I Built a Lithography Machine by Hand, and You’re Asking Me to Pay Rent?

I’m an underground tech geek on the run with my four-year-old daughter, carrying core blueprints that could bring down a conglomerate. Trapped with nowhere to go on a stormy night, I broke into a run-down secondhand shop. I used one hand to dismantle a boiler on the verge of exploding and saved the hot-tempered proprietress, who was drowning in debt. I hid in the basement by offering to work off my debt repairing appliances.

Outsiders think I’m a timid, broke single dad who’ll argue for ages over even half a yuan. They have no idea that neural modification has given my hands [Absolute Microscopic Touch].

Turning junk into treasure by changing the rules: A touch of my fingertips lets me sense metal fatigue down to 0.01 millimeters. What others see as scrap metal, I can repair by hand with a rusty screwdriver, even a million-yuan industrial machine tool, then sell it for a fortune.

Cyberpunk dad life: With a scrapped drone and an old phone motherboard, I can hand-build my daughter an automated attack-detection guard dog in ten minutes, leaving the local debt collectors who come knocking stunned out of their wits.

Deadly traps for counterattacks in the dark: By day, the money-grubbing proprietress chews me out. By night, I use an old microwave and secondhand capacitors to set up deadly electromagnetic pulse traps, silently melting wave after wave of conglomerate hitmen.

I had just taken off my oil-stained jacket when I noticed a red light flash, very slowly, from the seam of my daughter’s backpack. It was a military-grade micro tracker.

They were in town.

I picked up the soldering iron from the workbench and pushed open the basement’s iron door. Tonight, the secondhand shop would be adding a few more “new pieces of junk,” made from living people.