THE DIGITAL KID
This came about when Kevin J. Anderson put out a call for SF writers who were fans of Canadian rock band Rush. I’ve been a fan since I heard the Signals album on QFM 96 in Columbus in 1982. In fact, they were the first hard rock (for the time) band I liked. I have all their albums, enjoy most of their songs, and have a few bits of memorabilia. SF pretty much owns prog rock, or vice versa.
This started out as being based on the song “Analog Kid,” with a dash of Heinlein’s “Starman Jones” thrown in. However, it went in a different direction, as stories often do. “Digital Man” worked its way in there.
If you’re reading my stuff, I of course hope you’ll like the story. If you’re also a Rush fan you’ll likely notice this uses a lot of the Signals album as background.
If you’re a hardcore rush fan or even geek, you’ll probably be able to pick out references to “Subdivisions,” “Driven,” “Red Barchetta,” “Mission,” and some hints of “Anagram,” “The Pass,” “Jacob’s Ladder,” “High Water,” and Geddy’s solo tune “My Favorite Headache.” There’s one clear hint at “2112,” and you might recognize some background from my own Freehold universe.
If you enjoy the story, but are not familiar with any of those songs, I enthusiastically encourage you to look them up.
There was a brief disagreement with the editor over this story, a theme you’ll see repeated later. The editor, who did make some very good line corrections and even a couple of factual and background suggestions, decided the entire book should be in Imperial measurements, except where it was “sciency,” and metric would be okay then. My story wound up with a bunch of mishmash, including a correction from an engine with 7 liters of displacement to 7.39 quarts. The note in the margin made it clear the editor didn’t understand engine displacement, and was confused as to if that was a lot of consumption, but was okay leaving it in there. I stetted it to 7 liters, and snarked to myself that if one doesn’t understand engine displacement, one shouldn’t comment on it at all.
Poor Larry Dixon’s story (“Marathon,” involving auto racing) wound up with all his car masses, lengths, distances and separations taken from even centimeters and kilometers, to decimal inches and miles. That got corrected back too.
I commented online that at some point I was going to write a story with “arshins” and “cho.” I encouraged Michael Massa to do that in the Freehold anthology, with a story during the Russo-Japanese War. You’ll just have to search online for conversions.
Still, minor production issues aside, I enjoyed writing it, Kevin Anderson accepted it, and his acceptance email was almost a fan letter, and the editor otherwise did a good job of finding things to polish.
Here it is.
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The earliest scene Kent remembered from when he had real eyes was a meadow in the mountains. It sloped away on three sides, was surrounded by trees, and looked over the edges of a city below. It was hundreds of kilometers from home, and Mom or Dad had to drive them there. Sometimes they’d camp in a tent behind the cabin.
He couldn’t remember who owned it. He did remember Joey and Atilla helping him build a treehouse. They had three platforms, a rope ladder, and had even stocked it with rocks to fight off “others.” Looking back, he couldn’t remember what others they’d ever need to fight, and Atilla had used twine instead of the rope he bought to haul the bucket of rocks up. When it snapped, it had gouged Kent’s head open. He still had a scar from the stitches. At the time, that had seemed the worst pain imaginable. He’d since learned otherwise.
One summer, he remembered the trees down the hill being chopped to the ground and shredded by machines. Then an oval tower got built. It seemed out of place, growing out of the hill. Argosy Apartments, it was called. They had ads out about the gorgeous view, except they’d destroyed his gorgeous view to do it. They’d also destroyed the tree house. At night, he could look out over the geometric sprawl on the plain below, and the rushing lights of distant streams of cars.
Even here, the glare interfered with stargazing. He begged Dad to drive him over the peak at 2 a.m., so he could catch a meteor shower.
He and his friends continued to play there, but he tried to face the other way, uphill, so he wouldn’t have to look at the concrete. He wanted to imagine he was exploring the wilderness, not surrounded by millions of people.
“You seem frustrated,” Mom had said one evening.
“They put a building on the hill,” he said. “It was all rolling trees, and now there’s apartments.”
“I saw,” she said. “It’s not the same, eh?”
“No.”
“We noticed it, too,” she said.
He remembered the next year, when he sat in the back of the car as they drove for the summer house.
“Don’t we take this exit?” he asked.
Dad said, “We’re going to a different summer house.”
“Oh?”
“It’s a surprise.”
They drove up and over the mountains, looking down on a valley full of spruce trees. He had his wilderness back. There was a house here, too. They were two hours from the grid around the city, but here was wilderness.
