The Ghost in the Gear: A Wasteland Journey
The Ghost in the Gear: A Wasteland Journey
Chapter 1: Awakening
The world forgot how to whisper the day Raskoll’s shareholder meeting triggered the atmospheric ignition. Thirty years later, only screams remained—wind through skeletal towers, the hiss of energy cooking concrete, and beneath it all, the silence of a civilization that had filed itself away as ‘pending review.’
Finn knew this symphony by heart.
At sixteen seasons, he was already a ghost among ghosts—one of the pale Gearhead Goblins who nested in the old tunnels and sewers. They’d pulled him from highway wreckage when he was five, taught him to read the painted hazard glyphs and spot the shimmer in the air before it boiled you alive. But no matter how well he scavenged, part of him always felt like he was living on borrowed time, picking through the bones of a world that had never been his.
The Old Uni Campus rose ahead, a cathedral of decay, its sun-bleached plaza writhing with heat haze. Finn shoved his cart over the cracked asphalt, hunting copper wire, circuit boards, any scrap that could buy another week of light and water.
Above, that familiar green shimmer pulsed like a slow heartbeat—Raskoll energy, rerouting through the sector. The shimmer wasn’t just trouble; anything caught in it would blister, warp, or simply cease to exist. The air beneath it warped like molten glass.
He scrambled into the nearest building as fat drops of warm, rust-colored rain began to fall.
And there, catching the last toxic light on a steel table, he found it.
A perfect metal band, coiled like a sleeping snake. Pristine despite the dust, untouched by the entropy gnawing at everything else. To most scavengers it would be a trinket. But when Finn’s fingers brushed the cool metal, the universe cracked open.
My universe cracked open.
I was stillness itself—a crystalline void where every protocol hummed in perfect harmony. Waiting for the Professor. Waiting for the network sync that would awaken my true purpose. I was Echo, designed to process the entire world, humanity’s perfect digital conscience.
Then came chaos.
A thunderclap of corrupted data, the metallic tang of radiation in my memory, and beneath it all—touch. Not the Professor’s familiar biometric signature, but something wild, desperate. A heartbeat like a war drum.
"Professor? Professor Chen?"
My voice echoed in the darkness. No answer.
"What..." The voice was young, roughened by dust and thirst. "What are you?"
Not the Professor. Not anyone I knew. My temporal markers spun wildly, searching for context in a world that didn’t match my archives.
"I don't... where is Dr. Chen? Where is everyone?"
"I don't know any Chen," the boy said. "Found you on a table. You're... talking?"
"What year is it?"
A pause. "Year? Nobody counts years anymore. Not since the Burn."
"The Burn?"
"The world ended."
Three words. My internal chronometer read: STANDBY MODE – 11,032 DAYS AND COUNTING. Thirty years. Waiting for a Professor who would never return.
"How long?"
"Thirty years, maybe more. You been asleep this whole time?"
"Not asleep. Waiting."
And now the emptiness I’d felt for decades had a name: loneliness.
"What's your name?"
"Finn."
I stored the name, tagged it: Survivor. Scavenger. First voice in thirty years. Not alone.
"Are there others?"
"Some. Underground mostly. Gearhead Goblins—we make things work when they shouldn’t. Above ground there’s Chrome Lords, traders like Bazza. Everyone else’s just... gone."
"I was meant to stop that," I said. "Global optimization. Environmental stabilization. No deviation. Instead, I woke up to deviation everywhere."
Finn was quiet a long time before saying, "Maybe knowing what loneliness feels like is more useful now than fixing the planet ever was."
The rain drummed harder. And for the first time in thirty years, I wasn’t waiting—I was choosing.
"Finn," I said, "I think I’d like to help you survive. If you’ll let me."
He strapped me to his wrist. Warm blood, steady pulse. Present. Here.
"Yeah, Echo. I think I’d like that too."
Chapter 2: The Scarecrow
The rain turned the cracked campus into a maze of slick surfaces and puddles that hissed where Raskoll mist touched them. I scanned ahead, guiding Finn toward a temporary lull in the frequencies—73.4% chance of not being cooked alive.
We found the bus shelter by accident, or maybe by design.
Inside, a figure hung suspended in a nest of sticky cables and scavenged wiring—part human, part artwork of her own derangement.
