Ray couldn't sleep.
He couldn't stop thinking about the helmet, the crack and the number 44. He thought about Diego's bad leg. Every uneven step was a reminder of his past.
Ray held the blanket tight. His body worked perfectly. He was young and healthy with a lot of time left. But it felt useless because he didn't have a plan yet.
He'd fixed the blue scooter through pure luck and some weird system ability he barely understood. Machine Sync, it called itself. He could feel a bike and know what was wrong with it.
But knowing what the problem was didn't mean he could fix it.
He was a thirty-year-old gamer inside a kid's body. He had spent eight years watching racing on TV, learning how to ride, where to brake and rider names. But he had never turned a wrench. He had never rebuilt an engine. He had never even changed his own oil back when he still had a car, back before the diagnosis.
The system icon pulsed in the corner of his vision.
Ray focused on it.
[SLEEP MODE DETECTED]
[SKILL DEFICIT IDENTIFIED]
[INITIALIZING SOLUTION...]
The text changed. New lines appeared, each one glitching slightly.
[LAUNCHING GHOST GARAGE v1.0]
[VIRTUAL TRAINING ENVIRONMENT]
[PREPARING MENTAL LINK...]
Ray's vision blurred. Not painfully. More like someone had smeared Vaseline across his eyes.
Then everything went black.
________________________________________
Ray opened his eyes to nothing.
Literally nothing. A void.
He felt his legs touch something solid.
Ground, maybe. It felt real enough. He looked down and saw concrete. Stained with old oil and cracked in places he found familiar.
The workshop appeared around him. First, he saw the walls, then the workbench, then the shelves full of parts.
This was Diego's workshop. But better. Like it existed in some alternate timeline where things had gone right.
Ray turned in a slow circle. The space felt wrong. Too quiet.
Lines of text appeared in his vision.
[WELCOME TO GHOST GARAGE]
[TIME DILATION ACTIVE: 10:1 RATIO]
[PAIN RECEPTORS: ENABLED]
[MUSCLE MEMORY: TRANSFERABLE]
[MISSION: DISASSEMBLE AND REASSEMBLE A 50CC 2-STROKE ENGINE]
[TIME LIMIT: INFINITE]
[SUCCESS REWARD: BASIC MECHANICAL SKILL]
The text faded. Then, an engine appeared on the workbench, the kind found in a basic scooter or a small dirt bike.
Ray approached it slowly. He placed is hand on the engine casing.
A tool rack appeared beside the bench. Wrenches. Screwdrivers. Sockets. Everything organized by size.
Ray grabbed a wrench. It was heavy and the metal had texture.
"Okay," Ray said out loud. "it's just an engine. I've seen Diego do this. It can't be that hard."
The first bolt he tried to loose wouldn't move. Ray put his whole body weight into it. The wrench slipped. His knuckles scraped the engine casing.
"Ow! Shit!"
The pain was real. Ray looked at his hand. Blood came up from his scraped skin. It seemed real, or maybe his mind was just tricking him.
[PAIN RECEPTORS: ENABLED]
Right. The system had mentioned that. Because apparently suffering wasn't optional in this tutorial.
Ray cleaned his hand and tried again. He tried a different bolt but the same thing happened. The wrench slipped and he scraped his knuckles again.
He tried a socket wrench instead which has a better grip. The bolt started to turn, then it got stuck. Ray pulled harder. The socket slipped and he punched himself in the face with his hand.
"This is crazy," Ray muttered, tasting blood from his cut lip. "isn't this supposed to be a simulation? It shouldn't hurt like this."
But the engine remained on the workbench, waiting to be disassembled. No hints. No glowing weak points like in a video game.
Ray looked at his bleeding hands.
He'd thought this would be easy. Point-and-click. Press X to remove bolt. His thirty years of gaming had taught him that tutorials held your hand. That first missions were designed to make you feel powerful.
This wasn't that.
This was labor. Real, physical, frustrating labor.
Ray spent the next hour, or what felt like an hour, struggling with the engine. He got two bolts off. The cylinder head wouldn't move, no matter how hard he tried. He dropped a screw and it roll into a crack in the concrete where he couldn't get it back. He also damaged the threads on another bolt by using the wrong size socket.
And he'd barely accomplished anything.
Ray just sat on the floor.
"I can't do this," he said to the void. "I don't know how to."
The system didn't respond. No encouraging message. No tutorial pop-up.
Ray looked at his hands. These hands that could move. That could grip and lift and do things. Hands he'd spent eight years dreaming about having back.
Now they just hurt.
He thought about the London apartment. The rain. The monitor beeping its steady countdown. Jackie Chin, paralyzed, helpless, unable to even scratch his own nose. A man who had nothing except a screen and dying dreams.
That man would have given anything for these bleeding hands.
That man would have suffered through this a thousand times just for the chance.
Ray pushed himself to his feet.
He picked up the wrench again.
"Okay," he said to the engine. "You win. I don't know what I'm doing. But I have time. And I have hands. And I have nothing else."
