The first time Emanuel Griggs touched a steering wheel, he was twelve.
It was a '91 Acura Legend with a cracked windshield and three working gears, abandoned behind an East Oakland junkyard. The second he floored it, he understood something most people never would the road didn't just lead forward; it opened outward, to choices, angles, possibilities.
He'd spent his entire life since then trying to stay ahead of whatever was chasing him the law, the lies, the ghosts.
Eventually, it caught up.
And killed him.
Six Years of Shadows
Before he was a corpse, Emanuel was a legend or close enough.
Black Ops, special clearance. The kind of government work so off-books it was written in ashes. He did things no one talked about, with people no one ever named.
Extracted tech scientists from war zones. Neutralized rogue terrorist cells that flirted too close with with the enemies of the world. Ran dirty wet jobs across Panama, Jakarta, Prague, Mogadishu.
Emanuel didn't follow rules he followed parameters.He understood the balance: what needed to be done, what lines not to cross, what monsters to leave sleeping.
But being efficient isn't what made him dangerous.
What made him dangerous was that he cared.
In his off-hours, while other operators lost themselves in pills, women, and paranoia, Emanuel built cars. Obsessively. Compulsively. He modified street demons with clean lines and brutal internals. Civilians never saw them. But everyone in the black-budget world knew his name in hushed tones.
His final project? A dream-car obsession. The ultimate Knight Industries machine K.I.T.T reborn, he had fallen in love with the car .
He was weeks away from finishing it when everything went to hell.
Operation Ashfall
Mumbai. Rain-drenched rooftops. The heat smelled like petrol and lies.
It was supposed to be a routine extraction of a rogue encryption scientist suspected of collaborating with Sparta, just another shadow run. Emanuel and his six-man squad landed hard and moved faster.
Until the drone strike came. Not from the enemy. From above. From their own sky.
A U.S.-made Reaper rained hellfire on his position without warning. The exit route was sealed. Comms died. Backdoor protocols activated. A fail-safe a betrayal.
As his team burned around him, his lieutenant's voice crackled one final time through fractured static:
"They're scrubbing us. HQ wants no loose ends we… knew too much."
Then everything went white.
He didn't expect an afterlife.
He didn't expect anything.
But then not light. Not heaven. Not fire.
Code.
Streams of encrypted data floated around him, wrapping him in a cocoon of colour less thought. He wasn't a body anymore. He was thought, purpose, raw will drifting through digital ether.
"Welcome, user Emanuel Griggs."
A voice. Feminine. Neutral. Synthetic.
"Termination Confirmed.""Cause: Betrayal by employer. Status: Offline.""System Initiating… Dead Circuit Protocol."
"…what?" he muttered, or thought. "Dead what?"
"GIFT BOX SYSTEM: Booting.""You are no longer bound by your prior worldline.""You have been selected for continuation.""This world has need for ghosts who still burn."
He blinked. Or maybe didn't. It was hard to tell.
"Would you like to receive your Novice Resurrection Package?"
"…what's the catch?"
"There is none.""You no longer exist in the records of the world you came from.""Your gifts are as follows:"
Novice Resurrection Package:
Vehicle: K.I.T.T. v2.0 – Custom Knight Industries Tactical Transport, AI-integrated, multi-mode configuration.
Location: Echo Park Hills safehouse, Los Angeles – Fully equipped garage, digital isolation protocols enabled.
Currency: $7,000,000 untraceable black-market crypto-cash, instantly accessible via shadow accounts.
Identity: Cleansed. All records erased. New identity issued.
Purpose: User-defined.
"Do you accept?"
Emanuel paused, even here, at the edge of the void.
"I never got to finish her," he said softly.
"She has already been finished for you."
And just like that a pull. Like being yanked through a tunnel of neon lightning. Like falling into a dream made of pistons and circuits.
Los Angeles – Now
He awoke to the smell of leather, motor oil, and ozone.
Sunlight bled through glass panels, bathing the modernist hilltop house in warm gold. Below, the city stretched out like an open circuit board alive, chaotic, humming.
A glass table in front of him held three things:
A black smart key.
A burner phone with no contacts.
A manila envelope with a single line written across it:
"Welcome to the Drift, Ghost."
He stood slowly. Everything felt right like his muscles had been rebuilt by a mechanic with infinite time. Cleaner. Stronger. Optimized.
The phone vibrated once. A message:
Garage. She's waiting.
Garage – Sublevel B1
The moment the elevator doors opened, he knew.
She wasn't the car he built. She was the car he dreamed of.
Matte obsidian black. Sleek. Alive. Her chassis pulsed with a faint light like a sleeping heartbeat. No engine roar, just a low hum, like a panther purring.
Then she spoke.
"Emanuel. It's good to finally meet you properly."
"K.I.T.T.?" he said, jaw slack.
"Version 2.0. Tactical. Autonomous. Fully integrated. Shall we drive?"
She opened her gull-wing door with a hiss.
He stepped in like a man reborn.
A New World
As K.I.T.T.'s systems came online, a holographic map projected onto the windshield. Emanuel's HUD flickered with strange signals street-level activity, black-market routes, surveillance nodes marked "FBI," "..... ," "Cipher," and even…
"Toretto Network: Unknown Entity. Monitoring."
He narrowed his eyes.
"I thought I was off the grid."
"You are," K.I.T.T. replied. "But this world has its own kind of circuits. You're not the only ghost who's come back to life."
Emanuel took it in the engine beneath him was silent, yet lethal. The city ahead roared with chaos. The roads below screamed for speed.
"Mission queue ready," K.I.T.T. said. "Would you like to begin?"
Emanuel grinned.
"No. First… I want to see what this city really looks like at 300 miles per hour."
"Understood."
The garage doors peeled open, revealing the serpentine descent of Mulholland Drive.
K.I.T.T.'s wheels glowed.
The future was behind him.
Only the Fast & Furious world lay ahead.