The morning sun oppressively shone down on the alien saguaro and dying barrel cacti that covered the desert landscape as far as I could see. Well what I assumed was alien and dying. The Water Wars had not been kind to any of the local lifeforms. In this southern portion of what was once called Arizona State; there wasn't much growing any more.

  Arizona, my dad had explained, was a name used prior to the rise of the American Empire, before I was born. It was a good enough label for those who were left scratching an existence in the area. This landscape was both alien and familiar at the same time. I had spent most of my life underground, in a very unique shelter, but the past few years had been spent out here working and staying alive.

  At our last dig site we had managed to find a complete small town library saved in a freak lava tube bubble. Not sure what happened to the rest of the small town, we weren't able to find anything else of note, but the library itself was beyond valuable. Especially to a historical junky like my dad, before he died a few years back. Of course, we needed to sell it all to pay off the loans and debts that kept our crew fed, alive, and away from the clutches of the Black Market, as much as it was possible to avoid my own loan sharks. My history with the Black Market and specifically its subsidiary BDwerks is a long and sordid past, hopefully in the past is where I can leave it.

  Snapping back to the present, I looked toward the horizon in front of us, and eventually our next camp site, I wondered if I had made the right call. I have had mixed luck using my psychic abilities to find new sites to salvage and explore. While I might be a prodigy with machines and electronics, my divination skills were far more modest, and I was currently batting at a 40% success rate. Hopefully this new site could even up my average a bit more.

  Not that I was keeping score, but my uncle Sunny definitely was.

  Glancing over our crew I saw our vehicles making a dusty procession as we slowly crawled over the land.

  I sent a telemechanic message to my own personal super computer, >>I gotta say Big Fe, I am proud of what our crew had accomplished in our last dig. >>

  Our caravan snaked its way along a dead riverbed, the sun glinting off of our collection of trucks & trailers, hovercraft, and mechs. We had found enough pre-war material to pay for the entire outing, and quite a bit more, at our first stop.

  We were an eclectic group, me with my black market funded robotics research, uncle Sunny salvaging and mining to his heart's content, and our family friend, Miles, the mysterious elf scientist always searching for supernatural animals… and something about technology, I didn't alway understand his research, or pay all that much attention to it, to be honest.

  I strode to the side of our lineup in my pride and joy, a towering 11m tall Provender 54r from New Toronto. This mechanized behemoth was perfectly adapted for exploration, mining, and even combat. My green and gold color scheme was ridiculously dusty, but the mech, as with all my equipment, was in tip-top shape. Bipedal with an aftermarket missile pod on each shoulder; I was the tallest vehicle around. And also the most comfortable in my air conditioned 4 person pilot compartment. I had received this from my dad after his major promotion with BDtech and the local Black Market. It was also my biggest connection to him left.

  >>No I didn't mean that literally, Big Fe. >> My super computer did talk much, but I always got a sense I could feel what it was thinking. I was blessed with telemechanic abilities at a very early age. I could understand and take apart anything with electricity.

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  In the front of our convoy, we had my uncle Sunny in his BDwerks Multi-dozer, of course it was a knockoff of the Power Construction Corpo design, but he loved that machine. That was most of BDwerks these days, cheaper knock-offs, and shadily licensed remanufactured goods; at least their tools were quality. Sunny was currently trail blazing a path for the rest of our dozen assorted rigs. Around these parts, there were no roads, and hadn't been for years.

  I was a bit of a packrat. If I wanted to hear the truth, a lot of a packrat. Hauling around more than a few trailers worth of stuff. But you never know when an ancient treasure or old world item might transmogrify from junk to credits, or be the crucial piece needed for a field repair! Well at least that is what I keep telling myself. Sunny didn't help with his collection of heavy equipment, mining and construction gear. Our Kombi offroad trucks and trailers were full of looted cybernetics, synthetic soldiers, and salvage equipment. Rounding out our lineup, at the end of our convey were the 3 hover RVs, and my portable engineering lab.

  Crawling, running, and flying around was our protective screen, and my reason for conducting Artificial Intelligence and robotics research on the move. Inside each truck cab, suit of power armor, or behind every cyborg body armor was a synthetic intelligence of my creation. Don't tell the remnants of the American Empire but I had salvaged their fully automated drones, and remnants of their fallen cybernetic soldiers, as well as the corpses of the opposing corpo’s own cyborgs and mechs. We never did learn who the third party was in that conflict, and their equipment was all destroyed or off the shelf garbage. But when 3 major powers go to war over desalination tech and water access, there is a lot of carnage left lying around.

  With all the battlefield salvage we acquired, I had then masterfully adapted them, err hacked them, or at least gyvered them into some semblance of functionality. I created my own custom reasoning compute core for each newly created synthetic intelligence. I then outfitted them in disguised body armor, cyborg armor, and even power armor. We currently had half of my complete platoon providing realistic (aka sufficiently random) deterrence and hopefully protection to reduce the chance of alien, bandit, or idiot encounters. I had programmed them with a standard Picket & Screen maneuver for our entire convoy. My synths were currently performing at a basic level and could be counted on to shoot attackers and move in the right direction, almost all the time, now.

  I was still working on the finer details.

  Cruising along at 50 kph, we would reach the leeward side of the distant mountains by mid afternoon, assuming no breakdowns, dust clogs, or other calamities. While some of our vehicles could fly or cruise over 200 kph, you didn't want to get out ahead of your situation awareness out here in the west, and you definitely didn't want to get separated or break down in these parts.

  I toggled my radio headset, “Gretta to Dozer, over?” I liked using vehicle names on the radio. I saw it in the old vids I watched with my dad as a kid and thought it was cool. Not my problem Sunny hadn’t named his Dozer.

  Sunny replied, a smile in his voice “Little Sunny in Dozer to Gabby in Gretta, I read you, waddya want?”

  “I was just checking in and seeing how the crew is doing.”

  Sunny sighed a bit over the radio line, “Gabby, you know you could talk to them directly too.”

  “I know, I know, but you are better with people, and it always feels awkward the way they look at me and talk to me. Your wife means well, I think, and Miles does mean well, but I don't know how to relate to an elf that owed my dead dad his life. I mean come on, I like machines not people,” I ended up yelling.

  “Okay. okay. I get it Gabby, didn't mean to strike a nerve, you just need to try.” Sunny gently admonished. “And I heard that…, you know Trella cares for you.”

  “I get it, I really do, just not now ok. So really are we on track to make it to the next site this afternoon?” I replied.

  Sunny took a moment to think, and check in with the others. “Yeah everyone is fine with pushing ahead and getting there early, no need for a stop.”