Teddy was only able to wait a couple of days before he had to go back out scavenging. He had kind of hoped that Elaine would return right away, but his optimism ended the way it always did, with lonely, miserable angst, as he looked at his meager supplies and realized that it was, as always, a life or death struggle for survival.

As he often did when he was running into a time limit, he went back for something he had marked earlier but considered too dangerous to approach. This one had been trapped in a room between several static beasts--now gone, probably because they had gathered to attack the compound. To be thorough, he went to the next-closest marked Archon, and again, the static beasts guarding it had moved--although this time, they were not gone, just far more distant. That was more than enough, though, to let him gather the body.

And this time he did exactly that, wrapping the living corpses in a sheet and strapping them to his sled. It was macabre, but now that he wasn't hiding things from his employees, well, he could at least do the awful part of it when he was sure he was out of danger.

The guards in front of the compound eyed his cargo warily, but gave him a pained smile as he passed. Teddy could only nod, grimly, and got the bodies to a back room, one normally used for welding and mechanical work. Once he moved the bodies inside, he shut the door and sat in front of it, outside, taking deep breaths, able but unwilling to go in and commit to the awful acts he knew he needed to do.

Anna wandered by not much later, and to her credit, pulled up a pair of chairs and gave him one to sit in, taking the other for herself. She eyed the door and measured Teddy's reaction, clearly understanding the context, but wanting confirmation.

"Got two of them," said Teddy slowly, barely able to process what he was saying. "Just don't... want to open them up right now."

"You brought the whole thing back? Guess that makes sense. More sense, in a way, than leaving them." Anna stared at him for a minute, then looked down. "It's inside them, right? You gotta do something awful to em."

"Back of the head," said Teddy, cringing.

Anna looked at him for a long time, and some part of Teddy kept expecting some kind of laugh or smile or sneer, some way in which she was going to look down on him. But she just looked sad, and looked down, and nodded a bit.

So Teddy took more deep breaths, and although he was never really ready, eventually he walked back in, turned the head of the man on the table, and brought his knife to bear. In less than half a minute, it was over, and the small bloodstain on the sheet shrank moment by moment until it was gone, the knife wound healing slowly until the man looked whole again.

Teddy watched, horrified as always, and then walked out, locking the door behind him. Before long, he was in front of his portal ring, and he inserted the box into its slot.

Anna was there beside him, giving him an odd look. "So what do we have, boss?"

"Nothing special. Level 2. Don't know the markings." Teddy lined up the ladder as the portal opened, sparking against the edges of the ring, and slowly pushed it in until it latched onto the deck "above" him. "Give me a few minutes to get the walkways in place."

"Take your time," replied Anna immediately, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Don't rush. I know that was a bad--"

"I'm not rushing," snapped Teddy suddenly, and after a moment in which his head swam, he stopped and sat down on the ground, dizzy without being really sure why. "I'm not rushing. I'm running. Don't want to think. Just need to work." He stood and started climbing the ladder. "Don't want to think about it. Don't want to talk. Be done in a bit."

Anna watched him go without saying more.

The next few hours passed the way they always do. Teddy hung the walkways and got to the console, and this one was normal--"Carrier Disruption", it said, and Teddy entered the series of commands necessary to destroy the body. As always, a bunch of systems shut down in response, but that was no serious issue; the portal ring would keep this space open until they were done removing all of the systems, and he would need to shut things down in order to remove them anyway. None of them were of any use in here.

And then Anna and Jim came in, and did their first walk through. It wasn't a huge space, probably a small house in size, but it was tightly packed, as they usually were. The easiest things to sell were the first ones out--modular servers that could be disconnected from a rack and slid out. Resellers would take these to places that had originally had similar hardware--libraries, telecoms, fabricators, hospitals, government buildings--and those people would slowly try to rebuild what had been lost. Sometimes it didn't work out, but it was well worth the money to have pristine hardware that they knew worked, even if it wasn't exactly the right hardware for what they were doing.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

And it probably wasn't, thought Teddy again, as he pulled a sleek black case out of a very standard rack. Every one of these servers was stamped with identifiers that meant little or nothing to him, and the pieces inside were equally arcane. He knew a few things, and he could wire a server rack to relays to do plenty of everyday tasks, but these were not likely off-the-shelf parts for the rest of the world, and so their utility was probably minimal. How long he could support a business based on goods that probably aren't what anyone wants...

Anna slapped him on the back. "You're looking stressed, big man," she said, as she often did at times like that. "Don't worry. Things will work out."

Teddy nodded, and slipping the server into his backpack with the others, started in on the next one. "I just worry," he admitted.

"About what?"

