Death Race

Death Race

         Linda Quell’s son flew admirably in the Death Race. While others set aside training and dedication in subservience to an unwavering desire to survive, her son accepted his fate and focused on the art of his craft. He created beauty in his final flight; he sculpted destiny from fear and carved inspiration from blocks of bravery.
         His death was no accident. In fact, he dreamed of its arrival as a child. When teachers in school asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he answered dead. And they always smiled. You’ll never end up dead, they would say. What do you really want to be? And he would say something traditional like fireman or teacher. But he really just wanted to be dead.
         Quell dedicated his life to death, and it paid. Centuries of training accompanied some reasonable, albeit small, supply of natural ability, and he was accepted to participate in the Death Race.
         That guaranteed celebrity in itself, but he quickly became a standout candidate. Among a class of gods, he was recognized as Zeus. He was almighty because he held within his grasp the sweet gift of mortality, and he held it more firmly than those around him. He held it with the elegance and grace that could only accompany ingenuity’s embrace of the unknown. Other pilots were no more than imperfect imitations modeled on Quell’s ideal Form.
         In response to the question who will end up dead, last, Quell was always the answer. Betting businesses found betting men and formulated odds designed to offset his inevitable victory with heavenly gain on the unlikely chance of his demise. They rarely found takers.
         Those not in the betting circles praised his principle. Bravery, some said. Honor, others. Principle, said few, and the rest went quiet with reverence to the word itself. Principle: what cause did immortals find more worthy of death than mortality?
         None of them had experienced the closeness of death, the throbbing scramble for a moment, just a moment more: the pathetic desperation that accompanies unknown change. They could not bring it to themselves for the taboo nature of suicide, but they respected – even envied – him for it.
         It was long ago men carrying signs for peace and doctors carrying syringes for health had won victory for their causes. Medical professionals had outdone their bacterial nemeses and human life was made nearly eternal. Society made peace with remarkable haste after that; it turned out that when the only risk of war was shortening a limited lifespan, folks were willing to place ideology and patriotism ahead of already doomed survival. But with the sudden availability of eternal livelihood, no longer at stake was merely the shrinking of an already limited number of years, but the actual destruction of endless life. Most were willing to compromise principle for peace. The rest exterminated themselves quickly.
         With eternal life and peace came prosperity – life in the truly infinite leant every possible financial status to every single person at one point or another. With the burden of knowledge of socioeconomic implication, empathy became inevitable. Relatively quickly in the structure of forever, former economic truths became logically irrelevant and wealth naturally redistributed.
         No one discovered the meaning of life but most suspected it was embedded in struggle, because the irony of humanity was that everyone was peaceful, healthy and wealthy, and entirely miserable.
         They loved the Death Race for its fabricated struggle. For the participants, women came easily, drinks came free and admiration came in gift baskets with dark chocolate candies.
         When Quell was not training, he was basking in his celebrity.
         When he was training, pinnacles of focus shattered and emphatic aggression planted itself in the brain. Frontal lobe pulsations of the conscious intertwined with the most primal of subconscious emotion; the result tended to be transcendent dedication. This was fortunate, because anything less than transcendent dedication very well resulted in premature death.
         Many perished in training and they were all but forgotten shortly thereafter. They were casualties of a bitterly narrow viewpoint universally held: that death without righteous cause was elimination from memory; training for a righteous cause was not worthy of remembrance. Mothers forgot sons were born and spouses came to believe their centuries-long union was nothing more than a vivid dream. For those who died without purpose, existence did not end. It altogether ceased to have been.
         But every day that Quell and the other trainees did survive, respect rose. Celebrity elevated. Their presence often resulted in Lisztomania so impassioned that tears flowed from women and heartbeats occasionally stopped in men. The term – along with Franz Liszt himself – had long been forgotten, but hysteria escalated. Year-by-year, day-by-day during training, hysteria escalated. They were gods. Mortal gods among immortal humans.
 

