Incorporate with DeepSeek
The rain hadn't started yet, but the air over La Défense was thick with the promise of it. The kind of wet that made the city's neon bleed into the asphalt like a wound that wouldn't close. I watched her through the 360-stitched feed on the center tablet, a tiny figure in a white synth-silk coat cutting through the corporate drones outside the Renraku Arcology. Her escort—two slabs of muscle with obvious move-by-wire twitches—scanned the street with the dead-eyed efficiency of men who'd had their survival instincts surgically removed and replaced with subroutines.
The passenger door of the Maserati opened with a pneumatic hiss I'd installed myself. She slid in, bringing a cloud of expensive pheromone perfume and the faint ozone crackle of a high-end personal jammer. Her eyes, augmented with gold-flecked iris displays, swept the cabin. I saw her register the roll cage integrated into the roof, the three-screen dashboard, the complete absence of luxury.
She'd expected leather and wood. She got carbon-fiber switch panels and a fire extinguisher.
"You're the Troll," she said. Not a question. A statement of disappointment.
"People call me Kaine." I didn't look at her. My eyes were on the thermal overlay painting the street in blues and reds. The escort was retreating. Two blocks north, a heat signature crouched by a vent. Ambush potential. Low. "Seatbelt."
She didn't move. "I was told you were fast."
"I am."
"This car is old."
"It's older than you. It's also faster than anything Renraku builds that doesn't require a pilot's license." I reached up and flipped a guarded switch. The active stabilizers—my wing that wasn't a wing—extended from the front and rear on their linear rails. A faint hydraulic whine, then silence. "Seatbelt. Or this ride ends here."
She clicked it in place with exaggerated slowness.
I pulled away from the curb at exactly the speed limit. The electric motors from the Lexus hybrid unit in the rear tunnel pushed us forward in eerie silence. No engine note. No drama. Just the wet hiss of tires on pavement.
"The engine isn't on," she observed.
"Don't need it yet. City driving is for electrons." I tapped the rightmost screen. It showed a live top-down view of the car, stitched from the four cameras. A red laser line projected forward from the front fenders, calculating clearance. "See those lines? They tell me if we fit. You'd be surprised how many alleys in this city were built for horses, not widebody Maseratis."
She watched the display with something that might have been curiosity. Or might have been contempt. Hard to tell with the rich ones.
---
We cleared the Périphérique at 23:47. The rain started in earnest as we hit the A1 north. I let the V8 wake up.
The sound was—and I say this as someone who has heard a lot of engines die—religious. Four hundred horsepower of Ferrari-derived fury, muffled only slightly by the custom exhaust routing I'd welded around the new transmission tunnel. It sang a song of cast connecting rods and high-revving death wishes. The hybrid motor filled the gaps. Zero lag. Just a seamless shove into the back of the Recaro seat.
She gripped the door handle. "It's loud."
"You wanted fast."
We hit 220 km/h on a straight stretch between Compiègne and Saint-Quentin. The rain turned to streaks on the windshield, deflected by the Teflon coating. Lotus effect. Water beaded and fled. The thermal camera painted the road in ghostly green, revealing the heat signatures of a wild boar family trundling along the shoulder a kilometer ahead. I adjusted my line by half a meter.
She noticed. "How did you—"
"I see heat. Living things glow."
"That's... unsettling."
"It's practical. Hitting a boar at this speed would ruin both our evenings."
Silence for a while. The French countryside blurred past. Abandoned service stations. Wind turbines with blinking red lights. The occasional arcology dome, glowing like a bioluminescent tumor on the horizon.
She broke the quiet. "Do you ever get lonely? Driving all night. Alone."
I considered the question. The answer was complicated. I had the car. I had the drone docked on the roof, a DJI Mavic I could launch to scout ten kilometers ahead. I had the cyberdeck waiting back on the péniche, loaded with a local LLM that analyzed every kilometer I drove and suggested improvements to the rule-based hybrid controller. I had the Shabbat rum and the occasional joint when the week's work was done.
"No," I said. "I have good company."
She looked around the empty cabin. "Who?"
I patted the dashboard. "Her."
---
We stopped once. A charging station outside Lille that also had a toilet that didn't require a SIN check. She bought a soy-caf from a vending machine and stood under the awning, watching me check the oil. The rain had stopped, leaving the air smelling of wet concrete and ozone from the nearby maglev line.
She asked, "Why a Maserati? Why not something... modern?"
I wiped the dipstick on a rag. "Because modern cars are computers with wheels. They phone home. They have mandatory autopilot overrides. They can be bricked remotely by a corp decker having a bad day." I screwed the oil cap back on. "This car is analog where it matters. The engine is mechanical. The steering is hydraulic. The brakes don't need a software update to work. The electronics I added—the cameras, the lasers, the hybrid brain—those are *my* electronics. They answer to me."
"You don't trust the corps."
"I don't trust anyone who can turn off my car with an email."
