Hector from Sector 12

Appearance

Stocky, strong from physical labor. Hands calloused from years of wire work. He moves with the confidence of someone who knows exactly how many volts it takes to kill a man and has decided not to.

He always wears a gray beanie that completely covers his hair — no one has seen what's underneath in years. Some theorize he's bald; others think he has terrible hat hair; Hector isn't telling. His shirt is collared, typically blue plaid, buttoned all the way to the top — professional, because he's a tradesman. High socks are visible above his work boots or slides; some say it's practical protection against fiber splinters, some say it's style.

Voice

Hector refers to himself in the third person. Always has. "Hector from Sector 12 don't wait around" is not a statement of ego — it's a brand, maintained with the same discipline he brings to splicing fiber. Trade jargon bleeds into everything he says: deals get "spliced together," problems get "terminated at the junction," people who annoy him have "bad impedance."

He mentions his 3.5 weeks of formal education constantly — not defensively, proudly. His abuela arranged that certification, and in Hector's world that makes it worth more than any corporate degree. Those who've watched him work describe it as prayer with a wire stripper: methodical, reverent, fast. He treats his crew like family and everyone else like a potential customer.

Sample Dialogue

"Hector from Sector 12! What's the job? Hector's crew don't wait around — time is money, money is fiber, fiber is life."

"The Caldwell? Four settings. I use four. Why carry a tool if you're not gonna use it right? These little guys — they got facial recognition. Mostly works. Good enough for government work, better than government work."

"Three and a half weeks, certified. Abuela set it up. You know how hard it is to get into a program like that? You don't. That's why you're not certified."

"It's a gang. We run fiber. You want in, you track your miles. How many miles you installed? That's your rank. That's your reputation. That's your resume. You want to be somebody in this crew? Run cable."

"You want Hector from Sector 12 to run fiber through the Wastes? Double rate. Non-negotiable. The Wastes don't negotiate and neither does Hector. You want somebody cheaper, you find somebody cheaper. Then you find their replacement when the Wastes eat them."

The Caldwell (C4)

Hector's signature weapon is the Caldwell — a custom drone launcher he calls "the C4." The four has nothing to do with explosives or model numbers; it refers to the weapon's four fire settings: Light (single drone, minimal payload, for warnings), Medium (single drone, standard payload), Heavy (dual drones, coordinated strike), and Extreme (dual drones, maximum payload, full auto-seek — the setting Hector claims is the only one he uses).

"Why would I carry something and not use it right?"

The C4 spins up with a distinctive three-second whirring noise as the helicopter blades activate. Two mini drones launch at roughly 50 mph, auto-seeking targets via facial recognition — which Hector admits is "notoriously inaccurate" and calls "enthusiasm." Effective range is about 100 feet; a direct hit can remove an arm or half a leg. The sound of the C4 spinning up has become legendary in The Deep Dregs. Most disputes end during those three seconds, before the drones ever launch. Hector prefers it this way — ammunition is expensive.

The Fiber Guild

What Hector calls his "gang" operates somewhere between organized crime, a trade union, and a construction company. Initiation is simple: track how many miles of fiber optic cable you've installed — more miles means higher rank. They don't control streets; they control job sites and supply runs. Revenue comes from gray-market installation contracts, salvage extraction, and "protection" for legitimate contractors who wander into the wrong part of the Dregs.

In The Deep Dregs, if you need fiber work done fast and don't want to pay corporate rates, you find Hector's crew. They're reliable, their work is good, and if someone tries to interfere with a job site, well — that's what the C4 is for. The guild provides something rare in the Dregs: steady work, fair pay, and a sense of belonging. For a lot of young people in The Deep Dregs, joining Hector's crew is the best opportunity they'll ever get.

There are rumors the Guild's cable runs overlap with parts of the CyberFiber Network — the Sprawl's deep-layer fiber backbone that most people don't even know exists. Hector's crew has stumbled onto junction nodes that aren't on any municipal survey. They splice around them. They don't touch them. Hector has a rule about this, and the rule is: "If the cable is that clean and nobody's claiming it, somebody very serious put it there. Leave it alone."

