Chương 80: To Build a Mustang I

"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 that he was a complete lunatic techie with a death wish, 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. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. 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 purged, essentially leaving metadata ghosts without any content that could actually be recovered. 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. The 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," what 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.