The highways were alive tonight. Reds, golds, and yellows, headlights from other cars, zoomed by us, caught up and then fell behind. Around, through, beside. We squeezed between lanes with smooth speed. Meanwhile, the Convert’s shell was polished by a dull roaring slipstream as we wove through traffic.

The Super 88. It ran the length of the megapolis, above it sometimes, other times far beneath it, circling the entire city.

On one side of the maxway, storm clouds rumbled over Lake Trimond. Its salty waters were black in the night, and tumultuous waves belted the shorelines.

On the other side were the LowDowns, lights like tiny stars in rows and rows, not outwards, but upwards, shining brightly up, and up, and up. And far off to the east, where the road seemingly pointed, was Midtown whose impossible skyscrapers dwarfed Lowdown’s.

They were giant monoliths, white slabs of concrete and glass, standing ominous, lit well by their own light and the massive spotlights that always shined up at them. They were beacons: for business people, investors, nine-to-fivers, and stock traders, all people born to make the numbers go up.

Meanwhile, we starved below. They ate at fancy restaurants and slept in five-star hotels, laid with the best partners, were friends with the prettiest people, and drank clean water. A part of me yearned for that, and a part despised it.

Still, despite all its grandeur, laid beyond it was a sight even rarer for people like us. They called it Hightower, the Heights, or the Business Center. We called it Golden Heights, as well as a slew of other unsavory names. It shined gold in the night, all lit up with yellow lights, buildings the size of real mountains– no, even taller. They towered over each other and merged together in unfathomable masses of stone and steel. Some even touched the clouds.

If I was lucky, I’d catch a glimpse of it at night, that golden aura burning in the dark over MidCity. But only from my palace in WarZone. It was the only place tall enough to see past the heads of Midcity.

Some nights I stared at it for hours, wondering what life was like there. Did they live in complete decadence? Golden rooms with lavish furniture and servants to serve their whims? Or was it the only place to live a semi-normal life? That was hard to imagine under all that stone and steel. Maybe it was better not knowing.

The windshield shimmered under streetlights, slick with acid rain. The corrosive water trailed harmlessly over the glass like bright comets, buzzing under the glow of passing streetlamps. The engine growled beneath us. It felt good. This felt like home.

“Man, what a rush. It’s been a while since I’ve done something like this,” Mackie started. “You don’t know this, but I used to ride with V and his boys in their street races. We’d do this once a week back then.”

“I knew,” I said simply. I didn’t know V well, but I knew how it ended for him.

“Oh yeah? Huh.” He looked out at the road, watching the cars pass by with mild enthusiasm. But there was something else in his eyes… something I hadn’t seen in a while. “Yeah, those were fun times. Reminded me of when you used to race… of when we used to ride these highways all night.” He didn’t ask if I remembered that. He knew I did.

“Yeah. You were fast, Sleeper, and good. But they were better. You should’ve seen em, what they could do with a car.” Mackie lived in his memory for a moment, the rain tapping on the window in the silence, before saying, “Yeah… but it wasn’t the same. I miss those days… back when I was your girl.”

I didn’t say anything to that. I was sure he was fucking with me. He always did about back then.

In those days, Mackie was a woman. Went by the name Mackenzie… That was before all of his new implants, prosthetics, and cybernetics. Mackie was six-four now, almost two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle and metal. Back then, he weighed one hundred and forty pounds, a petite young woman, healthy besides all of the chems in her system.

At the heart of it, who knew what Mackie really was. Before Mackenzie, he told me he called himself M, and claimed to be from the slums just like me. He said he was M for a while. Then, piece by piece, somewhere along the line he became Mackenzie. Wouldn’t say much more than that about it.

I can’t tell you how easy the transformation is, but Mackie was always looking for something new, I guess. One part led to another and then you were a whole different person.

Though, Mackie was right about one thing. We used to ride Super88 all night together, all the way around the city back when we were half a decade younger or so. But get one thing straight. He was never my girl.

…yeah. Like some others, I was with her a time or two, something Mackie never lets me forget, but you have to understand, when you’re with someone for that long… it’s not like… things happen.

