“Howdy, kid,” says a firm voice.

“Jim?” I ask.

There’s a long pause. If this doesn’t work and Jim turns me away, well, I saw an overpass on my walk over here. I guess that’s where I’ll be living.

“Owen,” says the old man. “Your pop told me you might be coming.”

“Is he …” I trail off, voice breaking.

Jim shakes his head, mouth in a line.

“How did you know him?” I ask.

“We worked together, a long time ago. Good man.”

“Oh,” is all I can say.

“I’m headed out to work about now. You can come along, I guess. Long as you ain’t scared of getting yelled at a little bit.”

“Pure trash,” snaps the old man. “That’s what I call ’em. Not Pure Pride. Joe Vaughn can kiss my wrinkled old ass.”

White hair sticking out from under a ball cap, Jim hooks a thumb at a group of young men standing across the street. The demonstrators watch us silently, heads cocked, squinted eyes swimming in shadows. One of them spits on the ground. Standing with crossed arms or perched on pickup truck tailgates, none of them reveals the slightest expression.

The old man takes off his cap, tosses it to me. “Put this on and don’t talk to anybody. Nobody should be out here looking for you, but better to play it safe.”

I shuffle ahead to keep up with Jim as the bent old man humps it across the street. With only a piece of toast in my belly and virtually no sleep, it’s a struggle to keep my footsteps in his shadow. He’s got a heavy-looking duffel bag over one shoulder, but he hobbles quick and steady in the dry morning heat, like an old camel.

Jim has a strong chin and high, weathered cheekbones. On the drive over, he told me he’s a full-blood Cherokee but his hair went pale after his life hit a rough spot. I don’t have the gall to ask what that was. I imagine it involved a war.

“Fuckin’ gray hair,” calls one of the men from across the street as we reach the orange-ribbed fence of the construction zone. “Go home, ya scab amp!”

Jim doesn’t even look up, just leads me into the job site.

“Who are they?” I ask.

“Workers we replaced. They’re pure human. And young. But I tell you what, every man’s got a right to earn a living. Being young don’t earn you a damn thing in my book.”

A five-story, half-framed building crowds the work site. The rising sun flings skewers of light through its half-renovated steel skeleton. The frame straddles a deep, unfinished subbasement that makes a nauseating drop into crisp shadow. Jim tells me that, in a few months, this steep pit will be a claustrophobic parking garage for auto-driven cars. He says we don’t even have to run lighting down there—the cars won’t need it.

It’s still early. A crusty cement mixer filled with toolboxes swings overhead, lifted out of thieves’ reach by the site crane. A few elderly men mill around, drinking coffee. There’s hardly a worker here under sixty-five. Each has a maintenance nub, including Jim. Amps. When the old guys pass each other, they nod. Sometimes they give each other halfhearted little salutes. No smiles.

“Not a big talker, are you?” I ask Jim.

He shakes his head.

“My dad said I needed to find you. He said that you could explain why I’m here.”

Jim glances at me, eyes sharp and calculating. Chews on the inside of his cheek, considering. Finally, he shrugs. “Maybe,” he says. “Probably not. Anyway, there’s work to do.”

The old man drops to one knee and fiddles the drawstring open on his canvas duffel bag. In a well-practiced motion, he rolls down the sides of the faded bag to reveal tangled columns of dust-coated metal. Under a frenzied pattern of scratches and dings, I see the thin tubes are light-gold colored. Titanium alloy.

An ID code, like a VIN, is stamped onto one tube.

“My ride,” says Jim. “Beats a wheelchair and it beats the living crap out of the goddamn scooters that civilians get. Semper fi, kid. Semper friggin’ fidelis.”

Jim grabs the lightweight frame, lifts it out of the bag, and shakes it like a dirty T-shirt. The tubes flop out onto the ground, connected like a skeleton, with legs and arms attached to a backpack-like trunk. Without a pause, Jim plants one boot onto a foot-shaped piece of plastic at the end of one tube. He steps in with the other foot and then shrugs on the backpack part. The skeletal arms hang loose, their unfastened straps lolling like tongues.

“You’re a vet?” I ask, reaching out and touching the loose metal wrist of the thing. Jim nods. A pair of dull pincers hang from just above the wrist joint, scarred with shining gashes. I lift the dead metal, and the arm bends, limp. An array of compact tools is folded underneath, ready to be deployed: screwdrivers, files, even a power saw.

The pincer clamps onto my wrist and I jump back. I reflexively wrench my arm away from the cold metal, shake it off like a spider. Jim lets out a hoarse giggle. As both robotic arms settle down to his sides, the old man taps the maintenance nub on his temple.

“Settle down, kid. The exoskeleton is linked to my amp. Works even for a guy with no arms and legs. Mind control. All a vet has to do is claim arthritis and the VA coughs these things up like nickels.”

He casually lowers his arms into the arm bars of the device, straps them in one at a time. “Makes us more employable,” he says.

Jim is in his late seventies. He says he retired from the military forty years ago and he retired from the workforce a decade ago. Now he’s standing in front of me wearing a government-issued medical exoskeleton and about to start another day of hard labor, and this is the reason that those young men across the street are huddled together giving us the evil eye.

The old folks have stolen all the jobs.

Jim speaks to the foreman on my behalf. The Pure Priders outside won’t work alongside the old men, so the work site has to bring in extra amps. They could always use one more, according to Jim.

Around the site, a dozen other elderly workers shrug themselves into glinting metallic devices—drinking in the pure, sweet strength of youth. Others sway on prosthetic legs or flex sinuous carbon fiber forearms. All the old men set to their jobs with the grim robotic work ethic that always belongs to the previous generation. And across the street from the construction site, a dark pool of anger deepens.

For the next few hours, I’m setting up scaffolding and breaking it down so these vintage spider monkeys can place chattering rods of rebar. The sun has come up for real now, dull and pounding. Jim tells me I’m making less than minimum wage in cash for this. I’m thankful for the money but mostly for the mindless routine of work.

“Things are changing faster and faster,” calls Jim over his shoulder as he lays out rebar for cementing. He talks between the sporadic catcalls that still ring out from beyond the fence. “Change scares people. Makes them dangerous.”

“Then why are you here?” I ask. “You’ve got a pension, right?”

Jim chuckles drily. “You’re just a kid. You don’t know about getting old. But you’re right—it ain’t about money.”

“Then maybe you should think about getting a hobby.”

In a sudden mechanical jerk, Jim hops off the scaffolding and lands hard enough to make me flinch. He holds out his calloused hands, palms up. The exoskeleton motors grind quietly, like a cat purring, as the pincers retract.

“I’m a builder right now. What am I without a job? Without a tool in my hand?” asks Jim.

I picture Jim sitting inside his trailer, alone with a bottle of booze, finishing the umpteenth pointless game of solitaire. Stale, heavy air and the mindless whisper of a television. To him, the exoskeleton must seem like a second chance. Like youth bottled and sold.

“And what if the tool is inside you? What are you then?” I ask.