Space Runners #1

by Jeramey Kraatz

  It didn’t take him long to unpack his stuff once he managed to stop gawking over his temporary accommodations. He didn’t have many belongings on Earth to begin with, apart from a handful of gadgets he’d either salvaged or traded for, and knowing that the resort was going to provide space suits, he hadn’t brought much in the way of clothes. He tossed a few ragged T-shirts in one corner and fished out the small voice modulator he’d packed and placed it on the bedside table. At least his little brothers hadn’t taken that. He pulled his beaten-up old HoloTek from his backpack, the screen cracked and clouded with dirt that had somehow become embedded in the datapad, and then tapped on his shiny new device to start a data transfer, importing all his old files. After a few seconds, the transfer was complete, and he scrolled through some videos to make sure everything seemed in order. Most of them were outtakes from his scholarship vid. There was one, though, that looked unfamiliar. He checked the file’s info and found it had been created the day before. He tapped on it.

  To his surprise, the video began to play not just on the HoloTek but on the wall across from him as well. His grandmother and two younger brothers sat inside their RV, threadbare curtains tacked up over the windows, dust motes floating in the shafts of light that poured through the many holes. Their faces were all smiles, blown up to huge proportions and illuminating Benny’s room.

  “Hi, Benny!” all three of them said at once, waving. He wondered when they could have recorded this—maybe while he was out saying good-bye to the rest of the caravan.

  “We wanted to leave you a surprise,” his grandmother said. “I hope you find this! Otherwise we messed up. Boys, tell your brother that you love him.”

  Both his brothers rolled their eyes, putting up a fight for a few seconds.

  “Just don’t forget about us,” Alejandro, the youngest, said.

  “Sure, and bring us back some cool stuff.” Justin grinned.

  “Oh, yeah, and we took your holospider out of your bag. If you want it back for your trip, tell us before you leave, okay?”

  “And tell Elijah how cool I am. I’ll be old enough to apply next year!”

  His brothers started to bicker over which of them deserved to go to the Moon before the other. Benny sat on the bed, his knees feeling wobbly. It made no sense, given the extreme luck he’d had in winning the EW-SCAB, but suddenly he kind of wished he were back on Earth.

  Eventually, his grandmother turned the camera so that it focused only on her. She was all smiles, her darkly tanned flesh crinkling like raisin skin around her eyes.

  “Your father would be so proud,” she said, tears threatening to fall at any moment. “You know that, right, Benicio?”

  The video ended like that, with her frozen, staring into the camera, as if waiting for him to respond.

  Benny set the HoloTek down and fished the last remaining item out of the bottom of his backpack. A tarnished silver hood ornament in the abstract shape of a human. The figure appeared to be moving so quickly through the air that its body blurred, trailing behind it like wings or the tail of a comet. His father had pulled it off an old car he and Benny had found on a salvage trip one day when Benny was six or seven.

  “See this?” his dad had asked. “This is like us. Always moving forward. We keep going, no matter what. We never give up.”

  Benny brushed a piece of lint off the statue and put it on the nightstand beside his bed. It looked shabby in the high-tech room. Benny could relate.

  He wasn’t surprised his brothers had taken the spider but left the hood ornament. The three of them may have spent a lot of their days pulling pranks on one another and fighting over toys or tech, but Justin and Alejandro both knew what that silver piece of metal meant to Benny. Each of them had mementos that the others knew were off-limits. Stuff from their father. Salvaged junk that meant the world to them. Now that their dad was gone, it was all they had of him other than their memories.

  It hadn’t even been a year since he’d led a small team out into the Drylands in search for water. Only two people had returned. Benny’s father was not one of them. In the course of a day, the world as Benny knew it had ended.

  Benny had already been filming for his EW-SCAB video when it happened—he had always planned to try for the scholarship. But he’d almost abandoned the application in the week following his father’s death. Part of this was because of sheer exhaustion. He spent all his time making sure his brothers were okay, talking to them or trying to distract them when tears cut streaks down their dust-covered cheeks. He tried to turn himself into a rock, stone-faced, promising them he’d never leave—another reason he almost gave up on the EW-SCAB. It was only at night that he let himself really think about his father, when he’d climb up to the top of the RV after everyone else was asleep and wonder how in the world they were going to survive without him. One night, he’d taken the hood ornament up to the roof and realized that his dad would have wanted him to apply. Of course he would have. He’d want Benny to keep fighting, keep trying for everything he yearned for in life. Always moving forward. Never giving up. And what Benny wanted more than anything was to help his family.

  So he went for it. He poured every ounce of his heart into his application materials.

  And somehow that had been enough to get him this far.

  Now, with the hood ornament on his bedside table, he almost felt like his father had guided him there. And he knew that despite being away from his family right now, he’d be back soon. He’d take care of them. He’d be the kind of person his dad would have wanted him to be.

  7.

  A soft electronic ping sounded all around Benny’s suite, and suddenly the frozen image of his family was gone from the screen.

  Pinky’s voice filled the room.

  “Message received from Ricardo Rocha. Would you like to view it now?”

  “Uh . . .” Benny said, jumping to his feet. “Yes?”

