Incorporated with DeepSeek
Une nuit en Paris - A Paris night
The rain on the tiny hexagonal windowpanes of the rooftop *chambre de bonne* wasn’t real rain. It was Paris condensation, a slick, greasy drizzle born from the clash of corporate climate arrays over the Premier Arrondissement and the stagnant, thermal exhaust of the sprawling, unregulated *banlieues* beyond the Périphérique. It blurred the neon glow of a Thai fast-food joint five stories below into a smear of electric pink on the wet asphalt.
Inside, the air was thick with the ghosts of Gauloises Blondes Mix Amnesia, expensive perfume, and sex.
Jérôme leaned against the makeshift kitchen counter, a salvaged slab of zinc bolted to the wall, and watched the scene on the round, wobbly brasserie table. His calloused fingers, usually dancing across neural rig interfaces or coaxing life from a nitro-burning diesel engine, cradled a chipped porcelain cup of black coffee. His other coffee, an espresso stained with a ghost of milk, sat cooling beside the tableau.
The tableau was a still life of incongruous luxury. Two fresh croissants, their layered cores breathing steam into the chill air. A small pot of strawberry marmalade, glass gleaming. A curl of butter on a saucer. Next to it, like a discarded serpent skin, lay a luxurious piece of female underwear, silk and lace the color of a bruise. It rested against a petite Louis Vuitton Vernis bag, its candy-red surface reflecting the single bare bulb overhead.
He looked from the underwear to the shower door, a warped piece of plastic in a corroded aluminum frame. The water had stopped. The world, for a moment, was reduced to this capsule: the tinny patter of false rain, the hum of the illegal grid-tap powering the immersion heater, the scent of her.
She emerged not with modesty, but with the unselfconscious arrogance of a cardinal leaving its bath. Naked, skin glowing from the scalding water, trailing tendrils of steam. Water droplets caught in the dark thatch of hair between her thighs, beaded on the small, perfect curves of her breasts. She was economy and excess in one form, all taut muscle and hungry eyes.
“*Alors*,” she said, her voice a husky contralto that held the ghost of an Oxford accent. “You are contemplating the aesthetics of my discarded smalls while your coffee grows cold.”
“I was contemplating the contrast,” Jérôme said, his French native, but textured with the guttural edges of the *banlieue* and the technical precision of an AI engineer. “The artisanal and the synthetic. The curated luxury and the… immediate necessity.”
She smiled, a predator’s smile. “The necessity is for you to stop contemplating and start participating. I require a few more. A final symphony before the dawn chorus of regret begins.”
She padded across the rough floorboards, leaving damp footprints. This was her adventure. Her escape. From the Hermès-designed, full-service hotel suite in the Premier, where the air was filtered and the threats were fiscal. To this tiny rooftop cell in the 19th, a forgotten access point to a Paris of tarpaper, satellite dishes, and interconnected rooftops that formed a shadow city above the streets. A Paris where last night, after her two equally moneyed, equally bored girlfriends had giggled and climbed out the window to navigate the roofscape back to their luxury, she had stayed. With him. The half-American, half-Irish, somehow-French guy she’d collected from the park by the Bibliothèque François Mitterrand.
The memory played in Jérôme’s mind like a corrupted datachip. He’d been parking a “ride”—not a bike, but a refurbished Renault-Giacometti FCV with a souped-up fuel cell and a smuggling compartment lined with thermal-dampening gel—next to the library’s monolithic bulk. Needing a smoke, he’d crossed into the Parc de Bercy. Their laughter had cut through the hum of the city, a sound as foreign to that park as birdsong. They were out of place, three peacocks in a field of crows. He’d spoken to them in French, then English, then the bastardized *franglais* of the streets. He’d seen the calculation in her eyes, the thrill of slumming it. He’d shown her the other France. Not the museum France, but the metro France, smelling of ozone and urine. The fast-food France of synthetic *steak-frites*. The France of refurbished Hi-Fi systems playing scratched vinyl of *Serge Gainsbourg* and *Édith Piaf*, of Spanish red wine drunk from plastic cups with stale baguette and *fromage rustique*. A France of survival, not curation.
