“What do you think you are doing?” A domineering voice asked from behind Trace as he was looking through a box of processors.

He stuffed it in his duffel bag before turning to see who was talking to him. Standing there was a tall man with a shotgun pointed at his chest.

“I’m picking up a few items I had marked for myself earlier,” Trace told him readily. “I’m not entirely sure I like where you’re pointing that thing. You might want to change the location of that barrel.”

“I don’t recognize you. All of this belongs to those of us who stood up to the ‘Midway Gang’ and eliminated them. That doesn’t include you.”

“Are you sure about that?” Trace asked, far more calmly than he actually felt.

“Yeah, I am. Everyone who fought them lives around here. We were the ones being crushed under the heels of their boots, getting sucked dry as they stole all of our booze and other goods. Now some ignorant edger comes in and just starts grabbing whatever he wants.” The large man’s finger started sliding closer to the trigger. “Where were we when we needed your help?”

Faster than the untrained man could blink, Trace pulled out his CD-10 and shot him a single time in the foot.

The shotgun thundered a single time as the brute jerked it toward the ceiling. With his free hand, Trace reached out and yanked the shotgun from his hands.

“Being an edger is a job, you total gonk,” He snapped at the hobbled man. “Did any of you people ever think to post it with the job brokers? As for the other parts of what you said,” Trace leaned closer to the man. “I do live around here, and I was here yesterday. Is that understood?”

The man’s face paled as he finally understood what Trace was saying.

“Good, now I’m going to take my bag and leave.”

There was more that he would have liked to grab, a lot more, but it wasn’t worth the hassle it would have caused. He had gotten the server, and that was the main thing he needed at the moment. Everything else was simply things that would have been nice to have for in the future, not anything he had an immediate use for.

***

The stop at the gang building had taken longer than he originally planned for it too. However, it had also become an event all on its own instead of him simply checking out some damage as had originally been planned.

Still, he had gotten some goodies, so he wasn’t too annoyed with everything.

What he was annoyed with were all the new kids he saw climbing over the heaps of material in the junkyard. Further out, he could see the same thing happening in the unprocessed piles of trash at the landfill.

“What’s going on here? Where did all the street-meat come from?” Trace asked one of the older men he had encountered at the junkyard before. They had never exchanged names before, but they would help load each other’s vehicles or carts if they needed it.

He grunted and spat to the side. “Some corp bought out the buildings they were staying in and evicted them. Guess they are going to make a new megastructure in the location.”

Trace nodded in understanding. That was how he had originally discovered the junkyard himself. The building he had been squatting in was razed to the ground and he had followed some of the more experienced kids to it. All the metal and old cars provided plenty of protection until they could find a new spot to squat.

As long as they didn’t stay in the junkyard or landfill long-term, then people would turn a blind eye to them. After all, the adults who would be doing the complaining were often the same ones who had been in their position years before.

“I won’t be around for a while after this visit then,” He told the man. “I’ll get their help to find and load up on what I need. I have no desire to be around while they play their power games here.”

“You’re an edger now boy, you can afford to avoid this place. I can’t,” The older man said wearily, having seen this exact scenario play out too many times now.

“You best be careful, then. We both know how crazy things will be here for a while.”

An answering grunt was all he got in return as they went their separate ways. Trace hadn’t been joking when he told the old man he wouldn’t be back for a while after this run. The street-meat kids would have the run of the place for the next few weeks at least, and he had no desire to get entangled with any of that drama.

Trace waved a few kids over and together they began searching the area for usable sheet metal. Even with all of their help, it still took the rest of the day. By the time he left the junkyard, his truck was completely loaded down with metal, and all the kids who had helped him had thoroughly earned their pay.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Back at the warehouse, Trace unloaded what he could by virtue of pushing it out of the truck bed. With that done, he brought the duffel bag into the apartment and revealed the goods to Deckard, who was asleep at the moment.

With nothing better to do, Trace gathered up all the pieces that the scavs had been using for their setup and began putting it all together in the closet. He had enough wiped data prisms and unused data prisms by that point that storage wasn’t going to be an issue. Hopefully, the server itself was a decent one. The model looked fairly new, but that was all he could say about it.

As soon as the pieces finished going together, he plugged the machine into his desktop computer and turned them both on.

The computer could see the server, and the server could see a little over half of the data prisms. The rest needed to be reformatted for its specific file architecture. Once that was completed, he was looking at an absolute unit of empty space.

At least, that’s how it seemed in his mind. In reality, it was little more than enough for someone like Deckard to use for a project or two.

