Astral Assassin (In training)

The warm glow became a hot glare and sweat beaded across her face. Impressive, but a little unimmersive for her. If it was really her skin responding to the heat, she would have been flushed long before she broke a sweat.

The track became a wide orange desert, more Mars than Mad Max, with big metal wrecks stuck in it. No. They weren’t stuck. They were moving. Big metal pirate ships shaped like pipes with shit welded onto them roaming the desert sea. And there would be sand worms, she was sure of that.

Her bike was now more like a jetski, its front face covered in solar cells, with more next to her knees and probably at her back. There were no weapon controls that she could find, but a big button in the middle of her wheel had a diagram of what looked like a bike underwater. The dreamsense told her she was a scrap harvester trying to scoop up old fuel rods before the bigger, slower scavengers could get to them. Uh, okay? The fucking devs loved to give info through a dump that felt like it was cut out of their own fan fiction or something, which sucked because all the top racers damn sure knew this segment already so it was only newbies like Sam that had to decipher their worldbuilding bullshit.

Another bike moved across her side mirror, with a drill bit on the front of it just like hers, but open into segments like a squid mouth and glowing with plasma electricity, which seemed to be propelling it forward.

She swerved like she didn’t know how to steer then slammed the dive button when he was a few feet behind and he went right over her. The sand was dark and whooshing like an enclosed waterslide at night, and a screen she hadn’t really noticed in her dash became the only light, and pinged a cartoonish radar square.

The guy moving overhead quickly disappeared, and she realized the dots were either other racers who were also submerged or “fuel scraps”, which probably could be used to activate the electric-teeth charge-move for a short period of time.

After about five seconds of watching the screen, an alarm started screaming. Low power. Thus the solar cells. The bike was powered by the sun and could only stay under for a short time, unless she had extra fuel. So the fuel scraps had dual use.

Okay, the segment was growing on her.

She surfaced, and sure enough the guy who had tried to bite her with his drill mouth was sailing ahead, his drillbit now back to normal.

Farther ahead, two electrified bikes clashed with an awful nails-on-chalkboard screech, and somewhere behind her the signature crack of a bike’s fuel tank exploding echoed across the sand.

Closer to the horizon, a wing of pirate ships cut towards some kind of bourgeois desert cruise ship (white and gold, the colors of wealth in this track’s world) which was fluttering under a blue wavering forcefield that deflected cannon shot of some kind. Across the desert, on her left-hand side, a dark cloud of sandstorm approached, and pirate fleet and storm converged towards the central vanishing point where a dual sun smoldered like melting orange sherbert under the sandy air.

Bad ass!

She swerved around wreckage. She dove for fuel scraps. She watched the lead cars drill through what looked like little pirate bass boats and grab one shot rocket tubes out of the air. She picked one up as she passed through. She drove into the thick of the Pirate raid, now joined in by the cruise ship guards.

But her heart wasn’t in it. She didn’t even fire the rocket. Just snapped at every fuel scrap she could see and watched the carnage. Her apathy must have effected her driving, because she didn’t see another racer within striking range the entire time. As if they mistook her for a piece of scenery or something.

The track gave the option to drive through either pirate or cruise ship, but she just cut between them, where she dodged falling debris and flaming fuel by swerving instead of diving. A memory hovered out in the air like the molten sun, maybe kicked up again by the smell of smoke and burning metal, and she was sure if she went down into the quiet dark sand, it would break the surface and that would be it.

So when the battle thinned as the two great ships broke away from each other like two rocks that had struck in slow motion, and the great sandstorm rolled into view, rather than dive into the tunnels and caverns her bikes computer told her were right below the surface, she glanced at her full solar fuel tank and sped into the rolling lightning filled sandstorm, hoping the chaos inside would distract her somewhat.

It did not.

Somewhere in the warm darkness, as her solar cell counted down dramatically (though she knew with a full tank she would have just enough time to clear the sandstorm. It always worked like that) her mind floated back to the Hardworlds, but when it tried like a dog on a scent to wriggle her into memories of the last job, she swatted it towards thoughts of training, which usually worked to hold her focus, like a quiet little cave in a whirlwind. Thoughts of what she needed to do, what was expected of her, where she had come up short, always worked to overpower thoughts of what she wanted, what she felt, and who she felt about.

But something in the race had put her in a nostalgic mood, and her memories of Philip running her through the coin job mem fizzled out and his face dropped like a heavy stone down into the deep memories of their first time together, her training day.

“When you get in, pick me up here.”

He had an old Mapquest map folded up with a dusty square of the metroplex pointed at her and a bright red dot drawn on an intersection with the word “Mcdonalds” next to it. It looked absolutely bizarre next to all the perfectly formed un-blemished creations that made up the other (even the “faux-real” style constructs made to look like they had been dropped out of the Real, which had seen a resurgence starting around that time, didn’t come close), and though at the time she had thought it a gimmick, she would come to learn it was just a quirk of Philip’s Spirit, probably caused by spending his time almost exclusively in the Hardworlds.

It had been her first test. To drop in and find him. It had sounded simple, but when she woke up in that Self, she felt a vast chasm around her. There was no job-contact calling her, no assigned phone that pinged alerts to remind her of the Other or her assignment, no pre-prepared Self snugly fit into the job’s Hardworld. She was adrift, with only a vague memory of a mark on a map in a dream.

But she had done it, and that had been that.

And that had also been that for Poppy.

“I know how this goes, pretty soon you’ll be fucking him, thinking he’s going to make your little crash team into the next superteam, and then once he’s done with you, you’ll be just another brickslut!”

Sam couldn’t say anything that made a difference and it became obvious that the only way back into Poppy's arms was to turn down Philip’s offer for good.

