After seeing Rebecca and her brother off, Osiris' workshop slipped back into its usual hush. The servo-skull's low hum mingled with the faint clatter of tools and the quiet pulse of machinery, like a mechanical hive breathing in sync.
He laid out the scavenged parts across the analysis table, every motion clean, deliberate. The Thunder-Type 7 battery was hooked into a tangle of jury-rigged cables and regulators, feeding its charge into his hungry micro-reactor.
"Energy input's stable. Fluctuations under two percent," Osiris muttered, tracing the alert bar on his interface as it steadied. "Not bad, Buddy. We can finally stop running on fumes."
The servo-skull turned, jaw clacking once, blue optics pulsing in silent approval.
Osiris shifted focus to the pile of junk Rebecca had called scrap. The scanner whirred to life, a fine beam sweeping across a charred circuit board. "Check this out," he said, almost like talking to a trainee. "They've built this spiral nanocircuit that ditches stability for raw speed. Real 'burn bright, crash fast' logic, reckless, but kinda brilliant."
The skull hovered closer, feeding him magnified data. He chuckled dryly. "This place runs on chaos. Everything's patched, overclocked, and held together with spit and luck."
He grabbed a dull alloy shard next, sensors in his fingers flickering. "Smelting's sloppy, full of impurities. But those trace elements, they're deliberate. Probably their way of fighting acid rain and fallout corrosion. Makes sense… these folks don't build for beauty. They build to survive."
He took a half-step back, the metal of his leg clicking on the stained floor. "Same story here." He tapped another board. "Look at this neural interface. Redundant lines, messy design. Not optimized, just forced to work with trash-tier implants. Adapt or die, huh? Gritty engineering."
Osiris spoke with the calm fascination of a priest reading scripture from the Machine God's heretical archives. "The Mechanicus would call this abominable tech, but it's survival art in its own right. Learn it, Buddy, and we'll turn this madness into function." He rapped the servo-skull's forehead lightly.
The skull bobbed in acknowledgment.
After locking away the data, Osiris felt the rare flicker of satisfaction, discovery. These broken parts were blueprints to understand how this world fought entropy with whatever scraps it had left.
"Alright," he said, voice sharpening. "First priority: power system upgrade. Can't keep leeching juice off junk batteries and the sun." His hands were already moving, bolting together converters and buffer units. "Buddy, run the math. Optimize flow for the bench and smelter."
Holographic schematics flared alive before him, and he dove into the work. Tools danced like extensions of his will, disassembling old boards, pulling out clean wafers and metals. "Purity above ninety-nine point seven. Our bench deserves a real heart."
Hours later, the place had transformed. The new laser smelter glowed a soft red; its articulated arm hovered, steady as prayer.
"Low power test," Osiris ordered.
A narrow beam hissed to life, melting a shard of scrap into a perfect molten bead. It cooled into a mirror-smooth ingot. The servo-skull looped around it, scanning. Results: flawless.
Next came the network receiver. Osiris tore through heaps of chips, soldering at breakneck speed. "Their data grid's a nightmare. Signals all over the place. Rewrite the filters. Pull up those frequency logs we cracked last week."
The skull projected the requested data, and Osiris synced it into the receiver's fragile core.
Days later, a strange contraption,half antenna, half sculpture,jutted from the roof, buzzing faintly.
"Ugly as sin," Osiris muttered with a crooked grin. "But she works." He powered it on.
The static hiss gave way to clean streams of information. The flood of broken data became organized, patterns emerging from noise.
"Signal strength up four hundred percent. Finally, we're hearing this world's heartbeat." He watched as news clips, corp chatter, and encrypted traffic spilled into his logs. "Keep monitoring everything, tech, corp moves, street conflicts. Build the map."
The servo-skull blinked, silently syncing the feed.
"Reverse-engineering progress: materials science seven percent, energy tech twelve, network protocols five, bio-interfaces three…" he read from his HUD. Slow, but steady. The base was solidifying.
The workshop still stank of ozone and hot metal, but now it pulsed with purpose. It wasn't a shelter anymore, it was a forge of ideas.
Osiris stood before his new workbench, one tentacle holding a self-cast ingot, another scrolling a schematic for a power gauntlet. "Toughness still lacking, but strength's five percent higher than predicted. Adjust the stress layout, run another sim."
The skull projected the stress chart beside the blueprint. Outside, acid wind rattled the walls, but within, creation thrummed like a prayer.
The fire of the Omnissiah burned here now, small but fierce, carving a new shrine of machine logic into the bones of Night City.