Kais Zenix @ASZenix:
"[Video clip: Kais giving thanks]
That means you!
#AlSaqrRacing #DeltaHyper #FormulaAG #LetsKEEPGOING"(You 👍’ed this)
So, last question for Auckland. After your first race in the championship, is there anyone you would like to say thanks to?
The video feed was such high quality you could see every furrow in Kais’ face, a veritable crumple zone as the question hit him like a truck. Layla, as expected, had answered it with the grace of an experienced racer. Kais, as expected, was a different story. Nadia didn’t think she’d ever see fear out of him, and she still didn’t, but if she were to guess how it’d look, this face would probably approximate it about 33% of the way.
“Oh… Thanks, huh?” His gaze drifted, as though he was stuck in an exam wrecking his brain for what the right answer would be. The tension in the room was palpable.
“Hmm. I’m not really into all this sentimental stuff, to be honest.” Nadia couldn’t help but giggle a little.
“But the team, they’ve been real’ solid. And for giving me a chance, you know who you are.” He nodded uncomfortably.
“But let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, this has just been one race, and there’s a lot more to come.” Another awkward pause.
“That’s it.” The video clip cut to black.
“CHEERS!” Omar shouted, and the team erupted in cheer as a single voice. Nadia felt a nudge from one of the junior mechanics on her right and they clanged their bamboo cups together. The season had kicked off well and good, and so had the party.
Getting back from Auckland was a chore, but the speed at which the whole operation took place was amazing. Despite thousands of parts of equipment and a couple dozen hangovers, with their well-practiced crew, modular garages, and their
rather fast H2-jet, it took surprisingly few hours to get home, though Nadia hadn’t yet calculated how much her projectile vomiting might have given them a boost on the way.
Abu Dhabi - homebase for the Al-Saqr team, and the city of Nadia’s birth, or rather the one that had swallowed it in its expansion. It’s amazing what a few decades of peace can do. Where little over a generation ago rebellions and miniature nukes had wreaked havoc for some drops of water, there was now a rebuilt hypermodern city as semi-cosmopolitan as any of them. And within it, in one of its brownish-gray cubes of geopolymer concrete, a small cafe was exquisitely crafted to invoke the quaint coffee houses of old. Tourist-y nostalgia-bait? Perhaps. But the coffee was stellar. And that was exactly what was on the menu today: two café crème - one for each of Nadia’s university friends that had come to visit from Paris. And a double espresso - one for each of the bags under Nadia’s eyes - that’d do…
“Putaiinn... (Sophie, language!) Security’s no joke here, huh? I don’t think I’ve been through an airport more strict in. my. life. I bet their bio-sensors know exactly which friggin’ yogurt I ate this morning.” “Ça, c'est sûr, and the drones, and camera’s! I was so tense I was probably waddling around like a penguin trying not to stick out to the profilers.” The girls laughed and talked some more as Nadia nodded off to whatever the newest auto-translated x-pop song was that was currently playing.
“Have some more sugar, chérie.” Sophie said as she helped Nadia’s coffee to some more energy density.
“Then you can maybe tell us more about your internship.” “You've been so busy lately we hardly call each other anymore.” Alyx added.
“Well, it’s been interesting, to say the least." Nadia replied.
"I don’t know how much I can say--” “Because of the NDA…” “Because of the NDA…” The duo said in choir. Sophie smiled and nodded enthusiastically for her to get a move on. Nadia blushed as she brushed one of her dark locks behind her ear.
"Well, I mean I am just an intern. Mostly I've just been learning and helping out wherever I can. In the garage up until now, electrical systems, so most of the glamour flies right past me. Everything’s quite intense and inspiring, though." She thought for a second on what more to tell, then started scrambling around her bag, and took out her tablet showing a many-thousands paged book on neurology.
“I’ve gotten really interested in neural-ship connections lately. I’ve been reading up on it in my off-time. It’s… how the ship can read the pilot’s mind to find out what they want to do. Fascinating, but they’re super delicate. At those speeds, even a millisecond could be the difference between...” The image of last race's crash came to mind.
“Winning and losing?” ”More like winning and something way worse… right?"“Yeah…” Nadia said.
“And I don’t care too much about the winning, to be honest.” She paused and thought about how to phrase it.