Just forget it. It’s not something I want to talk about.

The car rumbled beneath us, wheels slippery with rain and murky road water. Mist exploded in splotchy clouds as we sped through puddles and the whole car shifted for a split second like it was floating midair. One by one, tunnel lights ran by, drip feeding us light.

Mackenzie was curled in the passenger seat, her legs kicked up on the dashboard. Her bare toes pressed against the windshield. The chill of the glass felt good. White light pulsed over purple toenails.

Headlights passed by, fading behind us where a hundred of them coalesced, mixed, and separated without reason or pattern in the rear windshield. The traffic in the city was ludicrous, a dead stop for hours sometimes, but out here there was a sense of beauty to it. I could almost feel the streets beneath me, sense the rumbling engines of the vehicles nearby. And shifting gears was as natural as breathing.

My CX-15 was perfect. Sleek, black, with onboard computers sensing pressures to a millionth of a degree, calculating speed modifiers… whatever a racer needed, it had. Sure the inside was a bit worse for wear, but who cares when it could turn a corner at sixty and push down the street at 90 in two seconds flat.

The tunnel ended and we broke out onto the Super88 mainway, a superhighway with ten lanes going both directions. I could really test my speed here. Pressing the pedal made the CX growl.

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We were high above Lowdowns now, raised above the rabble and the chaos of the streets. Midcity would pass right by us in less than a few minutes, the buildings there dwarfing everything nearby.

Mackenzie loved Midcity. The lights. The fantasy.

She leaned over my seat to look out the window, like she usually did, watching all the giant buildings pass by like lumbering mountains. Her eyes desperately tried to capture glimpses through far off windows, sneaking images of how the other half lived.

Mackenzie’s perfume was pleasant, a synthetic flowery smell. It was rare for Mackenzie to wear flowery smells, she was too tough, but she always smelled nice when we went out driving.

This close to me, I could feel heat radiating from her soft skin like an engine running hot. My head said, ‘don’t touch.’ Goosebumps prickled up my arms and down my neck.

Purple lipstick and shiny black hair, cut messy. It almost shined purple in the light. The ends brushed against my arm and face, sending a warm current into my gut. A sigh crawled out from my lungs but I did my best to hide it. This was a game she liked playing. And I resisted without word… at first.

Tattoos covered her slender arm: a black dragon chasing a black rabbit. She’d gotten it one night in a bad part of Lowdown, dragging me along after a drunk evening in some slum bar. She told me it symbolized our lives. I’m not sure how. Maybe that we were chasing a dream… or being chased by one.

Her other arm was already mechanized by then. But I can’t remember how she’d lost it, if she even did. The robotics shimmered in the headlights of passing cars.

A ball of heat was burning me up inside, making me fidget in my seat. I couldn’t take it. Her face was so close to me... I refused to look at her but I could feel her eyes on me instead of Midtown. Resisting the urge to check, my gaze stayed locked on the street ahead.

That didn’t last long. Finally, I broke and glanced over, my foot tenderly releasing the gas pedal. Mackenzie was looking at me, her stare hot enough to melt iron.

But I didn’t see her eyes. Instead, my gaze fell on her lips. Glossy. Tantalizing. She knew I wanted them against mine… even if I pretended I didn’t.

Softly, she put a hand on the wheel and steered us towards the side of the road. A part of me wanted to resist, to yank the wheel back on course, but... she looked too good.

In a black tank top, she flaunted midriff, showing a perfect cut of slender midsection and healthy muscle, and her shoulders were round, slender, and perfectly designed. I’d gone crazy all day seeing that much skin.

After all, Mackenzie was sculpted by a skilled designer’s hands. What could I do?

I slowed the car down, coming to a stop on the side of the street. Cars blasting by shook the CX with windy rhythmic pulses.

A residual resistance lingered as she leaned in. This was Mackenzie, not the Lowdowns chick she pretended to be. This was wrong. But without protest her legs crossed over my hips and she sat on me in the driver’s seat. Meeting those black eyes, feeling that warm soft body against mine, any resistance from me was thoroughly silenced.

