Jacob woke up the next day the way a man woke up after surviving a fire—alive, intact, and still smelling smoke that wasn't there.
Morning light leaked through the shop's grimy office window in thin, dusty beams. It turned floating motes into slow, drifting planets. The garage itself remained mostly shadow, the BMW M3 GTR squatting in the bay like a sleeping animal—blue and silver dulled under the dimness, still too legendary to look real in a room that smelled like old oil and stained concrete.
Jacob sat up from the cracked vinyl chair he'd collapsed into sometime before dawn. His back ached. His mouth tasted like copper and exhaustion. For a few seconds he didn't remember where he was, and then memory slammed into him—sirens, rotors, the PIT impact, the way the sky had failed to keep up.
His hands started shaking again.
Not as violently as the night before. More like a tremor in the foundation. Like his body didn't trust peace.
He stood, slow and stiff, and crossed the bay. He laid a palm on the BMW's fender. The metal felt cool, steady. Real in a way his thoughts weren't.
"I'm still here," he murmured, and it sounded like disbelief, not gratitude.
The HUD appeared as if it had been waiting for him to speak.
GOOD MORNING, DRIVER.STATUS: SAFEHOUSE SECUREHEAT: 2 (TEMPORARY)FUNDS AVAILABLE: $132,600RECOMMENDATION: Acquire operational infrastructure.
Jacob blinked, throat tight. "Operational infrastructure," he repeated, because repeating it made it less insane.
The system didn't argue. It simply slid a new prompt into his vision with the calmness of a cashier.
PURCHASE SUGGESTED:UNTRACEABLE LAPTOPCOST: $2,200REASON: Secure comms / public narrative control / sales channelNOTE: Hardware will appear on office desk.
Jacob stared at the empty, scarred desk in the office corner—dust, an ancient phone base with no cord, a stack of yellowed invoices from a business that had never existed yesterday.
He felt something sour rise in his chest.
Narrative control.
Public narrative control meant the system hadn't just watched him run. It had watched the world watch him run. It had learned what attention did. How it multiplied. How it fed the myth.
Jacob rubbed his eyes until they stung. "I don't want to be famous," he whispered.
The system's response arrived without warmth.
FAME: IRRELEVANTVISIBILITY: PROFITABLERISK: MANAGEABLEACTION: ADVISED
He hated how clinical it was.
He hated, worse, that a part of him—small, traitorous—felt relieved at the idea of doing something other than sitting in the dark waiting for consequences to find him.
So he purchased it.
He didn't click a button or type anything. He simply thought yes, and the money vanished from his total like it had been plucked away by invisible hands.
A soft thump sounded behind him.
Jacob turned.
A laptop sat on the office desk where there had been nothing a second ago. Matte black casing. No brand. No stickers. No serial label. It looked like every corporate machine and none of them, deliberately anonymous. A power cord lay coiled beside it like a snake at rest.
Jacob's skin prickled. The shop hadn't opened its door. Nothing had moved.
He approached it the way he'd approached the BMW the night before—like it might be a trap with teeth.
When he lifted the lid, the screen glowed instantly, already awake. A simple interface opened on its own: no Windows boot chime, no startup logos, no loading screens. Just a clean page with a single header:
WANTED // PUBLIC NODE
The nickname punched him in the ribs.
He'd known, intellectually, that the city would name him. Los Angeles always named its monsters and miracles—because a thing without a name felt like it could slip into your bedroom at night.
But seeing it written like that, in crisp text on a screen sitting on his desk, made it feel official in a way that sickened him.
"I didn't pick that," Jacob said aloud.
The system wrote back, as if it were answering a customer complaint.
NAME ACCEPTED BY PUBLIC CONSENSUSUTILITY: HIGHANONYMITY: PRESERVED
A folder opened without his touch. A video file sat inside.
wanted_pov_001.
Jacob's breath caught. "You recorded me?"
The reply appeared a beat later.
CHASE FOOTAGE CAPTURED (POV)IDENTITY REMOVAL: COMPLETEAUDIO FILTER: APPLIEDMETA STRIP: COMPLETEUPLOAD: READY
He stared at the filename until the letters blurred.
He remembered the chase from inside his helmet—wind, fear, the violence of speed—and the thought of that being turned into a file, into content, into something strangers could replay while eating dinner… it made his stomach roll.
And yet—another truth sat underneath the nausea, heavy and undeniable:
If the world was going to talk about him anyway, the world was going to fill the blanks with whatever story it liked.
This… was the system offering him a way to shape the legend.
