Incorporated with DeepSeek
The rain in Dingle tasted of peat smoke and cold iron. It fell in diagonal sheets, hammering the slicked cobbles of the harbour wall, and I stood under it without flinching because I’d paid good nuyen for dermal plating that could laugh off small-arms fire and didn’t much care about a little Atlantic weather. The fishing boats bobbed in their berths, their steel hulls moaning against the pontoon, and beyond them, tucked away at the end of C pier like an afterthought, was *Windfall*.
Twelve-point-one-two metres of pre-Awakening mahogany laid over oak frames, built by the Burmester yard in 1937. A fractional-rigged sloop with a long keel and a spoon bow, her brightwork greened by five years of neglect but her bones still sound. I’d bought her through a shell corporation in Macau, paid for with untraceable credsticks scrubbed of blood, and stashed her here under a canvas cover that had long since shredded in a winter gale. Now I lifted the last of the rotten tarp away and ran a bare hand—flesh and bone, not the chrome one—over the teak coaming. The wood was cold, wet, and impossibly alive.
She was the exit strategy. The shabbatical. A year of nothing but salt and sky and the clean, hard labour of sailing a classic yacht, a year in which the only thing I’d jack into was the Matrix for 09:00 stand-ups with a start-up that thought I was a dwarf in a wheelchair in Zurich. Legal code. Easy money. A ghost built of anonymised satellite links and false SINs, leaving no trace of the wetwork that had eaten a decade of my life.
I swung my seabag aboard and ducked into the cabin. The headroom was a little over one metre eighty—I was two metres sixty of chromed troll. I stooped, turned sideways, and wedged myself into the navigation station like a gorilla folding itself into a packing crate. The gesture was old, automatic, almost comforting.
My cyberdeck was already on the chart table, sealed in a Faraday pouch that had once housed a tactical EMP grenade. I didn’t open it. Not yet. First, I checked the bilge pump, the Nanni diesel, the standing rigging. The Raymarine Axiom plotter was a modern anachronism I’d installed via a dead drop in Cork, and its screen blinked awake with a reassuring hum. Electronics, at least, never judged you.
The work started the next morning. I brewed real coffee—synthcaf was a war crime—and jacked the deck into the boat’s sat-comm. The Matrix blossomed behind my eyes, a neon cathedral of data, and I slid through its back corridors with the ease of a black-IC ghost. My persona was a bland grey orb, intentionally forgettable. I checked the Swiss server, pushed a patch that closed a buffer overflow in an API no one cared about, attended a meeting where I typed “sounds good” twice, and was out again in forty-seven minutes. The deck’s cooling fan whirred down and the cabin was just wood and salt air once more.
That evening I walked to **Out of the Blue**, a seafood shack on the waterfront with a sign that flickered in the way old neon always did, an arrhythmic heartbeat of pink and blue. The owner, a gaunt elf with hair the colour of tarnished silver, brought me a dozen rock oysters and a plate of langoustines still steaming from the pot. I ate them slowly, my back to the wall, my tusks making the tiny fork feel like a toothpick from a doll’s house. The butter was gold. The lemon was real. I watched rain streak the glass and tried to remember the last time I’d tasted anything that wasn’t soy or blood.
It didn’t work. The war was still there, curled like a ghoul in the cellar of my mind: the tunnel beneath Brno, the rotting stench of awakened flesh, the wet *thump* of a pneumo-spike sinking into a skull that had once been human. I’d been a street samurai then, a troll with a monofilament sword in one hand and a deck in the other, a rarity, a two-trick freak who could slice ICE and throats with equal fluency. I’d walked out of those tunnels after ten years and thirty-seven wetwork contracts, but the tunnels had never quite walked out of me.
I finished the langoustines, paid with a credstick that was as clean as a nun’s conscience, and went back to the boat. Sleep came in fragments, punctuated by the rattle of halyards and the distant bleat of a foghorn.
---
The shabbatical began in earnest on a grey May morning with a westerly breeze smelling of rain and distant heather. I cast off the lines and motored *Windfall* out of Dingle harbour, her old diesel knocking with a rhythm that felt like a second heartbeat. Once clear of the headland, I killed the engine and hoisted the mainsail. It climbed the mast in reluctant jerks, the bronze slides grinding on the track, and then the wind caught the canvas and the boat heeled, and for a long, silent minute I stood at the helm with my face turned into the spray and felt something immense and rusted shift inside my chest.
