- 11 years before canon -
The elevator rattled as it descended, its panel lights flickering like they were afraid of the dark. I leaned against the metal frame, arms folded, the stench of mildew and rust clinging to my coat.
The hallway above had already begun to disappear into memory. That peeling paint, the cracked linoleum floor slick with spilled synth-soup, the screaming from Room 208.
It all blended together. The building reeked of bodily fluids and forgotten names. It wasn't decay. Decay implies naturalness.
This was rot-industrial, an intentional design.
I'd stopped flinching at the sounds of violence. A gurgled threat, the crack of a fist against bone, the crash of something human hitting a wall—these were the lullabies of this tower.
"Better start speakin', gonk! Else leads flying!"
A voice had roared from one of the rooms.
Gangers. Or something like them. The details didn't matter. The tone did.
This wasn't chaos.
It was a ritual.
The elevator doors screeched open.
The lobby was barely lit, half-choked with smoke, and alive with noise. Not a conversation. Just volume. Drunks shouting into their own reflections. The flick-flick of zippos lighting cheap synthetic cigarettes. The buzz of vending machines trying to push expired products.
I stepped forward, head high.
A man brushed past me hard, shoulder-first.
Intentional.
He turned, scanning me with dull red optics. "Watch it, ganic."
I didn't answer.
Another brushed past from the side, knocking the edge of my coat.
"Shit, you see his threads? Looks like a corpo's bastard took a dirt nap in a dumpster."
They laughed.
Three of them. Young. Wired. Faces pale from stim use. Tattoos animated—cheap bio-ink swirling patterns across their necks. Their voices grated against the walls like they needed to prove they existed.
This was how they tested people. Not with guns. Not yet. With space. With presence.
I stopped walking and turned slowly. Met the closest one's eyes. Not hostile. Not submissive either.
Just… observed.
He hesitated for half a breath before sneering and turning away.
His eyes seemed to flash red, its hue detailing curiosity before snickering,
"That one's fried in the head. No cyberware, no friends. Gonk's dead already."
They walked off, and I stepped onto the street.
The wind hit like an insult—sharp and stinking of burnt fuel and old plastic. Neon bled into the night like open wounds. Overhead, a hovercar screamed past, leaving a trail of synthetic music in its wake. Ads blared from suspended screens:
"YOUR BRAIN IS OUTDATED—UPGRADE NOW WITH MILITECH NEUROSET V9."
"TIRED OF BEING NOBODY? BUY IDENTITY. BUY STATUS. BUY RESPECT."
Everyone here was selling something.
And if they weren't, they were pretending they had something worth stealing.
A woman with steel legs strutted down the sidewalk, her skin lacquered in gold foil.
A child barely ten plugged a jack into a public terminal, eyes rolling back as he scrolled the Net through neural fire. A man vomited into a bin while an automated sweeper bot waited impatiently behind him, beeping every 3 seconds.
Every corner seemed to tell a story.
I kept walking.
A vendor called out. His voice cracked with false enthusiasm.
"Choom! Yo! You want the new Samurai remaster? OG 2020 cuts. Vinyl-style press. Preem stuff, straight off the Net!"
He waved a data shard in my face. I didn't stop.
He moved with me, still waving.
"C'mon, gonk. Don't be a fraggin' suit. You do have ears under that mess, right?"
Still no answer.
"Shit. Another dead-eyed ganic."
He spat on my boot and shoved past me, muttering, "Broke-ass meat puppet."
I stood there, letting the wind dry the spit.
Letting the insult sink in. Not into my pride. No, my pride was untouched.
But I needed to understand this world.
How far would they go? How far would I need to go?
So I continued my march forward, my eyes darting around, ensuring caution.
It was here that I spotted him just before the bus shelter—slumped against the side wall, wrapped in a jacket that might've been military surplus two wars ago. A broken heater hummed feebly beside him. The kind of man people pretend not to see.
I kept walking.
But his eyes found mine.
One was human. Sharp. Scarred. The other was cracked glass—an ocular implant long past the date it should've been pulled out and tossed in a parts bin. But it still flickered faintly.
He didn't flinch. Just watched me. Measured me.
Then he spoke.
"You new around here, ganic?"
I stopped three paces past him. My hand drifted near my coat's interior. He saw it.
"Relax. If I wanted to lift something off you, you'd be face-down by now."
I turned slowly to face him.
He grinned, mouth dry and lined with ulcers. His voice cracked like static. "What's a straight-skinned little corpse-in-waiting doing walkin' around like he owns the block?"
"I'm observing," I replied.
