NANITE

Despite himself, despite the stench and the sheer, overwhelming wrongness of it all, Ray cracked a smirk. For all his certifiable insanity, Arty had a strange, undeniable way of making even the grimmest situation feel… lighter.

And so, Ray's first 'treasure hunt' began. He stepped cautiously over rusted, discarded piping and shattered, iridescent display glass, heading towards the nearest towering trash mound. The debris under his heavy boot buzzed faintly with residual energy. He crouched and began to dig through the compacted refuse with careful, gloved hands. Among the tangled mess of wires and broken plasteel, he unearthed a busted, water-damaged laptop, a scorched and melted cooling fan, a warped, leaking battery pack—and then, to his utter, unadulterated horror, a half-melted, disturbingly realistic, flesh-colored dildo, still weakly, pathetically, vibrating.

"Don't toss it! That's a keeper!" Arty shouted from a few feet away, already elbow-deep in another pile of refuse.

Ray held it up with two fingers, his expression, even behind the mask, one of complete and utter revulsion. "Seriously, Arty? You can't be serious."

"The actuator coil inside is high-precision, dude! It's salvage gold! Perfect for fine-tuning drone motor controls!"

Ray let the offending object fall back into the grime with a disgusted thud.

"Come on, man, you've got gloves on! It's not gonna bite you!"

Ray just gave him a long, pointed look. "You're mentally unwell, Arty. Clinically."

"Hey! For a dude who apparently radiates a grayscale, emotionally void aura, you cry like an anime sidekick whose puppy just got vaporized," Arty muttered, deftly scooping up the vibrating object with a pair of long-handled tongs and tossing it unceremoniously into a battered, biohazard-yellow backpack that probably violated every health and safety code in the city.

An hour, or perhaps an eternity, passed in a blur of methodical, surprisingly focused scavenging. They picked their way through mountains of rusted, dismembered drones, piles of fried and corrupted data shards, chips, and vast, tangled bundles of multicolored wires and fiber-optic cables. Ray couldn't help but wonder, with a growing sense of unease, just how much of Arty's chaotically vibrant apartment was cobbled together from the decaying corpses of technology salvaged from junkyards like these.

"You get all your gear from places like this?" Ray asked finally, his voice muffled by his mask.

"Define 'all,'" Arty replied evasively, expertly prying open a discarded server casing and shoving a cracked, but potentially salvageable, hair dryer into his already bulging backpack.

Ray squinted at him through his goggles. "And you… you clean it first, right?"

"Of course, man. I mean, I clean the ones that, you know, really need cleaning," Arty said, his voice utterly deadpan.

Ray just stared at him for a long moment, biting back a shudder of revulsion. Still... despite the filth, despite the questionable hygiene practices of his companion, there was something strangely satisfying, almost meditative, about the hunt. It was… peaceful, in its own bizarre way. There were no demanding clients, no backstabbing colleagues, no heavily armed gangers trying to kill him. Just him and Arty, the vast, silent expanse of the landfill, and the occasional, distant rumble of a massive, automated garbage drone dropping its payload onto the ever-growing mountains of refuse.

Then—CRACK! A gunshot, sharp, loud, and dangerously close, shattered the illusion of peace.

Ray dove instinctively behind a towering heap of old, discarded plastics and twisted scrap steel. Something wet, viscous, and utterly awful squelched beneath his chest as he hit the ground. He glanced down—and gagged. A thick, viscous streak of light brown, foul-smelling filth was smeared across the front of his protective suit like a grotesque, abstract painting. He gagged again, the taste of metaphorical bile rising in his throat.

Arty, moving with surprising speed for someone laden with a backpack full of questionable salvage, dropped flat behind a rusted-out, doorless refrigerator. "Shiiiiiit," he whispered, his voice tight with alarm. "That was a slug, man. Big caliber. Definitely not some civ-pop snap-pistol."

They waited, breath held, every sense straining, listening to the sudden, unnerving silence. No follow-up shot. No sound of approaching footsteps. Just the mournful whine of distant, unseen scavenger drones and the whisper of the wind as it sighed through the metallic corpses of forgotten machines. Cautiously, slowly, they crept out from their respective cover. Ray groaned as he peeled himself off the reeking trash heap, the foul, sticky sludge clinging stubbornly to his suit. His hands, even through the thick gloves, trembled slightly as he tried to wipe it away, the texture like mucous-drenched, rancid oil. A ripple of genuine, visceral disgust slid through his spine.

Arty, meanwhile, was already crawling forward on his belly like a curious, cybernetically enhanced raccoon on a high-stakes reconnaissance mission.

"Where the hell do you think you're going?" Ray hissed, his voice a low, urgent whisper.

