Bikes in Space Volume 2

Table of Contents

1. Chapter 1

2. Chapter 3

3. Chapter 4

4. Chapter 5

5. Chapter 6

6. Chapter 7

7. Chapter 8

8. Illustration by Jeanne Hilary

9. Chapter 9

10. Chapter 10

11. Chapter 11

12. Bikes to New Sarjun

13. Credits

14. Colophon

Chapter 1

Bikes in Space Volume 2

Chapter 3

Introduction

If you ride a bicycle, no doubt you’ve spent a mile or two pondering the geopolitical and cultural implications of different kinds of transportation, what they means for our future, and wondering whether or not your pedaling legs have any impact on that one way or another.

If you’ve read much science fiction, you’re probably hyper-aware that the solutions, pitfalls, and yearnings to be found in much of our collective imagination are frankly pretty sexist and racist—not to mention confused about the economic and geopolitical realities of energy. (There are some great exceptions to each of these complaints, of course—though fewer exceptions to all of them at once.)

In planning for a less miserable and unequitable future, we won’t get far without improving the scope of this imagination and attending to who gets to dream what. This project is one small step, among many others, towards giving those shared societal dreams a much needed productive kick in the ass.

When I published the first volume of Bikes in Space, it was meant to be a one-off thing, a silly and fun distraction from a steady stream of urgent and earnest nonfiction. But then something else happened: The stories that started to roll in were satisfyingly silly, and they were also really good. The response from readers was excited. And once I got into it, I didn’t want to work on anything else.

So with this volume, Bikes in Space is now a series. I’m excited to offer you this collection of stories by new and returning authors. You’re welcome to submit work for future volumes. So long as your story has some elements of bicycling and feminism—whatever those mean to you—I’m happy to read them. If these first two projects are any indication, it’s going to be a fun ride.

Science fiction may not save the world, but the people reading it might have a shot. Instead of getting bogged down with the old guard’s gendered politics, let’s rise above and get to work dreaming up something better. Onward!

Elly Blue,

Portland, Oregon

April 19, 2014

Chapter 4

Racing the Drones

Caitlin Giddings

Caitlin Giddings is the former author of Spokes of Hazard, a zine about her chaotic, adventurous days as a Portland bike messenger and cross-country bike tour guide. She currently lives with her partner and pets in Allentown, Pa., and works for Runner’s World. You can find her at runnersworld.com/giddings or on Twitter @caitlingiddings

There’s this magic feeling you get when all the lights are aligned. Sailing off the Broadway Bridge into your own lane, weaving through the traffic in Old Town, obstacles coming at you fast like a video game. A car cuts you off without signaling. Two tweakers lurch into your path and freeze like urban deer. Wet streetcar tracks. Potholes. The smell of vegan donuts calling to you through the car exhaust.

“What’s your 20, 503?”

That’s my number, and as luck would have it, it’s also the Portland area code. “I’m downtown and I’m empty,” I answer the two-way strapped to my chest. My pager starts beeping. “Copy super-rush out of the North.”

They say Amazon’s drones could do this job faster than us, but they haven’t seen me like this, threading through gridlocked traffic like I could take the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs, picking up and dropping tags before they’re even hardly called in. I race the streetcar through the industrial sector. I drop down into the ritzy Pearl District, past art galleries and coffee shops, sprinting around slow-moving hordes of shoppers who jump when they feel me phase through like a ghost. You just can’t program this kind of rhythm and motion.

Hard to track it, either—that’s one of the many reasons bike messengers still ride the streets at all, and old-school brick radios and pagers have outlived the anti-privacy acts of 2034. Rocket City Courier wouldn’t have agreed to this race against the delivery drones if we weren’t more reliable and secure. But I guess that’s something my victory will prove today if I can hold on for the win.

My pager beeps with another five jobs, and it only takes me a second to copy dispatch and calculate a route between them. Like a true alleycat, today’s race replicates a messenger workday with pickups, drop-offs, and the occasional unwieldy package that doesn’t play well with those already on board. The trick is finding the fastest way to get to them, cram them into your bag Tetris-style, and make all your drops before another round of pickups sends you careening across town like a pinball flipper. There’s no time to coast when the whole future of the industry is on the line. With unemployment up around 45 percent these days, the last thing anyone wants to see is the delivery drones taking over one of the few thriving industries Portland has left.

The streets are quiet as I close in on my fifth pickup, but as I’m fumbling with my U-lock, I spot a drone, coming in hot. Attempts to radio base are hopeless—525 is clogging up the line, keeping dispatch entertained with some garbled joke about the difference between the Portland Police and a trampoline. She was never one for racing, but now it sounds like she’s given up entirely and retreated to a bar somewhere to make a retirement plan.

“Stay on target, gold leader,” I whisper to myself as I hustle into the tallest building in downtown—the “Big Pink”—to pick up what I hope will be my last job of the race.

Down a long corridor buzzing with a mix of human staff and automated office workers. Into the elevator, where a businessman turns to me and says what they all say: “I’d hate to have your job on a day like today.” Rain drips off my jacket into small pools on the elevator floor. I’ve always wanted to snap back, “I’d hate to have your job any day,” but instead I just smile and jab the “Door Closed” button a few dozen times, as if it’s connected to anything. I could be just as useless if I don’t prove myself today.

For once, the package is actually ready at reception, and there’s no sign of a robocopter hot on my heels. I’m in, out, and unlocking my bike when dispatch calls in with a mangled message that I’ve reached the home stretch. Something like, “503—last run of the night—bzzzzt.”

Only one more drop to make, and then I can head to the bar and celebrate victory over remote-controlled gadgetry with a nice cold beer or six.

This is it.

Here’s where I come alive.

I do a running cyclocross mount onto my track bike and head for the Burnside Bridge. Traffic is all jammed up in both directions—they must be running another security checkpoint.

I’m crouched low on my ride, head down in LightBike-mode, as I thread my way through the slow-moving cars like it’s my master plan to stitch them all together with a trip wire.

Now nothing’s moving in either direction except for me. Straight ahead is a dead end—a stopped car mid lane change. Reflexively, I bunny hop onto the sidewalk, careful not to veer too close to the crumbling gaps in the bridge’s sidewall, where it’s a long fall down into the toxic green glow of the Willamette River.

Jumping back onto the street, I shoot for a gap between two vans and steal a glance back at the competition. Two drones are closing in fast, serenely drifting over the slow-moving traffic like tiny spaceships no one but me can see.

Scanners don’t even register my bike as I roll through security and out into my own lane of traffic. One last round of Frogger. I’m in the clear if I just hammer up this last little hill to 28th. The sweet taste of victory is already in the air, and it tastes more than a little like vegan maple donuts.

The drones must have been tripped up by security, but now they’re here, picking up speed and numbers. There’s a cluster of four now, drifting down Burnside like they’re the insect ships in Galaga about to cast a tractor beam.

I reach the 20, glide to a stop, and rush around back to make my final drop. I have one trick left up my rain-jacket sleeve—I know from experience that dropoff for this building is on a different floor than the one listed on the package and can only be reached by service elevator. The droids are already somewhere in the building, programmed to head right to reception and bypass the mailroom. Rookies.

The elevator moves slower than a 50 gigabyte wifi cloud, but finally the doors burst open to a cavernous mailroom and what feels like a hundred flashbulbs. I slam the package down on the nearest table and lob my manifest over to the clerk for his sig.

No drones in sight. I did it. I won. I not only kept my job for another couple months or so, but a small news blurb about the race should send a message to the city that remote-controlled helicopters are in no way faster than our Rocket City Courier fleet. All that’s left now is to head back downtown to the bar for a hero’s welcome and a few rounds on the house.

I expected to feel amazing right now, but I just feel... tired, like something inside me has decided to power down. “I’m just... really glad... I won,” I hear my voice tell a reporter as I crumble to my knees. “Calling it a day now.” My helmet hits the pavement, and everything starts to fade.

#

The small crowd closes in for a final statement.

“Huh,” the tall man in the suit says, as he fiddles with the control panel on the new 503 model and the waiting reporters scribble notes.

