Ren never thought he'd miss the hum of a refrigerator.
Not the smooth, ultra-silent hum of a ship-grade cooler like the ones installed here in Cloudy Curtain's orbital habitats—but the cheap, rattling box he used to own back on Earth. The one he kicked to keep the compressor going. The one with old magnets and expired takeout coupons plastered on its faded white shell.
Here, everything felt too clean or too alien. Synthetic walls hummed with embedded circuitry. Screens responded to voice commands he hadn't even finished learning. The sink in his apartment didn't even have a faucet—just a filtered vapor emitter that responded to biometric requests. He accidentally fogged his face more than once just trying to get water.
And worst of all?
The datapads didn't have USB ports.
His new life as Ren Vesmir Larkinson had barely begun, and already he was playing catch-up with a world that made no sense. Ren was no engineer. He was a reader. A fan. A shut-in who lived on instant noodles and online games, not someone who could tell the difference between a carbon-bonded servo and a magnetically dampened piston.
The stories had made it look easy.
He remembered how Ves casually worked on busted mechs at the beginning of The Mech Touch, how he navigated interfaces and systems like it was second nature. Of course he did—he grew up with this stuff.
Ren hadn't.
He still reflexively double-tapped on screens. He tried to press virtual buttons instead of thinking them. He didn't even understand how neural interface keys worked. They looked like metal thimbles, but when he put one on, it made his head buzz like he had tinnitus.
The only advantage he had was a lifetime of reading. Of watching and memorizing. Of imagining.
But theory wasn't the same as practice.
So, he decided to start from zero.
Brill's scrapyard was a maze of twisted metal, corroded frames, and discarded dreams. It sat beneath the habitat's industrial layer, deep in the service district where the gravity was uneven and the air filters hummed like angry bees.
The first time Ren set foot there, he was overwhelmed by the sheer scale of everything.
A single mech arm was bigger than a car. Power conduits as thick as tree trunks hung from overhead racks. Bundles of burnt wiring littered the ground like vines. There were no clean surfaces, no neat labels, no helpful signs.
Brill, the scrapyard's cantankerous owner, gave him a single look and barked, "What are you? Lost or stupid?"
Ren had to resist the urge to bow—an old habit from online etiquette on Earth. "I want to learn," he said instead.
Brill's eyes narrowed. "From what I can see, you ain't got the hands for it."
"I'll earn them."
That earned a grunt. "Then start with the junk pile. You'll find more broken than working parts, but maybe you'll learn what a damn capacitor looks like."
So he did.
And it was humiliating.
The first week was a series of failures.
Ren spent hours disassembling what he thought was a sensor module, only to realize it was a broken heater coil. He electrocuted himself twice. Once by cutting into a live circuit. The second time by assuming a black wire meant "ground" in a multiversal future where color-coding was decided by individual manufacturers.
He burned his fingertips on thermoplastic casing. Cut his palms open on alloy sheeting. Ruined a perfectly fine power cell by dropping it on the floor. Brill simply watched, occasionally barking out warnings, but never offering unsolicited help.
"Experience makes better teachers than I do," was all he said.
Ren came home every night with bruises, dirty coveralls, and grease smeared across his face. His terminal's interface kept glitching because he kept wiping his hands on it while reviewing technical schematics.
But he didn't stop.
Because every once in a while, he learned something real.
Like how a signal amplifier had to be calibrated not just by output frequency, but by its material's thermal conductivity.
Or that power lines within limb modules had to be routed in curved spirals to reduce vibration stress during recoil.
Or that recoil in ranged mechs wasn't just about absorbing force—it was about controlling direction, vibration harmonics, and heat dissipation in complex, interrelated systems.
That one lesson took him three whole days, four busted stabilizer brackets, and a lecture from Brill about "playing with artillery-grade damping systems like a toddler with fireworks."
But when he finally got it, when he stabilized a half-built armature and ran a recoil test that didn't cause it to fall over?
He felt it.
That thrill.
That fragile, brilliant spark of understanding.
By the end of the second week, Ren had started compiling a log on his terminal—not of designs, but of concepts.
A glossary. An evolving map of how mechs worked from the inside out. He categorized components not by name, but by function, failure points, interdependencies.
[ENTRY #16: Beam Weapon Recoil]"Recoil is not linear. Beam rifles create shock pulses through superheated conduits that affect internal servos via frame resonance. Bracing must account for heat ripple + feedback lag."
[ENTRY #21: Targeting Algorithms]"Basic targeting uses three-point triangulation. High-end systems use predictive firing based on acceleration curves. Need to understand sensor drift and calibration routines."
Each entry was like laying a brick. Slowly, carefully, with frustration and error—but he was building something.
Three weeks in, Brill handed him a burnt-out rifle casing.
"Old K-9 Plasma Sprayer. Useless now, but the chamber's still intact."
Ren blinked. "You're giving this to me?"
"You've stopped breaking things. Might as well start building."
It wasn't much. The weapon had been long since gutted. No power cell. No focusing lens. But the frame was real. Scorched. Battle-worn. Heavy.
Ren cradled it like an artifact.
"Thanks," he said quietly.
Brill waved him off. "Don't thank me. Prove you can make something from it."
That night, Ren brought the rifle back to his apartment.
He cleaned it for hours. Polished the carbon scoring. Removed the cracked safety plate. Took digital scans and measurements of the barrel integrity. He compared it to known models from memory and technical archives, searching for compatible replacement parts.
It was the first component he would try to restore, not just understand.
And when he finally sat down, tired but determined, and tapped open a blank page on his terminal labeled:
"PROJECT: K-9 REBUILD, V0.1"
He realized something.
He wasn't just surviving anymore.
He was beginning to create.