Scrapper hated mornings most of all. The assignments came stamped and unchanging, datapads shoved into his hands without so much as a glance. Another demolition contract. Another building marked for clearing.
He was nineteen and had the frame of a front loader: shoulders wide, hydraulics built for leverage, power in every piston. A machine designed to shove, lift, and crush. Nothing of the fine lines or drafting instruments he longed for.
The caste had decided that was what he was good for. They looked at his alt mode and made their judgment permanent. To them, he was demolition embodied, a wrecking tool given legs. No one ever asked what else he could do. No one cared that in his off-hours he sketched frames and structures—ideas for towers and bridges that could last longer than the patchwork Kaon sprawls.
Instead, he was sent to tear down. Always tearing down.
He tramped toward the day's site, datapad clutched tight in one hand, resentment simmering beneath his armor.
I could build something better.
Something that stands longer than any of this.
But they'll never give me the chance.
The frame waiting for him loomed high against the morning smog—a half-dead warehouse, its skeleton sagging with rust.
Scrapper slowed.
He didn’t see ruin first.
In his processor, the structure snapped together—clean lines replacing warped ones, supports straightened, load redistributed across a proper frame. For a fraction of a moment, the warehouse stood as it should have been: balanced, reinforced, built to last.
Then the image fractured.
The real structure overlaid it—misaligned joints, uneven weight distribution, stress fractures already spreading along the east span.
Wrong.
The load paths were uneven. The outer supports carried more weight than they should. Cross-bracing was inconsistent. He could see it instantly—not as a guess, but as certainty.
He flexed his hydraulics and set his shoulders, already knowing he'd be the one to reduce it to rubble.
One more building crushed.
One more reminder of what I’ll never get to do.
The work sites blurred together—warehouses, tenement blocks, old foundries—each stripped to girders and brought down under the roar of heavy machines. Scrapper went where he was told, did what they demanded, reducing one frame after another to rubble.
Supervisors yelled from the sidelines for him to push harder, bring the walls down faster, faster, always faster. None of them ever noticed that he stood still a little too long before he started.
They didn’t see what he was doing.
His optics moved across the structure, and in an instant it rebuilt itself in his processor—every beam aligned, every joint locked, weight flowing cleanly from top to base. Then the flaws surfaced, sharp and obvious. Weak joints. Misplaced load. Points where the structure would fail under stress.
He wasn’t hesitating.
He was solving it.
He could see exactly how it had been built—and exactly how it should have been.
His hands tightened slightly at his sides.
He wanted a stylus. A drafting surface. Precision.
Not this.
But orders always came again, louder, sharper.
“Scrapper, stop standing around and get it down!”
So he did.
He drove forward, but even in destruction, his movements followed a plan. He struck at the load-bearing faults first, isolating stress points, forcing the structure to give way where it was already weakest. Each movement had purpose—each impact part of a sequence.
In his processor, the building collapsed cleanly before he ever touched it.
Then reality followed.
The metal shrieked under the weight of his loader, and walls fell one after the other—not randomly, but in controlled failure. Sections gave way in the order he dictated, the structure folding in on itself instead of exploding outward.
Dust filled the air until it choked him, coating his armor, settling in his vents.
The supervisors cheered efficiency when the structure collapsed into ruin. Another job done. Another pile of wreckage left behind.
None of them noticed the way Scrapper looked away, disgust tightening in his chest. They thought they'd trained demolition into him. All they'd really done was bury the builder he wanted to be.
On breaks, Scrapper sat apart with whatever scrap of metal he could salvage from the day's wreckage—a burned plate, a bent panel, even a slagged girder end would do. Anything with a flat surface.
He didn’t pick them at random.
He turned each piece in his hands, checking for warp, for stress, for whether it would hold a clean line. Even now, his choices were deliberate.
He scrawled on it with whatever marking tool he could scavenge—chalk, welding sticks, even the edge of a stylus filched from a distracted foremech.
Quick sketches, never polished but alive with detail.
As his hand moved, the structure already existed in his processor—complete, stable, tested. The lines he etched weren’t guesses. They were translations.
Bridges with supports balanced for strength. Towers designed to resist collapse. Housing blocks that could stand for vorns instead of the thin-walled shells they kept throwing up and tearing down again.
He adjusted lines mid-stroke, correcting load paths, reinforcing joints before they ever existed.
He knew they would hold.
He kept the sketches hidden—folded into piles of debris, tucked under plating, shoved deep into his berth back at the dorms. Because every time someone saw one, they laughed.
“You? An architect?” one worker had jeered, holding up a scrawled design before crumpling it. “You’re a loader, Scrapper. Know your place.”
The words still rang in his audials whenever he drew.
But he couldn't stop.
Not when the ideas burned in him every time he looked at a structure, every time he was forced to pull one down.
He had ceased to argue, but the bitterness never departed. It coiled in him, heavy as slag, pressed deep into his chest until it seemed to shape every breath he took. The laughter, the sneers, the casual dismissal—he carried them like rubble clinging to his frame.
He was already tired of it—tired of being told his ideas meant nothing, tired of sketching in secret, tired of tearing down when every line in his processor screamed to build.
Every swing of his loader was a compromise. Every wall he brought crashing down was one more reminder that the caste had decided who he was, and no one was ever going to let him prove otherwise.
When the last of the debris had been hauled away, Scrapper trudged toward the foremech’s shack to clock out. The office door stood open, the supervisor already gone to shout at another crew.
A datapad lay abandoned on the table.
Scrapper slowed.
Curiosity pulled at him, sharper than caution. He stepped inside and glanced down at the display. Structural schematics filled the screen—plans for a new warehouse frame scheduled to rise where today’s building had stood.
His optics narrowed.
He didn’t just read the design.
In his processor, it rose instantly—full scale, fully formed. Beams locked into place. Weight pressed downward through the frame. Stress spread along every line.
Then—
The failure point lit up.
Too thin along the east span. Load distribution skewed toward a single column that would buckle the first time a heavy transport rolled through the floor above. The structure sagged in his mind before it was ever built.
It won’t hold.
He could fix it in seconds.
His fingers hovered above the screen, processor already restructuring the design—shift that column, widen the cross-brace, redistribute the load through a secondary support line, reinforce the stress points before they formed.
The corrected structure replaced the flawed one in his processor—stable, balanced, durable.
Simple changes.
Obvious changes.
The building would last vorns longer.
A voice echoed somewhere in the yard.
Scrapper jerked his hand back like the datapad had burned him.
If they caught him touching a foremech’s plans, the punishment would be worse than any laughter. Tampering with approved designs was grounds for docking chits—or worse.
He stepped back from the desk.
Let them build it wrong.
Let them watch it crack.
Scrapper turned and left the shack, the solution still burning bright in his processor.
One day, someone will ask me how to build it right.
Walking back to the dormitory at night with his plating still coated with grey dust, Scrapper told himself the same thing he told himself every day. The thought was bitter but steady, the only fuel that kept him from collapsing under the weight of it all.
The caste is wrong.
They don't get to decide what I am.
One day, they'll have no choice but to see.
The dorm swallowed him and the rest of the workers whole, but his resolve burned quiet and sharp, tucked away where no one could strip it from him.
What is this Scrap?