She had stayed. Her intentions, a palpable force. Saying no was an option, technically. But Jérôme was a mechanic, an AI rigger, a channel-jumper. He lived in the spaces between yes and no, in the grey zones of legality and velocity. He rode the fastest bikes and cars, not for sport, but for transit. He did the jump—the sub-aqua tunnel sprint under the English Channel—to the crumbling docklands of London and the rust-belt sprawl of Manchester, all at night, all fast, his vehicles loaded with “goods.” Sometimes data-slaves, sometimes prototype chips, sometimes medical supplies. The line between legal and not-illegal was as thin as a monofilament wire, and in these times, no one kept the cops in check anymore. The *gendarmes* were private security for the corps. The real law was the law of the pack, and the packs—the street gangs, the drug-rockers, the neo-anarchist clusters—were turning feral, unpredictable beasts hopped on custom neuro-tox and desperation.
A tinny voice crackled from a vintage Grundig radio on a shelf, tuned to a pirate frequency. **“...*confirmation from Zurich-Orbital that the Mercurial climate-management array over Southern Europe will undergo another ‘stability test’ this week, promising further disruptions to agricultural sectors. The French Directorate has issued a statement urging calm and continued ration adherence. In local news, the *Quartier Chinois* in the 13th remains under lockdown following another outbreak of the ‘Wireless Flu.’ Authorities suspect data-hazard contamination. And a reminder from our sponsors at SpinRad: A clean signal is a clean mind. Trust the filter. Trust SpinRad…”**
The woman—he still didn’t know her last name, would never ask—ignored the radio. She was the embodiment of the world’s dark side, the id unleashed. In these times of economic failure, of climate catastrophe authored by boardrooms in the sky, of newsfeeds screaming murder and collapse, everyone had a shadow. She was letting hers out. The bitch in her, the hungry ghost, needed a full-glam, hardcore, intensive porn session with a stranger. A ritual to purge the ennui of her gilded cage.
And he? He was living his bright side. Or a facet of it. The gentleman. The provider. The one who took care of someone else’s needs. It was a cleaner transaction than most in the shadows. A simple exchange of sensation for sensation, a temporary mooring in the chaos.
“You are thinking too much,” she said, now standing before him, her scent—jasmine and sex and expensive shampoo—overwhelming the room. “The mechanic, the engineer. Always diagnosing. Never simply *experiencing*.”
“Kierkegaard said anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” Jérôme murmured, setting his cup down. His eyes fell on the LV bag. “Your freedom seems expensive.”
“It’s a cage with a better view. Last night, on the rooftops, with the city lights like a bed of cold jewels… that was freedom. You gave me that. The *other* France.” She traced a finger down the scar that cut through his stubble, a souvenir from a misunderstanding in Manchester. “Now give me the other *you*. The one that doesn’t think. The one that rides.”
He captured her wrist, his grip firm but not painful. A mechanic’s grip. “The one that rides knows that every journey has a cost. And an end.”
“Then let the end be spectacular.”
He pulled her to him. The conversation was over, replaced by the language of skin, breath, and pressure. As his mouth found hers, a different voice, this one recorded and slick with simulated concern, oozed from the radio. **“*Citoyens*, the Directorate, in partnership with Saeder-Krupp Heavy Industries, is pleased to announce the ‘Paris Renaissance’ initiative. Certain underperforming arrondissements will undergo… renewal. Your compliance is appreciated for a brighter, cleaner tomorrow.”**
*Renewal*. A corp word for demolition and dispossession. This rooftop, this entire crumbling block, was probably already tagged in some S-K database, slated for “renewal.”
The thought was a splinter of ice in the heat. As they moved from the counter to the narrow bed, a tangle of limbs and urgent silence, Jérôme’s mind, the part that never fully shut down, compartmentalized. He was a rigger. He lived in the matrix of things—the neural connection to his vehicles, the AI sprites he coded to bypass security, the intricate dance of smuggling routes. This woman was another kind of sprite, beautiful and temporary. A data-stream of sensation to be experienced, not stored.