“Not bad for a first test run, but this one was a little too... spirited. She was supposed to be programmed to obey all the traffic laws. No matter. The next model will be better, I promise you that.”

Chapter 5

The Sassy Chassis Lassies and the Devolution Revolution

Lisa Sagrati

Lisa Sagrati finds herself in the middle of Arizona with nothing to do but write. Her writing has appeared in Nerve, Red Savina Review, Poydras Review, and previous issues of Taking the Lane. She can be reached at Lmsagrati@gmail.com

Emily sat alone at the party, tuning in and out of the conversation of the group of men standing near her.

“I’m running an all-Kevlar suit and rig.”

“...just picked up a sweet new micro-composite carbon muscle cuirass...”

“Ya gotta get lighter and lighter, it’s gettin’ slower and slower out there...”

“Gearheads,” Emily muttered to herself. She had come to the party hoping to shake off the memory of what she had seen earlier in the day. But it was just more of the same.

“It’s dangerous out there, ya need the best equipment money can buy...”

Emily got up and found the hostess. She apologized for leaving so early, saying she wasn’t feeling well. She left and began walking to her apartment building.

A rickshaw rolled towards her. A robotic voice came out of its loudspeaker.

“Need a ride, lady?”

She shook her head and kept walking.

“Why walk when you can ride?” the voice continued.

“Because it’s faster?” she snapped.

“Touchy, touchy, little lady.”

She stopped and looked at the driver. He was clad in a complete suit of tarnished metal armor, decorated with band and slogan stickers. His early medieval style helmet had a long nose guard and left much of his face visible—the popular look among hipsters, who liked to appear casual about safety. But the rest of his rig put the lie to that pretension: The fairing, made of thin, high-tech ductile glass, sat above a fender equipped with two five-foot lances. The wheels were guarded by spiked shields. A menacing cannon protruded from the back—impossible to tell from the sidewalk whether it was real or a sub-Saharan knock-off. The battery trailer brought up the rear, a three-cubic-meter block, probably a bio-battery running on West Indies slave-grown sugar. It helped the driver propel the rig, but added so much weight itself that the net gain in power was negligible. The driver’s cage and passenger compartment were enclosed by 21st century translucent concrete, reinforced by thick metal cylinders. His cage appeared to open upward in the old style.

She shuddered as an image of the violent scene she had seen earlier that day flashed through her mind.

#

She had been walking home from her downtown job when a high-end rig pulled up to the curb. It was equipped with one of those new cages that opened out to the side. The man inside, dressed in a Burberry gold-titanium mail cuirass and mithril gauntlets and greaves, was texting into his loudspeaker system when he threw open the cage without looking. The four-foot wing of reinforced unbreakable glass slammed into an elderly woman shuffling along the sidewalk. She fell and lay there unmoving. Emily ran to her and called an emergency service when the elder didn’t respond. The rider pulled the wing closed and rolled away, his loudspeaker screaming “Watch where you’re walking, oldster!” Medics arrived, scanned the woman’s debit card and then strapped her into the back of an emergency vehicle.

Emily began walking away, but she felt too shaken to continue with her normal routine. She turned down an unfamiliar street and stared out at the traffic. The street was crowded with bulky, slow-moving vehicles. Some riders pedaled slowly in tiny gears, while others coasted on the power of their SugarCubes and E-Z Rider batteries, which stored coal and wind energy. The street resounded with broadcast threats and insults: “Outta my way, biped!” was a familiar slogan launched at people trying to cross the street on foot. Hipsters slung self-consciously archaic salvos like “Verily, thou shalt perish beneath my wheels!” But the soundscape consisted mostly of the usual blunt curses—a “Fuck you!” was met with a “No, fuck you,” and so on.

Emily watched as a rig swung into a left turn too sharply and its lance snagged on the front shield of another vehicle. All but the most luxurious rigs lacked a reverse gear, so the riders got out, exchanged insults for several minutes, then struggled to untangle the two rigs. Bottlenecks formed in all directions as drivers maneuvered slowly around them.

“This is insane,” Emily thought. “All these vehicles look like...” she reached for an appropriate metaphor. “...like war chariots. It looks like a military occupation.”

She glanced up at a billboard that was blaring an ad for chain mail. Two handsome blond men were jousting in a wilderness area, protected only with mail shirts and lightweight helms.

“...boasting superior ductility combined with classic style...” the announcer droned. Emily stared, fascinated. The actors were riding stripped-down, 20th-century bicycles. She shook her head, trying to clear the cognitive dissonance.

“Yeah, right,” she muttered. As if anyone would dare to ride something so vulnerable.

#

She looked at the rickshaw driver.

“Yeah, well at least I can still feel,” she replied. She turned towards home. A woman approached her on the sidewalk.

“Makes me crazy,” she said, gesturing at the streetscape. Emily chuckled in agreement.

“Makes me want to get out there and shake things up. 2050s style.”

“Oh yeah?” Emily said, trying to sound non-committal. She had been reading about the history of social activism, which seemed like ancient history to her. But encountering so many angry, pirate channels on the Internet had started her wondering if those days might come again. Forum posters were always claiming that a great-grandparent had participated in the Internet Freedom Struggle or the mass movement against the privatization of water. Those movements had failed in the face of the corporate coups that had put an end to the public sector, but their memory lingered in the lyrics of punk songs and in hacker manifestos.

“Would you like to sit down and have some tea?” Emily said.

#

It was a Friday afternoon. Emily was sitting in the back room of an abandoned battery-charging station. The room was packed with people, mostly women dressed in bloomers. The garage was filled with dozens of chassis—no, Emily corrected herself, with bicycles. A few months ago she had made her first trip to a junkyard where she had dismantled—liberated —a bicycle from its burden of rusted armor. Working from manuals and with the advice of other self-taught mechanics, she had gotten it into working order. So far she had ridden it only in laps and figure eights around the vast garage.

It was almost time. Emily thought she should be nervous, but what they were about to do didn’t seem real yet.

“Okay, ladies. Time to saddle up!” announced Eddie, the woman who had brought Emily into the group.

#

Robotic voices brayed around them:

“Crazy ladies, you are going to get killed!”

“Get out of the street!”

People on the sidewalks stood and stared.

“They’re not wearing any armor!”

“They’re just riding chassis!”

“They’re really moving!”

Emily was scared now. But she was part of the group, and that made it easier to just keep pedaling. They weaved in and out through gaps in traffic.

They came upon a construction zone. Imported slaves with pickaxes and shovels were leveling a steep hill several miles east of downtown. Only a few drivers were laboring up the open lane. The bicyclists slowed considerably as they started up the slope, but they soon overtook the battery-powered behemoths. Emily’s lungs and legs burned with the effort, but she felt a burst of new energy that powered her to the summit when the slaves leaned on their tools and cheered the riders on:

“Thassa way ta get ‘round now!”

“You show ‘em, lassies!”

Emily saw the neighborhood security service vehicles sitting at the bottom of the hill. She picked up a terrifying, exhilarating momentum as she rolled downhill, straight towards a row of heavily armored guards. It occurred to her that she might be arrested and taken to one of the secret prisons. But that thought was drowned out by her immediate concern—whether or not to apply her brakes, which could cause a crash behind her. The riders at the front shouted “Comin’ through!” and led the group towards a small gap between the guards.

The guards scattered when they saw that the bicyclists weren’t slowing down. Emily and the other riders blew past them, whooping, and pedaled back to headquarters.

“We’ve got something special to celebrate with,” Eddie announced once they were all inside. “Coffee grown by a cooperative—smuggled in personally by a friend of mine.” Several people gasped.

Someone passed cups around. As Emily sipped the heady brew, the words of an old advertising jingle came to her mind: “The times, they are a-changin’.”

Chapter 6

From an Interview with the Famed Roller Sara Zephyr Cain

E.L. Bangs

Elly Bangs rides and resides in her hometown of Seattle, Washington, where she works as an administrative octopus for bicycle advocacy and moonlights as a wannabe paperback writer. Find out a little more at elbangs.com

The question I get asked most often is probably also the stupidest—but whatever part of my brain used to concern itself with taking offense at it long ago burnt out from overuse.

