What I think off looping that ... for an hour.
Mmmmh. Let's put it like that:
The rain found every dent in the container’s roof, a Morse code of leaks tapping onto the stained concrete. My workshop: a forty-foot shipping container wedged between a collapsed overpass and a chop shop that never slept. The sign on the gate said *Reynolds Scrap & Salvage*, but the only scrap that mattered was the pile of impossible dreams I’d collected inside, lit by the sickly blue of a secondhand OttLite and the glow of a dozen mismatched monitors.
I didn’t jack in. That was for deckers and their brittle little minds. My religion was metal, carbon, and copper. The Wulf was my cathedral.
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The idea hatched from a fever-dream of old Isle of Man footage, grainy holo-vids of Superbikes screaming over a stone bridge called Ballaugh. In 2075, the TT still ran, a ghost race on a neutral island where megacorps couldn’t strangle the soul out of speed with their regulations. The Experimental Class was a blank cheque: anything with wheels and a powerplant, provided you had the drek-hot nerve to ride it. I intended to ride something that had no name yet, only a set of equations and a hunger in my gut.
The powerplant began with a Renraku military drone engine I pulled from a black-market auction in the Barrens. A 600cc twin-rotor Wankel, designed to hum at 8,000 rpm for days, powering a surveillance bird nobody was supposed to see. It had a ceramic apex seals kit and an eccentric shaft balanced to nanometer tolerances – pure serendipity. I tore it down on a steel bench, rebuilt it as a generator, mating the shaft directly to a high-speed permanent-magnet alternator I wound myself. Not bought; wound. One thousand seven hundred turns of silver-alloy wire per coil, painstakingly layered in a stator carcass I’d printed from high-temp polyphenylene sulfide. My fingertips were numb for weeks.
That alternator fed a buffer of lithium-titanate pouch cells, scrounged from a crashed S-K Securicor van. The pack was tiny, just 1.5 kWh, but it could swallow a hundred kilowatts of regen braking and spit it back without catching fire. The real soul, though, was the traction motor.
I built it from scratch, an outer-rotor monster that defied every product catalogue. The stator was a ring of cobalt-iron laminations I’d waterjet-cut from a scrapped satellite’s magnetic shield. Each tooth carried twelve turns of square copper wire – the high-turn magic that translated voltage into torque like a goddamn gravity well. The rotor? A carbon-sleeved bell of neodymium magnets that spun *outside* the stationary copper heart. At full tilt, it would shriek to 25,000 rpm, held together by a filament winding I had done by a dwarf in Tacoma who owed me a favour. She used a resin spiked with silica dust from a dormant volcano, claiming it would “sing in harmony.” I didn’t argue.
The gearbox was a single-stage spur reduction, a seven-to-one step-down from howling motor speed to chain final drive. Two gears, a billet casing, an oil jet I calibrated with a borrowed high-speed camera to catch every droplet. No gear shifter. No clutch pedal. The Wulf would have one speed: relentless.
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Then there was the frame.
I’d seen the lattice in a vision after three days without real sleep, staring at the structure of a dried sea urchin I’d found near the docks. Lord Kelvin’s old foam, the tetrakaidecahedron cell, mapped to the stress flows of a motorcycle frame through Bézier arches that curled like wolf ribs. I didn’t have a team or a corporate fabber. I had an Ares Arms prototype 3D printer I’d won in a card game, heavily modified. It could lay continuous carbon-fibre filament into a bed of PEKK thermoplastic, building shapes that no tube bender could ever conceive. The filament spools cost more than my truck, but I’d traded a crate of genuine pre-Crash bourbon for enough to print the Wulf’s skeleton twice over.
The printer ran every night from 10 PM to 6 AM, while I slept in a hammock slung above the container’s corner, the machine’s hum a lullaby. Layer by layer, the Kelvin lattice emerged – a lung-like web of cells that filled the space between two great Bézier arches flowing from the headstock to the swingarm pivot. I’d programmed the cell density to bloom at high-stress points, thinning where only aerodynamic skin was needed. The outer surface was a smooth, obsidian-like shell, punctuated by a hexagonal pattern of cooling vents. It looked like a fossil from a future where bones were grown, not welded.
One night, the printer jammed. A carbon-fibre strand snapped and balled up in the nozzle, printing an ugly scar into the lattice. I stared at it for an hour, then drilled it out, patched the void with a hand-laid carbon weave, and baked it under heat lamps. The scar became a feature. I named the bike Wulf because it was broken and fierce, and because the motor’s first test spin howled through the container like a timber wolf calling across the Mountains of the Moon.
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The build consumed six months of nights. I’d wake at noon, brew a pot of soykaf that could strip chrome, and spend the daylight hours scrounging, trading, machining. At sunset, the real work began. The container became a sweatbox of heated resin fumes, ionized air from the motor tests, and the tinny scream of a rotary engine that I’d rigged to a loading bank of old floodlights. Neighbours complained once. I sent them a case of synthale and they never bothered me again.
The final assembly was a ritual. I bolted the rotary-gen unit into the lattice cradle, aligned it with a laser plumb bob, and torqued the titanium mounts until the wrench clicked with a sound like a safe closing. The traction motor slid into its housing at the swingarm pivot, its carbon-sleeved rotor spinning with a whisper of clearance. I filled the oil circuits with a custom synthetic lube cooked up by a toxic shaman down in Puyallup, who swore it would “remember” its viscosity under any load. He wasn’t wrong.
