The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices harry simpson and AgentZero
Operatives Cassius au Bellona and Nicholas Rambusch
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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We walked about fifty feet to the first entrance on the blue side of the building. I pressed my thumb against the biometric scanner and punched the code, and the hydraulic locks disengaged with a heavy thud.
I pushed the door open and stepped aside, holding the door open as Judy took two steps in behind me and stopped.
"Holy shit," she said quietly, her eyes going wide as they tracked across the space. "This place has changed."
She turned in a slow circle, taking it all in. Her gaze lingered on the CNC machine, then moved to the furnace, then the gear cutter, with slow deliberation, as if she knew what industrial equipment was and was processing the fact that it was installed inside what she had last seen as an abandoned, mold-infested shell.
"I used to hang out in here," she said, still scanning the space with a disoriented expression. "Before you lot bought it. Me and some kids from the block used to sneak in through the blue-side door when the lock was busted. The floor was cracked, the catwalks were rusted, and the whole place smelled like standing water and rat piss... Whoever did the renovation knew what they were doing."
"Thanks," I said, and left it at that.
I walked toward bay one and extended my arm.
Judy's gaze followed the gesture and landed on the car.
The 1970 Ford Mustang Boss 429 sat under the overhead lights in bay one, its rusted and faded green body crouching on the concrete. The paint was almost entirely gone, reduced to scattered patches of oxidized green clinging to the body panels, and the chrome trim had corroded to a dull grey. The engine bay was empty, and the interior was stripped to the frame, exposing it to decades of atmospheric decay.
It was, objectively, one of the most beautiful things I had ever owned.
Judy walked toward it slowly, her boots clicking on the floor, and she stopped about three feet from the driver's side door, her hands on her hips and her head tilted at an angle.
"That's an old Mustang," she said.
"A Boss 429," I said.
"A Boss four..." She trailed off, then looked at me. "How old is this thing?"
"Ninety-nine years," I said. "Built in 1970. One of the rarest muscle cars ever produced. Ford only made them for two years, and most of them were destroyed, scrapped, or lost decades ago. Finding one in any condition is almost impossible. Finding one that's structurally recoverable is also an astronomical anomaly."
"And you're rebuilding it," she said. It wasn't really a question.
"From the ground up," I nodded. "I'll be making a new engine block on the CNC from raw stock. Every component will be manufactured right here, in this room, to tolerances that the original factory couldn't have matched if they'd tried."
I leaned against the wall beside the bay and crossed my arms. "The only things I'm keeping are whatever original body panels are structurally sound enough to restore rather than replace."
"That's..." Judy started and paused, looking at the car again as if recalculating its value through the lens of what I had just described. "That's going to take a while."
"Eh, I'm young, I got the time," I said. "It's going to take however long it takes."
"Spoken like a true wrench-head," she said with approval. She walked closer to the Mustang and crouched beside the front wheel well, examining where the frame rail connected to the subframe mounting point. Her eyes traced the corrosion pattern as if she were running a diagnostic and knew what to look for. "You know, for a hundred-year-old car, the frame looks solid under the rust. I think it's mostly just surface oxidation and nothing structural. You sandblast this, hit it with a rust converter, and prime it, and the metal underneath should still be workable."
"Really?" I asked with a raised eyebrow. "Well, the floor pans also need to be fully replaced, and the rear quarter panels are too far gone to save, but if you say the main frame is recoverable, then I guess that just eases the workload. But I'd still have to reinforce it."
"Yeah... What are you doing for fuel?" she asked, standing up and wiping her hands on her pants. "Because if you're going full custom on the engine block, you could always go electric. Drop a dual-motor setup into the bay, run a battery pack under the floor, and you'd have more torque than the original engine ever dreamed of."
"Fuck no," I said with more conviction than I intended.
Judy raised both eyebrows.
"Come on now. It's a Boss 429," I said. "It's getting a big block V8, that's non-negotiable. But it ain't gonna be the original 429-cubic-inch big block that Ford dropped into these things in 1970. I've already been doing the research to build a 9.4-liter twin-turbo, supercharged big block V8 on the CNC from raw stock. CHOOH2 conversion, obviously, since sourcing petroleum fuel in 2069 is about as realistic as finding a parking spot in Corpo Plaza."
"A 9.4-liter," Judy repeated, her eyebrows climbing. "With a supercharger and twin turbos. In a Mustang."