Take a guess at what that question is. Just have one look at me, long enough to work out what kind of woman I am. Then take a look around, down at the grime that’s always under everybody’s fingernails since the Crash, and at all the ash and the rubble and the rust that pervades this decently grim year of our lord Two Thousand and Fifty.

If you’re like most folks, you’re bound to look at me and exclaim something like “but why would anybody choose to be a woman now? In this world?”

I could take the easy way out and say it wasn’t really a choice, that becoming the person you see here was a matter of survival not unlike what anybody else does for water or bread or a dry nook to sleep in. Or I could claim that I was always female, despite any outward appearances I might’ve once had. But to me, both these answers—true as they are—miss the point.

It doesn’t make it any easier for already quizzical folks that I’m a Roller by trade. They all imagine it’s terribly dangerous out on the old freeways, in the new wilderness, evading thieves or cannibals or mutants or whatever else they think is out there—even though I always tell them blackberry thorns are my most fearsome enemy. What it comes down to is that they imagine that male is always stronger than female. They imagine that ever since the Crash, strength is the only virtue still worth aspiring to.

I wish I had some eloquence to explain that I am so much stronger since I started my change. Ever since I made my three-thousand-mile pilgrimage to Cascadia City, where that change is still as possible now as it was before the Crash. Ever since I mounted my first squeaky pair of wheels, turned my back on the cruel, theocratic town that bred me, and set out onto the silent interstates with the whole unknown breadth of the former U-S-A standing between me and my only hope: That bright Oz of greenhouses where genetically engineered phyto-estrogens and -androgens grow on trees, and where there are more doctors, and fewer stupid questions, than in most places.

There are some good questions you could ask me. Ask how in the hell I made it across the Western glowlands on that first ride to Cascadia. Lots of Rollers don’t even believe me. You know the radiation out there will blister your fingers if you so much as touch the ground, or kill you dead with one deep breath of dust, and it’s six hundred miles from one side to the other at its narrowest. Most Rollers with the guts to even try bring ten days of water and fancy lead-lined tents, huffing and puffing in their plastic suits with big tanks sloshing along on trailers behind them.

Me, I couldn’t afford all that, and there was no way around, so I just went. Nobody would hire me as a courier, they were so certain I’d die. I stripped the bike down as light as I could, pawned everything else for silver rings to barter with on the far side, stripped naked so as not to sweat out any precious water, tied a bandanna over my nose, and sped right out onto the wasteland. I shoved off at dawn and never put my feet down.

All day long that sun blazed down on my dysphoric body, and after it set I couldn’t tell how much of that ghostly light on the lifeless plain was real, or how much hallucinated. All those undying nuclear embers seemed to form an upside-down sky full of dim bluish stars, speeding around me all night. The constellations seemed to come alive. Some whispered secrets. Some shouted profanity or called me a freak, a perv, a deviant, but they only filled me with the will to go faster; the will to live, out of spite, to see the other side.

I was half-dead and delirious by the time I escaped the glowlands a little after dawn on the second day. But the winds had been kind to me. And I’d made a name for myself—even if it was under the name I didn’t want anymore, even if I was misgendered in my own legend.

There are some stretches where it’s even more dangerous than people think, but most of my job is no more fearsome than sedentary life. Parents these days tell their kids stories about road ghosts and suburban morlocks, but it’s all just to put the fear in them so they don’t grow up to be Rollers like me. Otherwise they would. I think everybody, female or male or anything, in their heart of hearts, has to crave my kind of life. It’s in our blood. It’s inherited from the world that ended before us: this idea of freedom.

My parents told me plenty about the way it was in their day, when people would just up and move their whole lives from city to city, state to state, all over the country that used to be here. To those people, “seeing the world” was a medicine for restlessness, a birthright—hell, a responsibility. It’s why they made their whole civilization so pitifully dependent on their cars. It’s why they couldn’t even see it coming when the oil dried up. They couldn’t imagine a world without infinite mobility, any more than we young folks can imagine how it all used to be. We Rollers are the last vestige of that freedom now, untethered from any one corner of this broken-down land, homeless yet at home everywhere. We’re the last ones who carry that fire.

I’ve made my living for ten years now as a courier and a cartographer and a scout, and I’ve seen a lot of things that aren’t easily believed, at least the way I tell them. I had a voodoo curse put on me by a Royally-appointed witch doctor in the Kingdom of Santa Cruz because he swore I was turning his daughter into a lesbian just by being there. I was ritualistically blessed on a mountaintop in Wyoming by a cult of mute Buddhist-Druids, for reasons I still don’t know. Once I was hired to brave the lifeless, haunted breadth of Los Angeles to retrieve a buried cache containing three hundred and fifty pounds of gold bricks, and I made it in one trip, with a horde of crazed scavengers running after me all the way to Malibu. In the Oregon woods I once stumbled upon the camp of the mythic Amazons—they call themselves that even though there are some men among them—who must be the greatest military force in the world today, having perfected the skill of riding a bike and shooting an arrow at the same time.

I can tell you how the life of a Roller isn’t as rough as you think. It comes with its own trials and tribulations, why of course—but no matter what goes wrong, all you have to do is keep moving forward. It teaches you a kind of optimism that’s rare these days. It sows in you a faith that there’s always some way to grease your chain just enough to make it over just one more hill, and one more after that, and one more.

I can rattle this stuff off all night long. I love telling stories, and sometimes there’s no good company on the road. But still somehow, no matter what the tale is, or how tall I make it, or all the funny voices I do for my characters, the one question I always get asked is the worst one: “Why would anybody choose to be a woman in this world?”

Sometimes it’s other women who ask me this, and in that case sometimes I go through the trouble to lay out what’s really probably my proper response. I tell them they could always go to Cascadia City and chew the bark of the phytoandrogen tree till their skin was thick and hairy and they’d have all the strength of any man. I tell them what I suspect they already know: That almost none of them would ever make that change—that they are who they are, and they’d never want to be otherwise.

On the other hand, sometimes it’s a bunch of guys asking me the Stupid Question, and there’s not much hope of walking them through my real answer.

So I tell them, as long as we’re being sexist, think about it this way: Strength isn’t actually the right virtue for this world or this age. Even when my beard grew thick and my skin was tough and my chest was empty, I was never that strong. I’ve never been fast, never handsome, never pretty, never been the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I’ve always had one thing going for me. It’s the virtue of a Roller, and it’s the one virtue you really need to make it in this crumbled country—and in every age of every place on Earth, it’s always been the virtue that women have kept alive, whether by nature or by the necessity of what they were put through.

It’s not all about strength. It wasn’t strength that got me across the glowlands, and it’s not strength that’s going to till our soil or rebuild our cities now. It’s endurance. What matters is endurance.

Chapter 7

Winning is Everything

Emily June Street

Emily June Street lives in California with a husband and two mutts. When not hanging upside down in her Pilates studio or banging on her keyboard, she can be found cycling or swinging on a flying trapeze. Read more about Emmeline Everett in the novel The Velocipede Races, forthcoming from Elly Blue Publishing. Find Emily online at www.luminouscreaturespress.com and on Twitter at @EmilyJuneStreet

Dead silence greeted me as I stepped onto the track at Velodrome Basile and wheeled my velo to the starting line. You could have heard a stomach growl or a cat sneeze in the quiet. Gazes—some malevolent, some eager, all curious—burned my skin. No matter how they felt about me, everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of Emmeline Everett, the world’s first female velo jockey to ride in a professional arena.

On the line the other jockeys fussed, adjusting dark goggles, smoothing leathers, yanking gauntlets. My hair stuck out from my helmet, free from the restriction of a concealing cap. No more hiding.

Basilean women occupied an entire row near the front. Dressed in comfortable attire rather than corseted gowns, they waved banners stitched with my name.

I lifted a hand defiantly and waved at them. En masse they rose and cheered. Boos and hoots answered the women’s support. Despite the earlier silence, it now appeared everyone had an opinion about my presence on the track. Pressure thickened the air. If I won, if I even placed, this Velodrome would raise an uproar no keir-track had ever seen. I understood the possible repercussions, but nothing would prevent me from racing full out.

