The rain hit the corrugated roof of the maintenance bay like a thousand tiny hammers. Inside, the air smelled of ozone, recycled metal, and desperation.
He opened a sealed compartment on his tool belt and withdrew a small, cloth-wrapped object. Inside was a crystalline shard—a fragment of a pre-Fall AI nexus. Illegal to possess. Impossible to use safely. But it was also pure, adaptive processing potential. rfn004 fix