He's sitting in his shack, staring at a gun.
It's in pieces, spread out before him on a tarp he's put down on the floor. Without even touching it he can tell what the reconstructed product will be: Arcus, one of their auto-rifles, illegally modified with what he can only assume is some sort of Fallen tech. Nothing too eye-catching, just something clamped onto where the magazine should be. He had no idea what it was, that was not for him to know, but whatever it was a Guardian would surely be glad to have it.
Again, though, it's very illegal. The men and women of the Tower can walk around with such things as they please, but down here in the city proper most all firearms were expressly forbidden. Especially firearms modified with unsupervised alien tech. Not that he'd face much repercussion if he were caught. That those of his trade operated with the Wall was something of an accepted secret. The Consensus never lifted the old restrictions but, at the same time, provided no means for those restrictions to be enforced. He had friends who claimed that was tacit approval from the Consensus itself, that their profession was now permitted. They said that a new dawn had arrived.
Lan-79 was too old to believe that. He remembered the bad old days, before the Consensus and the Tower. When the city was still young, when a dozen separate factions, each more broken and desperate than the last, claimed the right to rule. He remembered the infighting, the hunts and the lynching and the friends who'd vanished without a trace.
He was old enough to know that the times always change. What was tacit approval to some was to him noncommittal political maneuvering. Sure, the Consensus might not have passed any method of enforcement, but the option was still open if, at some point down the line, they needed it. The good times never last, despite what everyone wants to believe. His trade served a purpose at present, an important purpose. For the moment the benefits of toleration outweighed the cost. But who could say what things could be like, a few decades down the road?
Lan-79 hadn't seen any of those friends in a long while. He thought it best to cut ties while he could. He'd hear about them now and again though, about how they'd gone as far as to operate openly. Letting whole communities know who they were and what they did. Letting them know where to go to sell a gun. Or buy one.
To be fair, most of them were human. They didn't have to worry too much about the repercussion of their actions because they'd all be dead before long. Lan-79, however, had the future to consider. Where others began to branch out he downsized. Where others operated openly, becoming known figures in their communities, he retreated further into the shadows. Many derided him for his caution. Many, and not a single exo among them. His kind understood.
The times were always changing.
Ccc
At some point the gun was assembled.
He was sitting there, lost in the jumbled, scattered neurological activity he passed off for thought, and somehow his work was finished. That happened sometimes, when he wasn't paying attention. His hands would act on old memories, old instincts his conscious mind was no longer privy to, and suddenly some task or chore would be done.
It didn't used to happen all that often. But then, his work didn't give him the same kind of satisfaction that it used too. When he first discovered his talent with firearms he'd been elated. It was like finding a long lost part of himself, of who he used to be. He felt certain that before, long, long before, he'd been engaged in similar work. He could feel it.
That certainty faded. The years began to drag. His human friends kept dying off, familiar faces vanishing in the blink of an eye, replaced by an ever growing stream of strangers. Exos, incapable of replacing lost numbers, found themselves fewer and fewer each century. Buildings were torn down and rebuilt, streets changed, and still Lan-79 received no revelations. No lost memories of forgotten purpose. Just time, flying by, stealing away everything it passed. It's moments like that, when the weight of a century bears down on him and he realizes he can't remember what it was like to walk without a limp that he envies humans.
He can hear them through the walls. Layers of cloth and thin sheet metal do little to block out the sounds. People on the streets, in the hovels adjoining his, eating and sleeping and defecating and fucking and a dozen other time consuming bodily functions. At least it gives them something to do.
Now he sits and waits. Dust has gathered on his legs, crossed beneath him, immobile for perhaps a little too long. He wonders who will come for the gun.
Maybe it will be the boy. A young human with the mark of the Cult branded on his wrist. He will set it on its way to the dark recesses of the tower, where Lakshmi-2 eagerly awaits. Or maybe the woman, the Awoken whore who will put the gun one step closer to Banshee-44, the greatest of his trade, sitting high on his perch in the very same Tower.
Both rest at the end of a long and complex chain, a ceaseless flow of weapons from the bowels of the city up, up to the Tower. A chain in which Lan-79 is a small but vital link.
Ccc
He's lying on the mattress now. He doesn't remember moving. But it must have happened at some point. He turns his head to look at the room. It's empty, void of everything except a filthy tarp draped across the center of the floor. The gun is still there. No one's come to pick it up yet. He turns his eyes back up to the ceiling.
No lights coming in through any of the cracks. Must be nighttime.
He used to just lie on the floor, but then someone gave him the mattress as a gift, and it made him feel guilty not to use it.
He doesn't actually sleep. Doesn't need to, or at least he doesn't think he does. But he will dream every now and then.
Sometimes he sees flashes of what he assumes are the remnants of memories from before, scattered impressions of feelings and senses. Anger, fear, rage. The scent of burning metal. Smoke, wafting across a foreign, forgotten world. Not real, full memories. Just tantalizing scraps of what he once was. What they all once were.
Most times he relives a more recent past.
His first real memories are of war.
Ccc
Before he'd even fully come to they were already strapping plates of armor to his body, getting ready to throw him a few hundred thousand others into the slaughter.
It had been a slow process, being reactivated. It took a little while for all the major cognitive functions to come back into play. Kind of like growing up for humans, only in the space of minutes. He been told after the fact that there was protocol they were supposed to follow, a strict procedure used when waking up exos. They had to be acclimatized to being brought back to life with all their memories wiped, at the cusp of their maker's ultimate downfall. It took a few days, usually. There was a lot of talking, a lot of counseling involved, or so he had been told.
