Chapter 41: To Build a Mustang I (Patreon)

Apologies for the late chapter.

"Every act of creation is first an act of destruction."

- Pablo Picasso

---

Not even twelve hours had gone by since I had "become a man," according to Dino, and my bank account had been drained of over 130,000 eddies. I paid Vik what I owed him and paid O.T for the materials to build the Mustang. He replied almost immediately, telling me that he would be pulling up around seven in the morning today, and fuck me if this gonk didn't give mixed signals.

Though my first impressions of him were a complete lunatic techie with a deathwish, he was very punctual considering he had basically set the delivery time at twelve in the morning. He woke me up at six fifty-five with a call to tell me that he was five minutes out, and by the time I washed my face and walked downstairs, O.T was arriving in a Bratsk full of different metals. 

Though I appreciate his punctuality, you would think that someone living out in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere in the badlands would have taken their sweet time and arrived much later in the day. 

I opened the door for bay two, and Orsen leaned out of the cab of the truck.

"Wakey, wakey, it's time for shhkooool," Orsen said with a goofy smile that, mixed with his hairstyle and mustache, sent shivers down my spine. "This is the first of three shipments I got for you, my lanky choomba. It's loaded up with AR plates and structural steel, but I still need to make two more trips to get you all the scrap you paid for."

"How long is it going to take between trips?" I asked while yawning and stretching.

"Well, if traffic's kind, then maybe two hours. Three if it isn't," he said as he killed the engine and swung down from the cab. He landed casually on his feet, like a cat, and tilted his head while giving me a quizzical look. "You plan on feeding me between trips, or should I stop to buy my own shit?"

"There's some synthi-caf that I can get ready for you while you unload this," I offered, pointing to the coffee maker and minifridge in one of the corners. "There's also something left in the fridge right there that might be edible or regrettable. Knock yourself out."

"Regret it is," O.T said, and got to work.

He worked alone, and I watched the metals come off the truck in stacks, thanks to the hydraulic arm the truck had. He then operated a forklift he had at the back of the Bratsk and stacked the metal against the back wall beside the fabrication line in neat rows sorted by thickness. I quickly did a composition scan to confirm the grades.

It's not that I didn't trust him, but that sometimes people can make mistakes. So making sure everything was within spec fell on my shoulders, unless I was willing to get scammed.

Once he was finished, he packed up the forklift and skadaddled from my place, only to return two hours later with the titanium and the tungsten, repeat the process, and then return again at noon with the composites and everything else. By one in the afternoon, the first floor looked less like an open space workshop and more like a materials depot for a military vehicle program, which was more or less what it was going to become.

"Alright, choom, that's all she wrote," he said when he finished packing up. "I seriously have to see this baby on the road once she's done. Gonna look like Batman in that motherfucka."

"Like who?" I asked while furrowing my brows.

O.T looked up at me with genuine hurt in his eyes. 

"Like Batman," he repeated. "You know, that goth orphan motherfucker who beat up villains instead of killing them so he could just whoop their asses infinitely. He has a Batmobile and..."

He trailed off as he saw the smirk growing on my face. Of course I knew who the fuck Batman was. What kind of gonk wouldn't?

"Oh, you bitch," he said as he pulled out one of his gloves from his pockets and threw it at me. 

We laughed it off and then shook hands before he promptly left. He honked twice on the way out, and I closed the bay door one last time for the day.

I stood there for a minute, surrounded by enough raw material to build a car from nothing while expecting to feel something. Maybe some excitement or sense of satisfaction that this dream of mine was about to get on the road. But nope, I felt nothing.

Well, that wasn't entirely true. I did feel sleepy as fuck, but I just figured that it was due to the fact that I hadn't done anything today. I cracked my knuckles and looked at the time on my Kiroshis. 

"Half the day's already gone, no point in starting this now..." I said to myself. "I'll just start tomorrow."

I turned from the materials and went upstairs to the server room, locked the door behind me, grabbed the shard with all the info I had gotten, and settled into the dive chair, slotting the shard into its port.

Project BLACKGLASS was buried three subdirectories deep in the forgotten partition, and it was full of old code. The file creation timestamps predated the facility's current operating system by more than a decade, which meant the files had been migrated from an earlier server architecture and then abandoned at some point.

I hadn't gotten the chance to really dive into the folder due to the fact that I was focused on finding information that could fetch me some eddies, and though God knows how many eddies this would've netted me, it was personal to me.

