Chapter 2 - POC Racing for the People
As I understand it, the Earth Republic started the races. Back when there was only the one unified government. Back when every planet wasn’t a divisive patchwork of factions, states, factory towns, capricious oligarchs, and partisans. I believe it too, because the acronym is horrid. ATPOC–All Terrain Planetary Orienteering Challenge. It sounds like a yawn. Their intent was to give the new planets something to do, something to focus on that wasn’t the barely livable environment they’d cast their die on. Something that made the planets seem smaller, that mentally squashed the massive, barren spaces between city biospheres. So when those colonists stared out across the sea of emptiness that ringed every habitable zone, they wouldn’t see it for what it was. They’d remember the last race that was run there, the drama, the winners and losers. If you gave those vast, open expanses a heroic story, they no longer looked like the face of death.
ATPOC, or POC racing as most people called it now, started there and blossomed among the stars. One of the major sponsors took it over in its infancy, and through a steady stream of marketing, commodification, and merchandising, launched it into the mind of every human across the galaxy. And in doing so, secured their own necessary place in the natural order of things. Blue Whale, a soft drink company started in a humble lab on Earth, whose mind-altering, addiction-creating product was actually banned across much of its home planet at the time, became the only company that mattered. Because look, people need food and water and oxygen and all that stuff to survive, but they need entertainment to live. And POC racing was the only sport they wanted, the only thing that crossed planetary lines, the only thing that let them make stories out of mountain ranges, craters, and otherwise barren terrain.
Here’s how it worked. A previously uncharted point was chosen, somewhere out in the black where the maps didn’t stretch. We started from the nearest biosphere, usually. The first one there took the only prize that mattered. Everything in between was blind racing. We all had to use the same power source, but what we did with it was entirely up to us. Numbers of wheels, types of tires, amount of suspension–we could fiddle to our hearts delight, and did. Nothing that could be deemed a weapon was allowed, although the boundaries of that one were pushed constantly, and beyond that, racers could employ whatever tech they wanted. There were sonar-based near-field map generators, artificial intelligence route predictors, caustic traction-creating slime sprayers, terrain-predictive suspension adjusters, but the most important of all of these, the only tech nearly mandated by the sport, was the gravity adjuster.
It was originally designed as a ship launch support before coming to ubiquitous use in POC racing. We needed both ends of the gravity spectrum. You could anchor it down when you needed your wheels to really bite into the soil, make turns fast enough you could pass out, or turn it the other way when you suddenly cliffed out over a crater. You certainly weren’t going to win a race without it, and half the time it was the only thing that saved your ass from becoming a small splatter at the bottom of an unnamed ravine. Most of the tech I avoided, but that one I mastered.
POC racing season was based on Earth’s summer. For half of that solar cycle, we ran races across the galaxy. There was nothing feasibly restricting Blue Whale from running races through more of the year, but it had been determined that one of the best generators of excitement in fans was creating an artificial lack of availability. And so the athletes got a season to rest, to renew contracts and trade teams, to work on deficiencies or recover injuries, to go home.
Only, I never went home. I never rested. I trained. For twenty Earth years I was singularly focused on one thing–winning.
***
Come on Lev, commit to the corner! Christa’s voice blared through our com channel, but I didn’t need the reminder.
I dial up the gravity by feel with the adjuster next to my thumb, and dip the bike over. The tires chew into the dirt, and I hear the soil kick up majestically across my shins as I carve an arc inches away from the rim of a crater. My heart races as I lean in, hard, and then harder. The increased gravity compressing my spine down into the bike.
There is a purity in this, a focus and intent that blends perception with proprioception. I vent my rage through the earth, and find I’m laughing by the other side.
The turn completed, I snap the bike upright, accelerate hard, and then lessen the gravity just in time for the jump I know is coming. It does, and I soar. I swing the bike sideways, enjoying the playfulness of the connection, the oneness of us, and use the throttle to straighten it. The always present dust from the moon peppers me, and for a minute in the air as I sail towards the connecting backside all I can hear is the thumping of blood in my ears and the tiny impacts of the near-microscopic asteroids.
After the jump, hard brake and then into the chicane!
Christa loves calling this shit out, as if I hadn’t grown up on this track, as if I didn’t know its feel by heart. I land right in the sweet spot, the transfer scoops me up and rockets me forward, but when I squeeze the brakes to make the corner and sharp pain shoots up from my wrist to my elbow, it breaks my concentration. Fuck. Timing’s blown. I can’t swing the corner. I grab the brakes harder, which sends another gasp-inducing, teeth-clenching needle of pain up my arm, and drift to a stop just outside the track.