Electronics: dual silicon-carbide inverters, one to drive the motor, one to rectify the generator, linked by an 800-volt DC bus I’d insulated with layers of mica and paranoia. The brain was an off-the-shelf MoTeC ECU I’d reprogrammed with a cobbled-together Simulink model of the entire bike. The rider interface was a single throttle twist and a tiny OLED bar graph showing buffer charge. No tach, no gear position – because there were no gears.
On the final night, I pushed the Wulf out of the container. The rain had stopped. Under the halogen glare of the salvage yard’s perimeter lights, it crouched like a predator. The lattice frame gleamed with an oil-slick iridescence. The motor gap was a dark slit, ready to spin. It weighed 183 kilograms soaking wet, with 15 litres of fuel in a Kevlar bladder and a battery that could blow a city block if mistreated. It produced 200 peak horsepower, with torque that started at 1,400 Newton-metres at the motor and never dropped.
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The beat-up RAM pickup sat waiting, a ’39 Dodge with a rusted long bed and a hydrogen-injected Cummins that coughed blue smoke. I’d reinforced the bed with I-beams from a demolished building and fitted a motorcycle wheel chock that could take the Wulf’s mass. Packing was a solo job: a ramp of oil-stained planks, a winch bolted to the headache rack, and a lot of swearing. I wrapped the bike in a tarp, strapped it down with ratchet binders that sang in the wind, and threw my leathers and a toolkit into the passenger footwell.
The journey to the Island was a blur of border checkpoints and bribes. The Isle of Man in 2075 was a strange anomaly: no megacorp jurisdiction, a haven for riggers, shamans, and old-school gearheads who still worshipped the Mountain Course. I arrived at midnight, the ferry crossing a black glass sea. The paddock was already alive with teams from Ares Macrotechnology, Saeder-Krupp, and a dozen indie outfits. Their polished rigs gleamed. My RAM left a puddle of something unidentifiable. I parked next to a tent where a troll was bench-pressing a racing engine block. He nodded. I nodded back.
Race day came grey and cold, mist clinging to the hedgerows like the breath of the dead. I’d registered as an independent, number 77, rider name “Wulf.” Scrutineers poked at the bike with instruments that beeped uncertainly. The lattice frame baffled them. The outer-rotor motor was a blur of magnets and danger. But everything passed. The experimental class had few rules, and I’d broken none of them.
I suited up in leathers armoured with shear-thickening fluid, helmet painted matte black with a single white fang. The Wulf waited, silent. No starter button; the rotary fired when I touched a hidden toggle, spinning up to its generator whine, a distant turbine hum that blended with the inverter’s soft high-pitched song. The buffer battery read 85%. Good enough.
At the line, I was a ghost among the roaring petrol beasts and the crackling electric wails of the corp bikes. The flag dropped, and I twisted the throttle.
The Wulf didn’t scream. It *pulled*. A seamless, gearless surge that pinned my lungs to my spine. The world compressed into a tunnel of stone walls, flashing trees, and the impossible rise of Bray Hill. No gearshift interrupted the acceleration – just an unbroken, rising keen from the motor as it spun to 20,000, 22,000, 25,000 rpm. The reduction gear whined in harmony. The lattice frame danced over the bumps, its cellular core eating vibrations that would have rattled a metal bike’s fillings out. I flicked it through the corners with throttle and rear brake, sliding the rear tyre with a precision that felt like telepathy. The regen braking was a digital hand squeezing the wheel, linear and perfect.
On the Mountain Mile, I passed an Ares bike whose rider was wrestling a six-speed gearbox. He saw a black shape with no exhaust note, only a ghostly turbine howl, and then I was gone. The mist cleared over the Verandah, and for a moment the sun broke through, glinting off the Wulf’s carbon shell. It felt like flying through the inside of a diamond.
I chased a S-K prototype that had a mana-focusing crystal in its nose, some kind of astral speed enhancer. But magic couldn’t match the relentless torque of my hybrid. I reeled him in on the approach to Cronk-y-Voddy, the buffer battery feeding the motor a torrent of electrons while the rotary hummed at its perfect 8,200 rpm, sipping fuel and generating steady power. No slowdown, no heat fade. The lattice frame breathed.
The finish line at the Grandstand came too soon. I crossed it in a silence that was louder than any engine, the Wulf’s only sound a descending whir as I closed the throttle and let the regen drag me down to pit-lane speed. I’d ridden the 37.73 miles in 16 minutes and thirty-one seconds. A new record for the Experimental Class, and only a whisper behind the fastest petrol Superbikes.
Paddock workers gathered around. A corp rep in a gleaming suit offered a blank cheque. I smiled, unlatched my helmet, and let the cool sea air hit my sweat-soaked face. I didn’t answer. Instead, I walked the Wulf back to the beat-up RAM, its bed still stained from the night rains of Seattle, and I loaded the bike alone. The troll from the next pit gave me a slow clap, his massive hands booming like thunder.
As I drove off the Island that evening, the RAM’s engine ticking as it cooled on the ferry deck, I looked at the Wulf under its tarp. It had no nameplate, no corporate logo. Only the scar from the printer jam, and a lattice of bone-like carbon that held the heart of a howling ghost.
We were both night creatures. And we’d just showed the world what darkness could build.
