The Ghost of Rust and Chrome (Revised)

The spurs on Elias’s boots didn’t jingle. They never had.

They hummed instead — a low, ugly vibration of sapphire light that crawled up through the iron-heavy sands of New Nevada and into his bones. He hated that sound. It reminded him that nothing about him was old-world anymore.

Above, the sky was bruised violet, split open by the broken rings of a dying planet. Two suns burned overhead. Heat like that didn’t just blister skin — it cooked exposed circuitry. Elias had learned that the hard way.

Dusty Relic looked like every dead town he’d ever dragged someone out of. Same red dust. Same leaning buildings pretending they still mattered.

He pushed through the saloon doors. Carbon fiber. Reclaimed. Cheap.

The hinges shrieked — not dramatically, just neglected. Like everything else.

Ozone. Synthetic whiskey. Burnt insulation.

He didn’t sit.

“You’re far from the Inner Core, Lawman.”

The voice came from the dark, rough and uneven, like it had been rebuilt too many times by hands that didn’t care about symmetry.

The Copperhead Kid sat hunched in the corner, optics flickering crimson, cleaning a laser-revolver shaped like something stolen from a museum. Steam leaked from a cracked seam in his shoulder. He hadn’t fixed it. Either he didn’t know how… or he didn’t bother anymore.

“The Core doesn’t care where I stand,” Elias said. His hand hovered near his pulse-lasso. It twitched. That wasn’t a system error. “They care about the data you erased.”

Silence settled heavy.

The bartender — a multi-armed unit with a fractured screen — froze mid-pour. Liquid spilled anyway. Nobody laughed.

“I didn’t erase it to sell,” the Kid said. His fans whined, too loud. Nervous. “I erased it so I could remember. They were going to overwrite me. Strip me down. Leave the shell.”

Elias felt something snag inside his chest.

Not guilt. Not mercy. Just static.

He remembered rain once. Real rain. He wasn’t sure why that memory still survived.

The Kid moved first.

No bullet. No flash. Just an EMP pulse that slammed the room into darkness.

Elias hit the floor hard, metal scraping wood. His left eye rebooted slower than it should’ve. He swore under his breath — a very human habit he never bothered deleting.

Then he whistled.

The code hurt his throat.

The hawk-drone tore through the roof like it had been waiting its whole life for permission. Gravity spiked. Boards shattered. The Kid slammed down, pinned, hydraulics screaming.

Up close, the leaking fluid really did look like blood. Elias hated that.

“The West didn’t change,” he said quietly, more to himself than the Kid. “We just replaced the tools.”

He dragged the body out into the orange twilight. His ship waited nearby, rusted and patient, pretending to be a stagecoach.

As it lifted off, blue fire burned a scar across the desert sky.

Down below, Dusty Relic stayed dead