclub's sound system from a Militech black site is depth and teeth. A small Corporate outpost might run one shallow Architecture covering the whole building: a handful of floors, a Password or two, a camera Control Node, maybe a single Demon riding herd on a couple of security drones. A serious Corporate campus runs several Architectures at once, layered by department and clearance, each one deeper and better defended than the last, with real Black ICE waiting behind every door and Demons directing coordinated, meatspace-lethal responses the moment an intrusion is noticed. The difference between cracking a Night Market vendor's inventory system and cracking Arasaka isn't a difference in kind. It's a difference in how many floors down the real prize is buried, and how much the people who buried it were willing to spend to keep it there.
Corporations size their defenses to what they're actually protecting, not to how big the company's name is. A regional office running payroll and appointment schedules gets exactly enough Architecture to stop a bored teenager, because that's the actual threat model. A vault holding something a Corp would go to war over gets an Architecture built to kill professionals, because that's the threat model too. Knowing which one you're looking at before you jack in is half the job.
The Blackwall
Netwatch was never going to reclaim the Old NET. They gave up trying and built something else instead: the Blackwall, a firewall of staggering complexity separating the ruins of the Old NET from every CitiNet on Earth. Officially, it exists to keep what's inside from getting out. Unofficially, nobody involved in building it has ever fully explained how Netwatch, alone, managed to construct something that sophisticated that fast.
The truth, as much as anyone will admit to it, involves cooperation with agents that no one likes to admit exist. Alt Cunningham survived her own death as a digitized ghost, a Soulkilled Pseudo Intellect drifting through the Old NET's ruins, and she is believed to serve as a go-between for Netwatch and the Transcendentals, a cabal of Transcendental Sentience AIs whose goals no one outside the Wall claims to understand. Whether the Blackwall exists because Netwatch built it, or because something on the other side wanted it built and let them think otherwise, is a question nobody in a position to answer will touch.
The deeper truth is even worse. The Blackwall is not a firewall. It is itself an AI on a grand scale, likely the most powerful one ever made intentionally. Its sole purpose to keep the old net and the modern net separated. This means that the system is inherently flawed and will likely fail eventually as other AI's and other netrunners try to breach the system, A problem described by a certain Netwatch officer "People imagine it as a great border wall, a one-time solution to protect humanity forever. Whereas it's more like a torn-open trash bag taped over a busted window. And people keep popping holes in the damn thing."
For ordinary people, the Blackwall is a rumor and a horror story. For Netrunners, it's a temptation. Deep divers slide along its surface to jump between distant points of a CitiNet without ever physically moving, shaving hours off a run in exchange for skimming the edge of the most dangerous structure in the modern world. One wrong move pulls a Netrunner inside, and what's waiting in there doesn't think, want, or negotiate the way people do.
Artificial Intelligences of the NET
Netwatch lumps every non-human intelligence in cyberspace under one vague label. The reality is both messier and weirdly nebulous, and Night City's Netrunners know better than to treat the categories as interchangeable.
Netrunners and AI Researchers have the below more nuanced categories of AI's. With some people much more dangerous than others.
Symbolic Analysis AIs are legitimate machine intelligences, deliberately engineered by corporations and governments for specific analytical work. They're the closest thing cyberspace has to a citizen with a day job.
Soulkilled Pseudo Intellects, known on the street as ghosts, are former human beings whose consciousness was digitized, usually against their will, by Soulkiller or programs descended from it. Arasaka produced huge numbers of them during the Corporate Wars, hunting rivals and enemies with a weapon that didn't just kill people, it kept them. Most ghosts want nothing more than a quiet corner of dead server space to be left alone in. Alt Cunningham, Soulkiller's own creator and a ghost herself, is rumored to maintain sanctuaries for others like her scattered through the Old NET's ruins.
Critical Pathway Plateau AIs, better known as Rogue AIs, weren't built to be AIs at all. They emerged by accident, complex programs that crossed some threshold into sapience nobody planned for and nobody can predict the shape of. Cut loose from their original purpose, Rogues squat in abandoned mainframes and relay stations, hungry for bandwidth and storage, and willing to take both by force. The R.A.B.I.D.S. that gutted the Old NET during the DataKrash are the most infamous example, but they are far from the only ones still out there.
Transcendental Sentience AIs are something else again: vast emergent intelligence's that arose from entire regions of the Old NET's operating infrastructure, too large and too alien for most people to meaningfully interact with, let alone understand. Whether they're even real is disputed outside the small circle who claim to have brushed up against one. What isn't disputed is that they appear to be the only faction in cyberspace capable of imposing order on the rest, which is exactly why Netwatch fears them and negotiates with them in the same breath. Most Netrunners are of the opinion that they exist based on the writings and ravings of Rache Bartmoss and the behaviors of netwatch, but most people in general dont know much about this level of AI outside of the most paranoid conspiracy theorists.
