2. The Last Racer

-----THE LAST RACER-----
A short cyberpunk story by Peter Whitmore

The march of technology and progress is a tide that can't be stopped, at least not forever. Sooner or later, everything becomes obsolete, including yourself. Through no fault of your own, your entire livelihood becomes a relic, just because a more efficient way to do your job was invented. All the effort you put toward learning the old way is forever lost; Father Time does not take kindly to those who would overstay their welcome, it seems. Myself, I can hardly imagine what I would ever do once the world no longer needs private investigators.

Artificial intelligence had been making progress in leaps and bounds over the past century, but one of the fields they had yet to replace, for the time being, were the creative arts. This was most evident with traveling entertainers, a rare breed these days, but those who had what it took to flourish, truly flourished as they made their ways across the corporate sectors of America, brokering deals with each of the ruling corporate bodies for performance venues and audiences.

Such was the case with Burning Chrome, a band that played 20th century styled heavy metal music, but with mid to late 21st century sensibilities. Their lineup would often change, some of them playing with natural skill and talent, some of them using bionic implants to augment their performances, but they all brought forth their own kinds of authenticity that was seldom seen in the era of manufactured art. And while it was not my favorite kind of music in the world, I was nonetheless drawn to their concerts whenever they would tour in any of the Pacific City sectors, if only because I had a backstage pass.

I stood in the middle of the crowd at the open air festival they had put on in Autumn Falls, the desert sector of Pacific City that was comprised of the entirety of Nevada. In the GRID's AR space, all kinds of virtual objects were placed about on the stage, and in the air above the crowd, adding to the onstage pyrotechnics, which were themselves aided by the help of my contact, the band's own lead guitarist Aaron Steel. It seemed as if he could create fire with some clever sleight of hand tricks right there on the stage, but I knew better. I knew he was one of the few psions that had been awakened in the world, and that fire was something that he knew how to control with his mind. I also knew the truth that he, like the rest of Burning Chrome, were a band of traveling mercenaries. Their day jobs as touring musicians made for an easy cover in their travels, even if that did mean that their tour schedules were to change frequently and often without notice. This just made seeing one of their concerts all the more coveted by their fans, of course.

As the concert was nearing its end, I made my way past the crowd in order to reach the backstage area, seating myself calmly at one of the tables as Aaron came in with the rest of the band. He was easy enough to pick out in most crowds, considering that he and his band dressed the part for their century-old style of music they performed. Black leather jackets and jeans were common enough for classical heavy metal musicians, along with steel-toed boots, sure, but along with all of these things, Aaron's studded black leather jacket was electrochromic. Like an electronic board, the fibers in the jacket could change colors in sequence to create any number of animated patterns, and in Aaron's case, his black jacket would often appear as though it were perpetually aflame around the edges. A similar case was made for his shirt, which would frequently display the Burning Chrome band logo, or slogans related to their music. Currently, it was showcasing the phrase "ROCK HARD, RIDE FREE" in a large metallic font. It was quite the bombastic contrast from the desaturated, earthen toned trench coats I usually wore.

Oh, and then there was his hair. It was a striking red, almost crimson color, and he always wore it long enough for it to come down to his shoulders at the very least. Along with the animated flame patterns on his jacket, it suited his fiery personality and pyrokinetic control quite well, I must admit.

"Stony Joe! You got the invitation, I see! Glad you could make it!" Aaron looked quite pleased to see me waiting for him when he showed up, pointing to me with two index fingers sticking out through black fingerless gloves. I always found it somewhat amusing the way he wore fingerless gloves with words written across the knuckles. This time, the right hand was saying "RESTLESS", and the left hand, "WILD". The last time I asked him about it, he told me that it had to do with an old song. I accepted his word for it.

"It's good to see that you're in one piece too, Aaron. How goes the bounty hunting?" I replied. Aaron never had any visibly obvious bionic implants, if any at all, which was just slightly unusual for a member of Burning Chrome. For someone in a line of work as dangerous as his, one might expect to lose at least a couple limbs, like I did during my time on the Cerberus police force. Thankfully, prosthetics were becoming more and more affordable each year. I wouldn't replace mine for the world, however.

Aaron rolled his eyes at my question. "For the last time, Joe, it's mercenary work, not bounty hunting!" He snapped his fingers with irritation, a spark of flame briefly lighting up between them and illuminating the room for a moment. "You're a PI, for God's sake! If you were any good at your own job, you would know the difference!"

