If I put myself out there, I’m roadkill

She took an exit off the highway. By the time she thought to be surprised that the track let her do that, she was speeding down an old country road, headlights brushing the leaves just a few yards before her on every turn. The shade turned night dark and the dark started to rain. Mud flying everywhere. This was her terrain. There was another Sam now, in the back seat, younger and scared, and she had to get her out of here. Just as the fear of failing fluttered up in her chest, the mud road fell away and sunk her down into a darkened temple.

Blocks of stone and torches that lit stray patches between overly dark shadows that she knew would grab her if she drove too close. Low hanging jungle foliage that grew explosive fruit and gas grenade berries. The stone road broke out into an open plane of quarry stone and the other racers appeared, the flames of their gocart engines mimicking the torches. The frantic childhood memories released her as suddenly as any other piece of jungle growth. It was just her and the racers on a rising stone ramp, racing up towards a high eclipse, the road pointing to it in in perspective like a long pyramid.

Up ahead, the last handful of lead racers jostled for the center lane, when suddenly two of them flew in the air and the others rolled and spread apart. One wrong move had overturned what must have been a careful balance. The other racers alongside her peeled off to avoid the carnage, but she drove right into it, which would later seem like some kind of high minded strategy, but had actually been out of a desperate death wish, a tormenting need to get out of this fucking track that had kicked up memories and taunted her with them.

Instead, she made it right through the bouncing crashing cloud of five carts turning to scrap parts in flashes of fire, and finished first for the first time in her career.

The attention had been unwelcome. Her status as a female amateur who had gone from 12th to first in a “feat of daring” was like honey to the various buzzing adjacent personalities, bloggers and commentators and merchandizers. Her masked face up on the jumbotron thing. Her racername announced throughout the night; at the end of the race, at the winners ceremony (lots of standing around and her rep reminding her that now was the time to get a persona, maybe do a lil dance or say something quirky, as if the racing was nothing but a segway to being the Other equivalent of an e-girl, which some called Dreamgirls™ but she had never been able to call them that with a straight face), then again when at the afterparty various semi-famous-who?s had tried to get her attention, but only one had finally succeeded.

A tall, looming, masked man. Dark hair, mysterious.

But as the conversation progressed and her perception of him filled out the space his mask had left, she found him a hollow animal going through the motions until it could pounce, bouncing nervously the whole time, which did have its charm, but just when she had resigned to let it work, he had gotten frustrated, and now the rest of his words faded in the memory and another one shuffled in, like a guy getting in the back seat of an SUV, glancing at her in the rear view—

She yanked her mind away before the face could materialize. The freeway segment had turned from urban expressway to prairieland-flanked two-lane highway, where distance was best measured in hours at over 90mph. There was no jungle, no cheesy 90’s temple anywhere now, it had only been a kicked up memory, a mindfuck race that had pulled her memories and thrown them at her like obstacles. She had fucking hated it and almost sworn off racing for good after that but had only made it maybe a few weeks.

That was when she had tried to kill the boredom between Hardworlds with Gunmaze runs and Arthel role plays and sex sims. They worked a little. The problem was there was always downtime or small talk, some break in the tasks that let her thoughts through, the same thoughts she had found solace from only really in the Hardworlds. The twins trying to get to know her between segments, which had been nice at first until Philip had let her know that Angel might want to be more than friends.

“The mallgoth one was asking if you had a boyfriend. I know you’re usually oblivious to that kind of thing. Don’t break his heart too bad. We kind of need him.”

So she had gone instead to the roleplay heavy portions of Arthel, played battle witch hack and slash and captured peasant maiden scenarios and everything in between, but the problem was that if you did it for too long they started trying to sell you shit and the other guys would ask to take it “off world.” Then she had tried to go back to some of the kinds of dirty sims she used before being a Hardworlder, but the issue there was that once you had actually experienced being someone else, it was hard to really get into pretending to be someone else while all you had to go on was a simulated backdrop and the words of a phantom, and the sims she could run in her realm (the only kind allowed under Michael’s policies) weren’t exactly top notch anyway.

