I was dead.
Yet I dreamed a strange, software-influenced dream as my body was put back together by my built-in technology.
My dream consisted of a recurring image of the explosion that had ripped me apart, cast behind a visual of a dark mineshaft on one of the border moons. I operated a sonic extractor and loaded handfuls of terrelium into a crate. My hands were mere skeletons, my sleeves shredded blue rags.
But soon, I would awake, good as new. Race slaves never really died – we just got . . . delayed.
As I floated weightlessly in the darkness of interstellar space, the nanomedics swarmed over and through my torn body, a coursing wave of energy and intelligence. They raced to repair tissue, using preset triage criteria as well as making logic-based decisions as they went.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have tried to thread the needle – the space between the chunks in the tail of that comet had been narrower than I’d calculated. Should’ve left it to the liveware to steer me through, but I was overconfident.
No time now for regrets.
First, the nanomedics reactivated my autonomic system: brain, heart, lungs. They kept my consciousness suppressed and activated the dream sequence I was now experiencing. They also left the pain receptors in my brain disengaged while they methodically rebuilt the rest of my body at a frantic pace.
The bots that were reassembling my body - hundreds of millions of them - were a component of my ~dart – my racing craft. Each bot was composed of a level six hyperprocessor, several tiny tool-wielding appendages, and a certain amount of organic material to make them compatible with my biology. Working as a networked unit, they moved the length of my body in a microsecond, coordinated like a symphony of healing to bring me back to the way I was before the explosion hit, all in under ninety seconds.
But it was sixty seconds too late.
Thirty seconds after the initial impact, my ~dart had been torn apart by a core overload. As I came to consciousness following the body rebuild, I read the status report projected within my iris.
It wasn’t good.
My ship was already spread across nearly a half AU of space.
I ran a mental algorithm immediately, activating the return sequence. Floating in the immense black void, I watched the distant stars tumble around me. I knew I was the one spinning, but it always helped prevent nausea if I just told myself that I was the one at relative stop.
I waited.
As the return signal rode the EM Flow and reached each of the splinters and fragments of my ship, each piece – anything larger than a pinhead - reoriented itself in space and started toward my signal, driven by a gravitational inertia-drive the size of a water molecule. Before long, the ~dart would be reintegrated by the same technology that had repaired my body, and I’d be on my way.
But the extra minute delay would be hard to catch up from. I would certainly not win this one – a pity, since I’d hoped to retire with a bang - but I still wanted to come in ahead of Jones and my brother, David.
By now, Jones was at least a quarter parsec ahead of me, so I’d have to get creative.
When the ~dart was fully reintegrated and operational, having formed its original shape all around me, I checked the nav and set a new course through the heart of the Dawn Dancer Nebula, a short cut that most ~dart racers considered a suicidal run.
But hey, I’d been dead before.
۞
“I can see you.”
I spoke not with my voice, but whispered the words directly from my mind. The message traveled though my teleneural patch and directly into the EM Flow. The Flow carried my coded thoughts to the intended recipient – Roxy Jones.
As my streamlined ~dart emerged from the red, pink and gold plumes of the Dawn Dancer Nebula, I eased forward on the throttle ever so slightly and picked up speed. This open region on the other side of my short cut would be a perfect place to gain the ground I’d lost.
“Only in your dreams,” came the eventual reply. “I’m at least a half parsec ahead of you by now,” she messaged.
“Don’t be so sure,” I thought back. “Check your scan.”
After a few moments, her delayed message entered my mind’s receiver. “How in the name of Jupiter did you catch up? I saw you disintegrate.”
I smiled. Even through the code translation, I could sense her astonishment. She knew I was going to catch up.
After all, I was faster.
“I danced through a nebula,” I thought to her. “Face it, Jones. There’s no stopping me.”
Before I could receive her reply, my proximity alert sounded in my head, and the ~dart’s autostabilizer kicked in. The manual controls grew suddenly sluggish and withdrew into the console as the system’s liveware took over, weaving the ~dart through an uncharted band of asteroids.
My restraint harnesses automatically tightened under the torsion stresses. I could feel the snug belts across my body as the forces pulled my guts around my ribcage. Suddenly the spacious cockpit felt much smaller.
I spoke aloud to my liveware. “Where’d this mess come from?”
