Mar

Every single day began and functioned much the same. We weren't habitual, just compliant. We awoke just as daylight poked over the dusty mountains. The sun crept through the top windows, the light leaking across the concrete floor until it reached our bunks and illuminated the gray and dirty workshop. The cement floors were stained with motor oil and corrosive solvents. The workshop was a thin and unforgiving place with no regard for its occupants, with its intense mood swings that marked it sweltering in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter. But it was home.

Once the sun had staked its claim on the day, we would rise from our bunks groggily and sore from the previous day -- from each day of our lives so far. The exhaustion wore heavy on us, deep to our sagging bones and perpetually tired muscles. The fatigue plagued Magda and Alfred most, who were both decades older than Karl and I. Our teenage bodies weren't as broken down by the physical demands of our sentence, but still we ached, we moaned.

The day continued to brighten and the clock ticked closer to 7am. I rose from my bunk and scrubbed the heel of my hand against my face, shivering slightly. Sleep and I had a contemptuous relationship. Typically, sleep took forever to find me at night, keeping me constantly wonder if we were incompatible. No matter what actions or remedies I tried, I could never sleep more than a few hours at a time without waking. After I had finally fallen asleep last night, I still tossed and turned on the thin recycled rubber that was my mattress. Magda's story bounced around my head and made all of my dreams filled with drones and war.

The metal of the garage door rumbled as it pulled upward and light poured in harshly. A figure appeared, shadowed by the rising sun.

"Wake up, idiots! Get going!" Hatsui yelled, his synthetic voice grating my ears. I dragged my dry eyes over to watch him stride across the workshop and into his own office. He slammed the door hard enough that the wrenches on the wall shook. This was a better than usual mood for Hatsui. He must've won some money last night.

As consciousness slowly started to seep back into me, I became aware of the extreme dryness in my mouth and the sun starting to warm up the workshop. Hatsui left the garage door to the track open and the heat of the morning began to bake the workshop. It was already incredibly hot outside and each day of unbearable heat felt like it continued to rise and rise. The weather control in our part of the city must've been broken. It worked by staving off as much moisture as possible until thunderstorms gathered and torrentially fell. It was sporadic, dependent on whenever the quotient was filled and the system needed to purge. But occasionally the system was buggy and unnatural, frequently favoring extremes of temperatures. Not that the androids really noticed, not unless their skin started to melt off or when it rained. They always noticed the rain.

The city was an extremely controlled environment for the most part, but the farther one got away from the city center, the less reliable and glamorous things were. Hatsui's dingy track was near the border that separated the city from the expansive barren deserts of what used to be lush plains. Humans had caused so much damage to the Earth's environment that when the androids seized control, they sealed the humans and themselves into a half-sphere of efficiency and protection. The androids also dramatically reduced all harmful emissions and stopped deforestation. The damage, however, was already done. All we knew was that life could survive in the city and other cities like it, but the rest of the world was a dangerous place. And it was in that dangerous place that the most important race of the year took place: The Dead World Prix. In a two week long event, 100 humans competed for ultimate glory through various obstacles and challenges. The race started at the border of our city at dawn on the summer equinox. For fourteen days, the "lucky" drivers followed a 5,500 mile long loop through a total of various terrains, unpredictable weather, five challenges, and the ultimate enemy: the drivers left on the track that never finished, roaming mad over the landscape and trying to steal anything to survive or finally win.

Beyond the finish line sat riches beyond your imagination and upgraded citizenship.

But Dead World was so far an unwinnable race.

Dead World vans crept through the cities, looking for any human committing the smallest infraction to potentially use as the next contestants. Humans got picked up under the guise of arrest and were either selected for the race or sent to rehabilitation. Rehab was a massive facility where you manufactured things 20 hours a day until you died from exhaustion and then threw your corpse into a mass grave. The arresting androids analyzed humans right on the street and sent them to the proper place accordingly.

The race was a much quicker death in some ways, with the hope that you could always drive your car off a cliff out there or be eaten by one of the old contestants.

Freedom was good incentive, but fear was better.

The androids found the race gratifying. Bets were made at racing parties thrown by facilities. Each facility required membership, gained by an android's status within the city. Hatsui was mid-grade since he contributed to the race, but ambitious androids aspired to be invited to Godwin's personal betting party, the most elite in the city. Only a handful of androids were allowed in during the Dead World season, where they would watch the action together in Godwin's penthouse, making bets worth billions of credits over the demise of human drivers.

The two weeks out of the year that Dead World took place, Hatsui would let us have a rare break to watch the opening ceremonies. He would arrange for a self-driving car to come pick us up, a special occasion though we still would dress in the usual gray garb. I'd watch out the window with voracious hunger, taking in every new thing I could see. I didn't want to miss anything. Seeing the city in the daytime was quite different from Karl and I's thunder-covered night adventures to the market and the occasional errands to the parts shop.