Later, in a lull filled with the sound of their breathing and the eternal rain, she spoke into the darkness. “Last night… you spoke of the rooftops like D’Artagnan spoke of the road to Paris. All for one, one for all. But there is no ‘all’ here. There’s just you. And me. And this.”
“D’Artagnan was a romantic fool who served a corrupt king,” Jérôme said, staring at the water stains on the ceiling that looked like old maps. “The real musketeers were mercenaries. Glorified bodyguards. The romance is a lie we tell to make the servitude palatable.”
“You’re a cynic.”
“I’m a realist. Robespierre was a realist too. He believed in virtue. Look where it got him. The only true virtue in the shadows is competence. And silence.”
She propped herself up on an elbow. In the half-light, she looked like a marble statue of some vengeful nymph. “What are you transporting tonight?”
He turned his head to look at her. That was the shadow-talk. The recognition of the game. “Medicine. To a clinic in the Londres-East zone. Antibiotics that the corp-pharms are withholding to drive up prices.”
It was partly true. The antibiotics were in the hold. So were fifty kilos of military-grade neuro-spool, a weaponized data-feed that could send a unprotected brain into seizure. He was being paid separately for each. The gentleman and the smuggler. Two sides, one man.
“A noble cause,” she said, a faint, mocking smile on her lips. She didn’t believe him. She didn’t need to.
“A job,” he corrected.
She fell back onto the thin pillow. “I leave tomorrow. Back to the cage with the good view. I will think of this. Of the rain on the roof. Of the croissants. Of the brute with the philosopher’s tongue.”
He didn’t answer. The radio sputtered again with a burst of static, then a man’s voice, raw with panic and fury, shouted in *verlan* before being abruptly cut off. **“...*ils viennent pour les toits! Les enculés de S-K, ils amènent les ‘clairons’! Défendez vos—*”** *They’re coming for the roofs! The S-K bastards, they’re bringing the ‘cleaners’! Defend your—*
The signal died. The official SpinRad filter reasserted itself with a soft chime of elevator music.
The woman heard it. He saw the slight tightening around her eyes. Not fear, but a recognition of a world impinging. Her adventure had an expiration date, stamped not just by her return ticket, but by the grinding gears of corp “renewal.”
“You should go,” he said softly. “Before the dawn. The rooftops won’t be safe if S-K is sending in their demolition goons.”
“And you?”
“I have a channel to jump.” He sat up, the blankets falling away. The moment of intimacy was already receding, cooling like the espresso on the table. They were both returning to their roles: the escapist and the shadow-runner.
She dressed silently, with the same efficiency she had undressed. The luxurious underwear was reclaimed, the LV bag slung over a shoulder. She ate a croissant, standing, wiping the butter from her fingers with a napkin. A final, mundane act.
At the window, the one leading to the rooftop labyrinth, she paused. She looked back at him, now pulling on his worn synth-leather pants and checking the charge on his cyberlink interface.
“*Merci*, Jérôme,” she said. Not for the sex, but for the other France.
“*De rien*,” he replied. It was nothing.
And then she was gone, slipping out into the grey pre-dawn, a spectre returning to her world of filtered air and silent threats.
Jérôme finished dressing. He walked to the table. He picked up the other coffee, the one she had not touched, and drank it in one long, cold gulp. His eyes swept the room, erasing the memory of her from his operational mind. He pocketed his tools, his encrypted commlink, his neural jack filters.
The radio’s elevator music faded into a morning news aggregate. **“...*and in a heartwarming story, a joint initiative between the Directorate and Neo-Net has provided new educational sims for children in the 19th arrondissement, promoting civic unity and digital literacy. The future is bright, Paris. Embrace the signal.”**
He switched the radio off. The silence was absolute, broken only by the fake rain.
He took one last look at the small brasserie table. The empty plate, the crumbs, the pot of marmalade. A still life after the storm. A memory already being overwritten by the next job, the next run, the next jump.
He was a gentleman of the shadows. He took care of needs, including his own. And his need was to keep moving, faster than the collapse, faster than the “renewal,” faster than the memories. He shouldered his pack, a nondescript duffel containing his rigger’s command deck, and stepped out onto the rooftop, heading not for the romantic labyrinth, but for the hidden service ladder that led down to the alley where his Renault-Giacometti waited, humming with latent power.