I flex out my hand and stare down at the appendage that betrayed me. Covered by the thin barrier of the space suit, I can’t see the network of scars that I know pattern both sides of it. The colloidal lines that stretch from my wrist up to my armpit are still puffy with swelling. I close my eyes and see the injuries tracing my body. I have collarbones that are more metal than bone, a left femur with a rod through the center of it, and most recently, a broken arm and shattered wrist that refuses to stop hurting.
The fuck was that about?!
“It’s my fucking hand again, Christa. You’d think with how much they paid that doctor–”
Ah shit, sorry hun. Let’s call it there for today then, yeah?
I mentally tally the number of laps. Ten? Fifteen? I felt like myself again out there, that wonderful connection when nothing exists but action and reaction, where thoughts stop and I am finally, blissfully free. But my old self wouldn’t be turning in until she’d done thirty or forty. Getting old’s a bitch. I sigh, and pilot the bike slowly over the un-groomed field back to our trailer.
“We have colonies on Uranus for fucks sake, can’t science figure out how to make us heal better yet?”
You might have colonies on your anus, but I actually clean myself. Not everything’s about going fast you know, it’s good to take your time with healing that one.
I smile and drift the bike next to the airlock, then push it back into the garage. The door shuts behind me, and starts to re-pressurize. The filtration system turns on. All around me, dust hangs in the air, reflecting sunlight and clouding the distance.
“Coming in, you better have lunch ready.”
1000th reminder, I’m a mechanic, not a cook. So unless you want a bowl full of axle grease, you are still on the hook to prepare your own food. I’d actually take some too, while you’re at it.
The airlock is an abbreviated thing that would barely fit two people side by side. The first door slides open noiselessly, and snaps shut behind me. My feet press too firmly into the metal floor as I watch for the green light to appear above the second door. Christa’s been fucking with the gravity again. Highly pressurized air blasts my suit from all directions as a vacuum opens under my feet, removing any traces of regolith from my suit. The light turns, the door slides open, and I remove the angular helmet that protected me from the moon’s lack of atmosphere.
The trailer is small, utilitarian, and impeccably clean. That’s Christa’s doing, not mine. To my right is a hallway that leads to the shower and the sleep bays, elongated, stacked holes in the wall that are just spacious enough to not elicit a claustrophobic response. To the left of the entrance, a metal countertop is lined with fruit in organized bins, a coffee maker, a kettle for water, and a short bench style table. Christa’s there, trying to shuffle a deck of cards. As I enter, it spills out from her grease stained fingertips and scatters across the table.
“Is there a reason I’m being crushed into the floor by artificial gravity?”
Christa sighs and looks over to me with a grin. “I told you, I’m practicing my card shuffling for the Jupiter races. There’s credits to be had.”
“Maybe try doing it with clean hands, might help,” I say, hanging my helmet and starting to remove my suit. After freeing my top, I stretch my wrists against the hall wall and compare their sizes. The right one is swollen, again.
“As if the grease stains came out at this point. I’m half made of the shit, I swear. Now stop fuckin’ around with that hand and come put some ice on it.” Christa shuffled the cards into a case and put it away in her jumpsuit before climbing off the bench seat, and starting to meander the kitchen galley. “I’ll rustle us up some food.”
“And I thought you didn’t cook,” I say through a smile, taking the rest of my suit off. When I’m down to just a sweaty jumpsuit, I move to the table. My hands twitch to dust it off before I sit, but I refrain. Christa throws a cold pack in my direction, somehow nailing the placement right in front of me despite the artificial grav.
“Right, and I won’t. But I will let the computer make something for us since you’re basically dead weight now.”
I groan jokingly, as Christa opens a box from the cupboard and dumps it into the food processor. Freeze dried globs of brown and green fall from the carton, and the machine starts to whir.
“Beef and broccoli again then?”
“Nectar of the gods, I think you mean.”
Christa can’t see me smiling, there at the metal table with my wrist wrapped in a cold pack, studying her curly blonde hair and tanned shoulders from behind, so unlike my short-cut dark frizz and deep umber skin. There are streaks of gray in it now, just like mine. Age binds us, but maybe not wisdom. Other teams with my wins record have a full staff that moves from planet to planet like a military convoy. Cooks, masseuses, physical trainers, mental coaches, engineers. I’d done my time in that rich people circus when I was coming up through the ranks, met Christa there. She was an odd duckling, well the other one besides me, a poor girl from Mars that had made a name wrenching on some of the top’s machines. She was the best damn mechanic I’d ever met.
For the past decade, it had only been me and Christa. As soon as I got the notoriety I needed, I renegotiated my contracts, setup my own team, and immediately offered to hire her. She accepted without hesitation, and gave the last team she worked for a double barrel of middle fingers on her way out the door. Money flowed in from my sponsorships, bought us this live-in freighter, a fucking fast race bike, some shitty food, and the rest of it we hid away like the used-to-be-poor people we pretended we weren’t.
