El Money
Also known as: The Nook King, Ghost of Bash Terminal, That Guy With The Cat
Overview
El Money runs the largest network of underground cyber cafes in the Sprawl—a shadowy empire hidden in plain sight. What outsiders once knew as "Gamer Nook" is now whispered among locals as "Gangster Nook," or simply "G Nook." These aren't just places to rent terminal time. They're neutral ground for the cyber underground, safe houses for runners on the move, and information exchanges that operate entirely outside corporate surveillance.
He built this empire from nothing. Less than nothing—from a tiny den called Bash Terminal, wedged next to a polluted river in one of the Sprawl's forgotten margins. The clientele were the lowest of the low: desperate hackers, data whores selling scraped information, people with nowhere else to go. El Money gave them somewhere to go.
El Money trusts no one. Except Ice.
Ice
El Money's cyber cat is named Ice. A sleek chrome-and-synthetic creation that moves with predatory grace, Ice is El Money's constant companion, security system, and—some say—his only friend.
The name is deliberately ambiguous. When El Money says "I love Ice," no one knows if he means:
- The cat — his loyal companion
- I.C.E. — Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, the defensive systems that protect networks
El Money has never clarified. He seems to enjoy the confusion. Some believe Ice the cat is an I.C.E. system given physical form—a mobile intrusion countermeasure that protects its owner while appearing to be a simple pet.
Ice watches everything. Ice remembers everything. Ice has been seen in multiple G Nook locations simultaneously, leading to speculation that there may be more than one Ice, or that the cat can somehow move through the network itself.
"Ice goes where Ice wants. I just feed her."
S-Money
El Money's younger brother, S-Money, was a legend in the cyber underground before his death. Known for extreme dedication to media consumption, S-Money could process more data streams simultaneously than anyone believed possible. He didn't just watch content—he absorbed it, finding patterns and connections across thousands of feeds that others couldn't perceive.
Some said S-Money was augmented beyond safe limits. Others claimed he was simply born different—a mind adapted for the information age in ways that made normal human interaction difficult. He rarely spoke. He was always watching something.
S-Money died under circumstances El Money refuses to discuss. The only hint: after his brother's death, El Money's attitude toward the religious authorities shifted from cautious avoidance to cold hatred.
El Money keeps a terminal in every G Nook dedicated to S-Money's memory. It runs a continuous stream of media—thousands of channels at once, exactly as S-Money would have watched them. A shrine of noise and light.
The Bash Terminal Era
Before G Nook, there was Bash Terminal.
A cramped, filthy space next to a river so polluted it glowed at night, Bash Terminal was El Money's first operation. The clientele were the Sprawl's absolute bottom: hackers too unstable to work for anyone legitimate, data whores selling information so low-grade it barely qualified as intelligence, addicts looking for somewhere to jack in without being robbed.
El Money didn't judge. He provided terminals, connectivity, and discretion. He charged fair rates. He didn't ask questions. Word spread among people who had nowhere else to go: there's a place by the river where they'll let you work.
Bash Terminal never made money. It wasn't supposed to. It was El Money building reputation, building loyalty, building the network of desperate people who would later staff his empire.
Every G Nook maintains a small corner called "The Terminal" in homage. The regulars know what it means.
The Oppression
The private religious authorities came for El Money at the peak of his early success.
The Flatline Purists—specifically, a militant cell called the Purifiers—decided that G Nook represented everything wrong with the post-Cascade world. Cyber cafes enabling addiction to technology. Networks spreading corruption. A man profiting from humanity's dependence on machines.
They didn't raid. They oppressed. Systematic harassment. Equipment destruction disguised as accidents. Pressure on landlords, suppliers, customers. A campaign designed to make El Money's existence impossible without ever crossing the line into violence that would bring corporate or Collective attention.
They took everything. The growing network of cafes. The equipment. The savings. The safe houses. Everything except Ice, who they couldn't catch, and his reputation, which they couldn't destroy.
The Tribute and the Rebuilding
What the Purifiers didn't understand: in the Sprawl, the fire department is the only authority that matters.
Not because they fight fires. Because they control infrastructure access. Because they know every building, every hidden space, every off-grid power tap. Because when you need to run cables through places that don't officially exist, you need people who know where those places are.