When the stashed exo army had been unearthed beneath the cosmodrome however, time had been at something of a premium. Fallen were massing an offensive against a Wall still under construction. The Guardians, young and inexperienced, unused to the awesome powers granted to them, had suffered heavy losses. Droves of them, vital to the defense of the burgeoning stronghold, were stranded off-world, access between the core planets falling one after the other. Those few who managed back to Earth before the lines were cut assured the defenders that there wouldn't be any cavalry arriving anytime soon.
So, from their perspective, stumbling across a ready-made army of Golden Age war machines had been something of a small miracle. Before his higher functions had even begun to reactivate Lan-79 had been fitted with a thin covering of plastiplate armor, a predecessor to what was to become Titan fieldplate armor, too heavy even then for a normal human to bear, and handed a rifle.
The mind may have forgotten, but the hands remembered. He'd been told after the fact the he and the other cosmodrome exos wielded their weapons as though with a lifetime of experience.
He was never told, but assumed, that they were herded straight to the Wall.
When he came to, fully came to, he was lying on his side in the mud. A Fallen blade was lodged deep into his now ruined knee, the leg jerking spasmodically while the other tried to find purchase in the slick ground.
Legs were passing through his vision, running. He listened intently to the foreign, familiar sounds of gunfire, the roar of unknown machines, the screams of enraged Fallen and dying exos.
He'd been told after the fact that the offensive had been a phenomenal success. The exo legion had been utterly relentless. They'd pushed the Fallen line back so far that the builders had nearly a full day of uninterrupted peace to go about their work. Losses, of course, were catastrophic. Such progress would be lost in a matter of hours as attrition took its toll, and would not be made again for a long time.
At the time though Lan-79 was unware of all that. He'd ranged far from the wall when he'd been struck down, and his comrades had pushed on ahead, the sounds of battle growing more and more distant. Soon it got quiet. He was left alone, amid a field covered in the broken bodies of his kind. Most were dead, others were dying, and few like him were too incapacitated to get up and move.
He didn't know anything about the enemy they were fighting. About the refugees they were fighting for. About how the defenders at the wall were taking this short respite to shore up their defenses, to prepare from what was sure to be a brutal counterattack. About the incredible boost in morale the success of the exo army had brought. About how, in a matter of hours, said army would buckle under the weight of its losses, and the Fallen would be on the move again.
He was dazed and confused. He knew only that he couldn't move, that he was in pain, that he was dying.
He had no idea who he was.
Then the machines came from the sky.
Ccc
Thousands of them descended onto the battlefield, little spiked flakes of pure white fluttering over corpses. They all seemed to be searching for something, or someone, in particular. Several times Lan-79 was scanned by one big shining blue eye before being passed over.
Not long after, the dead began to rise.
Bodies that had been shorn, blown apart, cut up, were rebuilt in seconds. Some of the reborn, the chosen, continued on, heading towards the advancing, dying army that had left them behind. They were not seen again. Most began the long trek back to the wall, sometimes alone, sometimes with the broken body of a fallen comrade draped across their shoulders.
Lan-79 had been one of those lucky few. A passing exo on his way back to the wall had seen him, and lifted him up, carrying him across his shoulders. Lan-79 wishes he'd had the presence of mind to thank him for his sympathy. A cruel fate awaited those injured but living, as the Fallen crept back up to reclaim lost ground.
As it was he was still too dazed to form coherent thought, much less speech. He never got a name, never saw that exo again. Doesn't even remember arriving back at the wall. All he can recall is being carried, fire burning in his leg with every bounce.
He remembers their face though. Or, rather, the lack of it; a metal plate fell down across their forehead, obscuring everything above the mouth. A splash of red stained that plate, and at the time Lan-79's frazzled brain thought it was blood.
Later he would realize his mistake. It must have just been paint.
Neither Fallen nor exos bleed.
Ccc
A stream of light cuts through the room as the thin metal sheet he passes off as a door is removed. It's the boy. And, curiously enough, he is not alone.
The boy walks in and silently goes about his task, paying no mind to either Lan-79 or his companion. The other, a dark skinned human male, carefully steps into the dimly lit room. His clothes are worn and baggy, draped over his body in countless obscuring, insulating layers. It's a good disguise. But the boots give him away.
Lan-79's keen eyes observe the new, fresh rubber making up the soles. No scuff marks, cracks, shards of glass or any other detritus characteristic of the Basin. Not a local then. Someone more affluent perhaps, who needs to move about the Basin without drawing attention?
They boy picks the newly reconstructed rifle up and wraps it in the tarp it lay on before handing it over to the man. He sticks it inside the folds of his clothing. The boy heads back outside.
Lan-79 is sitting up on his elbows, staring at the man. Normally he and the boy do not interact with one another. There is no need. They know their roles. But until now the boy has always come alone. The man is an unknown quantity. Why is he here?
He steps forward towards Lan-79, drawing something from his coat. For a moment Lan-79 thinks he is about to die, that the War Cult has decided to off him for some reason. There was a time when that would have upset him far more, he reflects.
As it is the man is apparently not there to kill him. Instead he withdraws a small metal cube, holding it out to the exo. Ah, he thinks. A promotion then, of a sort. Lan-79 reaches up and takes the cube from the man, setting it down on the mattress next to him.
The man leaves, replacing the thin sheet of metal over the doorway.
Lan-79 is left alone in the darkness.