Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

They built me a second jack, behind my arse. When I strap myself in, I hot-wire myself to the car. I don’t drive it; I become it.

This has its consequences.

My body is a corporate concern. It has no solid boundaries. In short, it is a whore.

One of Formula Zero’s damn few rules states: one car, one driver. Havers has got round that—they saved my spine and in return have turned me into a databus, a way of loading the aggregate wisdom of Achebi’s Research Institute into a racing car; a smart messenger with a spine full of—what? Software? Wetware?

I have a name for it: Slime.

The Casino is fashioned in flamboyant style with towers at the corners and, sitting on the roof, great bronze angels, picked out by floodlighting which extends into the Boulengrins.

Angèle and I walk among the cacti. She is scared. Maybe it’s the race. More likely it’s being undercover, working for terrorists. I wonder how much they’re paying her? She has no respect or liking for them. Her politics are much more homely. Maybe they agreed to fund some rape crisis centers.

“Do you think that wafer will kill you?”

“Maybe,” I reply. Is this part of her job—to frighten me? Test my nerve? She may be right. To cause the world’s best speed driver to die twirling in flames through the bijou houses of Monte Carlo-No. Accidents themselves have their own phallic semiology. No sport on Earth so quickly forgets its widows. Grand Prix’s finest take Death as their bride. Whisper their names in awe: Depailler, Villeneuve, Willy Mairesse.

I do not think the Programme will kill me. Perhaps I lack the cruelty to credit such deception. Perhaps, if I were a woman, I could be that cruel. Perhaps (I look at Angèle, the stoop of her shoulders, her tired eyes, the way she twitches her fingers through her hair)—perhaps I would have to be, to survive.

We return to the Hotel de Paris. We have a suite overlooking the Casino. Tomorrow Angèle will sit on our balcony; she will see the cars as they stream into the square and snake down the hill.

Perhaps she will think of me.

We watch Danseuses Nouvelles. There are only five dancers in the company, including Helene. If I didn’t know better, I would say there were at least twenty. This is the heart of Danseuses’ enduring novelty. The way they dance alters their appearance. They toy with the semiology of movement, with their audience’s stereotypic racial and social expectations. They move in a way we expect certain kinds of people to move, and they become those people. The eye is tricked by the conditioned expectations of the brain. The government is outraged by the Programme ’s violent acts. But I suspect they fear this quiet revolution far more. They can handle terrorism: but seduction?

The credits spool and I undress. I sit cross-legged on the bed. Angèle pushes the wafer into my back.

In a while the headache clears. Two green circles appear, one above the other, center-vision. In an eyeblink they are gone. They are the first and last I will see of the Programme ’s system. It will perform its acts regardless. I will have no opportunity to intervene.

“It’s all right now,” I say.

Angèle turns on the light. She looks at me and she is afraid.

Inside me, something flexes.

Formula Zero is a race for cars, not drivers. It is a vicious testing bed for crackpot ideas, the way Formula One used to be till the 1970s and the iron rule of Jean Marie Balestre.

Formula One’s rule book ceased to reflect technical progress around that time. Formula Zero was conceived in the nineties as a way round the rule book and into the twenty-first century.

Anyway, crashes are good for business.

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.