  The Pit Crew member appeared on the wall, his chin held high, arms crossed across the chest of his dark red space suit.

  “Greetings, Mustangs,” he said in a deep, slightly accented voice. “It’s an honor to have you on my team. Please join me in the common room at the end of the hallway near the elevators.” He set his square jaw, eyes staring straight into Benny’s. “Now.”

  Benny immediately started for the door. There was something commanding in Ricardo’s voice—maybe because as the first Crew member he was almost five years older than Benny—that left no room for hesitation. The other Mustangs must have felt the same way, because by the time Benny got to the common room, they were almost all there, making small talk and comparing HoloTek apps as 3D images of red horses galloped or reared back silently along the walls. He spotted Hot Dog using her HoloTek’s camera to see herself as she fixed her hair. Ramona, unsurprisingly, had her face buried in a screen as she lounged in a chair against one wall. Jasmine was on the other side of the room, leaning against a corner with her hands in her pockets as she stared at the floor.

  Drue was standing near the door, talking to a girl Benny hadn’t met yet. He watched as she rolled her eyes and walked away from him, flicking two long dark braids behind her. Drue crossed his arms and made a face at her as she left, then scanned the room until he saw Benny. His eyes lit up as he waved him over.

  Benny stood still for a second—there were a lot of other people he hadn’t met yet, but there was something about how frantically Drue motioned to him that made him feel like Drue needed him by his side. And Benny had to admit, even though Drue was kind of full of himself, there was something exhilarating about his confidence and energy.

  “Who was that?” Benny asked as he approached.

  “Just some girl named Iyabo. No one interesting.”

  Benny figured this really meant that it was no one interested in talking to Drue.

  “I’ve been scoping these losers out and I’m pretty sure we’re the team’s best hope of coming out on top if we’re pitted against the other groups,” Drue continued. “As
long as you really do have the kind of ATV driving chops you say you do. That’ll come in handy if we fight Moon buggy paintball wars or something.”

  “There’s a big difference between being aware of your abilities and being arrogant, Drue Bob Lincoln,” a voice came from behind them. “The C in EW-SCAB stands for courage, not cockiness.”

  Benny turned to see Ricardo Rocha towering over them. He was at least two heads taller than everyone else in the room, and much broader, too. He looked like he could bench-press Benny if he wanted to.

  Benny hoped that he didn’t.

  The room around them got quiet. Drue paused for only a moment before holding out his hand.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m a huge fan. I guess you already know who I am.”

  “Benny Love,” Ricardo said, ignoring Drue. His penetrating eyes were the same dark brown as his crew cut. It felt to Benny as though their leader was sizing him up as he continued. “I saw your video. Nice moves out on those desert dunes. I’m eager to see how those translate into low-gravity speed runs on the lunar surface. And saving that boy took some real bravery. I’m proud to have you in my group.”

  Ricardo thrust out a red-gloved hand with such speed and precision that Benny tensed up and almost jumped. He shook it, murmuring thanks.

  Ricardo glanced at Drue. “You didn’t have a video, so we’ll have to see if you live up to all that big talk.”

  Drue smiled, but Benny could see that he was gritting his teeth. He looked back at the rest of the room. All eyes were on them. Hot Dog had both her hands clasped in front of her, a huge smile on her face as she stared at Ricardo.

  “Attention,” Ricardo said, walking past Benny and stepping up on a raised platform in front of one of the animated mustangs. “As you probably already know, I’m Ricardo Rocha, the first member of Elijah’s Pit Crew. That makes me his right-hand man. Part apprentice, part assistant, part bodyguard.”

  “And complete idiot,” Drue muttered, still smiling and clenching his jaw.

  Ricardo continued. “While you’re on the Moon, you’re my responsibility, and anything you do reflects upon me as your leader. That means I expect nothing but the best from you for the next two weeks. Elijah expects nothing but the best. And I’m guessing you all want to impress him, right?”

  The Mustangs erupted in shouts and cheers. Ricardo smiled.

  “Good. Now, let’s get to know each other. Remember, these are your teammates—it’s in your best interest to get along with them and work together.”

  One by one, they introduced themselves. Many were from places Benny had never imagined he’d ever see. Iyabo, the girl Drue had been talking to, came from Cameroon. A skinny, pale boy with dark eyes and hair was from Greece. Jasmine had originally been born in China before coming to America. Despite their home countries, almost everyone seemed to speak passable English. Benny got a few weird looks when he introduced himself as being from the Drylands, but he figured that was to be expected. Unless you lived in a border town or out in the desert, you didn’t exactly come across caravan members in your everyday life.

  Ramona was the last to go. She didn’t say anything, only clicked her tongue and held up her left arm, which had a HoloTek strapped to it—an older model, not the one she’d been given when she checked in. As she tapped on the screen, purple numbers began to scroll across the room’s walls, replacing the Mustang logos.

  01011010 01110101 01110000 00111111 00100000 01001001 00100111 01101101 00100000 01010010 01100001 01101101 01101111 01101110 01100001 00100000 01100110 01110010 01101111 01101101 00100000 01010111 01100001 01101100 01100101 01111010 00101110 00100000 01011000 01000100

  No one seemed sure what to make of this. Even Ricardo looked dumbfounded. Finally, Jasmine took a timid step forward.