"Toward the signal, bro! Toward the boom!" Arty whispered back, his eyes, even behind the grimy goggles, gleaming with a reckless, almost manic excitement. "You don't drop a heavy round like that in a place like this unless you've got some serious gear worth protecting. Or you are the serious gear. Either it's a clandestine gang drop gone sideways… or some rogue, military-grade tech just woke up from a long nap and decided it's snack time."

Ray stared at him, utterly dumbfounded. "You realize that's completely, certifiably insane, right? We should be going the other way. Fast."

Arty grinned through the grime on his gas mask, his teeth flashing white. "Comfort's for couches and corporate cubicles, Ray-man. This? This is where history glitches and legends are born from the wreckage. Let's go find out what, or who, just pulled that trigger."

They crept cautiously towards the source of the gunshot. The climb, over treacherous, unstable mounds of refuse, had brought them high, nearly level with the fractured, skeletal crowns of collapsed residential towers and rusted, precarious skywalks that loomed in the distance. On their bellies, they crawled across the splintered, uneven plating of what looked like a massive, discarded rooftop, peering down into the garbage-strewn glade below.

Ray's optics zoomed in, his HUD flickering faintly as it adjusted for distance and the hazy, polluted air. A body lay sprawled on the trash-stained ground—big, unmoving. Dark, matted hair, caked in dried blood and filth. The back of the skull blew open like a split, rotten melon. Gray brain matter, steaming faintly in the cool morning air, clung to jagged pieces of metal debris in obscene, glistening clumps. The man's pale, waxy skin was streaked with sweat and grime, catching the dim, pulsing light of the overhead municipal floodlamps that never quite managed to dispel the landfill's perpetual gloom. He wore a tattered, sleeveless red synth-leather jacket, torn along one side, over a faded, black ripper T-shirt and equally faded, patched denim jeans. But what stood out, even amidst the gore and filth, was the sheer, ostentatious wealth that hadn't yet been looted: a thick, gaudy gold chain hanging from his neck, twin expensive-looking, high-end chronometers on each wrist, and a gleaming, intricately detailed, gold-plated cybernetic arm from the elbow to the fingertips—it's polished plating gleaming obscenely beneath the layers of grime.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

Ray's jaw tightened. He knew that arm. He knew that style.

Arty, unusually quiet, set his bulging backpack down with exaggerated, almost reverent care. His usual manic bravado had completely evaporated, replaced by a wide-eyed, shocked silence.

Ray scanned the immediate area—thermal readings, faint electronic signal traces, subtle motion sweeps. Nothing. Just garbage, silence, and the overwhelming stench of death. He followed Arty as the younger man cautiously, almost reluctantly, made his way down a precarious slope of debris towards the body. The air here smelled even worse, thick with the coppery tang of fresh blood and the sickly sweet aroma of burnt plastic and ozone. Each step towards the corpse felt like slipping deeper into a dark, violent story that had already reached its brutal, inevitable conclusion.

Ray crouched beside the body and, with a detached, clinical precision, rolled it over. The dead man's face stared back at him—vacant gray eyes, mouth slack and agape, blood still seeping from a neat, perfectly centered hole in his forehead. Filth and grime were smeared across his high cheekbones and strong jawline.

Arty recoiled, his breath catching in a sharp, audible gasp. "Shit... Oh, shit, man..."

Ray knew the face. Not from his own life, but from the stolen memories of Red.

'Rex Future,' he thought, the name surfacing unbidden.

A notorious, mid-level fixer. A loudmouth. A showman. The kind who made himself too visible, too memorable, in a city like Virelia, where anonymity was often the key to longevity. Rumors had circulated for months that he'd vanished after a high-profile, violent deal between two major rival gangs had gone spectacularly, catastrophically wrong. Then… nothing. Just whispers. Ghost sightings. Red had caught wind that Rex had resurfaced a few weeks ago, trying to re-establish his old networks, but clearly, that return had been tragically short-lived. Now, Rex Future was just another forgotten headline waiting to fade into the city's relentless, uncaring news cycle.

Guess Rex… had no future after all, Ray thought, a flicker of grim, detached humor passing through him. Just another dead body in Virelia's endless, ever-growing pile of corpses.

Arty's lips pressed into a thin, hard line. He said nothing, his usual stream of chatter silenced by the brutal reality of the scene.

Ray moved with a cold, mechanical efficiency. He stripped the gaudy jewelry from the corpse, snagged the multiple data shards tucked into various hidden pockets, and then found the weapon—a beautiful, custom-made pistol, matte black and gold, with "REX" engraved in elaborate script along the barrel. It was perfectly balanced, clearly built for precision and stopping power. A steel-aluminum hybrid, with a long, ported barrel, an angular, oversized trigger guard, and a textured, ergonomic grip. Even the muzzle was plated in gleaming gold.