Jockey Number Two hissed and spit on the boards in front of my tyre. I clenched my fist and suppressed the urge to raise it. They would use any excuse to disqualify me. My position was tenuous at best.

“He’s Aloran,” Gabriel muttered, holding the velo as I clipped into my pedals. “Ungallant bastard.”

“It doesn’t matter.” I dropped down into my handles. The velo had been designed so that I could ride low, slung between handles and seat in a horizontal line. I’d never been able to get into such an ideal position when I’d raced in Seren.

I had practiced earlier to get a feel for the unfamiliar track with its steeply raked curves and aggressive design. How good it felt to ride a velo that fit my form! For so long I had been forced to make do with Gabriel’s leavings, seat too high, handles too wide. Now that I had ridden a velo made to suit my needs, riding hand-me-downs seemed as confining as wearing corsets.

I thought of Cassius. “Thank you,” I murmured.

“What’s that, Emmy?” Gabriel asked

“Nothing. But I love my new velo.”

Gabriel broke into a smile. “I’m glad you finally got one just for you.”

Number Two snorted beside us. “Bitch,” he hissed from the side of his mouth.

I could do nothing but glare at him, for the officiator called, “Jockeys! On your marks!”

I crouched low over the handles.

“Set!”

Screams and stomping shook the floor beneath my velo.

Bang!

My thighs sprang like a wildcat’s. When I rode, no insult could touch me. Governed by the keir-race code of honor, I pedaled behind Number Two instead of dusting him at the starting line as I wished.

Before we turned the first paced lap, Number Four broke formation, surging up my outside.

“Boo! Boo!” shrieked the women’s row. But elsewhere, cheers greeted Four’s breach of etiquette. Everyone understood the gesture: a woman didn’t deserve a keir-racer’s honor.

Concentrate, Emmeline. With one jockey breaking form, others would, too. The race would be a free-for-all. I drove my legs, pushing on Two’s outer flank. Four and One pulled ahead. Two and I rode neck and neck, no more than a finger of space between our elbows.

I accelerated into the curve. The Aloran jockey, instead of dropping towards the lower line, swung outwards, jostling my arm and cursing. I swayed but managed to control the velo by leaning into the Aloran to counterbalance. He snapped an elbow at my face. I dodged.

Ahead, One flagged. The Aloran and I sprinted together, overtaking One on the straightaway though he flung out an arm to foil me. I flew past the treacherous limb, determined to beat the Aloran cretin.

We took the second and third laps in tight formation, the Aloran’s breath a hiss of derision as he tried again to knock me.

The bell rang for the final lap and the race ignited. I held nothing back, spinning until my thighs screamed, crouching to present minimal body to the air. I inched past the Aloran and moved onto Four’s wheel. When he threw a glance, he allowed his velo a tiny swerve, first towards the line and then away from it. I took the chance, pushing into the gap between his velo and the line.

Control, Gabriel’s voice admonished in my head. Risky moves require control. Just as I passed the leader, his front tyre tagged my back one. I wobbled, but increased my speed to hold firm. The crowd’s shrieks told me Number Four had fallen.

The boards flew by in a glittering blur. Spectators screamed, “Manotte! Freak!”

I galvanized ahead of the Aloran, dropping to the line to prevent an inside pass. He tried my outside. I blocked him again.

The Aloran made me think of my useless track swaddy father, who used to pinch my cheek and say, “Pretty little things don’t ride, darling.”

Anger fed my legs as they churned a furious burn.

I crossed the finish line with my legs on fire. The velodrome erupted into chaos: shrieks, roars, applause, smashing glass. The women stood on their seats as they screamed.

A din rang in my ears. Bottles and debris flew from stands to track, smashing around me. A siren blared through the Velodrome to attempt to calm the crowd. I only understood that I had won when I spotted Gabriel pumping his fist into the air beside the other trainers, who stood in a silent circle marked by taut, furious faces.

I lifted both arms in the air, shaking my fists in time to the cheers and the taunts. When the Aloran jockey wheeled past, I held my hand out, but he refused to shake it.

Shattered glass crunched beneath my riding cleats as I turned away from him. The uproar in the stands intensified.

I had known it might come to this. I didn’t care. Sometimes, winning is everything.

Chapter 8

Grandma Takes Off

Elizabeth Buchanan

Elizabeth Buchanan is a writer and tour guide in Austin, TX. Her second novel is about immortal seven year olds who start a girl band. You can occasionally find her on Twitter at @weaselizabeth

Grandma Hornpiper lived out in an old filling station in the middle of the Deathcloud desert. We thought it funny ‘cause there never was much food out in the desert, so how could a station be called filling? Daddy called it something to do with the beforetimes and petros. He said Grandma were crazy for living all the way out there with no ‘un to tend her but he never said it to her face. She was his Momma, after all. She’d maybe of clocked him.

For me an’ Kace, Grandma was as regular and as beautiful a thing as sunset, coasting into town twice a’ week on her pedaller to collect her water ration and to spoil us with presents from the desert—cactus pears, honey what smelled of spice and mesquite, candied crickets. One time, in she came with a little box and inside of it a mouse with eyes like bits of glass, full alive and trying so hard to be still that it shook all over. It stared at us and ran its little hands over an’ over its whiskers.

“One of ‘em jumping mice,” Grandma said, I think mostly to me ‘cause I was older. “When I was your age, my loves, the desert started hurting and Mr. Jumping Mouse turned hard to find. Sure am glad to see him back. You two watch him now and get to know him, then we’ll take him home. You gotta learn my desert so to watch it for me when I take off. “

“Momma, you ain’t ever gonna take off,” Daddy said. He’d been listening and fiddling’ with some vaporizer from out in the fields. Grandma just winked at us.

“You wait and see, boy. When I take off, it’ll be with a bang!”

Some days we’d pedal back with her to the station, her big blue Cruiser and our little red ones, gaining speed on the hardpack dirt so our streamers and her big white braids whipped out behind us. Sometimes grandma sang her loudy oldtime songs. “Boooorrrn to be willlllldddd,” she’d holler. “Figgghttt for your rigggghttt to parrrtttyyy!” Then we’d come up to the station at just dark and she’d fix us cornbread and honey and we’d sit out back and watch the stars bloom over the mesa ‘til it were so cold our air came out of us like smoke and hung in the sky.

And it was on some night just like that, when Grandma had tucked Kace an’ me in our little camp beds and was readying to turn off the light, that a knock came on the door.

“I have a gun,” Grandma said to the door, just like she were saying “Beautiful night, yeah?”

“It’s me, Ruth. They called.”

“Ah. So it’s time.” Grandma opened the door. It were a lady voice, so I weren’t surprised when Martha Elk and Trinity Guajardo came inside. They were old timers like Grandma, part of the Council. “Let me say my ‘byes to the little ones and I’ll be right along.” The ladies nodded and went out. Kace started bawling right then.

“Where you gotta go, Grandma?”

“Now my babies, listen to me. You two are as fine a pair of girls as I could ask for and I know you’ll mind my desert and your Daddy for me. But it ain’t just us in the world. Now, do you remember what I said to you about the before times and how our People came to be spared?”

We said yeah. The story were the same the village over. The People had been driven to the desert, to the places nobody in ‘least wanted, so when the petros failed and the bad times had come, nobody came out to bother us.

“Well babies, when you’re old like me you learn that most stories people tell is 99 per cent bullshit. What helped us was aliens. You probably ain’t heard of those, but anyway, little green things with funny voices that live out there in those stars we’re always watching. They’re a kind of people too. And they’re tenderhearted just like you, my little Opal.” She pinched my cheek. “They can’t stand to watch hurtin’ much. So when they saw the bad times movin’ on in, they came over and BZZZZ, with their little rays they put everybody to sleep. And then they sat down and held their heads, ‘cause they didn’t know what to do next. Keeping us asleep altogether wasn’t much more than killing us straight. But they didn’t know much about us or about our old Earth, to make it safe again.