"In a Mustang that's going to weigh roughly seventy-five hundred pounds when the build is done," I said. "I did say I was going to reinforce the frame, so I'm also going to do the same with the chassis and going for a fully armored integrated subframe through a three-layer composite armor system. I'm talking about a ceramic-composite and carbon nanolattice outer shell to break incoming rounds and spread impact energy with a graphene weave and aramid fibers over an energy-absorbing honeycomb structure in the middle layer to handle shockwaves and prevent spalling. And to top it all off, an inner liner of anti-fragment material with electromagnetic shielding and a pressure-dampening cabin shell."
Judy's brain seemed to have undergone a short circuit as she stared at me. "You're... Jesus fucking Christ, you're building a damn tank."
"You bet your ass I am," I replied while nodding like a sagely master. "I mean, where do you think we're living in? It's Night City, and I'll be building a car that can survive anything it throws at it, and I want people to know it so that they don't fuck with me. I'm planning on widening the body further, getting a more aggressive front splitter, flared fenders, a side-exit exhaust, and a roof-mounted light bar that will hide a roof-mounted M2067 defender for when shit hits the fan. I still haven't decided whether I wanna go full matte black on the paint job, or dark purple with racing stripes. But one thing is for sure, nothing about this car is going to be subtle. When it rolls through the streets of Night City, there won't be a window that won't shake under the purr of its engine. I'm all about laying low, but when I drive that beast... I want every gangoon, every corpo, and every badge on the street to break their necks trying to look at it."
Judy's arms were crossed, and the look on her face said that I had her curiosity in the beginning, but now I had her attention.
"So," she said. "Not a sleeper."
"Fuck no. She's going to be the complete opposite of a sleeper," I said. "A sleeper hides what it is, but this car... she is going to be exactly what she looks like, which is a ninety-nine-year-old muscle car that someone rebuilt into a war machine and then had the audacity to drive through the streets as though it belonged there. It will be a rolling statement."
"What about the drivetrain?" she asked. "You can't run seventy-five hundred pounds on rear-wheel drive. Not with the kind of power you're probably going to be making."
"I'm telling you, I've had a hot minute to think through all of this. I'll be doing torque-vectoring all-wheel drive," I said. "With rear-biased dynamic distribution and an independently controlled electric front drive assist for launch traction. The front motors will handle grip management off the line and through corners, and the rear gets the full mechanical output of the V8 through a reinforced transmission spine. I'll also be designing a predictive grip management system tied into a launch traction dummy AI that reads surface conditions in real time and adjusts torque distribution on the fly."
"How are you thinking of handling the horsepower?" Judy asked.
"I'll be breaking it up into three tunes," I said. "Street tune will probably run somewhere around nineteen-twenty on the supercharger alone with the turbos in bypass. Then I will have a race tune that will spool the turbos and compound on top of the supercharger output to hit over three thousand. And finally, I will have a pursuit tune that removes all the electronic limiters and lets the full system run unrestricted somewhere around forty-five hundred."
"Forty-five hundred horsepower," she said slowly. "In a car that weighs seventy-five hundred pounds, and has armor."
"If the math I did is right, and the projection program I ran is accurate, I should be looking at a zero to sixty in about two and a half seconds," I said. "Zero to two hundred in under nine with a top speed of two-eighty-seven. The CHOOH2 conversion system I'll be designing uses a high-compression variable-geometry intake with an adaptive fuel mapping system that adjusts combustion ratios based on throttle demand and driving mode. Again, if that projection program I used is accurate, then the street tune will get roughly twenty miles per gallon in the city and thirty-four on the highway."
"Twenty miles per gallon on a 9.4-liter compound-boosted engine," Judy said. "How in the flying fuck?"
"Lean burn cycling on low-load cruising," I said. "The turbos bypass entirely under light throttle, leaving the supercharger to handle boost at minimal draw, and the variable-geometry intake restricts airflow to match a fuel curve I'm mapping by hand on the CNC's integrated programming terminal. It essentially runs like a much smaller, more efficient engine until you put your foot down, and then the supercharger whine climbs, the turbos spool on top of it, and the fuel economy goes out the window along with whatever was standing in front of you."
"That's insane," Judy said. But the way she said it, with her arms crossed, her head tilted, and the faintest trace of a grin tugging at the corner of her mouth, was not the "insane" look of someone who thought I had lost my mind.
