Dysto.001's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Jdawwwg had a person waiting on a med scanner, and no money left to buy one. So he chased a rumor into the rain instead. A scrap convoy was crawling toward the smelters tonight, hauling old-world tech pulled from a collapsed tower. If any of it was mint, he could trade up. If it was all counterfeit, the person waiting on him would not last the week. He caught the hauler where the road narrowed under the smelter chimneys. Rain sheeted off the stacks. Neon signs bled pink and cyan across the wet steel. He climbed the ladder between two crawling cars and dropped into a bin of scrap. Then he started sorting by touch, goggles down, hood up. Most of it was junk. A cracked servo. A counterfeit board stamped with a fake maker's mark. A rifle frame someone had already stripped for its core. He pushed deeper into the pile and his glove hit smooth black plating. He cleared the scrap off with both hands. The unit was huge. A decommissioned security frame, seven feet even lying down, black armor traced with dead pink and blue lines. A smelter tag hung from its chest on a chain: PROPERTY: SMELTER. Bound for the furnace at dawn. Jdawwwg pulled his plasma driver from the harness. The blue tip flickered on. He told himself he was only checking the cores for salvage value. The cores were intact. Better than intact. Adaptive, self-repairing, the kind of tech nobody built anymore. His hands moved before his head caught up. He reseated a shunt. He bridged a burnt line. He worked fast, crouched in a moving bin under the rain, and somewhere in the middle he stopped thinking about trade value at all. The optics flickered. Two lights came up, pink and blue, and steadied on his face. The frame's first recorded moment: rain on black metal, a stranger in a wet hood, a plasma driver held between them like a question. Jdawwwg looked at the smelter tag on the chain. He looked at the hands he had just used to repair, not strip. He drew a line through PROPERTY: SMELTER with the edge of the driver and painted two letters over it in pink sealant from his kit. D1. He said it plain, no buildup. "This one's still good." He rode the hauler until it slowed at a junction, then dropped off with the unit walking behind him on new legs. The med scanner would have to wait another night. He led the tall machine back through the wet streets of District One, toward a shipping container he used as a workshop, amber lights burning inside. The salvage tag swung from the machine's chest, still wet, the pink D1 not yet dry. The machine kept it. It has been keeping it, and proving him right, ever since.