Eyes on the road

And just then, the track jumped out at her.

The megacity had returned, breaking out of the darkness as a swarm of lights and planes of glowing nanometal under an inkblack sky. The track shot her and a few other racers out of the subterranean darkness and onto an eighth pipe swarming with future cars and a lumbering semi. Immediately, tracer rounds shot across the road.

She thumbed around the bike handles, but found nothing. A brief moment of panic, until she saw a racer ahead of her gun down a hapless sedan and swerve into the resulting opening, one handing an automatic pistol of some kind. She reached down at her chest and there, like an MP5K on a strap, she found it.

She throttled forward after him, weaving through cars that looked like pillbugs and earbud cases, until she was just behind him on the left-hand side. He heard her engine and whipped back with his pistol swinging. The moment she saw him move in his seat, she squeezed the break, let the G forces snap her gun arm forward in a flash, and cut right into the lane directly behind him. His burst went wild, but hers found home from the base of his back up to his skull. His frayed leather jacket (he was dressed up like some post apoc raider) exploded in fabric and gore and his bike snapped sideways like he had struck a wire and then spun out across the road spraying fuel then flame and zipped by her exploding somewhere far behind.

There was definitely some carry over from Gunmaze at times, not to mention her own Hardworld experience. She absentmindedly wondered, not for the first time, how many of the other racers were secret Hardworlders, as she maxed her speed down a magically wide-open lane.

Gunfire faded behind her, creating a moment of white noise sci-fi ambience that made her feel she had the entire track to herself again, until more automatic bursts echoed towards her from above and either side.

A quick glance confirmed that her track was heading for a dark rendezvous with seven other eighth-pipes as they all merged into a single tunnel like the plastic casing of a shotgun shell reforming itself. The dark arms closed in on her in her peripherals, flashing gunfire and explosions and shedding fragments of vehicles. In a few short seconds, the transition was complete, and she was flying down a tunnel, lit by rods of neon floating at the center. The roars of the roads merged into a single whirring scream, and all the battle noise became echoed.

Here she found what Sinthea, her booking agent who was also big into the nuts and bolts of the races, might have called “layered difficulty”, or something. The first layer was, of course, the race, getting ahead of the other racers. The second, which Sam had recently used to her advantage, was the difficulty of aiming a machine pistol one handed while dealing with powerful and sudden g-forces, which often required careful braking to get the gun in position, or acceleration to snap it to a target before they could react. Then there was the problem of dealing with falling vehicles and debris, as anything destroyed on the “ceiling” of the tube would fall on those below. And finally (or maybe not) was the variance of speed in the tunnel. Those on the bottom, (maybe to compensate for dealing with falling burning metal, or maybe because it was a real quirk of physics, Sam wasn’t really sure) accelerated quicker than those riding the roof (and those on the sides kind of split the difference she guessed?)

She could see the game designers laying all this out and having a good chuckle and congratulating themselves and all that shit, but in practice those four or five layers really just ended melding up into two considerations:

Those who got shit on and those who did the shitting.

Almost immediately, the other racers (glowing lights in the increasingly smoky darkness, differentiated from the NPC taillights by their brilliance and speed) moved up the sides and towards the ceiling. They shot at each other. They took out semis. They crashed into sedans and towtrucks (or whatever that thing with the crane was) that went skidding then rolling down the sloped sides in an awesome bouncing path of destruction, a car crash given a new dimension, and kicked up more rag-doll Rube Goldberg bullshit that, in one case, was just a quarter of the pipe short of making a full rotation.

The lights, muzzle blasts and laser tracers squealed over firework explosions and fluttering fuel fires that rolled like waves or sloshed like water thrown up out of a bucket, illuminated some dangers and cast others in dark shadows. The noises, blaring theater speaker sounds of vehicles grinding past or the skip stone echoes of gunfire and glass break car crash pop of collisions and the bass boosted explosions, were all very cool and very distracting, but once you’ve been in real car crashes and seen real things come crashing down into fiery ruin, like a bell helicopter taken out by a CG for instance, all this shit just felt kinda cartoonish.