“It’s more about making them…" Her mind flashed to her colleagues.
"... better.”
Nadia sighed to calm herself as she walked up to the Team Principal’s office. The door opened and Kais walked out with a pace suggesting he’d rather be anywhere else, and the nerves started up again. The weekly update with the team principal always filled her with some dread. No matter how much people tried to talk some realism into her, everytime it still felt like she was doing something wrong, or not good enough, intern or no - maybe Kais was rubbing off on her.
Omar beckoned her to enter and sit down as he tidied up some digital paperwork. Nadia tried looking at the reflection on his shiny bald head to see if she could secretly read along with his notes, but quickly stopped when she noticed she had been staring in her effort. Then Omar’s beard parted as a large smile appeared on his face.
“So,” he sat forward over his desk and laid his hands flat on top.
“How are you enjoying it so far?”“Oh, it’s been amazing, sir,” she replied, her voice gaining some pep as she spoke, and she even sat up from her usual slightly-hunched position. After their first race of the season last week, her insecurity had slowly started to make way for enthusiasm.
“I’ve learned so much in just these few weeks. How the team works, how intense racing is. I love being part of something so passionate.”Omar nodded with a smile, but seemed the slightest bit apprehensive, and thought deeply for a few seconds.
“I’ve been speaking with Kais.” And Nadia could feel a sinking feeling in her stomach. Say what you want about the man, when he said something, he meant it. And in the few days she worked with him at Al-Saqr Racing, she had gotten more than enough ‘tips’ from him to last for at least several more months, though, admittedly, most of them were some version of
“I can’t hear you when you don’t speak up”.
“Now, I know just as well as anyone that he can be… difficult sometimes. If you want I can assign you to Layla instea--”“No!” Nadia seemed surprised by her own boldness. Maybe Kais
was rubbing off on her.
“I can do it! I've even been looking into where I want to focus my efforts.” She said as she pulled up her notebook with ideas and timelines. They went over her plans and her interests for a while. Then Omar responded
“Alright. Sounds like you have a plan. Write up a proposal - higher ups like their paper trails. Discuss the details with the heads of mech’ and engineering, give it the ol’ Juan-Tewe punch, and you can be on your way!”
Two AGR cabins stood stripped bare and hummed softly in standby. A massive tangle of cables, neatly colour-coded, ran down them and into a set of small interface ports at one of the lab’s terminals. The lab smelled of running fans, plastic and rubber, and a faint tinge of heated circuits and isopropyl alcohol. Just outside the large window in front of them, Al-Saqr’s mechanical engineers were wrapping up work on the AG racers themselves. One of the juniors waved goodnight through the glass, to which Nadia fluttered a timid wave and smile back. In the distance the sun was slowly setting behind the mangrove trees of their little private island. But enjoying the scenery wasn’t what they were here for today. As Nadia checked the interface port at the back of his neck with blue-gloved fingers, Kais wiped off some sweat with his drenched towel. It had been a long day.
“OK, standby for plugin. 3… 2…”Kais couldn’t help but suck in some air. Nadia saw the chills involuntarily run down his arms and neck, briefly losing some muscle tone, then regaining it as he reconnected into his non-existent craft. No matter how often she saw it, it was unsettling every time, to see a soul spilling out of a body and into… well,
nothing, really, a digital imitation of reality at best. Chills ran onto Nadia’s arms and neck in a sympathetic shudder as she hugged her tablet to her chest.
It must’ve been the ninth simulated replay of the Auckland track of the week by now. They knew exactly where things went wrong. Tweak after tweak had been made and approved. The vectoring nozzles would be printed with some additional material, and the calibrations of the drive-pulsars started running into nanoseconds of precision. But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough for Kais.
“*tsk* Ahh!” he groaned.
“You’re still doing it!” And for a brief second Nadia and head neural engineer Remi Tewe shared a nervous look: was he talking to them, or to the ship?
“There're all these... barriers between me and the race, it’s like the ship itself is fighting me!” For most of the past few days now he had been borderline-fuming his way through the corridors. Al-Saqr’s ships had some of the most powerful AG-drive arrays of the bunch, but aiming and steering that much power correctly proved to be a problem.
