The Past, Rewired

[thisDerius]

Derius frowned as a creeping chill slid across the floor beneath him, the ambient hum of the mainframe shifting pitch ever so slightly as subroutines surged through coolant veins overhead. He cast a glance toward the corner of the room, where Donagan’s silhouette moved beneath the icy-blue glow of status lights.

"Yeah, I’m not exactly impervious to cold," he muttered, rubbing his hands together. The synthetic tissue on his fingers flexed like real skin, but lacked the warmth. "I think I’ll move over there before I freeze solid."

With a small grunt, he stepped away from the terminal, the interface continuing its automated data buffering and transfer routine. He let the system handle its job, trusting it not to fry anything important. Yet.

Derius wandered forward, slow and purposeful, eyes scanning the stark industrial structure of the place. It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t graceful. It was a bare-bones, bones-and-metal sort of place that stank of function over form. And he liked it. Every weld, every pipe, every support beam told a story of hands-on engineering—a forgotten era of work before synthetic AI built clean rooms in their sleep.

As his boots echoed along the grating, he heard Donagan’s voice crackle through the comms.

"Valve Five, right..." Derius murmured, brow arching. He glanced at the long row of industrial bulkheads, counting as he went. "One, two... that one’s broken... three, four..." And there it was—number five, barely visible beneath a flaking rust stripe and a corroded marking that had once been white. "Figures."

He crouched, gripping the wheel with both hands—his black, metallic palms locking tight around the frostbitten iron. "Lefty loosey..." he grunted, forcing it counter-clockwise. The wheel shrieked under the pressure, but slowly yielded, letting a cascade of thermal pressure hiss outward through a nearby exhaust.

Not wasting time, Derius rose and turned on his heel, the hiss of compressed cold chasing at his boots. "Note to self—don’t stick around after the valves open," he muttered, ducking through a pressure hatch just before the room behind him began to fog.

Crossing into the warmer control annex where Donagan waited, he exhaled sharply, brushing a thin layer of frost from his shoulder plating. He looked around once again—more intently this time—taking in the loose cabling, the older conduits, and the exposed fuse columns.

"The system feels outdated," he said flatly. "Too many open cycle ports, redundant logic gates... When was the last update? Or are we talking a ‘don’t fix what works’ kind of setup here?"

He stepped forward toward Donagan’s station, hands folding behind his back, more curious now than concerned. He could work with this—so long as the hardware didn’t decide to die in the middle of a critical decrypt.

"Don’t get me wrong," he added, eyes flicking toward the ceiling-mounted server array, "I like analog workspaces. But it’s like stepping into the past... fitting, I guess."