“uncharted”
The liveware’s voice sounded like a bored teenage boy speaking through a metal tube - probably the voice of the designer.
“No kidding,” I said, bracing myself as the ~dart made a hard bank to the left followed by an equally sharp rightward maneuver. “Any theories on the origin?”
“category seven dwarf planet 67543 is not scanning – evidence suggests this asteroid field previously existed as that planet”
“Theories on what destroyed the rock?”
“negative”
The liveware was a heck of an autopilot, but not much of a strategic thinker. Or a conversationalist.
“Scan debris for foreign elements – identify any fragments that are not indigenous.”
“debris is 99.998% indigenous material – balance comprised primarily of tertanium alloy and trace particles of Roentgenium Y-26 isotope”
David.
“Stop.”
My ~dart came to relative stop within three seconds of my command.
My brother David’s ~dart was the only one in the league with a tertanium alloy fuselage, and we all ran on RY-26 fuel cells.
And he was no longer showing up on my scan display.
The question was, if David had hit the dwarf planet, and his fuel cell had ignited and destroyed his ~dart and the planetoid along with it, why hadn’t his restoration kicked in? Could the failsafe have been knocked offline in the blast?
I hardly had time to investigate, but I couldn’t exactly leave my brother’s atoms to float around this debris field.
“Activate matter collector,” I said.
“specify parameters”
“Collect all carbon-based matter in a five hundred thousand kilometer radius on all axes. Commence now.”
A hum filled the cabin as the ~dart’s onboard matter collector drew all carbon-based molecules into a container in the aft storage compartment where my spare parts and waste matter closet were located. After about three minutes, the hum stopped.
“matter collected”
“Resume vector.”
I was plastered into the back of my seat as the ~dart shot back to half-max velocity – the best it could manage in this debris field. Soon we were clear of the floating rocks and picked back up to max velocity.
“Initiate microscan of collected matter,” I said. “Compare quantum level readings to database file Harrison, David.”
“microscan and cross analysis complete”
“And?”
“collected matter matches specified file 99.63%”
I closed my eyes. Took a ragged breath. Swallowed hard.
My older brother. Dead.
And not coming back this time.
Unfortunately, I had no time to mourn right now.
“Placement report.”
“five ~darts ahead, three behind”
Great. I’d lost two
positions while scooping up the remains of my brother.
If I fell in the last half of the field, I’d be joining him soon.
Those were the stakes.
As a race slave, it was my lot to run marathon after marathon. My only goal was to not fall into the losing half of the field.
Winners lived to race again, and had a chance at winning their freedom after a hundred races. Losers were placed in the mining colonies where life expectancy was about six months, tops.
All for the gambling pleasure of the Elite.
I’d placed in the top half of all ninety-nine of my races (since I’d first started racing nearly four years ago). If I survived this one, I’d be free.
If I fell into the lower half, I’d die in the deep, dark shafts of some border moon.
I looked at the field display, a green grid with glowing blue dots. There she was, not too far ahead of me.
Roxy Jones was a friend of mine. Sort of. We had a friendly rivalry going on. This was also her freedom race. Although we hated each other in a competitive environment, off-track there was a chemistry neither of us could deny. I secretly hoped that we’d both win our freedom this day and have a chance at a life together. If she wanted it too.
I considered the mathematics of the field, and sent a message to Jones.
“How did you fall into fifth place?”
After a few moments, “I slowed down when you hit the debris field and stopped. I was trying to figure out what you were up to. I didn’t see Marshall or Hunt coming from behind. They blew past me and left me in the stellar dust.”
“It’s David,” I messaged. “He’s dead.”
“His restoration failed?”
“Apparently.”
In the ensuing silence, a terrible thought occurred to me. Now that Jones had lost her third and fourth place spot, I’d have to pass her in order to move into the top half of the field and win my freedom. And that would send Jones into the bottom half.
And to the death mines.
A quick look at the field showed that Jones had no way to catch Marshall or Hunt at this point.
But I could still catch her.
The local stars rushed by, the distant ones seemed to hang immovably around me, as if I were standing still. I was soon within range of Jones, with only six parsecs left in the race.
“Well, you’ve seen the field,” she messaged to my mind. “It’s you or me, now.”
I didn’t reply at first. Finally, I thought, “I know. I’m trying to figure out how to make this work.”