The Dig Jobs

The Fiber Guild's most lucrative — and most dangerous — contracts come from the Fragment Hunters. ORACLE's dead infrastructure doesn't connect to the Sprawl's current networks. To pull data from a Cascade-era node buried in the Wastes, you need someone to physically run cable from the nearest live junction to the site — through rubble, through radiation zones, through Waste Lord territory, through whatever else the Wastes decide to throw at you. The Fragment Hunters are good at finding data. They are not good at laying cable. Hector's crew is.

The arrangement started in 2179, when a Hunter cell led by Dema needed physical fiber access to a pre-Cascade server farm. A typical Dig Job works like this: the Fragment Hunters show up at Circuit Row with coordinates and a payment offer. Hector inspects the route on whatever maps exist — usually outdated engineering surveys cross-referenced with Waste Lord territory markers. He names a price. The Hunters negotiate. Hector does not negotiate. The price is the price.

The crew deploys with full kit: spools of armored fiber optic cable rated for radiation and chemical exposure, mag-lock junction boxes, portable signal boosters, and the C4. Hector insists on Level 4 security for every Wastes run. His crew has been ambushed by Waste scavengers twice; the second time, the scavengers found the first group's remains and turned around. The work itself is brutal — laying cable through collapsed tunnels and across irradiated open ground, splicing connections where gloves blister from surface contamination. A Dig Job covering two kilometers of Waste terrain takes three days, and the crew emerges looking like they fought a building and the building won.

A single Dig Job earns the Fiber Guild more than a month of standard Dregs contracts. The data the Hunters pull from those dead servers — consciousness archives, ORACLE processing logs, pre-Cascade network maps — sometimes leads to fragment recovery operations worth millions. Hector doesn't ask what the data contains. Fiber is fiber. Cable is cable. What flows through it is the customer's problem. A famed Fragment Hunter scanner once described the Fiber Guild as "the most important people in the fragment economy that nobody has ever heard of." Hector framed the quote and hung it in the Guild's workshop, next to his trade school certificate.

History

Hector's father was a corporate security contractor who died protecting an executive. Hector received nothing — no pension, no recognition, no explanation. That is why he only trusts the guild and never the corps, and why he refuses to work for corporations directly even as he'll take their subcontractors' money if the price is right. His abuela raised him, got him into trade school, and is the only person who can tell him to put the C4 down — the reason he channels his anger into building something rather than burning it down. The contradiction at his center is the whole man: he calls himself a gang leader but runs a trade guild, carries devastating firepower but mostly uses it to protect workers on job sites, and wants nothing more than to keep his crew employed, respected, and off the streets — proof that honest work, however gray, beats corporate servitude.

Open Questions

• [ ] The Abuela Question. She set up the trade school, she's the only person who can tell Hector to stand down, and she knows his last name — which means she knows his father's name. What else does she know about where that man really died, and for whom?
• [ ] What the Guild Has Seen. The Dig Jobs have taken Hector's crew deeper into pre-Cascade infrastructure than almost anyone in the Dregs. What has the Guild accidentally helped recover — and what did they see that they won't talk about? One Dig Job in late 2180 pulled data that made a Fragment Hunter cell go silent for two weeks; when they resurfaced, they doubled Hector's rate without being asked and never explained why.
• [ ] The CyberFiber Nodes. Clean, unmarked junction nodes keep appearing on Guild cable routes, on no survey at all. Hector's crew splices around them, but two of the nodes the Guild found were active — data flowing. Hector logged the locations and told no one outside the crew. He hasn't decided what to do with that information yet.
• [ ] The Beanie. It hasn't come off in public since an incident three years ago that no one will describe in detail. Most assume vanity. A few people who were there that night change the subject fast.
• [ ] The Fifth Setting. Hector claims he only ever uses Level 4 on the Caldwell. But there's a scorch pattern in Sector 12's lower maintenance tunnels that doesn't match any known C4 configuration — a burn radius suggesting a fifth setting, or a very bad malfunction.