Somewhere above, a corporate tilt-rotor droned, the sound of the coming “cleaners.” Somewhere far away, a woman in a Hermès hotel room would order a café au lait and try to hold onto the feeling of cold roof tiles under her bare feet.
Jérôme sparked a cheap cigarette mixed with the Dutch finest bio-grade THC, the flame a tiny, defiant point of light in the grey dawn. He had a channel to jump and sharpen his senses to feel those hunting him, the corporate customs patrols with their ever changing lists of prohibited goods no one ever may look at, too. The shadows were waiting, and in their embrace, there were no philosophers, only mechanics. And mechanics knew: everything, eventually, breaks down. The trick was to be somewhere else when it happens.
While he walked to his ride the first bursts of Guttling guns firing at corpo cleaners echoed through the quarter. They would fight them off. Once again. The Resistance was alive again, crying.
Un weekend dans la campagne. - A countryside trip
The month had bled away like oil from a cracked sump—thirty days of channel jumps, nitro burns, and the ever-present taste of corporate rain. Jérôme’s world was one of precise, humming tension: the thrum of an over-engineered engine, the silent scream of data through his neural jack, the weight of a payload in the dark.
He was just sealing the reinforced cargo door of the Mercedes. It wasn’t a car; it was a theorem in steel and anger. A converted S-Class 600 *Ute*, a monstrous pick-up with All-Wheel Drive, a 12-cylinder heart fed by nitro-glycerine injection, MAN dual-fuel turbos snarling under custom baffling. It was overkill incarnate, a land-based torpedo for shadows.
The load this time was 10 tonnes of compressed pollen, sealed in military-grade mylar. Not simple hashish. This was the product of a quiet war in the flooded polders of Noord-Holland. Underground growers, more biohackers than farmers, had years ago raided a Genom-Pharm genetic library. They’d copied the component AI, fed it generations of Sensi Seed Cup winner genetics, and asked it one question: optimize for transcendent psychoactive potential, zero toxicity.
The result wasn’t a drug. It was a key. ‘Galactical,’ the hackers called it. For most, it offered a calm so profound it was like neuronal reset, the ultimate, non-addictive antidepressant. For a tiny fraction—those with latent neural plasticity, the ‘Witchers’—it didn’t just alter perception, it *expanded* it. It let the nervous system grow, temporarily, into something else. A sensor net. A predictive engine. Stoned on this gear, Jérôme could feel the EM whisper of a surveillance drone three blocks away, could taste the intent of a corp cop in the twitch of a muscle under a uniform. It made him the best shadowrunner in the business, and the biggest target. The corps hated it. It created minds that refused their neatly ordered reality, that excelled at ‘useless’ beauty and unpredictable freedom. They called it psychosis-inducing. It was truth-inducing.
As the hydraulic locks hissed shut, his cracked commlink—a relic running a Frankenstein mix of open-source and pirated corporate OS—chimed with a sound he never heard. A soft, melodic ping from a pre-installed, never-used corporate messaging app called ‘SynapseSync’. He frowned, wiping grease on his trousers.
The message glowed in the twilight of the cargo bay:
*I hope you remember me. I was the red head and I am in town again. She gave me your number and said I should call you. There is more to see.*
A slow smile touched his lips, the kind that didn’t reach his eyes. The woman from the rooftop. The luxury ghost. *She* had given her friend his number. The ultimate act of casual, dangerous privilege.
He slid into the driver’s seat, the leather sighing. The dashboard was a spiderweb of old analog gauges and new holodisplays. He typed back, fingers blunt on the glowing keys.
*ETA?*
The reply was immediate. *I am landing next week at Charles de Gaulle. Could you pick me up.*
*No.* He sent it, factual. The CCTV web at CdG was a spider’s lair of facial recog and corp-security handshakes. Picking up a walking LV advertisement there was suicide. *We can meet in the evening. Same place?*
A pause. Then: *Looking forward.*
He threw the Mercedes into gear. The engine woke with a roar that shook the concrete of the abandoned warehouse. He drove not into the sunset, but into the perpetual electric twilight, the nitro-injection a sweet, deadly promise in the fuel lines.
