The pain of blending lanes

At some point, she sat down and leaned her head back and fell asleep, crashing hard from the adrenal dump. Then a Sandman came and escorted her out of the dreamworlds and back to the office, like leaving a screaming, mentally destroyed version of herself alone in a Motel 6 parking lot to deal with a ruined life this Sam had created was as natural as getting your fucking 15-minute break twice a day.

But rather than being shuffled to the paydesk and hurried out with her stub like on every other job, this time she had been brought into a side office and briefed on what apparently had been a very serious fuck up.

The Job had been a standard attack/defense gig. The target was accused of fixing a private game or gambling ring or something using some Roulette-made software, so the Counters had gotten involved and the stakes were Nine World level, with Roulette trying to get him back and a private defense team trying to bleed them dry before everyone got together at the bargaining table.

And it turned out that while the company that had hired Sam was on the attacking side, Philip hadn’t been, which meant of course that she had helped the wrong side score a goal, embarrassing Roulette and causing much downhill shit-rolling for her “employer”.

“He was on the other team for Christs sake! Didn’t you figure that out?” Some guy, apparently the observer supervisor, had yelled at her, before he got a few hushed words thrown on him like ice water by the HR lady, and stormed out of the room.

The HR lady and her assistant, who either looked like or were disguised to look like the most sympathetic middle-aged women Sam had ever seen, with voices like a miracle-working inner-city teacher reaching out to the gang member student over math problems, had explained her error and advised best practices for avoiding such a thing in the future.

“When in doubt, stay out. You’re not expected to ever take a direct part in the operations of a job. So if someone asks you to do so much as hold a gun or bring them a coffee, you should direct them to your supervisor. Only your supervisor or dispatch should be giving you orders. Understand?”

“It’s not your fault, hun. He should not have involved you, period. It’s a bare-faced disregard for engagement etiquette. Observers and support staff like Sandmen and Reapers are protected by established ethics. If everyone acted like him then the Hardworlds would be completely unsafe for people just trying to make a living.

Looking back, Sam laughed. If only Philip would have been there. She would have paid good money to see him rant and rave about how safe the Hardworlds should be, about how anyone who steps into them should be ready to bite a bullet, about how the HR ladies themselves and their company was doing more to hurt people “just trying to make a living” than any one Hardworlder ever could, and on and on. 

But at the time, their words had made a kind of sense, if their tone and vibe (so contrasted to the honest to a fault bare bones declarations Philip had bombarded her with all day) had seemed a little fake, just a little plastic, like talking to someone your pretty sure is trying to hide the fact that they really have to piss. 

So she had kept her job, for a while, played along like she was into it and looking to move up, a façade which was mirrored in her repeated evasions of Poppy’s prodding into her memory of her “day with a real Hardworlder”.

“I don’t know, like, I just drove him around. He was really quiet and I was too scared to think. Then I stopped one time and he was gone and I like passed out.”

At the time, her memory of the job was hazy enough to warrant this summarization, but there was something else. Maybe it had something to do with Poppy’s known jealousy, but mostly it was what the job had shown her. That there was something out there she wanted. Something besides Arthel roleplays and fantasy sims. Something besides Poppy. And Sam knew how she would react to that. 

So the topic had run dry and fell away, and Poppy was too busy spending all the new mem and playing all the new worlds to care, but for Sam the memories nestled and grew, the feelings took root and spread, and the secret of them wedged like a seed stuck between her teeth, splitting the two of them apart.

Her Hardworlding days continued, now consisting only of observing and talking into a radio and waiting, stupidly, even looking in her mirrors and in the stature and stride of the few combatants she caught glimpses of, for the return of someone she could reach out and call anytime, until one day, she did.

Her mind snapped back to the present as the track dropped down into a dark tunnel where only well-spaced bursts of amber lit her way and she had to guess the track between them, and the memories left her. She had been dodging the phantom cops without thinking, navigating the city streets without issue, and now even the mini game of connect the dots in the dark was too easy. She needed something more taxing if she was going to keep from thinking about…

Water splashed her windshield from some puddle or maybe from an invisible stream of rainwater pouring down from the city above (if the track was capable of such continuity) and she saw him in the passenger seat with that smile that made his eyes burst out in crows feet and made her feel like he had somehow found out everything there was to know about her.

The lights melted out in the dark distance, becoming molten amber drips that blended and swirled into a glowing portal, and she was no longer driving, but falling.