Drones consistently whirred overhead, but most of them were for mundane things like deliveries and transportation. The most interesting thing to watch were the androids that walked down the streets in clothing of all colors. They were careless in their movements, not bothering to look over their shoulder constantly. Oppression didn't weigh heavy on their shoulders. They practically danced across the sidewalks, weightless with freedom soaking their toes. I envied them, the carelessness, the way that the world seemed to move around them.

When we got to the arena, Hatsui would direct us straight to our seats, but then take off to double check his odds with his android compatriots. The four of us would sit together, shoulder to shoulder, usually sandwiched between a few other humans that had been forced to come as well, and stared at the world around us. Karl and I were most eager to consume outside world, we couldn't contain our enthusiasm. Magda and Alfred were sadder about being out, their faces usually harbored a darkness that I couldn't understand until I was older. I would catch them glancing at each other, a completely wordless conversation in their tense eye contact.

When I was very young, I used to sit on Alfred's lap during the race. He would hold me tight and spell out things in my palm while I watched the opening ceremonies. This was before I had learned to fully sign with him, when I only knew the letters. He would point out all of the cars we had worked on for the race and he would tell me who was driving. Whenever I asked him if he thought any of them could win, he would just shrug his shoulders. When I asked Magda, she said that if any of them knew how to work on cars, they might stand a fighting chance. A bullet fired into the air, a resounding crack consumed the stadium for the briefest milliseconds of an almost-silence before the roaring of accelerating engines and squealing tires.

The randomness of human error and, I suspected, our suffering was satisfying for them. Made them feel better about their existence. Magda said it's retribution for what we did to them, not proper justice but maybe close enough but I disagree. Our enslavement was payment for what we did, Dead World was kicking us while we're already down. Another blow to humiliate and intimidate us.

Then there was the matter of enslavement. We were under the supervision of and in service to Hatsuimoto's Mechanical Repairs, one of three licensed shops in the country that worked on the cars for Dead World. Since most mass vehicular production had ended over a century ago and other modes of transportation were implemented, traditional and drivable cars were all but forgotten. When the race started and demanded a fleet of vehicles, the racemakers got crafty and recycled the rusting army of old cars. Hatsui got into the business because he saw the potential money it could bring in. Plus, he was a habitual gambler with a taste for the bloodiness of racing.

The cars in the best conditions and with the basic bones for racing, were taken to us where we spent every day fixing them. The warehouse next to our workshop was filled with these relics, with the memories of another time. We went through every relic thoroughly and coaxed them back to life with fresh oil and salvaged parts. The revival of the relics only to watch them get smashed apart not too long after the resurrection was bitter to watch.

Dead World was only weeks away now, evident by the late spring sun that burned outside and the rush to finish our projects. We were expected to send nine more cars to the racing facility by the end of the week. So far, we had two.

After extricating myself from my bunk, I headed to the dingy sink in the corner of the workshop. The thick plastic basin was about a foot deep and a foot wide, stained with motor oil and grease. I washed my hands and face with the slightly yellowed water that poured from the tap in spasmic gushes. Afterward, I went to the tiny closet that was our bathroom and changed into sturdier clothes for the day: gray linen pants and a shirt. The standard uniform for mechanics with the consistent gray that designated me as a human. Androids had the freedom of color, but we were permitted only to the drab hues of gray like they were trying to erase us into a sea of a blandness.

After I left the bathroom, I watched three bodies slowly emerge from their beds. They all moved groggily, except for Karl who had already started bouncing around the workshop, changing his clothes and moving things around. I moved slower, grabbing meal bars from the bin outside of Hatsui's office. They didn't fill our bellies, but they muted our hunger. I passed them to Magda and Alfred, who slowly rose from bed, their bones creaking with every move.

"Thank you," Magda said, her soft hands clasping over my hand.

Alfred signed, "Thank you," with his fingers tipping down from his chin.

I responded back by touching both pointer fingers to my thumbs in an okay and waving it slightly, an effective "no problem." He smiled.

I moved to my workbench and began pulling out the pieces of my current project: reprogramming and rewiring an Electronic Control Module for one of the cars. Working on the electronics and the wirings of the vehicle was one of things that I enjoyed most, it made sense to me. Just like how Alfred enjoyed working with the transmission and gears, and Magda preferred to tinker with replacing parts and making impossible modifications work. It was my preference for wiring and electronics that allowed me to have something to barter with at the market. When I had spare time from Hatsui's projects, I would repair things given to me by Rocky, an electronics trader, and give them back in exchange for useful things like batteries and painkillers. The work wasn't always consistent though, especially this close to Dead World. Rocky hadn't had anything for me in weeks, citing a problem with his work associates and their scavenging. Most of the stuff he had me work on came from outside the city, that much was obvious from the foreign dirt or sand that covered them. Buried treasure, Rocky had called it.