***
A week later, he wasn’t in the Mercedes. He sat astride a 2025 Norton V4RR, a brushed aluminum and carbon-fiber beast, its turbine whine reduced to a murmur. It was fast, but discreet. The ‘cargo’ was different, too. Not pollen. In a custom-built, climate-controlled capsule where the pillion seat would be, sealed behind composite shielding, was a cabin. A single, beautiful, hand-carved wooden cabin from a 19th-century Breton fishing boat, no larger than a violin case. A client in Le Havre, a nostalgia-drunk corp exec, was paying a fortune for this fragment of ‘authentic maritime heritage.’ The irony of smuggling nostalgia through a hyper-tech noir landscape was not lost on Jérôme.
She was waiting by the park near the library, a different silhouette this time. Hair darker, cut sharply. A tailored nano-weave trench coat that probably cost more than his bike. A small suitcase of brushed aluminum sat at her feet.
“No red,” he said, killing the engine.
“A girl must change her plumage,” she replied, her eyes taking in the bike, the man, the lack of a car. “This is more… intimate.”
“The car was working. This is for the back roads. The *routes nationales* the satellites forget.”
She didn’t ask about the odd, sleek capsule behind him. She just slung her case into the provided netting and climbed on, her arms wrapping around his waist with a practiced ease. Her touch was a jolt of pure, undiluted present.
They left Paris not by tunnel or motorway, but by the veins of the old country. Past the zones of ‘renewal,’ where S-K bulldozers sat like sleeping dinosaurs, into the rain-slicked darkness of Normandy. The bike ate the kilometers, a silver needle stitching through the torn fabric of the night.
They stopped at dawn near Rouen, at a truck stop that served real coffee and synthetic eggs. The radio chattered: *“…Renewal protests in the 19th turn violent. S-K security cites ‘anti-corporate extremism.’ The Directorate reminds citizens that unsanctioned gatherings are a public health risk…”*
She stirred her coffee, looking out at the mist rising from the fields. “It’s uglier than I remember. The world.”
“It was always ugly,” Jérôme said. “You just had better filters.”
“Is that your philosophy? Cynicism as a survival trait?”
“It’s observation. Love, in your world… it’s a transaction. Curated. A matching of portfolios, social credits, aesthetic compatibility. It’s Baudrillard’s hyperreal love—a simulation more perfect than the real thing, and thus safer.” He took a swig of coffee. “You love things. Experiences. The *idea* of adventure. Of the brute. It’s materialism of the sensation.”
She arched a brow, challenged. “And in your world?”
“In my world,” he said, looking at his scarred hands, “love is a vulnerability that can get you killed. It’s a thermodynamic loss. A distraction from the run. And yet…” He paused, the words of the dead Danish philosopher surfacing like a message from a drowned frequency. “Kierkegaard wrote that to dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself. I believe it is better to be hurt by love, to have dared, than to never have loved again. To live in that safe, filtered void is to not live. It is to be a ghost in a Hermès shell.”
She was silent for a long time, the rumble of outdated freight trucks filling the space. “That’s terribly romantic. And terribly painful.”
“Pain is data. It tells you you’re alive. Your world seeks to anesthetize. Mine… mine amplifies.” He tapped his temple. “Literally.”
“So you seek love? In the shadows? Between the jumps?”
“I don’t seek it. But if it comes, as a storm or a stray bullet comes, I will not hide in a bunker. I will feel the rain. I will take the hit. And I will remember what it was to be *present* before the system tries to spin the memory into something safe and sellable.”
They rode on, the conversation humming between them like a live wire. As Le Havre’s industrial spires pierced the horizon, wreathed in factory smog and channel fog, she spoke again, her voice muffled by the helmet and the wind.
“I am here for another adventure, Jérôme. A sexual one. A sensory one. To feel amplified. Before I go back and marry the son of a German media magnate. It is… efficient.”
He felt the words like a slight drop in pressure. A confirmation. “Efficient. Robespierre would approve. Virtue through efficiency. But his efficiency led to the Terror. Where is the virtue in your efficiency?”
“The virtue is in survival. In maintaining a position from which one can… occasionally slip the leash.”
