Cyclops
While Dozan was being instructed, quite well in Mack’s expert opinion, the space biker used his time to restore the wrecked, one of a kind automobile. It looked like none other and compared to what he had actually seen, or heard of, that machine was truly unique. The long car was powered by an old, aircraft engine created a decade before the Great War – an eight-cylinder kerosene guzzling monster which transferred its power directly to the drive shaft via a chain. The sleek, silvery body of the vehicle was adorned with polished brass ornaments and even the brake, one long lever sticking on the right side, sported similarly shiny a handle. On the nose and above the radiator, that vehicle had one single headlight which stuck out like a Cyclops eye and when Mack finally fixed the car’s rotten wiring, it shone with bright, golden colored light. Tires were not wide but thin and the car’s suspension needed a lot more work before it could survive any form of highly contested racing activities. The tires themselves were held not by modern rims but elegant and according to Mack, flimsy spokes. They needed to be replaced with such made out of megasteel… the biker was going to replace most of the key, rotten by rust elements with that modern alloy. It wasn’t that he had to order parts – Mack simply used a nano printer to craft them on his own. The device was what everyone used and all over the galaxy, when another spare part was needed or one was building something from scratch. Humans had created another machine, sort of a predecessor of this “workbench” called a 3D printer. It existed for a while shortly after the Great War; created around the end of the 1950’s, the innovative technology cleared the path for modern nano printers or workbenches as they were more widely known. You could chug pieces of salvage in it and then remodel them into the parts that you need, though this required a lot of skill and knowledge, despite the fact one had access to G-net and its vast libraries full of diagrams. It was indeed a source so vast that searching it thoroughly would take a couple of lifetimes, that or… incredible luck. Far easier was to memorize a plan, construction diagrams or better yet, create those from scratch, using your own knowledge. There were naïve fools who thought that having such a ginormous abundance of data under one’s fingertips would completely negate any need of memorizing. The harsh reality was that with such a multilayered database, connected to an incalculable number of other databases, over thousands of light-years and employing millions of different search engines, many of which were perfected long before most races that now browsed even existed, it was nigh impossible a task to find one specific piece of data. Perhaps if the browser was a master coder, hacker or brave enough to link his ghost directly into G-net’s vast expanses… daring to entertain the chance of facing one of the malevolent AI’s. Mack was a trained, professional mechanic, able to fashion every part on his own and that without wasting time, bullshitting around the Cyber-verse. That was perhaps something that their new crewmate Alice would like doing, yet even she’d love to have a company, somebody guarding the “back” of her sub-routines.
Hard at work, Mack failed to notice how this car, which he’d finally found the name of buried under a thumb of rust, the “Cyclops”, was completely restored. Took him four months of grueling, back-breaking work and if Mack was any other person and not the adopted son of his master mechanic father Alberto… he would’ve failed for sure. Now the problem was how to get his bike back and how the ‘eff would they find the proper type of kerosene? The latter he decided to leave in the most capable hands of his captain, yet the former was a problem for him to deal with. The Crows always took care of business! Magistrate or not, that authoritarian cunt was up to no good, he could always smell corrupted gobbirmunt officials – perhaps it was a good idea to call Boris after all? Mack again reached for his PDA, typed up a short link, yet stopped himself before sending it. He decided to march straight into that obnoxious cunt’s office and demand his unlawfully confiscated motor vehicle!
Universe… he was now beginning to even think like that bastard!
This is a short promo excerpt from my fourth book "Von Braun's Gambit". Pictures are courtesy of @giedrizimus
Did you like this alternative history universe? You can read more in my self-published books on Amazon:
Twin Suns Of Carrola - Starshatter book 2