The files were sparse, with most of the project documentation having been purged, essentially leaving metadata ghosts without any content that could actually be recoverable. What survived was only a personnel roster, a two-paragraph project abstract, a series of internal memos with escalating urgency headers, and the termination report.

The roster listed nineteen names. Eighteen of the names had been redacted, with black bars across the fields where the names should have been, each sealed with encryption keys that had been destroyed along with the personnel files they protected.

However, the nineteenth wasn't redacted.

Project Lead: Alejandro Alfonso Lopez Reyes.

I read the line three times along with the hyperlink that pointed to the termination report at the bottom of the directory. However, I wasn't ready to click it yet.

I began by reading the project abstract, which highlighted Project BLACKGLASS as a Militech Advanced Systems Division initiative operating out of a subterranean black-site beneath the Charter Hill tower, established in the spring of 2052 for the stated purpose of investigating and characterizing anomalous network phenomena originating from beyond the Blackwall perimeter. The objective, buried in the corporate euphemism, was to develop protocols for controlled interaction with post-Blackwall entities for strategic intelligence purposes.

In other words, they were seeking a way to have controlled interactions with post-Blackwall entities that could help them identify and recover lost technologies, and my father had been the one leading the project that was trying to talk to things behind the Blackwall.

The internal memos told the story differently, though. The earliest memo, dated late May 2052, described initial calibration and the establishment of clean baseline scans, meaning that they weren't trying to contact anything on the other side, but actually trying to find something. The next, from July, described the first stable signal returns from beyond the Blackwall, but it was virtually worthless.

And then there was the last memo, dated the second week of November 2052, which claimed that there was a breach by an AI from beyond the Blackwall which resulted in five operators iced in their dive chairs from prolonged neural exposure to the entity's response signal, and the sixth in critical condition and unresponsive. Cause of death was listed as brain liquefaction.

From then on, my father had unilaterally severed the connection at the primary junction and, in the days that followed, had personally handled the elimination of the remaining project support staff, citing containment protocols that Militech had built into the project's operational framework for exactly this contingency.

Total personnel loss: Eighteen.

Five to the entity, and thirteen to my father's hands.

I read the memo twice and sat in the dive chair looking up at the ceiling of the server room for an hour, lost in thought, though I did not think about anything in particular. I just sat there. My father had led a project that had opened a door to something behind the Blackwall, and when the door refused to close, he had done what needed to be done, and then he had gone home to a wife who had just given birth.

Six months. That was how long BLACKGLASS had operated successfully. May through November of 2052. Half a year of knocking on the devil's door before the devil answered, and my father had been standing on the observation deck when it did.

The termination report was so clinical too.

Project BLACKGLASS terminated by unilateral action of Project Lead A. Reyes following catastrophic containment failure.

All project personnel (18) confirmed deceased.

Project Lead status: Null.

Project assets: Destroyed.

Project data: Destroyed.

Recommendation: No further investigation. File and forget.

File and forget, a very clean way to not acknowledge what had happened or that the project existed, and acknowledging that the project existed, which would have exposed Militech's violation of every international law governing Blackwall research. So they buried it, and my father was ordered to kill anyone else connected to the project.

The files of Project BLACKGLASS ended there. A project I had never heard of, and a dead end that technically wasn't really a dead end because my father had left something else behind. Something my mother had been keeping safe for years now, and I only knew of it because I had overheard her cursing it when we first moved to Rancho.

I stood up from the chair and climbed the stairs to the third floor, where Mom was standing at the kitchen counter, getting ready to cook something. She looked up when I came in and did the quick scan she always did.

"Mijo," she said. "¿Qué pasa?"

"I need the shard, Ma," I said.

She went still for a second. The look on her face was closer to something she had been rehearsing than actual surprise.

"Which shard, mijo?" She asked.

"The one Pa left," I said. "The encrypted one you cursed to hell and back and still kept."

Her hands stayed on the counter, and her fingers pressed against the surface, whitening at the tips while her eyes failed to meet mine.

"That thing got your father killed," she said quietly. "He had told me to keep it safe and that someday you might need it... But how can I give to you what caused your father's death? It's only going to lead to your death."

"Ma, I understand how you feel about it," I said. "But I'm asking for it because I need it now."