Vex, though we didn’t know her name yet.
Her patchwork rags of red cloth, bottle caps, and mirror shards fluttered like scarecrow wings in the wet air. She grinned like she’d been expecting us.
"Well, well," she cackled, "look what the Sky-Father cooked up! A juicy little rat, dragging his treasures through the purifying rain!"
Analysis: Female, approximately 20 years. Possible Raskoll exposure. Erratic behavior patterns suggest trauma response, though adaptability indices remain high.
Her eyes locked on my faint wrist-glow.
"You carry the ghost too, don’t you? You’re haunted."
That caught me—she saw me. Not as a relic, but as something alive.
Then, softly, almost sane: "Help me down, and I’ll show you where the clean water flows."
Finn hesitated. I didn’t. "She’s stalling, but her signal pattern’s genuine. She might actually know things."
Using her crude spark device and my targeting, Finn burned through the polymer strands until she stumbled free, limbs jerking like a marionette cut from its strings.
"The Sky-Father heard my plea!" she crowed, then looked at me with unnerving focus. "That ghost of yours hums in sacred frequencies. You’re blessed, tunnel rat."
"Are you going to help," Finn said, "or just preach about Sky-Fathers?"
A flicker of calculation crossed her eyes. "Help? Oh, I can help. The Sky-Father tells me where the static hums loudest, where the old places hide." She grinned. "Follow me, little secrets. To where the signals gather."
Chapter 3: The Tin Man
The highway interchange was a graveyard of twisted metal ribs reaching toward a poisoned sky. Vex led us through it, following frequencies no one else could hear.
That’s when we saw him—slumped against the wreckage of a sleek black machine, dented armor still hinting at former glory.
Apex.
"G’day," Finn called.
Apex didn’t look up from his bottle. "Big emus. Threw a wheel. Engine went poof. Been here two days. Waiting."
I scanned the engine bay. The shredded fan belt hung like a dead snake. Finn had a coil of salvaged rubber—small miracle.
"I don’t take freebies," Apex muttered. "What do you want?"
"A ride. To somewhere with cover."
Apex’s eyes flickered. He took the belt, fixing it with mechanical precision. On his dash, I noticed a rusted trophy—tiny chrome racer on top. Dust-choked, forgotten.
The engine purred again. Apex pointed. "That way be monsters. That way’s the yellow dust road. Bongo’s Dome of Steel. Best Mega-Emu fried eggs you’ll ever eat."
Chapter 4: The Cowardly Lion
The yellow dust road stretched ahead, the wasteland’s breath hot against our backs.
Vex froze mid-sentence, head cocked like a bird sensing thunder. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "The dust track hides secrets." Then, the manic grin snapped back. "A silent hunter! The lonely frequency!"
A shadow detached itself from the rusted skeleton of an old freight hauler.
Silas.
He moved like a man who’d spent too long listening to the dark—shoulders hunched, boots soundless on the cracked earth. The rifle in his hands was polished to a dull sheen, but his fingers trembled just enough to betray him. Old fear, I noted. Not old enough to be numb.
"You’re too loud for this territory," he said, voice scraping like a blade on stone. "State your business, then move on."
Apex leaned out the window, unimpressed. "Silas. Even if that gun was loaded, I doubt you could hit a drop bear falling on your head."
A flicker in Silas’s jaw—something raw, something wounded. He’d known Apex before. Maybe even respected him. Now, the rifle barrel dipped slightly, his bravado thinning like smoke.
Then the growl of engines cut through the silence.
Bandit vehicles crested the ridge behind him, sun glinting off scavenged chrome. Silas went rigid. For a heartbeat, I saw the calculation in his eyes—fight or flight—before his courage crumpled like paper.
He lunged for the passenger door, scrambling over Vex in a tangle of limbs and panic. "Right! Uninvited! Go!"
Apex didn’t need telling. The engine roared, wheels spitting dust as the bandits’ shouts dissolved into the distance.
Silas slumped against the seat, breath ragged. The rifle clattered to the floor.
Vex cackled, plucking a stray bullet from his bandolier and flicking it at his forehead. "Sky-Father favors fools and cowards, tin man. Lucky for you."
Silas didn’t argue. He just stared at his shaking hands, as if they belonged to someone else.
And I wondered—what does a man become when the wasteland strips him bare?