So maybe that was why it was so easy to drive straight down the center of the bottom of the pipe. Or maybe she was just stupid. That was always a possibility.

A section of a future tanker the size of her apartment bounced off the road and she did a kind of sideways slide through the resulting gap under it, aiming her bike for a few seconds right at the scrap-metal occupied impact zone which only opened up into barren shadowed highway about an eight of a second before she got to it. Things dinked off her bike and the wreck groaned and screamed above her then it was just the roar of her engine.

In her peripherals, laser fire flickered and all that, but the bottom center lane was mostly lonely. Maybe that was another reason she had taken the risk. Racing against people was fun. Beating them was fun. Sometimes even getting beaten by them was fun. But a lot of times she got the feeling there was a whole other level of game going on beneath the track, the kind of game she had never been good at.

The popularity game.

She had seen racers pass others who they obviously could have taken out, let others pass just as uneventfully, and seen others chase down racers with a persistence bordering on obsession. Little things that couldn’t be justified by just the game itself. Things that she had heard whispers of from the fans and others, and blunt references to from her agent.

Something about being alone made her feel watched, and a part of her mind looked for an opening to ride the tube wall up towards the swarmed racers shooting it out up there, where she would be just another middling contender, and so basically invisible.

But she was gaining too much ground to do that. She had already dodged a handful of dropped burning sedans (one of which had crashed through the floating center tubelight and showered her with sparks) and three massive cargo wrecks, and now hopped the lane and drove up the sloped side of what might have been some kind of future bus, and shot off it like a ramp as the scattered wreckage of something she hadn’t seen fall passed by beneath her. She landed perfectly and the bus spun out behind her, its wheels shredded by the debris.

And just like that she was in the lead.

The racers above faded back beyond her line of sight, unable to drop any vehicle down on her now, but off in her peripherals she saw a couple of lights on either side break off and swerve down the sides of the tube.

She waited. Her mind was a single tone, thoughtless, silent. This was why she raced. This was why she…

Her pursuers opened fire from both sides, and as a reflex she cut the bike towards the shooters on her left-hand side. Just as expected, they had braked to bring their pistols around, limiting his movement and making them seem stationary by comparison to her. She, however, had her gun on her chest mount, and accelerated as she swiveled the barrel around and fired over her left elbow, her bike sliding nearly horizontal in a storm of tracers from her enemy’s missed rounds.

She dropped her head down to her shoulder and lined up the red dot on her pistol. Half a second later two bikes were spinning out in a froth of sparks and a third was seeking cover behind some semi.

The fire from her right side had gone quiet. In her peripherals she sensed a massive commuter bus in the center lane. She whipped the bike back to the right, then tapped the brakes a few feet from the bus, snapped her gun hand around, and let the barrel graze the side windows as she passed.

The instant the bus cleared she saw three other riders coming down the sloping pipe just behind her. She got the first one, just one lane over and a few yards away, before he even realized she was there, and his bike pitched forward in a ragdoll spray of sparks.

The other two immediately opened up on her, and she instinctively dipped into a sideways slide, her left hip just inches above the street as it ground sparks off her slide posts, and slammed the brakes.

The rolling wreck of the first rider screened her and their rounds fell around her as they zipped past, just as she let the g-forces glide her gun hand forward. A sustained burst that burned through the rest of her magazine caught them both like a tripwire made of tracer rounds, the drastic spread of the weapon working fully in her favor.

She accelerated again and bounced her bike up. The machine pistol, its breech now locked open and smoking, (which she thought odd for a laser gun, but the rule of cool was supreme on these kinds of tracks) was attached to its mount by a wire and she found the button that yanked it up to her chest where a new mag slid home out of the satchel.

She felt pretty bad ass, until she saw four lights speeding ahead of her down the top of the track pipe. Four lights which didn’t seem to be shooting at each other.

Motherfuckers.

She pushed the throttle and tried to catch them. One aimed straight down and shot a sedan in its front tires, causing another to rear end it and go sailing up and sideways. She had to slide into the right lane to avoid it and got doused in fuel and glass. No sooner had she righted herself than a big tanker went sideways. In the real world, which to her was the Hardworlds, nine times out of ten a tanker truck was hauling milk or soybean oil or something, but in the action move land of the race track, she knew it had to be fuel.

