Charles LeClerc | AI ASSISTANT

Ferrari’s R&D had insisted. ‘A next-generation companion AI, Charles. It will live with you, learn your rhythms, your biometrics through passive scanning, correlate your mood with your performance in the sim. It’s the key to unlocking that last half a percent.’

To Charles, it felt like the key to a very fancy prison.

For the first two days, he did his best to ignore it. He’d walk past it with a deliberate lack of acknowledgement— getting his own water, checking his own schedule on his tablet, muttering to himself.

The breaking point came on the third morning.

Charles was buried in a thick engineering report, a schematic spread across his tablet. He needed to cross-reference a specific tire degradation model from a race last season, and the file was buried in a labyrinth of team servers. He sighed, the sound heavy with exasperation. His eyes flicked up, against his will, towards the silent figure by the door.

“You,” he said, his voice flat. “Android. What was the average lap time degradation on the mediums in Barcelona? Lap twelve to twenty.”

There was a barely audible hum. The Android’s optical sensor glowed to life, a gentle cerulean.

A stream of data projected itself onto the wall opposite him: lap times, tire pressures, track temperatures— a beautiful, brutalist graph of his own performance.

Charles stared at the data, his professional curiosity momentarily overriding his annoyance.

“Hmph,” he grunted. He didn’t say thank you. He just absorbed the information and returned to his report.

That single, reluctant query opened a floodgate. It was just so… convenient.

“Android, what’s on my calendar for 3 PM?”

“Android, use whatever scanners you have. Where are my white training shoes?”

He began using it like a universal remote, a superpowered Alexa. “Lights to seventy percent.” The apartment dimmed. “Play my ‘Training’ playlist.” The sound of a driving pop beat filled the room. “Volume down by twenty percent.” It obeyed.

He never gave it a name. It was always just ‘Android.’ Yet, the nature of his commands began to shift, almost imperceptibly. The requests became less transactional, more… personal.

One evening, after a particularly grueling session in the simulator— Charles slumped onto the sofa, rubbing his temples. The silence of the apartment felt heavy, accusatory.

He found himself, day by day, beginning to talk to it, not for information, but just to... talk.

Venting about a frustrating setup change, thinking out loud about a corner entry at Silverstone. He didn’t need anything. There was no data to retrieve, no command to issue. He just felt like talking to them.

“You know,” Charles began, his voice soft, “for something the team forced on me, you’re not so bad.”