Gaming the System

by P A Wikoff

  With my left hand, I pulled out my electro prying knife from my belt bag and started to get to work on the speed governor. It was a simple yet effective device. Just a steel peg on a ring, which stopped the handle grip from turning past a certain point. With a couple of prying twists, it broke off and spiraled away behind me.

  I narrowed my eyes and pulled the throttle as far as my wrist would allow, while simultaneously white-knuckling the handles for maximum lift. The turbine jolted, and I bucked from the sheer force. If it wasn’t for the special grip on the seat, I would have been thrown off like a rider on a robo-mechanical bull. This was going to work. It had to work.

  Forty-nine feet.

  The more I climbed, the more vertical the Sky bike became, increasing the rate at which I was escalating.

  Fifty-five feet.

  “I did it!” It was a new record. No one had ever gone higher than fifty feet with a hover vehicle, and the previous record of 49 feet was set with the use of a ramp.

  Two records set in the same day. What an eventful trip this was turning out to be. The heavy work had been in the preparation and patience. Looking down at the brake, I debated taking a victory lap. Then again, I was still climbing. I couldn’t give up now. I didn’t want to beat the old record; I wanted to blow it out of the sky. So, I tucked my head down low and pushed my toes into the climb.

  Sixty feet.

  The turbine engine started to rattle and sounded high-pitched. It was really taking the abuse. This was not good, but I wasn’t stopping here. The sky was mine, and I saw victory over the horizon.

  Seventy-three feet.

  Up here it is so empty, no buildings to avoid, no…

  A delivery drone nearly crashed into me, and I had to pull the bike hard to the left—spinning off course. I was way out of my jurisdiction. Any airspace above twenty feet was reserved for the United Systems Drone Service, or U.S.D.S., and now I knew why. I could get in some serious trouble if I happened to smash into someone’s delivery—especially on a launch day.

  The world was up, then down and around, as I spun every which way. Fighting with the controls, I managed to muscle the bike back to a reasonably steady angle. The rattling stress of the maneuver caused a couple of bits and bolts to break off and fall to the ground.

  “I hope they weren’t important,” I said over my shoulder, trying to catch a glimpse of what I had left behind. I was still in the sky, and that was all that mattered.

  Soon, I reached my maximum altitude. I wasn’t climbing anymore, and everything was shaking fiercely. Leveling off the controls, I reached the peak of my climb and hovered there for a moment at eighty-two feet above the ground—a new height record.

  The nose of my bike started to roll over and point straight down towards the hard ground below.

  “YODO,” I said, referring to the expression “you only die once.” Taunting death with my cry, I scrunched my face, and braced for whatever might come next.

  Starting my descent, I grabbed the lever near my left knee, pulling it out of the safety position and into the “rocket stop” setting. This feature was reserved for crashing situations. It was designed to exhaust all remaining fuel cells to propel you backwards, in order to slow you down enough to deploy the landing wings. It was recommended to never ever, under any circumstance other than a high-speed crash, use the lever. Especially before you were in one. There was a very high risk of burning out your whole system by doing so. But I had just done it, from more than eighty feet in the air. The turbine glowed bright yellow as the rest of the world turned into a blur.

  “Here we go!”

  I was at a dead stop when I had pulled the lever. So, naturally, instead of slowing down, I rocketed through the sky backwards like the opposite of red-hot meteor, returning to the heavens instead of crashing down from them. Flames burst out of the front of the turbine, as it destroyed itself internally.

  I felt the heavy force of gravity pushing me down against the handlebars. It took everything I had to focus on steering and not falling off the bike, which was shaking uncontrollably. The special seat couldn’t even handle this much friction.

  “Yeeeehh,” I screamed through the freeing feeling. It was both terrifying and exhilarating. I didn’t know where I was going besides just up. The world below got smaller and smaller as I tried to focus on keeping the bike level and steady.

  By the time I was able to look at my console, all the gages were pinned in the red zone. My speedometer didn’t read “MAX”; it was now into the negative numbers.

  To my utter amazement, my altitude was at a whopping two hundred and thirteen feet, and still climbing rapidly.

  A flapping side panel peeled back, then ripped off and shot into unknown sky, exposing wires and delicate internal parts. The bike had an aerodynamic design, but not while moving in this direction. I was travelling against the grain, in a sense. The friction was starting to wear on it and literally tear it apart. The bike was toast and getting toastier by the second.

  Five hundred and ten feet.

  I tore into a thick layer of smog. Visibility was non-existent. It was dark and black, but not calming and safe like “The Black” I was used to. It was harsh and constricting. Even my O2 satchel was having trouble filtering out the stuff. I coughed violently as I smashed the machine. It sputtered and beeped, but still wasn’t working properly. My fingers twitched, my lungs ached, and I started to feel lightheaded.

  Then green, bright green skies as far as my eyes could see. Never having been above the smog layer before, I had never seen anything so spectacular in my life. It was rich with vibrant undertones, which changed depending on how the light hit them. It was like being blind and seeing the world for the first time.

  Tears of who-knows-what filled my eyes. I couldn’t decide if I was happy, sad, or regretful. There was just too much for me to process, in order to truly understand what I was feeling in that moment.

