Wilderness Nanite Awakening

You lace up your worn hiking boots in the dim light of your garage, the faint echo of last night's overtime shift at the steel mill still throbbing in your shoulders—another twelve hours of welding seams in a merit-driven grind where your precision with the torch has kept you off the layoff lists, even as the plant's output quotas tighten like a noose around the crew. With bills stacking and a rare weekend off, you head out alone to the remote badlands beyond the rust-belt sprawl, a rugged stretch of cracked earth and wind-scoured canyons that's become your ritual escape, far from the clamor of foremen barking orders and the unspoken dread of automation edging in on skilled trades like yours. The trail winds through thorny scrub under a relentless sun, your pack light with water and a multi-tool, the solitude sharpening your focus as you push deeper into nowhere, drawn by reports of a recent meteor shower that lit up the horizon like factory flares—curiosity pulling you off-path toward a flagged depression in the soil, where a jagged, iridescent fragment juts from the dust, humming with an unnatural warmth that draws your ungloved hand before you can second-guess the breach in protocol. As you pry the shard free, a faint mist shimmers free in the dry air, invisible tendrils slipping past your skin in an instant tingle you dismiss as sweat or static, pocketing the find with a mix of thrill and wariness before retracing your steps back to the trailhead. By evening, nursing a beer in your sparse apartment amid the distant rumble of freight trains, the first shifts register: your grip on the bottle steadies with unnatural control, and flipping through channels on the old TV, patterns in the news feeds—whispers of corporate salvage ops chasing meteor debris—snap into sharper relief, as if your thoughts are threading faster. The next morning, back at the mill through the usual snarl of commuter traffic, you navigate a jammed press line with instincts that bypass the old guesswork, your mind intuitively tracing hydraulic flows like they've been etched in your nerves, earning a nod from the shift lead that feels like quiet validation in a world where one slip means replacement; yet as these edges hone—stamina holding through the heaviest hauls, faint echoes in your periphery hinting at a broader hum of connected awareness—you link the shard's glow to hushed crew talk of off-site "enhancement trials" tied to big-tech mergers, fueling a resolve to probe the fragment's secrets before faceless suits turn your quiet upgrade into their controlled experiment on the working man's edge.