She was quiet again as we got back in. The highway stretched north, toward the Belgian border. The light pollution map in my head—a mental overlay from years of driving this corridor—showed the glowing spine of Europe curving down through the Ruhr, the Rhineland, toward the Alpine passes and the Italian industrial plains. We were just a tiny moving dot on that spine. One of thousands. But faster than most.
I pushed the throttle. The V8 screamed toward its redline. The hybrid motor added its silent shove. The G-force meter on the center screen climbed past 0.7. The active stabilizers adjusted their angle by two degrees to keep the rear planted.
She didn't grip the handle this time. She leaned back and closed her eyes.
"Wake me when we hit the Alps," she said.
"Four hours," I replied. "Maybe three and a half."
"That's impossible."
"For a normal car, yes." I reached up and tapped the drone launch icon on the tablet. On the roof, the Mavic detached and shot forward into the night, its camera feeding me a hawk's-eye view of the empty autobahn ahead. "For this one, it's just Tuesday."
---
Dawn came as we crested the Brenner Pass. The Italian side was socked in with fog, but the thermal cameras cut through it like a hot knife. She woke as I slowed for the border checkpoint—a ghost of what it once was, now just a toll booth with a bored guard and a cred-chip scanner.
She watched the guard wave us through without even looking at our faces. "How did you—"
"I have seventeen different SINs loaded in the car's broadcast system. One of them is a certified Renraku diplomatic courier. The guard's scanner saw it and decided we weren't worth the paperwork."
"That's illegal."
"So is breathing in some parts of Europe now." I accelerated into the fog. "You wanted to get to Milan before breakfast. We're on schedule."
She was quiet for the final stretch. The fog lifted as we descended into the Po Valley. The sun rose over the industrial sprawl, painting the smog in shades of orange and pink. I pulled into the drop-off point—a private villa behind a ten-meter wall—at exactly 07:43.
She unbuckled and paused with her hand on the door. "You really aren't impressed by anything, are you?"
I thought about it. Thought about the V8 holding together at 7000 RPM for four straight hours. Thought about the hybrid brain seamlessly blending torque. Thought about the drone returning to its dock automatically as we slowed. Thought about the data waiting for me back on the péniche, ready for the LLM to chew on and suggest new rules.
"Not by money," I said. "Not by status. Not by beauty." I met her gold-flecked eyes. "But I am impressed by machines that do exactly what they're built to do. And by people who do the same."
She held my gaze for a moment. Then she nodded, once, and stepped out into the Italian morning.
I waited until the villa's gate closed behind her. Then I turned the Maserati around, pointed it north, and let the V8 sing me home.
The péniche rocked gently against its moorings, a low-frequency rhythm that had become the baseline of my existence. The boat was a hundred-year-old cargo hauler, steel-hulled and stubborn, converted by three previous owners before I'd claimed it as my own. I'd welded the two shipping containers to the deck myself—one red, one blue, stacked like a child's forgotten blocks. The lower container held the Maserati, its roller bench system gleaming under strips of warm-white LED tape I'd run along the ceiling seams. The upper container was the lab. My temple.
It was 03:47. The stretch of canal between Paris and Bruxelles was dead quiet. No corporate patrol boats. No smugglers. Just the distant hum of a maglev line and the soft lap of black water against the hull. The light pollution map in my head showed me exactly where I sat: a dim pocket of darkness wedged between two glowing metropolitan tumors. I liked it here. The stars were almost visible.
I climbed the steel staircase bolted to the side of the red container, each step ringing hollow under my weight. The door to the upper container hissed open on salvaged pneumatic rams—same model I'd used on the Maserati's doors. Inside, the air was cool and smelled of solder flux, cooling fluid, and aged rum. The LED strips along the ceiling were set to a dim amber, calibrated to preserve night vision while I worked. I never used white light after sunset. White light was for people who'd forgotten how to see in the dark.
The cyberdeck dominated the far wall: three 28-inch 4K monitors on a reinforced swing arm, positioned low to accommodate my height. Trolls don't slouch; we just exist in a world built for smaller species. The left screen showed a live feed from the Maserati's roof camera—a static view of the canal bank, the occasional bat flitting through the frame. The center screen was a terminal, currently running `btop`, showing the local LLM idling at 2% CPU usage. The right screen displayed a Grafana dashboard, waiting for data.
I settled into the custom-welded chair—a car seat from a wrecked Peugeot, mounted on a swivel base—and pulled the rum bottle from the drawer. One finger. No ice. The Shabbat was still three days away, but tonight's drive had earned it. I lit a hand-rolled cigarette, the sweet smoke curling up toward the ventilation fan, and plugged the Maserati's data umbilical into the deck's primary port.
The screens came alive.
The first thing I always check is the engine log. Not the sanitized OBD2 summary—the raw data stream from the array of sensors I'd embedded throughout the drivetrain. The center screen filled with a cascade of numbers and graphs. I scrolled past the standard metrics and focused on the cast connecting rods' stress indicators.