The new house was all log outside, all wood panels inside, with rails and deck around it. It was like something out of a western movie.
His father said, “This was your uncle Travis’, but he said he wasn’t going to use it much, so he let us buy it from him.”
“Can Joey and Atilla visit?”
“If their parents say so, yes.”
He and Dad nailed timbers and plywood to make another tree house, in the thick lower limbs of a larch. It shifted in the wind, which scared him at first, but eventually became fun, then soothing.
Overhead he had vivid blue sky by day, and black nights scattered with buckets of stars. He’d sleep out under them, unafraid of the blanket of night or the animals passing through. He stared at the stars, knew every constellation, and watched until late became early, for glimpses of meteors. That was where he was bound. No one could build apartments to block that view, if he could get into space.
Far down the hill, the high-speed train wrapped through the valley. He could only see it occasionally, and the road not at all.
It wasn’t until later he realized Mom and Dad were rich. So were several of his friends. He showed pics of his summer house to kids at school. Reggie Hanaway grabbed him at lunch one day.
“It’s kinda not cool that you have a second house. A lot of the kids here don’t even really have one, just apartments.”
“I just like it,” he protested. “I’d live there all year if I could. I don’t care about money.”
“Well, it isn’t fair,” Reggie insisted.
He guessed money mattered to people who didn’t have it. Just as space mattered to him. There were three companies building ships to explore other stars. He wanted to be on one.
“You’ll need lots of math,” Dad had said. So he started reading sites on geometry and trigonometry, and used his chore money for proctored tests.
When he was sixteen, his parents let him drive some of the trip. It was tiresome, across the flat prairie and up into the hills, then the mountains proper. It had seemed so much shorter when he was young.
“I never realized what a thousand-kilometer trip actually was,” he said.
“Ain’t it, though?” Dad replied. “The turn off is just around the bend here. Slow for it.”
“I got it,” he agreed.
His uncle had died two years before. They owned the cabin outright now, and the barn of tools and equipment. They also had one of his old cars. It wasn’t like modern vehicles. It had no fuel cell. The engine was over seven liters and guzzled gasoline. The brakes and suspension were a lot softer and slower than a modern car, and it had no navigation or feedback. You even had to change gears manually. It was simple in mechanism, and he learned how to maintain most of it with the shop tools. He watched old videos and read books on how to handle it on the road.
In between he lay in the grass and watched deer, elk and bobcats amid the waves of grass. At night he looked at the stars.
The next year he took the van down into the town for a container of gasoline.
“Hi, Kent,” he heard. It was Sheriff Okume.
“Hi, Sheriff.”
“What do you need gas for?”
“I got my uncle’s old car working.”
“That old Hemi?” the Sheriff said with raised eyebrows. “Watch yourself. Those things were damned near uncontrollable.”
“I will.” He knew every bolt of it.
It took some time to clean the engine up and get gas flowing, but it fired with a cackle.
They probably shouldn’t have let him take it, he realized later.
It’s my turn to drive, he thought.
The car swayed on turns. It was gorgeous, but heavy and ungainly. In a straight line it was like a rocket, and he loved the acceleration pinning him to the seat. He could imagine he was lifting for space. He nailed it on every straight. It didn’t like turns, though. He’d studied inertia. This was a good example.
The curves came up fast, and he was scared. The tires whined on the edge of their envelope, and it took real strength to muscle around the bend, even with power steering. It held, though.
The next curve surprised him, and he braked, double-clutched and downshifted. The tires skittered, and the car grabbed. He was learning it, becoming one with it. He would master it.
As he thought that, the road wound up before him into an inside turn that gave way to a tight outside bend. He recognized it. He hadn’t realized he was that far up the mountain already. He slammed the shifter, stomped the pedals and heaved the wheel. He felt the car understeer and skid across the road, then gravity dropped away as he sailed into the open air over the spruces below. He had a moment to think about how pretty they were, and that he was flying, before they shot past him like feathery spears and a crashing bolt of pain ran up his spine into his head.
| | |
“Kent, can you hear me?”
“Ayeh.” That wasn’t the right . . . what was . . .
“You’re safe. You’re in hospital.”
That was . . . what it?
“No . . . eyes . . . work . . .” he muttered. The . . . words. Words. Hard to get.
“You suffered some brain damage from the accident. It will take time to recover. Do you understand?”
