“It's a wrench,” Todd observed.

  “I can see that,” Grandmother responded. “I just can’t figure out why that would be a problem for Control. It makes me think it isn’t just a wrench.”

  The two of them were standing in a transportation room. It took the transportation system eight hours to get them there. They weren’t certain they were on the same continent anymore. The system issues were all rated. They could be trivial, easy, moderate, difficult or hard. There was only one hard issue, which Irene refused to even look at yet. There weren't any trivial issues on the list, so they started with the easy ones.

  They cleaned up all the easy issues within human and selkie territory. Most of the easy issues they fixed so far were variations of prolonged occupation. All they had to do was knock everyone out and drag them out of the way. When they cleared the first issue at Chicago, Grandmother thought that particular problem would be rare. It turned out players everywhere figured out that occupying a space would keep it from changing. Dozens of people were engaged in the cheat.

  Filtered by difficulty level and sorted by travel distance, this was the next closest easy issue. The area was not currently occupied. Tinkerer assured them there were no players within the supersection. Grandmother wasn’t certain how large a supersection was, but she suspected it was very big. The wrench was so close to the Speedwell version that it made Grandmother wonder if a human left it, even though she was certain that was impossible.

  The wrench was jammed into the transportation door, holding it open. Beyond the door was a dark shaft that both rose above them and dropped below. They arrived at this transportation room through the other door, which was usually the departure door. Irene suspected that with the door held open, no one could arrive at this transport room using the normal system. That might be why the wrench was used. It might also be there to give access to the dark shaft beyond.

  “It must be from outside the structure,” Grandmother continued. “I don’t understand why the nanobots don’t just eat it.”

  “The nanobots don’t eat everything brought in,” Todd responded.

  “What do you mean?” Grandmother said. She straightened up and stepped back from her inspection of the wrench and the gaping hole beyond. She turned to look at her younger companion. “Eventually they get everything. This issue report is very old.” The numbering system used by Control was very hard for Grandmother to read. She tended to just think large or small. The report date on this issue looked small to her, meaning it was long ago.

  “They don’t eat the fertility implants,” Todd countered. “They didn’t eat your staff.”

  “Hmm…” Grandmother murmured, which was her way of conceding the point. “I loved that staff,” she commented, turning to look at the wrench. Her staff was actually a broom handle. It was made of carbon fiber on Earth and was incredibly tough. It survived the trip across the dark sea of interstellar space. She carried it in the structure for thirty years before shattering it against the skull of an animal that attacked Todd outside of Control’s influence. Her love for the broom handle didn’t explain why the nanobots didn’t eat it. She really didn’t know why it was immune.

  She called Tinkerer. The robot stepped out of the transportation stone interface that was part of the back wall of the room. The robot wasn’t really here. It was a complete projection.

  “Engineer, what service do you require?” the Tinkerer asked. Tinkerer was an avatar for the Game’s Control system. The Game wasn’t built by humans. Humans only stumbled into it after the generation colony ship that brought them to this system landed on the planet.

  “Hello Tinkerer,” Grandmother said to the projection. “There is a wrench in the door slide.”

  “The arrival door will not close.” Tinkerer replied.

  “I had a staff when I was tier five. I loved that staff,” Grandmother responded.

  “An ancestral weapon is a precious object that must be protected,” Tinkerer commented.

  “My father gave me a blade,” Todd stated. “It broke on my first hunt.”

  “An integrated weapon’s breakage rate is a system constant,” Tinkerer stated.

  “An ancestral weapon,” Todd stated, “isn’t produced in the structure.”

  “An ancestral weapon comes from outside and has been handed down at least five generations,” Tinkerer responded.

  “My father was an engineer,” Grandmother stated. “I am not certain what his parents did. Still everyone on the Speedwell ended up related to everyone else by the time it landed here. The flight lasted longer than five generations. I should look up what my grandparents did when we get back. That will be interesting.”

  “But how…” Todd stopped talking. Tinkerer didn’t respond well to questions. They got a lot more information out of the robot by just making statements around it. They thought it was a loophole in its programming. Tinkerer might be an avatar for Control, but it too was controlled. It was controlled by the code written by the long dead developers of the game. Although right now they were on the job so it might answer direct questions in order to fulfill its duties to support the engineering department. They might resort to that eventually, but Grandmother was still thinking.