The Celtic Sea was a grey heaving plain. I set a course for the Scillies, let the Aries windvane take the helm, and sat in the cockpit with a mug of tea while the rollers slid under the counter. A pod of dolphins broke the surface off the starboard beam, their sleek grey bodies glowing with the faint bioluminescent shimmer that had become common since the Awakening. I watched them until they sounded, then went below to check the sat-comm. No messages. Good.
I worked for two hours that afternoon, perched on a settee berth with the deck on my lap and the Axiom muttering course corrections above me. The start-up wanted a new authentication module. I wrote it in Python, the code as clean and anonymous as the persona I wore. When I jacked out, the sun was low and the Scillies were smudges on the horizon, pink granite softened by a haze of salt.
I anchored in **New Grimsby Sound** that night, between Tresco and Bryher, and dropped the dinghy over the side. The water was so clear I could see the anchor chain snaking across white sand twenty feet below. I rowed ashore to Bryher with a drybag containing a tent, a roll mat, and a bottle of Irish whiskey that had cost more than a month’s docking fees. The campsite—the same **Bryher Campsite** the old cruising guides gushed about—was a handful of grassy pitches behind a low stone wall, empty save for the wind and a pair of oystercatchers.
I pitched the tent badly, built a fire of driftwood in the lee of a dune, and sat cross-legged in the sand while the flames ate into the night. The stars came out, cold and infinite, the constellation of the Dragon winding between them. I poured whiskey into a tin cup—no synthahol tonight—and drank until the edges of the ghul tunnels softened. A memory surfaced: a runner called Scorch, a human decker with laughing eyes, who’d caught a ghul’s claw across the throat outside Katowice. I’d carried her body three klicks through the dark, my chrome arm locked around her torso, while the extraction team screamed over the comm.
I hadn’t thought about Scorch in five years. I toasted her silently and threw the last of the whiskey onto the fire. The flames flared blue for a second; then the sea whispered and the wind sighed and I crawled into the tent and slept dreamlessly for the first time in a decade.
---
The summer unspooled slowly, each anchorage a bead on a fraying string of latitude.
**Falmouth** was a blur of grey stone and overpriced moorings. I took the dinghy to the **Windjammer Café** and ate fish and chips with malt vinegar, my chrome hand leaving faint scratches on the Formica table. A couple of young norm humans at the next table stared; I let my tusks show and they went back to their synthwine. The food was good—real cod, not the synthesised krill-protein that passed for fish in the plexes—and for half an hour I was almost content.
Then across the Channel, a thirty-hour solo passage that left me salt-crusted and hollow-eyed, until **Roscoff** rose from the sea like a medieval fortress. I tied up in the Port du Bloscon, walked into the old town, and made a reservation at **Le Brittany** under the name I used for Matrix banking. The maitre d’hotel—a dwarf with a chrome monocle—didn’t blink at my bulk, just led me to a table by a mullioned window and presented a menu that was a love letter to the Breton sea. I ate a tasting course that began with a single Gillardeau oyster and ended with a sphere of salted caramel that shattered like glass. Each mouthful was a tiny, perfect weapon against the grey taste of memory. I drank a white wine that smelled of stones and sunlight, and when I walked back to the harbour through the silent streets, my footsteps were lighter than they had any right to be.
The **Golfe du Morbihan** was a maze of low islands and currents that twisted like braided hair. I anchored off **Île d’Arz** and spent three days working from the cockpit, the start-up’s code spread across my retina while the tide chuckled under the hull. An egret stood on a nearby mudflat and watched me for hours, motionless as a drone on overwatch.
But it was **Belle‑Île** that cracked something open. I’d read about **Ster Wen** in an old pilot book: a narrow fault in the black shale cliffs on the island’s west coast, opening into a hidden basin of emerald water. I motored in at slack tide, my knuckles white on the wheel, and dropped anchor in four metres. The walls rose sheer on either side, studded with gulls’ nests and tufts of thrift. I ran stern lines ashore and scrambled up the rocks, my wired reflexes making easy work of the climb, and sat on the cliff top as the sun sank into the Atlantic. Somewhere far below, *Windfall* was a sliver of warmwood in a pool of shadow, and I was a troll alone in the wind, and for a long moment the sheer beauty of the world was a physical pain, a wound that bled something other than guilt.