Of course he understood. He wasn’t . . . wasn’t . . . that word . . .
He started crying. He felt someone hold his hand, then lean against him. It was Mom.
“Physcal therapost?” he asked.
“I’m a helper while you learn how to move again.”
She sounded pretty. He wished he could see her.
He felt her hands and someone else’s steady him upright and pull his arms onto rails. He clutched at those and managed to stay upright. He locked his elbows and let his lower body dangle.
“We’re going to work on trying to walk today,” she said. “It won’t happen all at once. For now, just get used to being upright again.”
He knew how to walk. All you did was walk. Except his legs didn’t do anything when he tried. He tried to talk and made gargling noises. The words had stopped again.
“Remember, your left leg is a replacement,” the helper said. “It might take some time. It’s normal.”
No, what was normal was walking. He looked at his legs and couldn’t see them.
He thought really hard. Think, walk, think, walk. Sweat started rolling into the bandages on his face, and he started crying again. He was clenching his jaw, and his teeth hurt. His shoulders hurt.
Think, walk.
The helper reached over and put her hand on his, and gently pulled his fingers off the bar.
Think, walk!
His left leg moved a fraction. Then another. Then it slid forward the length of a foot. He could tell by where his knee was.
He heard her gasp something.
She’d said, “Already?”
He strained and growled and clenched until his teeth felt like they were being stabbed. Then his real foot slid forward to join the left.
His arms went numb and he fell, landing in a heap and busting his lip on the bar.
“Did it,” he said.
When he woke up he was back in his room.
He knew when the doctor came in. He’d already learned to identify people by the sound they made and their presence in the room.
“How are your words, Kent?”
“Better,” he said. “I can remember a lot of them. What happened again?”
“You had a concussion and traumatic brain injury. Sections of your brain died. Do you remember what today is?”
“Eye day. New eyes.” He was frightened, but he needed to see.
“Yes. We can’t transplant. Your optic nerves were too badly damaged. We’d have to put artificial nerves in anyway. So your eyes are artificial, too.”
“Yeah.”
It took a long time for his eyes to come back, because they weren’t eyes. He saw grainy upside-down images. Then he saw right-side-up images. Finally they colored in. He noticed that things focused perfectly in front, but not outside of a circle of direct vision. He could see better, though. There were colors here he’d never known before. He asked about it.
“Yes, the imagers are designed to cover the entire spectrum that’s theoretically visible to humans, and a little more for harmonic resonance.”
“What does that . . .”
“You’ll learn later.”
He saw things differently than before. His memory of lighted streets in veils of fog wasn’t the same as what he saw now. Now he could see the droplets and tiny rainbows of light through them.
His senior year had him in tears, or would have, if he’d still had tear ducts.
He was still finishing junior year work he’d been doing at home, because he’d missed most of the school year itself. But more than that, he remembered he’d been a clocker in trigonometry. He’d been starting on calculus and gearing up for diff eq, in high school.
Now, geometry had him angry.
“But what is the answer?” he asked as Mr. Siles helped him plot another graph.
He followed with his eyes as Mr. Siles pointed.
“That. Minus fifteen to seven point three.”
“But which one?”
“All of them, Kent.”
He knew this, but he didn’t. “How can more than one be an answer?”
“How many integers are between one and ten, not counting them?”
“I . . . Oh.”
He’d been stupid. How could he not know that?
Mom and Dad didn’t even mention the car, but it hung there, a subject never raised. It has been valuable, historical, and Uncle Travis’. All the additional support he’d needed on top of the medicine had cost them the summer house and land. In a shove of the accelerator, he’d destroyed part of his family’s history. He was an apartment kid now.
He’d also destroyed his future. He was too far back in math to get into the programs he needed for space. He could dream, but he was trapped. He didn’t want to work in one of the towers that blocked the stars.
“Hey, Kent, want to come cruising?”
“Sure,” he said. He couldn’t drive again yet, and wasn’t sure he wanted to. But Marc had a sweet convertible, and it was a warm night. He needed to get out of the house.
He realized part of the reason they took him along was freak factor. At the Coff-In coffee shop parking lot, high school and college kids milled about. In shorts, his left prosthesis was visible. It almost matched the skeletal wheels, seats and window frames of Marc’s Turbo V.
Shortly, a burning-hot blonde ran fingers along the door ledge, looked at him, and asked, “Did you get those shades to match the car, too?”
“Not exactly,” he said, and took off his shades to show the metal orbits underneath.