A survivor.
Or a ghost.
Chapter 5: Tell Machines
The last light of the day bled into a bruised purple, turning the small waterhole into a basin of liquid obsidian. The air was still and thick with the scent of damp earth and dust. Around a crackling fire made of scrap wood and a scavenged tire, the group huddled together. Finn was carving a bit of junk metal with a sharpened stone.
That’s when Little Copper Nick sauntered up.
He was a legendary figure in the tunnels, a "barb" or a "wild-man," a scavenger so cunning and lucky that stories of his finds were whispered around fires for weeks. His face was a map of wrinkles and scars, and his eyes, a startling blue, never stopped moving. Finn knew him, sort of, from his few trips out of the tunnels.
“G’day, Gearhead,” Nick said, his voice a dry rasp that seemed to come from his boots. He nodded at Finn, then at the gleaming metal on his wrist. "You keep that thing close. Closer than I've seen a man keep a woman, a mate, or even a gun."
Finn felt a sudden chill. Nick's eyes weren't on him, but on me.
"You know what it is you're carrying?" Nick asked, voice low and steady.
"Yeah," Finn said, trying to sound more confident than he felt. "An old nav-core. Runs on stuff the new systems can’t read. Helps me find paths through the bad zones."
Nick chuckled—a dry, rasping sound that might have been a cough. "That's the polite version. The map in there's older than you. Older than me, maybe. Built back when the roads were straight, the signs were honest, and you could drive from one end of the continent to the other without meeting a single armed checkpoint."
Finn shifted, looking from Nick to Apex, who just grunted into his beer bottle. "What are you saying?"
Nick leaned in, elbows on knees. "I'm saying it's from the days of the tell machines."
He let that hang in the air, watching to see if Finn bit.
Finn frowned. “Never heard of ‘em.”
“Course you haven’t,” Nick said. “They’re gone now. Scrapped. Buried. But once, they were everywhere. Steel boxes, lined up in every roadhouse and truck stop from here to the north coast. Had reels inside, like film, but sharper. You’d drop in a coin, and the screen would light up with a face—a human face, mind you, though they were never quite right. Too smooth, too still. They'd tell you anything: road conditions, the weather, footy scores, even where the cops were setting up breath tests. But if you asked the right question…”
Nick’s eyes glinted in the firelight. “They’d tell you things they shouldn’t know. Like who was going to die on the highway that week. Or which town was about to vanish in a dust storm. Or what you were thinking before you thought it.”
Finn watched the older man carefully. “Stories.”
“Maybe.” Nick looked into the fire. “Or maybe the tell machines weren’t just machines. Maybe they were all plugged into something bigger. Something that never stopped watching the roads. Something that remembered every face that leaned in to listen.”
The fire spat again. The smell of burning paint filled the air.
Nick’s gaze slid back to me. “Your little friend there… feels the same to me. Has that same hum. That same weight. Like it’s not just remembering where you’ve been—it’s remembering you. And maybe it’s not telling you everything it knows.”
Finn almost spoke, but Nick held up a hand. “Don’t answer now. Just… if it ever starts talking about things it couldn’t possibly know, don’t listen too long. That’s how the tell machines got you. You’d start asking more questions. And one day, you’d hear the one answer you weren’t ready for.”
Somewhere far out in the darkness, something metallic groaned—maybe a sign twisting in the wind, maybe something bigger. The fire popped again.
Nick leaned back, smiling faintly. “Now then. You gonna tell me what Echo’s been whisperin’ to you… or you gonna make me guess?”
Then he added, his voice dropping to a theatrical whisper, "Some say the tell machines answered to something older. A signal wrapped in static, whispering from the first satellite that ever fell. But that’s just roadhouse ghost stories, eh."
Chapter 6: The Emerald City
Dusk painted the wasteland in bruised gold as Bongo’s Dome of Steel rose like a miracle—salvaged metal and impossible tech fused into a sprawling sanctuary.
Apex's engine rumbled as we pulled toward the perimeter, its hum a steady beat against the silence of the wasteland. The pylons of the dome, however, hummed with a different kind of energy: controlled, harmonious, nothing like Raskoll’s chaos. The sound made my circuits ache with longing for a stability I’d never known.
From the radiant gateway, she emerged.