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         They deserved that respect; their training was handily difficult. While The Death Race itself was to take place on mounted rockets, training began on computers with software designed to test reflexes and nerve. In the earliest phases of testing, trainees were allowed to withdraw without consequence. Few did.
         Multi-dimensional simulations followed. Almost perfectly lifelike, these applications allowed trainees to apply their objectively identified skills to a simulated course. A false cockpit created pixelated holograms randomly designed and animated at speeds no man could possibly match.
         The cockpit was not a cockpit at all. It was simply a log, roughly three feet in diameter, designed to mimic the fuselage of a rocket. It had a rubbery seat and a metallic joystick approximately one-third the distance from its nose. Not terribly different from the real rockets it mimicked, the rockets’ direction – both in the hologram simulation and in the actual Death Race – responded precisely to the movement of the joystick.
         Initial testing indicated that Quell was far from an ideal pilot. His raw ability was not impressive: he scored near the bottom of his class in reflex response and he tended toward the squeamish in high-pressure situations. But Quell, race administrators failed to realize, was an artist, not an athlete. The rocket was his weave, and he guided it through the tapestry of his final days with unparalleled results.
         His simulation scores regularly doubled the next best participant. The truest test, though, prior to The Race, was dummy training. Pundits speculated that Quell’s inability to cope with pressure would finally shine in the potentially lethal dummy races and their prodigious frontrunner would fall. The dummy races were, no doubt, far more lethal than their simulated predecessors. But those speculations proved futile.
         The Death Race was not so much a race as it was a one-way strain of focused endurance. Participants did not race together in one massive exodus, nor did they race in heats. They raced individually, and they were judged not on their time in a completed circuit – as their rockets all traveled at the same remarkable pace – but on the distance they were able to fly before death.
         The course was not without obstacle. In the earliest rounds of dummy training, the course was mostly bare and rockets came armed with brake pads, cockpit cages and buffers to limit the possibility of fuel ignition. Technicians filled tanks to just minimum capacity to allow pilots to outlast their rockets. As training wore on, the course became a maze, the rocket a deathtrap and fuel nearly unlimited.
         While few deaths actually resulted from training, casualties were plentiful. Days’ end regularly saw fractures, concussions, bumps and bruises. Far more serious injuries rose in two-step cadence with increased training intensity.
         The trainees hated dummy rockets. The fundamental flaw of the Death Race training program was that far more was at risk in training than during the Death Race itself. Men were immortalized during the race, almost regardless of their performance (though top performers were surely remembered far longer and more passionately than their lesser counterparts). Death in training, however, resulted in erasure from history altogether; that was the greatest punishment a man could face. As a result, efforts in training focused more on survival than actual ability. Participants ignored opportunities to increase their skill if it presented even the slightest risk of harm.
 

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         Quell, however, was not subject to such measured methods; he operated on a higher plane of function. On land, he was an awkward, lanky man; he tripped and stuttered and stumbled. But aboard the vessel of his choice, he became an almost inhumanly docile creature capable of linking thought to action, action to achievement. His ability lay in fundamental desire to create beautiful death in a world charmed by ugly existence: he used struggle as a paintbrush and threat as a canvas. Death was his Magnum Opus.
         As the Death Race drew near, a peaceful population sat on edge. Civilization turned barbaric; normally respectable gentlemen sat in bars until the latest of hours like drunkards, arguing not for position or influence but whether Quell or Geitner or Bruce would capture eternality and forever’s worth of folklore. Fights were common among such gentlemen. Non-betting men placed fortunes on yet undecided results; betting men placed their livelihood. Sanity was on retainer, but its services were not presently required.
         Ideological principle morphed into hysterics; women screamed piercing screams and threw themselves at participants and men whooped, teary-eyed. They were emotions backed by fundamental logic, however. Principle, they remembered. Somewhere deep in the recesses of their frazzled brains, they remembered.
         By the day of the Death Race, policing required not only guarding participants from fanfare, but also frequenting and inspecting local bars and viewing venues to ensure some bastardization of orderly conduct. Police officials generally accepted their task was doomed for failure and assumed rioting was imminent; in fact, officials often found themselves inclined to participate in such reckless behavior.
         Bars filled beyond capacity with every human in existence – the sheer excitement of the mystery of death enraptured the oldest of men and women and the youngest of children. Humans lost the engrained condition of civility and logic on that day. Their eyes glued themselves to every medium of viewership available to them.
         The Death Race began in reverse order of assumed ability. The weakest contestants – still masters of coordination and reflex in their own right – flew and died first. The best flew last, and the regulars flew in the middle. Upsets and surprises happened frequently, but the order was chosen as such to quench the short-term blood thirst of the audience at the beginning while maintaining long-term curiosity until the very last pilot had flown.
         The participants raced in a seven-mile underground circuit, lined with thick glass windows separating the tunnel’s violence from audience grandstands. The glass was designed in coordination with the rockets to ensure every possible safety precaution for the fans. The rest of the tunnel appeared as a natural cave, because it was. Rock structures and bends posed as obstacles for participants. Rock and glass stood unfazed in the face of fiery collision. Rockets and men did not.
 

