Chương 66: New Faces I

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, 'What! You too? I thought I was the only one.'" - C. S. Lewis As soon as El Capitan left, I went through the instruction manuals for the five pieces of fabrication equipment I had just gotten my hands on. They totaled just under three fucking thousand pages of technical documentation.

Yeah, I wasn't about to read all that, so I had Neural Link run a program that would sift through the digitized PDFs and identify what I would need to properly operate them.

Once it did, the number of pages I had to actually read dropped down to just 300, about 10% of the original amount, meaning the remaining pages were just full of repair and upkeep that I could go through at a later date. I had seen El Capitan's men run their quick tests on the machines themselves, but I had to run my own as well.

Once I was sure that everything powered on properly and that the spindles ran true within the tolerances listed on its operational manual, that the glass press's hydraulic ram cycled smoothly, the scrap-fab's heating elements reached operational temperature in the timeframe specified by the manufacturer, and the furnace lit, I was able to breathe in peace. It seemed like once again, El Capitan had been true to his word. I changed out of my current outfit into something more laid-back and chill.

A clean black T-shirt, sweatpants, a pair of black-and-white sneakers, and my father's silver cross. To anyone who saw me, I was just one tall-ass kid walking about. I still had the Mantis Blades sealed in their case in the storage room on the second floor. I had once contacted Vik to ask about the installation, only to hear him reiterate what he had already told me: not to touch my skeletal structure.

That bone density argument, the "your body is still growing, and I will install no damn Mantis Blades into forearms that haven't finished fusing their epiphyseal plates" spiel, all of which I understood. But that conversation was six months ago, and I had grown four inches since then, and I wanted to know if the timeline had shifted in any way, shape, or form.

I knew that the Net was my domain, but in my experience, the real world tended to put me in rooms where a cyberdeck and a quickhack chain weren't always the best option. The Mantis Blades would give me an edge in such situations. And if I combined the moves I had learned from all that hand-to-hand training I had done with those mantis blades, only God could tell how dangerous I would become.

I stepped out through the grey-side entrance and into the afternoon sun, pulling up the cab network through my Agent as the door shut behind me, when I saw that chick walking across the cracked asphalt to the side of the lot and the orange building toward the decommissioned firetruck I had seen her working on a few times. She was carrying a cardboard box that looked like it weighed more than she did.

I zoomed in with my Kiroshi's on the box only to see she had an assortment of automotive components, brackets, hose clamps, a voltage regulator, and what appeared to be a salvaged alternator housing that had seen better days. This chick was hard to miss, really. I could probably spot her walking through a crowd without zooming in from, like, a block away, with that vivid gradient of green and neon pink she had in her hair.

The left side of her head was shaved clean to the scalp, exposing the pale skin and the faint metallic trace of a neural port above her ear. She was maybe five-four or five-five, and she moved like she had been tasked with doing something and wasn't interested in distractions. I killed the cab request before it finished processing and called out to her.

"Hey!" I started walking toward her across the lot as she stopped and turned, the box balanced against her hip, and she looked at me with guarded assessment. It wasn't all that surprising, given that strangers who called out to you in parking lots rarely brought good news. Her eyes tracked from my face down to my boots and back up.

"What?" she said.

"Where do you get your parts?" I asked, nodding toward the box. The question seemed to catch her off guard, as if she had been expecting something more aggressive and transactional, something that would've been more typical of Night City. Her guard shifted, and the defensive posture recalibrated from "potential threat" to "unexpected variable."

"Why do you want to know?" she asked, her tone carrying a testing edge.

"I've got a project I'm about to start working on," I said, keeping my hands visible and my body language open, which was something I had learned to do when talking to strangers to seem less imposing, given my height.

"Just curious where you source from." She looked at me for another second, running her own calculations, then glanced down at the box in her arms as if its contents had suddenly become relevant to her assessment of whether I was worth talking to.

"The trash mountains," she said.

"You'd be surprised what people throw away when they think nobody's going to dig through it."