Not to reveal himself. Not to confess. Just to steer the narrative like he steered a car—by choosing the line.
Jacob sank into the desk chair. The vinyl stuck slightly to his skin. He felt unclean.
The system didn't wait for permission. The cursor moved. A site built itself in front of him with eerie speed, as if the laptop were merely a window and the real work happened somewhere else—templates assembling, pages linking, text appearing.
A stark homepage. A black background. A single word in white:
WANTED.
Below it: a short caption, plain, almost taunting.
"You saw the chase. Here's what it looked like from inside."
A play button.
And then a smaller line, colder:
"No face. No name. Just speed."
Jacob's throat tightened. It felt like someone had written his addiction in a sentence and called it a manifesto.
The system highlighted the final step.
PUBLISH NOW
Jacob's finger hovered over the trackpad.
His hand shook.
He thought of Brian O'Connor—steady eyes, jaw set, the way he'd kept coming even when the physics didn't make sense.
He thought of Dom, Mia, Letty—those few seconds where their world had glanced off his like two cars brushing mirrors at high speed. He thought of his old world, too—the courtroom, the fluorescent light, the word convicted waiting like a blade.
He thought: If I hadn't been taken… I'd be gone.
He pressed publish anyway.
The site went live with a quiet confirmation.
PUBLISHEDPROPAGATION: ACTIVEMIRRORS: CREATEDDISCOVERY: IN PROGRESS
Jacob stared at the screen as if it might suddenly accuse him of something.
Then, like a delayed thunderclap, the reactions began.
Not in a neat feed like the modern world.
This was 2001—message boards and forums, dial-up users downloading the clip in fragments, RealPlayer windows stuttering, Windows Media loading bars creeping forward. People mirrored the file on personal pages. They posted links in chatrooms. They argued in threads that ran for dozens of pages overnight.
On the laptop, the system opened a monitor window that showed the ripples spreading.
"FAKE.""CGI."
"No way that's real—look at the stability."
"That's the sickest J-turn I've ever seen."
"Dude outran the helicopter. OUTRAN."
"It's a movie shoot."
"My cousin works at the station—LAPD is pissed."
"Blue BMW ghost. They calling him WANTED."
Jacob watched strangers build a myth out of pixels and disbelief.
It made him feel hollow.
He'd wanted to disappear. Instead, he'd thrown gasoline on the legend and lit it with a match.
His eyes stung, and he didn't know if it was exhaustion or shame.
The system, satisfied, moved on.
As if attention were simply another meter to fill.
BEGINNER PACKAGE
AVAILABLERATIONALE: Bound Vehicle concealment required. Daily driver needed.DELIVERY: IMMEDIATEREGISTRATION: LOCAL DMV (LEGIT)COST: $0 (REWARD)
Jacob blinked. "Daily driver?"
A new line appeared.
BOUND VEHICLE RISK: HIGH (VISUAL SIGNATURE)RECOMMENDATION: Use alternate vehicle for public presence.
The logic was sound. The feeling it gave him wasn't.
A daily driver meant participating in this world. Going outside. Becoming a person who existed in daylight. Not just a ghost in a garage.
Jacob opened his mouth to protest—then stopped, because he realized he didn't know what he wanted anymore.
Before he could decide, he heard it.
A low, smooth engine note outside.
He froze.
His body reacted first—heart snapping tight, adrenaline flaring, hands clenching as if they expected a steering wheel.
He crossed the bay and peered through the shop's dusty front window.
A car sat parked neatly at the curb, as if it had been there all night.
A 1997 Toyota Supra.
Deep paint, clean lines, that familiar muscular curve to the body that made it look like it had been designed to move even while standing still. It wasn't flashy in a way that screamed for attention, but it carried a quiet confidence—one of those cars that made people look twice without knowing why.
Jacob stepped outside slowly, the morning air cool against his skin.
He walked around it, fingertips hovering over the fender without touching. He half expected it to dissolve.
It didn't.
The interior smelled new. Not factory-new exactly—more like "perfectly maintained," like someone had loved it properly. The keys were in the ignition, plain and unremarkable.
The HUD confirmed it with ruthless efficiency.
BEGINNER VEHICLE: 1997 TOYOTA SUPRAUPGRADES: LEVEL 1 (COMPLETE)REGISTRATION: COMPLETEOWNER: JACOB COOPERADDRESS: (SAFEHOUSE ROUTED)PLATES: ISSUEDNOTE: THIS VEHICLE IS TRACEABLE (LEGIT)
Jacob stared at the owner line until his vision blurred again.
