“Yeah, I, uh, need some body armor. Nothing bulky, but it needs to be able to withstand light arms fire. Also, do you have any holsters for a larger revolver and ammunition in this caliber?” He placed down one of the massive revolver rounds.

The clerk whistled in appreciation. “A seven-hundred Magnum. I haven’t seen one of those in a while.”

Picking it up, Trace was indeed able to see a ‘.700 Magnum’ printed around the rim of the casing. With how shaky his eyes had been before, he had completely missed it, and the box had no markings on it.

“No wonder you want a larger revolver holster, if you have something capable of firing one of those.” The large man turned around and began looking through his inventory. “I have three holsters here fitted for revolvers. I’m not sure if any of them are big enough though.” He put them in the pass-through chute and let Trace try them out.

It only took him a few moments to determine that all three were too small. The last one was close but was still too tight in the end.

“I’ll keep my eyes open, but it’ll be a matter of luck for something that size. Same for the ammo. I see some come through here occasionally, but not often.”

It was disappointing, but ultimately understandable. They exchanged details so he could message Trace if something showed up.

A few minutes later, he walked out of the store wearing a body armor vest. It was lightweight, with self-healing synthfibers, and had cost four hundred credits. It was enough to make him want to cry, but at least his chest and back were now better protected.

Another fifty credits had gotten him a second extended magazine for the semi-auto on his hip.

Both purchases hurt, but he was feeling better for them. He would need to practice his shooting at some point in the near future though, otherwise, word would quickly get around about how bad of a shot he was.

Walking down the street, he sent a message to Jonas the Slick asking if he still wanted the items from the job. Trace really didn’t want to deal with the man, but he also didn’t want to gain a reputation for flaking on jobs. He doubted that would happen, especially if it were coming from someone like Jonas the Slick… There was a certain mental component to it as well.

He had completed the job; he needed to turn it in. Otherwise, it would be easier to not do so the next time, and then again, the time after that. Some things were a slippery slope, and for him, this was one of them. Not that he necessarily wanted the items, he just didn’t want to deal with Jonas or life in general at the moment.

Unfortunately, he didn’t have the funds or ability to ignore jobs from job brokers that he didn’t like or that were less than trustworthy. So, he needed to keep a tight leash on that side of himself, at least until he could tell them all to frack-off.

May that day come soon.

Jonas the Slick returned his message with his usual meeting spot and a time that had Trace jogging to meet it.

The job broker was looking rather frazzled when Trace entered the restaurant. His tofu burger and seaweed fries had hardly been touched and looked to have been sitting there for a while.

Trace slid onto the bench opposite the man, pulling his courier bag around to his front. “We going to talk about you trying to get me killed or what?”

The man glared at him and wiped his sweaty hands on the front of his usually impeccably kept if worn suit. This was the first time Trace had ever seen Jonas use it as a napkin, or for it to have creases in it.

“All jobs have risks, you know that.”

“And part of your job as intelligence gathering was ensuring that I would have a free window in which to operate. A timeframe that the scavs would be out of the den for the entire time I was in there!” Trace hissed back. “Failing that, you should have had someone on overwatch to message me that they were returning. Was the pay for this job that low, or are you set on skimming that much from each one?”

Jonas the Slick’s face went red with anger as Trace hit a nerve with that last accusation.

Trace scoffed. “Really? Your broker fees aren’t enough already, you have to skim even more off the top? How much from each job have you been taking? Thirty percent, forty percent, more?”

Jonas’ face continued to redden despite him not saying anything in his defense.

“Whatever, just pay me for the job, and I’ll give you the items that were requested,” Trace said, suddenly tired of dealing with the man.

A payment for three hundred credits, almost three times what he was expecting, suddenly entered his account. In disgust, Trace reached into his pack and retrieved the items for the job, placing them each on the table in turn. He wanted there to be no question that each item had been delivered.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

With that out of the way, he stalked out of the restaurant and began stomping his way toward the junkyard. Each thump of his booted feet jarring his recently healed legs, the pain giving him something else to focus on.

By the time he had reached the junkyard, he had run through some of the sensor-suite functions in his eyes. There were a lot of them, and many of them depended on secondary items to function properly, as they weren’t wholly independent sensors.

The ‘Smart Sensors’, for instance, connected to anything he wore or used, such as the ammo counter or a targeting reticle on his guns. The ‘Wearable Sensors’ were meant to connect to his clothes and any other items with a diagnostic or sensor feature attached to it. At the moment, that only included his new armor vest.