So she left, not out of any pride or self-worth, but because she was finally convinced her nagging suspicion that Poppy never really loved her and was in fact eager to get rid of her was correct, which, looking back, she wasn’t so sure of, and though the calls and messages afterwards (ignored, in order to save Poppy from the doom of wasting any more time with her) had become increasingly angry and ranting until finally one day they stopped dead like a street gone quiet after a multi car collision, she was now just as confused about what they fuck Poppy had actually wanted or felt as she ever had been.

But Philip was about as easy to read as the bold menu signs gathering dust (or looking like it, anyway) in his floating restaurant above the clouds. He barked his feelings and his orders in the same cadence and with the same importance. And he laid out her future as he saw it like it was a simple mechanical process that they were both powerless to change even if they wanted to.

“You’re gonna be my driver,” he told her, when she met him at a table outside the dusty Mcdonalds across from a food bank. He always did that, made her meetings or training in the most unglamorous parts of the city. Even when they had trained to hit that guy who lived out of his Dallas high rise, they had run drills in a recreation of the floorplan made of taped together cubicles in an un-leased floor of a call center.

“Why can’t we just go to the actual building in a different Hardworld and train?” she had asked.

“I want you focused on the important shit.”

But, anyway, back to that first meeting over McChickens and windblown cigars…

“You’re looking at a month or so of training, till you’ve got the way we operate down, then you’ll drop into live jobs. A few more months or so of training while you shadow me on the job, then you’ll be ready to drive the rest of the team, or just yourself to scout, depending on what the job requires.”

“The team?”

“One thing at a time. First, get me to Keller in one piece.”

Then he had fired his pistol out the window at a police cruiser as they passed through an intersection, with about the same energy as if he was wiping his nose, and it had been a hell of a ride up 820.

She thought of that time, her solo training with Philip, as she always did, fondly, longingly, wishing she had done some things differently, but mostly just trying to figure out what she had done to deserve it.

She had tried, at first, to keep from asking him too many questions. Every time she started to wind one up, she felt like it was Poppy in the passenger seat ready to give one of her rambling speeches about Hardworlding in response, or to get all exasperated that Sam just wasn’t getting it.

But Philip was different. His answers were energetic barks. He took his time, answered thoughtfully and slowly, often pausing to drag on his cigar after a “hmm” that Sam quickly learned meant basically “give me one second to think on that”, even if they were in the middle of a chase or doing something completely unrelated to her question. And though he did get tripped up a few times at her overly particular and technical way of thinking, he never got mad or showed his frustration beyond a brief narrowing of the eyes that seemed more like a “how do I get through to her?” than a “why is this bitch not getting it?”, though it was Sam’s instinct to assume the latter over the former.

And if there was a long moment of quiet, or if his answer to a question seemed to land with less than understanding, he would often actually bark out loud,

“Ask me another question.”

So she did.

“Why don’t they just keep sending attackers in forever?”

“Expensive. Diminishing returns. Not every Hardworlder can get into every Hardworld.”

“How can the target stay in for days but we can't?”

“Who says we can't? And usually the VIP is put under, dropped into his Self, with a dome on his dreamworlds and all that.”

“Why isn’t every hit done with drones?”

“Mechanical shit like that is more susceptible to being pushed on by any Hardworlder worth a shit. I can put a round on a drone first time almost every time if I can see it, but when two Hardworlders get in a gunfight, its different. It’s a clash of wills.”

“Why cant they just like go into their dreamworlds, imagine a different them, then wake up in a completely different Hardworld?” (After a discussion on Doors, which Philip spoke of like a cheap exploit in his favorite game)

“Dreamworlds are the domain of the Self. They’re connected to him, made of him. You wanna swap Selfs, you gotta touch the Other. Even with a Door, you probably touch the Other for an instant.”

“Why did you hire me?”

“Because you did exactly what I told you to.”

Huh. It had seemed like no big deal at the time. What else could she have done? She had been scared out of her mind, but later he told her nine out of any ten Hardworlders wouldn’t have listened as well.

It was a simple answer. Obvious, and once received, one that left her looking for the secret she had assumed he had waiting for her.

It was all like that. Besides a few maneuvers and technical details, “wardriving” as he called it (in a tongue and cheek way, while Poppy and others had always used the terms with the utmost seriousness) seemed to mostly be about what not to think about while doing it.

“Like shooting, I want as little bullshit between your thoughts and the wheel as possible. You’ve known how to drive since you were in fucking high school. This is about moving the car like its melded to your fucking spinal column.”

There was a lot of driving the cars until they wouldn’t, seeing how far rims could take you, and which parts could take a bullet without bricking an engine. How much a four-cylinder stock Japanese sedan could actually push or drag, including other cars and even a mobile home. Lots of driving through buildings (she quickly learned just how drive-thru-able most modern American structures actually were), over curbs and even barriers if the vehicle permitted, off elevations and up slopes (driving a Honda Fit up a double escalator was an especially giggle-inducing experience), through mirror-high water, straight across a Wal Mart, produce displays and all, and that was just with personal vehicles. Once they moved on to box trucks, semis, Busses, and construction equipment and even hijacked bearcats and Armored trucks, it turned out there wasn’t a lot of places you couldn’t take a vehicle into if you didn’t give a shit about collateral or jail time or even your own ass.

All the while, Philip was right there drilling her with phrases like “Why don’t you actually give it a fucking try?” and “I can hear you telling yourself it won’t work from here. Give me something more positive to listen to.” Along with about a million other pointers and sounds of approval and wise cracks.

And when she dropped back out of the Hardworlds, for the first time she had real hard copy of the mem from inside to replay in the Other, which was a soul shocking experience at first.

It was a good time, then her training had come to an end, and she had met the team…