"I heard you," she said, finally meeting my eyes, and I could tell she was fighting herself as to not look away. "Te pareces demasiado a él. When something caught his attention, he always had that look on his face that you have on yours right now... Like he was carrying something he couldn't put down."

"Ma," I said. "I need that shard."

"I should've destroyed the thing years ago," she grumbled, but turned and walked to her bedroom. I heard a drawer open, along with the rustle of jewelry followed by a case unlatching. She came back to the kitchen holding an unmarked, matte black data shard in her palm and hesitated to hold it out to me.

I slowly took it from her hands and kissed her forehead.

"Gracias, Ma," I said.

"No me agradezcas. I'm only giving it to you because I know how you get when fixated on something, and I know that you're not going to let it go," she said, holding my eyes for a bit. "Just be careful with whatever's on it... Your father wasn't afraid of many things, Santiago, but he had a certain fear of that. One that was equally matched by his curiosity."

"I promise I'll be careful," I told her and headed back downstairs.

The shard was encrypted with a biological key my father had built himself, one that could only be opened once my brain had developed beyond a certain point. Given that my father had feared it, according to my mother, I wasn't about to just slot this into my port or my chair to do a deep dive into it. I isolated my terminal from the net by unplugging all wires other than the power, and sliding a network kill-switch I had bought, which pretty much jams any device within a 5-foot radius from connecting to the net.

I plugged in a pair of Infovisors I had bought for this sort of event, where I had to access data but did not want to risk my own self or my own chrome by interfacing directly with it. The contents resolved across my overlay in a structured directory of coordinates. There were dozens of them, and some pointed to physical locations such as server facilities, relay stations, and hardened data vaults that were scattered across the continent. Others pointed to something else, such as virtual coordinates that existed outside conventional Net architecture, plotted against a boundary of the Blackwall.

According to the notes on the shard, my father had mapped things behind it across years of work. There were time-stamped entries from 2058, when he first began actively parsing the raw telemetry he had smuggled out of the BLACKGLASS black-site on this chip. Entries from 2059, which were more detailed and focused on tracking specific structural formations in the data, which he was calling "artifact clusters."

His entries seemed to get more disorganized and urgent rather than precise as the time progressed. His entries from 2061 stated that he had found something in the telemetry that had rearranged how he understood what he was looking at. And it was like a rabbit hole from there on, with the entries getting denser, more mathematical, and tracking coordinates against biometric baselines with a borderline obsessive behavior. 

And in the deepest layer of the directory, tagged with his personal encryption signature, was a single entry that stopped me: "The link is native purpose of the link was never to make humans more powerful. It was meant to build a bridge, a bridge that would allow artificial intelligence to take over a human mind and body, erasing the original person. It was never about us, but about them. I thought I was saving my little Einstein from what is to come, but I was really just offering him up on a platter. Some of them already walk amongst us."

I read it multiple times, and each time, shivers ran down my spine. My Neural Link, the chrome I had grown up thinking of as the most ordinary, most invisible piece of technology in my body, was actually meant to condition my mind and allow an AI to take over my body with ease.

I looked down at my hands through the gap in my glasses and saw them noticeably tremble.

I let out a soft and nervous chuckle as I thought about it. Maybe the two experiences I've had when upgrading my chrome was... no. I need to find out more information.

I kept scrolling, eventually reaching the directory's deepest layer, which contained one more file. It was isolated from everything else and timestamped November 2052, on the same week that Project BLACKGLASS had gone to shit. It was a captured signal profile, a microsecond snapshot of an entity's transmission pattern from the exact moment it had reached out.

I opened it, and the signal profile loaded. As soon as I did so, my Paraline attempted to parse it against its database of network signatures, AI communication protocols, and encrypted data formats I had come across, and it found a match in under a second.

It was the same signature I had felt in Vik's clinic.

It felt as if the world spun under me, and I didn't even get a chance to remove the glasses when memories I could not recall came rushing in. Six minutes of lived experience that had been surgically extracted from my consciousness flooded back into my mind, and I recalled a dark figure, red code scrolling across my Kiroshis, the drop in temperature, voices talking, and the hatred. For some reason, it had felt ancient and as if it were specifically targeted at me.

The room went sideways, its walls tilting in my peripheral vision, and I gripped the armrests of my office chair. I had no control over my body as I fell sideways with my chair and my heart rate spiked while my head felt like it was about to explode.