His name existed in this world's bureaucracy now.
That should've comforted him. Instead it scared him, because it made him real in a way running never did. A name in a system meant the world could eventually tug on the thread and find where it led.
He swallowed hard and whispered, "You're giving me a normal life."
The system replied with the same unemotional certainty.
NORMALCY: FUNCTIONAL COVER
Cover.
Everything was cover. Everything was strategy. Even breathing sometimes felt like something the system would optimize if it could.
Jacob went back inside and shut the door softly, as if loud sounds might summon the past.
The laptop still glowed on the desk, showing a rising counter of mirrors and downloads.
And then the system opened another menu—one it hadn't shown him before.
A section labeled:
COMFORT
Jacob stared at it, wary. "What's this?"
The answer appeared as if it were obvious.
DRIVER STABILITY IMPROVES WITH FAMILIARITYCOMFORT MODULE: ENABLEDNOTE: Items manifest within designated space only.
The shop's back recess—the folded pocket of geometry—shifted subtly. A warm light flickered on in a corner that hadn't existed yesterday, revealing a small room carved out of the impossible: cleaner walls, a simple couch, a low table, a shelf.
A place that didn't smell like oil.
A place that didn't feel like hiding so much as surviving.
Jacob stepped into it slowly, heart oddly tight, as if he were walking into the memory of his own bedroom.
On the table sat a speaker set—compact, modern, clean-lined, absurdly out of place in 2001 and yet somehow muted by the room's hush. Beside it lay an iPhone.
Jacob stopped dead.
It wasn't just an object. It was a piece of his old world, a shard of the life he'd had before everything narrowed into court dates and panic and speeding to outrun himself.
He picked it up with both hands, like it might crack.
The glass was cool. The weight was perfect. The screen woke at his touch, familiar icons blooming into view.
His chest tightened so hard he thought he might choke.
He'd expected a miracle to feel like triumph.
Instead it felt like homesickness.
The system chimed softly.
DEVICE: PERSONAL MEDIA HUBCONTENT: COMPOSITE FILE — MUSIC LIBRARY (THROUGH 2001)OUTPUT: SPEAKER SET LINKED
Jacob's thumb hovered over the screen.
He scrolled. Names. Albums. Songs he'd forgotten he knew until they were suddenly there again. Music from childhood. Music from late nights. Music from years when his life hadn't been measured in mistakes.
He chose one without thinking—something soft enough to not make him flinch.
The speakers came alive, and sound filled the small room with a warmth the garage couldn't produce.
It was just music.
And it nearly shattered him.
Jacob sat down on the couch like his legs had given up. He pressed the phone to his chest for a second, eyes closed, letting the sound wash over him. He felt the ache of everything he'd lost—not just a city or a timeline, but the illusion that he'd had time to fix himself before the world decided what he was.
He breathed in and out, slow.
The music made the shop feel less like a hideout and more like a place where a human being could exist.
For a few minutes, he let himself be that—human, exhausted, scared, alive.
Then the song ended, and the silence afterward felt louder than the chase had.
Jacob opened his eyes and stared at the phone in his hands.
In the front bay, beyond the comfort room's doorway, the legendary BMW sat hidden and waiting.
Outside, a perfectly legal Supra waited at the curb with his name on the paperwork.
On the desk, an untraceable laptop watched the world argue about a ghost named Wanted while the story spread like wildfire through the early internet.
Jacob swallowed hard, because the shape of the next truth was already forming:
He had escaped the cops.
He had not escaped attention.
And now, for the first time since he'd arrived, he had something that felt even more dangerous than speed—
a home, fragile as glass, sitting in a world that would eventually come looking for the myth he had helped create.
...
Brian O'Connor had watched the posted video so many times that the sound of it lived behind his eyes.
It wasn't clean footage—nothing on the internet in 2001 ever was. It buffered. It skipped. It smeared motion into streaks. But the perspective was intimate in a way the helicopter feeds never were: the road rushing up like it wanted to swallow the car, the way traffic became a slalom course, the weight shift on corner entry, the split-second correction that saved the rear end from snapping loose.
And the voice—if you could call it a voice—had been filtered into something unusable. Distorted, pitch-shifted, stripped down until it was just breath and engine and the wet-click of a turn signal that sounded almost… deliberate.
No name.
No face.
No plate.
Just a black visor's edge occasionally catching light at the top of frame like a crescent moon.
WANTED, the website called it. A single word like a taunt.
By noon the next day, half the precinct had seen it.
By evening, everyone who mattered in the street scene had too.