“Maybe you should just be trying to figure out how to win.”
“Roxy.”
She didn’t answer.
I checked the ~dart’s backup power reserves and shunted it all to the engine. As I slipped forward at a hundred and ten percent velocity, my mind raced with equal speed to figure a way through this dilemma.
It was like experiencing a grief cycle. My first instinct was to deny the reality of the choice I was being forced to make. I told myself that maybe if we tied, the Elite would grant us both our freedom.
Not likely. Such a thing was unprecedented, and the Elite were not known for their compassion or generosity. Most likely they’d send us both off to the mines, or make us race one-on-one to break the tie.
Escape was impossible.
Like the return signal that reassembled the ~darts, our bodies were infused with cell-level restraint processors that disabled our ability to travel outside the general race track parameters. Any attempt to do so would instantly put us in a paralyzed coma and send us back to the finish line under liveware control.
A part of me I didn’t want to acknowledge wanted to just blow past Jones and win. I quickly pushed that ugly part back down below the surface.
As I came within ten kilometers of her aft thruster wake, my heart grew soft and I eased off the power, slowing to ninety-five percent max and dropping back from her ~dart.
After a moment, I heard her in my mind. “What’s the matter, Harrison? Push your ~dart too hard?”
How could she be so cold? Was this her way of dealing with the situation, to pretend this is just another race? To imagine that the result of this race was not going to be freedom for one of us, and a lonely, miserable death for the other?
Such cruel fates!
I chose to not answer Jones. Instead, I continued to tackle the logistics – to find some way to beat this game.
Perhaps there was a way I could disable (or even destroy, if necessary) one of the leaders – make room in the top half of the field for both of us.
The ~dart was equipped with a proton vaporizer – not a weapon – a tool for clearing obstacles on the circuit. If I could get within range of Marshall or Hunt, I could maybe knock out one of their engine clusters with a quick jolt from the PV. Even if I could make it look like it was a malfunction, I’d be docked ten wins for violating the rules, thus having to win ten more races to gain my freedom - but that was a small price to pay.
There wasn’t much time left for deliberation, so I made a determined effort to catch the other racers and do the deed.
I pushed my ~dart to the max, then used my power-shunting method to get it up to a hundred and ten percent again. At that rate, I shot past Jones like she was standing still.
She didn’t send me a message.
Probably surprised at my bold move.
Or maybe she hates me now.
I checked the field display, and I was approaching Hunt, but not fast enough. I wouldn’t be in range in time to change the standings. I needed more power. For more power, I’d need more–
Matter.
“Convert matter sample Harrison, David to replace fuel reserve. Shunt additional power created to engines.”
“complying”
David would be glad to know I was making use of his atoms.
My velocity increased to one hundred twenty percent.
Still not enough.
I quickly dropped back, and Jones shot past me, back into fifth place.
As we neared the final parsec stretch of the race – a straight run between two huge nebulae, the answer struck me like a laser.
When a race slave won his freedom, he was granted one material possession with which to start his new life. Most chose their ~dart, as it could be sold in the trading colonies for parts and converted into useful items such as food, clothing, passage on a freighter, or even a piece of land on a planet in a safe star system.
If I won, I could claim my ~dart, then find out which mining moon they took Jones to, and when she died, I could use the ~dart’s restoration technology to bring her back to life after she was discarded by the Energy Consortium. As long as I could get to her body within three days of her death, I could whisk her away, restore her, and we’d be free together.
With new determination, I sent my ~dart rushing headlong down the nebular corridor, quickly gaining on Jones.
I pulled alongside her – I was so close I could see her through her starboard panel.
She looked over at me.
I thrust forward, ready to put my plan into action, but just as I started to creep ahead, I thought I saw her face change. I thought I saw a tear in her eye.
It was crazy – there was no way I could’ve seen anything from that distance.
But then I thought – what if my plan didn’t work? What if I couldn’t find out what moon she was sent to? What if I couldn’t get to her body within three days of her death?
And most of all, how could I consign her to that pain and misery?
No.
I couldn’t go through with it – the risk was too great, the price too high.
I pulled back on the throttle and dropped to eighty percent.
Jones disappeared in front of me like a flash.
Too bad the last time I’d see her face, it had that look of pain.
