Running on emptiness
The road curved upward into the loop and G-forces pressed her hard into the bike seat from her collar bone to her hips. Her knees found their spongy shelves as her feet worked the pedals and her thighs gripped the quasi-liquid space rubber seat for dear life. The material molded to her form and stretched up her sides leaving only a foot and a half wide strip of tight armor exposed down her back. She could feel the road in her teeth and the roar blasted her ears.
The half-pipe shaped future highway began its loop over itself and the space age city rolled around her, all massive towers and flying everythings. Ahead of her, a handful of racers, the last of a hundred between her and the top slot, dodged around imaginary traffic and space opera police cruisers. Two of them were girls shoved into latex suits with artificially enhanced asses that bounced with every zig and zag and Sam noted not for the first time the tactical advantage of their outfits. They made it very hard to focus.
A flash of fire drew her attention, finally. The bikes were all equipped with lightsaber like blades on this segment and one of the leaders had swiped an auto-semi which now went sideways and rolled flaming right towards Sam. She leaned to the left and grinded her glowblade on the road in a shower of sparks as the tumbling future truck rolled over her head and threw a windy wave of heat on her back.
A millisecond later she was up again and passing between two magnetized sedans shaped like an old wireless mouse she had run into the ground years ago. For a moment she could feel it in her hand, rolling across the particle board as a long gone Saturday broke open and bled out all around her, then the track snapped back into focus as she throttled between two lanes and the starship clogged sky rolled alongside the scooped edge of the highway.
Three of them, above her eyeline because of the loop. Lightbladed bikes glowing like tracer rounds through the vehicles ahead, not so much dodging the traffic as cutting through it, letting the false cars part and clash around them like fucking water while she scraped the side of a van thing and tried to regain her speed.
More fire at the top of her vision, then floating down slowly like a wide maple leaf or the wispy remnants of burnt paper, sending smoke up to the sky in her backyard, the fire massaging her soul, the cops called. But it was only the smoldering auto-semi completing its fall from the top of the loop. She saw herself crushed by it. Big red X on the map. Back at the stalls. Race playing out on the screen. No. She gave the throttle everything and aimed right for the back of what might have been a limousine. Motion blur all around her. Fire pressing down so close she could see the metal windowframes. The limo moved at the last second, a punchline to the joke she had been unwittingly telling every time she had swerved around a car on this God damned fucking segment, and then the fire was gone and there was a grinding whooshing sound behind her.
Little lights somewhere ahead. The track heading down into subcity darkness. Cutting sounds as some of the racers behind her sliced through the wreck and crashing snapping sounds as others didn’t quite get the angle or timing right. She saw herself, back there, falling, failing, not so long ago, then threw her focus back towards the smoking darkness just before it covered her.
It was deep black. Not even the light of her blades. A clue. The roar of the tunnel shifted, transformed, and became engine groan of an older kind. Like a movie. The darkness fluttered and the smoke rolled white and then became clouds just before she broke through.
Massive dome of dark ocean. Orange horizon with a whisp of sun like a check engine light. The whole world a cunt hair from darkness. Her bike was now a jet fighter as imagined for a Star Wars knock off. They were going in for a dive, though the semitransparent ghost of the track remained, always. Machine gun fire as streams of tracers shot up from the battleships and a flock of missiles sprouted smoke below her.
This was a new one.
She felt the buttons under her thumbs and fired her own stream of sparking rounds at a missile that shot up from below the transparent track. It died in a flash that showered her with metal sparks with a sound like a sparkler firework and she fired at the racers ahead of her, uselessly. Another stream of rounds passed by over her head from behind, and she found a switch under the trigger that gave her a HUD of a rear facing camera, ball turret like, that sighted a backup gun apparently now mounted under her bikefighter. She fired a wall of rounds and the pursuing racer, who had gotten way too close too soon, exploded. A jolt of glee shot through her. A good segment for once. The snap decision, figure-it-out-before-you-die-ness reminded her, not for the first time, of the Warioware cartridge she had nearly melted into her DS.
A release of the switch and she was forward focused again, as a stream of anti-air fire and missiles demanded her attention. She had just enough time to notice the track below curving out of the dive before it vanished and swarm of missiles and flak and even non-racer enemy fighters surrounded her. For a moment, the track was nowhere, and she really was flying in a downward dive. A nice touch. A few breaths of reflexive fire and near misses later, the track had returned, and she was nearing the end of the dive.
An alarm blared suddenly in the dash, a red plastic square with a cartoonish bomb symbol, teardrop with box fins and everything, silhouetted in scratched black. She almost smacked it in reflex, but held off and waited for just before the clear track curved up ahead of her, then let the bomb drop.
As she rose out of the dive, machine gun fire and explosions and harsh metal sounds all around, the ship exploded behind her, launching her forward on the track like boost item in an arcade racer, and the noise of war faded. As the black sky lost its stars, some lights remained. The lead racers.
She pushed the throttle and focused, clearing all thoughts. That was the trick on the straightaways. The less you thought about anything besides the track, the faster you went. Like Buddha on the speedway someone had said to her once. Of course it couldn’t be all like that. Had to give the less focused racers like her a chance, and no one would want to watch—
Shut Up! The track! The Track!