“Oh, wow!” she said, more impressed than bothered.
Jackpot.
Yeah, it was shallow, and what did he care? He’d lost his real eyes and suffered a lot of pain. This was only fair.
“What’s your name?”
“Casey,” she said.
He could walk with a limp. He could see adequately. He’d even done well enough to get accepted to Avalon University, but that meant nothing now. His eyes especially needed ongoing tuning, and they occasionally aberrated enough to need a reboot. He wouldn’t be going to space.
So he threw himself into cybernetics. There had to be a way to integrate stabilization protocols and circuits onboard. Then, of course, they’d have to be micronized.
Materials did funny things at that scale. Cryogenic cooling was not an option for an implant.
It was properly graduate work, but he didn’t want to wait. Class, study, then independent research. The grad students were aloof, but finally accepted his determination. He thought some of that was pity for his “condition.” That should irritate him, but if it got him where he needed to be, he’d swallow it.
His apartment mate kept nagging him.
“Kent, man, you need rest,” Andy would tell him at four in the morning.
“I need study.”
“You’re going to pass.”
“Passing isn’t enough.” He had to clock it.
And he had to get to the gym. The left leg needed to work like the right one, and he needed more muscle tone. He pushed weights until his entire body burned, and bulked.
He still talked to Casey, but they weren’t dating.
She’d asked, “But what job are you going to get in the real world?”
“If I can’t crew a ship, I’m going to one of the stations,” he said.
And that was it. She wanted to remain on Earth.
| | |
The farm in the hills wasn’t his anymore. Still, he made a point to drive up and take in the view from roadside, and from the public land further up. There was a quite nice meadow there, and the view was even more vivid, if slightly artificial, with his eyes. He even went in winter to see the endless quilt of snow. He drove cautiously, sedately, with all the automated controls engaged, wincing every time someone passed him and volted up the mountain.
His sophomore year he got a spot of good news. The deep space projects changed the rules. They said they’d take certain prosthetics if they were stabilized.
That was his field. That’s where he’d put all his effort.
His work was already known. CyRe Inc. and Omega sponsored some of his research and provided prototypes. He was in his second year of his doctorate when, completely apart from his thesis, one of his papers led to micronization of monitor and adjustment circuits, that just might be powered by bioelectricity. He received patent co-credit, and references.
A recruiter from CyRe called and offered him a position.
“Thank you very much, and I expect I’ll take it, or something similar,” he said. He’d probably have to. Better a rat in a race than in a cage.
“What would convince you?” she asked.
“If you had deep space operations,” he said. “I put my life into this because I’d wanted to get there, and couldn’t with the prostheses I had. I probably can’t now, even with the improvements they’re making, but I don’t want to commit until I have to.” He wanted the lights of space, not of an industrial park.
“I’m sorry that we don’t,” she said. “But I’d like to keep in contact as you get closer to completing your doctorate.”
“Please do,” he said. If he couldn’t go, he could help others, whether they wanted to reach space, or just live normal lives. He wanted space, though.
An hour later, his phone rang again.
“This is Kent,” he answered.
“Mister Eastman, my name is Najmul Hasan. I’m with HR at Prescot Space Resources. Ms. Luytens at CyRe gave me your information . . .”
He would have to make a point to visit Ms. Luytens. He’d never met her, but she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
Prescot even wanted to pay him. He promised to consider their offer seriously and respond within three days. He lasted two days before accepting, and barely avoided screaming that he’d do it for free.
He was going to space.
Prescot had heavy industry in the asteroids, and wanted to jump to other systems. They worked with JumpPoint, on theoretical physics he was only vaguely aware of. But they were going to space. They had a ship ready for trials, a destination, and wanted crew.
When he went to the mountains in August, he took a specially programmed sensor suite along. He hoped he’d need it.
This time he had control of the car. It was modern, safe, and handled any surface. It was better than his uncle’s historical beast in every measure, but it lacked character.
Still, it took him along the road and up the mountain. He didn’t let it get near the edge of control. Any time he felt traction feathering, he eased off. His future wasn’t in race cars. It was in spaceships.
For the next two years he learned how to fly an interstellar ship. The math was simple, really. The tough part was adapting his eyes so he could control them with internal feedback, and learning how to do that. The lack of eyelids was still more hindrance than help. Then, some of the flight controls were operated by tracking the pupils. He had no pupils. Four cyberneticists created an interface that mounted to the side of his eyes, and used induced microvoltage to mimic tracking. He wasn’t involved with that, because he was working on the ship’s bionetic systems. He had to grit his teeth and trust in four strangers to make things work without ruining his eyes or bouncing him from the mission.