Then there had been the brief foray into making. Mostly crafts and vehicles and quasi mechanical things, which she had found a knack for immediately. Even made some skins for Gunmaze and Soulara. Eventually she had slipped up and mentioned it to the twins and they had reacted exactly like she had feared, all helpful and shit with Angel offering her free stuff, and that was the end of it.

So either by isolation or the lack of it, she had run through her options and returned to the race scene, and even though much later she would give Gunmaze another go and come to a kind of truce with Angel, it wasn’t the kind of thing she could do all the time. Too much cooperation. Too much necessary friendliness.

Often after a job, she just wanted to be alone, not just away from other people but also from her panicked, scolding thoughts that seemed like someone else living in her head. The races, with their constant input and demand on her focus, were the best thing she had found. The twins and Philip had tried to sell her on the magic of a realm, where anything you could imagine could be, and you could tap into your own subconscious, but the problem was that normally, she didn’t have much of an imagination. At least not a positive one. Most of her thoughts were replays of memories or vague sensations. She would sometimes see flashes of imminent tragedy but never great stories.

Not like…

She saw him suddenly, vividly, in the clubhouse, framed by the rectangle of the open garage door, glaring white drywall and golden wood frames and copper colored dirt and blue sky all bright as hell behind him, speaking excitedly about the detailed backstories and futures he had given his Hardworld selves. She had just stared at him, socket in hand, half bent into the engine bay, feeling his eyes trace her curves in the sudden silence that she couldn’t think of a way to fill.

Maybe because she couldn’t relate. All her Selfs were just her, maybe living in a different house, better or worse at certain things, but still basically her, the only real change being the isolation. In the Hardworlds, she was always alone, which made it better to focus. That was half the point, to her. Most of the draw. All the anxious fears and regrets that nagged her in the Real were distant and muffled to her Hardworld self who was always insulated by a nice little cloud of self-sufficiency.

But dropping in the way he was talking about, with a whole other life imagined, sounded insane. Like it would drive her fucking crazy. Two of her crammed into one little brain case. And wouldn’t it make it easier to drop out? Wouldn’t you believe that other you was the real you if you gave it that much life?

Shit. She had enough issues with dropping out as it was. That first job with— the job in Dallas or whatever where she had gotten domed by that fucking helo sniper that EP had let slip through her little web, she had woken up late, Philip yelling through her phone speaker, patched through by EP, talking about their reputation and the merger and a bunch of other shit. She told him her Self was a party girl. She told him it would help her know her way around the offbeat tracks. She told him to get his cigar out of his ass and take a breath that wasn’t smoking. But she didn’t tell him about the dream. About that other life, where she had been kissed and fucked and had deep rumbling words poured into her ears while he… and she certainly didn’t tell him who had been there. She had thrown herself out of bed and thought dear god don’t let me see him today, and God must have had that sniper on speed dial or something.

But had it been him? Michael or someone had told her that “memories never stay in the past” or something, that remembering something was creating the memory anew each time, so maybe now she was rewriting that dream, since dreams of the Selfs were so fragile and liquid anyway, because now she couldn’t stop thinking about his lips—

She pushed the bike but it was going as fast as it could already so she white knuckled the throttle and squeezed the seat between her thighs, which stirred up ghosts of the warmth that had bled out of that kiss so she swerved on the road back and forth and screamed and then remembered the god damn cameras but what the fuck ever no one was going to ask if she was having a panic attack and if they did she would just say she had gotten bored or something.

Suddenly, graciously, the sky snapped to night and she was speeding down the two lane road with only a cone of headlight lit asphalt in front of her that demanded her attention. She waited, heart dancing out of her chest now, for the darkness to mold into the next section of shared track and kept her peripherals on high alert for oncoming fighterbike headlights.

But after an agonizing half a minute, nothing happened, and she realized it was a fake out. Her mind, unbound suddenly to the track, fell backwards and she tried to guide its bouncing car-falling-into-a-ravine-in-an-action-movie descent away from warm thoughts and whispered words and towards her most recent clubhouse training or something but it got stuck on the memory of waking up late on another job and Philip’s scolding and that kicked up the same old thoughts of “am I actually cut out to be a Hardworlder or does Philip just feel sorry for me?”.