So they figured the best to do was to ask the oldest people they could find. Once the elders had given them advice, they unfroze just a few Peoples. Gave us pedallers, cause they said it was the best machine they could find in all our history, plus medicine and machines enough and let us start living on and rebuilding. Promise was when those folks got old, they’d be back to see about the next step.”

“Someday, hope is, everybody’ll be awake and ready to join their old folks up in the stars. But you two don’t need to be worrying about any of that for a good long while. Just sleep here where it’s warm, then take your time pedallin’ home in the morning. I love you.”

Then she went out, and we heard the squeak of her pedaller as she started away. Kace and me stared at each other in the dark. Then, not saying nothing, we put on our shoes and our sweaters and we went after her.

It were a bright moon, but for hours and hours we followed and didn’t see nothing but just three old ladies riding down through the middle of the desert, their skirts tucked up between their knees. It were monster cold and I rode with only one hand on my pedaller so I could tuck the other ‘un warm up underneath my armpit. I was wishing I could put my ears in my armpits too when suddenly the lights came up like summer all around us and both Kace and me fell off just from surprise.

It was the end of the mesa. The flat plain stopped like somebody’d cut a slice right out of it – which is how canyons look, usually, but we weren’t expecting it, nor to see our old Grandma pedallin’ full speed for the canyon edge, looking for all the world like she were singing while she went. Martha and Trinity too had these big ol’ grins we could see clear as day. The light weren’t from the sun or moon neither. There were some big odd thing like a giant water drop hovering right over the middle of the canyon, prettier than any hummingbird, and the light flowed from it.

It were clear enough now we could see the other shapes, other pedallers comin’ in from all sides of the canyon. Some of their faces I knew, like Big Old Mr. Domingo from the town library, who had a bandanna tied around his head and his sunglasses on. Some of ‘em were from a whole lot farther away: dark skinned faces, light skinned faces, all different kinds of dress but all of ‘em old timers with wrinkles and gray hair, just grinnin’ and pedallin’ as fast as their legs could take ‘em. Soon they were right at the edge. Kace grabbed for my hand.

“Either way, it’s gonna be somethin’ we remember,” I told her.

The old folks reached the edge an’....kept right on going. Swear it. The light didn’t change, but somehow it were solid as a rock and the pedallers rolled on over that light like that’s what they were made for. Come to think of it, maybe they had been. There were hundreds of them now, old ladies and old men, some of ‘em standing up in their pedals to reach the Shiny Thing a little faster. My hand felt sweaty in Kace’s. I heard, clear as a flute, Grandma’s voice across the canyon and the others joining in, and then the two of us, because she’d taught us the words:

“Darlin’ go make it happennn, take the world in a love embraaaace, fire all of your guns at once and explode into spaaaaaaaccce!”

“Born to be willllddd!” Kace and I sang with all our hearts. But suddenly it was only our two little girl voices. The old folks had made the Shiny Thing and passed right on through the walls. It stayed a minute more, still and movin’ all at once like the little jumpin’ mouse in his box. Kace swears up an’ down there were a little green man ‘winked at her. Then there were a great BANG, and the light bounced up away into the stars and it were dark again.

At sunup, just one hour after, we were alone in the desert. You can guess it was it hard to explain all we’d seen to Daddy when we pedalled back into town ‘next day. But still at night, when our schools’ all done, Kace and me ride out to Grandma’s station, with some dinner in a bag and sometimes with Daddy too. We stare up at those stars, at those old folks pedallin’ and singin’ up there inside ‘em, and we get excited. Someday, we’ll get our turn at the stars. ‘Til then, we’ll watch the desert and keep our legs strong.

Midnight Ride

Maddy Engelfried

Maddy Engelfried lives in Davis, California. You can find her comics and artwork at maddy-spencer.tumblr.com

“What should we do for your birthday tomorrow?”

Amelia looked up at her mom from the sack of rice on the floor in front of her. “I don’t know,” she said.

For any other kid it wouldn’t even be a question. She was going to be thirteen. When village kids turned thirteen, they received a bike, a fast one with fat tires for forest patrols and a basket for hunting and gathering. Amelia knew what she wanted for her birthday. It just wasn’t going to happen.

“What if we made a cake?” her mother asked. “I’ve been saving our sugar ration.”

Amelia managed a smile. “Okay.”

The two of them sat on the floor of the village co-op, rationing grain from the last gathering expedition. They ladled rice into small cloth sacks in the light of the afternoon sun. Apart from them, the village was deserted—everyone else was out on patrol.

“Oh, damn,” Amelia’s mother said. “I forgot about dinner. Will you get the fire started?”

Amelia nodded, and pressed her knuckles into the floor, lifting her torso off the ground and onto the small wooden cart that lay on the floor beside her. She pushed on the floor with her hands and wheeled herself toward the fire pit, where she began arranging kindling.

Amelia’s father had made the cart for moving the large sacks of food that went through the co-op. He had died in a crash a week later, on patrol in the forest. Amelia, then a baby on his back, had survived, but her legs had been crushed under his falling bike. She didn’t remember her father, and her mother barely mentioned him. Now she used the cart to get around the co-op, but it was too slow and rickety for the city streets, so she stayed inside most days.

Amelia sorted rations while her mother started dinner. Twelve cups of rice for the Smiths, ten for the Sakuras, nine for the Hendersons. “Oh, give the Hendersons an extra one,” her mom said, hanging a pot of lentils over the flames. “Marie’s eating for two now, you know.” She sat down to help  Amelia. “Speaking of the Hendersons, what’s Sam up to? I haven’t seen her in a while.”

“I think she’s busy with the bikes,” Amelia said.

Sam used to visit the co-op almost every day. She and Amelia would help with cooking, or sew squirrel pelts together for coats, or read the salvaged books in the library. But since Sam had started apprenticing at the machine shop a month ago, she had come by only once, to fetch the last month’s rations. “I’m learning a lot,” she had told Amelia, smiling through her thicket of freckles. “Paschal says I can start building bikes on my own soon. How’re you?” But Amelia had had no exciting news to share in return.

Sam was older, almost sixteen, with a bike of her own that won every race between the village kids. The other village children were not cruel, but their eyes always strayed to Amelia’s stumps at some point during every conversation. In the nearly two years that they had been friends, Sam had always looked her in the eye. But there wasn’t a lot to do at the co-op, and it wasn’t as though they could go cycling together. Amelia couldn’t really blame her.

“Well, I guess that’s it,” her mom said, standing up and dusting off her hands. The month’s grain rations lay in neat piles on the floor. “Why don’t you find something to do while I finish getting dinner ready?”

Amelia wheeled herself to the bookshelf that comprised the co-op library. She had read everything at least twice, but she pulled a yellow magazine off the bottom shelf and wheeled her cart to the window with it. She had looked at this magazine with Sam before. The gatherers had found it in a flooded house, so it was wrinkled and blurry, but most of the pictures were still visible. Some she recognized—birds, frogs, moss, trees. Some were odd, like the people in grass skirts or the huge, snowy landscapes. Some looked oddly familiar, like the cityscape on page ten. It reminded her of the village, but its buildings were taller, and there were lights in every window, no craters or trees growing through the middle of the streets.

She turned the slick, wrinkled pages to Sam’s favorite picture. It was a long line of cars on the streets of the same city. Sam had claimed that cars used to be even faster than bikes, but Amelia didn’t believe her. She had only seen one car in real life, near the outskirts of town. The gatherers had dragged it out of the river, but it was so rusted that the metal was unusable. It sat on the edge of town and sometimes the smaller children played on its decaying frame.

The sun began to set. On the horizon, Amelia saw a few tiny shapes moving toward the village, the first cyclers returning from patrol. Maybe Sam was with them. Maybe she would come by to retrieve her family’s ration again.

As if in answer to her thought, a loud knock sounded at the door, and Amelia jumped. Her mom opened it. “Sadie! Did everyone make it back all right?”

“I think so,” Sadie replied. Amelia tried to turn back to the magazine. Sam would be at the machine shop, probably all night.