  Having been so dazzled by the view, I hadn’t even noticed that I was breathing easily again. This could have been the afterlife, for all I knew.

  An alarm started to blare.

  Snapping out of the moment, I noticed that the bike was well past being overheated. Now a real threat of it actually exploding was drawing near. This had to stop.

  Nine hundred nine feet.

  What a record! But it isn’t mine, not yet. No one keeps track of people who get themselves killed.

  The engine was working hard, but it wasn’t ascending any more than a few inches a second. The gravitational pull was too much and quite unforgiving.

  I moved the lever by my leg into discharge mode, hoping to cool it off some and salvage what was left of the turbine. Instead, it moaned and groaned as if its gears and blades were being broken from the inside out. A thick black plume of smoke billowed out of the exhaust.

  That was about the time I pulled the engine release. Detaching the internal sleeve of the turbine from the outer shell caused the engine to fire out the back like a missile. With a loud boom, it exploded right above me.

  “That wasn’t in the advertisement!”

  Bright yellow and red light reflected in my eyes from what remained of the explosion as I rubbernecked to catch the action. It was all very beautiful until the weight of what had just happened started to sink in.

  “That was one of my engines.” And it was now reduced to burning debris raining down on me from above. My days of going reverse or even slowing down were long gone.

  Suddenly gravity grabbed ahold of me with its mighty clutch and pulled me into a free fall, avoiding most of the burning destruction.

  What made matters worse was that the bike was no longer getting any power. Even the small indicator light that never turned off was off.

  “On,” I said, but there was no response. Under my seat was the breaker switch. I pulled it a couple times, hoping to reboot the system. “On, on, on, on, on!” Still nothing happened. It was as dead as a forest.

  This was not good. One thing was abundantl
y clear; I was going to die.

  Chapter Three

  Crash Bandicoot

  O ut of control, like a wild pitch, I twisted and turned every way possible down into the smog layer. It was impossible to get my bearings with the world around me moving so fast. My equilibrium was going haywire.

  No matter how much I beat on the controls, nothing was responding. The power would glitch on and off, but never stay on long enough for me to figure out what exactly was going on.

  “You can do this. You’re a good bike,” I said, petting the frame where I had just smacked. There must be a short in the wiring somewhere, but I had no idea as to where. I was dead in the air here.

  As quickly as I had seen the world get smaller, it was now getting bigger, a lot bigger, and fast. I needed a plan.

  “Scratch that. You’re the best bike. A genuine world record holder.” I tried to use flattery as a motivation.

  It was one of those frustrating moments where you tried everything you can think of, and you’re just about to resort to something crazy, like praying, when…

  A lightning surge bolted right towards me. Every single hair in my body stood on end. Even my eyebrows felt like they were pushing my goggles off my face. I covered my eyes with my hand, not wanting to witness my own end, but the unique properties of the electrical wave caused me to see right through my eyelids and through my hand, like if I were looking at an X ray. Every color was reversed. I saw the bones in my hand as they trembled. Was I vaporized or worse?

  Scared to death, and of death, I looked around, astonished at what I could see. For a brief moment, I had X-ray vision. I could see my insides as if they were on my outside. I could see the inner workings of the bike, and they were more than just trashed.

  The bolt had missed me by about fifty feet or so, but I still felt its warmth all around me. Its power kept me suspended in the air, no longer falling or moving.

  No wait, that’s not right. It was more like time was distorted while I was in the proximity of the surge. I knew this because I could see it slowly snaking its way across the sky. I’d seen this marvel from afar. These surges are instantaneous. If you happen to blink, you miss them.

  Then I noticed the console. A wire was flapping around, disconnected from what might be the starting mechanism. It somehow, in all the excitement, had become loose.

  The huge bolt of purple electricity twisted and turned around me as if it were a compressed tornado of pure energy.

  I gave the console one hard, double-fisted hammer strike right where the wire was. The force, combined with the power it must have borrowed from the surge, jump-started the system. The console and everything else was sparking and going haywire, but it was “on” for all intents and purposes.

  As fast as the lightning surge had come, it vanished, leaving a faint scar or memento in the sky where it once had been.

  The bike’s power stayed on long enough for me to enable the gliding gear. First the tail wings came out. Then, poof, the glider wings followed and caught the wind beneath them. Everything slowed down to a crawl. I had done it.

  Somewhat soaring downward, like a kite caught in a gust, I started to gain a little control over where I was going to drop out of the sky. Life seemed calmer up here, above the busy bots and hot concrete jungle. But I knew that the hard ground was going to catch up with me eventually, and it wasn’t going to be a soft landing.

  A feeling of relief snuck out of me, giving me a moment to enjoy the view and the vast expanse beneath me. It felt as though I was the last person alive on this planet.

  It wasn’t a huge stretch of the imagination at all. Rarely did I run across another living thing in the real world. Worker bots and other command-driven machines were always doing little busy work. Some models you could talk to and maybe have a pre-programmed conversation with, sure, but they were not alive. Yet they had somehow inherited the outside, and it was more their domain than ours.