It was the most honest thing she’d said. They were both leash-slippers. His was permanent, a life in the wilds. Hers was temporary, a sanctioned furlough into the dark.
He delivered the cabin to a quayside warehouse in Le Havre, the exchange done with retinal scans and silent nods. The payment hit his account, a number that meant nothing to her, everything to him. Freedom for another few months.
He took her to a hotel, not the best, but one with old character, thick walls, and no questions. The sex was what she wanted: intense, gymnastic, a draining of glands and demons. It was philosophy made flesh, a debate where bodies shouted their contradicting truths. Her materialism of sensation met his romanticism of the wound. For a few hours, they were a perfect, closed circuit.
After, in the sweat-cooled dark, a local pirate news feed hissed from his commlink on the bedside table: *“…the Noord-Holland bio-hack collective has claimed responsibility for the disruption of Genom-Pharm’s latest antidepressant trial. Their statement, quoting the philosopher Byung-Chul Han, says ‘The Smooth Society seeks to eliminate all friction, all otherness. We provide the grit. We provide the real.’ Authorities are pursuing…”*
She heard it. “Your people?”
“In a way. Grit providers.”
She turned to him, a silhouette against the harbour lights. “This was perfect. The ride. The… grit. It was what I needed.”
“I know.”
“You won’t ask for my name. My real one.”
“No.”
“And you believe that this… this connection, however brief, is better than the safe, connected marriage I will have?”
He looked at her, and in that moment, he didn’t see the corp princess, the materialist. He saw another human, adrift in the same catastrophic century, choosing a different lifeboat. “I believe,” he said slowly, “that when you are old, and your safe world feels as thin as paper, you will remember the smell of the nitro on the Normandy air, the vibration of the bike through your bones, and the words of a dead Dane spoken by a smuggler in a truck stop. And you will know, for a second, that you were truly alive. That is the gift. The wound. The love. It’s all the same thing.”
She didn’t cry. She simply nodded, a capitalist acknowledging a superior transaction.
In the morning, she was gone. A note on the pillow, in elegant script: *For the grit.*
He stood at the window, watching the massive container ships slouch towards the sea. He felt the ache of her absence, a clean, sharp pain. Kierkegaard was right. To have dared was to have lived. The alternative was the living death of the Smooth Society, a world she was returning to, and which he fought against with every fibre and every stolen, beautiful, galactical breath.
He packed his few things. The bike waited downstairs. The channel was always there, waiting to be jumped. The shadows were deep, and in their embrace, a man could nurse his wounds—the proof he had loved, and lived, and dared—while riding faster than the void that sought to claim them all. He fired up the Norton, the turbine’s whine a promise of motion, of continued friction against a world hell-bent on becoming seamless, painless, and utterly, terminally bland.
 |
| HI made - J4v |
The wiser you get the more crazy you will appear. Dream, Freak, but live.
The Irish sails
The North Atlantic in winter was not an ocean; it was a clinical manifestation of a failing climate, a furious, churning entity that had shrugged off all attempts at corp geo-regulation. Jerome was a storm sailor. This was his liturgy, his penance, and his profit.
Covering the route from the continent to Ireland required a specific, mad ballet. Corporate coastguard cutters, with their stabilizers and weather-prediction AIs, stayed in port when the barometer plummeted. Jerome’s vessel, the *Fool’s Gambit*, a forty-foot, carbon-composite-hulled sloop retrofitted with a silent hydrogen fuel cell and hydrofoils, came alive in such chaos.
The operation was two-part. First, the rigger. From a cliff outside Brest, a nameless associate in a radiation suit would launch a torpedo-shaped transport drone, submersible and surface-skimming. It carried fifty kilos of the ‘Galactical’ pollen, sealed in neutrally-buoyant pods. Its AI was programmed for a single, storm-exploiting vector into the Celtic Sea.
