My eyes are full of lignocaine. Underlids count off the seconds. I tense my arse and spool the revcounter into the red, just out of my line of focus. I pop the clench plate into my mouth and bite down. The throttle glows green. I blink. The visor snaps down. It’s made of kevlar. A projector micropored to my head beams eight external views onto the inner surface of the visor then settles for center-forward.
Eight seconds.
At -7.2 the car handshakes the processor behind my lumbar jack. Point nought nought one seconds into the race the handshake is complete and all this touch-and-blink gear takes second place to Achebi’s direct-feed wizardry.
Four seconds.
I smile a special smile. Engine status icons mesh and flow behind my eyes.
Zero.
I’m in a different place. A green hillside. Rock-strewn fields and olive trees, the way it was. The track is a smooth black nothing under my wheels, swirling round the hill. I follow it with cybernetic eyes. Gentry in the Ferrari is a blue icon on my near side. He cuts me up on the first corner. I’ll use him as a pacemaker. I’m so far ahead of the league table I’d be happy to let him win. But if I don’t pass the post first, then Catharine’s meme-bomb sits in me, waiting for the next victory. It only triggers if I’m race champion.
A sick fascination is driving me. That and a hope that the Programme’s attack on the machismo-oriented Grand Prix might dovetail with my own wish for vengeance on Maureen Havers.
My tires are the sort that go soft and adhesive in the heat of acceleration. I have five laps’ advantage over the opposition, five laps glued to the road, before they lose their tack and I slip into something more hard-wearing.
There’s the sea—a grey graphic nothing. My eyes spool white prediction curves and hazard warnings. I take Gentry on the skid in a maneuver that shortens my tire life by a lap. I feel the difference, the loss of traction. I’m picking up sensory information from every stressed member of the vehicle, directly, through my spine. I am the car—and the car is feeling queasy. At the pit robots tend me, probing and swapping and inflating the things that make up this surrogate body of mine. My wheels feel tight and warm again, hugged near to buckling by fresh, high-pressure tires.
I scream away from the pit. The Longines people send me a stop time and ETF. It flashes on my underlid for half a second and disappears. They’re counting me down for the World Record—a special etherlink tells me how I’m doing.
The real danger now is the back-markers don’t have the decency to pull in for me. They do not like me: Havers and Achebi have made me far too good. With me around, no one else can hope to get near the championship.
By next season, I reckon FISA will rule against my kind of driving for the good of the sport. Then I’m back to clench plate and dataskin and honest dangerous driving. And in another twenty years Formula Zero will have accreted its own four-inch-thick Yellow Book and the whole process will start over again. A new breed of Formula Libre.
From São Paulo, maybe.
My shoulder blades itch. There’s something strange in my nervous system.
I wonder what it does—
I’m tearing towards the tunnel (look no hands) when there’s the most appalling jolt. The gearbox tears its guts out and my ribs try straining themselves through the crash-webbing. The strap across my visor slips. I round the bend along the harbor road and my neck isn’t up to the G-strain.
I slide into the pit and nausea overtakes me. The car realizes I’m going to throw up. The helmet snaps open and the clench plate grows hot to make me spit it out. I throw up over the side of the car. A valet trolley wheels over and scrubs off the mess, revealing a smeared ELF decal.
My whole body burns green fire.
Every nerve sings with power.
Achebi’s unmistakable Go signal. I scrabble under my seat for the clench plate. Its taste of sour saliva is nauseating and I wonder idly if I’m going to be sick again on the circuit. My helmet slams itself down and the graphics blink on.
It only takes a moment to become a car again.
But this time it’s different. This time, I’m way down the field and will be lucky to be placed. This time—the first time this season—I will have to race.
I may not be able to live with what the Programme does through the medium of my flesh. But I know I cannot live with it buried in me—I cannot live in ignorance. I am compelled. What atrocity have they given me to perform?
Will I karate the neck of the president of FOCA? Will I tear Maureen’s eyes out—or my own—in front of a billion couch potatoes?
Some of Angèle’s special anger flows through my veins and into the car.
It feels good and dangerous, like the Grand Prix I remember. The difference is, back then I knew when I was stretching the car to its limits. Now I can feel it. I’m an athlete with a steel body, a middle distance runner doubling speed on the last five laps.
My arrogance is rewarded.
The car starts falling apart.
It’s not anything you can see. Even though they’re wired up my back, I nearly miss the signs—ticks and prickles and a hot metal taste in the back of my throat.
I don’t have time for another pit stop. I hope to God they don’t show me the black flag.
I’m an athlete, pushing my body and doing it damage and before long my knees are crumbling, my toes are burning away, my lungs are full of acid phlegm. I’m screaming cybernetic agony into my helmet as I come in sight of the prize pack. They are jockeying for position with all the cumbersome grace of whales. My scream becomes a roar. I think of the horror dozing fitfully in my spine, I think of the hurt behind Angèle’s eyes, and every hurtful stupidity under the sun—and I hurl myself forward. Danger icons spill blood behind my lids.
Four and Three concede with grace and let me past. I run tandem with place Two—Ashid in the GM. I know from old he’s no gentleman. We hug wheel-space through the square.
Odds-graphics blink on by my field of vision. Data chitters through me. I take hold of the wheel. I want to be ready. If this goes wrong it might crash my systems. The wheel recognizes my grip and unlocks, shaking me boisterously like an overfriendly scrum half.
I watch the odds-window, turn the car in, Ashid jerks sideways and back and already I’m wheeling past him. Our back wheels kiss and make up, then I’m running for pole.
Martineau leads and he is Havers’ Number Two. If I can get within five lengths of him he’ll slow down like a good boy and let me win.
All of a sudden I have a pacemaker to get me there.
I left Gentry behind at number three. Why Gentry—why not Ashid? The GM is still sound, my icons tell me—which is good because even a kiss can send an unlucky car tumbling—so maybe Ashid’s nerve’s gone, ’cause he’s more than a match for this prick. I think Gentry must have popped a pill.
I let him come alongside. I know he rides with a clear visor so I let go the wheel and wave to piss him off.
Then I change gear.
This is easy. Achebi sussed this months ago. A simple algorithm—car on road. No obstacles, no other drivers, a full complement of feedback systems to make allowances for where the car is fucked.
Time for my 550 kph Sunday drive.
Longines sends regrets. The record is safe.
But my mind’s on something else—
Martineau is tootling towards the line. I’d ride a dignified half length ahead of him only Gentry’s been driving like a madman behind me for the past two minutes and I’m too hyped to slow down.
And as I pass the line I realize: I’m no different. I too am wedded to danger, which is a longer name for death. Achebi made me fast, yes, but they also made me safe. I don’t hate Maureen Havers, or what she did to me. I hate Achebi for protecting me. I hate the doctors for repairing me. I’m like all the others. A life-hating thing—a phallus-cocoon finding new ways to die. Why else did I let the Programme infect me? What have I done to myself?