Conner Penske

Conner Penske is a veteran who returned to his rural community with extensive injuries and a difficult adjustment to civilian life. First seen by Flynne Fisher on his Tarantula, he is introduced through the contrast between his conspicuous independence and the help, equipment, and adaptations that make it possible. As the story develops, he becomes more than a person his friends worry about: he joins Lowbeer’s work as a practical operator and is trained to handle an unfamiliar machine that may be a weapon.

Identity and Background

Conner is a veteran of the same general military world as Burton Fisher, who sometimes helps him at home. Flynne remembers him as a sweet, handsome boy from high school; she also knows that he and Burton do not talk to others, as far as she is aware, about what happened to him. His return has left him missing a leg, the foot of the other leg, an arm, and several fingers on his remaining hand. His face is unscarred, a contrast that makes the extent of his disability less immediately legible to Flynne.

He lives on Gravely Road, beyond the more familiar parts of the county. The road had been a teenage make-out spot, but Flynne has little recollection of ever going as far out as his home. His house is a single-story building in poor repair, set among overgrown junk: a rusted tractor, a trailer resting on flat tires, old appliances, and a large Army quadcopter raised on concrete blocks. The setting establishes a life surrounded by salvaged or disused machinery, a detail echoed by the equipment Conner himself uses.

Mobility, Adaptation, and Daily Life

Conner’s most visible means of getting around is his Tarantula trike, which he steers with a servo rig funded by the VA. He rides mostly at night on county roads, sometimes crossing into neighboring counties, and tends to keep going until he needs fuel. Flynne understands this habit as a way for him to get loose; his riding is not merely transportation but a form of movement and independence shaped around what his body can manage.

His adaptations are practical and imperfect. Janet makes him fitted, multizippered black Polartec body socks. At home, he can use a VA-provided prosthetic, but Flynne sees why he dislikes wearing it: it looks dynamic while still, then changes character when he moves. He is Velcroed into it, and its proportions make him look like a figure from an old anime. The device offers one form of mobility, but it does not erase the difficulty of living with his injuries.

Flynne knows that some losses might be addressed through transplants: a donor toe could potentially serve as a thumb, and a right foot might also be available if Conner were willing to register and commit time to the process. Other limbs cannot be transplanted because his remaining nerve length is insufficient for the necessary connection. The possible procedures and their limits make clear that medical repair is neither simple nor complete. Flynne’s sharper realization, as she sees him seeming unusually composed, is that what happened to his mind may have been worse than the visible injuries.

Conflict and Relationships

At Jimmy’s, Conner’s presence unsettles a group of drunk football players. Janice warns Flynne that he is not doing well when he drinks, and recounts that he had been in the parking lot earlier before leaving. When Flynne goes outside, she finds his Tarantula under the lot lights and two of the young men confronting him. One throws a bottle at the trike. Conner smiles, and Flynne sees that he has a thin, spine-like mechanical appendage controlled through a monocle-like interface. She tells him he needs to go home, but he challenges her to get out of his way. The scene turns her concern into a direct encounter with the capacity he has brought into the situation.

The appendage is not a device made specifically for him. Macon explains that it was surplus purchased through eBay, obtained legally, and that he and the others supplied a servo interface and circuitry. They do not know what is attached at its working end. The improvised apparatus is significant because it is neither an ordinary prosthesis nor a fully understood weapon: Conner can control it, but its purpose and capabilities remain uncertain to the people around him.

Conner’s bond with Burton is conveyed less through explanation than through practical care. Burton sometimes helps him at home, and the two men keep the details of Conner’s experience private. When Flynne visits, she finds Burton with Conner in the living room. Conner is sitting upright in a chair, then stands, revealing that there had been no chair at all. The moment changes Flynne’s understanding of what she has been seeing: his posture and stillness had concealed how he was supported.

Flynne’s own relationship with him mixes familiarity, worry, and frankness. He calls her Burton’s little sister and later teases her as Burton’s cute sister; she does not let the banter displace her concern. After the encounter with the football players, she finds herself crying as she considers his possible medical options and recognizes how much his condition has changed him. Her response is not simply pity: it registers the gap between the boy she remembers, the man before her, and the parts of his experience he does not explain.

From Local Operator to Remote Participant

When Flynne enters the story’s remote-embodiment technology, Conner also becomes capable of acting through a peripheral. The device opens its eyes, examines its large hands, tests the fingers and thumbs in sequence, sits up, and rises to its feet. Flynne identifies herself, and Conner recognizes her, having seen a screen-grab Macon showed him. The scene gives him a new bodily experience: for a moment, he can explore a capable body through direct movement rather than relying on the prosthetic and mobility systems available to him at home.

Lowbeer asks Flynne to join a discussion and specifically includes Conner. He admits that he does not understand the larger situation, but Lowbeer emphasizes his value as someone on the ground. His role therefore grows from local ally to participant whose knowledge and practical presence matter to an operation extending beyond his town. Flynne’s recollection of seeing him run in the other peripheral also connects this remote embodiment to her memory of him, without suggesting that the new body resolves the circumstances of his ordinary life.

Later, Conner describes training with a large red cube, about three hundred pounds, powered by inertial propulsion and internal flywheels. He has learned to balance it on one corner and rotate it, but has been made to return before he can say what it is for. The object’s unfamiliarity is part of the point: Conner is being trained in a machine whose purpose is withheld even from him.

Ash reports that Lowbeer obtained plans and specifications from Vespasian, an early enthusiast in experimenting with alternate continua who was known for weapons and for setting populations against one another in prolonged combat. Conner is the person being trained to operate something based on those plans. Ash does not know precisely what the device is, but judges from Vespasian’s interests and Conner’s evident enthusiasm during his first lesson that it is probably a weapon. The account places Conner’s physical capability inside a much larger and morally troubling system of technological experimentation.

Change and Narrative Significance

Conner’s trajectory is not a simple story of disability being repaired. His VA prosthetic has limits; his Tarantula and improvised servo-controlled appendage offer other kinds of agency; and the peripheral gives him access to movement through a body distinct from his own. Each technology changes what he can do without making the costs or constraints of his daily life disappear. The narrative keeps practical adaptation, public vulnerability, and military consequence in view together.

His character also unsettles the boundary between care and danger. Flynne approaches him as someone who needs protection, but the confrontation at Jimmy’s shows that he is not merely a passive object of concern. The uncertain appendage, his composure after violence, and his later training with a device that may be a weapon make his capacity consequential and hard to categorize. Lowbeer’s description of him as boots on the ground recognizes that capability, while the origin of the machine’s plans ties it to experiments in which other populations have been treated as material for conflict.

The contrast between the neglected objects at Conner’s home and the technically enabled bodies and machines around him gives his scenes their particular texture. The old quadcopter on concrete blocks, the repaired Tarantula, the VA prosthetic, the bought-on-eBay appendage, the remote body, and the red flywheel cube belong to different scales of use and danger. Through Conner, technology is neither an abstract promise of recovery nor a neutral tool: it opens possibilities, exposes unknowns, and draws a local veteran into a future whose purposes he may not fully know.