  “The broom was in the engineering closet all the way out from Earth. Who knows how many of my ancestors used it. Traces of the DNA of everyone who touched the handle could have been left on it,” Irene commented.

  “DNA traces are one way to prove a weapon's ancestral status. An ancestral weapon retains that status as long as a descendant still lives.”

  “So it could be an ancestral weapon,” Todd said, “and whatever race brought it here is still in existence in the structure.”

  “Yes,” Grandmother agreed after a long pause. She was waiting to see if Tinkerer would volunteer anything. “That sounds good to me. The other thought I had was that it is made out of nanobots itself. Nanobots that Control doesn’t control. They might react badly to me touching it.”

  “I have no Interest in the item and no knowledge on how it will react,” Tinkerer declared.

  “Nanobots then,” Todd said. All three of them looked at the offending item. Well at least the two humans looked at the wrench. Since the robot was really just an illusion it faked looking at it. The only time they saw a real robot was when they were hired. “When Tinkerer hired us, he said he lost Interest in your new staff.”

  Grandmother looked over at the staff she leaned against the wall. She took it from a fighting automata in the coliseum. She recently lost her first staff when she challenged the arena. When her opponent showed up carrying a black staff, she was highly offended. It made her feel like it was mocking her. She Claimed the staff from it. She still remembered the absolute conviction she felt that the staff was hers.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  Grandmother was aware that the staff was still powered outside of the structure, where all nanobots should be deactivated. Not that she ever did anything with the staff other than use it as a walking stick. She deciphered the code inscribed on it and knew that the staff was an amplifier for certain attack spells. Tinkerer told her the staff could level the continent. She didn’t have any reason to doubt its word.

  If a staff could level a continent, what could a wrench do?

  She picked up the staff and ran her fingers over the incised symbols. She swore she could feel the symbols shift under her fingers.

  “I have an interest in this staff,” Grandmother said to Tinkerer. “I’ve come to love it. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.”

  “Bound to your essence, it will deactivate at your death,” Tinkerer stated. “It is a safety built into all nanobots of that design and is triggered on Claiming. Older versions could be transported unbound so that they could be sold to another. They could even be transported off-world since they were not bound to a controller either. Such designs proved problematic as cosmic radiation degrades code and can cause unusual behaviors without a control stream to supply corrections.” That was a lot of information. It was also information that seemed to stray far from the original topic. That was an indication that it was pertinent to the current issue. Tinkerer’s duty to help the engineering division was overriding his code restriction to not tell players how the game worked. Of course the information was highly technical and might not be of help to a player anyway.

  “I think it's talking about gray goo,” Todd announced, horrified as he realized what it was hinting at. Grandmother once told him that uncontrolled nanobots were a favorite end of the world story on Earth. He made the mistake of looking up some of that fiction in the Speedwell’s library in the years since. The idea was that uncontrolled nanobot replication would consume a planet and replace it with a soup of nanobots.

  “Yes, I believe it is,” Grandmother responded. “This is an easy task. I hope that means the wrench isn’t currently misbehaving.” Grandmother braced herself, preparing to reach out and grab the wrench.

  “I have gloves,” Todd commented. “I’ll do it.” Todd's offer was not without merit. The integrated gloves he was putting on were not the thin pliable leather they appeared to be. They were nanomaterial. The nanobots of their construction were firmly under the control of Control. Grandmother thought that if anything tried to jump to Todd from the wrench, they would push it back.

  Quickly, before Grandmother could lodge a protest, Todd reached out with his large dominant hand and grasped the wrench. She too carried gloves in her pack, but he didn’t want her taking the first risk. At tier four, Todd could bring a considerable amount of force onto the tool. The physical muscles in his forearm flexed as he strained against it. The wrench did not move. He released it.

  “It’s like trying to move a protection crystal,” He reported.

  “Hmm…” Grandmother murmured. She realized Tinkerer didn’t make any comment after her observation that maybe the wrench wasn't misbehaving. That was a bad sign. “A wrench does seem like an odd choice for jamming a door. I would think a screw driver would work better.” She spoke her thoughts out loud hoping Tinkerer would jump in.

  “One of Eileen’s companions was using a fork to hold open doors,” Todd observed, referencing a set of introductory videos that were on Speedwell’s computers. “It could just be the tool they had on hand.” Grandmother couldn’t remember if she ever told Todd that Eileen was actually her. The introductory videos were constructed from recorded footage of her first trip to Londontown and Chicago.

