Survivors.
The word hit him before he’d consciously processed the words in the static. Eastern Theater Command — headquarters in Nanjing. Of all the institutions that might survive an apocalypse, a major military command was near the top of the list. Underground infrastructure, stockpiled supplies, armed personnel, organizational discipline. If anyone had the resources to weather a month-long storm and come out the other side with functioning radio equipment, it was them.
He worked the frequency dial for several minutes, trying to relocate the signal. Nothing. Whatever alignment of atmospheric conditions and transmission timing had let those few words through, it wasn’t repeating.
He eventually gave up and sat back.
But the signal had done its work regardless.
He’d assumed other survivors existed. He’d built that assumption into his planning from the beginning — the water treatment plant, the Carrefour basement, the bodies in the storage room. Evidence had been accumulating. But assumption and evidence were different from hearing a voice, and the difference turned out to be larger than he’d expected. Something had loosened in his chest that he hadn’t realized was wound tight.
He wasn’t the last person alive.
The loosening was immediately followed by the tightening of something else.
In a functional society, being alone with significant resources was neutral. In what the world had become, it made him a target. He had Vajra. He had supplies, weapons, a power system no one else he’d encountered seemed to possess. Any group of survivors with more people than scruples would look at what he had and start calculating.
Anyone who tries something dies first.
He said it flatly to the empty cab, establishing the policy with himself before he needed to apply it to anyone else. The persecution complex had been called that because it was irrational. Out here, it was just threat assessment.
He opened the map files on the laptop.
Nanjing. Hefei. He turned both options over.
Nanjing had a confirmed survivor presence — or had, when that signal was sent. Eastern Theater Command backing meant some kind of organized authority, which could mean safety or could mean a different set of problems entirely. He had no prepared resource map for Nanjing, no pre-surveyed fuel depots or supply points. His Hefei planning was substantially more developed.
But Nanjing was south, not north, which meant no Yangtze crossing — he’d already ruled out east and south because of the bridges. Except Nanjing was east. He’d have to recalculate.
He closed the laptop.
Chaohu first. Decide at Chaohu.
Whichever direction he ultimately chose, the Chaohu waypoint was on the route to both. He’d have more information by then — fuel situation, road conditions, possibly more radio contacts. No decision needed today.
He gave himself three days in the car graveyard.
The logic was straightforward: this was the densest concentration of recoverable metal he’d found since leaving Wuwei, his spare parts inventory had taken heavy losses during the crocodile incident, and the water supply he’d brought from the treatment plant wouldn’t stretch indefinitely. Three days to salvage, fabricate, and resupply, then move.
The Optimus 1.0 went on every morning before he left Vajra. The paranoia tax, paid daily.
He worked through the wrecks methodically — testing structural integrity before committing his weight, noting which vehicles were corroded through and which still had usable sections. The central mass near the motorcycle frame had been drained to near-powder. The outer vehicles were in better shape, corroded normally rather than catastrophically.
On the second day of salvage, he was forcing open the rear hatch of a rusted-out SUV when something inside caught his eye.
A wooden crate, roughly the size of two stacked luggage cases. The wood had deteriorated significantly — when the hatch swung open and the crate shifted, sections of the panel disintegrated into powder where they’d been weakest. Through the gaps he could see the contents: stacked bundles wrapped in oil paper, the paper similarly degraded, crumbling at the edges.
He lifted one bundle. Heavy — like picking up a small dumbbell.
The oil paper fell apart in his hands and left him holding a flat cylinder of metal, palm-sized, with a small circular hole bored through the center.
He recognized it immediately.
Wire drawing dies. The tool used to pull metal stock through to produce wire — the die held a fixed-profile hole, and the metal was drawn through it under tension, taking the hole’s shape. Circular holes made round wire, square holes made square wire, octagonal holes made —
He looked at the rest of the crate.
Fifty-odd dies, ranging from the largest — about the diameter of a wash basin — down to the smallest, roughly the size of a child’s fist. A complete production set, every profile size in sequence.
He picked up one of the mid-size dies and examined the hole surface carefully.
CVD coating. Chemical vapor deposition — a process that deposited a diamond film onto the interior surface of a hard metal alloy base. Not pure diamond dies, which were expensive to produce, but not plain alloy either. The diamond coating gave the interior hole the hardness and wear resistance of diamond while the hard alloy body provided structural support. Standard industrial tool, common in wire manufacturing, almost impossible to wear out under normal conditions.
Hard metal alloy. Tungsten-cobalt composition. Harder than anything currently on Vajra’s exterior.
He thought about the upgrade roadmap he’d been developing.
Four vectors for Vajra’s evolution: Activity saturation, component improvement, material upgrades, and modular platform development. The third vector had been waiting for a material source worth acting on. He’d had tungsten alloy and titanium alloy flagged as ideal targets — tungsten for maximum hardness and heat resistance, titanium for weight-to-strength ratio if he ever needed Vajra to operate in environments where mass was a limiting factor.
If Vajra only ever runs on land, tungsten is the answer. If Vajra goes airborne someday, titanium becomes essential.
He let the second thought sit for a moment without dismissing it. Airborne was distant. But so was everything else he’d built, once.
He loaded the entire crate into Vajra’s cargo section.
The salvage continued. Gears, shafts, intact bearing assemblies, sections of structural steel that hadn’t corroded through — he gathered what he could find and sorted it into the growing inventory. Most of the vehicles were too far gone to yield much, but the car graveyard was large and patience was a renewable resource.
When his focus started to flag, he climbed to the roof, shed the armor, rigged a canvas sheet as shade, and sat in the warm breeze with fried meat strips and a bottle of something that was a week from its printed expiry date.
He was letting his eyes go soft and unfocused, the particular mental state that came from being adequately fed and not immediately threatened, when his peripheral vision caught movement on one of the distant wrecks.
He had the telescope up before the thought finished forming.
A black ant. Roughly the size of a mineral water bottle.
Then another one appeared over the rim of the wreck.
Then several more.
He counted silently as they emerged, one by one, onto the rusted surface of the car.
Mutated ants.
(End of Chapter 21)