Incorporated with DeepSeek
The Film
## Week 23.5: Salt, Solitude, & Skater Footage (A Captain's Log - Fragment)
**Log Entry: Red Sea - Day 3, 02:17 Local.** Wind’s a fickle bitch tonight. Sahara Gap yawns ahead like a parched throat. *The Frame* skims the obsidian water, twin hulls whispering on ground effect, a ghost on liquid mercury. Above, the parafoil kite strains against its tether, a hungry phantom against the star-smeared void. It’s not just pulling us; the tiny turbines whine, bleeding amps into the compressed air tanks. Feels like cheating gravity, physics stretched thin. Below deck, the Beowulf cluster hums, a low, insistent thrum felt in the bones – rendering *‘Smoke & Mirrors in Kowloon’*. It eats power like a dragon eats virgins. Out here, solitude isn't peaceful; it's a pressurized vessel. Salt crusts the solar cells, the autopilot whimpers corrections, and the only company is the paranoid scan of radar for corporate patrol cutters or Somali ghost ships. Thoughts echo too loud. The stories I carry… the kid in Jakarta who bled out after extracting data from a Wuxing server… her eyes haunt the darkness beyond the nav lights. Why do I do this? The crypto donations ping occasionally, a digital heartbeat in the void. Reminder: someone out there *needs* the raw truth.
**Log Entry: Mediterranean - Day 5, 18:43 Local.** Made it. Frag me sideways, we made it. The Gap spat us out into the Med like a bad taste. Used the kite along the Libyan coast, skimming low, solar cells drinking the brutal sun, air tanks groaning at 300 bar. Coast Guard drones buzzed like annoyed hornets near Sicily, but *The Frame’s* signature is minimal when she’s not kicking up spray. Just another rich idiot’s toy on their screens. Dived twice – once for real, hugging the bottom silt off Malta when an Ares frigate decided to play games, once just to test the seals. Sweet silence, that crushing blue. Now, Marseille. Not the chrome-and-neon tourist trap, but the *Vieux Port’s* rotten teeth – the Docks Entiers. Crumbling concrete monoliths, graffiti like arterial spray, the stink of salt, fish, ozone, and despair. Found my slot: a collapsed warehouse slip hidden behind a rusted gantry crane, accessible only at high tide through a skeleton of rebar. *The Frame* slides in, a knife into a sheath. Solar arrays retract flat against the hull; she looks like derelict flotsam. Perfect. Time to swap the roar of the sea for the roar of humanity.
**Log Entry: Marseille - Day 6, 21:15 Local.** Warmth. Not temperature – though the night air is thick and warm – but *human* warmth. Found the Skaters of the Shattered Skyline in their concrete nest – Level 3 of the ‘Bassin de Radoub’, an old dry dock turned vertical slum park. Kids, mostly. Orphans of corp layoffs, runaway wageslaves, technomancers hiding from GOD. Bones McCoy, their de facto leader, met me with a cracked grin and a suspiciously modified cyber-eye scanning my thermal signature. Recognition dawned. "Le Film! You made it through the Corpse Gap!" The name hangs here too.
They swarm like excited rats. Not for me, for the *stories*. They know what I do. They’ve seen my work pirated on burner chips in the squats. They have footage. Oh, frag, do they have footage. Not just jumps over acid-pitted concrete or grinds down decaying crane arms. They showed me the underbelly. A smuggler’s drop gone wrong in the sub-levels, recorded from a pigeon-drone. Corpsec beating a squatter collective, filmed through a cracked window three blocks away. The raw, shaky, terrifying poetry of survival in the cracks. They tell me their stories too, huddled around a jury-rigged holo-emitter casting weak light: Lola’s brother disappeared after tagging a Shiawase substation; Rico’s cyber-leg was repo’d by Evo when his mom lost her job; the whispered rumors of insect spirits nesting in the abandoned desalination plant.
Their energy is electric, desperate, hopeful. They shove datachips into my hands like sacred offerings. They feed me questionable synth-stew and cheaper synth-beer. The laughter is loud, edged with hysteria, but *real*. It’s a shock to the system after weeks of my own company and the Beowulf's cold logic. This… this is why. This raw, pulsing nerve of the world the corps try to sanitize, to bury. I record audio snippets, scan faces with subtle lenses, absorb the atmosphere – the smell of sweat, synth-weave, and spray paint; the echoing shouts bouncing off concrete; the thumping bass bleeding from somewhere above. Bones claps me on the shoulder. "Make them *see*, Film. Make them see us down here in the ruins." The donation counter on my secured node ticks upward steadily. Not just crypto – respect. Fuel of a different kind.
**Log Entry: Marseille - Day 7, 04:38 Local.** The meeting bled into the early hours. Too much footage. Too many stories. The compressed air tanks are full, the solar cells greedily sucking the pre-dawn light. Time to go. Always time to go. The warmth lingers, a tangible thing in the small cabin, battling the pervasive salt-damp and the metallic hum of the Beowulf cluster already chewing on the new data – tagging, analyzing, cross-referencing for the render. I can almost see the outline of the movie: *‘Concrete Angels: Grinding on the Edge of Nowhere’*. It’ll be brutal. Beautiful. Illegal in twelve corporate states before it’s even finished.
A proximity alert pings – soft, insistent. Not Skaters. Thermal bloom, two sources, moving with tactical precision along the gantry above the slip. Corpsec? Local muscle? Doesn’t matter. *The Frame* groans as I disengage the mag-clamps holding her to the crumbling dock. The hybrid engine whirs to life, silent but for the vibration in the deck plates. I flick the switch for the air-gun ports – hatches slide open with a faint hiss of equalizing pressure. Not for fighting. For *discouragement*.
As *The Frame* slides backwards into the greasy water of the slip, silent as a shark, I see two figures freeze at the gantry’s edge, silhouetted against the bruised Marseille dawn. One raises a commlink. I don’t wait. A burst of high-pressure air screams from the port-side gun, not aimed to hit, but to *deafen*, to disorient. The concussive *THUMP* echoes off the concrete canyons. By the time their ears stop ringing, *The Frame* is submerged, gliding silently out into the deeper channel, kite unfurling like a grey wing to catch the morning breeze.
**Log Entry: Mediterranean - Day 7, 12:05 Local.** Back in the embrace of the open sea. Solitude returns, but it feels different. Less empty. The salt spray stings, the autopilot whines, the Beowulf thunders below – chewing Lola’s brother’s story, Rico’s defiant leap over a chasm of pipes, the shaky drone footage of corpsec brutality. The raw data is chaos. The render will forge it into a weapon. A truth bomb.
The isolation offshore is harsh, a crucible that forges focus but threatens sanity. The warmth of the ports, of *their* stories, is the oxygen. It burns bright, fast, and leaves you craving more. But it’s the only thing that makes the solitude bearable. The only thing that makes the risk worth it. I check the encrypted upload queue. *‘Smoke & Mirrors in Kowloon’* is ready. I hit send. Let the corps tremble. Let the shadows see themselves reflected. Let the donations ping.
Le Film sails on. The story never ends.
