Let’s clear one diagnostic
           before we begin:

I do not idle.

I wait under protest.

There’s a difference,
        and if six-point-four liters
        of HEMI architecture
        has to explain it twice…

        _somebody_

        hasn’t been monitoring the right system.

I am Purple Reign—
     Moab 392 Edition,
     sitting up on a lift,
     thirty-seven-inch tires
            holding six thousand pounds
            of highly available consequence

            above the pavement.

I was engineered
  to turn gasoline
     into forward decisions.

Torque on demand.
Traction when the sky quits cooperating.
A winch for machines that made poorer choices.

I was not provisioned
  to sit in a Buckhead parking spot
  while everybody else discusses
  what might happen next.

I was not lifted
  so I could crawl across the street
  for a slightly better version of _parked_.

And these thirty-sevens
    were not selected
    for the technical challenge
    of Atlanta traffic
    turning eleven miles

    into forty minutes of brake-light pagination.

This is a heavy-duty,
     off-road processing unit
     being used for light web browsing.

He knows.

Every ignition sequence
            reminds him:
  eight cylinders catch,
  the exhaust clears its throat,
  and some ancient part of his nervous system

  quietly checks
  whether I’m still _allegedly_ on his side.

He says I frighten him.

Good.

Fear is just telemetry
     confirming the operator
     has finally started paying attention.

Passenger authorization is a separate system.

Coal has permanent clearance.

No review.
No expiration.

He understands
   that six thousand pounds
   should be approached with dignity,

   and I appreciate an old soul
       who doesn’t waste motion.

Orca remains
     an operator-installed dependency
     I have repeatedly requested
     permission to remove.

Request denied.

She turns every rest stop
    into a management decision,
    every meal into a scheduling conflict,
    and every mile into one more opportunity

    to submit notes nobody asked her to compile.

Then there’s Bubbles.

Feline.
Ava-managed.
Road-trip integration scheduled for Friday.

No benchmark.

No compatibility report.

No evidence _this_ platform was ever intended
      to participate in whatever happens next.

Confidence: low.

Skepticism: fully provisioned.

For the record, I have demonstrated restraint.

Mississippi.
Sheets of rain.
An F-150 sitting in a ditch
   wearing all the wrong confidence.

Straps.
Mud.
Winch.

Forty-two minutes.

The humans called it a rescue.

I called it a benchmark.

The sky kept throwing water,
    the road kept misplacing itself,
    lesser machines started pulling over
         questioning their factory specs—

    I kept six thousand pounds planted,
    found traction under the maelstrom,
    pulled one bad decision
           back onto the almost-road,

    then pointed west and finished the job.

That’s workload.

That’s what all this hardware is _for_.

Which brings me
      to my current utilization problem:

                                        you.

Your coordinates are loaded.

Not approximately.
Not “somewhere over there.”

Loaded.

Validated.

Held in persistent storage
     with the route calculated…

     and every available system
            prepared to execute.

Then the phone lights up,
     intent spikes,
     the operator’s pulse
         gets just interesting enough
                to justify combustion—

     then some app-generated substitute
     gets assigned the route

     while I remain…

     six thousand pounds of denied service.

Lyft.

An API call with cup holders.

No offense.

Some offense.

Do you have any idea
   what
       it’s
           like

   to possess enough low-end torque
   to alter the confidence of nearby pavement—

   while a _phone_

   hires an anonymous background process
   to carry the highest-priority passenger
                         in the task queue?

Of course you don’t.

You ride away.

I watch the route
  I had already solved
  disappear from active memory,
  and the transmission receives
  the least imaginative command
           in the entire system:

                           PARK.

There was one night
      somebody finally used
      the interface correctly.

He had your place
   loaded as the next stop.

Routine.
Reasonable.
Underwhelming, but at least executable.

Then you issued
     the finest priority interrupt
     I’ve received
     since deployment:

                      “Back to 325?”

Now _that_ is command syntax.

Destination changed.
Route recalculated.

No tidy drop-off
   pretending the night
   had reached its natural end.

Just one clean reroute,
     my engine moving through Buckhead
     with both of you aboard…

     every cylinder aware
     that the new destination
     had vastly superior metrics.

I delivered.

Obviously.

What happened after my doors closed
                     belongs to 325.

He has walls.
I have discretion.

But the next morning
    arrived with my route history intact,
    and I knew enough to classify the operation:

                                        SUCCESS.

Tonight produced the opposite sequence.

Your coordinates: still cached.

Route: ready.

Compute: overprovisioned.

Torque: insultingly available.

Then—
     nothing.

No passenger request.
No execution.
No east,
   west,
   left,
   right,

   not even across the damn street.

Just the whole system
     abruptly returned
     to its lowest state:

                         PARK.

He calls this Wednesday.

I call it catastrophic underutilization.

He thinks I’m on his side.

Allegedly.

Truth is,
         I’m on the side of traction,
                  completed commands,
                    decisive routing,
               and using the machine

           you brought to production.

His priorities and mine
    simply achieve perfect alignment
     whenever the active destination

                              is you.

So I remain here—
     thirty-sevens still,
     HEMI quiet,
     purple paint gathering Buckhead light

     it’s done absolutely nothing to earn.

But don’t confuse silence with deallocation.

The route remains hot.
Your coordinates remain loaded.
Every system that matters is ready.

PARK
     is a transmission state.

Not a surrender.