“If we want to get any better, I need the craft to be an extension of me. I need to feel every inch of the terrain, every shift in gravity. Why does the balancing still feel wrong, huh? Why…?” He let out a frustrated sigh. Tewe nodded at Nadia and she quickly made sure to scribble down some notes.
It became increasingly apparent through their many discussions that Layla’s and Kais’ approaches weren’t exactly alike in their drive. Layla focused on making
herself more like a machine to bridge the interfacing gap, to almost become a mechanical part of the racer itself. But Kais wasn’t like that. The machine had to
listen to him. Every imperfection of the craft’s handling felt like a flaw in his own mind.
Nadia's hands tensed around her tablet. The team had brainstormed an idea, Tewe and the others, but it never got anywhere near the approval stage. Still, if she didn't try it again now...
“I’m not sure if it’d be smart to do this, but we still haven’t really looked into the neural dampeners proposal from last ideation session properly yet.” Nadia proposed with some hesitation in her voice.
“No matter how many sensors or actuators we install there’s only so much data we can sync. A human’s brain is still different from an AGR ship, so your neurology gets loaded and read-out differently than in ‘normal life’ situations. Certain brain regions get suppressed, others only get very controlled, very limited stimulation. It seems only logical that updating this system could unlock more potential.”“But the neural dampeners are listed as a safety feature in the specs for a reason!” Tewe responded matter-of-factly as he rubbed his eyes in exasperation, his reading glasses perched upwards on his balding head.
“We’ve been over this. We can't risk seizures in our pilots. Better to be selective with what data to sync, and that's what the AI filters are for. I really don’t think it’s a very good idea to go outside safety parameters for something as critical as the neural interfac--”“We try it.”
It was late. The trip home took a bit longer than expected - it seemed no matter where you went in the world, public transportation was the same everywhere: late. When Nadia arrived she opened the door as quietly as possible, but then she heard the holovision was still on, airing one of her father’s go-to sitcoms in the living room, and her mother was boiling tea in the kitchen. As she put down her bag next to the door and took off her shoes, her mother’s voice came round the corner.
“Nadia habibti, you’re late from work again. Have you eaten yet? We have some leftovers in the fridge if you want.”“Thanks, Mama.” Kiss. “I grabbed a bite earlier at work. It was a long day, you know how it is.” She put her keys in the family key-box.
“I know you better than you know yourself, habibti. Don’t let yourself be overworked. You’ve got plenty of years ahead of you.”“What about him?” A deep voice interrupted them from the living room between short, labored breaths - the voice of her father. Despite his ailments, even after all these years, it remained as strong a presence as ever.
“You’re working with him too?” Nadia’s mother cast her eyes down in a resigned look. Maybe she had tried to keep him from worrying, but the tension in his voice was unmistakable. There was no doubt in Nadia’s mind about whom he was speaking with such barely-contained anger.
“Yes, Baba.” Her voice shrunk.
“Be careful around him, Nadia. You know their kind can’t be trusted,” he replied, his eyes unfocused, gazing into the holovision frame, or perhaps a thousand yards through it. Nadia had seen it often enough.
Her gaze drifted to her feet as if they knew what the right answer would be.
“I-- it’s a different time now, Baba. He’s just a racer now. And we don’t really interact much anyway, it’s all very professional. I get that you’re worried, but you’ve raised me well - I can take care of myself.”An uneasy silence filled the room. Then her father turned off the holovision. That was it for the night. In the gloom, he started taking off the cheap, outdated prosthetics that had served as his legs for longer than she had been alive now. And as his nerves disengaged, a sigh escaped his lips. But Nadia knew the sigh was for
her.
“People don’t change, Nadia. Not when they’ve been through…” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“Just remember he’s not your friend. And never will be. He’s a soldier. People like him, they were made for destruction.” He turned to Nadia and looked her in the eyes.
“I don’t want you to get caught in the line of fire, hayati. That’s all I ever pray for.”
And in another part of the city, Kais stepped through his apartment door with deliberate carefulness. He halted his breath for a fraction of a second, every one of his senses on high alert, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. All was dark, and all was quiet. He put down his bag, and took off his shoes. Keys jangled lightly as he laid them in their usual place. Then silence returned, and he was, once again, alone…
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