"Nah, I wouldn't be all that surprised," I said.

"Night City probably throws away more in a week than most cities produce in a month." Something in her expression shifted, and a small crack in the default wariness let a sliver of actual interest bleed through.

"You know scrap?"

"I know a thing or two about cars," I said.

"I know enough to know that an alternator housing from a Bratsk doesn't end up in a Badlands scrap pile unless someone at a depot decided to write it off instead of filing the maintenance request." She looked at the alternator housing in her box, then back at me, and this time, there was genuine surprise mixed in with the residual caution.

"That's exactly what this is, a Bratsk alternator. Found it in a pile south of Rocky Ridge."

"Does it work?" I asked.

"Not yet," she said. The way she said it told me more about her than the previous two minutes of conversation combined.

"The bearing's shot and the stator windings need to be rebonded, but the housing itself is solid. Once I get the internals rebuilt, it should be able to push enough current to run the auxiliary systems on the truck." You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"Oh yeah. I've seen you working on getting that firetruck back up and running again," I said.

"Yeah, I found it being left to rust and decided to give it a makeover," she said, the wariness from earlier receding enough that she set the box down on the ground beside her, freeing her hands and showing me a bit of trust.

"It's stripped of the emergency equipment and the comms, but the frame's still solid, the suspension's recoverable, and the drivetrain just needs a full teardown and rebuild. Most people will look at it and see scrap, but to me... to me this is a vehicle that someone gave up on too early."

"I know the feeling," I said. We talked. Standing in the lot between a firetruck and my building, the September afternoon pressing down on the cracked asphalt around us, we talked about engine blocks, drivetrain geometries, and the specific challenges of sourcing automotive components in a city that had collectively decided that vehicles were disposable commodities rather than machines worth maintaining.

She knew her way around a mechanical system with an intuitive, hands-on fluency that, I have no doubt, came from years of learning by doing rather than learning by reading, and I found myself matching her depth with ease. We traded observations and technical specifications with ease. It was as if we were two people who were discovering, in real time, that we spoke the same language.

She told me about the firetruck's electrical system, which she was rewiring from scratch using a hybrid architecture that combined salvaged municipal wiring harnesses with custom-fabbed junction boxes she had built herself from raw copper and recycled polymer housings.

The original system had been a 48-volt DC setup designed for the emergency equipment, and she was converting it to a dual-bus configuration that could run both the legacy 48-volt systems and a modern 12-volt auxiliary circuit for whatever aftermarket hardware she wanted to integrate later.

"The junction boxes are the worst part," she said while gesturing with a pair of imaginary pliers.

"You can't buy them off the shelf because the NCFD used some connector standard that nobody else adopted, so every box has to be fabbed from scratch. I've been casting the housings from recycled polymer stock and hand-soldering the terminals."

"How many boxes do you need in total?" I asked.

"Fourteen," she said.

"I've already done nine. The last five are the ones that control the pump and ladder hydraulics, and those need higher-gauge wiring than anything I've been able to source so far." I ended up telling her about the CNC machine I had just installed and what it could do for precision components, and watched as her eyes lit up with unmistakable hunger.

She asked me about the scrap-fab unit's thermal tolerances, and I quoted the spec from the manual I had read two hours ago, and she nodded as if the number confirmed something she had already suspected.

"What about braindance rigs?" she asked, shifting the topic so abruptly that it took me a second to follow.

"What about them?" I asked.

"I've been getting into BD editing," she said.

"I'm still a rookie, so I'm taking apart recorded experiences and reassembling them, learning to cut, layer, and remix the sensory data." She shrugged, as if describing a hobby rather than a technical discipline that most people couldn't begin to comprehend.

"The hardware side of it is basically signal processing and neural encoding, which isn't that different from what someone would do with a cyberdeck. Different application, but underneath it all, it's still the same shit."

"Damn girl," I said.

"You edit BDs and rebuild fire trucks."

"And I fix vending machines on the weekends when I need quick eddies," she added.

