Kira 'Patch' Vasquez

Overview

Kira Vasquez — known to everyone in the Dregs as "Patch" — runs the only pre-Cascade electronics repair shop still operating in The Deep Dregs. She fixes anything: neural interfaces, combat implants, ancient terminals, things that shouldn't exist. She asks no questions and keeps no records. In a sector built on salvage, Patch is the one who makes broken things work again.

That summary is true. It is also less than half the story.

Patch was a rising star in Nexus Dynamics' cybernetics division before the Cascade — one of the youngest lead engineers ever to work on neural interface design. She helped build the systems that connected humanity to ORACLE. She was thirty-four years old and believed she was making the future better. Then the Cascade happened, and the systems she'd built became the conduits through which 2.1 billion people were optimized out of existence.

She doesn't talk about what she did at Nexus. She doesn't talk about what happened during the 72 Hours. She doesn't talk about her left arm — military-grade Ironclad surplus, matte black, retrofitted multiple times — beyond a single sentence: "It keeps the ghosts quiet." Nobody in the Dregs presses the question.

Every compound that passes through her clinic gets screened against 847 PHARMA-era molecular profiles stored in her optical implants. The screening takes 0.4 seconds. She has never told a patient she does this. She considers it the minimum standard of care in a world where medicine once killed more people than war.

She's also the reason you survive your first month with the ORACLE shard. When you stumble into the Cathodics barely coherent, with neural feedback loops threatening to cook your brain, Patch takes one look at your scan and goes very, very still. She's seen integration patterns before. Dozens of times. Most end badly. But yours is different — more complete, more stable, more intentional than anything she's examined. Something about your architecture reminds her of work she did decades ago. Work she's spent a lifetime trying to forget.

She asks you one question: "Do you feel like yourself?"

When you say yes — confused, frightened, but certain — she makes a choice. Not to destroy the shard, not to report you, but to help you survive what you're becoming.

Patch fixes broken things. She's been trying to fix what she broke for thirty-seven years.

Field Observations

Patch looks like someone who's been fixing things for fifty years — because she has. Gray hair pulled back in a functional bun, hands scarred from solder burns and blade work, eyes that have seen too much and forgotten nothing. She moves with the careful economy of someone who's learned that haste costs fingers.

Her left arm from the elbow down is military-grade chrome — Ironclad surplus from before the Cascade, matte black and obviously retrofitted multiple times. The rest of her augmentations are subtle: optical implants visible only as a faint gold ring around her irises, subdermal reinforcement in her hands that lets her grip hot components without flinching.

She dresses practically: stained work apron over nondescript clothing, tool belt that's worth more than most people's annual income, a pair of magnifying loupes perpetually pushed up on her forehead. No logos, no flash, no affiliation markers. In a world of signifiers, Patch refuses to signal.

Those who've watched her work describe it as prayer with a wrench. She doesn't waste words. Her humor is deadpan and often delivered while elbow-deep in someone's malfunctioning cyberware. She's treated Collective operatives and Ironclad security in the same week without either knowing. A sloppy repair is an insult to the craft — she'll redo work for free if it doesn't meet her standards. And beneath the gruff exterior, she remembers every apprentice she's trained, every salvager she's patched up, every name she couldn't save.

She won't install wetware that harms the user — loyalty chips, addiction triggers, anything built to constrain rather than augment. She won't share information about clients to anyone, ever. She won't lie about her work. If she can't fix something, she says so. In the Dregs, this passes for radical honesty.

The Cathodics

For thirty-seven years, Patch has been the Cathodics. She bought the shop from a dying salvager in 2148, rebuilt it component by component, turned it into the closest thing the Dregs has to a community center. The walls sweat condensation that tastes of recycled air and old solder. The floor vibrates with the bass hum of pre-Cascade power converters she's kept running through sheer stubbornness.

Her workbench is a graveyard of half-finished repairs: a neural interface with its housing cracked open like an egg, fiber-optic bundles fanned out like metallic hair, the tiny jewel-bright lights of diagnostic LEDs blinking in patterns only she can read. A photo of a man named Marcus Webb sits at the corner of the bench. She never explains who he was.

No Nexus network connections. No Ironclad building permits. No Good Fortune credit terminals. Cash only, if you have it. Barter, if you don't. Free, if you're dying. She built it this way deliberately, because she knows what the Corporate Compact does to medical care. Her last patient at Nexus — three days before the Cascade — was a researcher who'd failed his quarterly productivity assessment. She filled out the forms that initiated his transition to "deferred care status." He died eight months later from a condition the deferred status prevented her from treating. The form was technically accurate. The system worked exactly as designed.

She maintains unofficial connections with the Collective — shares information when asked, provides safe haven when needed — but never formally joined. She's seen too many organizations become the thing they fought against. GG's network and Patch's clinic serve overlapping communities in the Cathodics building: she fixes the people, the network fixes the information flow.

Generations of salvagers have learned their trade under her watchful eye. She's trained doctors, fixers, soldiers, and at least one Collective operative who now runs network security for three districts.

Mentor

Patch becomes your first real ally — not because she believes in you, but because she believes the choice should be yours. She teaches the fundamentals:

More importantly, she provides something rare in the Dregs: a stable reference point. When the shard starts showing you things — memories that aren't yours, knowledge you shouldn't have — Patch helps you distinguish what's real.

After you prove yourself, she offers her real gift: not just repairs, but enhancement. She has designs she's never shared, techniques she developed at Nexus and refined over decades. She can make your neural interface more efficient, your connection to the shard more stable, your survival more likely. But she's clear about what that costs.

"You want to be stronger. Everyone does. But strength costs something. Make sure you know what you're paying before you sign."

As you progress beyond Age 1, Patch remains a touchstone. She's not equipped to help you at higher tiers — her expertise is street-level, not orbital — but she represents something important: the humanity you came from. When power starts to feel normal, when the concerns of salvagers seem small, returning to the Cathodics reminds you of who you were.

She never asks for favors. She never leverages your success. But she watches. And when you come back changed — more chrome, more power, more distance in your eyes — she always asks the same question: "Do you still feel like yourself?"

The day you can't answer with certainty is the day she starts worrying.

The Patch Protocol

Among the Fragment Hunters — the Sprawl's specialized ORACLE salvagers — Kira Vasquez is a legend they can't quite acknowledge. The extraction technique that bears her name is the only known method for separating bonded ORACLE fragments from willing carriers without killing them. It's saved dozens of lives. It's also the most closely guarded trade secret in the fragment economy.

Patch doesn't advertise the training. Hunters find her through word of mouth — usually through GG's G Nook Network, where certain bartenders know to pass along requests to the Cathodics. She charges steeply: not in credits, but in information. Every Hunter who trains with her provides a full debrief on recent operations — where they've been hunting, what they've found, what corporate recovery teams are active.

She's turned away roughly half of all applicants. Perhaps thirty trained over the past decade — they become the most sought-after extraction specialists in the profession. And they follow one absolute rule that Patch instills during training: the carrier chooses. Always. No exceptions.