The tracking worked. The module was slim enough, but protruded from the sides of his head like bug eyes. He looked properly cyborg with those installed. That almost seemed fitting.
He was paired up with Lance Naguro for training. Together they worked on astronautic computers and onboard mission controls. They still had to learn to astrogate and pilot. The days started at 0500 and often went until dinner. They sat at consoles matching those of the Seren Wrach. The flight, with the Jump Point, should last about a month. They might remain in system for a year longer. These couches would be their work stations. They were smaller than any cubicle, but they’d be in space.
About a month in, Lance said, “Kent, if you’ll pardon the terminology, you’re a machine. Do you ever sleep?”
“Yes.” Some nights he saw treetops and a dark void. Some nights it was a dark void with stars. Other times it was a cubicle in a building. That was scarier than the first one. “But I want to do this.”
“There’s no doubt,” Lance said. “I think you’re pretty well guaranteed to be Lead.”
He shrugged, “Lead, Second, as long as I go. Or the next flight. But I’m going. I’ll volunteer to remain in place for the second mission, too.”
Three months later, he got notice.
Lead Engineer, Astrogation and Project Control: Kent Eastman.
So then he had a crash course in flying, and cringed at the term. He went up in sailplanes and propeller trainers with instructors, then into jets, and finally, a converted military fighter. He discovered the loss of a leg let him pull more Gs—he had less extremity for blood to pool in. That, and his eyes worked past where flesh eyes grayed out from the same issue.
Parachuting terrified him, every jump. It took ten jumps to qualify for escape procedures, but he took ten more. It didn’t reduce his fear. Falling would forever be his phobia. Gravity fell away, and he saw spruce trees.
It was only logical, he insisted to himself, that he buy a Hawkwing HangJet.
It did handle a lot like a hang glider. Then, if you dialed up the thrust, it turned into a tiny aircraft. You could drop from a plane, or throw yourself off a mountain. He knew he had to do both.
The drop from the jumpship wasn’t as scary with the jet as it had been with a parachute. He pulled the lever that snapped the wing struts open, thumbed the igniter, and felt the engines shove. Here on the coast, he could see the endless waves of the sea. It wasn’t space, but he felt there was a bond. He flew in broad loops around the dropzone, and stirred up a wave of leaves when he touched down.
After that first open-air flight, he loaded the kit into his car, and with Lance along, drove up to where the farm had been. It now belonged to some wealthy producer, who’d kept all the buildings, but had built a castle deeper in the trees. He messaged ahead to be sure he was expected, and welcome.
The police lights surprised him. Had he been . . .? Damn.
It was Sheriff Okume, who said, “Doctor Eastman, do you know why I pulled you over?”
The sheriff had helped save his life fifteen years before. He owed the man.
“I am so sorry, sir. I wasn’t even paying attention.”
Smiling and shaking his head, Okume said, “We already had one wreck this year. Slow down, okay?”
“Yes, sir. Have a good day.”
Yes, he’d slow down. For now.
Lance chuckled, and he realized his fellow astronaut didn’t know the details. He shrugged and drove.
He pulled through the electronic gate and bumped across the meadow.
There was his sensor pillar, with a hawk soaring down past it to snag a mouse from the grass. The pillar was untouched, and had two years of panorama. He pulled the pins mounting it to the steel post, and opened the trunk.
“Okay, Lance, you take it back down.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yup,” he said, grabbing the hangjet, and closing the trunk. “I’ll beat you down.”
His phone rang. Even up here.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Kent! What’s the site for your interview? I want to make sure I catch it.”
Indeed. That was in twenty minutes.
He told her, and started laying out his gear for his first earth launch.
The hawk watched him curiously from a half kilometer away. His eyes were slightly better than the bird’s.
On cue, the stream channel called.
“This is Kent.”
“Doctor Eastman, are you ready?”
“Sure.”
“Okay, we’ll start recording . . . now, and intro, and we’re on.
“We’re live with Doctor Kent Eastman, before he leaves Earth and heads for another star system. Hi, Kent.”
“Hi, Alex.”
“How do you feel about leaving Earth? Sad? Or eager to get away?”
“Well, both of those. I’ll miss my family and friends, and my favorite places, but I’m leading the way where I hope others will follow.”