"Oh, is that right?" He nodded as if impressed. "Most 'ganics' don't last long enough to start observing. Not unless they're packing chrome in the right places or a bullet in the brain."
"I'm carrying."
He let out a cough that sounded like laughter.
"Course you are. Can't afford an eye mod, but got yourself a piece, huh? What is it—Militech knockoff? Or some scrapyard rat special? I wouldn't be surprised if it were some trash from Budget Arms either."
"I didn't come to talk about my weapon."
His eyes narrowed, the glint of a soldier behind all the wear and tear. "Nah. You didn't come to talk at all. But here you are."
I looked past him. Toward the horizon. Past the neon and the signs. Past the haze. A cluster of high fences, like a scar across the skyline.
"The dump," I said. "That local?"
He squinted. "You mean the bone yard? Yeah, it's local. Been there since the Fourth fell. Used to be a parts depot before Saka blew it. Now it's full of junk—bots, cables, old frames. Trash to most. Loot to few."
"Who runs it?"
"No one. Not officially." He coughed again, then spat to the side. "You might get hassled by some tweaked-out scavs, but most of the big outfits don't care. They got cleaner ways of gettin' tech."
"Bus routes?"
"Two blocks east, take the yellow line. But it's irregular. Better off walking."
I nodded, noting the directions. Committing them to memory.
"You don't ask many questions," he said after a pause. "But when you do, they're good ones."
I didn't respond.
He tilted his head.
"You some kind of techie?"
My eyes narrowed. "Why do you say that?"
"Just the way you look at stuff. You're not scared, but you're not hungry like the gangers. You're calculatin'. I'd cough that up to either you bein' a solo… or a techie. Well, at least somethin' of the sort. You're hands are too rough for a biomed or ripper."
He sniffed once. "Either way, you don't belong here. Not in this part of the city."
"Neither do you," I said.
He chuckled. "You're not wrong, kid. I used to belong somewhere, a long time ago. Third Corporate War. Back when the world still thought it could be saved. They burned half my team in a corpo cleanse and dumped the rest of us into the system."
He tapped his temple. "Left me with firmware I can't uninstall. Dreams I didn't ask for."
"And now you sit here."
"Now I watch."
We stared at each other for a moment. The silence wasn't heavy. Just inevitable.
He gestured vaguely toward the direction of the junkyard. "You'll find what you're looking for in there. Might not look like it at first. But if you got the brain, I think you do… you'll see what others don't."
I said nothing. Just turned and walked away.
But I heard him mutter, barely above a whisper:
"Not a techie… but not a nobody either."
---
The wind was quieter beyond the broken fence. It was the silence of death, not peace—static-filled and heavy, like an old battlefield forgotten by time.
The junkyard was worse than I'd expected.
Crushed drones. Mangled exosuits. Piles of cracked optics and half-melted neural chips. Entire mechs lay like corpses turned inside out, their servo joints long since locked in rust.
But it wasn't useless. Not to me.
Where others saw junk, I saw systems—supply chains, components, architecture. I saw the broken skeleton of a machine that once flew. A pair of bipedal boots with built-in balance gyros—dead, but salvageable. A collapsed maintenance bot with an intact welding arm.
Even without blueprints, even without tools, I could see the logic behind their design.
The structure. The method. The language of the machine.
I'd only taken a few steps inside when I heard the voices.
Three. Maybe four.
Footsteps sloshing through oil. The creak of cheap chrome joints. A hacking laugh.
"Yo, what'd I tell you? We got ourselves a lil' trespassin' ganic."
I turned slowly.
Four of them. Scavs. Augments patched together with rust and stolen data. Skin split to fit in bone-reinforced limbs. Faces covered in self-modded masks—stylised, ridiculous.
But I didn't laugh.
They weren't funny.
They were dangerous, like a rabid dog.
They needed to be warned or put down.
"Choom doesn't even got a dermal plate," one sneered. "You lost, kid? This place got no buffets or charity booths."
"Heard he was askin' questions," another said. "Old man's been yappin'. I don't like it."
They spread out. One with a machete carved from an old exhaust blade. Another with cybernetic knuckles twitching like they had their own brain. One had a gun—cheap, plastic-framed, but lethal.
"I'm going to warn you once," I said calmly. "I am not defenceless. Turn around. Walk away."
They laughed. One mimicked my voice with a nasal whine.
"Not defenceless, he says. Ain't you got school tomorrow, kid?"
I didn't wait for them to surround me fully. I moved.
Fast. But not fast enough.
My instincts acted like I was someone else. Someone stronger. I stepped forward with confidence, aimed a strike at the closest one's throat, and nearly slipped on a plate of warped steel. My foot caught. He swung wide.