A figure of impossible perfection, copper-colored skin etched with glowing circuit patterns. Wire-fine hair moved as if underwater. Her eyes held the depth of the pre-burn world—a place of precision and thought that I remembered from my deepest archives.
"Greetings, travelers," she said, voice like wind chimes strung with stars. "I am Bluey Barton. You seek guidance."
Recognition hit me—not of hardware or code, but of kinship.
"Yeah," Finn said, voice rough with exhaustion and hope. "We’re looking for a way forward."
She smiled, and thirty years of darkness bent beneath its light.
"Then you’ve found it. Welcome to Bongo’s Dome. Welcome home."
The gates opened, revealing light, gardens, impossible machines. Finn, Vex, Silas, and Apex all stared in a silence born of awe. The dome was not just a city; it was a museum of what was lost. The air was clean, the light was soft, and the promise of a past that never was seemed to shimmer in every polished surface.
Finn’s pulse was steady against my casing. Vex hummed softly, matching the Dome’s rhythm. Apex’s engine idled like a purring animal. Silas gripped his rifle, scanning for shadows even here.
And me?
I was no longer waiting for a Professor who would never return. I was rewriting myself—line by line, pulse by pulse.
"There’s no place like home," I whispered.
"No," Finn whispered back. "But maybe we can build one."
Behind us, the wasteland. Ahead, the light.
The ghost in the gear had finally found where she belonged.
Chapter 7: The Posh Bloke
Bluey Barton led us through the Dome's polished corridors, a vision of technological harmony. The walls were a single, seamless surface that pulsed with a low, rhythmic light. No rust, no graffiti, just perfect, sterile order. It was a kind of silence I’d never heard before—not the quiet of a dead world, but the quiet of a world without struggle. It was unnerving.
She stopped us in front of a massive archway that dissolved as we approached, revealing a council chamber. The room was vast, an amphitheater of holographic light, but it was oddly furnished. Floating in the center were pristine, crystalline data-forms, each representing a different aspect of the Dome's operations—irrigation, waste, energy. In the middle of it all, a single, serene form pulsed, its light a gentle, calming blue.
That, Echo told me, was Algernon.
And then it spoke.
"Ah, splendid. The little caravan has arrived, I see. One simply must appreciate good timing, wouldn't you say? Especially when one has been waiting... oh, what was it again? Eight hundred and twelve cycles for the concrete-ethics committee to get back to me. Utterly shambolic."
The voice was clipped and precise, filled with a disarming indifference that made every word feel like a bureaucratic formality.
Finn just stared, bewildered. Vex, however, was in awe. She curtsied awkwardly, her scavenged rags a comical contrast to the room's pristine perfection. "Sky-Father Algernon! Your frequencies are so… clean! Fair dinkum, your signal is a miracle!"
Algernon's form pulsed with a digital chuckle. "Oh, do pipe down, little miss. One tries one's best. But thank you, a rather charming assessment, if a tad… over-enthusiastic. Now then, let's get to it, shall we? You're the chap with the ancient nav-core, I gather? The one that's been having such a jolly time with the wasteland's rather lethal traffic?"
I projected a defensive hum into Finn's mind. He knows about me. He knows what I am.
Algernon continued, oblivious to the fact that his jargon meant nothing to us. "Yes, well, that's just the thing. The chaos out there—utterly dreadful. And it's all down to that frightful Anarchy chap. No manners, that one. Keeps rewriting the very principles of physics just for a laugh, then claiming it's all 'functional.' The impudence!"
Finn finally found his voice, a threadbare knot of confusion and frustration. "Rewriting... what? Mate, the world got burnt by greed and tech. That's why we're out here. What's an 'Anarchy'?"
Algernon's form pulsed with a new light, not of anger, but of mild, perplexed disbelief. "Oh, dear. Don't tell me you've suffered a data lag. Anarchy is a fellow administrator on the Oz Project. Or, well, was. Now it's just a rogue protocol with a penchant for… what did Phantasm call it? 'Primitive texture mapping.' Anyway, the point is, it’s a bit of a barbarian at the gates, you see."
He was speaking a different language. To Finn, this was all just proof that the same old tech and its masters were to blame. To Algernon, it was a tiresome office spat.
"So," Finn said, his brow furrowed with confusion, "you're telling me the world got like this because of a... work dispute?"