I just chuckled at his response. "Yes, yes, I'm aware." I responded with a wave of my hand. Riling him up like this was one of the few sources of amusement I had left. "Now what's your next bounty? Why did you call me here for it?"

Aaron gave an irritated sigh and continued, "Well, as you can see, we just finished our show here in Reno, and the next one is in Vegas, but we're going to need to keep a low profile in order to reach our next contact. We're forming a convoy on the drive through the desert since the highways are being attacked by motor bandits. We can't afford to have that happen."

I scratched my chin and felt a bit of stubble as I considered what he told me. "And you can't hire corporate law enforcement to guide you through it? This is Autumn Falls, that's Mitashi Technologies territory. You're a rock band and you can't hire security from them?"

Aaron shook his head. "Not without blowing our cover. MitaTech has been getting suspicious of us enough as it is, we don't need to give them any more reasons. Besides, the stretch of desert we're going through doesn't fall under their coverage plans. Not profitable enough for them. It's everyone for themselves on that road."

Figures. The corporations weren't out to improve anyone's quality of life but their own. All the goods and services once offered by governments were now done for profit. Of course, this also left plenty of blind gaps that could be fulfilled by smaller businesses, such as gangs and crime syndicates, mercenaries and bounty hunters, and the occasional private investigator like myself. Truly, it was a capitalistic nightmare, but I had to live in it.

"All right," I began, "So what do you need me for? Do I look like a chauffeur to you?"

"Oh no, Joe. You're not the chauffeur. We just need you as an extra pair of hands. We've already got a driver."

---

Thomas Swift, or Turbo Tommy as he was known back in his racing days. Born in 2020, he became the car racing hero of the entire West Coast throughout the '40s and '50s, entertaining whatever American folks were left back home during the Cyborg Wars, including myself, when I was a small child. Time used to be that automobiles seemed to lack their "auto" component, in that a human driver was required to operate it, rather than an onboard AI. This caused a lot of injury and death due to human error leading to many accidents, but at the same time, human ingenuity also brought about the sport of car racing, and the creation of faster and more powerful engines until the racers drove in excess of three hundred miles per hour. As a sport that dated back roughly two centuries, it was truly one of the first marvels brought about by the fusion of man and machine. The first of many, to be sure. Turbo Tommy was the latest to continue the racing tradition, and the very last.

When the Cyborg Wars ended in 2060, three multinational corporations had survived via war profiteering and turning the battlefields into testing grounds for their new wares: Detroit robotics authority Icarus Industries, Berlin biotech firm Asclepius Medical, and Tokyo electronics giant Mitashi Technologies. Finding themselves the most valuable companies on the planet, they took the world by storm and made even more of a killing selling their products to the general public on all seven continents. Autonomous robot drones. Cybernetic implants. Bionic enhancements to every organ in the human body, and artificial organs that humans never possessed before but now could. Medicine to cure and treat countless diseases, including artificial plagues created by bioterrorists. Microscopic drones that could repair and enhance the body from the inside. Virtual and augmented reality networks that spanned the entire globe. Artificial intelligence programs that could rewrite their own code as they learned, achieving animalistic levels of sentience. And of course, putting the "auto" back into "automobile". Cars that could drive themselves.

Like a virus, the concept and application of the self-driving automobile caught on quite infectiously. Once the public was convinced of their safety record, people began advocating for them over manually driven cars, and eventually began outright demonizing people who still manually drove their cars, claiming them to be unsafe, unfit, a menace to society. The popularity of racecar driving took a sharp nosedive as this happened. Being a racer or a fan of racing became heavily stigmatized, driving these sorts of people underground. Secret racing clubs became one of the few remaining places where you could see someone manually driving a car in America.

The decline of manually driven cars and the rise of automatically driven ones was what sealed Tommy's fate. His passion was now a crime, and most other racers ended up looking for other careers. But not Tommy. At least, not for the most part. At first, he tried to continue racing in the underground circuits, but even that was not enough for him. He started taking on more jobs suited to a man of his talents and skills, jobs somewhat similar to Aaron's mercenary work. Self-driving cars could not get you absolutely everywhere in the world, after all. For all those places, the ones out of the way from the corporate sectors, people who actually knew how to drive cars were required. Driving schools used to be ubiquitous at the beginning of the 21st century, but now they were driven underground, and information on driving was heavily censored online since the corporations also controlled the GRID. Not to mention the trouble of actually finding a manually driven car anymore. These were unfortunate circumstances, but also circumstances that made Tommy find new life as a professional driver.

