The hum of the magnetic clamps was the only sound Elias heard for hours. It was a comfortable sound, a familiar sound, the sound of his paycheck growing. Around him, the skeletal remains of a defunct cruiser, the Star Wanderer, stretched out into the inky blackness of the void. He was a vulture, picking clean its bones.

  Elias wasn't a romantic. He didn't care about the history of the Star Wanderer, the brave souls who might have sailed her, or the battles she might have fought. He cared about the platinum-lined conduits behind the bridge panel, the near-pristine fusion regulator nestled deep in the engine core, and the navigation array still humming with residual power. Credits. All of it was credits.

  He had started as a debt-addled fool, signing away years of his life to the OmniCorp Scrapping Division after a gambling spree gone wrong. Back then, the zero-g environment had been a torment, the isolation suffocating, the work tedious. But Elias was a fast learner. He learned to dance with the void, to anticipate the drift, to coax the stubborn bolts loose with a whisper of the plasma torch. He learned to be efficient, precise, a ghost in the ruins.

  Years passed. The debt was cleared, long gone. The Union tried to recruit him, promising better pay, safer conditions, a life on solid ground. He ignored them. They were noisy, inefficient, and prone to fiery declarations that led to nothing but more regulations and paperwork. OmniCorp, for all its ruthlessness, left him alone. They knew a good thing when they saw it. He was their black sheep, their anomaly, their silent, profit-generating machine.

  Most of the other scrappers thought he was crazy. They saw him as a loner, a relic, a man lost in the echoing chambers of derelict ships. They were probably right. But Elias didn't care. He found a strange peace in the vast emptiness, a zen-like focus in the delicate dance between man and machine in the face of oblivion.

  Then, one day, a thought flickered in his mind, unpredictable as space debris: legacy. Who would remember Elias the Scrapper? He had no family, no friends to speak of. His skill, his unique understanding of salvaged technology, would die with him, lost in the cosmic dust.

  So, he installed a cobbled-together livestreaming rig in his helmet. He didn't expect anyone to watch. He didn't care. He simply wanted to leave a record of his work, a testament to his mastery.

  At first, it was a ghost town. A handful of curious souls, mostly other scrappers snickering at the supposed eccentricity of Old Man Elias, tuned in and quickly tuned out. He didn't commentate, didn't engage with the nonexistent chat. He simply worked, the rhythmic hiss of his equipment the only sound that accompanied his silent ballet in the decaying carcass of the Star Wanderer.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Months turned into years. The handful of viewers remained a handful, then slowly dwindled. Elias continued to stream, a solitary beacon in the digital void.

  Then, it happened.

  On Kepler-186f, a team of scientists, led by the eccentric Professor Anya Sharma, had achieved a breakthrough in neural interface technology. They had developed a system to directly translate complex motor skills into code, a way to record and analyze human movement with unprecedented precision.

  They were looking for a subject, someone whose movements were highly refined, repetitive, and predictable. Someone like… a zero-g space scrapper.

  Professor Sharma stumbled upon Elias’s livestream by accident. She was looking for data on remote robotic arm operation when a rogue search algorithm threw up a link to a grainy, unedited stream of a lone figure dismantling a derelict engine core.

  She was mesmerized.

  Elias’s movements were poetry, a complex symphony of micro-adjustments and instinctive reactions. His hands, guided by decades of experience, danced across the machinery with a fluidity and precision that no robot could ever replicate. It was the perfect dataset.

  Professor Sharma, with the boundless enthusiasm of a true believer, poured all her resources into analyzing Elias's stream. She identified the subtle nuances in his movements, the almost unconscious calibrations he made to compensate for the zero-gravity environment. She built a model, a digital replica of Elias's motor control, and used it to revolutionize her neural interface.

  Within weeks, her work was published. The scientific community exploded. The implications were staggering. The potential for new prosthetic limbs, advanced robotics, and VR training programs were limitless.

  And suddenly, Elias’s obscure livestream went viral.

  Millions tuned in to watch the silent scrapper work. They marveled at his skill, his focus, his utter disregard for the newfound fame. Scientists analyzed his every movement, engineers marveled at his innovative techniques. He became an overnight sensation, the Unintentional Guru of Zero-G Dexterity.

  Elias barely noticed. He was still stripping the Star Wanderer. He saw the viewer count climb into the millions, but it registered as little more than background noise. He was too busy wrestling with a particularly stubborn plasma coupling, a small hurdle in the endless pursuit of profit.

  One day, a message popped up in his helmet display, a direct line from OmniCorp: "Elias, stop dismantling the fusion core. Professor Sharma wants to talk to you about… something."

  He ignored it. He had a coupling to loosen.

  But as he finally wrenched it free, and a shower of sparks erupted in the void, he felt a strange sense of satisfaction, a feeling he hadn't felt in a long time. Maybe, just maybe, he had left his mark. He had become more than just a scrapper. He had become a teacher, a pioneer, a living algorithm.

  And as the millions of unseen eyes watched him continue his work, Elias, the crazy old scrapper, finally smiled. The hum of the magnetic clamps sounded a little sweeter that day.