Night City never slept. It coughed and groaned and bled light through every crack. Dorian Reyes preferred the hours between midnight and dawn, when the neon buzz faded to something almost peaceful. The garage was quiet then. Just him, the tools, and the soft hum of a half rebuilt Thorton Galena waiting for a new heart.
He was underneath it, elbows deep in the engine block, when the door rattled.
"Digging through the guts of another corpse?" a voice called out. Familiar. Annoying. Warm.
Dorian slid out from under the car, wiping grease on an already stained rag. Leo stood in the doorway, silhouette cut by the sodium glow of the street behind him. Tall, lanky, always dressed like a data broker who actually enjoyed the job. A crooked grin sat on his face like it belonged there.
"It ran when I bought it," Dorian said.
"Everything runs when you buy it. The question is for how long."
Dorian sat up on the creeper and tossed the rag onto the tool bench. He glanced around the garage. It was small, cluttered, but organized. Tools hung on pegboards in order of frequency of use. Wrenches on the left. Sockets on the right. The old man's system. Gunnar's system. Even after all these years, Dorian kept it exactly the same.
"What do you want, Leo? It's late even for you."
Leo stepped inside, letting the door hiss shut behind him. He pulled a small metal case from his jacket pocket. About the size of a pack of cigarettes, but heavier. He tossed it to Dorian, who caught it one handed.
"I found something," Leo said. "Something you're going to want to see."
Dorian turned the case over in his hands. No markings. No serial number. The latch was old school, mechanical. He popped it open.
Inside, nestled in foam padding, lay a data chip. Not the slim, encrypted kind that corpo spies used. This was a legacy chip. Thick. Clunky. The kind of relic that only worked on antique readers from the 2050s. The kind of reader that Dorian kept in his apartment because he was the only person in Night City who still cared about old games.
"What is it?" Dorian asked.
Leo leaned against the workbench, arms crossed. "You know how I scavenge old data caches. The ones from before the DataKrash. Mostly it's garbage. Corporate memos. Broken software. But last week, I hit a real jackpot. An old archive from the 2020s. Full of games. And I mean full. Hundreds of them."
Dorian raised an eyebrow. "Hundreds?"
"Most are unplayable. Corrupted. But this one..." Leo nodded at the chip. "This one is different. It's called The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Came out in 2011. Ancient. But the weird part is, someone modded it recently. The file headers are fresh. Like, last year fresh."
Dorian felt a flicker of interest. He didn't show it. "So someone uploaded a mod for a hundred year old game. Why do I care?"
"Because I tried to run it on three different rigs, and nothing worked. But you? You're the only guy I know who still keeps a legacy reader. The only guy who still cares about this stuff." Leo pushed off the bench and walked toward the door. "Consider it a gift. Or a curse. Either way, it's yours now."
Dorian looked down at the chip. The foam padding was old, but the chip itself was pristine. No scratches. No dust. Almost like it had been made yesterday.
"Why me?" Dorian asked quietly.
Leo paused at the door. "Because you're the only person I know who still believes some things are worth fixing. Not replacing. Fixing." He grinned again. "Don't stay up too late, engineer."
The door closed. The garage fell silent.
Dorian stared at the chip for a long time. Then he looked around the garage again. His eyes landed on the old wooden desk in the corner. Gunnar's desk. The old man used to sit there with a cup of synth coffee, reading repair manuals printed on actual paper. He had been a Nomad once. Left the family to start a workshop in the city. Never talked about why.
"Anything broken can be rebuilt," Gunnar used to say. "You just have to care enough to try."
Dorian remembered the day Gunnar took him in. He was eight years old, fresh from the corpo orphanage after his mother died. He didn't cry. He just stood there with a small bag of clothes, staring at the floor. Gunnar had knelt down, looked him in the eye, and said, "You look like you need a project. Good. I have plenty."
That was the first time Dorian picked up a wrench. He didn't know what to do with it. But Gunnar showed him. Patient. Steady. Never treating him like a charity case. Just a kid who needed to learn how things worked.
"Your mother trusted me," Gunnar said once. "So I trust you. Don't prove me wrong."
Dorian never did.
He slipped the chip case into his pocket and walked to the desk. A framed photo sat next to the old manual. Gunnar and him, standing in front of a fully restored 2045 Villefort Columbus. Dorian was sixteen in the photo, grease on his face, smiling. Really smiling. That was rare.
I should call him, Dorian thought. It's late, but he doesn't sleep much either.
But he didn't. Instead, he turned off the lights, locked the garage, and climbed the stairs to his apartment. The chip felt warm against his thigh. Or maybe that was his imagination.