And Brian—who was supposed to be working the case, collecting facts, building something that would hold up in court—felt like he was chasing smoke while the whole country inhaled it and called it air.
The call from BMW came in through channels Brian hadn't expected to touch.
It wasn't a random tip line. It wasn't some shaky witness. It came as a formal outreach: legal department first, then a request routed through the department's liaison, then finally the kind of meeting that happened when embarrassment met liability.
They put him in a small conference room that smelled like paper and tired coffee. A TV cart stood in the corner, already connected.
Someone had printed out still frames from both the news chopper and the posted POV video—grainy, but enough to make the blue-and-silver livery unmistakable.
Lieutenant Bilkins sat with his arms folded, face set in that expression that meant don't make this harder than it already is.
Tanner leaned against the wall. Two men in suits sat opposite them, corporate calm draped
over their shoulders like expensive coats.
One introduced himself as a representative from BMW's North American legal team.
The other spoke less, but when he did, his words came with careful precision—a technical consultant, maybe, or an engineer who'd learned how to sound like a lawyer when necessary.
Brian didn't like either of them, not because they were hostile, but because they were clean in a room full of grime.
The BMW lawyer nodded toward the TV.
"We've reviewed the footage. Both sources."
Bilkins's voice was flat. "And?"
The engineer slid a photo across the table—an official shot, glossy, professional. An E46 M3 GTR, race-bred, aggressive stance, the kind of machine that belonged on a track, not in a police chase.
"We believe," the engineer said, "that the suspect vehicle is consistent with an M3 GTR concept we've developed in theory and competition—an ALMS-specification model."
Brian's attention sharpened. "You're saying you made it."
The engineer's mouth tightened slightly, as if he hated the simplicity of the question.
"I'm saying the architecture exists," he corrected. "The idea exists. Certain components, certain solutions—yes. We can see them in the way it behaves. The stability at speed. The way it rotates and recovers. The power delivery."
Brian leaned forward before he could stop himself. "But?"
The BMW lawyer answered instead. "But the specific vehicle in your footage is not a unit we manufactured, registered, or sold."
A chill walked up Brian's spine. Not fear—something colder. Possibility.
Bilkins exhaled. "So it's a fake."
The engineer shook his head once. "No. Not fake."
He tapped a still frame where the car took lateral impact and didn't crumple the way it should have. "This is not a body kit on a street M3. This looks… engineered."
Brian felt his jaw tighten. The memory of the PIT attempt returned—the shove, the refusal to fold, the way the police car's front end had taken more damage than the suspect's quarter panel.
The BMW lawyer opened a folder and slid out a single-page summary like he was laying down a chess move.
"We have reason to suspect," he said, "that proprietary design concepts may have been compromised. In other words—stolen blueprints. Or information derived from stolen blueprints."
The room went very still.
Bilkins's eyes narrowed. "You're telling me someone built a race-level BMW using stolen plans and then took it street racing through my city."
The engineer's voice stayed careful. "We're saying the probability is non-trivial."
Brian stared at the still frame again—blue and silver, black helmet edge in the top corner like a signature. He felt, for a moment, the strange sick pull of the chase: not the adrenaline, but the shape of the driver's choices, the competence, the way that competence read like intent.
Stolen blueprints meant money. It meant expertise. It meant a reason beyond thrills.
It meant this wasn't just a street racer.
This was something bigger—something engineered.
Brian heard himself ask, quietly, "Who would have access to that?"
BMW legal didn't answer directly, and the fact that they didn't was an answer of its own.
"There are ongoing internal reviews," the lawyer said. "We are prepared to cooperate with law enforcement, within reason, to ensure our intellectual property is protected."
Bilkins bristled. "Within reason."
The lawyer didn't flinch. "We also have a public relations issue. That video is circulating widely. People are associating BMW with—" he gestured vaguely at the paused frame of a car outrunning a police helicopter, "—criminal activity. That's not acceptable."
Brian caught the irony and tasted it like metal: BMW wanted to protect their reputation, while LAPD wanted to protect theirs, while somewhere in the middle a ghost named Wanted was turning the city into his personal track.
Bilkins stood. "O'Connor, take point with them. Get what you can. Names, vendors, anything that might point to who built that car."
Brian nodded, but his mind had already shifted gears.
Stolen plans meant someone had built the car. Which meant mechanics. Shops. Parts pipelines. Supply chains.
And in Los Angeles, supply chains flowed through the street scene the way oil flowed through an engine.
Which meant Dom Toretto's orbit wasn't just a convenient hunch anymore.