I couldn't breathe, and my vision blurred. I tried to stand up only to slam into the ground, and for God knows how long, I was back on the floor of Vik's clinic with my palms flat and my chest heaving while something looked at me from right in front of me.

Eventually the panic that had overcome me passed and my heart rate steadied. I lay on the floor for what felt like forever, my mind still spinning and my sense of balance nowhere to be found.

I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready to follow the coordinates or to look at whatever the fuck that thing was. I wasn't ready to understand what my father had done in the spring and summer and fall of 2052, or how the entity had known who I was, or why the thing seemed to have it out for me.

Not today.

I gathered myself as best I could, and groggily pulled the shard from the terminal. I then locked it in the drawer, and sat there a while longer with my hand on the drawer.

It took a good amount of time for me to finally be able to stand up again, and I noticed that it was already dark outside when I did. So I just went back up to my room, my head killing me, and threw myself on my bed.

---

I felt much better when I woke up the next morning. I still wanted nothing to do with that shard for the time being, but thankfully I had already told myself that I was going to start working on the Widowmaker today. I showered, had breakfast, and brushed my teeth before heading downstairs.

About ten minutes later, Mom came downstairs.

"Ah, señor Reyes," she said to me.

"Why are you calling me that?" I frowned.

"Oh, just, you know. It appears you have grown enough to get your day started and still not even tell your mother good morning or anything," Mom said.

I let out a sigh and walked up to her and gave her a hug. "Buenos días, ma."

"Good morning to you too," she said as she returned the hug. "I'll be running some errands today and having dinner with a friend. I'll be home late."

"Alright, I'm finally getting started on the Mustang today," I nodded. "So I'll be here all day. Do you need any extra eddies?"

Mom gave me a soft smile as she shook her head. "No, mi amor. I have more than enough eddies in my account thanks to you."

"Alright then, have fun," I said, quickly turning my attention to the work I would have to do since ot was already about nine thirty in the morning.

As Mom backed out of the opening door, I noticed a silhouette walk through the grey-side entrance with two cups of iced synthi-caf. Sasha wore a smile on her face and waved goodbye to my mother as she finished backing out of the bay she was parked in.

The bay door closed, and not even a minute had gone by before Judy came through the blue-side door with a toolbox in one hand and a bag of synthetic beef jerky in the other. 

As she did, I remembered that Sasha and Judy had not met before.

"Sasha," I said, gesturing between them, "this is Judy. She's our neighbor. Judy, this is Sasha. She's a choom of mine from the Net."

Sasha extended her hand, and Judy took it. The handshake lasted the normal amount of time, but Judy's eyes did a sweep of Sasha in the process, taking in her appearance, posture, proximity to me, and the two cups of iced synthi-caf that had been brought for exactly two people.

"Cute output," Judy said, which landed in the space between the three of us like a small explosive.

I noticed Sasha's cheeks begin to flush and she suddenly discovered that the nearest stack of metal was extremely interesting. For my part, I simply scratched the back of my neck and let out an awkward laugh.

"Well, slow down, Speedy Gonzales," I said. "We're just chooms."

"Oh rrreeeeaaally?" Judy narrowed her eyes slowly and deliberately while exaggerating the word. "Could've fooled me."

"Judy," I sighed.

"What?" She asked while throwing her arms up in the air. "I'm just making an observation."

"You sound like my mom," I deadpanned.

"Now that I come to think of it, your mom's a smart woman," Judy nodded sagely, which made me chuckle.

I turned to the Widowmaker before the conversation could evolve any further in a direction that was going to make Sasha's face match the red detailing on her jacket.

"Alright," I said. "I need to get the car onto the lift since it's a unibody and I want to start with reinforcing the frame from below. Judy, take the front left. Sasha, front right. I'll push from the rear."

We took positions. I put my palms against the rear of the Mustang's body and felt the oxidized texture of ninety-nine-year-old American steel. The metal was cold under my hands, and the rust flaked off in small brown drifts every time I applied pressure.

"On three," I said. "One. Two. Three."

We pushed together, and this time it was much easier to get the car rolling forwards than it had been when I had to push it by myself when I first found it. It was still reluctant to do so, and it made it known through the ear-piercing screech of metal as it moved, its wheels protested, and its suspension groaned. Something around the back tires made a weird sound, but I just chalked it up to something concerning but not immediately terminal, and kept pushing the car toward the lift platform one dragging foot at a time.