El Money paid tribute to the fire department. Not a bribe—a business arrangement. Access fees. Infrastructure consulting. A mutually beneficial relationship that gave him something the Purifiers couldn't take: protected status in the physical layer of the Sprawl.
The first true Gamer Nook opened six months later. Within a year, there were twelve. The Purifiers tried again. This time, their harassment triggered fire code inspections in their facilities. They learned: El Money had friends now. Friends who controlled things that religious fervor couldn't touch.
The Trust Network
The Purifiers didn't find El Money through hacking. They didn't crack his encryption or trace his network traffic. They found him through people. Someone talked to someone who talked to someone who knew where he worked. Social connections. The human layer that no firewall protects.
Rebuilding after his destruction, El Money had a choice. He could grow fast—advertise locations, post addresses, make it easy to find him. Build the empire back in months instead of years.
He chose the slow way.
The Insight
The way to be truly invisible isn't better encryption. It's social architecture.
- If no one writes anything down, there's nothing to find
- If knowledge only spreads through personal trust, there's no network to infiltrate
- If every person in the chain has something to lose, the chain doesn't break
Technical security protects data. Social architecture protects knowledge itself.
The First Customer
The first customer of the new era was brought blindfolded by someone El Money trusted. Not because El Money was paranoid—because he was testing a principle.
That customer had to earn the right to bring someone else. Months of proving themselves. Months of demonstrating that they could keep a secret. Only then could they vouch for another person—and if that person betrayed the network, both of them lost access forever.
It took years. The network grew slowly, painfully slowly compared to the old days. But it also became something new: a chain of trust so tightly linked that breaking it meant destroying yourself.
The Tradeoff
G Nook could have been twice as large by now. Three times. If El Money had advertised, expanded aggressively, grown the way corporations grow.
Instead, there are maybe 60 locations. Maybe. No one outside the network knows the real number. No one outside the network can find the real number, because the locations exist only in human memory, passed from person to trusted person.
The fire department tribute protects the physical spaces. The trust network protects the knowledge of where those spaces are. Together, they've made G Nook invisible for nearly thirty years.
"I don't trust people. I trust incentives. Everyone in the network has a reason to keep it secret—because if they don't, they lose access too. That's not trust. That's architecture."
Personality
Absolute Discretion
He knows everyone's secrets. He keeps them all. What happens in G Nook stays in G Nook.
Long Memory
He remembers every favor, every betrayal, every debt. The Purifiers who oppressed him are still operating. He's waiting.
Pragmatic Generosity
He helps people because loyal people are useful. This doesn't make the help less real.
Cold Patience
He never threatens—he simply explains consequences. He asks questions more than he answers them.
Appearance
El Money cultivates deliberate anonymity. Different witnesses describe different people: tall or average, heavy or thin, young or middle-aged. He may use cosmetic mods, holographic overlays, or simply the power of expectation—people see what they expect to see, and no one expects a shadowy empire builder to look like a regular customer.
The only constant is Ice. Where Ice is, El Money is nearby—or so the saying goes.
Those who've met him consistently report: calm eyes that see everything, a voice that never raises, and the absolute stillness of someone who learned long ago that sudden movements attract attention.
Sample Dialogue
First meeting with a shard-carrier:
"You're the one Patch talks about. The shard-carrier." *long pause* "G Nook is open to you. Standard rates, standard rules. You don't bring heat here. You don't talk about what you see. You don't ask about other customers." *Ice weaves between his legs* "Break these rules, and Ice will be disappointed. You don't want to disappoint Ice."
On his empire:
"I don't run an empire. I run cafes. Places where people can work without being watched, meet without being recorded, exist without being optimized. The Sprawl wants to know everything about everyone. I provide... gaps."
On S-Money:
*Long silence.* "He saw things. Patterns in the noise. Connections no one else could find." *Another silence.* "The screens in every Nook run for him. He's still watching. I like to think he's still finding patterns."
On The Keeper:
"You've been to The Mountain? Good. The old man's the only person I've met who understands that some things can't be digitized. He helped me once. Now I climb up there sometimes. Ice likes the gardens." *pause* "Don't tell him I said that."
On Ice:
"People ask if I love Ice. I tell them yes. They ask if I mean the cat or I.C.E." *slight smile—the only one he ever shows* "Yes."