Then her bike landed, hard, and she had to wrench the handles to keep it from spinning out, and the sci-fi city, which had a name that stuck in her head about as well as one of those passwords with all the alternate caps and symbols, exploded all around her as the track returned.

She immediately checked her position. Sixth. God fucking dammit! What was the point of the private tracks if the same four mother fuckers (though now joined by some fifth asshole) kept the lead the entire god damned time?

The mega highway had been trimmed down to a five-lane flat track that immediately sparked into gunplay. She saw number five cut towards her. Fuck you bitch. No solidarity, huh?

She slid her bike sideways under a lumbering maintenance car that looked like a shipping container hovering over the track, and number 5’s rounds cracked somewhere unseen. 

Oh, this place.

It was a repair depot, supposedly. She had only seen it on rotation once. The fan favorite, the painfully barren Palace Grounds, which had once been an ultra-rare event, now appeared more often than even the fucking space elevator, while Sam’s favorite, the underground test facility where aliens would latch on to the riders granting random power-ups like x-ray vision or acid spit, barely got any play lest the fans bitch about “RNG” like a bunch of fucking babies.

She revved her engine, then pressed the break. Rather than shoot out in front of the box car, the way number 5 probably expected her to, she dropped back behind it the way she had come just moments before, and sure enough number five had his gun arm outstretched, aimed just ahead of the maintenance car.

She emptied her mag into him and he fell and rolled in a shower of sparks. With her bolt locked backward, she reached down for a new mag, and found nothing.

What the fuck? 

It took a few moments. Frantic moments, during which she scanned the depot (which was like a train yard combined with a far future distribution center, reflected against itself and wrapped in a tube) and enjoyed, on some distant level, that her thoughts were finally flushed out of her head.

She saw the lead racers moving strangely, all zig zags and double fakes, instead of their normal swanlike-sliding into the win like a key into a lock bullshit, but nothing happened for a few confusing seconds, and then,

Thundering gunfire behind her, low rpm like an automatic grenade launcher or maybe an Ultimax 100. The first bursts must have gone short, but the next one sailed over her shoulder, big chunky glowing bits of whatever they used instead of lead or tungsten in the year 3000, and tore up the road ahead of her in a rough line of fire and dust.

She glanced at the rearview fast enough to see the muzzle flash on the front of a pursuing bike, then went searching with her hands for her own trigger. There. Two levers, like the breaks on a mountain bike, just far enough ahead of the throttle/break handles that she had to awkwardly reach out an index finger to activate them.

She barely had time to wonder if big handed racers had the advantage here, or if like the distance was proportional so everyone had to do the same annoying stretch/point thing, before another burst screamed past her, actually bisecting her evasive slide and tearing half of her windshield to pieces.

Shit!

She swerved towards a rising conveyor belt and maxed the throttle, knowing her attacker could only track her across a horizontal axis, and the stream of tracers followed her across the plane. 

She made it onto the conveyor and her speed died instantly (the fucking thing was really made of those rolling cylinders) until she got traction again and shot up the belt with a squeal just as the bottom of the belt got torn to bits by her attacker's cannons. An instant later she was climbing toward some other layer of the honeycombed depot and the pursuing bike grumbled by beneath her, his barrels still smoking.

Despite the cluttered appearance, the depot wasn’t all that different from other portions of the track. It was a tube that could be traversed across any portion by g-forces, and shit basically rolled downhill. As she sped across a plain covered in rows of stalks that looked like those old speaker arms people would park next to for a drive-in movie, burning debris fell out in the center of the space, where the lead racers dropped wrecks and runner-ups from above.

To make sure she had the controls down, she fired her cannons at one of the speaker-arms and it went up in a massive fireball that set off flashing alarms everywhere. She drove through the black smoke and it gushed over her broken windshield and packed around her helmet for a few seconds of pure silence and nothingness, and when she came out on the other side she realized something.

She was sick of this fucking race. The fake danger. The cliquish “pros”. The absolute absence of alien powers generated at random. The fucking fans who would be sure to pester and post about every other thing she did today especially if it resulted (in their minds) in the poor or non-first-place performance of their favorite racer. Then the few fans who had decided that she was their favorite, actually, and then spoke to her or wrote to her in gushing tones that somehow always communicated that they were doing some brave unexpected act of charity by rooting for her instead of the real stars, and of course she always felt that their expected reward for doing so was some quality time with her body. 