I breathed a long, heavy sigh. I’d done the right thing. I’d rather she lived – rather she
was free.
I watched the field display as, one by one, the leaders crossed the finish line. Looking out the front of my ~dart, I saw the distant flash of light at the end of the nebular corridor as Jones passed into safety and freedom, and the finish line force field was snapped into place behind her.
Our connection through the Flow was severed. It was over.
Terrelium mines, here I come.
۞
I waited to be processed at the finish line force field with the rest of the losing half of the field.
This was a new experience for me.
I’d heard rumors about it. After you’re in the huge race hangar and disengaged from the ~dart interface, mech-orgs three times the size of a man pull you from the ~dart, strip you out of your flight suit, brand you with a new category tag and cram you into a slave freighter bound for the outer systems.
As it turned out, it wasn’t that bad. The mech-orgs were only twice the size of a man.
But they were as rough as advertised, and when the one assigned to me – a green-fleshed brute that announced itself as Thale 86 – grabbed my arm to extract me from the ~dart, it nearly ripped it out of the socket.
“Watch it!” I shouted. These guys were not programmed to treat us with the same respect we racers were accustomed to. We may be slaves, but as racers, it was important that we not be damaged in any way. Now we were just fodder for the mines – expendable bodies to be tossed around and used up.
Thale 86 did not respond. It just sliced off my flight suit with a precision laser embedded in its index finger, shooting it right down the middle of my chest and down one leg without me feeling anything more than a tickle. Then it clenched its hand around my neck from the back and steered me toward a corridor that led directly to the slave freighter.
They didn’t waste any time.
An announcement over the Flow indicated we were headed for Moon 171. Didn’t mean much to me – one mining moon was like any other. I felt the engines kick in. With no windows, I could only assume we were on our way to our doom.
The freighter’s gray walls were accented by gray, short-pile carpeting on the floor, and gray support beams running the length of the gray ceiling. A dismal transport to our dismal destination.
A ship of the damned.
Some smaller mech-orgs came through a door into the main chamber and handed out work suits – full-body outfits of dark blue Zeflar fabric – flexible, durable, and sure to outlive me to be used for another thousand slaves of my build. I slipped into mine. It was snug. The Zeflar warmed my skin up to standard room temperature, and would regulate my temperature to remain there no matter what the temperature in the mines or how hard I exerted myself.
I counted about eighty of us on the flight – the losers of over a dozen of today’s races. Nobody looked at anyone else – no one made conversation. They were all too busy contemplating their coming deaths.
I was too busy thinking of Jones. And my brother, now that I had a moment to think about it.
Perhaps there was some way to escape. Just because I’d never heard of it happening before didn’t mean it was impossible. Maybe security out in the mining moons was not as good as the stories – maybe it was just scare tactics and PR. The Elite were not known for their honesty, after all.
Surely there was a way to overcome the mech-org guards – a system-wide power-down, an organized revolt?
About three meters to my left I spotted one of the guys from my race. He was about my height, with a blond buzz-cut and hazel eyes that stared vacantly ahead.
“Is that you, Jordan?”
His eyes turned to stare at me. “Jorgenson.” He stared some more. “I saw on my field display – what you did. Why?”
I swallowed hard, cast my eyes down. “I uh, one of my engine clusters fizzed. My ~dart’s liveware didn’t have time to make the repair before it was all over.”
“That didn’t show on my screen,” he said, his voice deep and hollow sounding, as if he were incapable of speaking up.
I just shrugged, rubbed at the stubble forming on my chin. “You think there’s any way out of this?”
He snorted gently. “No.” A beat. His eyebrows flicked upward. “This is the beginning of the end. They say it’s easier if you just accept it.”
“How’s that coming for you?” I asked.
He repeated his little snorting sound. “Workin’ on it, man.”
The transport shuddered gently.
“We’ve slipped to Planck velocity,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Jorgenson. “We should be in the moon belt in a few hours.” With that, he closed his eyes and entered a sleep cycle.
So much for conversation.
Planck velocity made most people sick, but racers like us were used to it. Eat, sleep, navigate, make repairs – it was all the same to us at Planck. So what if, in the back of your mind, it felt like you were having every atom in your body turned inside out. After enough time, you just learned to ignore the sensation.
In fact, I was going to miss it.