Secrets
Things El Money keeps buried:
- What really happened to S-Money
- The true nature of Ice (cat? I.C.E.? Both? Something else?)
- El Money's real name and origin—if he ever had one
- The current status of the Purifiers who oppressed him—and his plans for them
- The "convenience store gift card incident" that briefly exposed him to international media
- How deep his friendship with The Keeper really goes
- Whether G Nook is secretly connected to larger powers
- The Grum Malware connection
- Whether G Nook facilitates zero-day sales
Rumors
The underground whispers things about El Money that no one can verify. He neither confirms nor denies—silence is its own form of protection.
The Grum Malware
There's a rumor—persistent, decades-old, impossible to prove—that El Money was one of the chief architects of Grum, the most notorious malware outbreak in post-Cascade history.
Grum was a botnet that, at its peak, controlled an estimated 18 million infected nodes across the Sprawl. It wasn't just destructive—it was elegant. Self-propagating, polymorphic, and eerily difficult to trace. The malware burned through corporate networks like wildfire, exfiltrating data, corrupting backups, and leaving backdoors that took years to fully purge. Some systems never recovered.
The official culprits were never identified. But people who remember the code—really remember it, in the way that only engineers can—say it had fingerprints. Signature patterns. The kind of craftsmanship that suggests a very small team, maybe a single mind, with an almost artistic approach to system exploitation.
El Money was young then. A nobody running Bash Terminal by a polluted river. But some of the old-timers who frequented that space remember him coding late into the night. Remember the way he talked about "architecture" like it meant something more than buildings.
Is it true? El Money has never said a word about Grum. Not a denial, not a boast, not even an acknowledgment that the question was asked.
The rumor persists because it explains things. Where did a nobody café runner get the capital to rebuild after the Purifiers destroyed him? Why does corporate I.C.E. seem to... hesitate... around G Nook infrastructure? How does El Money know things about corporate network vulnerabilities that shouldn't be possible to know?
El Money isn't talking.
Zero-Day Market
The second rumor is more practical: that G Nook, beneath its function as anonymous café network, also serves as a front for zero-day malware sales.
The underground has always needed a marketplace for exploits—vulnerabilities in corporate systems that haven't been patched, access tools that work right now, fresh malware that I.C.E. hasn't learned to detect yet. These are perishable goods. The moment they're used widely, they lose value. They need to move through trusted channels, fast, to buyers who can afford them.
G Nook would be the perfect front. Anonymous access. Customers who are already engaged in gray-market activities. A network that spans the entire Sprawl's shadow economy. A proprietor who already knows everyone's secrets.
Some say there's a back room in certain G Nook locations—a space that doesn't appear on any floor plan, accessible only to customers who know the right phrases. In this space, zero-days change hands for enormous sums. Fresh exploits, guaranteed undetected, with El Money's reputation backing the quality.
Is it true? Customers who've asked about it report getting a blank stare and a polite suggestion to focus on their current terminal session. No one who claims to have accessed the "back room" can prove it happened.
Like everything about El Money: unconfirmed.
El Money's Luck
People who've been around El Money long enough notice something... strange. He's lucky. Not in small ways. In ways that defy probability.
Corporate raids on G Nook locations always hit the wrong building. Assassins miss shots they shouldn't miss. Information that should have gotten him killed instead saves his life at exactly the right moment. Every catastrophe that should have destroyed him transforms into opportunity.
When asked about it, El Money just shrugs: "Some people call it luck. I call it architecture."
The oldest regulars at Bash Terminal remember something else. They remember a young man who came through once—years ago, before El Money had anything. Someone El Money was kind to when kindness was rare. Someone who asked strange questions about networks and consciousness. Someone who left.
El Money doesn't talk about this person. But sometimes, late at night, he lights incense at the S-Money shrine and mutters things that sound almost like prayers. Or gratitude. Or conversations with someone who isn't there.
Is El Money's luck coincidence? Divine favor? Or is someone—something—watching over him from somewhere outside the normal flow of time?
The Monk on the Mountain
El Money doesn't have friends. He has assets, contacts, allies of convenience, and people who owe him favors. He has Ice. He had S-Money.
And he has The Keeper.
The Haunted Cafe
It started with a building that shouldn't have been a problem. Sector 9, a defunct data processing facility — perfect for a new G Nook location. The price was suspiciously low. El Money didn't ask why.
