There was a comfort in repetition. The soft whirr of the extractor fan overhead, the faint burnt-plastic scent of solder, the tap-tap of a booted heel nudging a drawer closed. Void's workbench wasn't clean - hell no - but it was controlled chaos, and right now that's all she could stomach.
Her bench was lit by the glow of an LED matrix, barely hanging on to its current animation cycle. Two columns had glitched out, frozen mid-scroll like they'd just given up on life. "Relatable," she thought. She rolled her wrist, cracked her knuckles, and hunched back over the board with her tweezers and cursed breath.
The code was a mess. Not because Void was some kind of a script-kiddie - she knew exactly what she was doing. It just refused to cooperate, and printf("fuck\n"); sprinkled every two lines was obviously the best way to debug. The matrix was supposed to pulse out little pixel hearts in magenta and white, a dumb aesthetic flourish for a synthpunk audio reactive badge she was prototyping. The one Aura always wanted to make. Instead, it spat out gibberish, mocking, taunting her "sucks to suck, bitch."
She wiped sweat off her temple with the sleeve of her customized hoodie. Middle of June, temperature's getting high, and it was still the body she inherited from Aura, and that thing fucking hated heat. The time on the corner monitor showed 01:10AM. Of course it did.
"Okay, you little shit," she muttered, re-flashing the microcontroller with a new build. The C code still had some timing jitter on the PWM handling, and the interrupts weren't clean - thanks to the barebones STM32 she was working on. She liked it that way, though. No polish. Just raw silicon. Resembled her emotional state.
Her workbench was surrounded by little half-finished monsters. PCBs stacked like Tarot decks, each one etched with tiny runes and traces that looked more like satanic imagery than circuits. In the corner, a 3D-printed replica of Malorian Arms 3516 waiting for another coat of paint glared at her, almost like it wanted to say "I miss you." She hadn't touched it in weeks. Too much going on. Too much she didn't want to think about.
She took a swig from a bottle of carbonated coffee whose taste resembled rust more than roasted beans. Behind her, a wall of sticky notes curled at the edges. Half were to-dos. The rest were things she refused to delete because they were written in someone else's handwriting. She preferred not to look at those for too long.
Her laptop chirped.
Compilation successful.
She loaded the firmware, reset the board, and... boom. Matrix lit up. Hearts, clean as hell, rippling across the grid with a smooth pulse. She smirked, just barely. There were still a few edge cases in the color blending algorithm, but for now, it worked.
She leaned back, staring at the patterns. Her spine ached. So did her thoughts.
Void lived like this. Code by candlelight, emotional damage and existential dread written in commit messages. Something she learned from Aura. She liked the isolation most days. People were noise. People disappointed. Or worse - left.
Tonight, however, the silence itched a bit too much.
So she grabbed her phone. Her lab gloves left soldering flux smudges on the screen as she opened that godawful dating app. She didn't even like it. It felt like trying to summon companionship with a vending machine that mostly sold excrement wrapped in thin, gold sheets.
Still, she scrolled.
Most bios blurred together - gym rats with generic_girl.exe presentation, twelve filters and zero personality, queers who wanted 'chaotic good energy' but couldn't spell "capacitors" correctly. But then:
Hobbies? Video games, drawing, modeling, sculpting.
Love me some nerds who aren't afraid of showing their obsessions.
Void blinked. That was new. Or at least, less bad-type-of-cringe. No weird pickup line, no selfies with mountain shots or cocktails on the beach in a bumfuck nowhere. Just... someone who found comfort in creation, maybe.
She tapped the profile. Dee. No last name. Based in UK. A photo of a girl staring judgingly, yet invitingly at the viewer, dyed bangs, computer displays with gorgeous a e s t h e t i c s in the background. Most of the pictures were her with a cat. Presumably hers.
"Great. Another one of those... From the Queen's Land no less. Those bitches cling to me like styrofoam to a cat. I do have a soft spot for those, though," she blurted under her nose.
Void hovered for a second.
Looking for: friends
"Ah fuck, there's the catch. Knew it was too good to be true. Eh, here goes fucking nothing..." She swiped right anyway, against her better judgement.
Then went back to the bench, pretending she didn't.
She picked up her tweezers again, eyeing a new batch of addressable LED modules she'd ordered from a sketchy vendor in Taiwan. If they worked, great - if not, she could always reverse-engineer them out of spite, post schematics on her blog, and figure out what's wrong with help of other nerd cave hermits. The fun wasn't in the result. It was in the fuckery of getting there.
The next build would include heat sensors, a bit of gesture control, maybe even BLE support if she felt like punishing herself. She scribbled the rough outline onto a sticky note and slapped it onto a drawer with the others. Her handwriting was crooked. It always got that way after midnight.
The LED matrix was still flowing.
Void watched it for a bit, the loops slow and predictable. Magenta-white-magenta. The only heartbeat remaining she still trusted.
ping
She reached for her phone again.
Her eyes narrowed. The app. She unlocked it.
Matched.
She squinted. Dee.
Void stared at the screen, then muttered. "Well, well, well... Let's see if you're as disappointing as everyone else I've seen here so far."
She hesitated for a bit, then typed:
Void :: 2:10AM
asked for an unapologetic nerd so here i am.