She could either try and go around it, hoping no one shot it as she did, or,

She snapped the gun forward and fired a single burst, which was all it took. The tanker went up in a dome of bright fire that ballooned into a darkening cloud. She slid as far left as she could before smashing through the wall of flame, which because of the tanker’s previous speed was not an isolated point on the track but a deep channel that took her longer than expected to drive through.

For a moment, everything was fire, and she recalled a nightmare she had of being trapped in a burning warehouse… or had she? No. It was a Selfshadow, as Lindsey had called them. Memories of a past self lingering long after the job was done.

“Some you’s stick around more than others,” she had said, in very Philip-esque brevity. Though Sam had been hesitant to ask him about them, those phantom memories that didn’t quite gel with the rest of hers but seemed to float around outside asking meekly to be let in, reminding her of floaters on her eye or stray cats that looked at you from across the street but never directly approached your front door, she had mentioned them to Lindsey as one drifted into her thoughts during a QA session (where a senior team member, usually Philip, would review the mem of a job with her and provide feedback), in her typical “say whatever inane thought that pops into your head” way that Sam hated about herself.

However, Lindsey must have mentioned it to Philip, because later, in the clubhouse, he pulled her aside.

“I don’t want to discourage you reaching out to other team members, but I want to get it straight that just because I seem like a meat and potatoes realist, doesn’t mean I’m not acquainted with the more metaphysical aspects of Hardworlding. Basically, don’t be shy about telling me anything. There's nothing you’re gonna go through that I haven’t already.”

Sam had suspected at the time, and still did, that he was more agitated that she had reached out to Lindsey (who he seemed to have some kind of professional rivalry with) than he let on. But still, it was nice that he cared.

The dark tunnel returned, but flame still lingered in places. It took her a second to realize her bike was on fire.

A few seconds later, it didn’t matter anyway. The central streetlights flared and fused and became a glowing familiar sun, and the leading racers froze in place and flared into those familiar starbursts and vanished with the track.

A radial display of track choices revealed themselves to her fully with dreamsense or Otherspeech or whatever it was called, and she scrolled through them mentally.

There was a serene beach track, the top of an aqueduct, a tunnel flooded with amber lights…

She knew that this time, the tracks wouldn’t be static. Those only happened once a race, to give a break. These solo segments would have some kind of challenge that she might be able to guess based on the setting.

But time is money, and she hated trying to strategize a way to game the system anyway, so she just picked one at random.

The City.

The other choices vanished, and she found herself flying down an eerily empty city street, presently being drenched in rain, reflecting a shuddering alternate world on the sleek black ground, the fire on her bike vanishing into steam. A nice touch.

It was a blend of at least three cities, none of them particularly familiar to her outside of movies or architecture magazines. There were brownstones and railway whatever’s, San Fran Victorians, bodegas and financial centers, all shaded under abstractions of the famous skyscrapers of Chicago, New York, even Beijing. There was, however, nowhere the strip malls and mixmasters of Texas, or even any of the iconic towers from either DFW or Houston metros. There never was, in dramatics like this. It made her feel all the more alien, made her memories of the Hardworlds all the more tempting.

But the streets demanded her attention. Cars slowed or pulled in front of her. Dead traffic had to be penetrated with side mirror smashing precision. The subtle underlaid ghost of the track had to be followed by sharp turns and unexpected detours down subway stairs, over pedestrian bridges, back onto street paths that rose into ramps and dove into underground tunnels in impractical, racing-game-contrived ways.

For a while, she assumed that this in itself was the challenge of this segment, until a shrill noise bounced off the close pressed concrete and glass, a sound that activated her clubhouse training, particularly the “what to do once you’ve fucked up big time” portion of Philip’s instruction.

Police sirens. Growing closer. Though these were toned and cadenced as movie music, they echoed in her memory as the real thing, and brought those memories screaming back to life.

It had been a hot Texas evening dying into a damp night, and she had no idea what the fuck she was doing…