Pain bloomed across my ribs as he landed a glancing blow.
I staggered, breath stolen.
Too slow. Too weak. You're still acting like you're in armour.
I pivoted. My hand snapped out—not to strike, but to grab. A jagged rod from the ground. Rebar, maybe. Still solid.
I parried the next swing, redirected it into the wall of a rusted car shell. Sparks flew.
The scav with the gun raised it. My eyes darted—two paces to the right, a drone's battery casing lay cracked but exposed.
I grabbed it, hurled it mid-spin.
The casing hit his wrist just as he fired. The shot went wide.
I lunged. Not at the gunner, but at the support strut behind him. A collapsed lift rig. My weight on it unbalanced the frame, which toppled into him.
He screamed as it pinned his shoulder, the gun clattering to the ground.
The last one came at me with a blade.
No time to think. Only apply.
I stepped in—not back—inside his swing. I raised my arm to block and took the slice. Pain exploded in my forearm. Blood. But I'd closed the distance.
My free hand grabbed a broken buzzsaw blade from the ground and slammed it up under his jaw.
His modded teeth clattered loose as he dropped.
Silence again.
Three groaning. One dead.
I dropped the saw blade.
My body trembled. Not from fear, but effort. Overexertion.
I clutched my ribs. Breathing heavily. A tremor ran through my fingers.
Your mind is sharp. Your will, sharper. But your body is…
Insufficient.
I stood over their broken forms. Took no trophies. Left no words.
But I memorised what they taught me.
The city would not reward strength.
Not in flesh. Not without augmentation.
But it would reward adaptation.
I turned back to the scrapyard.
My blood is still warm. My breath is still shaky.
I bent down to the drone again—reopened its panel with a piece of wire and a screw bit.
The systems spoke to me. The machine had been discarded.
But I would rebuild it, I would give life where others would destroy.
It would be reborn anew within my great plan…
The blood had dried on my sleeve by the time I returned to the centre of the dump.
Distant sirens wailed somewhere near Watson. A low-flying cargo haulier roared across the skyline. But here—amid twisted limbs of machine and corroded steel—the city was quiet.
Good.
I preferred silence when I worked.
The first step was power.
I couldn't rely on stolen batteries or black-market wall ports. The city's grid was fractured, corporate-controlled and monitored. If I were to rebuild anything, I would need my own energy source.
I found it in pieces.
The remnants of a SakaCorp industrial welder gave me the core shielding. An old taxi drone yielded its condensed fuel cell—a weak one, but intact. Parts of a microwave turret from a security bot allowed me to stabilise the voltage.
It took me six hours.
The sun was nearly gone by the time it hummed to life.
Crude. Bulky. But stable.
A miniature arc reactor. Sloppy by my old standards. But in this world?
Miraculous.
I used its power to reignite a half-dead repair rig—a skeletal, wheeled thing with limited arms and low-level motion recognition. It twitched to life like a breathing corpse.
I began splicing cabling into its joints, grafting parts to its claw, overriding its command input through a busted Netwatch module. From trash, I built tools. And from tools, I would build infrastructure.
But the next step was harder.
I needed a logic processor—something to coordinate my machines, handle diagnostics, and parse language protocols. A simple AI. Not even true intelligence. Just enough to automate repair, construction, and scaling.
I opened six different chassis. Ripped out data shards. Dumped cores onto a makeshift reader I'd jury-rigged.
All garbage.
Burnt logic. Corrupted sectors. Data fragments that couldn't last a millisecond outside a military-grade stabiliser.
I stood over the growing pile of failure and rubbed my forehead.
In Latveria, I could've built a quantum neural assistant in under a day. Here…?
To run the computations I needed, I'd have to build something the size of a small apartment block. With these materials, even that wouldn't be enough.
Most computer interfaces, "Keyboards" were far too outdated to compute anything of substance.
The tech was bloated. Overprocessed. Built for flash and chrome, not precision. Nothing condensed. Nothing efficient.
I could see what needed to be done.
But I couldn't do it yet.
Not without power.
Not without material.
Not without time.
Still, I didn't stop.
Where others would've despaired, I recalibrated.
I scavenged until my fingers were blistered. I worked until my breath burned in my throat.
At some point, I stopped using measurements—I began seeing ratios in my head. My mind filled in the gaps. A memory of blueprints from another world, reshaped around the trash of this one.
Wiring. Steel plating. Pressure valves. Circuit relays. A new exo-frame rig, welded onto the wall. Primitive. Heavy. But a starting point.
Everything was a prototype.
But it was mine.