I’d been prodding the mass-fab all morning and as far as I could tell, there wasn’t anything wrong with it. Well, not technically true, there was tons wrong with it if you counted rust. But being a fancy and extremely high-precision device, the metal parts were mostly cover panels and structural…all the really crazy bits inside that made it go looked like they were composites, ceramics, synthetic weave, or plastics, and they’d held up pretty well in here out of the sun and weather.

Now, even with that said, I had no idea how to make the thing go. I wasn’t a molecular physicist who could figure out how this thing broke down raw matter into its chemical components and rearranged it at will, or a computer who could measure and debug the core which provided the machine with its programming. I was more familiar with the “push button, get product” level of operation. I did notice the delith cell wasn’t giving the normal effusive pink glow, meaning that this thing had been sitting here so long it had literally outlived its nuclear half-life.

Or, more likely, the cell had just cracked at some point, and I was sitting in a cloud of radioactive bullshit. Which was really much more of a long-term issue than I was able to care about at the moment.

Either way, I needed to find a new delith cell to get this thing running, and I think I knew where I might look. The Bunker — the work shed in which I lived — was a satellite building to a larger facility further to the north. Or, more specifically, the catastrophic ruins of a larger facility.

Still, it was the closest thing I would ever find to human civilization, so it was my best hope for finding a delith cell which wasn’t broken. I had nothing better to do today, still having some boar left over, so I head out immediately.

Outside the bunker, and still partially surrounded by the rusted and ruined remains of a chain-link fence was an old, old asphalt road, long since bleached white, and with more cracks in it than asphalt at this point. In a few hundred more years maybe it would be just a bed of conspicuous rocks, but in the meanwhile it gave me clear direction which way to go.

Over an hour of walking, I saw signs of the facility’s wreckage grow both in number, and in absolute devastation. The Bunker had to have been at the very outskirts of the facility, and I assumed based on the distance and its low, sturdy profile, was the only building which seemed to have survived intact. There were some standing rooms, posts, walkways, even completely rusted heaps of metal which used to be cars, but nothing closed to the elements in any way.

I’d already poked around this far, and knew there wasn’t much to be gained from snooping through these buildings. Maybe if I got lucky, I could find a locker with some abandoned clothes that were all synthetic and didn’t break down, but more than likely it’d just be cleaning and office supplies, if anything. I didn’t know what kind of facility this once was, but it had a ton of offices and science stuff.

I pressed forward and the ruins diminished into rubble and debris, still devoid of any plant life except grass. Here, it was just an open wasteland without trees or structures for thousands of feet, sloping downwards towards a huge bowl scooped into the ground. A crater, maybe? Some meteor slipping through a hole in the Skyweb and obliterating this whole place?

Somehow I doubted it. Probably more likely that this was deliberately targeted in the Sino wars and either bombed or sabotaged. I hoped it was the latter, because if it was bombed, I’d probably already have taken a lethal dose of radiation.

Of course, that would make perfect sense for them to exile me in an exclusion zone.

I pushed the thought out of my mind and focused on my task. There wasn’t going to be anything here, I needed to go in a circle around the crater where buildings like The Bunker could have survived. I headed east, towards the hills, not tall enough to be mountains, but still imposing on the skyline.

Maybe the parts higher up from the central explosion would be less damaged? Or maybe there were some structures built into the hill itself, which would have been protected. It was a bit of a long shot, but there were roads heading out in that direction, so something had to have been over there at some point.

After another hour, I was following a road through the trees, seemingly in the middle of nowhere now. Under the forest canopy, this road was much less sunbleached, but much more broken up by roots and plants. I kept tripping over chunks of asphalt which came up under my feet in the relative darkness of the trees. As I swore over another bruise on my toes and considered maybe I should walk in the trees and just follow the road, I felt something prickling in my mind and stood up at once, looking for…anything.

The forest was eerily quiet, and the prickling in my mind continued. Had I seen something subconsciously? Was there a bear or something dangerous, and my brain had picked up on it before I had? I waited and watched, tense, feeling like something was creeping just outside my vision.

After a couple minutes of my tense standoff with nothing, my nervousness subsided and I wondered what brought it on to begin with. The forest seemed to stop holding its breath as well, and the wind whispered gently through the trees as birds resumed their distant chirping.

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It was bizarre. And I was not a fan.

I considered turning around and heading home, but after another few moments I realized I was being stupid and there still wasn’t anything here. I kept along the road.

I didn’t have to go that much further before there was a rusted metal gate on the road, complete with a collapsed guard post and what must have been some seriously intimidating fences, before they rusted and collapsed away. Now it was just a ring of rusted collapsed metal and barbed wire. Still nothing I’d want to climb through, but fortunately nobody was manning the guard post, so I let myself in through the gate.

