The man who entered Ben Carter’s workshop was made of dust and desperation. He moved with the brittle caution of someone who expected the ground to give way, his thin frame wrapped in rags that had long ago forgotten their original color. In his hands, he held a water purifier, clutching it like a prayer book. Its casing was cracked, and a fine red grit bled from the seams. He placed it on the workbench with the reverence of a last resort. The gesture was silent, but the request screamed from his hollowed eyes.
Ben Carter did not look up from the plasma cutter he was recalibrating. The hiss of the tool was a familiar sound in the cavernous space, a workshop built into the iron guts of a derelict ore hauler. The air smelled of ozone, hot metal, and the faint, sweet scent of lubricant. Ben finished his adjustment, the cutter’s whine settling into a placid hum. Only then did he turn his attention to the man and the broken machine on his bench.
He picked up the purifier. It was a standard civilian model, a cheap system never designed to last. His fingers, stained with grease and scarred from a thousand minor burns, moved over the device with an unnerving precision. He found the hairline fractures in the housing, the corrosion on the intake valve, the faint warping of the chassis from too much direct sun. He didn't need to open it. He already knew the diagnosis.
The scavenger watched, his breath held tight in his chest. Hope was a physical thing, a pressure building behind his ribs. He had walked for two days to get here, following rumors of a mechanic who could fix anything.
Ben set the purifier down. He shook his head once, a small, final motion. The core filtration membrane was shot, dissolved by particulates too fine for its cheap design. It was irreparable. The system’s failure was total. The scavenger’s face seemed to collapse inward, the last architecture of hope giving way.
"Please," the man rasped, his voice dry as the dust on his clothes. "I have parts." He fumbled inside his rags, producing a handful of scavenged components: a bent copper wire, a cracked data chip, the servo from a child’s toy. They were worthless. His desperation was so profound it had become a kind of currency, but it was one Ben Carter no longer traded in.
Ben ignored the offered scrap. He looked past the scavenger, through the open bay door of the workshop. Outside, the perpetual twilight of the Grey Wastes painted the landscape in shades of rust and bone. The skeletons of two Warden-class Mecha, twelve-meter titans of war, lay half-buried in the dust. They were monuments to a different kind of failed system, their armor plates peeled back like broken ribs. The steady, almost subliminal clicking of the workshop’s perimeter Geiger counter was the only reply.
"A system designed to fail devours its own," Ben said, his voice a low rumble of worn-out parts. He tapped a finger on the dead purifier. "This was built to break. So you’d have to buy another one. That was the old world’s logic. The new world just inherited the wreckage."
The scavenger stared, not understanding. He wasn't here for a lesson in history. He was here for water.
— Stop trying to fix the machine, — Ben continued, his gaze still fixed on the derelict warframes outside. The hulks were proof. The Compact built its machines to be perfect, but perfection was a brittle state. The wastes were littered with it. — Just try to survive its collapse.
He turned away from the man and the broken purifier. He walked to a large, dented cistern in the corner of the workshop and filled a metal canteen from its spigot. The sound of clean water splashing was an obscenity in the quiet ruin. He screwed the cap on tight and walked back to the bench.
Ben pushed the canteen into the scavenger’s hands. The man’s fingers closed around it, his knuckles white. It was an act of personal kindness that felt colder and more final than the rejection. The price of this water was the last of his hope. He had come for a fix, for a way to keep his own small system running. He was leaving with a handout, a temporary reprieve.
The scavenger nodded, a jerky, bird-like motion. He turned and walked out of the workshop, the canteen held tight against his chest. He did not look back. Ben watched him go, a small figure shrinking into the vast, grey emptiness, until he was just another mote of dust.
Fifteen kilometers away, sealed in the sterile cockpit of his Warden, Rhys Carrick heard the entire exchange. He was monitoring local, open-band comms, a habit born of boredom and a sliver of paranoia his training had never fully scrubbed away. The signal was weak, layered with static, but Ben Carter’s words came through with the clarity of a sermon. Rhys scoffed, the sound loud in the humming silence of the cockpit.
He dismissed the mechanic’s cynicism as the simple philosophy of a man who had given up. A weed growing in the cracks of a greater design. The Compact was not a system designed to fail. It was a system designed to win, to impose order on chaos, to scrub the world clean of the spiritual rot that had poisoned it. The hulks of abandoned Wardens were not proof of failure; they were the acceptable cost of progress. His loyalty to that system was a solid thing, a bulkhead against the kind of despair that left men like Carter rusting in the dust. It was at 95%, a near-perfect efficiency.
Back in the workshop, Ben Carter stood at the workbench for a long time after the scavenger had gone. The faint, rhythmic clicking of the Geiger counter measured out the silence. He finally picked up the handful of worthless parts the man had left behind and swept them into a disposal chute. He did not believe in sentiment.
He moved to a battered comms terminal in the corner, its screen glowing a sickly green. The exchange with the scavenger was already forgotten, replaced by a more pressing anomaly. The open-band chatter he’d been monitoring had caught something else. The faint, encrypted signal of a lone Warden-class Mecha, its transponder code identifying it as a unit from Tower-7.
It was the presence of the machine that was wrong. And its vector. It was moving away from its designated patrol route, heading southeast toward the shimmering, cancerous glow of a known Eden. Ben’s fingers moved across the keyboard, his movements economical and precise. He logged the time, the Warden’s last known coordinates, and its projected path. He added a single, terse note: Irregular patrol. Vectoring toward Eden border.
It was a habit, nothing more. A lifetime of surviving in the wastes had taught him to notice things that were out of place, to log the loose threads in the systems around him. Most of the time, they meant nothing. But sometimes, they were the first sign of a catastrophic failure, the first tremor before the collapse. He saved the file, the screen blinking once before returning to its quiet scan of the empty frequencies.
He did not know that he had just marked a ghost on his map.