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         Rigel Williams raced first. Expectations for his success were low – few men bet that he would place higher than even one other participant of roughly two hundred scheduled. His race was met with desire for exciting and violent conclusion – no finance or dignity was at risk. Rigel knew this and accepted his place.
         His rocket launched from the starting gate at a stunning pace and he flew well for a brief period, evading rocky structures and picking beautiful lines into hard curves. But relatively quickly, he lost control as he knew he would. He overcompensated in response to an obstacle jutting from the base of the tunnel and flew far too high. Without control before a tight veer to the right, his race was all but concluded. Realizing his race nearly concluded, he ignored survival and focused on a creating spectacular conclusion. He rotated his rocket so its underbelly faced upward and he dangled from its cockpit.
Harnessed into the vehicle only by nylon straps, he dangled as the rocket dragged along the roof of the tunnel, ripped its flimsy shell and ignited. The smoking rocket collapsed onto him and continued straight into the apex of the curve.
         Williams happily met his end in collision with a viewing window. His body thudded and crumpled and blood smeared and his rocket exploded in a fireball and those who paid for the privilege of premier seating recalled their investment with glee. Pilots waiting for their race celebrated the first collision, the glorification of their comrade for life - evidence of their inevitable fate - with whiskey and filatio in the privacy of the racer’s quarters. They ignored Quell’s furious note-taking and dedication to the viewing window before him.
         Several other racers followed in Rigel’s footsteps. Grand conclusions and fireballs, broken bodies and littered carcasses enraptured an increasingly rambunctious, heavily intoxicated crowd.
         Early in the festival, the audience cheered those pilots who intentionally satiated their desire for epic conclusions and actually booed those who fought for extended survival. How dare you think you’re the best, racer number twelve of two-hundred and four, They seemed to say. How dare you fight for victory, Mr. Sixth Percentile.
         But as the races carried on and as the chances of success for racers moved from impossible to unlikely to contending, the crowd slowly silenced. People watched their bets fight selflessly for survival and payoff before selfish engagement in glorification. As racers outperformed, underperformed and just performed, rowdy drunkards sobered in admiration, disappointment and financial upheaval.
         It must be noted that few had placed bets on a first place finish this particular year. The rationale was rooted in Quell’s secure ownership of the pedestal. No one bet against his odds because his odds were nearly fact; his victory was simply a truth that had yet to occur. In order to win even the smallest amount money on his victory, a bettor needed to front quantities of money so copious that they required home mortgages and bank loans. It wasn’t so much that people weren’t willing to take that risk – which some did, to be sure – it was more that the small financial gain associated with his victory didn’t actually merit the effort required in paperwork and financial transfers necessary to complete the transaction.
         And because the course changed from year to year, both in distance and difficulty, a bet could not be placed on Quell’s breaking of old record because all things were not equal. Craig Sachem’s longest run, for instance, 243 years prior, was in a tunnel many argued too free of obstacles. Those in the audience that year recalled yawning in boredom even during the races of the less capable, simply because the course was not challenging enough.
         Craig Sachem raced for seventeen laps before intentionally thrusting his rocket into the ceiling. Many speculate (and usually speculate as folklore more than fact) that he ended his race prematurely because he had to piss.
         So Quell’s Death Race could not be compared to previous races, though most were sure he would rank among the best had all things been equal.
         But, again, bettors failed to realize what had been made clear before: Quell was an artist, not an athlete. Quell was a journeyman of his mind, not of an eight mile subterranean tunnel.
         When Quell mounted his rocket, weary watchers recovered in full wakefulness. They were in the presence of the making of history.
         He flew well for a period. He evaded rocky structures and picked Rigel’s beautiful line into the first three hard curves. A rock jutted from the floor - no more than a minor disturbance in a fairly easy section of the course for Quell. But he pulled his rocky high - just feet from the cave’s roof. He rotated, dropped to dangle from nylon straps. His rocket ripped as it skimmed the roof. It smoked and collapsed onto him as he approached the apex of the curve.
 

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Linda Quell saw pride in her son’s eyes. She smiled as his rocket burst above her. She laughed as her son’s body crumpled against the glass, just feet from where she sat.