“What are your final preparations before you leave Earth for several years, possibly forever?”
“I’m actually at a remote place in the wilderness, that’s been an inspiration to me for a long time. I brought a stereo-holo-imaging setup so I can create a full surround image of it to take with me. It’s been running for two years, so I can visit any season I want, or just let it run at its own pace. There’s audio as well. I just wish there were some way to preserve the scents.”
“So you’re taking a bit of Earth with you?”
“A small bit that’s very personal to me, yes. We have entire matrices of images, video, music and film, and we’ll get updates as we go. But this archive is something for me.”
“Can you take a listener question now?”
“Sure.”
The voice was that of a teenager. “Doctor Kent, I had ocular implants two months ago. I’ve been blind since birth. I’m just starting to see things now and I guess it’ll be years before everything syncs. It’s almost dizzying. I managed without sight just fine, but now I realize there’s that much more, and I will be able to see more than most people. How did you get from recovery to where you are now?”
He knew which eyes the boy meant. His research had helped create them. A small shiver of satisfaction ran through him.
“You have to be driven,” he said. “Whatever you want to do, it has to be a passion that possesses you. You have to live it, dream it, wrestle it. If it doesn’t mean that much to you, it’s not your destiny, and you have to find what is. Never settle for less. Of course, it might take a long time to get there, and there might be detours. But you have to make the path.”
He’d expected a half-hour-long interview. Those were typical. At forty minutes he realized this one was running long. He sat back in the grass and pulled his hat brim over his eyes. The evening sun was still bright in the clear sky.
After an hour, he got up and started prepping for departure. He had to do so before it got too dark.
A young woman in the Seychelles wanted to know what courses had been hardest.
“I had to take high school math twice,” he said, as he mounted the wings on the frame. “I had a traumatic brain injury from the accident that destroyed my eyes. It was so frustrating, I got so angry, knowing I’d learned all this and it was gone. Once I got through that . . .”
“The rest was easy?”
“No, not at all. But I knew it wouldn’t stop me. All I did was math. If you’re going into space, math and science are critical, even if you’re in a social science. The more you can do to help the mission crew, the better.” In fact, ballistic math had been easy, after all he’d done.
Alex asked, “So what do you think you’ll find there, Kent?”
“I have no idea,” he said. “Something different. Somewhere I’ve never seen.” He realized he’d barely seen Earth.
“I understand that. Exploration.” The interviewer concluded with, “Thanks again, Doctor Eastman, and good luck and safe skies.”
“Thanks very much, Alex. Good luck down here.”
He took one last long look around in the still, cloudy evening, smelling the spruce, the mountain grasses, the tang of the fuel in his jet.
He donned the harness, checked every item religiously. He’d never been gigged in training on that. He took the list line by line, every time.
The meadow dropped away to the east, sloping steeper and then down a shallow cliff to the land below. He’d chosen this spot from memory. It was a safe, almost perfect launch zone.
He gripped the controls, flexed the wings, and read the HUD.
He had the one booster for launch, so he had to make it count.
He started the turbines and heard them spool. With the auto-igniter engaged, he jogged, ran, sprinted for the slope, and leapt. The wings caught air.
The booster cracked and roared, and shoved him across the mountainscape as the turbines ran up. He angled slightly down to gain more velocity, watched the revs climb, and felt the thrust drive into sustained flight range.
He arced wide right, looking for the ribbon of old asphalt below. He found it, woven through the trees, and rose above it, looking . . .
There. That bend, those trees. That’s where his journey had started.
He took a tight, banking turn around the bluff, feeling Gs increase as he drove into the thermals rising up the slope. The trees had recovered, though there was a visible dip where the car had shorn their tops down. The maples glowed red and orange in their fall livery. The wind whistled past his helmet, causing ripples down his jumpsuit and down his spine.
And now it begins again, he thought.
Leveling off with arms out, he made a long, smooth descent, until the treetops whipped past only meters below, and the wind scoured his cheeks. He kept his enhanced vision on the path ahead. It wouldn’t do to crack up now. He had an appointment to make.
The clouds parted, and bright beams of golden evening sunlight drenched the landscape. The trees gave way to shaven fields, and he ran thrust-up until the wings thrummed in resonance, then eased off until consumption and velocity curves guaranteed he’d reach the landing zone. The sky ahead was indigo fading to a velvety violet. The sun was at his back, melting into the mountains.
It’s my turn to fly.
The road unwound behind him. Before him were the stars.
End