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 pnes of glowing naal under an inkbck sky. The track shot her and a few other racers out of the subterranean darkness and onto ah 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 panitil she saw a racer ahead of her gun doless 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 fsh, and cut right into the ne 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 fabrid gore and his bike snapped sideways like he had struck a wire and then spun out across the road spraying fuel then fme and zipped by her exploding somewhere far behind.

  There was definitely some carry over from Gu 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 ne.

  Gunfire faded behind her, creating a moment of white noise sci-fi ambiehat made her feel she had the erack to herself again, until more automatic bursts echoed towards her from above aher side.

  A quice firmed that her track was heading for a dark rendezvous with seven hth-pipes as they all merged into a siunnel like the pstic g of a shotgun shell ref itself. The dark arms closed in on her in her peripherals, fshing gunfire and explosions and shedding fragments of vehicles. In a few short seds, the transition was plete, and she was flying down a tunnel, lit by rods of neon floating at the ter. 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 “yered difficulty”, or something. The first yer was, of course, the race, getting ahead of the other racers. The sed, which Sam had retly used to her advantage, was the difficulty of aiming a mae 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 anythiroyed on the “ceiling” of the tube would fall on those below. And finally (or maybe not) was the variance of speed iuhose otom, (maybe to pensate for dealing with falling burnial, 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 ying all this out and having a good chuckle and gratuting themselves and all that shit, but in practice those four or five yers really just ended melding up into two siderations:

  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 brilliand 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 e was) that went skidding then rolling down the sloped sides in an awesome boung path of destru, a car crash given a new dimension, and kicked up m-doll Rube Goldberg bullshit that, in one case, was just a quarter of the pipe short of making a full rotation.

  The lights, muzzle bsts aracers 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, bring theater speaker sounds of vehicles grinding past or the skip stone echoes of gunfire and gss break car crash pop of collisions and the bass boosted explosions, were all very cool and very distrag, but once you’ve been in real car crashes and seehings e 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 ter of the bottom of the pipe. Or maybe she was just stupid. That was always a possibility.

  A se of a future tahe size of her apartment bounced off the road and she did a kind of sideways slide through the resulting gap u, aiming her bike for a few seds right at the scrap-metal occupied impact zone whily opened up into barren shadowed highway about a of a sed 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, ser fire flickered and all that, but the bottom ter ne was mostly lonely. Maybe that was another reason she had taken the risk. Rag against people was fuing them was fun. Sometimes eveien by them was fun. But a lot of times she got the feeling there was a whole other level of game going oh the track, the kind of game she had never been good at.

  The popurity game.

  She had seen racers pass others who they obviously could have taken out, let others pass just as ufully, and seen others chase down racers with a persistence b 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 refereo 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 tender, 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 floatier tubelight and showered her with sparks) and three massive cargo wrecks, and now hopped the ne 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 beh her. She nded 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, uo drop any vehicle down on her now, but off in her peripherals she saw a couple of lights oher side break off and swerve down the sides of the tube.

  She waited. Her mind was a siohoughtless, 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 t their pistols around, limiting his movement and making them seem stationary by parison 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 sed ter 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 uter bus in the ter ne. She whipped the bike back to the right, then tapped the brakes a few feet from the bus, snapped her gun hand around, ahe barrel graze the side windows as she passed.

  The instant the bus cleared she saw three other riders ing down the sloping pipe just behind her. She got the first one, just one ne 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 smmed the brakes.

  The rolling wreck of the first rider sed 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 burhrough the rest of her magazine caught them both like a tripwire made of tracer rounds, the drastic spread of the on w fully in her favor.

  She accelerated again and bounced her bike up. The mae pistol, its breeow locked open and smoking, (which she thought odd for a ser 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 ya up to her chest where a new mag slid home out of the satchel.

  She felt pretty bad ass, until she saw fhts speeding ahead of her dowop of the track pipe. Fhts 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 ao rear end it and go sailing up and sideways. She had to slide into the right o avoid it and got doused in fuel and gss. No sooner had she righted herself than a big tanker went sideways. In the real world, which to her was the Hardworlds, imes out of ten a taruck was hauling milk or soybean oil or something, but iion move nd of the race track, she k had to be fuel.

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

  She she gun forward and fired a single burst, which was all it took. The tanker went up in a dome ht fire that ballooned into a darkening cloud. She slid as far left as she could before smashing through the wall of fme, which because of the tanker’s previous speed was not an isoted point orack but a deep el that took her lohan 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 beeant 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 mentiohem 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), iypical “say whatever ihought that pops into your head” way that Sam hated about herself.

  However, Lindsey must have mentio to Philip, because ter, in the clubhouse, he pulled her aside.

  “I don’t want to disce you reag 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 yonna gh that I haven’t already.”

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

  The dark tunnel returned, but fme still lingered in pces. It took her a sed to realize her bike was on fire.

  A few seds ter, it didn’t matter anyway. The tral streetlights fred and fused and became a glowing familiar sun, and the leading racers froze in pd fred into those familiar starbursts and vanished with the track.

  A radial dispy 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 khat 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 challehat she might be able to guess based oting.

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

  The City.

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

  It was a blend of at least three cities, none of them particurly familiar to her outside of movies or architecture magazihere were brownstones and railway whatever’s, San Fran Victorians, bodegas and financial ters, all shaded under abstras of the famous skyscrapers of Chicago, New York, even Beijing. There was, however, he strip malls and mixmasters of Texas, or even any of the iic towers from either DFW or Houstoros. 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 peed with side mirror smashing precision. The subtle underid ghost of the track had to be followed by sharp turns and ued detours down subway stairs, over pedestrian bridges, bato street paths that rose into ramps and dove into underground tunnels in impractical, rag-game-trived 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 crete and gss, a sound that activated her clubhouse training, particurly the “what to do once you’ve fucked up big time” portion of Philip’s instru.

  Police sirens. Growing closer. Though these were toned and ced 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…

  For some, the only home is the Hardworlds. ime, we'll meet two of them. Episode, Otherlives.