Jerome’s role was the second part: the crazy sailor. He’d sail the *Gambit* into the heart of the depression, meeting the drone’s ping in a world of vertical water and horizontal rain. Using a magnetic winch he’d built himself, he’d haul the shuddering ‘torpedo’ aboard, lash it down, and then turn and run before the wind, not for port, but back out to sea. He’d ride the storm’s outer edge, staying offshore, a ghost in the grey fury, until the system exhausted itself or blew towards Norway. With climate change, that could be two days, or five. Time measured in buckets bailed, in protein bars choked down, in the profound, vibrating solitude of being the only human for fifty miles in any direction.
It was after one such run, his body still humming with the phantom pitch and yaw of the waves, that he sat in *The Salty Algernon*, a pub in Dingle that smelled of peat smoke, wet wool, and defiance. He was nursing a cup of strong tea, letting the land-sickness settle, when his cracked commlink buzzed. The SynapseSync app. A different name, but the same syntax.
*More friends of them. We heard the coastline is beautiful this time of year. Are you touring?*
He stared at the message, then out at the harbour where the *Gambit* bobbed, looking innocuous and battered. A smile touched his salt-cracked lips. The ‘red head’ had evidently started a whisper network. He typed back, the philosophical rigger in him making a choice to dare.
*Do you like Dublin? I can pick you up at the airport.*
A pause longer than the storm’s eye. *Ahm. Yes, I book a flight I guess.*
*From there it was no guessing.* He sent the final confirmation. The game was afoot, but the board had changed. He wasn’t meeting her in the crumbling Parisian shadows. He was inviting her into a slice of his world, however temporary.
***
Dublin’s winter rain was a softer, more persistent sibling to the Atlantic’s fury. It soaked the world in shades of grey and green. The house was not in the trendy digital quarters, but in the drowned, tree-lined outskirts near Howth. A solid, two-storey Victorian, bought with a particularly risky run involving data-slaves from Reykjavik. It was his safe house, his archive, and now, for a weekend, his B&B for one.
He met her at Arrivals. She was wrapped in a coat of some smart-fabric that shed water like a duck, a single leather weekender in hand. No entourage. The ease with she slipped into his old, non-descript Land Rover spoke of her new familiarity with descent.
“No motorcycle?” she asked, as they left the airport glow behind.
“The storm sailor is home. He drives something with roots.”
The house made her stop in the gravel driveway. It wasn’t grand, but it was *substantial*. Ivy-clad, yellow light glowing from deep within. “You *own* this?”
“Everyone needs a port between storms,” he said, leading her inside.
The interior was a clash of histories. Exposed original brickwork held shelves of vintage French philosophy texts—Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir—next to technical manuals on sub-aqua propulsion and AI kernel protocols. A state-of-the-art security system blinked quietly beside a collection of wind-worn maritime charts. And in the living room, the centrepiece: a massive, open fireplace where peat and oak logs crackled, throwing heat and dancing shadows against the darkening afternoon.
She stood before it, peeling off her coat, the firelight painting her in gold and amber. “It’s… authentic. Not a curated authenticity. The real thing.”
“That’s the only kind I deal in,” he said, pouring two glasses of an Irish whiskey that tasted of smoke and barley. “The real storm. The real risk. The real fire.” He handed her a glass. “And the real conversation. You are not here just for the coastline.”
She took the glass, her eyes holding his. The materialist and the romantic, diplomats across a flickering hearth. “No. I’m here with a proposal. A contract.”
He gestured to the worn leather armchairs. They sat, the storm rattling the windows, framing their dialogue.
“I represent… a collective. A small start-up, operating in the creative resilience sector.” Corp-speak for a black-market luxury service. “We have a product that needs to reach a Gold Resort in Cyprus. The *Aphrodite’s Silence*. It must arrive offline. No digital trail. And it must bypass all scanners, port and resort alike.”
Jerome swirled the whiskey. “What is the product?”
“A container. The size of a viola case. Climate-controlled, but otherwise inert. Its contents are not your concern. Their value is in their… uninterrupted, unobserved journey.”
“Everything is my concern,” he said softly. “That is the first clause of my contract. I am not a blind mule. I am a precision instrument. You hire the mind, not just the vessel.”
She sighed, a concession. “It’s a clock. A 17th-century French antique pendulum clock. But its casing… it’s lined with a crystalline data-storage medium, grown, not printed. The first ten thousand cycles of its pendulum, recorded at a quantum level, encode a mathematical key. A key to a new, non-corporate encryption protocol. The start-up are artists and coders. They want to deliver it as art. The resort’s client is a collector who appreciates the… irony.”