I'd added three piezoelectric strain gauges to each bank, epoxied directly to the rod bolts. They measured micro-flexion. Tonight's run from Paris to Milan had pushed Bank 2, Cylinder 3 to 87% of its theoretical failure threshold during that long pull up the Brenner Pass. The rule-based controller had done its job, cutting hybrid assist slightly to reduce the torque spike when the V8 hit its power band, but the data told the truth: that cylinder was tired. It needed a lighter touch on future Alpine climbs.
The LLM noticed before I did.
A notification popped up on the terminal:
```
[ANALYSIS COMPLETE] Trip ID: 2026-04-11_23-47_Paris-Milan
[CRITICAL OBSERVATION] Bank2_Cyl3_Strain: 87.3% of yield strength.
[CONTEXT] This occurred at GPS segment: BrennerPass_Climb_North_v2.
[PROPOSED RULE CHANGE] Reduce hybrid torque fill at RPM 4500-5500 when GPS matches "Alpine_Gradient_>6%".
[PROPOSED PARAMETER] Set MG2_Torque_Limit = 220Nm (previously 250Nm) for this segment only.
[CONFIDENCE] 94%
[APPLY?] Y/N
```
I took a drag of the cigarette and stared at the numbers. The LLM was right. It had correlated the strain gauge data with the GPS coordinates, the incline data from the IMU, and the hybrid motor's torque output. The rule change would soften the punch exactly where it was needed, without affecting performance on flat ground. This was the beauty of a system that learned. It didn't guess. It didn't have ego. It just looked at the data and told me what the car needed.
I typed `Y`.
The terminal responded:
```
[RULE UPDATED] BrennerPass_Climb_North_v2 profile modified.
[NEW PARAMETER] MG2_Torque_Limit_Gradient = 220Nm
[BACKUP SAVED] Previous config archived to /rules/archive/2026-04-12_03-52.bak
[SYNCING] Pushing update to vehicle control unit... DONE.
```
The Maserati, sleeping in its container below, received the update through the hardline connection. Next time I climbed that pass, it would protect itself better. This was the relationship I had with the machine. I didn't own it. I curated it.
I switched my attention to the right screen, pulling up the G-force and suspension travel traces. The Citroën-inspired hydraulic system—actually a custom setup using Xantia spheres and a modified pump—had performed beautifully. The IMU data showed body roll never exceeded 2.1 degrees, even through the tight switchbacks before the Italian border. The active stabilizers, those wing-like appendages that lived on linear rails, had adjusted their angle seventeen times during the trip, each movement logged and timestamped. They'd added exactly 3% to the car's high-speed stability while creating effectively zero additional drag. The data confirmed what my hands had felt on the wheel: the car was planted. Confident. Almost smug.
I pulled up the thermal camera footage from the moment we'd passed the wild boar family. The timestamp read 00:14:22. The rich girl—she'd never told me her name, and I'd never asked—had been looking out her window at the rain-streaked darkness. She hadn't seen the heat signatures glowing green on my screen. She hadn't known we'd missed a collision by half a meter. She'd just felt the subtle lane adjustment and assumed I was a very smooth driver.
She wasn't wrong. But smoothness was just the surface. Underneath was a nervous system of sensors, a brain that processed threats before they became threats, and a Troll who'd spent too many years on these roads to be surprised by anything.
The left screen caught my eye. The canal outside was still. The water reflected the faint glow of a distant arcology, a smear of orange on the horizon. But the Maserati's roof camera had picked up movement near the bow of the péniche. A small heat signature. A cat, probably. Feral. Smart enough to avoid the electrified rails I'd installed to keep the river rats from chewing my data cables.
I leaned back and let the rum warm my throat. The LED strips dimmed further, responding to my bio-signs—a simple script I'd written that read my heart rate from a chest strap and adjusted ambient lighting to match. Low heart rate meant calm. Calm meant dim. The container glowed like a cave lit by dying embers.
The LLM was still chewing on the data, now analyzing the hybrid battery's charge cycles. I watched it work, lines of inference scrolling past on the terminal. It had flagged an anomaly: during the long stretch between Saint-Quentin and Lille, the regenerative braking had harvested 8% less energy than predicted for that speed profile. The cause wasn't mechanical—the Lexus unit was solid. It was environmental. The rain. Water on the road surface reduced tire grip just enough to lower the regen efficiency. The LLM was now proposing a new rule: when the rain sensor detected precipitation above a certain threshold, it would reduce the maximum regen torque to prevent the rear wheels from losing traction during deceleration.
Smart.
She'd asked me if I got lonely. Driving all night. Alone.
I looked around the container. At the three screens. At the server rack humming quietly in the corner, its hard drives holding every kilometer I'd ever driven. At the drone docked on its charging pad, its rotors folded like a sleeping insect. At the Maserati below, its V8 still warm, its hybrid brain already updated for tomorrow's unknown journey. At the canal outside, black and endless, reflecting the faint glow of a Europe that had forgotten how to be dark.
"No," I whispered to the empty room. "I have good company."
I finished the rum. Stubbed out the cigarette. And let the data keep me company until dawn.