My one-hundred race career had started out a little rocky – I’d won the first half dozen races on sheer luck. Which quickly made me a favorite bet among the Elite. Pretty soon after that I got the hang of it, and was setting records. I placed first in races fifteen through forty-seven, an all-time streak record.
I placed somewhere in the top three for the next forty one races, then started to slip a little off my game in the last few runs.
When they started putting Jones in my class.
I enjoyed the challenge, actually. Even when you’re racing for your life, it can get dull when there’s not much chance you’ll lose. Jones changed all that. She kept me on my toes, forced me to exceed my own self-expectations. Made me feel alive, and gave me a reason to actually think about what I wanted to do with my life once I gained my freedom.
This was not what I had in mind. I’d planned to go out quite gloriously – which is why I’d tried that crazy maneuver that got me killed in the second half of that last race. I had not planned to wind up a mine slave.
I looked around at the gray walls, the sleeping or catatonic ex-racers on their way to a short life of hard labor, and at the four towering mech-orgs standing as sentinels at each end of the chamber with their boxy heads, bovine eyeballs, and stretched-out, cloned flesh over their muscular bodies.
And I started to second guess my decision to lose the race.
Maybe there had been some other way to make it work out.
They say it’s easier if you just accept it.
Maybe Jorgenson was right. Second guessing was enough to drive you crazy.
۞
The entrance to Mineshaft K-947-beta looked like the mouth of a long-dead dragon – rugged dark-gray and black rocks forming jagged teeth of stalactites across the giant roof. We filed into its rocky throat in single file under a black sky pin-pricked with tiny diamonds.
The mech-orgs didn’t poke, prod or shove us – which somehow made them even more menacing, and made me feel like a lamb going to the slaughter. The beastly guards just stood there with their boxy heads, emotionless faces, and powerful musculature, looking like they had only two settings: docile and kill.
Right before being swallowed up by the great hole in the mountainside, I felt panic rise in my gut. Was this the last time I would see the outside? I looked up at the stars – the place I’d spent so much time as a slave racer – and almost – almost tried to run.
But before the message got from the animal-instinct part of my mind to my muscles, a bald-headed woman just three paces ahead of me broke loose and dashed for freedom.
It was a pitiful sight – as she reached the ten-meter radius from the entrance, her slave cell-coding paralyzed her and she fell on her face in the gravel, skidding to a halt with a grunt.
Two giant mech-orgs approached her – clearly in no hurry, since she wasn’t going anywhere. As she moaned helpless
ly, locked in the grasp of the cell-coding constraint, the mech-orgs raised their shoulder cannons in unison, and blasted her at close range without ceremony. The energy beams converged on her mid-section and disintegrated her, rather slowly – one wave of white-hot energy moving toward her head, the other toward her toes. Within a few seconds, she was a small pile of black powder.
The mech-orgs holstered their shoulder cannons, then turned to the harried slave line as if to say, “Any questions?”
We all just turned back to toward our fate, and trudged on with our heads hanging down and our arms limp at our sides.
Defeated.
۞
The first two weeks in the mine were kind of a blur.
They worked us twelve hours on, six hours off, in an endless rotation that meant very little without daylight or even artificial light cycles.
It felt like one excruciatingly long day.
The so-called rest periods were, at first, like having a blackout. No dreams, and no apparent passage of time. I’d fall into my hard bunk, close my eyes, and a moment later I’d be woken up for the next shift.
But like the prisoners in ancient stories, I kept a count of the days on the wall beside my bunk. I used the blood that came from my knuckles and fingers each day to mark the tallies.
After two weeks, sleeping turned from a momentary rest to a seemingly endless toss-and-turn in the pitch blackness, as a new recruit brought into our dorm had a serious snoring problem.
On the fourth night of snore-fest, the sound suddenly stopped. When the next shift started, Snore-Man was found to be dead – choked by one of his room mates. Nobody owned up to it, and the mech-orgs didn’t ask questions. They just dragged his body out, and by the next rest period, another new recruit had taken his place.
I did him the courtesy of warning him not to snore.
Now that I was in a kind of a rhythm, my mind started to wander while working.
I thought about Jones. I thought about freedom. I recalled the woman who’d attempted to escape that first night. Thoughts of escape seemed hopeless. Every scenario I could think of ended with me getting blasted to powder.