"The market. Can't be what people really need." He reached back to disconnect cables from the next server. "Won't last forever."

"No," said Anna, "it won't. Nothing does, right? They thought the Old World would last forever, and it didn't. This," and she gestured around, "might last our lifetimes though. And that girl Elaine, she seems like she has some ideas. So, maybe we'll figure something else out."

Teddy grunted, but his mind churned on those thoughts for a while. "The old world... they were just thinking one day ahead, too. Weren't planning for..." he shook his head. "...and this is all that's left over."

"Oh, stop," said Jim from a few rows down. "What they built lasted centuries. We probably can't make anything that would last one. Don't act like you have to fix the world; either we survive... either YOU survive, or we won't be able to scavenge any of these things ever again. I doubt we'll figure out how to get your... shard, talent, thing, out of you when you die, so we'll just be screwed. As long as these things," and he banged on some piece of hardware, somewhere, "are out there, people will figure out how to use them. Once they do that, the pieces we scavenged will be worth a thousand times as much. And if we're still around... then that'll be that. We'll be fine."

Teddy fit the last server into his backpack and let his thoughts simmer for a while. "Yeah," he said eventually, and shouldered the pack, making for the ladder. "You're probably right. I just wish..."

A voice from far below called, "If your wish was to see my pretty face again, guess what? Wish granted."

There was a shocked silence for a minute, and then Teddy--morose, depressive, pessimistic Teddy--could feel a grin spreading over his face.

----------------------------------------

Elaine loaded the two bodies she had brought back into Teddy's locked back room, and then started spreading a bunch of miscellaneous crap into a different storage room. Teddy was baffled to a certain extent, sometimes by what she was unloading, but always by why. He recognized, of course, books, and the point of the thin, colorful comic volumes was obvious as soon as he paged through one. But why?

"It's like I said," Elaine explained, as three of her rapidly stacked some small plastic boxes on a set of shelves. "Mecha archons like--like the man in the other room there, had power sets that were built on pop culture. He kept a bunch of them sitting around, and while probably some of them are just random entertainment, I figure at least some of these have to be the basis for his stuff. And... he was a King, so he probably had access to pretty much all of them." The Elaine dedicated to standing there facing Teddy and Jim, who was also watching, shrugged. "Some of these are classics. Some are probably trash. And who knows, maybe they've degraded and can't be used anymore, but it was worth a shot. If nothing else, they'd sell like gangbusters. People always want entertainment, and some of these things might be one-of-a-kind now.

"I've seen most of these units bofore," said Teddy hesitantly, as he looked over the electronics. "Almost all broken, though." He tapped one or two of the boxes inquisitively. "So these are just entertainment devices?"

"Sure. Some going back centuries. This box," she tapped one, "connects legacy hardware to any QOMI-compatable displays you might have lying around." She paused. "QOMI spec uses those are the braided fiber-optic cables, these ones," and she pulled one out of nowhere. "...if you don't know the names of them, I mean. Not sure how common they are nowadays."

"Most of the ones I've seen are broken," said Teddy, and Jim nodded. "Both the cables and the displays they went into.  They were kind of... flimsy."

"Yeah. And the world's a harsh place, now." Elaine grinned. "Luckly, I did bring back a few in pristine condition. Two flat-panels and a stand-in holo display. We can set them up later. You'll finally have a way to unwind from the stress of the day aside from alcohol and moping."

"That..." that did sound appealing to Teddy. "What kind of stuff is this, anyway?"

"Some are just movies. Some are interactive video games. And I'm pretty sure this console," she laid a finger on one in the middle of a stack, "was some kind of proto-AI evolving simulation machine for immersive gaming, for the holo display. I saw the adverts but I never took the time to play with one in person. It... might be garbage."

Teddy looked the stack up and down. Truly, the one thing he hated most about his life was being left alone with his thoughts. He had mostly gotten past the point in his life where he was actively suicidal, but he wasn't anything like happy, or stable. "You think they work?"

"Something's got to work," said Elaine brightly. "They were just sitting there, secure in a... vault. So we'll try them out later, maybe tonight." She paused. "In the meantime... I really want to take a look inside the, uh, your latest victim, as it were. Do you mind?"

"No, no, not at all," said Teddy, stepping back from the shelves full of game machines. To his embarrassment, he realized the other Elaines were done offloading things, and only one copy of the woman was left. "Do you want us with you, or...?"

"Yes, definitely." Teddy recognized belatedly that suddenly there was no mirth in Elaine's voice, just a soft-edged determination. "It's going to be weird, and I don't really want to be alone for this."

Teddy looked the woman up and down for a minute, and nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Sure."