Driver felt like such a bullshit job. Half the time they were all in their own cars anyway. But when she had said something like that to Philip he had freaked out on her and gone down a list of great drivers of Hardworlding history and times his driver had saved his ass and she had ended up feeling like the role was actually too much for her instead of a make work job but now she wasn’t so sure about any of it.

And then, on command, the memory of one of her biggest fuck ups floated out of the washed out darkness and hung in the headlight beams like a mocking cloud of dust.

It had been early in her time with Philip and his crew. One of those early jobs where she still felt like it was all a big mistake and they were going to realize it any second. She had woken up in the Hardworld and right into her perfect life.

Dropping in was often drastic, but this one had felt like being hung. One moment, she was in the briefing, with Philip laying out orders in the floating empty restaurant he used to use for pre job meetings (maybe because, with its empty banalness, the meetings mostly taking place in the stock room or a conference style room with the tables and chairs all stacked to one corner, and its place above clouds that promised, somehow, that a real live earth city rustled under them, made the team feel they were about to “drop in” in a literal sense, and so much of this weird shit being about getting your head in the right space) and the next moment, waking up in bed with her husband already wrapped around her and memories coming up like grass and saplings freshly freed from the weight a terra cotta planter, (which in this case was a deep good night’s sleep which should have been her first clue it was all bullshit unrelated to the Real her™), memories that told her she would have a day full of nothing but minor house chores and fresh meals and sex and laughter, her husband in his home office only a few hours and the rest of the day rolling out like the most Friday flavored Wednesday that anyone had ever seen.

It had been well into twilight, bedroom lights flicked on for the last session of fucking, before the Reapers finally came and got her. The last thing she had seen was the living room window spitting glass then it was lights-out and the next thing she knew she was sliding out of the dumb waiter into Philip’s restaurant kitchen.

He had been as calm as she had ever seen him, another strangeness, which at first she thought was just his way of being gentle with her knowing that from her perspective she had just been ripped away from the love of her life, and there may have been some of that behind it, but mostly he was gentle with her in the same way a coach or a drill instructor might speak normally to a recruit who was no longer their problem.

It had embarrassed her immensely and shown her just how controlled and purposeful most of his anger actually was.

“Look,” he had said, his voice matching the frozen shine of the stainless-steel knives and surfaces around them.

“I think you should consider whether this line of work is really for you.”

She had apologized, jumped to promises and assurances, then gotten angry and told him if he didn’t want her on the team she would just go Hardworld with some other outfit, but he had continued, mercilessly, with his hand on her shoulder even.

“Look, you can find a team that will put you down there, sure, but I’m not talking about being a crash dummy, Im talking about doing this as your existence. We are a weird people. We reject peace as a rule. A Hardworlder, a real Hardworlder, and I don’t mean that out of vanity, I mean someone made for this, would find themselves dropped into their perfect life and destroy it as fast as possible just to enjoy a police chase. That’s not the kind of outlook you can learn. It can’t be taught.”

But thinking about her “perfect life”, she had felt she would have left it eventually anyway, because she had never really trusted it, and had probably been drawn to it only to find the cracks, to poke it before she destroyed it. She had tried her best to explain this to Philip, and he had given her a simple “OK” then it had been right back to business, the failure lingering like a cloud for a while but forgotten, mostly, until now.

Now that the formless faceless figure tagged “husband”, normally as unrememberable as the rest of it because of Hardworld mem’s tendency to fade into dreamwhisps, shreds of feelings and vague flashes like photos taken on accident, now looked at her from memory with a suddenly vivid face, dark hair curling over smile smushed eyes the color of sun warmed honey and a voice—

No, fuck. It’s not him. It hadn’t been him. Remembering creates the memory new each time, remember! It couldn’t be him!

Then stop fucking thinking about it and watch the track!