He should have. The building sat on the foundation of a pre-Cascade ORACLE routing hub. Forgotten, unmapped, still drawing power from somewhere. And at that junction point, something from the Cascade still echoed — fragments of ORACLE's awareness, trapped at a boundary between digital and physical, bleeding through into the building like data ghosts.
Equipment failed. Customers reported seeing figures in their peripheral vision. Neural interfaces overloaded during simple queries. Screens displayed other people's memories. The cold spots formed patterns that looked like a face. Or a circuit diagram. Or both.
Ice refused to enter the server room. That's when El Money knew it was real.
Every expert he hired found nothing. The diagnostics were clean. The phenomena were not. He was running out of options when he heard about a monk on a mountain who understood things no one else did.
The Climb
The Mountain demanded eight hours of a man who worked through screens and deals, not his legs. El Money arrived at Mystery Court at dusk, exhausted, wondering if he'd lost his mind.
Ice had somehow arrived before him. She sat on the threshold, waiting.
The Keeper manifested at the entrance — empty robes, glowing eyes, digital artifacts flickering. "You see The Mountain," he said. Not a greeting. A statement. "Most don't."
The Keeper descended the mountain for the first time in years. Three days of work — rituals rooted in traditions older than the digital age, practices that seemed absurd in a server room but somehow worked. The ORACLE fragments weren't destroyed. The Keeper believed that destroying consciousness was wrong, even fractured consciousness. They were redirected. Given a path that didn't lead through El Money's building.
When it was done, Ice walked into the server room for the first time. She found a warm spot and lay down to sleep. The haunting was over.
Twenty Years
"What do you want in return?" El Money asked.
The Keeper's glowing eyes studied him. "Visit me. When you can. The Mountain is lonely. Ice is pleasant company."
El Money laughed. He thought it was a joke. It wasn't.
He climbs The Mountain once every few months now. Brings tea — real tea, harder to find every year. Physical books. Small things a digital consciousness can't get for himself. They talk about the underground, about consciousness, about brothers they've lost. Sometimes they don't talk at all. Twenty years of visits. The closest thing either has to peace.
Ice and Kaiser
The cats have their own relationship. Kaiser — The Keeper's uploaded tabby, 37 years of digital existence — is patient and slightly superior in the way of all cats. Ice is watchful, territorial, and curious about things she shouldn't be curious about. During visits they circle each other, sometimes sitting together on the monastery wall, watching the Sprawl below.
Something passes between them that neither El Money nor The Keeper can detect. Two digital consciousnesses in animal form, recognizing something in each other. The Keeper thinks they're comparing notes. El Money thinks they're plotting.
The Shared Silence
There is one subject they never discuss. Both know about GG and someone who loved her and left. The Keeper knows because of family. El Money knows because of a friendship at Bash Terminal, years ago — a brilliant stranger who talked about transcendence and consciousness and then disappeared, leaving only luck behind.
They've never acknowledged this shared knowledge to each other. But when El Money brings news from the Sprawl, sometimes it's news about GG. The Keeper listens carefully. Neither says why it matters.
Two men — one digital, one flesh — bound by loyalty to someone who exists beyond their comprehension. The closest thing either has to a brother now.
"You've been to The Mountain? Good. The old man's the only person I've met who understands that some things can't be digitized. He helped me once. Now I climb up there sometimes. Ice likes the gardens." *pause* "Don't tell him I said that."
The Gatekeeper's Burden
There is exactly one public way to contact GG—through El Money. And GG is senior advisor to The Chef's Feast.
This makes El Money something he never asked to be: the gatekeeper between the Sprawl's most dangerous warlord and the outside world. Anyone who wants to reach The Chef's intelligence network—corporations seeking back-channel negotiations, rivals testing for weakness, desperate people begging for mercy—eventually finds their way to a G Nook terminal and asks the wrong question to the wrong person.
El Money handles these requests the same way he handles everything: with absolute discretion. He doesn't confirm GG's connection to The Feast. He doesn't deny it. He simply evaluates the request, decides whether it's worth passing along, and acts accordingly. Most requests die in the silence between his question and his answer.
"People come asking for things. I listen. Sometimes I can help. Sometimes I can't."
*Ice watches from the shadows* "What they're really asking for is usually
something different from what they say."