“We bagged a moose,” Sadie continued. “The others are quartering it now.”

“A moose? Amelia, did you hear that?”

A moose meant weeks of meat, fat for soap and candles and cooking, and bones for needles and tools. The hunters hadn’t found anything that big in months. “Isn’t that great?” her mom said.

“Yeah,” Amelia replied, forcing another smile.

The sun set, and more villagers flocked into the co-op to retrieve their rations. Amelia stared out the window, listening as her mother served the soup. She looked up every so often to scan the faces in the room, but Sam was not among them. The sky darkened, and the guests began to trickle away. As the stars came out, she lowered herself back onto her cart and wheeled herself to her cot. She fell asleep while her mother and the last few visitors chatted by the fire.

#

“Amelia.”

Amelia opened her eyes and shut them again.

“Wake up,” someone whispered.

She rolled over. The full moon loomed in the window, and Sam’s freckled face loomed over her own.

“What’s happening?” Amelia said.

Sam clamped her hand over Amelia’s mouth. “Shh!” They both looked across the room at Amelia’s mother, but she didn’t move from her cot, and her breathing stayed slow and steady.

“I have to show you something,” Sam whispered. She was grinning.

“At night?”

“Well, I was going to wait ‘til tomorrow, but it’s basically your birthday now anyway.” She stood up. “Come on. I’ll get your cart.”

Amelia put on her jacket, and the two girls crept out of the co-op, Sam on tiptoe, Amelia scooting softly across the floor.

Outside, the only sounds were Sam’s bike wheels and the chirping crickets. Sam pedaled slowly, Amelia’s cart in her bike’s basket, and Amelia on the handlebars. They stopped at the massive door of the machine shop. Sam lifted Amelia from the handlebars and set her down on her cart. Then she pulled a key from her jacket, turned it in the lock at the bottom of the door, and pulled the handle up. The door shuddered and creaked as it slid into the roof.

“Sorry about the mess,” Sam said. Amelia wheeled herself across the the threshold and was about to say something about it not being a problem, but then she found herself unable to say anything at all.

She had seen the machine shop before, but she had never been inside. The moonlight glinted through the open door off more bikes than she had ever seen in one place. There were bikes dredged from the river and bikes retrieved from abandoned houses. Shiny bikes and rusty bikes, with two wheels or three wheels or no wheels at all, leaned against the walls in every state of disrepair. Wheels and tires were stacked almost to the high ceiling, pedals hung from racks on the wall, and bolts and screws were scattered all over the floor.

Sam wove her way through the maze of machinery, clearing a path for Amelia’s cart. Amelia followed her, and they approached a lumpy, cloth-draped silhouette near the back wall. Sam lifted one corner of the cloth and handed it to Amelia, who stared at it.

“Pull it!” Sam told her.

Amelia yanked at the cloth, which snagged on whatever was under it. Sam hurried to free it. Amelia pulled again, and the cloth billowed to the floor in a cloud of dust.

“Happy birthday!” Sam said. Amelia squinted at what she had uncovered. It had three wheels, and a silver frame prickling with bolts, and a basket, and a low seat that looked like it had been hacked from an old chair, and...

“See? It’s got hand pedals!” Sam squeaked.

Amelia stared at her. “You...you made this?”

“Uh-huh! Took me almost a month, but it’s done.” Amelia wheeled herself closer to the bike as her friend continued. “I already tested it. It totally works. It might be a little slow, but I can tweak it later.”

Amelia found her voice. “Sam...thank you.”

Sam looked down at her friend, her grin impossibly wide. “Wanna try it out?”

“Now?”

“Why not? There’s enough light from the moon.”

Amelia lifted herself onto the seat, and Sam showed her how to use the hand pedals. Then she grabbed her own bike from where it leaned against the wall, hopped on, and gestured at the street. “After you,” she said.

Amelia pedaled out the door, wobbling slightly. She had never controlled a bike before. She was slow at first, but her arms were strong, and Sam slowed down for her. Soon they matched each other speed for speed. Talking and laughing under the moon, they pedaled down the streets of the ruined city.

Chapter 9

It’s Just Like Riding a Hovercraft

J. Rex

J. Rex is a grad student in literature who used Doctor Who to justify her Masters Thesis work in medieval literature, because why not?

It is 328 NCE, 300 years after the forced evacuation of terrestrial Earth. A small archaeological expedition of graduate students and faculty reach the planet’s surface and begin their investigation of this pre-human site.

After a few days of getting used to terrestrial surface movement, we journeyed to the new discovery. We agreed to try out not only terrestrial movement, but terrestrial language as well. Our first stop was a “farmhouse” on the outskirts of a small “town.” We removed our leg devices a few yards from the house, and took faltering steps towards it. Dr. Janice strode confidently towards the site, while I followed slowly and shakily behind him. I kept promising myself I’d be able to stride around like the Doctor one day, but it was slow in coming. My body was not as quick to learn as my mind. I knew all the steps from my reading in the camp, but still was not able to perform them without stumbling. At least the other students were having the same difficulty.

As we reached the building, Dr. Janice told us to split up and examine its perimeter. I followed the “bearded” man, a transportation engineering student named Dustin, and went around the left side of this decrepit structure made of some sort of organic matter.

Under a broken “window,” I saw the strangest sight I had ever seen. Dustin looked as shocked as I, but, I soon found out, for very different reasons.

“They are wheels!” he cried. “W-H-E-E-L-S! I never thought I’d see them in person!”

I had heard of wheels in my study of pre-human history, but had never even seen a picture of them.

“I didn’t think wheels had this much metal in the middle...”

“No, no, Marie, that is not the wheels. These two things on the end are wheels. I have no idea what this middle part is, or how this device works, but there are two wheels here...and here.”

“I see. And wheels make this device carry things? Like a walkway?”

“Well, yes, but you need something to move the wheels. Like a motor. But I don’t see a motor. How do these wheels move?”

Dr. Janice came up, and saw our confusion, and then what we were looking at. “Holy Cow,” he swore, “It’s a bicycle! And a full one! You guys have made the discovery of this trip. Let’s get it back to the truck and get back to camp.”

A “truck” is of course the hover vehicle we use to bring the full group around when going long distances. Dr. Janice grabbed the “bicycle” and put it over his shoulder and strode off quickly.

The rest of the group shambled over, the head archaeology Professor and another student following last of all. Everyone gathered around the bicycle. The Professor and Janice proclaimed we should spend as much of our time as it took figuring out how this device works.

A bicycle, as the Professor described on the way back, was some form of primitive transportation that did not require fossil fuels. It transported one person, sometimes two, around. No more information survived, but recently several motorcycles had been discovered. They were similar in design, but with motors. The mystery of how a cycle without a motor could run had an almost cult-like following among engineers.

If we could figure out how it worked, we would make history.

That night, I awoke repeatedly from dreams about the bicycle. My subconscious mind could not let it rest. I snuck out of the sleeping tent and over to the main research tent as fast as my shambling legs could carry me. The light was on in the research tent as I approached. Dr. Janice addressed me without turning to see who it was. “I knew you wouldn’t be able to sleep, either. Tell me how you think it works.”

I told him about my dream, and he stared at me quizzically. “You sit with it between your legs and move them similar to walking?”

I nodded vigorously, if timidly. He looked at me for a long time, then said, “Well, you might as well try it.”

The Professor had forbade us from touching the bicycle. The Doctor’s disregard for his boss’ authority surprised and delighted me. We moved the bicycle to the center of the tent, and he helped he get on. As he held the handlebars, I pushed down on the right pedal. The bicycle moved forward! I pushed down on the left, which now was higher than the right, and moved forward again! Suddenly, a voice sounded from a dark corner.

“I should fire you both. You’ve disobeyed my explicit orders.”

The Professor stepped forward, and we could see her smiling. “But you have just made history, so I suppose I must congratulate you.”