It took us about four minutes to get it centered to the left, and once I had it, I positioned the lift arms at the factory pinch-weld locations and verified the contact points before engaging the hydraulics.

Once I did, the Mustang came off the ground, reaching a height of three feet. I then grabbed a work light from the fabrication bench and lay on my mechanic's creeper to get a look at the bottom of the car, which I had yet to see, even when Judy and I initially inspected it. But when I looked under it, what I saw made me close my eyes in pain.

"So, how bad is it?" Judy asked from above me.

I didn't answer right away, instead reaching a finger up and pressing the tip of it against a section of the frame rail, and applying maybe two pounds of pressure.

"Fuck," I muttered as my fingers went right through the rust and into air. The oxidation had eaten through the steel entirely, converting what had once been a structural member into a brittle iron oxide shell that crumbled at the pressure of a baby's hand. I pulled my fingers back and rust rained down onto my face and into my hair.

I moved three feet to the right along the rail, and found another spot to press, achieving yet again the same results.

I checked the cross-member junction, and it was the same. The rear subframe mount. Same. The floor pan above the transmission tunnel, and this time my whole hand went through up to the wrist, the metal disintegrating around my fingers in a soft cascade of corroded flakes that pattered onto the ground.

"It's bad," I said.

"How bad is bad?" Sasha asked from the other side of the car.

I rolled out from under the lift and stood up, brushing rust out of my hair and off my shoulders. Then I looked at the Widowmaker where it hung on the lift arms, and I saw something that almost made me shit myself.

The car had fucking sunk. Not a lot. Maybe half an inch. But the body had settled into the pinch weld contact points, the metal deforming under the car's own weight. The unibody wasn't supporting itself anymore, and the rust had eaten enough that the remaining metal was bending under a load it had been engineered to carry without effort.

Having previously analyzed only what was easily visible to us, I did not think it would be this bad, since those parts were solid. But seeing this now just made me want to go back to sleep and not deal with this.

Then, if that wasn't enough, I heard a sound coming from the back of the car. It was a slow metallic creak, as if metal was separating from metal under stress.

I stepped back on instinct and pulled both Judy and Sasha back with me.

The entire rear axle assembly, which consisted of the wheels, the differential housing, the springs, and the trailing arms, all of it, separated from the underside of the car in a single grinding release, and the whole assembly dropped three feet to the ground with a crash that rang off the walls of the ground floor. Sasha jumped, and Judy winced.

I took a deep breath and stood there with my hands at my sides and watched the last structural pretense of the 1970 Ford Mustang Boss 429 fall off in one piece.

The axle sat on the ground in a pile of corroded metal and flat tires and seized bearings. The Mustang hung on the lift above it with a gap where its rear used to be.

Nobody said a word for like five minutes before Judy broke the silence.

"So, it's fucked," Judy said.

"An astute observation," I scoffed.

I had wanted to save the original body, and that had been the plan since day one. Keep the factory panels where they were, recoverable, preserve the original frame geometry, and honor as much of the ninety-nine-year-old steel as possible, because the steel was the car's identity, and the thread that connected it to the assembly line in Dearborn in 1970, and cutting that thread felt like cutting the thing that made this a Boss 429 instead of a replica wearing the name.

Obviously there were going to be things that I was going to change, like modifying the frame to accommodate a bigger engine, but it was safe to say that plan was dead. It had died somewhere between my fingers going through the frame rail and the rear axle taking a shit.

The body was fucked. The frame was fucked. Maybe there were some parts that were still salvageable, but as a whole, every structural element the unibody architecture relied on, all of it, was compromised to a point where restoration wasn't a question of skill. You couldn't restore metal that no longer existed.

I looked at the fabrication line against the back wall, at the five machines I had to my disposal and at the eighty-two thousand eddies worth of raw material sorted by type and grade. I definitely had more than enough to build a car from nothing, and though that's not what I wanted to do originally, that's what I was going to have to do.

"New plan," I said. "The bucket has kicked the shit, and it's time to Frankenstein this shit. Looks like I'm going to have to make everything by hand."

"You're making everything?" Sasha asked.

"Eh, most of it," I replied. "I'll just order the parts I can't make myself."

Judy looked at me with a hint of pride and appreciation.

"You know," she said, "most people would've walked away and just bought a new car and modified it."

"I've already burned too many eddies in this venture to turn back now," I countered.

"Hmm, fair enough," she said as she rolled up her sleeves. "So where do we start?"