Running oiness

  The road curved upward into the loop and G-forces pressed her hard into the bike seat from her colr boo her hips. Her knees found their spongy shelves as her feet worked the pedals ahighs 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 ieeth and the roar bsted 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 st of a hundred between her and the top slot, dodged around imaginary traffid space opera police cruisers. Two of them were girls shoved into tex 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 fsh of fire drew her attention, finally. The bikes were all equipped with lightsaber like bdes on this segment and one of the leaders had swiped an auto-semi whiow went sideways and rolled fming right towards Sam. She leao the left and grinded her glowbde 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 millised ter she again and passiween two magized 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 gourday broke open and bled out all arouheraapped bato focus as she throttled between two nes and the starship clogged sky rolled alongside the scooped edge of the highway.

  Three of them, above her eyeline because of the loop. Lightbded 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 csh around them like fug water while she scraped the side of a van thing and tried tain 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 sm auto-semi pleting 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 pying out on the s. 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 st sed, a pune to the joke she had been unwittingly telling every time she had swerved around a car on this God damned fug 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 wred 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 bot even the light of her bdes. 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 o. e horizon with a whisp of sun like a chegine light. The whole world a t 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. Mae gun fire as streams of tracers shot up from the battleships and a floissiles 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 fsh that showered her with metal sparks with a sound like a sparkler firework and she fired at the racers ahead of her, uselessly. Aream of rounds passed by over her head from behind, and she found a switder the trigger that gave her a HUD of a rear fag 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 ohe 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 switd 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 fk 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 ouch. A few breaths of reflexive fire and near misses ter, the track had returned, and she was nearing the end of the dive.

  An arm bred suddenly in the dash, a red pstic square with a cartoonish bomb symbol, teardrop with box fins and everything, silhouetted in scratched bck. She almost smacked it in reflex, but held off and waited for just before the clear track curved up ahead of her, thehe bomb drop.

  As she rose out of the dive, mae gun fire and explosions and harsh metal sounds all around, the ship exploded behind her, ung her forward orack like boost item in an arcade racer, and the noise of war faded. As the bck sky lost its stars, some lights remaihe lead racers.

  She pushed the throttle and focused, clearing all thoughts. That was the tri 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 ce, and no one would want to watch—

  Shut Up! The track! The Track!

  --

  Just as the hts regaiheir bike silhouettes, the sky exploded in a radial manda thing.

  ht.

  The rough transtion of the traame, or the name for this type of track, was “bursting flowers”. It had been ied by some Korean guy roup like ten years ago. Though randomized tracks were nothing new back then, and even its modurity with the sable and upgradable segments had been done before, the “flowers” that gave it it’s name were bold enough to unch it into a full blown fad.

  Or maybe it just had a cool name. Maybe other tracks had done something simir and eveer 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 predig 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 bsting off.

  Eight slices of sery rotated around a tral point of light. A dark cityscape. Dripping sewer. Dreamcore pstinels 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 pce before her and her bike e on its own. It was like that sometimes and you just had to go with it. She told herself that you wao find the slice that felt right that day so it could more easily fade to background noise and anyway the quicker you chose ohe 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 o 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 us success. There was some uainty about whether or not the fans would care to see the racers rag not against each other but against personalized tracks, but the addition of head hopping pov view had si. She tried not to think about who if anyone was watg 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 weled her, by the way the feel of the road and ft massiveness of the sky reminded her of the Hardworlds, of the team, and of—

  No. o 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 automatid there was nothing to kick her mind away from the thoughts now buzzing just out of sight like bees in a Six Fgs trash . Rather than try and stoically clear her mind she promised and pointed her thoughts at what was directly around her, just outside the track, beyond the false projes, and ran through it, checklist style.

  Refles. A backwater resort, barely ging to it’s RWA lise. 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 sts that had died not so much from the off brand ing supplies as just withering uhe multi week spaween bookings, turning tomblike rather than vanishing, but sihis was the Other and all, there were no lingering smells or even smudges on the e or hamfisted mirror everything that gave the pce its name or at least tried to justify it, no flickering iy sized sign that floated in the bck or its refracted sisters brang off from it, the refleg 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 pstic 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 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 boun 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 ers, went in the peripheral pces, like she often did on her way to get her check from the office or watch repys in the camera room (these mother fuckers wouldn’t send anything but the streams over the speaker. Like anyone would try and scrape this pce).

  But mostly, it showed its age in the people. The way they walked, not like guests expl or hurrying to take in the sights before their tickets expired (she hadn’t seen aake in” anything here ever), but like NP a set path or stuff pced on a check out veyer belt, like they khe 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 g 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 sed 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 pert of it, the “good parts”, like the st bit of bodywash in a bottle that you couldn’t turn the right way to get pletely empty.

  And maybe most of all, the way they looked at any new visitor like lions watg 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 pce because it’s what they knew, because it was the only pce they had ever been seen, she was here to be invisible. They were trying to remember, she was trying tet.

  But it hadn’t worked yet.

  For Sam, driving takes the mind away from... other things. What's your favorite way to escape yourself, and what do you do if it fails you? ime, let it all out. Episode, Heart on the Asphalt.