She had been fine staying in the unpaid casual circuit, the “free swim” let loose on the race tracks between major events, but either because she had won too much or because a lot of her tactics (which were really just knee-jerk reactions) differed from the “meta”, they kept pestering her to race “comp”, and when she had mentioned it offhandedly to the twins, Nova had said that Michael encouraged them to flesh out their “spirit selfs”, their Otherworld non-Hardworlder identity, by finding some kind of employment or passion or even faux addiction, either to cement the believability of their alias or just to give them something to counterweight the powerful pull of the Hardworlds.

So, going comp became like a special assignment from her boss in her mind, and propelled by her desire to not let him down, she fell into this bullshit. Ironically, after she had run her first comp race, all the pressure to advance vanished, and people mostly ignored her. Which was nice. Maybe half the reason she had stayed in was the fear that if she dropped back down into casual play the pestering agents would crawl back out of the woodwork.

The linear carwash space she had been flying through abruptly ended (soap jet blown off her helmet and everything) and she found herself sliding down a wide conveyer toward the bottom of the track. While the dull white noise of the sprayers and mops had lulled her into a nostalgic flashback, now the noise of the race returned in full. 

The bike-cannons boomed and their echoes were broken by the splayed levels and walls that made the tubular depot look like the inside of a SlapChop™ used to destroy a flash drive. Engine roars came back like poorly heard dreamnoise. Some fake machines clanked with a deep underwater rumble that reminded her of her apartment near the trainyard. All the sounds were distant. The fizzling cluster of lead racers had passed her by. A quick check told her she was now 9th.

Fine. Whatever. Maybe the twins would be done with “Mike’s forced time off” as they had called it, and she could go back into the clubhouse. But what if he—

She squeezed the throttle and nearly spun out of her turn. Down on the bottom of the tube, trailers hauled wrecked future cars and moved at lazy speeds and she guessed the designers wanted you up on the sides and the roof, where any substantial drop in speed could send you falling. 

Her thoughts and an engine hum drew her eyes upward.

The cluttered depot had cleared out a bit on this portion, and she watched, unobscured, as five bikes drifted around the roof, their cannons going off at gentle intervals if at all. She knew there would be discussion about it, and some would say that they intentionally avoid “wiping out” the lead racers until the last lap because the “respawn rubber band” or whatever the fuck could help them make up the difference unless you dropped them at the last second, which completely ignored the fact that the fallen racers would have to make it past their competitors in places 15 through 5, which said argument took as a given, which really pissed her off.

So, without much thought beyond an angry impulse, she popped the clutch.

Every racer had the option of choosing an automatic transmission, but doing so applied a few minor debuffs to the bike. Despite this, most of the top racers used automatic just to free their hands for weapons/power-up operation, but Sam liked the added layer of intimacy it added, and she had learned to ride mostly in the Hardworlds on Lindsey’s bike, which is also where she learned to wheelie.

Her front wheel rose up and silhouetted her cannon barrels against the oncoming blur at the center of the tubular space, the portal to the next segment. She fired and everything was muzzle flash without the cover of her windshield frame, then a stream of tracers bisected the dark tunnel and struck the ceiling ten yards from the lead racers.

Immediately, their relaxed saber smooth curved trajectories got all fucked up and one of them even squealed on the brakes. Sam laughed out loud, the noise just as disjointed from the atmosphere of the track (dramatic crescendo building towards something new as the Depot terrain thinned out and revealed the next portal, with some music to match, cheesy ass fucking devs) as the sight of her tracers clashing with the muted almost candlelit amber in the darkness of the rest of it.

She walked her fire instinctively. The cannons were probably based on Browning 50 cal mem, one of which Philip had let her run wild with on the clubhouse as a reward, and the memory of which was burned extra vividly in her mind. The Hardworlds are weird like that, selective in what they let you keep. 

A second into her wheelie, her stream of fire caught two of the lead racers right through the center in a single sweep and they dropped from the ceiling in ruffling ribbons of fire and smoke. Beautiful!

The rest shit themselves and started evasive maneuvers. She chased them with her fire like a kid with a magnifying glass torturing ants, up on one wheel all the way. 

The burning wrecks of the fallen riders struck the road ahead of her, but she kept her wheel up till the last second, and another racer spun out and lost traction on the roof.

She set the wheel down mere yards before the burning roadblock and swerved around it, again flying through solid smoke.

When she came out, the track was already melting, and the third falling racer turned swiftly into a dot of light.

Lucky son of a bitch. Next time, mother fucker.

The warm glow of the next portion bloomed in the darkness, and she was firmly in 7th place.