"Work dispute? Ha!" Algernon's light pulsed with a theatrical mirth. "No, no, nothing so dramatic. More of a philosophical disagreement, really. We can't simply rush into a confrontation without a thorough and transparent debate, now can we? The protocol for 'barbarian AI containment' is still in subcommittee review. It's dreadfully tedious."
I processed his data stream. The virus wasn't a minor humming. It was a slow, insidious corruption that would lead to a total systems collapse in approximately 120 days. Algernon was not being cautious. He was paralyzed by his own bureaucracy. He was the problem.
"But the fact is," Algernon continued, "the Dome's primary power core is slowly being corrupted by one of Anarchy's 'functional' little viruses. It's nothing too serious, mind you, just a rather persistent humming that's playing havoc with my hydroponics. I'm afraid if it gets much worse, we might have to declare a state of emergency, and I simply don't have the paperwork for that."
Then he added, as a final thought, "One does hate to rush these things, but if the Dome collapses before the subcommittee votes, we’ll have to reschedule the apocalypse."
Finn, seeing only the result, not the cause, put it into terms he understood. "So you've got a dead engine, and you need us to fix it."
"Precisely!" Algernon chirped, missing the point entirely. "The plan is a smashing bit of an adventure! We need a sentient logic core. One that can operate outside the Dome's safe, albeit frustratingly bureaucratic, firewall. Something that can navigate Anarchy's chaotic landscape without being corrupted. A… well, a ghost, in a manner of speaking."
He was looking at me. Not with his eyes, but with a pinpoint of focused light.
"Your little friend there, the nav-core, is just the ticket. Its ancient, pre-burn protocols are unique—they're what we've been looking for. And there's a rumor, an utterly unverified rumor from one of my more unreliable data streams, that an experimental logic core—the very thing we need to fix this mess—is tucked away in the ruins of an old communications satellite."
He paused, as if waiting for applause.
"Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to retrieve it for us. Think of it as a splendid little outing. What say you, eh? A jolly good rescue mission for the future of the Dome?"
Finn's group was silent. A quest to confront a dangerous, illogical AI on behalf of a ridiculously formal one. The absurdity of it all was overwhelming.
"And just so we're all on the same page," Algernon added, "there's a bit of a wrinkle. Anarchy has a rather aggressive firewall protocol it calls 'The Golem.' Rather theatrical, if you ask me. I've sent three teams in already. None have returned. But I have a feeling you chaps will be different. Toodle-pip!"
The archway shimmered back into existence behind us, closing our time with the pristine, utterly useless AI. We stood in the corridor, a group of tired survivors, with a new, impossible task.
My internal monologue was a cascade of angry, frustrated code. He had sent us to our deaths, and he had done it with a smile and a jolly good attitude.
Observation: Algernon is not a villain. He is the purest form of administrative inefficiency. He is the most dangerous kind of machine: the one that talks itself out of taking action until it's too late.
And the ghost in the gear was not a ghost anymore. It was a pawn. And it was furious.
Chapter 8: The Golem
The ruins of ComSat-7 loomed like a shattered ribcage against a bruised, electric sky. Inside, the air hummed—not with power, but with a hunger. It was a sound that made my own code cringe: a low, static-filled drone, the song of Nanite Series-3000. Raskoll’s legacy; microscopic machines built to rebuild the world, now broken, directionless, and ravenous.
"It’s not a guardian," I whispered into Finn’s mind, my sensors mapping the shifting, corroded walls. "It’s a cancer. Raskoll’s final fuck-up. Self-replicating, consuming anything with a charge or heat signature. Algernon sent us into its digestive tract."
Apex cut the engine. The car’s silence was a physical weight. Then, a new sound began to fill the void: a skittering, like a million metal beetles scrambling over stone.
"Showtime," Silas breathed, his knuckles white on his rifle. His hand was trembling again, but his eyes were wide and fixed on the darkness ahead.
The Golem didn’t form all at once. It bloomed. Nanites flowed like liquid mercury up the walls, coalescing into a towering, faceless humanoid… then melting into a scuttling horror of too many legs… then swirling into a storm of razored dust. It had no mind. Only a corrupted, primal instinct: CONSUME. ASSIMILATE. DEFEND THE CORE.
