The chair had started making the sounds three days ago.
It wasn’t the usual creak from the left housing. It wasn’t a thin brake pad grinding. Rory knew those sounds. Something in the drive hub.
He could feel it more than he could hear it. A hesitation in the right wheel. A second or so delay before the servo engaged.
He waited in the back room.
It smelled of stale beer. The bulb above him flickered. The plastic shade was cracked. It still cast a jaundice-yellow glow on the stained walls. He’d watched the vids of this week’s Premiership goals three times already.
Moira had said she’d be free by two. Half-past at the latest. Rory had no way of reaching her.
He’d found her through a friend. Someone who knew someone who’d worked with her at a parts plant outside Glasgow. Before it shuttered. “She’s good,” they’d said. “Skittish lass, though. You’ll have to go to her.”
This was the closest thing to compromise that she’d allowed. Meet in the back room of the Stag’s Head. The landlord was her cousin, or something, and didn’t ask questions. His chair had struggled up the slight hill to get here.
Maybe the charge regulator had been on its way out for weeks and he hadn’t noticed. He worried everything was going to fail at once.
His chair was an Akeron. Not an antique. Some subsidiary of Keida Prosthetics had bought Akeron. The sympathetic woman on the phone had told him that they didn’t honor warranties on legacy models. Official process was to go to Edinburgh, surrender the chair, wait for six weeks for a new Keida model with current firmware. And pay the equivalent of three month’s rent.
So he sat in the back room of a pub and hoped.
The door opened and a woman came in, carrying a plastic crate. The kind supermarkets used for deliveries. She was maybe fifty. Short gray hair and grimy hands. She set the crate on the table and looked at him.
“I’m Moira,” she said.
“Rory.”
She crouched and looked at his chair.
“200 model,” she said. “You said it was the right drive?”
“Something keeps clicking, and it’s slow.”
“Let me see.”
She shuffled sideways until she was facing the right side of the chair, and ran her fingers along the drive housing. Her touch was light. She grabbed a small scanner from her back pocket.
“The play in the hub’s just age,” she said. “But it’s making the motor work too hard. Or it could be the bearing seat’s worn.”
“What do you think?”
“If it’s the bearing seat, I can’t fix it here.” She was quiet for a moment. Her fingers stopped at the seam where the axle met the wheel. “But I think it’s the motor.”
She pulled open the crate. Inside, in an anti-static foam wrap, was a hub motor. Tool marks around its bolt holes. Grind marks where the serial number should be. But it was clean. New seals.
“Old 160 motor,” she said. “Same housing. Different controller firmware, but I can reflash your whole system.”
“How much?”
“Four hundred.”
“C’mon.”
Moira looked at him. “You want to know the official price?”
“I’ve not got four hundred.”
“OK. What do you have?”
He had two hundred and eighty pounds on a credit wafer. Most he’d been able to save, what with the rent and mum’s prescriptions.
He told her.
She was quiet for a minute. He listened to the pub’s holo through the wall. Someone laughed.
“Alright,” she said finally. “Two eighty. And I keep the old motor.”
“And?”
“And you keep your mouth shut about where you got it.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” She pulled the crate toward her. “I’ll need an hour. You can wait in the bar.”
He couldn’t go to Edinburgh.
She wheeled him out to a worn table where he could see the holo. He shifted himself over into a wooden chair. Moira even brought over a pint. Then she pushed the Akeron toward the door.
“Moira.”
She stopped.
“Thank you.”
She didn’t turn. “I haven’t fixed it yet.”
The door closed behind her.
A story from the Static Drift universe.
Article Photo by Martin Fennema on Unsplash.