We had our fights through the years, mostly from me getting snippy with pre-race nerves, but we always figured things out, mostly when I got over my shit and apologized. Christa was the only family I knew anymore. She’s seen me through wins, losses, injuries, and the terrible recoveries that followed them. She’s been my constant.
“What am I going to do about this damn wing come race day?”
“Well, what did you do last time?” Christa says, not turning around.
“A shit-load of pain killers.”
“Weird, that’s what I was going to suggest now, too.”
I sigh, and massage my wrist. I close my eyes and see a flash of a memory. The accident that ended with me high-siding my bike out of a corner, the local gravity cranked up high, and landing with all that energy on my outstretched arm in red martian soil. My blood freezing on the ground in tiny crystalline rubies before my suit auto-repaired and closed off the vacuum leak. Passing out from the concussion and pain and shock. The same snip that plagues me in the moments before I fall asleep and sends panic signals through my body that it’s happening all over again.
I’m getting old. I’ve been through this cycle enough times to know its ebb and flow. The thoughts are fresh still, but I’ll wear them out and move on eventually. I just feel tired thinking about recovery.
“You know you can retire whenever you want, right? I’m not forcing you to keep going,” Christa says, placing two steaming bowls of green and brown mush on the table. For a moment, her curls fall across her face, and I long to swipe them back behind her ear. That door is long closed though.
“I know it, I don’t think my body can take another injury. Not one like this. Maybe I’ll retire after this race.”
“Which is exactly what you’ve been saying for years.”
“How do you think an athlete knows when to retire?”
“I’d say there aren’t many at your level that know when to. Most let the game tell them.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
For a while, we eat in the easy silence of people who have lived in each other’s shadow for years. Spoon in the gloop-food, close your eyes to pretend it’s the real thing and not bizarre freeze-dried, preservative packed, fully enriched cardboard, chew even though it’s technically unnecessary because the food is already in a semi-liquid state, moan in satisfaction to the delight of the other.
“You ‘member about tonight?”
I raise my eyebrows in question, and pretend to not know exactly what she means. The event I’ve been dreading for weeks. Months, maybe. Christa smiles, and the ice at the core of my being melts just a little.
“If you’re not on that stage when they tell you, dancing to their tune, greeting the moonies with a wave and a smile, I have a feeling that stooges of a certain drink company will be knocking down this door.”
“You really know how to convince a person.”
“There’ll be real food there.” Christa says, holding up the green and brown mush in front of her face, and letting it plop-plop-plop back into the bowl. “Plus, I have matching clothes for us to wear, and they’re actually not jumpsuits.”
I groan and roll my eyes for her amusement. “I meant to tell you, I actually have another plus one I’m taking this time.”
Christa snorts. “That would imply that people like you, which I’m sorry honey just isn’t true, and that you’ve spent a single moment not training or recovering or eating or sleeping to actually acknowledge that someone else exists. Sorry, not buying it, you’re stuck with me.”
“Oh come on, Bart likes me!”
“That frail provisional government commissioner? I think a firm handshake might break him.”
We cackle together, and for a moment, things are easy. The night seems easy.
“What are you worried about anyways? The mooners love you. They hate Blue Whale, sure, but that’s like, very reasonable.”
That’s the problem though. I wish they hated me. I wish they knew that I abandoned them. That I left and never talked to my dad again because I didn’t want to acknowledge he was dying and I was leaving. That I was too busy carving out a life for myself to fix their suffering. That every one of my wins they cheered for was just a hollow, emotional victory for the moon, and had done nothing to actually improve their lives.
“I can’t stand to see them putting their hopes in me.”
“Well they’re going to, nothing you can do to change that, and I don’t think they’re wholly misplaced. You may not have changed things around here, but you’ve made them believe in something. And you do have a history of protest, I seem to remember.”
“And my contracts hang on me not doing that again.”
“Well, if it’s time to retire, then maybe it’s time to say fuck-off to a couple of them. You’ve got a stage and an audience. Just saying.”
And that, folks, is why I love Christa. She’s my conscience as much as my friend. A few years ago, I’d finally settled things with the behemoth and we agreed on a mutually beneficial partnership. They’d give me money, and I’d stop mentioning that their drink was poison, that it was a performance-enhancing drug, that their mission of enriching communities only enriched the pockets of a few very rich politicians. It was either that, or an early retirement, and a quick fade into anonymity fueled by their ample marketing dollars.
Is it the right time to retire though? I can’t tell. Our lives are these series of choices we make, of closing one door and opening another, and at times I feel completely paralyzed by the weight of it. Does it matter if I choose this race, or the next? Does it matter if I choose, or have the racing choose for me? What is there for me, after all this?
I do know one thing, though. There’s not much I love more than a good fuck you to some suits.
Cover image taken from Émile-Antoine Bayard’s Illustrations for Around the Moon by Jules Verne (1870) (Public Domain)