"The suspension will be active hydropneumatic with magnetic dampers and adaptive ride height," I continued, because there was no stopping now until I finished. "Mil-spec control arms with reinforced ceramic bearings, active shutters, and a sealed underbody for thermal management at speed, and adaptive rear stabilization for handling under the weight of the armor, and variable geometry vents integrated into armored aero channels to keep the engine cool when the compound system is running at full spool."
"You've been thinking about this for a while," Judy said.
"Since the day I got my hands on it," I said.
She looked at the car again as if she was imagining what it would look like based on my descriptions alone.
"Old school bones," she said quietly. "New school teeth. You have a name in mind?"
"The Widowmaker," I said.
"Yeah," she said while nodding in appreciation. "That tracks."
While we were standing in bay one and discussing my future plans for the Mustang, the rumble of the Galena's engine filtered through the closed bay door beside us.
I quickly checked the cams and then pulled up the bay door control through my Neural Link and opened it, allowing Mom to roll the Galena in slowly and park a few feet from the Mustang. The Galena's oxidized panels, sitting beside the Boss 429's corroded frame, made them look like two patients in the same waiting room.
"You plan on fixing that bodywork?" Judy asked, nodding toward the Galena.
"Eventually," I said.
The driver's door opened, and Mom stepped out, her eyes sweeping around until they found me and then Judy. Then they traveled back to me with a certain look.
"Mijo," Mom said, closing the car door behind her and planting her hands on her hips. "Are you planning on being a player with two girls at the same time?"
"Ma, no, she's..." I started.
"Yeah, that's not happening," Judy cut in, her voice flat and unapologetic. "Although I don't think it's really any of your business, I'm a lesbian."
I looked at Judy, then at Mom, then did a quick internal assessment of whether the floor could open beneath my feet and swallow me whole.
Mom looked at Judy for a moment before the surprise gave way to warm amusement.
"You know," Mom said, leaning against the Galena with her arms folded, "I have a friend named Lourdes. She called herself a goldstar lesbian, and was very proud of it too. Used to lecture the rest of us about compulsory heterosexuality during lunch breaks... Well, I hadn't seen her in a few years, but we just reconnected today, and wouldn't you know it? She has a husband now."
I pinched the bridge of my nose and closed my eyes. I never wanted to disappear more in my life than I did right now.
"Ma," I said.
"What?" Mom said innocently. "I'm just sharing."
"You're oversharing," I said.
"That's what mothers do, mijo," she said with what I can only describe to be a shit eating grin.
Judy looked more amused than offended. She glanced between Mom and I, then took a step backward toward the blue-side entrance.
"This was a cool chat, Santi," she said. "But I should get back to the truck before I lose daylight."
"Yeah, it was," I said.
She turned to leave, then paused, her eyes drifting to the fabrication line against the back wall.
"Hey," she said, turning back to me. "I've got a connect. A guy who knows which parts of the mountains have the best metal... I'd be willing to introduce you tomorrow, if you're free."
"In exchange for what?" I asked.
"Let me use the machines," she said, nodding toward the scrap-fab and the furnace. "My firetruck rebuild is going to take a whole lot longer at the rate I'm going."
I thought about it. The scrap-fab could convert raw scrap into usable stock, but the output quality depended entirely on the input quality. If Judy's connect could source the best scrap, then the machine could produce stock worth working with. And clean scrap would give me a near-unlimited supply of raw material for the Mustang at a fraction of what legitimate vendors charged.
"Deal," I said.
Judy grinned, transforming her entire face.
"Tomorrow morning," she said. "I'll come grab you at nine."
"I'll be here," I said as she turned and walked toward the blue-side entrance and left.
Mom was leaning against the Galena with her arms folded.
"She seems nice," Mom said.
"She's our neighbor, Ma," I said.
"I said she seems nice," Mom said. "I was making an observation, not an implication."
"Por favor, Ma. Everything you say is an implication," I said.
"That's not true," Mom said, heading toward the stairwell. "Sometimes I also make predictions."
She disappeared up the stairs laughing, and I shook my head before turning my attention back to the Mustang, which did not have opinions about my social life as one of its many virtues.
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Stone requirement for a bonus chapter next week has already been met. I request more, if you'd like to give me more and continue growing this story.
The infamous P@treon exists for those of you who want to read ahead.
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They get around 3 long-form weekly chapters (4.5-6k words each (Though currently that number has dropped because work is killing me and I don't have much time to write.)