Chapter 10

The Bicycle Maker

Matthew Lambert

Matthew Lambert is an author, teacher, and biker. He loves stories in all their forms, and particularly enjoys writing flash fiction. He can be reached at isanyonereadingthis@gmail.com

“Now that the humans are gone,” thought the Bicycle Maker, “who will ride my bicycles?” For lovely bicycles they were, big and small, bright and shiny as the day they were made, perfectly painted to make little children clap their hands when they saw them, and balanced just right so the adults would smile just so as their little ones pedaled furiously around the shop. And when the sunlight streamed through the large shop window, glistening off of the spokes of the antique Penny-Farthing, and from there onto the rims of the elegant spoke-less single speeds, the Bicycle Maker could feel in its tick tock heart that they longed to be ridden.

So the Bicycle Maker began working on self-turning wheels, and put them on all its beloved bicycles. For a few days the silent city was graced with a splash of colour and furtive exploration, ending when the tired wheels turned back towards the shop to be recharged. And although the wheels were quite pleased with themselves for serving in their turn—such simple creatures, wheels—the Bicycle Maker could sense among its creations a feeling of disquiet. They are meant for more than mere going, the Bicycle Maker thought...they want to be ridden. It mused.

After much thought, the Bicycle Maker realized the brilliant, uncouth solution. It would have to make something to ride the bicycles. A barbaric thing indeed, for a Bicycle Maker to build a biped—inefficient, inelegant creatures that one could hardly consider complete without a bicycle under their feet. But, it supposed, efficiency must take a back seat to happiness, in these matters of the heart.

So the Bicycle Maker diagrammed, tinkered, prototyped, and constructed; soon the bike shop was full of feet, articulated hands bristling with multi-tools, unblinking camera eyes, electric motors, batteries, gimbals and gyroscopes. After overcoming its initial qualms, the Bicycle Maker found the project invigorating, for it required the use of long dormant circuits and nigh forgotten mechanics. And all the while its children waited patiently, whispering stories of bumpy roads, flat tires, rain puddles, and loving riders.

Soon the Bicycle Maker was admiring its newest creation. Two legs, two arms, one eye, no wheels—although every screw had been tightened, every joint oiled, and every gyroscope spun, the biped looked incomplete, standing there. The Bicycle Maker reached out and gingerly flicked a switch. A ripple of excitement ran through the bicycle shop. Some of the smaller bicycles could not contain their glee and fell over with a happy clatter.

Slowly the rider lifted its head. Its camera eye gazed about the shop, taking in the tricycles, the fixed gears, the hubless cruisers, the mountain bikes, a proud recumbent, a lightweight cargo hauler, a pearlescent touring bike. At last it focused on the venerable Penny-Farthing. It slowly reached for the large bicycle, and then, realizing the distance betwixt them, walked towards it. With as good an approximation as any machine can make of reverent adoration, its hands ran across the frame, and then the long, elegant spokes of the old high wheel. The rider carefully lifted the eldest bicycle from its stand, and rolled it towards the shop door. The bicycles were, of course, delighted: the Penny-Farthing had regaled them with many stories from the ancient past, and it had been ever so long since it had been ridden. It seemed only fair. The Bicycle Maker, however, watched the pair leave with trepidation. The Penny-Farthing was a lovely but difficult machine, and the rider had no practice. Would the gyroscopes prove true? Was its programming quite sound? The jangling of the shop bell did little to set its mind at ease.

The rider rolled the high wheel out into the street, reached up to grip the handlebars, planted one foot on the small step near the diminutive wheel, and pushed off with the opposite foot. Once, wobble, twice, steady, thrice, and with a skip jump, up the robot went into the seat, far above the ground. Its legs worked in tandem to turn the large wheel. The robot’s internal gyroscopes whirred as it shifted its weight to the side, turning gracefully onto a small, tree-lined street, out of sight of the bicycle shop. Down the road the merry pair rolled, gaining speed as the rider’s legs pumped faster, feet tracing out a small circle, dwarfed by the large wheel between them. They eased through another turn, and though the rider tried to be mindful of its duty, the Penny-Farthing wistfully implored upon it, and they swooped towards a lovely greenway, full of sprawling trees, vividly colored flowers, and the occasional fountain. A desire for adventure and travel grew, reverberating between rider and bicycle, a yearning for moonlit roads, sun-warmed sand, and the crashing of the surf.

After an hour the Bicycle Maker began to despair. Its foolhardy creation had surely bitten off more than it could chew, and was now lost, and the antique high wheeler with it. Loss and disappointment mingled mechanically in its heart. It sent some tricycles out on a scouting expedition. No sign. Hours passed. Days. Weeks. The Bicycle Maker mourned, its tick tock heart wound round and round with sorrow. It ceased its ministrations. The shop fell into dusty disrepair. The bicycles cursed the good fortune of the Penny-Farthing one day, and mourned its now-certain demise the next. A few began to rust. It had happened again. They were riderless, abandoned.

Then one bright sunny morning, round the corner they came, both cycle and rider no worse for their journey. The rider now wore a straw sun-hat and a heavy laden backpack. A thrill of excitement ran through the shop, and several bicycles quivered so ecstatically that their bells began to sound. Bicycle and rider leaned together into a graceful loop and continued towards the door. The joy of the bicycles built to a fervor, and they began to pour out of the shop to greet their old friend. The prodigal robot plucked the straw hat from its head and waved it about. Horns squealed, bells clanged. The robot squeezed the brake enthuastically. But it forgot the weight of its backpack. The Penny-Farthing pitched forward about its central axle. Momentum carried its rider inexorably over the handlebars head first, but with its feet it pushed the high wheel towards a nearby hedge. The Penny-Farthing’s wheel wobbled in dismay as it fell into the soft foliage. The robotic rider tumbled through the air, arms flailing. Its bulging backpack came loose, and out flew myriad seashells, bursting into sand on the pavement. A thousand crashes, then, silence. The Bicycle Maker’s heart skipped a tock. A tricycle screeched. The straw hat returned to the earth. And having completed its post crash self-diagnostic, the rider sparked, sat up and raised an Allen wrench before wobbling gently over.

The tricycles carried the robot and the Penny-Farthing carefully back into the shop. The jangle of the shop bell was met with silence, broken by a voice unheard since the last customer walked out the door: “Safe? Safe? Are my children safe?!” the Bicycle Maker cried. Its appendages moved towards the robot and the beloved high wheel, bristling with tools, patches, and diagnostics. The Penny-Farthing was dirty, and in need of some oil, but otherwise unharmed. The robot had suffered a dent in its head, and some its smaller tools had snapped off. The Bicycle Maker cradled its two-legged child with a low, electronic moan. The bicycles crowded around, the Penny-Farthing leaning forward to peer over the tops of the other bikes.

“Lost, my child is lost!” But at the sound of The Bicycle Maker’s voice, the robot’s camera eye whirred and slowly focused. “SAFE!” boomed the Bicycle Maker, puffing dust from decrepit speakers, “MY CHILD IS SAFE!” The bicycles clamored, ringing bells, honking horns, and clicking dérailleurs. The Penny-Farthing relaxed down onto its back wheel.

“I must make you a helmet,” the Bicycle Maker said to its creation, “and you will both tell me of your adventure. And when you are done, we shall begin building your brothers and sisters.”

Chapter 11

Tabula Rasa

Gretchin Lair

Gretchin Lair is an unrequited astronomer, pretend patient, gentle adventurer, recovering calligrapher and unfinished poet. She can’t wait to explore space by bike. Contact her at gretchin@scarletstarstudios.com

After the flight, Celeste rebooted her bike and felt something she had never felt from it before: Pain.

She recoiled and automatically adjusted her biofeedback module to its lowest setting, but the whimpering was unnerving. After a few moments, she silenced it.

She rummaged in her bike bag and there it was: A tag from the Spaceport Safety & Security Alliance. They found nothing suspect, it read, but they could not be held liable for damages.

She winced and examined the bike more closely. Her stomach sank. There was a large scrape on the head tube, one of the fenders was cracked, the shifting mechanism was crushed, and one of the stabilizers was slightly bent.

The KE chip must have been damaged, too. She tried to reconnect to the bike to access some of the images and routes from the trip but no matter what she did the bike only cried harder. Waves of its unhappiness rippled through her. She tried to think calming and comforting thoughts at it, but finally she had to shut it down completely. The unexpected bikelessness made her feel uneasy and lonely as she finished unpacking.