  “Tools have a default form they return to when unused for a set period,” Tinkerer observed. “Changing forms without input could be a sign of code degradation or default behavior. Either behavior in itself is not inherently dangerous.” Todd was looking at his glove, trying to see if there was any damage to it.

  “I don’t think my glove is dissolving,” Todd commented.

  “Nanomaterial armor’s degradation rate is a system constant,” Tinkerer stated.

  “You’re safe,” Grandmother declared. She looked at the wrench and tried to remember exactly what Tinkerer said when it hired them. “I will have to Claim it,” Grandmother announced.

  “Bound to your essence, it will deactivate at your death,” Tinkerer stated. Todd fell silent as he tried to think up how to ask how an item was Claimed without actually asking. What did you do last time? was also a question.

  “Umm…” Todd groped.

  “I just knew it was mine and took it,” Grandmother said, somehow knowing what his unvoiced question was. Considering the situation it probably wasn’t that hard to figure it out.

  “It is a wrench. You are the Engineer. Of course it is yours,” Todd said, in an attempt to support her. The problem Grandmother was experiencing was that none of the tools were hers. Tools all belonged to the Speedwell. As a member of the engineering and maintenance team she used those tools, but they were always returned to the tool room at the end of the shift.

  She was certain that in order to signal her nanobots that she wanted to Claim the wrench she needed to recreate that absolute certainty she had that the staff was hers. Her nanobots would then tell the wrench’s nanobots and if they were still working correctly they would become bound to her essence, whatever that actually meant. Of course that idea was hinging on the assumption that these were essentially the same type of nanobots. A completely different source might have a completely different design and not respond to the communications of her nanobots at all.

  If they were too far off in design wouldn’t the structure nanobots not see these invaders as special and just eat through them? Grandmother thought. Since Tinkerer volunteered information about older designs, Grandmother was fairly confident that was what the wrench was.

  She just needed to own it.

  She shifted her staff to her secondary hand and flexed the fingers of her dominant hand. The wrench did not belong to the Speedwell. According to Tinkerer it was not bound to anyone. No one was going to come back for it. It was jammed into this door slide for darkness knows how long. A tool was meant to be used. It should wait patiently for the next need, but it shouldn’t be completely forgotten. It should be held close, at the ready. The wrench needed a user to carry it through the world and use it to fix problems. That was the purpose of its existence.

  Irene was an Engineer. She not only fixed things, she built things. An Engineer needed good tools to accomplish her tasks. Here was a tool, just laying around. It was capable of far more than any tool Irene used before. If she wanted it all she had to do was take it. It would serve her well.

  She grasped the wrench. “Mine,” she said with absolute conviction and pulled the wrench back, intent on taking it to the next job. The wrench popped free. The door slid shut.

  “The arrival door is fully functional,” Tinkerer announced. “Do you wish me to update the issue as complete?” Todd noted the question.

  “Do you want the wrench?” Grandmother asked Tinkerer, countering his question with her own.

  “You have Claimed it. I have no Interest in it,” Tinkerer responded.

  “It was easy,” Todd announced. Grandmother wasn’t so certain of that. That little conversation she had with herself to pump up her intent seemed different looking back. Some of her thoughts were… sharp and filled with longing. She slipped the wrench into her pocket. Its weight pulled at the fit of her leathers, twisting their fall. Then it settled, lightening its weight, happy to be near. She wasn’t going to think about that.

  “Yes, Tinkerer, please mark the issue complete,” Grandmother commented.

  “Can we walk a bit before we head back?” Todd asked Grandmother. “I feel like I’ve been stuck in the Speedwell apartment all day.”

  “Do you wish to inspect the local area to determine if there are any unreported related issues?” Tinkerer asked.

  “Yes,” Grandmother responded. “Is the area available for inspection?”

  “It is,” Tinkerer responded. “I will clear the way.” The robot stepped back, turning to look at the wall opposite the physical interface. In a normal transportation room this wall was glass with a door in it. In this room it was cement.

  As they watched, the cement wall dropped, descending into the floor. Another wall, constructed out of glass with a door already in place, slid in from the side. It locked into position. An audible click rang out as the door latch released. The glass wall was transparent showing them a clear view of the hall beyond. It was brightly lit and looked as if it was constructed yesterday. There wasn’t even any dust on the ground. There was no sign of any of the wild beasts that usually roamed the halls of the structure.

  Todd pulled the door open and stepped out, Grandmother followed.