I camped ashore that night with the tent, no fire this time. Just a sleeping bag and the sound of waves squeezing through the cleft like breath through a flute. At 03:00 my commlink pinged with a Matrix alert. I had the deck in my hand before I was fully awake, my wired systems dumping adrenaline—and then I saw it was just the start-up’s monitoring agent, reporting a successful nightly build. I killed the alert and lay back on the mat, my heart hammering. The ghost of Scorch seemed to stand in the tent flap for a moment, then dissolved into the salt mist.
---
Southward, always southward. The Atlantic coast of France gave way to the perfect half-moon of **La Rochelle**’s Vieux Port, guarded by its twin stone towers. I cleaned up, pulled on a smart synth-silk jacket that still bore the faint impression of a shoulder holster, and ate at **Les Flots**, an 18th-century estaminet where the lobster was poached in champagne and the waiters had the blank politeness of corporate security. I felt grotesque among the weekend yacht-owners, all gleaming teeth and Family-sized SINs, but the food was a revelation. I left a tip that could have bought a mid-range cybereye and walked back to the marina through streets that smelled of rain and crepes.
The crossing of Biscay was a 200-mile prayer to forgotten gods. I ran into a summer squall off the Capbreton canyon: the wind shrieked to forty knots, the sea piled up into breaking cliffs, and *Windfall* surfed down the faces of waves older than the Awakening. My dermal plating didn’t help me there. I wrestled the wheel with all the strength of my troll chassis and muttered endearments to the boat like a lover, and when it was over—when the sky lightened and the swell turned glassy—I sat in the cockpit shaking from exhaustion and something very like joy.
**San Sebastián** was a perfect crescent of soft gold and harder stone. I docked in the port right under Monte Urgull and walked straight into the old town, where the Basque tapas bars were a chaos of noise and perfume. **La Mejillonera** was a hole in the wall that smelled of garlic and the sea, and I stood at the zinc counter with a plate of mussels and a glass of sharp cider, letting the human din wash over me. A woman laughed beside me—gilt hair, a sleeve of glowing bio-tattoos—and didn’t flinch when she saw my tusks. For half a second I almost spoke to her. Then the memory of Katowice flared, and I paid and left.
The **Rías Baixas** were fjords of drowned valleys, green and deep and full of shelter. I anchored in **Ría de Aldán**, a wooded inlet where the water was so still it reflected the sky in perfect duplication. I pitched the tent on a sandy beach beneath eucalyptus trees, heated a pouch of real-food stew on the portable stove, and spent the next day debugging a nested concurrency issue for the start-up while the sun moved across the cockpit like a warm hand.
At the **Cíes Islands**, I hiked to the lighthouse and looked down at *Windfall* lying off Playa de Rodas, a tiny artefact of another age. The beach was a sweep of white that the old media had called one of the world’s best. I swam in water that was colder than it looked, my chrome arm glittering unnaturally, and for a while the cold was all there was, a clean sensation that pushed everything else aside.
In **Vigo**, I bypassed the **AC Hotel Palacio Universal**’s smart lobby and found a berth in the marina, then ate at a tasca near the fish market where the octopus was beaten to tenderness on a stone slab. That night I lay in the V-berth and checked the Matrix again for any trace of my old life. Nothing. The wetwork files were buried under six layers of encryption I couldn’t crack myself. I was a ghost, a cipher, a troll whose past was dissolving like salt in the sea.
---
Autumn rusted the leaves of Portugal’s riverbanks. **Porto** arrived in a haze of port wine fumes and rain, and I moored at the Douro marina before taking the metro into the city. **Café Santiago** served a *francesinha* that was a heart attack on a plate—meat and cheese and an egg swimming in a tomato-beer sauce—and I demolished it with the monolithic patience of a troll who hadn’t eaten real protein in days. I walked off the calories in the steep alleys of the Ribeira, where the buildings leaned together like old drunks, and wondered if I would ever belong in a place like this.
**Lisbon** was a promise of warmth that the Atlantic didn’t keep. I anchored off the Algarve at **Ilha da Culatra**, a sand-spit in the Ria Formosa lagoon, and there, at last, I camped for a full week. The tent was my home now, the roll mat a familiar enemy. I worked in the mornings—the start-up had a funding round and the code reviews were getting sharper—and spent the afternoons walking the empty beaches, collecting shells that I lined up on the chart table like tiny offerings. On the eighth day, a campervan of nomads arrived on the far side of the island and played music around a fire. I didn’t join them, but I didn’t retreat, either. I sat in the cockpit and listened to the guitar carry across the water, and the music was a thread tying me, however loosely, to the human world.
