Lore file / people
Rache Bartmoss
Rache Bartmoss was the legendary netrunner behind the R.A.B.I.D.S. dead-man system whose activation triggered the DataKrash and helped destroy the Old NET.
Source trace / documented lore
The central claim matches the linked lore sources. Archive styling is presentation, not additional canon.
Lore trace
Rache Bartmoss wanted the Net to make secrecy impossible.
He became one of the most capable and notorious netrunners of his era, targeting corporations he saw as systems of control. His final answer was a dead-man mechanism: if the corporations killed him, his autonomous programs would open their datafortresses anyway.
Those programs were the R.A.B.I.D.S.
A weapon that outlived the operator
Bartmoss designed the R.A.B.I.D.S. to breach protected corporate systems and release their information onto the public Net.
He did not live to control what happened after activation.
The programs propagated beyond their intended mission, spreading through the Old NET, damaging infrastructure and contributing to the release of powerful artificial intelligences. Their activation became the trigger for the DataKrash.
Why he appears in this archive
Bartmoss was not an Arasaka Soulkiller engineer.
The connection is code lineage: Cyberpunk RED describes the R.A.B.I.D.S. as being based on a twisted version of Soulkiller.
That makes Bartmoss a crucial branch in the archive's family tree. Alt's breakthrough showed that software could operate directly on neural and engramic structures. Arasaka turned that breakthrough into capture and custody. Bartmoss took related ideas in another direction and built autonomous attackers for the Net itself.
The two stories collide in the same ruined cyberspace.
The legacy nobody could roll back
The DataKrash was not a temporary outage. It changed the architecture of the world.
The Old NET became too dangerous to restore as one global system. Corporations withdrew into private networks. NetWatch eventually built the Blackwall to contain the regions humanity could not reclaim.
Bartmoss died.
His code kept running.
Recovered machine layer
What the archive thinks it recovered
The block below is written as recovered Arasaka-era data. Corruption and Keeper annotations are interface fiction unless the sourced lore trace explicitly confirms the claim.
Source trace & provenance
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