With that particular project finished, he sent off a message to Monroe, went through the enhanced teaching modules, and then went to sleep.

***

Trace had taken apart and been studying one of his spare scout rifle mods for over an hour when Monroe arrived the next day. He didn’t have any particular idea on what he wanted to do with it. Instead, he was merely using the opportunity to learn everything he could about how it worked.

Since it was a spare and a double, it didn’t particularly matter if he ruined it. As long as he got some value out of its destruction, he would be happy. Not that he wanted that to happen.

He let Monroe and van Black Betty inside the warehouse and showed him all the sheet metal he had managed to gather the day before.

“How much of the roof do you think you will be able to repair with all of this?”

The big man stepped over to his truck and looked over everything that was still in the truck bed, along with what he had pushed out onto the ground.

“If we’re just talking about patch jobs for the rust and holes, then this might be enough.” He rumbled, stressing the word. “The roof really needs more than that done, but I would say that is the absolute minimum.”

“Alright, you start on that then. When you’ve finished, we’ll talk about your truck.” Trace held up a hand, stalling him from saying anything. “I’m not saying we’re going to do it right now, but I’m open to the idea. We just have to do a few things together first.”

Monroe grinned, revealing several metal teeth on the same side as his cyberware arm. “That’s fine, as long as we get there in the end.”

Trace shook his head and went back to the table he had been working at. The mod was called a ‘Target Tracker’ at the same time that the targeting reticle would appear in his vision. Whatever he was aiming at would be marked in red. Even after he removed his finger from the trigger, the tracking would remain until he took another shot, or a minute had gone by. It was an interesting mod, and it did work through walls. That was actually the main reason he wanted to learn how it worked.

Most of the other vision-based mods he had seen didn’t work once they lost sight of the target.

What he had come up with so far was pretty much nothing.

It used some surprisingly advanced sensors, but that was it. However, he had seen more advanced models on mods that couldn’t manage what this one did. It was annoying, and ultimately beyond his ability to understand at the moment.

Trace put it all back together and stored it in a corner next to his projects for later. Maybe he would have Deckard go through the programming on it at some point. Surely, that would reveal something.

Inside the apartment, he found the braincase in question just about to finish up with his project of rewriting all the code for the 3D printer. While Deckard was asleep, Trace had run a second connection from the server to him. He was now able to backup everything he wanted. He could also access the net again through the server’s connection to the desk computer.

Deckard was strangely quiet when Trace entered the apartment and sat on the edge of his bed.

“My mother… She caused a lot of harm after she believed I died. Didn’t she?” The screen on the 3D printer was going through a series of diagnostics, as Deckard updated each piece in turn.

“Yeah, yeah, she did. Steel goddess Meredith -that’s what we call her these days- went berserk for a bit.” Trace relaxed onto his back and closed his eyes. “She completely closed off space to everyone but herself. Multiple World Wars happened, both because of her and outside of her. The world supposedly went from being some glorious utopia to the mess we have now.”

“All because of her,” Deckard said softly.

“I used to think that, you know? She was easy to blame. No one ever sees her. The goddess moniker is fitting, as she is practically a mythical being. Then I did meet her. It wasn’t even for very long, only a couple of minutes. And you know what I found instead of some mythical goddess? A distraught mother, one who had lost everything the day you were attacked. She may have facilitated our downfall, but the people who attacked you are the actual cause of all of this.”

The 3D printer beeped, and the head began to move up and down, then side to side as it cycled through its new boot-up sequence.

“I… need to think about things. This was never the plan. We wanted to help people. That was the entire purpose of Koarden Enterprises.” There was a moment of silence as Trace sat up to watch the printer finish whatever it was doing. “Alright, I believe it is ready. Can you grab a spare piece of electronics and put it in the intake tray?”

It was with some confusion that he went outside the apartment and grabbed something from a table. It had been beaten and deformed to the point where he couldn’t even guess at what it might have been.

Regardless, he gingerly dropped it into the intake module and stepped back. A series of lasers formed across its opening, cutting it into pieces. A little farther inside, there was another set of lasers placed in a grid that diced everything that came into contact with them. At the bottom, he could just barely see a glowing hopper that liquified the metal.

The printhead began to move as whatever program Deckard had ordered it to run began to process. A little at a time, they watched as a series of small blobs began to form at different points on the print plate.

“Hmm, it’s not perfect, yet,” Deckard announced after they had been watching it work for a minute. “But it does work, sort of.”

“What do you mean? What is it doing?”

“It’s sorting the metals of the item you put in there, obviously.” The avatar said smugly. “That pile is titanium, that one is gold, that tiny one palladium.”