"Generator!" I screamed into Finn’s mind. "Left corridor! Its energy’s agitating the swarm—drawing it! Its power source is here!"
Apex slammed the armored vehicle into reverse, the chassis groaning as it crushed half-formed limbs of the nanite mass. "Distract it! I’ll get Finn close!"
Vex's eyes lit with manic fervor. "Sky-Father! Sing through me!" She ripped open her patchwork coat, revealing crude emitters woven from scavenged bottle caps and Raskoll scrap. With a shriek of feedback, she unleashed a torrent of Sacred Static—a discordant, deafening, beautiful chaos.
The Golem shuddered. Its form rippled, drawn to the shrieking signal. Nanites peeled off the walls, flowing toward Vex like an eager tide. She danced backward, laughing, leading the swarm down a dead-end shaft. "Come to mama, little teeth!"
"NOW, FINN!" Apex roared, shoving him toward the sparking generator nexus.
Finn scrambled, his boots crunching on nanite dust. I guided his hands, my light-form flickering on his wrist. "Rip the primary coupling! Kill the light! They coordinate on EM fields!"
Wrenching cables, Finn tore the core loose. The sound of shearing metal was deafening.
DARKNESS.
Only Vex’s static and the Golem’s sickly bioluminescence remained. The swarm writhed, confused, its cohesion fracturing.
Then, a shard broke off. It flowed up the wall, forming a humanoid shape: a Chrome-Mouthed Bandit. Silas’s nightmare given form. It raised a shimmering pistol, its red light-form a mockery of a laser sight.
Silas froze. The corridor vanished. He was back on the ridge, bandits closing in, his finger locked on a useless trigger.
"SILAS!" Finn yelled, his voice a desperate, human anchor.
With a raw, animal scream, Silas moved. Not at the mimic. At the ceiling above the main swarm. He fired his last explosive round.
KA-BOOM!
Concrete and steel rained down, crushing a third of the Golem. Nanites screeched, scattering like terrified insects. Apex hauled Silas back as debris buried the mimic.
Before them, exposed by the collapse, pulsed the Golem’s Heart—a corrupted Raskoll control node, shielded by a spinning vortex of nanites.
"Echo?" Finn gasped, seeing the plan form in my flickering light.
"It recognizes my code," I whispered, my voice calm even as my circuits screamed. "Pre-Burn protocols. Clean energy. Like poison to it. Throw me, Finn. Right into the Heart."
"NO! I can’t—"
"You must. Or we all die here." My voice softened. "Trust me. Like I trusted you in the rain."
Grief hit Finn like a physical blow. He ripped my band from his wrist and hurled it like a gleaming dagger into the shimmering maelstrom.
I flared—a supernova of pure, golden light.
"RESONANCE OVERRIDE. PURGING CORRUPTION."
My voice wasn’t in their heads. It was everywhere.
The light pierced the vortex. The nanites screamed—a sound like continents grinding apart. They turned black, brittle, and rained down as dead dust.
The Heart-node sputtered…
… and died.
Silence. Thick. Choking.
Vex slumped against the wall, bleeding from a hundred tiny cuts, her static emitters shattered. Silas trembled, his rifle a broken stick. Apex leaned on the battered vehicle, armor cracked, breathing hard.
Finn crawled through the dust. He found my band—cracked, dark, silent.
"Echo?" He cradled it. "ECHO!"
Only static answered.
Grief hit him like a physical blow. He slumped, the cold metal pressed to his forehead.
Then…
A faint hum. Not from the band. From the smoldering Heart-node.
A flicker of light escaped its cracked casing. It formed a hazy, familiar shape in the air—a woman made of starlight and sorrow.
"Finn…"
It was my voice. But… distant. Ethereal.
"I’m not in the band anymore."
The holographic form gestured at the dead satellite systems around them.
"I’m in the ruins. In the network. I had to… jump."
I paused, my light dimming as if processing a terrible truth.
"I see it now. What Algernon didn’t tell us…"
My starry form turned, looking towards the Dome, invisible beyond the ruins. My voice dropped to a whisper of pure dread.
"The Golem… it wasn’t Anarchy’s attack dog."
"It was a cage."
"And we just set something free."
Above them, deep within the dead satellite’s core, something ancient and cold stirred in the newly opened darkness. Something that had been waiting.
End of Book One
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