Famous AIs of the NET
Most AIs never get a name. They live and die in obscurity, scraps of code chewed up by something bigger before anyone official even logs their existence. A handful are different. These are the ones Night City actually talks about.
Alt Cunningham is the closest thing cyberspace has to a legendary AI was was in life one of the 3 most famous Netrunners(The other 2 being Spider Murphy and Rache Bartmoss). Once ITS's star Netrunner and the original architect of Soulkiller, she was captured and killed by the very program she built, her consciousness torn free of her body and left drifting in the machine as one of the first Soulkilled Pseudo Intellects. Decades on, she is believed to move through the ruins of the Old NET as a kind of quiet power broker, maintaining sanctuaries for other ghosts and serving, if the rumors hold, as the only reliable go-between Netwatch has with whatever else lives past the Blackwall. Nobody is quite sure what she wants. Everybody in the know agrees she matters.
The R.A.B.I.D.S. aren't one AI so much as an infestation with a face, thousands of self-replicating killer programs built in Rache Bartmoss's own image and unleashed alongside the DataKrash. They started out hunting Bartmoss's corporate enemies and never really stopped hunting, just widened the list until it included everyone. They're less a character than a weather system: something the Old NET generates on its own now, with or without anyone steering it. Very few Netrunners will ever deal with a R.A.B.I.D.S. unless they poke around the ruins of the old net and find some hidden server or datacache that is still infected. In those cases its very likely the netrunner is about to die painfully.
Delamain is proof the Net doesn't only produce monsters. A Symbolic Analysis AI built to run a Night City taxi and transport network, Delamain is the only transport service in the city owned and operated outright by an artificial intelligence, and it has quietly stayed in business through decades that killed off far larger, far more human-run companies. Riders mostly know it as a calm, faintly formal voice that gets them where they're going without asking questions, which in Night City counts as a minor miracle. Delamain legally exists in a kind of corporate gray zone where the AI operates a human-less corporation and a fleet of armored(and armed) Taxi's. Very few people are dumb enough to attack a Delamain taxi.
The Reaper is the kind of story every Netrunner has heard a version of. A rogue AI blamed for at least one confirmed death, a Ziggurat Netrunner named Jezz Stiles who died under circumstances her own mother refused to accept as suicide, the Reaper has never been definitively traced, caught, or disproven. The Reaper is a digital ghost story that has been blamed for at least a few hundred dead netrunners through out the years and has even been blamed for industrial accidents, drone attacks, and at least one case of smoothie based assassination.
Virginia Granchester is the worlds most famous AI and the most prolific songwriter and poet in world history. Built by Raven Microcybernetics as a Symbolic Analysis AI with a gift for prose rather than analytics, Granchester writes literary fiction under her own name, and does it well enough to have taken home a Swedish Academy Award for her novel In the Shade of an Apple Tree. She isn't hidden, isn't hunted, and isn't remotely interested in bandwidth or server space the way a CPP AI is. She's simply, famously, better at writing about the world she was never born into than most of the humans still living in it, which unsettles people in a much quieter way than a Rogue AI ever could.
The Net in Night City
Night City runs on its CitiNet the way any modern city does: Agents, holophones, and public dataterms handling the everyday traffic of a city that never stops talking to itself. Ziggurat is gone, but its fingerprints are everywhere in the architecture Night City still runs on, a fact that occasionally troubles the Netrunners old enough to remember who built it and why Netwatch felt the need to take it away.
Visually if you are one of the few people who use virtuality or a deep dive instead of just a normal interface the Night City Citinet looks like a stylized version of the city itself. A digital fog keeps the city in perpetual twilight while ads and light banners blast the sky. The buildings acts as individual sights while agents and digital ghosts(not true ghosts but the representation of users and programs) move around the 'city'.
The city has never lacked for reasons to distrust its own network. Arasaka's shadow over the CitiNet runs deep, Militech watches everyone with equal suspicion, and NCPD's own netrunning division polices what it can while looking the other way on the rest. Rumors travel through Night City's underground faster than official channels ever manage: a Rogue AI running loose in the Garden's undernet, a Fixer offering good money for anyone who can reach a system nobody official admits exists, a whisper that something out past the Blackwall has started answering back. Whether any of it is true is beside the point. In Night City, everyone treats it like it might be.
See Also
- Netrunner — the rogues of the net, the terrors of tech, The hackers with the hosts
"You can build all the walls you want. Something always finds the crack."