He looked like a shell of the man I once knew, his aged figure clad in the racing uniform I always saw him wear at the races, now faded. There wasn't much for me to say to him when we met. I was just one of his many fans. He didn't know me. He had no reason to know about nor care about me back then, nor did he have too much of a reason to even today. He heard about himself being an inspiration to random people every day, at least back before there wasn't so much of a stigma against drivers. He already knew what he was to me; what was I to him? Just another client.

We set off for Vegas that morning, myself and most of the band riding along in Burning Chrome's armored tour bus, which was decked out with all manner of mounted weaponry for just such an occasion. Aaron, on the other hand, brought out one of his bandmates to ride alongside the bus on high-powered motorbikes, armed with onboard cannons said to make them quite dangerous when combined with their high mobility. Leading the convoy was, of course, Turbo Tommy himself, driving what appeared to be a modified race car out in front of the tour bus. I had to wonder what arms his own armored racer was equipped with, and what experience he had picked up learning how to drive and operate vehicle mounted firearms at the same time. Perhaps I was soon to find out.

Since I was the most trusted contact of Vykarius, whose mastery over the GRID was unparalleled, and for good reason, he and I were assigned with the all important duty of monitoring our local GRID space for the presence of anyone or anything that might be nearby, since most vehicles had connections to the GRID, and so they would have a detectable presence.

"So those motorbikes can be manually driven too?" I asked Aaron over our GRID's conference call.

"You betcha!" Aaron replied.

"So where did you learn to drive one of those things?"

Aaron just rolled his eyes at my inquiry. "Mercenary school, where do you think?"

Before I could respond any further, the voice of Vykarius suddenly chimed in with a warning. "Heads up! We got unidentified vehicles converging on us!"

I checked the telemetry on my GRID overlay, and immediately found what Vyke was referring to. We just drove past a series of stationary markers on our map. Moments after we passed, they ceased to be stationary, and began heading in our direction. It appeared that one of the gangs was staked out here, and once they noticed us drive past, they started to give chase.

To confirm my suspicions, I left my seat at the bus and headed towards the back, looking out through the rear window to see some hazy figures behind us on the desert horizon.I adjusted my cyber eye's magnification setting until I could make them out clearer. There were at least a dozen rust colored vehicles accelerating towards our convoy from behind. Three cars, eight motorbikes, and a large armored truck bearing human and cyborg skulls on its hood.

One of the cars broke away from the pack to approach us first. Two aircraft miniguns were mounted on its roof, and when they closed the distance to our bus to less than fifty feet, those guns began to rev up.

"Look out!" Was all I could shout over the conference before our soon to be tailgater began unloading torrent of gatlng rounds at the bus, peppering its back with bullet holes as I dove under the rear window for cover. Luckily, even our windows were bulletproof, but I wasn't going to take any chances. While leaning against the back of the bus, I pried open the window slightly, enough to stick through the barrel of the rifle that I had been provided, and began to blindly fire back while keeping myself hidden as best I could, relying on the data from the GRID overlay to determine if I was having any effect.

Our pursuers seemed undeterred despite my efforts, and at least one of the other bus passengers seemed to realize this. He ran over to me and shoved something into my hand. "Joe, use this!" He exclaimed. It was a sort of grenade. Not a very common type of grenade, not a very legal type of grenade either, but an effective type of grenade nonetheless. I held it in my mechanical arm, activated the arming mechanism and hurled it out through the back window with all my might, watching as it detonated right as it fell beneath the car, sending it flying into the air and colliding with two of the bikers on its way back down.

"Bullseye, Joe! Looks like you're still a crackshot from your days on the force!" Aaron exclaimed over the conference call. "The bikers are catching up to us next! I'm going in to hold them off!"

I looked out the side window and, surely enough, Aaron's bike was slowing up just a bit in order to reach some of the remaining six approaching bikers. As he closed the distance to one of them, he drew a machine pistol from his side holster and let loose a volley in his enemies' direction. I watched as a cloud of red mist erupted around the nearest one, quickly falling off of his bike afterward. It wasn't his usual rifle that he had built into one of his guitars, but he needed to keep a hand on one of the handlebars, after all.