Inside was not much, but still the largest collection of standing buildings I’d seen since exile. It looked like a mining camp, with some huge mining excavator type machines which were now as much a dome of rust as their original shapes. There were what must have been some temporary buildings which were now just piles of plastic and fiberglass I might want to dig through, but there were also still brick buildings that looked like they might have been a dormitory and administration building, and the mine itself in the side of the hill still loomed as a pit of blackness.

My first stop was the dorms. If there was anything interesting and not-company issued, it’d be there, I thought. The building was still pretty solid, and I couldn’t wrench the metal doors open, so I let myself in through one of the many broken windows.

I found myself in a bedroom with a rusted metal rectangle strung up with springs and wires; all that remained of a bed frame. Some piles of refuse were all that remained of nightstands and bookshelves. The closet and bathroom doors may have once been wood, because they were gone now. The closet had nothing but damp rot inside, but the bathroom was almost pristine by comparison.

There was a shower with a shower curtain, cloudy and streaked with stains. The finish on the tub was blistering off on all the edges and what was underneath was covered in rust. The ceiling had collapsed in one place, the shelf under the counter was now mostly gone, just a couple of rotten wood triangles suspended from the stone countertop. In better condition was the sink and toilet, which were both filthy, but seemingly pretty undamaged.

Most interesting was a mirror, covered in filth and black spots, and with the reflective backing having a spiderweb of peeling cracks running through it. In the few spots not damaged by either, I could see my eyes twinkling in the relative darkness. Carefully stepping around the fallen ceiling, I looked at myself closer, and immediately regretted it.

I was almost gaunt. My hair was nasty and matted in places, my face was streaked with filth, but none of that mattered compared to just how thin I now was. I’d only been out here a couple weeks, but I’d been moving and working hard every day with hardly anything to eat.

I’d once been a big guy. I was a star quarterback. I wasn’t huge, like the linemen, but I was a little over 6 feet, with pretty broad shoulders, and worked out. The thing looking back at me in the mirror looked like you took my skeleton and just hung bits of a person on it. It was horrible to look at, and knowing it was me just made it so much worse.

For the first time out here, I felt like I wanted to curl up and cry, but I knew if I let myself do that, I wouldn’t be able to stop. There were too many injustices piled against me right now for me to indulge myself in a single one without getting lost. So I stepped to the side, out of the way of the mirror, pushed the image out of my mind, and swallowed down my anger and sadness. I gave myself a couple seconds to normalize, taking a deep breath and slowly letting it out.

Then I yelled inarticulately and grabbed both sides of the mirror and ripped it from its rusted, rotted hinges and threw it at the shower with all the strength I could find.

I couldn’t do it. I hated it. I hated myself. I hated that the mirror seemed so damn heavy to my emaciated arms. I couldn’t get the image of my eyes twinkling from behind that withered face out of my mind. I hated that my yell was strangled in my throat and came out like a half-croak because of all the talking I hadn’t done. I felt alien and inhuman, like I’d lost everything that made me a person.

I felt like an ex-human. An Exhuman.

The mirror didn’t shatter, it just crashed through the curtain into the shower with a bang. I guess that was probably a good thing. I didn’t need broken glass everywhere. Behind the mirror was a metal medicine cabinet, still full of pill bottles and lozenges and rusty razor blades. Nothing I could use. This whole place was a waste of time. I was just leaving when something caught my eye. Next to the rusted razor blades was an electric razor, apparently cordless.

It took some working to separate the rusted metal head from the rusted metal cabinet, but once I wrenched it free, I held the brittle plastic body of the now-decapitated razor in my hands. I cracked the case with a satisfying snap and saw, at the base, a friendly pink glow.

I pulled the small delith cell from the casing and held it up to see clearly, bathing the entire bathroom in the faint light.

Another surge of emotion flowed through me. This place hadn’t been in ruins forever, not long enough to outlive the half-life of delith cells at least. There must be more, there was hope to be found here. And as quickly as I’d lost all hope in myself, I found it again.

It was becoming a mentally exhausting day.

I stepped outside through the window, careful to avoid the broken glass, and noticed with annoyance just how easily my smaller body cleared the gap. I’d checked only a couple rooms and hadn’t found too much of interest, though I was up to three tiny delith cells…not enough to power anything significant like a mass-fab, but maybe if there were any tools or (in my wildest dreams) a laser pistol laying around in one of the guard stations, I’d probably want to make sure it had power.

Maybe that didn’t make any sense, but the cells represented hope right now, and I was desperately clutching as many of them as I could.

I thought I’d take a brief look in the mine and then the admin building and head home, as it was already afternoon, but one look at how far I’d get in the mines without a light nixed that plan. Maybe the admin building would have lights to explore the mine then.

And man, did it ever. I rolled myself under the huge garage door and let my eyes adjust to the dimness inside, and realized, I’d hit the motherlode.