Part One: The Blind Sides
A chime familiar to all Zona Lobos competitors echoed through the leather seat beneath her back and bum. Tasìa knew the procedure that would follow from dozens of previous races.
The first lap of a challenge was essentially an inspection in motion.
The skellabot spoke again.
"Switch to full manual. Any assistance from your vehicle's integrated analog or AI directed cruise control will result in automatic disqualification and the forfeiture of $10,000 USD."
She did as instructed. The Zorro Azul pinged the HybrClydis to test her compliance.
"Good. Now, even up your speed to sixty miles-per-hour to be in-sync with my vehicle. I'm going to take the lead position as we ascertain whether your racer is competition capable and that you are prepared mentally and physically for the challenge."
The Zorro Azul mag-racer cut to the opposite side before it drove around and then up in front of her position.
"Increase speed to one hundred and twenty miles-per-hour in increments of ten miles-per-hour every two seconds."
The chime played low and snappy every two seconds to assist her effort. Tasìa had already shifted her mind into a meditative state to better manage her sense of time delineation and reflex control.
At the end of the twelve second test, the Zoro Azul skellabot praised her.
"Ninety-seven percent compliance accuracy. I have never seen anything like that. Your previous totals have averaged seventy-four percent which is itself a standard deviation higher than the normative distribution."
Quite a surprise, and Tasìa wasn't sure how to take it. She felt in her bones that even though she had been out of the IMCQ for going on two months she was still in a state of recovery with every day a struggle to get back to being as good as she was before she was incarcerated.
Back when she was such a precision operative, she had managed every adverse situation that came her way without any one of them resulting in a lethal outcome.
True, up to Green-eyed Elise's ambush that cost me the team, Tasìa reminded herself.
She refocused her attention, and put the uncomfortable feelings of recriminations aside. The mag-racer was quietly humming along in front of her. It needed for the two vehicles to clear a steep descending corkscrew bend before the next test that would guage her vehicle's steering for it's capacity to hold steady between repetitive performance gradients.
When they reached a stretch of straight track, the chime echoed once more, softly.
"Clip the radial center from the left, then the right, then left right several times until I say the phrase, 'at ease.'"
As she steered even she caught the little wiggle to the right. She guessed the power train above the steering wasn't absolutely centered. Tasìa doubted that it would disqualify the vehicle. She had performed in vehicles far more imbalanced than the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis.
"At ease. Now I will need one moment."
She steered rightward by five meters where the track flowed even to induce the wiggle once more. This time the oscillation jolted to the left. Same cyclical response but different location.
The tilt caused it.
The skellabot's test was conducted on even and leveled track surface. Her test was done at a seventeen degree horizontal tilt on the right ramp skewer.
Something is not entirely secured.
She should had run a systems diagnostic when she stopped at a Quick Mart a few hours earlier for a snack. It was cheap and would have taken her no more time than to perform her stretching exercises on a restroom crossbar.
The skellabot spoke once more.
"There was a pull to your right. A .023 differential from perfect stability. An exact magnitude lower than disqualification. Your software readings, however, don't quite match up. More investigation may be required to ensure it is not symptomatic of tampering but for now you are cleared.
"The challenge shall begin when you complete this lap. Get familiar with the layout. Some changes have been made since your last competition.
"Floor it to one hundred and eighty miles per hour then switch to cruise control. You have eleven minutes to reach the start."
"How many miles," she shouted above the roar of her now stressed engine, "to the start?"
"Thirty-one."
"Well then, we better get the move on."
It wasn't long before she encountered the first change up from the surface as she remembered it. The sudden downward shift in force momentum nearly flipped her car when the asphalt beneath her dipped, unexpectedly. Her muscle memory was prepared for an up turn.
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She had no choice but to stay her foot and keep the steering locked steady. Hitting the breaks or turning to absorb the impact would have damaged the rocker frames that supported the carapace.
She went airborne, leaving her gut to unclench from the state of free fall. The rumble in her stomach cascaded over and over dangerously close to her bowels letting loose until the HybrClydis' nose tipped downward and the reverse course drag caused her to upchuck in her mouth.
Careful! All of this is being live streamed. She reminded herself. Keep composed.
Tasìa kept her lips tightly sealed together as the sports car finally touched asphalt and she needed to assert control over the steering before it flipped itself.
However, she was amazed how quickly the wheels snapped back in solid alignment to the the ribs of the track. The heavy weight of the Alfa Romeo HybrClydis worked in her favor to secure its traverse balance.
The hybrid was renown for its bulked up mass. Only now did she appreciate the advantage it gave her on the track.
She grabbed her water bottle, drunk from the built in suction straw, and swallowed hard to chase the bitter chuck back down her throat.
The Modality nudged a set of thoughts in her head for her consideration.
- Take your physical presence out of it. Put your being into action.
Wow. Her own personal coach!