I discussed some of my ideas with Jorgenson, since he sometimes worked nearby. He always shot them down. He was hopeless. Resigned.
But I still had a spark of hope, however crazy it might be. At about two months into my new life, I decided to test some assumptions about the limits of our confinement.
Not a good idea.
It hurt.
Bad.
See, the mech-orgs never paid us much attention if we were working. As long as we loaded cart after cart of terrelium ore, they didn’t care. So, I put my rocks where I was supposed to, but I used my sonic extractor in a specific pattern, trying to use the pulverizer to open up a hole in the wall and see how deep our cell-coding restriction boundary extended into the rock face.
By the end of my shift I had bored about two feet into the craggy surface, just wide enough to reach my arm inside. The mech-orgs were beginning to round us up to take us back to the dorms.
Now would be my only chance to test it out.
I reached my arm in as far as I could, and suddenly every nerve ending in my body felt like it was on fire. My vision turned pure white, and my brain felt like it was going to freeze solid and explode at the same time. I couldn’t withdraw my arm – couldn’t move at all.
When my vision returned, I was lying on my back next to the wall. Thale 86 – my mech-org – was standing over me. Through the ringing in my ears I heard it say, “Pick it up and take it back to Dorm 883.”
Then I felt myself carried by human arms back to my bunk, where it took about an hour before the tingling finally went away and I could move again. I had a pounding headache and all of my muscles hurt. My fine motor skills remained shaky the rest of the night.
“You’re lucky,” said Jorgenson from the top bunk. “The mech-orgs almost vaporized you.”
“Why didn’t they?” I asked.
“I convinced them you were not trying to escape – that you were just stupid.”
“You only told a half truth,” I said. “I am definitely stupid.”
“Listen,” he said, “you need to quit with the talk of getting out of here. It is not going to happen. Why not make it easier on yourself and just give it up?”
“I can’t. Experience has taught me not to. When I first started racing, I was clueless. I’d been picked by the Elite in some ‘random’ selection process. I’d expected to spend my life working in vege-cloning facilities like my family has always done. So when they first strapped me into a ~dart, there were plenty of people who expected me to either put myself inside an asteroid at ninety percent, or just finish last and wind up here on day one. But I believed in an alternative. They told me I could win my freedom after a hundred wins. So I determined to make that a reality. Were the odds against me? Of course. But I didn’t care.”
“And now here you are, a free man,” said Jorgenson, gesturing around at the darkened dorm with his hand.
“You’re missing the point,” I said. “This is just a hiccup on the road to my freedom – another challenge to overcome.”
“Riiight. Like the way you overcame the challenge in that last race – by throwing it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “It was so obvious you let Jones win.”
“Which just further proves my point that I am in charge of my own destiny,” I said, conceding his accusation while bolstering my own argument.
“Try telling that to the mech-orgs,” said Jorgenson.
I turned over in my bunk and faced the wall, where I could just make out my tallies.
Sixty three.
“I’ll get out of here,” I mumbled. “Or die trying.”
۞
Three days later I saw a chance to prove my words.
I noticed Thale 86 had a problem with its right eye – some kind of cataract or something. Mech-orgs had the eyes of cattle because although the Elite could clone flesh a-plenty, they had trouble with the complex optical organ. They just couldn’t make them work. So, the mech-orgs got beef cattle eyes, which would otherwise have gone to waste in the meat production facilities. They looked weird enough with their stretched skin and their boxy heads, but the cow eyes made them look particularly creepy, like hornless minotaurs.
With Thale 86 having a blind spot, I decided to take advantage.
At the end of the shift, I took my time clearing up my area. The only ones left in the small cavern in which I was working were Thale 86, another mech-org, Jorgenson, and me.
“Move,” said Thale 86.
“All right, I’m coming,” I said. Then I dropped my sonic extractor. “Oh, sorry.” I bent to pick it up as Thale 86 stepped toward me. I ducked low to the floor and turned to his right, then quickly jumped up behind him and grabbed his shoulder cannon before he could turn his head to track me.
The cannon didn’t detach.
But I had my finger on the trigger, and I fired.
It hit the wall.
The other mech-org turned and fired, just as Thale 86 spun around with me hanging on its back.
Thale 86 was hit.
