Bartmoss [ accidental ] death

[Dr. Pooper]

what if the emp charge that V and Panam used to down the Kang Tao AV also caused bartmoss’s cryo-freezer thing to stop working 👀

later on in game after you down the AV you hear about parts of the city losing power on the radio! if it was that strong to damage NC’s power grid no doubt it would have ♥♥♥♥♥♥ with the freezer and thats why theres still ice and the body hasnt decomposed

wow XD

[Alt]

Bartmoss "died" long time ago. Back in 2020s. He was stuck in the net because of heart failure. The hardware was supporting his low brain activity. For something like 15-20 years he was wreaking havoc on the net. Ruining every corporation's and netruner's day. Until they found him. THe reason why his body was dropped to that landfill so long after his death is because he paid for his electricity and living apartments for tens of years in advance. His lease just ended.

[Dr. Pooper]

Originally posted by Alt:

Bartmoss "died" long time ago. Back in 2020s. He was stuck in the net because of heart failure. The hardware was supporting his low brain activity. For something like 15-20 years he was wreaking havoc on the net. Ruining every corporation's and netruner's day. Until they found him. THe reason why his body was dropped to that landfill so long after his death is because he paid for his electricity and living apartments for tens of years in advance. His lease just ended.

yes Alt. everything can be explained by searching some terminals around the secondary quests but this does not explain the time range between "when they took Bartmoss" to 2077 because the body is not decomposed at all and there is still ice in the fridge.
you know, these are the typical answers a Corpos worker at NetWatch would give. do you work for them? xD

[Dr. Pooper]

Originally posted by Alt:

Bartmoss "died" long time ago. Back in 2020s. He was stuck in the net because of heart failure. The hardware was supporting his low brain activity. For something like 15-20 years he was wreaking havoc on the net. Ruining every corporation's and netruner's day. Until they found him. THe reason why his body was dropped to that landfill so long after his death is because he paid for his electricity and living apartments for tens of years in advance. His lease just ended.

who knows what lies beyond the BW, because Spider Murphy was talking about a Silverhand engram, I guess he already succeeded for Bartmoss. Cunningham has taken a different path but the place is the same

[LuckySeven]

Disregard most of what the game shows or says about Bartmoss. Most of it is misdirection. While the game implies that he died after the power in his fridge was cut, this is not what happened, and there's good reason to believe that the Bartmoss we encounter in-game is a body double.

The truth is that Bartmoss was killed way back in the 2020s, during the middle stages of the Fourth Corporate War. During the "Shadow War" stage of the fourth corporate, Militech had hired on Bartmoss to hack Arasaka and destroy their Soulkiller 2.5 master system. This did massive damage to Arasaka's systems and set their progress on Soulkiller 3.0 back a fair bit, while also (in typical Bartmoss fashion) managing to do a fair bit of collateral to Militech in the process.

Eventually, Arasaka would get fed up enough with his attacks that once they'd manage to trace his location, they'd send a squad of mercs (the players in this adventure) to his apartment to assassinate him. The mercs fight through a whole building full of civilians who have been (unbeknownst to them) hacked and programmed to defend Bartmoss' apartment from intruders, and makes their way to his room. In his room, they encounter a bunch of drones and robots that attack them in addition to Deathwish, Bartmoss' surprisingly lethal cyberkitty.

After fighting off all of the defenses, they are left trying to figure out where to go from there. Through whatever means, they'll eventually discover the apartment's fridge, which to their surprise, contains the shriveled and frozen (still living) body of Rache Bartmoss, the netrunner that's been giving them so much ♥♥♥♥.

They kill him, and moments later, a Rube Goldberg-esque set of bells, flags, and lights start going off, Beethoven's Ode to Joy starts BLASTING over the speakers in the apartment, confetti fires out of the ducts and all over the place, and a printer nearby spits out three pages.

The first page reads "Congratulations! I am now apotheosized! Expect changes under the new management."

The second reads "Learn to read English already. Arasaka today."

The third reads "Receipt: One Rache Bartmoss. Take your damn reward, but beware the fiscal tubeworms before they eat your brain with sharp prognathous jaws leaving nothing but flagellating orgiastic gleepods decomposing where your soul used to wrestle screaming against the chains which bound you to your pathetic Weltanschauung. Yes, of course that's a german word. I love Nietsche. So go smoke your Kimono."

In addition, a small arachnoid robot drops from the ceiling and hands the merc squad a high-density datachip, saying to them "Have a cookie. You have thirty seconds before the grand finale."

Unbeknownst to the squad, Bartmoss had the entire building rigged to implode, and thirty seconds after Bartmoss is killed in his fridge, the entire building implodes in on itself and kills the squad if they've not managed to escape. Bartmoss' corpse and fridge (which would likely have visible damage from the merc squad at least) would have ended up amongst the rubble, and the book even mentions that the merc squad would've had to have dug through it to find his corpse in order to collect the reward (ie; the undamaged, unshot, fridge and un-wounded un-shriveled Bartmoss don't really make sense).

FYI, the game mentions a mass driver being used to kill him, but this is because one of the other options in the tabletop for if the player merc squad failed on their mission was to mass driver his entire building to make sure he dies. This is because Bartmoss is supposed to die either way here as he sets off DataKrash, and that's a big part of why the bombing has to happen later, as Arasaka ends up being one of the only factions with a massive uncorrupted database by the war's end. At least until they get nuked anyhow.

The HD datachip the merc squad recovered contained extremely valuable data, particularly the details about the Fourth Corporate War, aka the OTEC-CINO War, and how it was all started by Eurobank manipulating the two smaller corporations into escalating their conflict over the acquisition of the bankrupt corp IHAG. This chip being taken by the merc squad here also explains why there's nothing on Bartmoss' cyberdeck in 2077. It's not the real one, and any valuable stuff would've been taken decades ago anyway.

Overall, Bartmoss died in the 2020s at the hands of Arasaka, and the one we see in game is likely one of his MANY body doubles. Just read the third page his printer spat out. The guy was extremely paranoid, hacked a whole apartment building to be his drones, and lived in a bloody fridge 24/7 so that he'd literally *never* have to touch grass. Using body doubles is 100% in his MO, in my opinion.

[Silverbane7]

@LuckySeven
Well, at least we know the cat survived. (Mike confermed that Nibbles is related to Deathwish)