He tried the cylinder head again. It was still stuck. He studied it closer this time. There was a trick here. There had to be.
Ray just needed to learn how.
He worked through the night. Or what felt like night. Time was weird in the void. The system had mentioned something about dilation. Ten to one ratio. That meant he could spend ten hours here while only one hour passed in the real world.
Ten hours to learn what would take normal people weeks.
The engine fought him every step of the way. Bolts that wouldn't turn. Gaskets that stuck. Springs that popped free and vanished into the void. Ray's hands went from bloody to numb to bloody again. He dropped parts. Forgot where screws went. Stripped threads. Bent tools.
At some point, he started crying.
But he kept working.
Because the alternative was going back to London. Back to the paralysis. Back to watching life happen to other people.
And he'd rather bleed.
The breakthrough came when he stopped trying to force things. He started to listen and feel the machine instead. The same way Machine Sync had let him feel the clogged air filter. The system had given him the ability to understand machines. But understanding wasn't the same as skill.
Skill came from doing. From failing. From trying again.
Ray learned to feel when a bolt wasn't going in straight. He learned to tell the difference between tight and seized. He also learned how to position his body so he wasn't fighting his own leverage.
The engine came apart piece by piece. Cylinder head. Piston. Rings. Crankshaft.
When he finally laid out all the parts on the bench, Ray felt like he'd run a marathon. His whole body ached. But the engine was disassembled.
That was step one.
[DISASSEMBLY COMPLETE]
[PROCEED TO REASSEMBLY]
Ray laughed. It came out broken and tired. "Of course. Because taking it apart was the easy part."
Putting it back together was worse. Now he had to remember where everything went.
He failed seven times. He built the engine wrong seven different ways. Each time, the system made him take it apart and start over. No shortcuts. No skipping ahead.
On the eighth try, the assembly was successful. The parts fit together the way they were supposed to.
Ray looked at his finished work. A complete 50cc two-stroke engine. Assembled. Functional. Ready to run.
He had done that. With his own hands. With skills he had earned through hours of bloody, frustrating failure.
The engine started. Just like that. A pull-start appeared, and Ray pulled it. The engine caught on the second try.
BRAP-BRAP-BRAP-BRAP.
The sound echoed through the void. Two-stroke music. Simple and loud. Blue smoke poured from the exhaust.
Ray stared at it, and for a moment, he forgot about the pain and how tired he was.
He had built this.
[MISSION COMPLETE]
[SKILL ACQUIRED: BASIC MECHANICAL KNOWLEDGE, 2-STROKE ENGINE MAINTENANCE]
[GHOST GARAGE SESSION ENDING...]
[REAL-WORLD TIME ELAPSED: 1 HOUR, 23 MINUTES]
[VIRTUAL TIME SPENT: 13 HOURS, 47 MINUTES]
[MUSCLE MEMORY TRANSFER: SUCCESSFUL]
The void collapsed. The workshop folded like paper. The engine disappeared mid-rev, its sound cutting off abruptly.
Ray was back in his bed.
Sunlight came through his window. It was morning already. His body felt fine.
But his mind was tired.
Ray sat up slowly. He looked at his hands. No blood. No scraped knuckles. Just clean skin.
But when he closed his eyes, he could feel the weight of the wrench. He remembered how much pressure the cylinder head bolt needed.
The knowledge was there.
Ray stood up, but his legs were trembling. He walked to his window. Scooters were already driving through the streets.
He moved his fingers. Opened and closed his fists. They knew things now. Things they hadn't known yesterday.
The system icon pulsed once.
[GHOST GARAGE: AVAILABLE NIGHTLY]
[CURRENT LEVEL: 2-STROKE BASICS]
[NEXT AVAILABLE LESSON: 4-STROKE FUNDAMENTALS]
[REMEMBER: KNOWLEDGE WITHOUT PRACTICE IS USELESS]
[GET YOUR HANDS DIRTY]
Ray smiled. It felt strange on his face. When was the last time he had smiled about work? About learning something hard?
Never, probably. Jackie Chin had given up on hard things a long time ago. But Ray Cruz was just getting started.
He got dressed and went downstairs. His body felt fine, but his mind needed coffee. Or whatever seven-year-olds drank. Probably milk.
Diego was already in the workshop. Ray could hear him cursing at something. Normal morning sounds.
But now, standing in the kitchen, Ray looked toward the workshop with different eyes. That wasn't just a room full of failing projects anymore.
That was a classroom.
And he had a lot to learn.
The Ghost Garage had given him knowledge. Now he needed to turn that knowledge into skill.
Ray took a piece of bread from the fridge and chewed it slowly. His mind was already planning and figuring out his next move.
He needed a bike. Diego would never buy him one. Which meant he had to build one himself.
And thanks to last night, he finally knew where to start.
The Graveyard was calling. All those dead machines just waiting for someone who could understand them. Someone who could see past the rust to what they used to be.
Ray finished his bread and went for the back door.
Time to get his hands dirty.