There was a host of other sensor features that he understood nothing about as well. However, the one he was most interested in was the ‘Active Sensor’ that had a ‘Search and Rescue’ function. It took some tweaking, but he was able to modify it to locate certain items by their shape. The best part was when he did that it automatically created a new entry in the menu for the item as ‘Search and Rescue 2’. Which left the original version completely unmodified.

With this new setting, as soon as he entered the junkyard, he set it to scan for five items with recognizable shapes. Each one had the potential for differing amounts of titanium. Unfortunately, they also resembled several other items. He would need to find one of each item first and scan them specifically. Until then, there was a very large chance that he would keep coming across items that merely looked similar.

The scan would record all the dimensions of the item and remove that possibility.

The next hour was spent with him, going up and down the various rows of the junkyard. He couldn’t run the scan constantly, otherwise he would drain the auxiliary-system functions too quickly. He had to be more judicious in its use, as the wireless charging modules in each of his cyberware augments could only do so much.

One of the next modifications he needed to make was a dedicated wireless charging array. It was basically a glorified antenna that ran along the spine, or wherever else you wanted it. But it boosted the wireless energy that was being broadcasted everywhere and then let him direct it to specific augments more effectively.

No matter what, it meant that during the next hour; he spent a lot of time picking up items and then throwing them back into the pile. Each one of them had matched one of the five vague descriptions he had fed the scanner before. None of them were quite right though.

A few of them did have titanium, either as part of their shell or used inside them. Those pieces he kept to bring back to the apartment.

Finally, he found one of the actual items he had been looking for and was able to scan it directly. After that, everything began to move quicker, as he now had a proper model of one of the items. Every time that particular item was found, it was highlighted in green for him, instead of the normal yellow.

When he finished two hours later, the duffel bag had been filled to overflowing. He was not looking forward to the walk back to the apartment due to how much it weighed, either. However, he had managed to find and scan another of the five items he had originally set it to search for.

Trace knew he still had to get some food, both for himself and the braincase, but at the moment, he wanted nothing more than to simply go back to the apartment. He was hot, sweaty, covered in grease and grime, and all his injuries hurt!

Those stupid nanites had better make all of this effort worth it.

At least buying from the junkyard was cheap, not as cheap as grabbing it from the trash heap. Still, it didn’t bite into his funds too badly. He had more than enough credits left over to buy food and nutrient mix. The best part is he didn’t even need to skimp on what sort of food he was going to buy for himself for once. That meant there wouldn’t be endless lines of ‘food-in-a-can’ in his future. The things might be cheap, and filling, frack-it, they weren’t even bad tasting most of the time. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to trust them. He always felt a little off after drinking them for too many days in a row.

Back at the apartment, he laid everything out on the table and made a couple of quick trips to the trash chute. The crate was looking much emptier after those trips, and while you weren’t exactly supposed to dump loose trash down the chute, plenty of people did. At least his trash was still mostly self-contained. He pitied whoever had to clean up the loose boxes of takeout and other moldering remains down below.

If there was even someone who had that job, for all he knew, they might just let it all pile up until it filled a truck bed and then haul it out. Actually, that made a certain amount of sense as well, now that he was thinking about it. Have a large compacting container down there and then simply swap them out whenever it gets too full.

Shaking his head, Trace went back to the stack of new items he had just retrieved from the junkyard.

A small smile lit up his face as he began to take them all apart. His old screwdriver whirring as the motor in it struggled to turn the seized screws. The soldering iron he had brought back from the dead with its terrible tip smoked more than usual as he removed one component after another.

This was fun for him; it was cathartic in a way. It was something that he understood and enjoyed learning more about. There was something about it that just made sense to him in a way little else about life ever had. If he was lucky, maybe someday he would learn enough about how modern tech worked that it would actually be useful.

He wouldn’t be trying to repair any of these. They were strictly destined for the scrap heap and nothing more. He was collecting useful parts, and any titanium he found, that was it.

Unlike the night before, the pile of titanium was much more respectable in size this time around when he finished. He had specifically chosen these pieces because of their high titanium content. High being relative in this case, as it was still less than a percent of each item’s overall weight. It was frustrating and time-consuming, but that was where numbers came into play.

Sure, it was a minuscule amount of titanium that he removed from each one. However, when there were forty of them, seventy… then it became another story entirely. Of course, the pile also ballooned in size because of all the other metals attached to those pieces.

He couldn’t help it. The only way he knew to cleanly separate them was with heat, and he didn’t have a forge.

What he did have was soap and soda to clean them all with in preparation for being shoved down his throat later.