Jerome leaned back. It was beautiful. It was insane. It was exactly the kind of gritty, philosophical middle-finger to the Smooth Society he admired. “Cyprus. A long way from the Irish Sea. My sailing is for the North Atlantic.”
“We know. We’re not asking for a sail. We’re asking for the rigger, the storm-thinker. The route is from Bergen, Norway to Limassol, Cyprus. By air, but off the grids. We have a vehicle. It needs a pilot.”
He stared into the fire, thinking of the Norway run. The payload from Bergen was usually medical contraband, headed for the frozen conflicts of the East. This was different. A clock, ticking its secret across a continent. “Why me?”
“Because you believe in the ‘grit,’” she said, quoting their Le Havre conversation. “Because you believe in daring. This clock, this journey, it is a dare. A piece of beautiful, useless resistance in a world of efficient tyranny. It is… a love letter to a different way of being. I thought you, of all people, would understand its poetry.”
He looked at her. The corp princess, quoting poetry of resistance. Was it a mask, or had the grit truly worn a groove into her polished shell? Kierkegaard whispered: *The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.* Was her foray into the shadows her form of prayer?
“The fee will be substantial,” he said, the romantic momentarily ceding to the practical smuggler.
“It is. Half on your neural signature, half on delivery. In untraceable crypto-gold.”
He nodded. The contract was implicit, sealed not in data, but in the shared understanding across the fire. He would do it. For the poetry, for the dare, for the wound of connection it represented with this emissary from the other world.
The weekend unfolded in two interwoven stories. The first was of the Dublin house: of conversations that lasted deep into the night, fueled by whiskey and firelight. They debated Badiou’s concept of the ‘Event’—was their meeting, this contract, such a rupture in the normal order of their worlds? She argued from a position of Lyotard’s postmodern condition: all grand narratives, including those of love and revolution, were dead; only small, personal narratives, like this weekend, had meaning. He countered with the stubborn romanticism of Kierkegaard’s ‘knight of faith,’ who believed in the absurd, in the personal commitment that defied all systemic logic.
Their bodies continued the debate in the old bedroom upstairs, under thick Irish quilts, the rain a constant percussion on the roof. It was less frantic than before, more exploratory, a mapping of territories both physical and philosophical.
The second story was the one he built in his mind, the plan for the run. Bergen to Cyprus. He’d need to modify a low-altitude cargo drone, mask its signature as a weather balloon swarm, plot a course using the corpse of the old Jet Stream, now a drunken, climate-changed monster that would confuse corp radar. He’d have to rig it from here, his consciousness riding the drone’s sensor suite through thunderstorms over the Alps, past the automated defence grids of the Italian maritime states, across the indifferent Mediterranean. It was a symphony of risk, a storm of a different kind.
On her last morning, they stood at the garden gate, the storm having blown through, leaving a world washed clean and brittle.
“You will do it?” she asked, not needing to specify.
“I will. For the clock’s pointless, beautiful tick. For the dare.” He reached out, touched her cheek, a gesture so unusually tender it surprised them both. “And because you asked.”
She leaned into the touch, the materialist allowing a moment of un-calibrated sensation. “When you are in the drone, over some dark sea, think of this fire. And the grit.”
“I always do,” he said.
He watched the hired car disappear down the lane. The house felt immense and empty behind him. He turned and went inside, closing the heavy door on the damp world. The fire had burned low.
He walked to his rigger’s den, a converted study humming with dormant equipment. He powered up the main console, holoscreens flickering to life with orbital weather maps and illicit flight paths. The romantic interlude was over. The storm sailor was gone. Now, the rigger was at work.
He had a clock to fly from Bergen to Cyprus. A piece of art, a key, a dare. A love letter from a world of filters to a world of grit, to be delivered by a man who believed it was better to be hurt by the sending than to never have sent at all. Outside, the Irish rain began again, a gentle, persistent echo of the coming, continental storm he would soon ride, alone, in the silence of the machine.
HI made. J4v
