Rache Bartmoss

Codename: GhostLord

“Running diaper-toting little pukes through netspace on a data raid! It’s amazing what boredom can drive you to.”

Since the first moment he could talk, Rache Bartmoss has been getting into someone’s face. Parents. Teachers. Employers. Other Runners. Governments. Entire nations. If there was a target out there trying to tell him what to do, Rache Bartmoss unerringly aimed for it like a homing missile.

Rache Bartmoss is a genuine legend; he’s busted into the toughest systems on earth and lived to brag about it. His programming rivals even Alt Cunningham’s, and she’s recognized to be the best ever. Most of the major dodges in Netrunning are his innovations, as are most of the hairiest stories; he’s fought Netwatch head to head and ten to one; explored the farthest regions of cyberspace, and has even (he claims) talked to the aliens who kidnapped Elvis, created the Carbon Plague, and taught the secrets of pyramid power to the Atlanteans.

Of course, over thirty years of determined Netbanging has also made Rache not a little schizoid. Even his best friend, Spider Murphy, has serious doubts about the sanity of anyone who stayed jacked in through the entire I-G Transformation of the Net in 2014, and then slammed his head against the wall for an hour afterwards because it was so frackin beautiful!

Rache’s last facedown was only two semantic degrees short of fatal; nailed by a particularly nasty type of black ice that placed his heart into continual fibrilla-tion, he barely managed to activate his cryogenic backup system in time. The result froze his body but left his hyperactive mind still aware and jacked into the ’face.

For the last seven years since his “death,” Rache has been an interested bystander watching the progression of the ISA, the Carbon Plague, and the rise of the Cybergeneration. Except for publishing his "posthumous’ memoirs (Rache Bartmoss’ Guide To The Net), Rache has had nothing but time on his hands. The high point in his life was when Alt’ Cunningham contacted him from the Ghost Town and asked him to handle the CyberRevolutions Intelligence operation. He accepted, not out of any desire to help the juvegangers (Rache dislikes children intensely), but to yank the ISA’s chain.

Alt’ has offered to clone Rache a new body, but he won’t hear of it. ‘Why would I want a body again? I barely used my old one when it was still warm. Right now, the whole damn Net’s my nervous system." is his usual reply. Instead, Alt has arranged to have an advanced low-temperature, superconductor cybermo-dem installed on Rache’s cryo-capsule. This allows the Ghost Lord (as other Netrunners and Wizards refer to him), to run the Net as fast as any Al.

As the grey shadow of the CyberRevolution, Rache Bartmoss gets to do what he likes most—break into secure systems and “liberate” the information. Sometimes he gives it to the Revolution to use in its campaigns against the ISA. Other times, he goes rogue and uses whatever he uncovers for his own heinous purposes; broadcasting the Vice President having sex with his mistress on Net-54’s international feed, piping old cartoons into all the data screens of CorpSec; wiping the main data bases of BuReLoc so that a hundred thousand ‘undesirables" are suddenly wiped off a purge list. Or putting the head of CorpSec on an assassination call sheet for ISA’s Agent teams (“These drips never bother to look at anything,” he groused when the hit team actually got three quarters into the op before realizing they were eliminating their boss).

Rache is also the most philosophical of the CyberRevo-lutionaries; probably because he has all the time in the world. He muses that there are probably a lot of deeper meanings to the structure of the CyberRevolu-tion; things that "only a bunch of dweeb professors with brains jacked like senile tubeworms into the Corporate-run sludgepit of Modern Academia will ever concern themselves with, and even then only at brain-dead cocktail parties filled with other living corpses of a decayed educational factory system? In his fevered cosmology, he sees Alt as a great earthmother icon overseeing the birth of a new species, John Silverhand as a risen redeemer come to lead the way, and Morgan as the force of dark reality and yin to John’s yang. Rache, of course, says he’s the old madman who squats at the end of the table yelling things no one else wants to hear. Or maybe some type of technoelectronic Holy Spirit descending on the unwary and plaguing them with visions.

It could be true. It’s also true that at this rate, Rache Bartmoss may be the one who eventually writes the history of the CyberRevolution simply because nobody else had the time.

In the meantime. Rache raids the Interface and plays homicidal Robin Hood games. He occasionally deigns to train young Wizards in the “higher” forms of Netrunning; more often, he leads them on wild and extremely dangerous incursions into towering black ice fortresses. He is the spiritual leader of the Revolution, because he thinks he can see the Big Picture.

If he’s right, Lord help us all.

To spread his brilliance to the masses he has created Roving Autonomous Bartmoss Interface Drones. You are (thankfully) much more likely to meet one of these than the real thing…