It froze in place, forming a shield for me as I continued to piggyback it and fire its cannon at the other mech-org. I hit it, and it froze. I jumped down and moved toward the doorway out of the cavern.
Jorgenson leapt in front of me and blocked my path.
“What are you doing?” I asked, panting. “Don’t you want to be free?”
“Oh yes, I do. That’s why you’re not going anywhere.”
“Are you crazy? We can get out of here right now.”
“No.”
With that, he decked me with a right hook that came out of nowhere, crashing into my chin.
“What is the matter with you?” I yelled, scrambling back to my feet and squaring o
ff with the large man.
“I’m securing my freedom.”
“By staying here?”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I’m under contract.”
“For what?”
He stared at me coldly. “Twenty-three races. I had twenty-three more races to go – and freedom never felt farther away. I just didn’t believe I could win them all. I’d been barely placing in the top half my last fifteen races. So when one of the Elite approached me with an offer, I couldn’t refuse.”
“Offer?”
“They took me out of the races – put me here. I’m on a six-month deal. I work for the mech-orgs. They are programmed to not injure me or harm me in any way. I’m here to help with security, as a spy and an enforcer. I talk people out of escaping, infiltrate escape conspiracies, quell breakout rebellions. And I – ”
I charged him, enraged. “Traitor!”
He lunged at me at the same time, and tackled me to the ground, pinning me.
“I guess they feed you pretty well, too,” I grunted, noting his strength, and noticing for the first time that his face was ruddier than the rest of us pale, frail rock chippers.
“Why couldn’t you just leave well enough alone?” he said through gritted teeth. “You couldn’t just let it be and die here peacefully, could you?”
“You make me sick,” I spat. Summoning my strength, I pushed him off me and tried to stand.
He’d somehow managed to get to his feet faster than me, and kicked me in the ribs. I heard a cracking sound and fell to the floor in agony.
He kicked me again.
Repeatedly.
“I *kick* just *kick* want *kick* to kick* be *kick* free!” he grunted with each sickening blow.
I could feel my insides turning to jelly under the force of his work boot. I saw stars. I vomited.
And then he lifted my sonic extractor from the floor, came and stood over me where I lay helpless. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’d do the same thing in my shoes.”
And then he brought it down on my skull with all his might.
Blackness.
I was dead.
۞
I was dead.
Yet I dreamed a strange dream as my body was put back together by ~dart technology.
My dream consisted of a recurring image of Jorgenson smashing in my skull, cast behind a visual of Roxy Jones accepting her freedom race winnings. She stood before an Elite race organizer. The Elite waved an instrument across her forehead, deactivating her constraining cell-codes. He asked her what she wanted as her one material takeaway. She pointed to her ~dart.
The nanomedics swarmed over and through my crushed body, a coursing wave of energy and intelligence. They raced to repair tissue, using preset triage criteria as well as making logic-based decisions as they went.
First, they reactivated my autonomic system: brain, heart, lungs. They kept my consciousness suppressed and activated the dream sequence I was now experiencing. They also left the pain receptors in my brain disengaged while they methodically rebuilt the rest of my body at a frantic pace.
The whole process took less than ninety seconds.
I opened my eyes to find myself cradled in Roxy’s arms.
“I beat you,” she said, smiling down at me.
“Not as bad as Jorgenson did,” I said. “How did you find me?”
“Your body was tossed into a waste heap on the mining moon. David helped me track you down – we got to you two days after you were killed.”
“My brother? He’s dead.”
“Clearly not,” said David, stepping into the ~dart’s cockpit area from the aft area.
“But I collected your atoms,” I said, confused.
“It was a set-up,” said David. “The Elite wanted to make that race the biggest betting opportunity in history. So they staged my death. The rouse was intended to pit two freedom racers against each other – to make you choose between death and love. It made major headlines in the entertainment world.”
“And you took part in this rouse?” I said, getting angry.
“They offered me my freedom. They also threatened to dock me twenty race wins if I didn’t cooperate.”
I frowned. But then I started to smile as I contemplated the fact that my brother, my love and I were all alive – and all free people.
“Well,” said Roxy. “How do you feel?”
“As good as new.”
“And you’re only a couple months late for your freedom,” said David.
“Well, race slaves never really die,” I said. “We just get . . . delayed.”
THE END
Decisions, Decisions
Writers of the Future Honorable Mention, December, 2009
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