The Modality had been quiet for weeks now so it quite surprised her to hear the entity advise her on such a trivial matter as a race. To that notion the Modality addressed:
- It is good meditative practice for you. I will shut up when your mind is quiet. I will also remind you if your mind drifts back into noise.
At times the Modality's willful, commanding nature was disconcerting to her but Tasìa shook off the unease she felt. The Modality was quite correct in what she needed to do.
As she gained control over her breathing to slow it to a near stop, she imagined her self dissolving into static. She was the hands on the steering wheel and nothing more. Muscle memory evaporated from her reflexive actions, and no longer did it effect how she handled the track.
She could feel the improvement that the change in her mentality caused in the quality of her driving.
No matter the sharpness of a turn or the slope of a bend, she adjusted in real time with ease. With an extremely light foot on the breaks she let the vehicle crest wide once more into the side ramps.
Where she tested the oscillation several times more at different angles of tilt the differential began to form a geometric shape in her imagination.
Something. There is something I am missing.
Her growing awareness sent an alarm up her spine as she was about to grasp the answer. But before she was fully aware of where those thoughts lead the skellabot spoke into her speakers again:
"Excellent time. The morphology of the track will grow more extreme with each lap. Do you wish to bow out? You still may without invoking a penalty."
It snapped her back into the race. The passage of time caught her by surprise. She was no longer merely the hands in front of her vision.
Tasìa became fully embodied and able to answer the question.
When she considered it, she chuckled at the notion. "Fuck no."
The mag-racer pulled up beside her. Tasìa did a double take. She realized that to have been out of sight for the entire lap, it had ridden exactly and expertly in the right-side blind spot that lay off by two meters and even with the back tire.
"Then. Free up the cruise control on the count of five. Five . . . Four . . .. Three . . . Two . . . One!"
Flipping the cruise control off after the thirty-one mile run at high speed sent a surge into the HybrClydis. It rode up high, skipping like a stone across the ribbed surface of the track as it propelled her forward.
The read out showed she had hit 210 mph. The mag-racer was several lengths behind her now. It hugged the high ramp and soon she saw the tactical advantage it gave the mag-racer.
The topography of the track in the middle valley coming up switched into a terse set of zig zags meant to force her to slow down and hit the apex radial low.
That caused her to grind out for several meters. She refused to break until the last second so she could keep her lead and momentum. Though the rocker frames protested with a screeching rat-a-tat-tat as she steered into the bends, her maneuver worked.
To press her advantage even further, Tasìa shifted gears into an ultra mode that doubled battery consumption. If she succeeded, it would be a decisive move and, barring accident, secure her victory.
She floored it once more. With a quick glance at the faux back screen to check on the mag-racer. It was still at a distance from her and seemingly not made any progress to catch up in spite the route design intended to slow her down.
In fact, she was beginning to notice, that it was staying at the exact same distance behind her. Tasìa's flesh tingled with suspicion.
This can't be mere coincidence.
To test her gut instinct, Tasìa zig-zagged, decelerated, floored it again to two hundred and forty mph, and then decelerated once more to one hundred and fifty mph. The mag-racer maintained the same exact distance.
Tasìa pushed the intercom control.
"Zoro Azul are you in this race or not? Cool with me if I take your twenty-five K. I plan to do a little entertaining while I am here anyway."
The mag-racer answered back with electronic noise. It dawned on Tasìa that the electronic noise was a distress signal that the mag-racer sent out.
Is it reporting me to bounty hunters? No fucking way!
No. Not here in Vida Escondida with the Autonomous Authority running things. Though bounty hunters roamed the streets of the city like anywhere else in the Quadra, the Vida Escondida Autonomous Authority was infamous for ignoring the demands of other governing bodies.
If complying with their demands did not profit them and fucking over clientele rarely ever did the answer was to always tell them to piss off.
But something was indeed up.
The words "Challenge voided," came across the two-way intercom as the mag-racer swept to the side, and no longer followed the course. It disappeared out of her sight.
Lights swiveled from a source that hovered above the HybrClydis. The distinct hum of hover engines erupted in a roar that surrounded her.
Damn thing must be huge.
As she glance above, she could still not see it, nor the source of the swiveling lights.
Could she outrun it and get back on the highway before they sent a ground team? Her energy read-out that combined battery and fuel into one estimate for the current range of distance the HybrClydis could reach displayed two hundred and thirty seven miles as the absolute limit.
Damn. What a pisser. What else could it be but bounty hunters?
Tasìa white-knuckle clenched the steering wheel. She bore her teeth while she sneered. Thoughts of her outlaw of a great-grandfather, the very same one who blessed the family with the alias 'del Alma-Gris', came to her mind.
The name that he adapted after bearing one of the most common names in the Spanish speaking world his entire life over the generations came to be their surname.
She thought of his favorite song. As she sung her voice became a sonorous chortle higher and sharper than her natural low, smooth timbre.
"Ain't gonna be nobody's million dollar -"