Incorporated with DeepSeek
The rain over the Pas-de-Calais was a cold, chemical mist that tasted of salt and old magic. The sprawl’s glow painted the cloud base a sick orange, turning the coastline into a smear of shadow and neon rot. Beneath a decommissioned maglev pylon, a single headlight blinked twice — then a third time, deliberate.
Lucien stirred from his rigger cocoon, the gel padding releasing him with a soft sigh. His *ExecuTrike 80* — a machine that had started life as a corporate trinket for elven managers in La Défense — now squatted beside the pylon on widened stances, its nanofiber canopy beaded with moisture. The trike’s legal shell remained, a veneer of respectability: the same sleek recumbent tadpole that bankers in Canary Wharf glided to meetings on, silent and smug. Underneath, it was something else entirely. He called it *La Puce* — the Flea. Because it bit.
“Cargo’s dry, *mon ami*,” crackled the voice in his inner ear, the throat-mic picking up the smuggler’s Gallic snarl. “The dive team crossed the Jump twenty minutes ago. Sushi-grade data vaults, still sealed in Faraday wrap. Don’t ask whose they were.”
Lucien didn’t. He just popped the rear cargo pod’s magnetic clamps and watched two armoured cases — no larger than old-world attaché cases, but heavy with optronic guts — slide into the hidden compartment behind the seat. The pod had been a design masterpiece from his banlieue workshop: insulated, gyro-stabilised, running off a tertiary battery so it wouldn’t drain the main pack. The elves at their corpo towers would never guess their chic little trike was carrying enough stolen data to crash a small corp.
He sealed the pod, the molecular bonding strip hissing shut. The rain picked up, tapping an irregular rhythm on the canopy. Dusk was bleeding into true night.
“Go dark,” he subvocalised to his smuggler contact. “I’m taking the Flea into the sprawl.”
Then he jacked in.
The datajack at his temple clicked home, and the world fell away. Lucien’s consciousness poured into the vehicle’s piloting computer, his body going slack in the custom-moulded seat. His breathing slowed, syncing with the trike’s systems. The rigger interface — a black-market VCR 3.0 grafted onto his cerebellum — transformed perception. He was no longer a man in a machine. He was three wheels on wet tarmac, a 96-volt heart thrumming under his seat bones, a canopy skin that felt the rain like fingertips on glass. His AR overlay painted the road ahead in ghost-green, threat vectors flickering.
The electric mid-drive motor hummed to life. Silent. No pistons, no roar. Just torque. *La Puce* accelerated from the pylon’s shadow, its twin front tyres carving through puddles without a splash, the rear wheel biting with the authority of a limited-slip diff scavenged from a dirt-track quad. Lucien could feel the road’s texture as if it were his own skin — every crack, every lost bolt. The steering yoke responded like an extension of his spine.
He angled east, toward the artery that fed the Paris-Franken sprawl. The cargo delivery window was tight: dawn at a dead-drop in the Frankfurter Innenstadt, deep in the arcology shadows. From the coast, that was a four-hundred-kilometre gauntlet through three corp enclaves, a toxic-waste graveyard, and at least two contested gang territories. On a 125cc scooter, it would be a noisy, fuelled nightmare. On the Flea, it was a silent glide.
*La Puce* slipped into the old A16 autoroute, now officially a “restricted industrial corridor,” meaning it was patrolled by underpaid KE goons who’d sell you out to a ganger for a pack of soyBTLs. Lucien pulled the trike’s speed down to an unremarkable 45 km/h, the legal moped crawl. A tactical choice. He was just another delivery drone, too slow to be a threat. The canopy displayed an animated advert for a soy-café chain, projecting a holographic barista that danced on the wet asphalt. Anyone scanning the EM spectrum would see a commercial commuter unit, nothing more.
But Lucien watched the real world through his own eyes, the sensor-enhanced feed revealing heat signatures in the rusted-out industrial parks. Gangers — a trio of them, huddled under a sabotaged streetlamp, their auras running hot and feral. His targeting computer highlighted their probable weapons: two Ares Predators, one sawed-off. He didn’t slow. He just… *drifted*. The tadpole geometry — a 1,350mm wheelbase and a centre of gravity so low the skid-plate nearly scraped ground — let him shift weight without telegraphing. The front track widened subtly, hydraulic actuators spreading the wheels an extra five centimetres for a more stable firing platform if needed. He’d built those actuators from a salvaged drone’s landing gear. Riggers lived for this scrap-hound engineering.
