Val had seen some well-equipped personal workshops in her life. Her own apartment was relatively spartan, essentially designed only to be a place to eat and sleep, but that was far from the norm. Fynn’s family kept an armory in their house where he and Jenma could tinker with their exosuits, and Talira had turned her room into a programmer’s paradise with computers and monitors on every wall. Several childhood memories of large mansions with state-of-the-art workshops bubbled up in her mind as well. Of course, Guilds and even the Defect compound had large armories, workbenches, and computing stations, but they were designed to serve entire squads, not individuals.

The room Val found herself in was without a doubt the most elaborate personal workshop she had ever seen. She forced herself to take in the whole room first to ensure there were no hidden dangers. The left wall was lined with cabinet after cabinet of weaponry, serving as the safehouse’s armory. Her gaze fell on the massive workbench dominating the center of the room, relief flooding her body as she saw a disassembled exosuit waiting for her. Well, probably not for her, but she’d make use of it anyway.

A separating wall partitioned off a small living space in the back right corner of her room. Val saw a well-stocked kitchenette, bathroom, and cot that made her feel right at home. Finally, the forward half of the right wall was dedicated to a computing station as an array of monitors angled down over a chair and desk. While neural links had opened up alternate approaches to human-computer interaction and technically made keyboards and monitors obsolete, many still used them out of familiarity. Walking over to the desk, Val pressed a key and watched as the screens flared to life, displaying various readouts on the status of the safehouse.

Holy crap, Noir. You’ve been holding out on me, this safehouse is amazing.

I know. There was no small amount of pride in Noir’s message. It’s not normal to dip into my stock of safehouses this early into a User’s career, but extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary responses. We should be safe here for a time. Rest up, and we can outfit you before we move out again.

Music to my ears.

A wave of exhaustion hit Val, the adrenaline of the jailbreak and impromptu cliff diving session wearing off as she had made it to relative safety. She dropped her makeshift ammo purse into the chair by the desk and tossed the rifle onto the workbench. Making her way into the living area, she stripped out of her wet clothes and flopped down onto the cot. Within seconds of wrapping herself up in the blanket lying on the cot, she trailed off into a deep, dreamless sleep.

Val walked around the workbench, looking down at the dismantled exosuit laying there. It was early in the morning, but Noir’s clock indicated that she had already slept about nine hours. That was more than the five or six hours she got on a typical night, but then again the previous day had been anything but typical. It probably would have been smarter to go back to sleep and rest while she could, but she felt the need to get up and prepare like a true professional User.

Be honest with yourself, you were too excited to go back to sleep. You’re like a little kid in a toy shop.

Noir sounded amused as they interjected into her thoughts again, but it didn’t startle Val as much as it used to. Plus, she had to admit they were right – the safehouse had really nice facilities, and despite her underlying stress, building up an entirely new set of armor from scratch was fun. She’d had to rush her new exosuit when she joined the Defects, but now she had time to truly personalize it.

Apparently the safehouse had been modified since its inception, so Val wasn’t stuck with century-old technology. However, it had been a decade or two since the last update, and it showed in the model of exosuit that lay before her now. The armor plating was bulkier as the older nano-infused steel was less dense than modern manufacturing processes allowed, and the joints were stiffer and more mechanical than she was used to.

Despite these limitations, Val was just excited to have any armor at all. Her passive nano regeneration had healed most of the damage from the previous day’s mad rush through the forest, but she had been lucky to avoid any real encounters. Val had no expectation that her luck would hold up though, and any protection would be welcome for when she inevitably had to fight her way through.

One complication in making any modifications was the lack of raw materials. Thankfully, the last User seemed to have been larger than Val, so fitting the exosuit to her body only required removing material. It did mean she was stuck with the bulkier armor and less flexible joints, but one area Val was able to make significant improvements was the nano control infrastructure.

Armored exosuits had been a prominent technology even before the Singularity Wars. Their construction had been one of the first things modified to take advantage of the large nano fallout from the wars. Modern constructions had three main layers: an outer heavily-armored layer that provided protection; an inner layer designed to interface with the operator’s traces; and a middle layer of pure nano that served to control the entire exosuit. Val was essentially limited to just reshaping the outer and inner layers to fit her body and match the locations of the traces running down her limbs, but the middle layer was a different story entirely.