Arty watched, unmoving, his face pale beneath his grime-smeared goggles.

Ray turned his gaze to the dead man's golden arm. "Think we can detach it?" he asked, his voice low, flat.

Arty shifted uncomfortably, his eyes darting away from the corpse. "Uh… not really my specialty, man. I don't usually mess with… mods."

Ray could have used his nanites. But not in front of Arty. No.

His eyes landed on a half-buried, discarded refrigeration unit a few feet away. "Help me move him," Ray said, motioning with a curt tilt of his head.

Arty hesitated for a long moment, then nodded slowly, reluctantly. They moved the heavy body together, a grim, silent tableau, hoisting it with considerable effort into the refrigerator's yawning, empty cavity. The door groaned shut with a final, rusted, metallic thud, a makeshift tomb in a city of a million forgotten dead.

"I'll come back later," Ray said, his voice still flat, devoid of emotion. "With some proper tools and get that arm out. It's worth a lot of NEX."

Arty stared at the closed refrigerator for a moment, then muttered, his voice barely a whisper, "That's a whole lotta cheese, man. If it's real gold, anyway."

Ray didn't respond. It was real. Rex Future didn't do fakes. Especially not when it came to projecting status and power.

They walked back to Arty's van in a heavy, oppressive silence. Arty kept glancing nervously at the ground, as if he expected to see Rex's dead, accusing eyes staring back at him from beneath the refuse. He was shaken. Visibly. His fingers tapped a restless, agitated rhythm against his thigh. Ray, on the other hand, felt… blank. Detached. He had seen death before—up close, far away, through his own eyes and, more recently, through the borrowed, fragmented eyes of the people he'd absorbed. It didn't shake him anymore. It just sank deeper, another layer of cold, hard sediment in the endless, murky ocean of his soul.

But for once, for Arty's sake, he decided to be the one to cut the silence. "I checked out that data shard you gave me earlier," he said, his gaze fixed on the grimy van window, his voice carefully casual.

Arty turned, his eyes wide with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension.

"Didn't expect to see you tied to a bed like that. Pink bunny ears and all. Very… festive."

A sudden, explosive burst of laughter erupted from Arty—loud, sharp, and almost desperate in its intensity. "Shit! Oh, man, I thought I deleted all of those!" he said between gasping breaths, his face flushing a bright red beneath the grime. "My ex, Brunhilde… she had some… really weird kinks, man. She liked to—"

"Nope. Stop. Right there," Ray interrupted, holding up a hand. "Spare me the details. My brain is still trying to recover from the visual." A faint, almost imperceptible smirk touched Ray's lips.

Arty shook his head, still grinning, a measure of his usual manic energy returning. "Sorry for traumatizing you, my dude. Occupational hazard of associating with a certifiable genius like myself, I guess."

They didn't talk on their way back. Mainly because Arty, despite his earlier enthusiasm, still seemed a little shaken.

After Arty had parked the van, with its precious, if somewhat disturbing, cargo, in the secluded lot behind his apartment building, both of them now back in their relatively clean civilian clothes, he turned to Ray from the driver's seat, a new light in his eyes.

"You passed, by the way," Arty said, flashing a cheerful, almost idiotic grin.

Ray gave him a suspicious, sidelong look. "I passed what? Advanced Trash-Hunting and Corpse Disposal 101?"

"No, man, I mean—you're pretty good. In a pinch. You passed my test."

Ray just stared at him, his expression a perfect mask of weary disbelief, the kind of look that clearly said: What the actual fuck are you talking about now, Arty?

Arty leaned in a little, his voice suddenly more sincere, more grounded. "Look, man, I've had people, so-called 'friends,' flake out on me the second I actually needed real help with something important, something a little… off-book. Just wanted to see if you'd show up, you know? When it wasn't convenient, when it was weird and probably dangerous. And you did. You didn't bail." He reached over and clapped Ray enthusiastically on the shoulder. "Congrats, Ray-man. You're officially… not a total flake."

"Thanks… I guess," Ray muttered, unsure whether to be insulted or flattered.

"So, you want some of that gourmet pizza now?" Arty asked as he popped open the driver-side door with a cheerful creak.

"Nah. I'm heading home to eat with my mom. Then I've got a few other things I need to do while the sun's still actually up."

"Fair enough, fair enough," Arty said, hopping out of the van with his usual boundless energy.

As Ray stepped out too, Arty turned, his expression more serious now, more grounded. "Seriously though, Ray—thanks for today. For real. If you ever need help with tech stuff, cracking encryption, patching a fried system, building something crazy from scratch… anything at all… I got you. You've got my secure comm."

Ray shook his offered hand, a quiet, almost imperceptible nod exchanged between them. A strange, unlikely alliance, forged in a junkyard amidst death and discarded dreams.