--
Just as the other lights regained their bike silhouettes, the sky exploded in a radial mandala thing.
Oh right.
The rough translation of the tracks name, or the name for this type of track, was “bursting flowers”. It had been invented by some Korean guy or group like ten years ago. Though randomized tracks were nothing new back then, and even its modularity with the swappable and upgradable segments had been done before, the “flowers” that gave it it’s name were bold enough to launch it into a full blown fad.
Or maybe it just had a cool name. Maybe other tracks had done something similar and even better but had been named like “choices” or something and hadn’t been made by some mysterious sounding Asian collective, so they had never caught on. She had never been good at predicting what anyone would like, really.
Anyway.
The transparent track broke apart into a radial as the other racers turned solid glowing white and vanished with a sound like the Super Friends blasting off.
Eight slices of scenery rotated around a central point of light. A dark cityscape. Dripping sewer. Dreamcore plastic tunnels and poolrooms. Stone bridges across jungled granite spires.
She let them all roll by as the wheel moved with a sound like a giant crystal turnstile and then a dull, warm sand colored slice locked into place before her and her bike entered it on its own. It was like that sometimes and you just had to go with it. She told herself that you wanted to find the slice that felt right that day so it could more easily fade to background noise and anyway the quicker you chose one the quicker you would finish it but if you just chose the first one every time you were fucked because they usually put the more mentally taxing ones at the beginning, but really, it was hard not to try and use flowers like a kind of horoscope.
So she found herself suddenly alone (putting the racers by themselves for long stretches was another bold move, or maybe the bold move, that had defined Flowers and launched its success. There was some uncertainty about whether or not the fans would care to see the racers racing not against each other but against personalized tracks, but the addition of head hopping pov view had sinched it. She tried not to think about who if anyone was watching her and her alone) flying down a dusty highway that screamed “Texas” not just by the purple thistle and distant rising mixmasters, but by the warm way it welcomed her, by the way the feel of the road and flat massiveness of the sky reminded her of the Hardworlds, of the team, and of—
No. Need to focus.
The only challenge of this highway segment was weaving around the sedans and semis, and little did the track designer know how practiced she was at that to the point it became automatic and there was nothing to kick her mind away from the thoughts now buzzing just out of sight like bees in a Six Flags trash can. Rather than try and stoically clear her mind she compromised and pointed her thoughts at what was directly around her, just outside the track, beyond the false projections, and ran through it, checklist style.
Reflections. A backwater resort, barely clinging to it’s RWA license. If it was a hotel in the Real, it would have been a motel, and the pool would have been paved over, and the rooms would have smelled of smoke and body fluid scents that had died not so much from the off brand cleaning supplies as just withering under the multi week spans between bookings, turning tomblike rather than vanishing, but since this was the Other and all, there were no lingering smells or even smudges on the chrome or hamfisted mirror everything that gave the place its name or at least tried to justify it, no flickering in the city sized sign that floated in the black or its refracted sisters branching off from it, the reflecting pool (which its makers had taken literally so that its surface rushed back to stillness after any agitation and any would be ripples turned into slight tremors after a few feet, giving it a plastic feel of the same kind as everything else here which made it all feel like a Chuck-E-Cheese or something) was just as “serene” and clean as it had been the day it was made, the carpets were all spotless, the shadows in the alcoves had razor-cut edges, and the masquerade hall and bounce room looked like they had just dropped out of the molds.
But that’s how it was here. Nothing aged. Nothing got dirty or even kinda faded. The hotel-motel showed its age in other ways. Somewhat in its emptiness, the walls of quiet that would greet you if you turned certain corners, went in the peripheral places, like she often did on her way to get her check from the office or watch replays in the camera room (these mother fuckers wouldn’t send anything but the streams over the speakernet. Like anyone would try and scrape this place).
But mostly, it showed its age in the people. The way they walked, not like guests exploring or hurrying to take in the sights before their tickets expired (she hadn’t seen anyone “take in” anything here ever), but like NPCs on a set path or stuff placed on a check out conveyer belt, like they knew the path and had been on it forever and now the trip from A to B was just a formality. The way they stood around. That guy in the pool today. Not swimming or actually using the pool, but like a bird in an exhibit who had seen its little square of fake terrain so much it refused to even glance at it, just stared out at the guests like one of them was going to hop the barrier and whisk it off to the savannah. (He had looked at her like that for a second but then it had gone away and she was left feeling like she had disappointed him somehow). The way they only really occupied like ten percent of it, the “good parts”, like the last bit of bodywash in a bottle that you couldn’t turn the right way to get completely empty.
And maybe most of all, the way they looked at any new visitor like lions watching a thawed brisket get lowered into their enclosure, and now that they had stopped looking at her like that she wondered how long it would be until she started looking out like that herself.
But she kinda doubted it. While they stayed in this place because it’s what they knew, because it was the only place they had ever been seen, she was here to be invisible. They were trying to remember, she was trying to forget.
But it hadn’t worked yet.
