Rochester Inn

[Knuthetal]

Noam Fourfall was sitting comfortably in a dark corner. He needed a place to lay low for a while, badly. People were looking for him, people with guns. Well, at least he left with a bang.

He looked excruciatingly tired - which turned out well for him, for once. The bartender got distracted by the look on Noam's face and forgot to actually charge him. He couldn't have paid, actually. Ageira made sure to clean his accounts - again, oddly luckily for him. He noticed that first move, and managed to run before they went for the kill.

He was typing away on a small computer now, piecing together a plan to get some money - he needed that now, and needed it badly. He was trying to come up with possible locations of a few wreckages in the area. Looting those should give him a start, and Junkers had just the data he needed to pull it off. Good folks. He made a note to redirect a shipment of factory-fresh parts their way as soon as he was safe. Hacking corporate mainframes was his way of solving most of the problem he faced. Come to think of it, it also created a good part of those.

He noticed a shaken technician leaving the room hurriedly, carrying what looked like cybernetic hardware. Ancient hardware, probably for that cyborg in the protected part of the area. Noam liked cyborgs, they were reasonable. Mechanical men, that's how some called them. He didn't. For him, cyborgs were better than men, so it would be an insult to their cold, rational perfection. Mechanical men... now that was what he was trying to become. Feeling some kinship to the now-armless machine, Noam edited the note, putting optronics and servomotors in place of hull panels and ship parts. Getting those will be more of a challenge, but it's worth a shot, he though. But in the meantime...

"Hey there!", he shouted out to the engineer, "Come here for a second, would you?".

The man approached reluctantly.

"What is it?"

"See, this part here grafted onto that part there - the LE214 stabilizer would cause trouble with the QUX-7 servomotor, since it has a feedback loop a few notches into the barely-acceptable range."

"I realise that, but it's not like we can get the LXes out here. Come to think of it, we don't even get LF5s."

"Tough titty. But as it happens, I do have an LF702 you could use installed in my ship - some custom work I did one evening. Now, with the recent turn of events, I would rather have my ship blend in than stand out. So, I'll make you a deal - help me jury-rig it back into mediocrity, and you can have all the parts that are left over. How does that sound?"

"Done."

"Let's get to it, then."

---