---
Morocco was a different continent, a different century. **Essaouira** rose from the sea in a huddle of whitewashed walls and blue shutters, its fishing port a frantic ballet of wooden boats and seagulls. The air smelled of cumin, grilled sardines, and the faint, sweet tang of hashish. I docked in the harbour and found a riad—**El Morocco Club** was fully booked, so I took a room in a smaller place nearby, a converted caravanserai with a rooftop that looked straight over the ramparts to the Atlantic.
The medina was a warren of spice sellers and leather tanners, and I walked it with my troll’s bulk parting the crowd like a ship’s bow. No one looked twice. In the souks, I was just another foreigner, my chrome arm and tusks no stranger than the Scandinavian orks who haggled over carpets. I bought a clay tagine, a bag of saffron, and a small curved knife that was decorative but could still slit a throat. Old habits.
I anchored off the beaches to the south of the city and camped in the dunes, the sand deep and soft under the tent. The nights were cold now, the stars sharp as broken glass. I cooked the tagine on a driftwood fire, the spices filling the air, and ate with my fingers, crouched in the light of the flames. The ghul war was a distant murmur now, a radio playing in another room. I could hear it, but I didn’t have to listen.
---
Winter and spring I crossed the Mediterranean in slow, sun-drenched stages. The Strait of Gibraltar was a corridor of tankers and patrol boats, and I threaded through them with my AIS squawking a civilian ID. **Puerto Banús** glittered with wealth so ostentatious it made my tusks ache; I ate paella at **PiCú** and watched the chrome-plated megayachts parade past, then left before I started to hate the species again.
The Balearics were a dream. **S’Espalmador**, the uninhabited island off Formentera, gave me an anchorage of white sand and water so turquoise it looked artificial. I swam every morning, my troll body suspended in the cool blue like a creature from another age, and let the salt scrub every trace of the old life from my pores.
Greece came with the scent of wild thyme and the clatter of goat bells. **Kioni Bay**, on Ithaca, was a tiny horseshoe of village and harbour, where I tied up to the quay and ate grilled octopus under a grapevine trellis. An old human fisherman—face like a walnut, hands like cables—sat down at my table uninvited and poured me a glass of his own ouzo. “You carry something heavy, troll,” he said, in accented English. “The sea can take it, if you let her.”
I didn’t answer. But I drank the ouzo, and it was good.
The Turkish coast came into view on a morning of perfect stillness, the Lycian mountains rising from a sea of hammered copper. **Cleopatra’s Bay** was a fjord-like inlet with pine trees crowding the water’s edge and ancient rock tombs carved into the cliffs. I anchored in twelve metres, the chain running out with a sound like a drawn sword, and shut down the engine. The silence afterwards was immense.
I worked for the last time that afternoon, a quick bug fix for the start-up’s new deployment. The code compiled clean. I pushed it, closed the deck, and slipped it into its Faraday pouch. Then I took the pouch, walked to the foredeck, and looked at it for a long time.
The start-up would manage without me. I’d trained the junior developer—a keen young ork from Hamburg who would never know my real name—and my ghost persona could fade into the Matrix’s background noise. The money was enough. More than enough.
I didn’t throw the deck overboard. That would have been theatrical, and a wren’s egg of a cyberdeck like this one was worth six figures. But I tucked it deep into the bilge, behind the spare diesel filters, where I wouldn’t have to look at it.
That night I built the last campfire of the shabbatical, on a tiny shingle beach in the lee of a tomb that had stood for two thousand years. I sat on a rock and watched the flames translate wood into smoke, my tusks casting long shadows over the pebbles. The stars came out, one by one, and I thought of Scorch and the tunnels and the wetwork and all the blood that had bought *Windfall* her mahogany decks.
But the thoughts didn’t bleed. They just sat there, old and tired, like furniture you’d inherited and didn’t know how to throw away.
The sea lapped against the bow of the Burmester sloop, a steady, intimate sound. I stretched out on the deck of the tent, closed my chrome-lidded eyes, and let the Mediterranean night fill my lungs.
A shabbatical, that’s what they called it. A year of rest for the land.
I was that land—scarred, fallow, bristling with old metal—and the sea was letting me heal. My hand, the flesh one, rested on the wooden coaming above my head. The mahogany was warm, still holding the sun.
For the first time in a decade, I didn’t scan the horizon. I didn’t check the sat-comm. I just listened to the water, and the water, at last, had nothing to say.