"A girl's got to diversify." About fifteen minutes into the conversation, she paused mid-sentence, tilted her head, and looked at me with an expression that was equal parts amused and accusing.

"You know, choom," she said, "you never actually introduced yourself. You just walked up and started questioning me about the things I got in my box." I blinked as I realized that she was right. I had been so caught up in the mechanical conversation that I had skipped a basic social protocol and gone straight into sharing detailed technical knowledge with a stranger.

"Right," I said, extending my hand.

"The name's Santiago, but everyone calls me Santi. I'm sixteen."

"Sixteen, right..." she said, not believing a word I had said, as she took my hand, raising an eyebrow.

"I'm Judy. Judy Álvarez." She sucked her teeth in and sighed.

"Let's say you really are sixteen, then you're probably older than me. I'm sixteen too, born on the tail end of November, on the twenty-seventh." I felt a smirk tug at the corner of my mouth before I could stop it, and a chuckle came right behind it.

"What's so funny?" Judy asked, her grin collapsing into a frown.

"November twenty-sixth," I said. Her eyes went wide as saucers and she shoved me softly as if we had been chooms for a lifetime.

"No fucking way." Her reaction caused me to laugh properly this time.

"One day," Judy said, shaking her head.

"We were born one day apart while living in the same neighborhood and working on engines. What kind of bullshit cosmic coincidence is that?"

"Shit, it's Night City, ain't it?" I said with a chuckle.

"It's the city of fucking dreams for a reason."

"The city of fucking dreams," she repeated with a wider grin, filled with disbelieving amusement. As we kept on talking, I came to the realization that Judy was quick-witted, direct, and uninterested in the social performance that most people in Night City used. She said what she meant, and she didn't feel the need to fill silences with anything other than more silence, which was a quality I appreciated more than I could have articulated.

The conversation somehow found its way back to the braindance editing work she was getting into, mentioning that her grandfather had been a techie and had taught her everything she knew about working with machines, and the way she talked about him carried the warmth of someone who was referencing a living person rather than a memory. So, being the curious me, I asked where they were.

Her grandparents had apparently left her their apartment in Kabuki and moved to Oregon because they couldn't stand the city anymore, which meant she was living alone at sixteen in Watson, rebuilding a decommissioned firetruck in a parking lot, and teaching herself braindance editing in whatever hours she had left. She also had a way of talking about technology that treated it as something alive rather than something manufactured.

She reminded me of myself in the fact that, although she had someone to teach her the basics, she had to teach herself for the most part. After a while, she shifted her weight, crossed her arms, and looked past me toward the building with a new curiosity.

"So," she said.

"I noticed a lot of activity around here a couple of months back. Trucks were coming in and out with workers, and there were more this morning, too. The building change hands? Your parents buy it or something?"

"Something like that," I said. Judy raised an eyebrow at the non-answer.

"Why this area?" she asked, gesturing at the surrounding lot.

"If your family had enough scratch to buy a building and remodel it, you could've gone somewhere nicer like Japantown or Little China. Hell, even the Glen's got better curb appeal than this." I looked back at the building and its faded blue and weathered grey paint. The exterior looked exactly as forgettable and unimpressive as I had wanted to keep it.

"Let's just say that we like to lay low," I said. Judy snorted.

"I mean this with all due respect, Santi, but if laying low was really the goal, you're doing a pretty bad job of it. Six cars and trucks rolled through here this morning. The whole block noticed." I chuckled.

"Fair point. It was a one-time thing."

"Uh-huh," she said in a skeptical, teasing tone.

"So what's this project ride of yours? You mentioned it earlier but dodged the details like a corpo dodges a subpoena." I looked at her for a moment, weighing the decision. We had spent the better part of an hour talking shop, swapping technical knowledge, and connecting over a shared mechanical obsession. She was a gearhead, a real one at that. After all the specs, the stories, and the conversations we've had, showing her the car wasn't going to compromise anything.

And the look on her face when she saw it was going to be worth whatever minor operational exposure the gesture represented.

"Follow me," I said.