The gangers saw a corporate egg on wheels and whistled. One started to jog toward the road, brandishing the shotgun. Lucien let his consciousness dip deeper, into the secondary systems. A small port on the trike’s front nacelle irised open, releasing a cloud of synth-pepper aerosol in a precise cone. The jogger stumbled, retching. By the time his friends looked up, *La Puce* had already ghosted two hundred metres down the next off-ramp, a faint electric whisper.
“Pepper spray, *sérieusement*?” muttered his disembodied voice. “You’re getting soft, Lulu.”
He ignored the teasing of his dead brother, a voice that lived only in his own head. Focus was for the road.
The motorway bled into the edge of the Old Territories, a hardscrabble no-man’s-land where the rebuilt sprawl had failed. Here, the rain fell harder, mixing with the chemical run-off from long-abandoned mana-refineries. The sky churned with balefire and the occasional flicker of wild spellstorm. Lucien pulled the canopy’s opacity to full, cocooning himself in darkness lit only by the green instrument glow. His body temperature was dropping a degree Celsius — a minor sign of strain from the VR dive. The trike’s biomedical monitor whispered a warning, then auto-injected a mild stim. His heart kicked. Good.
The road deteriorated into broken ferrocrete, and the Flea’s active suspension began working earnestly, each pushrod absorbing the blows. Lucien *felt* the jarring in his virtual bones, but the machine’s feedback loops were so tightly tuned that his mind registered it as mere information, not pain. He was an insect crossing a decayed leaf, untouchable.
A drone pinged him — a Lone Star traffic monitor. His fake ID squirted back the persona of an elven data analyst commuting late. The drone drifted lazily away, bored. Corporate cover identities: the gift that kept on giving.
Midnight by the time he crossed the Seine near the old refinery district. The moon was a sliver of sickly green, the astral plane bleeding through like a wound. A pack of devil rats scattered before his headlamp, their eyes reflecting crimson. On a low overpass, he spied a lone metahuman figure — a troll, armoured in corpse-paint, standing utterly still in the downpour. Lucien’s threat board gave it a 72% probability of being a ghoul scout. He didn’t slow to find out.
Instead, he engaged the run’s single, precious piece of illegal kit: a military-grade chameleon coating scavenged from a shot-down Ares Dragon. It wasn’t invisibility — nothing so romantic. It refracted light and dampened sound in a three-metre bubble. The battery drain was horrific, but it gave him two minutes of near-ghosthood. The Flea shimmered, became a suggestion of motion, and slipped past the troll’s position like a fever dream.
“That’s two minutes off my range,” he chided himself. No choice. The alternative was a fight, and Lucien was no street samurai. He was a rigger: his weapon was the vehicle itself.
The final leg took him into the Frankfurt Megaplex, a vertical nightmare of chrome and dragon’s breath. The sprawl here was thick with arcology shadows, the street-level a forgotten canyon. The delivery point was a defunct subway entrance, its gantry overgrown with bioluminescent moss. He rolled to a stop at precisely 04:37 AM, local grid time. A pair of glowing orange eyes resolved from the darkness — a dwarf decker, her datajack trailing fibre-optic dreadlocks.
“You got the vaults?” she asked, voice tense.
Lucien popped the cargo pod. The cases slid out on anti-grav casters, beeping their release codes. The decker’s eyes widened. “*Merde*… pristine. The rigger does good work.”
He didn’t respond. He was too busy pulling *La Puce* back from VR, the world snapping into painful reality. His body was cold, his throat dry, but the machine was humming a satisfied standby note. He reached for a thermos of synthcaf from the door pocket, cracked it, and watched the decker crew vanish into the tunnels with their prize.
Dawn bled pink over the eastern arcology as he retracted the canopy, letting the morning air wash over his face. He lit a cigarette — real tobacco, his one vice, mixed with real cannabis one to two— and leaned back against the seat, the trike still cradling him like a lover. The rain had stopped, leaving the streets smelling of ozone and wet concrete. In the sky, a police tiltrotor chopped lazily, oblivious.
For a few minutes, there was no run. Just a machinesmith and his creation, a rigger and his reason for still breathing. He’d built *La Puce* from a corporate legal toy into a ghost that carried shadows through the sprawl. Not for profit. For the feeling of being one with the machine, of being a single perfect entity moving through a broken world.
He exhaled smoke, watching it curl. “*À la prochaine, ma belle*,” he whispered to the trike.
Then he plugged back in, turned the wheel east toward a maglev station that would carry them home, and disappeared into the waking city.