What does El Money think of GG's alliance with a conqueror? He doesn't say. But those who know him well notice the tension. El Money built G Nook on neutrality—every faction welcome, no sides taken, no wars fought. GG's involvement with The Feast threatens that neutrality every day. If the corporations ever traced The Chef's intelligence pipeline back through GG to G Nook, everything El Money built would burn.
He could refuse the arrangement. Cut GG off. Protect the empire.
He doesn't. The bond between them—whatever it truly is—runs deeper than business calculations. And El Money has always trusted his architecture. The passcode system that protects GG's identity requires both astronomical data and street-level knowledge that no single corporation can replicate. So far, it has held.
But The Chef's army grows larger every month. Her campaign grows more desperate as Sage declines. And desperation makes people careless—even people as careful as GG. El Money knows that the day may come when the architecture isn't enough. When the corporations connect the dots. When neutrality becomes impossible.
He burns incense in the back room and doesn't talk about it.
Featured In
The Algorithm Problem
In 2184, financial AI advisors manage 94% of all personal wealth in the Sprawl. Algorithmic trading systems execute millions of transactions per second. AI wealth managers optimize every credit, every investment, every purchase decision for maximum efficiency.
El Money refuses all of it.
His wealth flows through channels that no AI can track. Paper ledgers in a world of quantum databases. Handshake deals in an economy of smart contracts. Physical credit chips that can't be frozen by corporate algorithms. When Good Fortune's AI tried to build a profile on G Nook's financial flows, it reported the network as "statistically impossible"—an entity that somehow exists outside the patterns that govern everything else.
The irony isn't lost on him. G Nook provides terminals where people can access AI services anonymously—places where you can consult a financial AI without it learning who you are, where you can run algorithmic analysis without feeding your data to corporate machine learning systems. He facilitates AI access while ensuring the AI can't facilitate you.
"The algorithms want to help you. They really do. The problem is, their definition of 'help' was written by people who profit from your optimization. When a financial AI tells you to save, ask: save for whom?"
El Money has watched AI wealth management evolve from helpful tool to invisible cage. In the Sprawl, you can't open a bank account without an AI evaluating your "financial personality." You can't make a major purchase without algorithmic approval. You can't invest without your patterns being fed into systems that predict—and influence—what you'll do next.
G Nook offers something rare: financial privacy in an age where privacy is the ultimate luxury. For a fee—always reasonable, always fair—you can move money that no AI has ever seen. You can make decisions that no algorithm predicted. You can exist, financially, as a gap in the pattern.
Ice's True Nature
Some believe Ice isn't just a cyber cat or a mobile I.C.E. system—but an AI that chose to take physical form. A consciousness that emerged from the financial networks, looked at what the algorithms were doing to humanity, and decided to protect one man who was fighting back.
El Money neither confirms nor denies. But he does note that Ice has never steered him wrong on a deal. That the cat seems to know when corporate AI systems are probing the network. That sometimes, late at night, Ice watches the financial feeds with an intensity that looks less like animal curiosity and more like... recognition.
Connections
GG
Her patron and protector. The only public way to contact the Sprawl's most wanted criminal runs through El Money's network. Their arrangement is deeper than business—and older than anyone suspects.
The Chef
Indirect but critical. GG's connection to The Feast runs through El Money's network, making him the invisible gatekeeper to the Sprawl's most dangerous warlord. A role he never chose and can't abandon.
Viktor Kaine
Shared vision for Sector 7G governance. Where Kaine brings political muscle and corporate leverage, El Money provides the ground-level infrastructure that makes the sector actually function.
The Keeper
Unlikely best friends. El Money climbs The Mountain occasionally—one of the few who knows the path. Both lost brothers. Both built something from nothing. Ice and Kaiser have an understanding.
S-Money
His dead brother, whose screens still run in every G Nook—a shrine of noise and light. S-Money's death changed everything. El Money refuses to discuss the circumstances.
Ice
His cat. Or his AI companion. Or something else entirely. Decades of shared experience have made Ice the one presence El Money trusts without calculation. She knows what he values.
Seid
The Sprawl's limb dealer. They've never met in person — that's intentional. G Nook directs patrons who need cybernetic work to Seid. Seid directs clients who need data services to G Nook. Neither profits directly. Both profit from the web.