It was the only place in the city where miracles got traded without anyone asking too many questions.
The posted POV video hit the street scene like a match in a room full of fumes.
At Toretto's market, it got passed around the old way: not viral links and trending tags, but a guy leaning across a hood, a burned CD pulled from a pocket, a friend's cousin saying, "You gotta see this."
Dom watched it in the back of the shop, in the small office where the light was dim and the fan rattled. The computer was old, beige, scuffed. It took its time buffering, stuttering, choking on the idea of something moving that fast.
Letty leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, expression hard to read. Mia sat on the edge of a chair, hands clasped tightly like she was bracing for bad news.
When the clip finally played smoothly for a few seconds, the room filled with engine noise and wind and the raw, hungry sound of speed.
Dom didn't smile.
He didn't scoff either.
He watched the line.
That was always what Dom watched.
He saw the way the driver didn't jerk the wheel. The way the lane changes weren't frantic. The way the car took a gap with absolute faith—like the driver had already decided the world would move out of his way.
Letty's eyes narrowed. "That ain't luck."
Mia's voice came quieter, uneasy. "It's… not normal."
Dom didn't answer right away. He waited until the video hit the moment where the car rotated—clean, controlled—and snapped back straight as if it had rails under it.
Then Dom exhaled slowly through his nose.
"He knew what he was doing," Dom said.
Letty's mouth twitched into something almost like appreciation. "Yeah. And he wasn't showing off. Not really."
Mia hugged herself tighter. "He blew through our race like it was nothing."
Dom's gaze stayed on the screen where the black edge of a helmet flickered in the top of frame. No face. No tells. Just absence where identity should be.
"A ghost," Mia whispered, more to herself than to them.
Letty's eyes sharpened. "Ghosts don't run on gas. Somebody built that car."
Dom's jaw tightened as if he'd bitten down on an idea that tasted bitter. "And
somebody's going to come looking for it."
He didn't say LAPD.
He didn't have to.
At the station, the posted video made everything worse.
Not because it gave them leads—Brian hated that it didn't—but because it made them look like they'd been outclassed.
Officers watched it and got quiet. Some got angry. Some laughed too loudly. A few called it fake because fake was safer than admitting they'd been beaten by something they didn't understand.
Bilkins fielded calls all day. City officials. PR. Media. The pressure to produce a face grew teeth.
And in the middle of that pressure, "Wanted" became less of a nickname and more of a problem the department could not tolerate.
Brian heard it in the way people spoke now.
Not "the suspect."
Not "the driver."
Wanted.
As if naming him made him containable.
As if a label could replace evidence.
Brian hated that part most of all, because he knew how the city worked: once you were myth, people stopped caring whether you were human.
They wanted a story that ended with cuffs.
Or a crash.
Elsewhere, the world reacted the way the world always reacted to a ghost story they could replay.
They argued.
They copied.
They mythologized.
On message boards and racing forums, people zoomed in on still frames and drew lines and made claims. Someone insisted the car was a movie prop. Someone else swore it was a government test vehicle. A few—mostly the ones who'd actually driven fast enough to respect physics—went quiet and simply watched again, because the car's behavior didn't look like fiction.
Shops started getting strange questions.
"Can you make my car do that?"
"Can you tune me like Wanted?"
A handful of reckless kids tried to imitate the J-turn in parking lots and clipped curbs and light poles. Tow yards got busier. Cops got crankier.
And the name "Wanted" spread without ever touching a real identity.
Because nobody had one.
Not a face.
Not a plate.
Not a signature except speed.
Brian drove out of the station late afternoon with Bilkins's words still in his ears and BMW's implication lodged in his mind like a shard: stolen blueprints.
He gripped the steering wheel hard enough to whiten his knuckles.
He had joined the force thinking criminals were criminals because they were sloppy.
Wanted wasn't sloppy.
Wanted was a ghost with engineering behind him.
And now his superiors were pushing him into Toretto's world early—before Brian had even built a proper cover story in his own head—because in the LAPD's mind, every fast thing in this city eventually touched Dom Toretto's circle.
Brian stared down the road, eyes sharp, expression controlled.
Underneath that control, something else moved—something he didn't like admitting even to himself:
Curiosity.
Not about the car.
About the person inside the helmet.
Because every time Brian watched the POV clip, he felt it—under the engine and the wind and the filtered audio—something that didn't belong to a joyrider.
A tension.
A purpose.
A man who drove like he had already run out of chances.
And Brian didn't know yet whether he wanted to catch that man…
…or understand him before the city decided to destroy him.