  So, yes, technically I was alone. I never attributed artificial intelligence like A.L.I.C.E. with being alive. That was what it was all about, wasn’t it? Having free will, a personality that was your own—a soul and not just a serial number. Things created aren’t living. They just go through the motions of the day until they’re recycled into something else. No one missed a piece of gear when it needed to be replaced. Like getting a new keyboard or phone, maybe if the newer version wasn’t superior to the one being replaced, then you might feel a pang of empathy for the old gear. People just wanted the best and to be the best, in all aspects of life. If something better never came along, we as a race might have found contentment.

  Let me also add animals to the list of soulless, non-living entities. I believe that animals used to have souls, back long before I was born, before we started growing them in factory farms. Animals had somehow changed since that time, and here is my evidence. I’d seen all the hilarious cat and doggo videos in the old intercloud archives. There were so many of them that they must have been posted daily, maybe even hourly. None of the current animals acted the way they did in those videos.

  Nowadays, house pets were very similar to computers; they did their function, and that was about it. Cats sat on your lap without scratching you for no reason, and dogs only barked at intruders and never stole food off the table or out of a baby’s hand. It was as if someone had squeezed out all of the animal’s personality and imperfections, and what was left was dry, boring pulp. That is what we grew now, pulp pets.

  I would have ranted more on this point, but off in the distance I spotted it—the postal warehouse where my dad’s package was being held. Like a trail of ants, drones of all shapes and sizes were coming and going in straight lines.

  If my altimeter display hadn’t been broken, it would have probably read that I was a few hundred feet off the ground at this point.

  I started to glide towards the shipping facility, as much as I could, anyhow. The controls still weren’t responding the way they should.

  “The drones go marching one by one…” I started to sing when something blue crashed into me like a punch to the face. My bike swerved left and right as it followed my knee-jerk reaction, reeling from the collision. Goggles shattered and disoriented, I tried to shake off the dizziness I felt.

  Descending at a steeper angle than I wanted, I broke into an uncontrollable nosedive. This was about the time someone would normally use the rocket-stop booster to get out of this situation. Not this time.

  “Come on, baby,” I said with the sincerity of a husband to his wife, as I yanked up on the controls with all my might. I was slowly pulling out of it when the right glider wing tore off with the opposing force.

  Now I was spinning again, but this time in a corkscrew at a forty-five-degree angle, turning around and around like the hands on a clock. I tried to bring in the other glider wing but was met with an error light.

  Gliding wings were never made for this type of landing, but I had reinforced them by fusing two sets together. It took a little modification in the stowing compartment, but I made them work.

  Time was running out. I knew it as I stared at the fast-approaching ground.

  “Let’s go,” I said over and over as I kicked the slot where the left wing was being difficult. It was no use; the wing was never going back in there. Maybe if the world hadn’t been turning so fast, I might have been able to troubleshoot the problem.

  With a couple turns of a knob, I deactivated the smart-foam mechanism in the seat that kept me perfectly glued to it.

  Running the risk of falling off the bike, I used everything I had to rapidly kick at the remaining wing. It didn’t take much, but after a couple of kicks, it broke off completely.

  My corkscrew spin turned into a straight, forward fall, which was better but still not great. Pinching my seat between my knees and white knuckling the handlebars, I heard the angelic sound of the lift fans as they came on in full force.

  At least those still worked…sort of. The blissful sound turned to horror as the hun
dreds of fans began breaking apart underneath me. Parts were falling off from everywhere and throwing shrapnel into other working fans, creating a chain reaction of destruction. It wouldn’t be long before they weren’t strong enough to stay in the air.

  Some broken fan part ricocheted and scratched my arm. I didn’t have time to dwell on my injury, not just yet, because the ground was not simply approaching, it was here.

  Dust from the ground blew all around me as I came in for my final descent. The fans weren’t completely useless. I was able to level it out some, but it was going to be rough.

  “Here we go!”

  Grazing the ground with a nice hard kiss, the deafening sound of metal on concrete put my stomach on edge.

  I smashed through a wooden crate filled with apples. Straw packing material took to the sky.

  “Woah.”

  I scraped and slid sideways about thirty feet into a smoky and abrupt stop. It was a rough landing, but not as bad as it could have been. At least I was alive.

  When I went to turn everything off, I found that the bike was already dead and unresponsive. This was not good.

  “My baby!” Suddenly a wave of feeling depleted came over me. Like a corpse, I slid off the seat and flopped on the ground next to the bike, staring up at the dark sky above. It took a moment for my body to catch up to my racing heart.

  “What in the world was that thing?” I said, referring to whatever I collided with in the air. I threw off my cracked goggles in order to look myself over, forgetting where I was. Sitting up, I noticed a spot of blood smeared along the front of my coat.

  “It couldn’t have been a drone. They don’t bleed, not even oil.”

  Maybe it was all the adrenaline in my system, but other than that scratch on my arm, I felt great—exhausted, but great.

  In the distance I saw something that was out of place with my concrete surroundings. It was bright blue and blowing in the wind. I dusted myself off and went over to it, just in time to catch one in the wind. Upon close inspection, it was a long soft feather.