The first kiss was always the best. There was something in it, a longing passion, a sense of wrong, something I couldn’t explain. By the second and third, though, she wasn't the Mackenzie I knew. She was just Mackenzie.

Mackenzie was much older than me. I don’t know by how much exactly. Could’ve been thirty years, could’ve been fifty. For all I knew, she could be a hundred years old.

But that didn’t matter. With all her new hardware, the genetic alterations, and chemical enhancements, her age had been erased. So too, whoever she’d been before.

We met countless years ago now, back in a body mod parlor on the border between LowDowns and WarZone. I was young, 19, barely a man when I walked through the front door on a job. We locked eyes and with that cruel smile of hers, she eyed me up and down like prey. The first words she ever said to me were, “I think you’re in the wrong place, pretty boy.”

But that was a long time ago. Since then we’d ascended the underground together. Starting off as scummers in WarZone, we ripped off small-time corpo land developers trying to reclaim Warzone, stole from humanitarian efforts, back before they gave up on us, and robbed police cars for stuff to sell, and for fun. Many nights our hungry bellies kept us up, but we’d tell stories to occupy the time.

A shit-mouthed bitch and a weather worn punk ... Seems like two different people's memories. Mackenzie was someone else now… So was I.

No longer a starving kid from the slums, I was now a small-time player in the underworld, a gun toter, a racer with a chip on my shoulder. I had a rep, and money.

Me and Mackenzie had been together so long that I don't remember life without her. But she was changing all the time. These days, she was a lot quieter. A lot less wild and reckless. She still had bouts of suicidal adrenaline chasing, but it was nothing compared to when I met her. It was like she was… I don’t know, more relaxed.

Add that to the constant modifications she added to herself and she was someone slightly different every day. I used to resent her for that. But now I realize so am I.

In the slums of Warzone, you live a hundred different lives. A piece of you was lost no matter what you did or who you were. Eventually, you lose so much of yourself you become someone else..

..Maybe we weren’t so different after all.

Who was I then? What was left of me that was still me? Was there something that stayed behind no matter what changed? Mackenzie was proof that wasn't true...

There was nothing left of M in that woman. Not her face, or body... shit, not even her thoughts. She still acted like she was young, without a clue as to how the world worked or where to go in it. Others got old. But she didn’t. There was no slowing down with her, no signs of stopping. But I guess that makes sense.

How do you age when you can just take the old piece out? Mackenzie, or M, or whoever the hell this person was, they’d be someone different tomorrow. Could she live forever that way? Would she?

Something told me yes.

I held her in my arms in the passenger seat, her cold metallic arm cooling me against the heat of our naked bodies together. Who was she? I brushed her hair away from her face and just for a moment, I saw someone different, I saw the Mackenzie she was trying to be. Fast asleep, it looked as if peace had finally found her.

The rain tapped against the window like a cruel finger, reminding me of my shame. Disgust set in my stomach like poisonous bile.

Her mannerisms were all new, along with her face, even her body. But she wasn’t Mackenzie from LowDowns. She was Mackenzie the killer, the WarZoner street rat, a stranger, a liar in sheep’s flesh. No matter how many times she changed she couldn’t change that fact. She couldn’t change the world’s memories. Only trick it for a brief moment.

I shook her awake. A warm hand slipped up to my neck and she pressed her cheek against my chest.

“No,” she whispered, still asleep. The feminine sound of her voice almost made me change my mind.

“Get up. Let’s go… Come on. Get off me.” She sat up, wiping her eyes, dazed. I scooted her off my lap harshly and switched seats. As I started my car up again, Mackenzie rolled up into a ball in the passenger seat, grabbing my coat from the back. She covered herself and watched out the window as I saddled back onto the maxway.

We didn’t have to worry about pregnancy. Whether she had the right parts before or not didn’t matter. Full body modification killed those organs and there was no product that could simulate them. That was something biology still had over us, I guess. It was the one thing the corpo’s couldn’t figure out– the one thing they couldn't manufacture: human life.

“Hey, Sleeper,” Mackenzie asked, staring out the window as the maxway roared by.

“Yeah?”

“Are you afraid of dying?”