Theodore "Teddy" Elvis Helmann had a scrap yard that people came from miles around to look in. The business was pretty good, good enough he had to hire a number of guards even though he would have much preferred to just sit quietly in his junkyard and play with his toys.

As a scrapper, Teddy went out into the world and found remnants of the old world and took them apart. That was a very concise and clean thing to tell people, and it didn't make him sound like he had blood on his hands, but people always seemed to see things in his eyes when he spoke to them, things that scared them. As long as it ended the conversation, Teddy didn't care.

He didn't like going out to find his collection of Pandora's Boxes. That part of the job was awful. Actually cracking them open, though, that was fun.

His last sortie had only given him one, but this one was enough. Archons had "levels", which from a certain point of view was just a number, but that number determined how much equipment was in their thing, their pandora's box. The higher the number, the bigger the power source, the more racks of computers, and the more ansibles would be found inside. Each of those things was a prize for someone. Most Archons you found didn't go above a Level 4, and those were very rare.

This girl had been a 6, which Teddy honestly wasn't sure he'd heard of before. He wished she were alive so he could learn her story, find out what happened, but well, if anyone knew how to crack open the data stored on these Archon computers, they didn't tell him.

Teddy was mulling it over in his head as he rode back through the gates of his compound. The guards all offered him a salute, and every salute was different; Teddy had insisted they each do something, but he didn't care what. It was something of a security challenge, since the guards had come to know each others' salutes, and you weren't supposed to use anyone else's. If you saw someone new using an old salute, there was probably a problem.

There had been a few problems. That's why he had guards.

His hover sled slipped easily down the ramp into his underground lair. Beacons in the sled confirmed his identity and let the doors open for him, then close after him. The tech was neat, and he enjoyed putting things like that together. Tech from the before time fascinated him, as much because it was forbidden as anything. Oh, the Administrators wouldn't kill him for having it--they even knew where he'd gotten the things--but they wouldn't tell him anything and they wouldn't make anything new, for anyone. He was also pretty clear on the fact that they were constantly monitoring what he did find, and he was okay with them taking shit he found if they didn't want him to have it. That had happened once. He still wasn't exactly sure the difference; all he knew was that the dead guy had been dressed real nicely, and the data tag on his box, his thing, was different.

In any case, this girl was normal, just high level. When his sled came to a stop, Teddy hopped off and approached his workspace. It was not a pretty thing, but it worked: a giant empty wheel in the middle of his workshop with a hole on a pedestal. Teddy sidled on up to the pedestal and deposited the level six Box into the hole, giving it the proper commands to make it open up.

In the middle of the wheel, a spark of light appeared. This pinprick opening expanded pretty quickly, but not too fast--the faster it moved, the more static electricity it generated, which sparked against the edges of the wheel. Those were very powerful bolts, and the only reason they didn't sound like thunder was because they didn't have far to go. That's why, especially to start, he had to go really slow, only speeding up when the portal was almost filling the frame.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

The world on the other side was normal, for this kind of thing. Pocket dimensions were designed with a "down", but they had no gravity until you opened them, so Teddy had to enter from the "bottom" of the space. The portal was the only real source of gravity, so that became "down", and Teddy would have to climb up with a ladder. The first few times that was tricky, but he knew what he was doing now, and he carefully pushed the long ladder through on its track, waiting until it connected with the steel mesh that was the deck plate above. The hooks on the ladder slipped into the gaps in the mesh, and when he pulled back down, it latched in place. Easy.

He climbed the ladder, looking around quickly. It was definitely a larger space than normal, probably four times the size of the largest one he'd ever been inside of--and that was a big warehouse-sized place. Teddy could just about get lost in this one, if they weren't all so straightforward.

Once he got to the top, he found himself as always beneath a large, unbroken steel mesh floor stretching dozens of feet in every direction. The first couple times he'd cut through the mesh, but now he would hang a walkway that led to the edge of it, and then just use another ladder to climb up onto the deck proper. He had a bunch of clips that fit into the steel mesh, and after attaching two and roping himself to one, he swung out and added another pair. On and on this went until he had a parallel track all the way to the edge, at which point he came back.

Each section of walkway was only so long, but going up and down the ladder with them was annoying, so he tended to strap a couple to his back at a time. After going and fetching the first two, he swung out to the second set of anchors and hung the far side of the walkway on the third set, then clipped the second set of ropes into the same anchor he was using, and the third to the one behind him. Six ropes was enough to hold up three scavengers people and a fair chunk of heavy equipment, but if worst came to worst, he could still end up cutting holes in the deck.

It took a record five sections of walkway to get him up, but before long, he was standing on the bottom level of the Box, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He often wished he could open the portal here on the bottom level, but for many reasons, that just didn't seem to work. If it were just a matter of gravity, he would have gotten used to it, but the portals all seemed to open up at the edge of the space, and the few things he was comfortable tweaking didn't seem to change that.

The bottom level here was storage--no great surprise. Tanks upon tanks of air, water, basic nutrients, and other things that were related to the Archon's particular gift were all lined up, with narrow inspection paths through them. They weren't meant to be opened; the tech that powered this whole place would just teleport the stuff in and out of the tanks directly, but then, Teddy had no use for a tank full of pure water or oxygen or whatever anyway.

Still, he glanced them over. Nothing too weird. A couple were mag-bottles full of plasma, which might have been iron or some other solid stored in a volatile state so it could be made into whatever all at once. Maker-type and shaper-types had a bunch of that in stock; he still had no idea what type of power this woman had.

The ladder up to the next level was built in, and the next level had a simple hole in the mesh that Teddy crawled through with easy practice. The next level was a good four hundred times larger, and was mostly computing equipment. As always, there was a terminal right there, so tantalizing, but Teddy didn't know how to use it. An administrator, at his desperate plea, had finally given him one very important command for the terminal, and he stepped up to it, prepared to finally let the dead woman's body decay into nothing--because even with the box taken out, all of this equipment was still keeping it alive, though it was a good sixty-seventy miles away by now.

But the status on the terminal was unusual. It was supposed to say "Carrier disruption" and occasionally something about "reconnecting" that flipped back to the first thing very quickly. This one didn't, and it completely creeped him out. It just said "Standing by".

So Teddy rushed back out of the hole in a panic. He needed to speak to an Administrator about this before he touched anything else. While they might just take his Box away, he was sure that they would want to know of any possibility that someone else had survived the end of the world.