I hoped he would get things in soon. The progress on the vehicle in the junkyard moved forward and I was still trying to prepare for a journey in the meantime, collecting as many extra supplies as possible. I planned on taking everyone with me, Magda, Alfred, and Karl and that meant we needed enough things to keep the four of us alive at least for a little while, at least until we could figure something else out. It was hard to fully plan out since none of us really had much an idea of what lay outside the city, besides what we saw televised on Dead World. We knew that every contestant that failed was still out there, traversing the dead landscape, unable to return to the city, wandering spirits. If they could make it, then so could we. It was just a matter of getting out of the city together before worrying about what awaited us out there.

"Hey!" Hatsui yelled at me, pulling me from my work. He barreled toward me, insanity painted across his face. "Step away from that, we've got test-driving to do this morning."

I blinked in surprise at him before sliding off of my stool and following him toward the warehouse. The warehouse was filled with mechanical shelving that housed the cars we worked on. The finished ones went straight to the Dead World facility, but the others that still needed maintenance or testing stayed in the warehouse. Hatsui grabbed the controller from the wall and all of the shelves shifted around until a single blue car descended onto the concrete. We had nicknamed her Blue Lightning. She was fast, gloriously so, but she was full of electrical problems like she had been struck by lightning. She was still on the shelf because of those electrical problems and the piece of her fender that was missing.

"We've had this one for too long. Test drive it and if it's acceptable. I'm not afraid to send it without the fender." Hatsui said then handed me a pair of goggles. I wouldn't get to wear a helmet or fire-proof racing suit like Dead World Racers while I test drove, but it didn't bother me. I liked to feel free while I was driving.

Hatsui watched me climb into the car. I depressed the clutch and turned over the engine, it roared to life with a snarl. Even motionless, I could feel the power that rumbled beneath my feet and fingers. When Hatsui wasn't watching, I slipped off my thin leather boots so I could drive with bare feet—I had a hard time thinking with my shoes on. My toes curled around the pedal and I felt every fiber of the acceleration through the ball of my right foot, the rumble of the engine under my left.

Carefully, I drove Blue Lightning from the warehouse and onto the track, Hatsui walking next to us. In his hands he held a tablet that told him everything he needed to know about the car, connected by a small transponder to the ECM I implemented myself.

"The temperature gauge is all over the place," Hatsui criticized. "I thought you said you fixed that."

"I've rewired several components and reset the temperature module twice. Maybe it struggles with idle?" I suggested, hesitation in my words. Hatsui considered my opinion.

"Just drive it, then we'll evaluate." He instructed and moved into the pit.

I would be lying if I said I didn't take pleasure in driving. Though so many aspects of my life were difficult and at times terribly discouraging, driving almost made it all worth it. The few moments I got to steal away with the cars and feel their speed with my own body were some of the best I had. There was no hesitation in my muscles as I slammed the gas pedal to the floor and screeched away from the starting line. Hatsui might complain about tire marks later, but it was worth it. Blue Lightning, through all of her faults, was still an immensely enjoyable vehicle to drive. The steering was tight and quick, responsive communication between every flick of my wrist and narrow turning of the tires. With every daring move, every slide around the corners of the track I felt genuinely alive, conscious and present to my surroundings. It was momentary, excruciating bliss.

When I came to a smooth stop at the finish line, inches from running over Hatsui's toes, it took a second to scrub the smile from the bottom half of my face. My eyes must've been wild when I looked up to Hatsui through the open window.

"It drives just fine, just cooler than optimum. It might be a heat shield."

"Then tell the idiots inside to fix it so we can get it the hell out of here. I'll put another car on the track while you do that." Hatsui instructed and moved back into the warehouse. I drove the car inside the workshop and parked it on the lift.

"What's the diagnosis?" Magda asked, wiping her hands on an oil-stained cloth.

"Running too cool. We should check the heat shield," I instructed and opened the hood. Despite the extensive rewiring job the vehicle required, I hadn't seen where a heat shield might've been though I wasn't necessarily looking for it at the time.

"We've got this, sweetheart. You go back out and drive," Magda said.

"Yeah Mar, go back out there and have fun driving," Karl said sarcastically.

I hesitated by the door for a moment, wondering if the privilege I felt in driving was something to feel guilty about. "You can drive one day too, so long as you can concentrate long enough not to crash."

"That was one time!" Karl griped to Magda as I left the workshop. I couldn't help but laugh.

"Enough fooling around. Get to work." Hatsui seethed when I approached the next vehicle to test. A low to the ground and ostentatiously orange monstrosity. I crawled in and started the engine, my soul purring with the engine.