Despite losing another one of their own, the unwelcome bikers pressed forward and continued to close in on Aaron's position. While I was reaching for my gun and trying to line up a shot with them, one of the bikers rode right alongside Aaron's bike and proceeded to take a swing at his head with what looked like a rusty lead pipe. He ducked it and tried to put some distance between himself and his aggressor, also having difficulty lining up a shot with his gun. Eventually, I saw him just snap his fingers, and the enemy biker suddenly burst into flames, falling behind as a burning wreck. These bandits had just witnessed Aaron's pyrokinesis firsthand.

Four bikers remained, along with two cars and a truck. The former were our focus as they were the closest at the moment. I just grabbed my revolver and aimed for the body of one of the bikes as I took a shot out one of the windows. The resulting hit punched a massive hole in the bike, causing its vital systems to fail and slow to a halt, leaving him in our dust. Meanwhile, our own two bikers were each leading on one of the enemy bikes, each, into position on the sides of the tour bus right before a pair of hidden compartments opened, revealing a pair of mounted machine guns that quickly shredded the two hostile bikes and their riders to pieces.

"That's...seven bikers down?" One of the Burning Chrome members inquired. "How many did you say there were, Joe?"

"Eight. There were eight bikers. Plus two more cars and a truck." I replied.

"I'm not seeing an eighth biker anywhere..."

As it turned out, he was hiding out in our blind spot, at least for a moment, before he rode towards the window I had opened to fire threw, and tossed in a flaming bottle of Molotov with uncanny aim, engulfing the bus's interior in fire.

"Oh fuck, oh fuck! Oh fuck! The fucking bus is on fire!" One of the band members panicked as I scrambled to get clear of the spreading flames and reach for the extinguishers. The entire conference call erupted into panicked yelling over each other as we tried to put out the fire. The larger vehicles following us took this opportunity to approach and fire their mounted weapons at us, painting intricate patterns of bullet holes across the bus's hull.

Tommy, who had been silent this whole time, suddenly piped up as his car had slowed down to drive alongside the bus. "Shut the fuck up, all of you!" He shouted at us over the call. "Put out the goddamn fire and then hit the brakes! I'll take care of these assholes for you!"

As I sprayed down the back of the bus with foam, the bus driver's AI was issued an order to brake, and so it did, quickly slowing our speed by more than three quarters in the span of a few seconds, allowing the two cars and truck to simply speed on by us. I could see gunshots emerging from Tommy's car, likely a provocation to get the remaining bandits to chase after him instead.

"Don't come looking for me, just get your asses to Vegas!" Tommy continued, shouting over the roar of gunfire. "You're no good to your fans if you're dead! Me, my time's already come and gone! I ain't got shit left to lose!" The rest of us tried to protest, but Tommy had immediately disconnected from the call after he was done speaking, and ignored all further transmission requests.

"Well, you heard Turbo Tommy." Aaron was the next to speak up. "Go on ahead to Vegas. I'm going to help Tommy!" I couldn't find the words to protest this, and could only watch as Aaron's bike sped away in the direction Tommy and the bandits had gone.

---

Somehow, we made it to Vegas without encountering any more motor bandits that evening, staying at a luxury hotel that had been reserved for the band that night, sans Aaron. He would arrive on his bike the following morning, looking only slightly worse for wear considering the circumstances.

"What happened? Where's Tommy?" I was the first to greet Aaron at the front of the hotel as he went to park his bike alongside the damaged tour bus.

Aaron only responded with a shrug as he removed his helmet, straightening out his long red hair. "Beats the hell out of me. I spent all night looking for him. I eventually found the wrecks of the two cars and the truck that was chasing him. I also found the bodies of the drivers of those cars, but not their leader, who I assumed was in the truck. It was completely empty."

"And no Tommy either?"

"Not a trace. I couldn't find anything from his car, or even tire tracks. He completely disconnected all his GRID devices too."

Of course. I turned my focus away from Aaron to check my personal GRID feed. Thomas Swift had completely vanished from my contacts, as did all communications and message logs I had sent to or received from him. It was almost as if he had never existed to begin with.

Then, I received a message from Vykarius. It was a blank file containing only an attachment. I opened it to see a memo that appeared to have originated from the Dark GRID, the part of the GRID free from corporate control. It contained information regarding underground race circuits throughout Nevada. Turbo Tommy was still headlining all of them. Perhaps the Dark GRID had not yet received any information regarding Tommy's demise, either...

...Or perhaps Turbo Tommy was still in the race after all.