005 Speed

And I'm breaking another rule! My own rule, this time. I couldn't think of a poem for speed, and I kept getting distracted by thoughts of two different books on my To Read list with 'speed' in the title. Add to that the fact I've been thinking about a character's back story lately and I somehow ended up with over 3000 words of exploration.

If there are some gaps, errors or unfinished sentences, I apologize. This isn't all or even the beginning of the story, and it hasn't been edited or fixed up, just some raw rambling, but I don't want to miss another day, so here you go. An excerpt. XP

Oh, and I was aiming for present tense with this, but I don't write that often and I think I slipped in a few places. Sorry. *sweatdrop*



The bike begins to vibrate on its own frequency, the ride smoothing out like it doesn't even feel the road -- and very soon, it won't. In approximately 10.5 seconds, she'll be at the ramp, its sharp curve ushering her onto a whole new plane, one unthinkable before the last half century. Leave it to the disaffected youth to take everything beyond the point of sanity. Skyscrapers and racing are ancient concepts, but it wasn't until the intelligrid that people had a way to combine them.

The intelligrid was the logical step for a digital society to take, covering every surface from the highest building to the simplest park sidewalk with sensors and circuits. It's designed so the city can absorb data through every pore, like the body picking up signals through the nerves of the skin. Walls can also be remotely controlled, changing between reflective and absorptive panels, holoscreens and more. Most important for racing purposes are electromagnetic tracks, designed to make maintenance a breeze. On most days, you can see little carts sliding up and down, left and right, anywhere they need to go.

Maybe if the engineers had thought a little harder, they'd have realized using the same track on both street and wall was a dangerous mistake, a temptation that someone would eventually act on. Too late. That cat's been out of its bag for a hundred years, with technique and equipment improving all the time. Even if the city spent the billions, possibly trillions of dollars to change the grid, Hetta's pretty sure racing will still find a way. A wild thing never forgets life outside its cage.

The very first wild things arrived on the scene nearly two hundred years ago. They called themselves Team Rocket, an allusion to an archaic game Hetta vaguely knew of. What she did know was Musashi and Kojiro in their white suits with red Rs on their chests, their modified Cosmos tearing along the underside of bridges, around and around cylindrical towers, even up to the Olympus Tower, highest point in the city. Hetta has watched the movies, read the books, devoured the enigmatic lives of those two renegades. They're the reason she came to these streets in the first place. Right here, in this city, they gave birth to something never before seen, something that's now spread across the globe to any intelligridded city, but it's heart will always be right here, embodied in the first headline of the Global Standard:

In Metro York, they ride vertical.

She hits the ramp, its lightweight frame as hastily constructed as the tempnet that feeds her data. It rattles and squeals as if in pain as the surface lifts and curves in a tight corkscrew that opens up on the smooth, warehouse wall. Sidewalk zips by only a few feet on her left while under her wheels, an ad flashes in gawdy colour and staticky fuzz the interferes with the tempnet readings. In seconds, she's passed it and the lines clear up in her vision. Crates and barrels fly overhead, almost close enough to reach out and knock over. This is the most claustrophobic leg of the race, the one where most first-timers lose their nerve and their balance, tumbling to the ground.

The edge of the warehouse is fifty-four seconds away. The guideline passes in a blur, and she snorts her agitation as she pulls the handlebars to the right, coaxing the bike to a ninety degree angle from the ground. Gravity pulls at her head and chest, willing her body to bend as it tugs the bike down toward the earth, but her speed is good, and the EM tracks are doing their work, attracting and tugging the bike further along. If she stays on those faint lines in her visor, she'll do alright.

Beyond the rumbling roar of bikes, she hears a squealing, clattering wreck. Somebody didn't make the transition. Its nothing but noise, a quick appraisal of the surrounding environment. She learned long ago to put emotions out of her mind, a skill that's good for more than racing. Blood pounds through her veins, carrying its adrenaline cocktail to every limb, but her mind is clear and alert. Her eyes dart around the visor, both seeing the readouts and through them to the physical world.

Wind assails her as it tears down the street. The violent rumble of the bike and the exertion required to stay upright in the seat will leave her aching for days, but now it only feels a comforting warmth. Her suit is lined with sensors, monitoring heartrate, perspiration, temperature and more. It's mostly automatic, a tiny line of symbols in the corner of the visor alerting her to every reading's status. Most of her focus remains on the terrain.

Her visor is running several feet ahead of her, working with the natural delay of her physical reactions so she sees each new thing as her body is still going through the motions for the last. Colours and symbols flash in her sight, alerting her to weaknesses in the structure, gaps and dents and protrusions that can easily send a bike careening off the surface. The tracks might hold a maintenance cart in place, but a bike is a different story. Slow down and you fail to keep the proper magnetism. If you're lucky, a quick rev will suck you back on. If you're not, then you better be the type to ride with a parachute.

A line of red lights across her vision, bringing a constant beep that warns of imminent danger. 12.8 seconds.

She tacks hard to the left, seeing the world spin, all the signs and cables and bridges, the thirty-six stories to the ground. A plume of orange and puffing black smoke reveal the fate of a wreck. She doesn't know who. She doesn't have time to care. Her body leans right, the magnetized gauntlet reaching out, adding its little bit of anti-grav pull. Still the Pantera wobbles and snarls beneath her, tires clawing for the friction that will pull them forward.

In the corner of an eye, she catches the red words 'hot wire'. Run over that, and it won't matter if the electrocution kills you because the fall most certainly will.

As her bike finds a new groove, the perfect mix of speed and angle, she lets her mind leap forward to follow the red line. It goes all the way across the building, a trap to make the game more 'interesting'. She can practically see the bets piling up. The codemonkeys must be hooting in their little boxes.

A new warning pops up. The edge of the building is near. It's a rectangular type, no curving to another side. If she can't go up, there are only two options. One of them is going back down. She won't be doing that one.
Her speed notches higher, and a mental command overrides the warning. Instead she sees wind speed, bike speed, distances and trajectories. In the last few seconds, she angles the bike to a fifty-four degree angle and flies right off the warehouse edge.

The world seems to freeze around her, light and sound in limbo while only she remains aware, breathing, sharply yanking the bike around so the wheels are ready for the landing zone. Nearly forty stories separate her from the gawking specks below. She catches a few pinprick flashes, photos being snapped as souvenirs or as bonus material, sold to the erags for big money. Hetta kind of hopes someone will miss the jump and fall on them. She hopes again that it isn't her.

The wheels thud down on the fresh wall, a minefield of solid structure and glass windows -- which don't contain EM track. Her bike is angled down, using the momentum of gravity to build her speed. Software in her helm runs the calculations, constantly presenting, erasing and re-presenting her with pathways as the bike judders down the wall.

Finally, she edges back to parallel, then begins to climb. Crisis averted. A fleeting question -- how many didn't make it? -- passes through her mind and is gone. Ten yards to her right, shooting out of a smoother landing, is Dodger, his silver bike flaring beneath the touch of the afternoon sun.

There is still a race to be won.