In a city where the Grid moves nearly every vehicle (see Transportation), driving yourself is a statement. The people who still do it in Talaris are hosts, artists, and thrill-seekers rather than transport workers, and their motto is “A robot moves the body. A human moves the soul.”
The Unmanaged Variable laws
The Grid does not try to steer a manual vehicle. It quarantines it. Autonomous traffic reroutes to leave a 20-meter “kill box” of empty road around a manual car, an effect bystanders call the Red Sea Effect. It looks like traffic bowing to royalty. What it actually does is give the driver room to crash without taking anyone else along.
Manual vehicles carry black holographic plates, and if one crashes, the Grid will not intervene unless a bystander is in danger. Before a manual car will start, every passenger lays a hand on a scanner on the dashboard. It is a legal waiver and a small ritual, and it means “I trust this driver with my life.”
Curators
Curators are the heirs of the jeepney drivers, reinvented as hosts. Their wide-bodied electric vehicles, called Sarimanoks, are painted in a neon-baroque style of airbrush and projection mapping, with plush seating, lighting that pulses with the passengers’ heart rates, and climate settings with names like “Baguio Morning” and “Palawan Dusk.” Some Curators specialize in slow drives along the seawall for the newly heartbroken, with tissues provided. Others specialize in loud, fast rides that deliver a group to a club already worked up. Some put a cellist, a poet, or a tarot reader in the front seat, and some partner with a bartender, so that the ride is the bar.
Wrenchers
Wrenchers are the car obsessives. Their builds, which they call Frankensteins, combine pre-Grid mechanical parts like hydraulic steering and real gearboxes with jailbroken high-density batteries, hydrogen engines, or gasoline engines kept running for a century. “Breathers” make a silent electric motor exhale colored vapor or a deep resonance, and “redlining” strips a battery’s firmware limits for bursts of torque, at the risk of a pack that vents or burns. Wrenchers gather in the Undercity, the deep levels beneath Shibs (see The JD Strip), where they race in old military hangars far from the family-friendly streets above.