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[h2][center][color=red][b]4[/b][/color]. [color=red][b]3[/b][/color]. [color=red][b]2[/b][/color]. [color=red][b]1[/b][/color]. [color=green][b]GREEN[/b][/color].[/center][/h2]
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“Son of a…!” Kais said as he swerved. He had sped off the start, and nearly grazed Amy’s stalled ship right at the starting lines. “Control, Sterling’s down. Report!” “Just a stall, Kais, be on the lookout, she’s coming back,” his race engineer Zeina said. And before he could enjoy his headstart, Amy had fought her way past him again with a vengeance.

The rest of the race, the migraines plagued him once again, but the largest by far was the one in front of him. Han defended well. He had seen her up-close back in Auckland, battling those in front of her and gaining on Makara almost effortlessly, but to be stuck behind her now himself was even more infuriating. Han seemed to either have a reaction speed or a tactical, forward thinking mind that [i]very[/i] few other people on the grid had. Like she [i]knew[/i] what he would try for the moment he had decided on it, only to cut him off. “Come on, take her down, Kais.” he said to himself, but was blocked just as he came out of the corner and went for an overtake.

“Control, Han’s blocking hard. Tell me where she’s weak.” “Just keep pressuring her, Kais. She’ll crack.” And there, almost inhumanly subtle, he [i]swore[/i] he saw her setup an opening for a tricksy move that might well have been from the go-karting incident. [i]Crack?[/i] Kais thought. [i]She’s baiting you. Don’t play her game.[/i]

He lined up for an inside pass instead, and was blocked yet again…

And again.

And again.

Until the chequered flag flew, and they came in 7th and 8th.

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Kais' head still ached, and Layla had seemed ghostly pale after the race, absentminded, and she hadn't even come up for the interviews with Delta Hyper either, so Kais wanted to get his own interview over with as soon as possible. Yet the crew seemed to have a schedule of their own they were sticking to. So, he waited impatiently.

Kais begrudgingly nodded at Han as she was invited into the booth, and his headache seemed to worsen. “Hey you, that trick you pulled? I’m not going to forget it. You want to fight? You’re getting one. Next time we go neck and neck, we’ll see how you like it when I stop pulling my punches,” he said, and could already imagine the rolling of eyes, the haughty smirk. some variant of I’m-better-than-you, and so he made sure to add “and tell Cassie she had a good run. [i]Second[/i] place is nothing to scoff at, P[i]7[/i].”

Then, when she was in her interview, he crossed his arms again, and started tapping his arm, until Beatrix was up. “Bad luck, huh. Saw Ava’s burn-out, pass her my regards, will you?”

Then, to Nora: “Heard you had some trouble keeping your ride stable.”

Then came Paul. And as he passed, Kais said "Not bad, ace. I’ll need to keep an eye on you.”

Then, finally, he was brought in, and Aurora seemed to quickly rush through the question the moment she saw the look on his face. It was hot here too.

[quote]"Kais, a difficult weekend out there after two podiums in a row for yourself and the team, it looked like you and Layla are struggling with focus on the ship. What do you think happened out there?"[/quote]
“Aurora, I’m a racer, not an engineer.” Kais said with exasperation. He rubbed his eyes, where the pinching pain had slowly started to subside. And he thought with some annoyance about how the two of them had done during the race. Layla came in 12th, and showed extreme twitching during the race, not something he would’ve expected had she used the safer setup. His feet rocked with restlessness. “We’re working hard on things, alright. And sometimes it’s just not your day. Maybe next race will be better. See you all then.” Then he stood up and walked out as quickly as he came in. He needed to check up on something.

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“Nadia, with me,” Kais said as he walked past her in the paddock, and Nadia instantly snapped to attention, nearly knocking the drinks out of Hamid’s hands as she excused herself, waved him ‘till later and followed, knowing exactly what would have been so pressing to Kais.

“Where’s Layla?” Kais asked. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her in a while. I think she’s resting, she’s not online in any case. She seemed a bit out of it. Do you think she’s alright?” “I think she got rid of the guardrails we put on her neural modulator - idiot. I need you to help me comb through the data, I want to know what happened to her out there.”

In the hours after, the two of them hid themselves away in some corner, and went over the replay of the race, their V.I. assistants helping them filter it all to find the most anomalous sections of the race. And very quickly, it became clear that, indeed, she had disabled their safety-setup, and in fact had gone above and beyond.

“There’s a massive neural spike in Layla’s readings, far beyond baseline,” Nadia said. “But the signal sent through the neural link was categorized as an ‘unknown’. That rarely happens. Normally those're completely filtered out.” “What did the ship’s systems make of it?” Kais asked as Nadia pulled up the data. “Strange, the pattern seems more like interference than anything else, but the ship’s A.I. seemed to know what to do with it. It didn’t discard it as an outlier, in any case. But I don’t see any particularly anomalous commands going to the ship controls, no spikes there at all. I don’t get it.” “Hmm, then surely it would’ve reported it back to Control for debugging. Look in the communication logs.” Nadia tapped away. “There are some strange broadcasts sent, anonymously too, but none of them were received by our own systems. This is weird. Where did they go?” Kais leant back in thought. Spying malware? No, that would've been active all the time. This was an intentional action, interpreted by the A.I. and triggered by Layla's thoughts. But what did it act upon? “Do we have anything on the rest of the networked systems here, any track telemetry?” Nadia pulled up the graphs on the holo-tablet: a few milliseconds following the event, there had been a brief spike in how much power was drawn at one of the track sections. “No, that can't…”, a creeping suspicion came over Kais. “Holography, now!” And then they saw it: Amy's ship stalling when its energy systems spiked and tripped up her neural link.

Layla had wanted. Her ship’s A.I. had listened. And through the network, seemingly as good as untraceable, another ship's systems had spiked. And Kais said, “What the [i]fu--[/i]?”

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[center][color=gold][h2]To be continued...[/h2][/color][/center]
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