  “My binary is a little rusty,” she said, “But you’re . . . Ramona from . . . Wales?”

  Ramona chuckled.

  “Woot,” she said. “Much leet, Jazz.”

  “Okay,” Drue whispered to Benny. “Maybe you were right. Maybe she is speaking robot.”

  A new series of numbers and what looked to Benny like gibberish strings of letters appeared. Jasmine’s eyes chased after the lines of code, her face scrunched in concentration. Finally, she laughed a little, apparently getting some joke that was lost on the others.

  “Excuse me.” A woman’s voice filled the room as Pinky’s hologram walked out of the wall, causing a girl near her to scream. The screens scrambled, and were then replaced by the mustangs from before. “What exactly do you think you’re doing messing with my projection systems?”

  “It’s okay, Pinky,” Ricardo said. “It looks like we’ve got quite a programmer on our team.”

  Ramona let her reddish-blond curls fall back down into her face as she opened a can of soda, grinning at Pinky.

  “Also,” Ricardo said, “hasn’t Max been on you about popping up out of nowhere?”

  “Humph.” Pinky casually walked through the open doorway, blinking out of existence when she was a few steps into the hall.

  The skinny boy from Greece raised a hand. “So, Pinky seems cool and all, but can I get a talking dog or something as my room butler instead?”

  “Elijah’s pretty protective of the AI’s form,” Ricardo said.

  “Why? It’s just a hologram, right? It could be anything.”

  “Well . . .” Ricardo paused for a moment. “Pinky was Elijah’s personal assistant for years as a flesh-and-blood person. She was still here when I was an EW-SCABer. I got to meet her a few times.”

  “So, what happened to her?” Hot Dog asked.

  “She didn’t like it up here. She missed the ocean and the sunshine on Earth. Elijah was . . . upset when she said she was leaving. He kept himself busy in his quarters and had her spend her last week here with the newly designed artificial intelligence system. She basically uploaded her personality into it. I have to say, she’s pretty similar to the original.”

  “I guess we know who the all-seeing eyes of the Taj are,” Benny whispered to Drue.

  “Seriously. Remind me not to say anything bad about the computer lady.”

  “Okay, Mustangs,” Ricardo said, straightening his posture like a soldier about to march. “Enough talk. Who wants to see the rest of the Taj?”

  Excitement surged through Benny so quickly that he didn’t even realize he was shouting until his voice was ringing out through the room. They were all yelling, ready to explore.

  Ricardo led them through the halls, pointing out things of interest. A solid-gold replica of the first Space Runner encrusted with diamonds. Astroturf soccer fields out back, with goals floating ten feet off the ground. A room made up entirely of gray rubber that Ricardo referred to simply as a “virtual gaming environment.” Even the kitchen was a technological wonder. Jasmine gasped when she saw the state-of-the-art lasers used to chop vegetables and flash-cook food.

  With each new marvel, Benny’s understanding of what life could be like changed. He knew that wealthy people in the cities lived in a completely different way than those in the caravans—he’d had glimpses of this himself when he lived in an apartment as a kid—but the sort of luxury available at the Taj was mind-boggling. And as much as it filled him with excitement, he couldn’t believe that some people lived like this all the time. What would that even be like?

  He wondered if, just maybe, he would like to stay at the Taj. What would his family’s life be like if they could all somehow live here?

  “Why are we seeing all this without getting to do any of it?” Drue groaned. “That video game room is new! Heck, I’d even be happy using one of those laser potato peelers right now. This is torture.”

  Benny noticed Ricardo looking back at Drue with disdain.

  “Dude, Drue,” Benny said, “you’re going to drive everyone else and yourself insane complaining. You wouldn’t last for five seconds in the Drylands.”

  “I could tough it out.”

  “Really? Because my caravan has tak
en on a few people who got forced out of a city before. They usually don’t last for long.”

  Drue’s eyes widened a little.

  “You mean . . . you killed them?”

  “What?” Benny asked. “No, are you crazy? They just ended up wandering off and getting lost in the desert because they were bored. Or left to try and hack it out somewhere else. We don’t kill people.”

  Drue shrugged. “You hear stories. The Drylands are supposed to be lawless. Full of roaming gangs and stuff.”

  Benny wondered if this was why he’d gotten some weird looks when he introduced himself to the rest of his team.

  “Most of us are just trying to stay alive,” he said. “The others . . . Well, the Drylands are dangerous, just not always in the way you expect them to be.”

  It was then that Ricardo stopped in front of a giant steel slab at the end of a hallway and turned to the group.

  “You’re about to enter one of the most exclusive places in the galaxy. Behind this door are the most sophisticated machines known to man. Personally, it’s my favorite room in the Taj.”

  Somewhere toward the front, Hot Dog squealed.

  “Welcome to the garage, Mustangs.” Ricardo grinned, lifting his chin and looking down over the bridge of his nose at the group. “I hope you’re prepared to prove you’re worthy of the EW-SCAB.”