Much of the technology regarding the origin of nano was either lost in the Singularity Wars or heavily restricted by the city Councils and Daemon collective. Effectively, this meant that the “hardware” of nano had not been improved much over the past two centuries, and so the middle layer of the exosuit didn’t change much in composition either. Instead, people focused on more efficient or specialized arrangements of nano, leading to advancements in the “software” of nano.

Val’s first rotation had been with the Technician Guild, the main driving force of new nano constructs and subroutines. Noir had centuries of experience manipulating both human and exosuit nanosystems, with a particular focus on their performance in combat scenarios. Between the two of them, they had plenty of ideas for how they should reprogram the middle layer of the exosuit. Not always compatible ideas, though.

I keep telling you, I’d like to dedicate some of the control matrix to support a limited set of body enhancement subroutines.

Val lay the next section of the inner layer over her right forearm, triggering the nano along the seam to lock into place. Brow furrowing in concentration, she cycled nano actively down the traces in her arm and into the piece of armor. She focused intently on the nearest screen, clicking her tongue in annoyance as she saw a spike in power loss near one of the contacts in her wrist.

Detaching the piece of armor, she walked over to one of the empty armor fabrication units. She input the results from the latest test run into the unit, placed the sleeve inside, and turned the machine on. She watched for several seconds to ensure the modification parameters seemed reasonable, nodding with satisfaction as the unit started altering the sleeve.

On the way back to the workbench, another fabrication unit beeped and drew her attention. She hummed to herself as she pulled the glove out of the machine, slowly sliding it over her hand while bringing up the relevant testing protocols on the monitor. Resizing both the outer and inner layers was tedious work, but Val preferred to do it by hand. Literally by hand, in this case.

I swear I’ll program the exosuit to shutdown on the detection of any pun if you keep this up.

Hang on now, that’s a little excessive. Val was pretty sure the Daemon was kidding, but no reason to antagonize them. She hurriedly moved back to still contentious but safer ground. But why not help shore up my physical ability with a little support for body enhancement subroutines?

We’ve already discussed this. You have a much higher compatibility with nano disruption subroutines than body enhancement. And my entire arsenal is designed around nano injection and disruption. Our marginal gains from focusing on those areas are much higher than shoring up an area where your abilities are below average.

Val winced at Noir’s wording. Ok, just because it’s true doesn’t mean you have to say it like that. Put this in your training set of “poor fact delivery”.

Don’t you dare compare my elegant digital constructs to some glorified data fitting model. Ugh, to think you humans once called that “machine learning”, or even “artificial intelligence”. So primitive.

The indignation billowed out from Noir, causing Val to whistle softly under her breath. Note to self: don’t mention the early history of digital sentience research. Clearly that was a sensitive subject for a modern-day Daemon with a mild superiority complex.

Aaanyways… All your advanced nano disruption techniques mean nothing if I can’t hit the target or get blown to pieces immediately. If you want to do a cost-benefit analysis, why not mention diminishing marginal returns? The first bit of supporting body enhancement might be more valuable than eeking out the last little bit of power from nano disruption techniques.

Bold move trying to make a quantitative argument against an entity that can literally run the numbers. Val fought back the familiar impulse to roll her eyes. But… while your second argument doesn’t really hold up, I guess I should take into account that you are less physically capable than previous Users. Alright, I’ll allocate 10% of the control matrix to body enhancement.

Wow, you’re on a roll with back-handed compliments today. I deserve at least 15% for withstanding this abuse.

You’ll get 12%, contingent on no more puns.

Val expected more snarky comments from Noir, but they went quiet. For a moment, she was worried they would completely ignore her request anyway. But then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the main monitors at the computing station flicker. Looking closer, she saw a brand new set of parameters were being loaded into the Daemon’s simulations of the middle layer.

She turned her attention back to her newly adjusted glove. Sending nano into the armor, Val smiled with satisfaction as the power transferred from her nanosystem into the component with minimal loss. She took the glove off and set it in the finished pile, which was steadily growing but still dwarfed by the to-do pile.

No sense worrying about how much there is left to do. Can only chip away at it piece by piece.

Brushing a strand of hair out of her face and tucking it behind her ear, Val picked up the next piece and got back to work.