The next day she took the bike to Kinetic Specialties, a bioshop servicing bikes, personal scooters and motorcycles. The guy at the counter was surprisingly unsympathetic when she tried to explain what had happened. He kept his eyes on the monitor as he spoke.

“Yeah, that happens sometimes. We’ll wipe it and fix it so you can sell it as an NKE and buy a new biobike.”

“What? No! I don’t want to wipe it, I just want to fix it.”

“Can’t do that. It’s a Tabula Rasa. They’re pretty cheap bikes: once the KE chip goes on those they’re no good. You have to replace both your chips.” He paused meaningfully. “Higher-end biobikes have better components.”

Celeste bit her tongue. “Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Can we just replace the chips, then?”

The counterperson sighed, eyes still on the screen. “We can do that, but it’s a lot of hassle. It would probably be cheaper and easier to buy a new biobike. Or use this one as an NKE.”

“I don’t want a new bike. This one has all my stuff on it.”

“Oh, yeah, new chips will totally wipe all that out. You’ll be dealing with a blank slate again.”

Celeste froze. The idea of losing years of kinetic empathy with this bike was devastating. Having to start all over again with a new bike? This bike had years of logs in it; it knew her routes and gravity modifications on a dozen different planets. This bike had been with her on the endless river trails of Ott Ama and the spacious fields of Ebanon, and without its memories she could only faintly recall the full beauty of those places. Without her bike’s gentle and persistent encouragement she never could have made it up the hill they conquered together in Morregan City. Recalibrating the collision detection system was going to be especially painful.

She chose her words carefully, struggling to keep her voice even. “I really want to try to salvage it if I can. Is there anything you can do?”

After consulting with the other mechanics he finally agreed to give her a referral to a kinetic therapist. “It’s probably not going to work, though. You’re wasting your time.” His tone made her cheeks burn as she rolled the bike out of the shop.

It took her a few days to call the therapist. In the meantime, she tried using the bike as an NKE, but what had once been almost effortless felt awkward and just... broken. She kept the bike in the hall and tried not to look at it.

The KT receptionist was pleasant but also not terribly sympathetic, so it was a relief to meet Dr. Elles. She was older and had implants that glowed in colored patterns at her temples. She was obviously offworld. Her enthusiasm and energy was contagious, and Celeste allowed herself to be hopeful.

“I’m so sorry, Celeste,” Dr. Elles began after they had hooked the bike to a diagnostic machine. Her eyes moved back and forth as she reviewed the data streaming to her internal interface. “Damage like this that breaks the KE connection is terribly hard on riders.”

She moved around the bike, connecting wires, tapping the frame and making adjustments. “The good news is if it’s going to work, it will work pretty quickly, within 6 to 8 visits. But to be honest, KT doesn’t always work. Or it works in unpredictable ways. Sometimes we can recover the data, but we’ll spend months retraining the kinetics or the empathic tangle. And sometimes reconnecting to a damaged bike can damage the rider.”

“What?” Celeste asked, surprised.

Dr. Elles looked up. “Well, you know it’s pretty complicated. We’re messing with several brain functions: Motor skills, haptic perception, equilibrium, reflexes, the emotional processing center in the limbic system... Most of the time it just works. But there are lots of ways it can go wrong and we can’t predict them all.

“For instance, in humans, conscious proprioception is communicated by the medial lemniscal pathway to the cerebrum. But unconscious proprioception is communicated primarily by the spinocerebellar tract. If something like that gets mixed up, it sure can make things confusing!”

She chuckled, but stopped when she saw Celeste’s expression. “But don’t worry. That hardly ever happens.”

Celeste was not comforted. Her head was swimming and she felt cold.

Dr. Elles continued, “We’ll run a lot of the kinetic compatibility tests in parallel to limit your risk. Tabula Rasa bikes have a little bootstrap program that does it for you automatically when you first set up your bike and you hardly even notice it. We’ll run some simulations and peak wave matching tests before we attempt a synaptic handshake. If we see anything significant we’ll let you know, okay?”

Celeste left her bike with Dr. Elles with a sense of foreboding. She read stories on the galactic net about KE damage and by the end of the week decided the risk was probably not worth the reward. She began to look at new biobikes online: the new models were even lighter than her old one, and some now offered stealth mode and peloton communication options.

But when she went to pick up her bike from Dr. Elles, she felt a flicker: The bike was happy to see her! Out of habit, she automatically tried reconnecting and was immediately overwhelmed by a swirl of impressions, emotions, distances, physical sensations, close calls, sounds and everything all at once layered in motion and relative weights—swirling oiseau overhead, wild and wooly animals lifting their heads as they passed, underwater labyrinths and Dr. Elles was shouting and running and—

It stopped abruptly and Celeste staggered forward. Her whole body felt like it was was still buzzing.

“Are you okay? I must have left something on. Did you try to reconnect? Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Celeste said, slowly sitting.

Dr. Elles grabbed a pen light and shone it in Celeste’s eyes one at a time. “Can you tell me your name? What’s the date today? What planet are you on?”

Celeste dutifully answered the questions and submitted to a neurological exam. When Dr. Elles was satisfied there was no immediate damage, she clicked her pen light off and said, “Well, that was lucky. I was going to show you the results of some tests we had run. I didn’t expect you to connect.”

“My bike was happy to see me,” Celeste said, weakly.

“No—we didn’t do any empathic calibration. With KE bikes it’s pretty easy to confuse what you’re feeling with what the bike is ‘feeling,’” Dr. Elles said, using her fingers to create air quotes. “Kinetic empathy is still pretty limited. I know some riders feel sentimental about their bikes, but KE bikes are only programmed for very basic empathic entanglement. They can respond to your emotions but they can’t have independent emotions of their own. I know it’s confusing. At least Tabula Rasa doesn’t include a fully anthropomorphic module like some biobikes do: it’s always hard to work with people when they want me to restore their “winged steed” or whatnot.” Dr. Elles rolled her eyes a little and laughed, but Celeste was silent, remembering journeys with her bike that had felt like flight. “Why did you try to reconnect, anyway?”

“I told you. The bike was happy to see me.”

“Wait: before you connected?”

“Yes.”

Dr. Elles frowned. “That might indicate sandbox issues. That’s bad.” She paused. “I’m sorry, but you can’t continue to use this bike. Sell it as an NKE and get a new one. And get yourself a thorough self-diagnostic before your next chip implant, too.”

Celeste felt a pulse of fear from the bike. She looked up to see if Dr. Elles had noticed, but her expression didn’t change.

“I’m going to put it in safe mode so you can take it home and salvage the data for storage if you want. Dump the data, erase it, and sell it. But for heaven’s sake, don’t reboot it again.” She smiled and shook Celeste’s hand. “Good luck! Cassie will take care of your bill at the front desk.”

That night Celeste stared at the options on the optical projection panel:

[Safe mode] [Erase] [Reboot] [Shut down]

Her eyes hovered over “Safe mode” for several minutes. Then she held her breath, slid her eyes to the right, closed them and hoped for the best.

As the bike rebooted, Celeste was immediately flooded with relief. She didn’t care if she was feeling it or if the bike was feeling it: She grabbed her bike and hugged it to her, laughing and crying. It reminded her of how they felt when they had almost skidded over a cloud cliff in Todras, where one more breath or shift would have sent them tumbling miles below. There was a moment of stupendous silence, a nothing full of everything, before the bike had somehow managed to flip around and catch the edge, spinning its tires until it finally gained traction and slid them safely onto the red cirrostratus shelf. Celeste had scraped her leg badly on the ice crystals but she had hardly noticed because they had been so giddy and relieved to be alive.

This time, mixed with the relief was something else. She had a hard time naming it: A mixture of triumph, loss and reassurance she had never felt from her bike before. When she finally realized what it was, she hugged the bike tighter. “You’re welcome! You’re welcome,” she murmured to her grateful bike.

Bikes to New Sarjun

Jessie Kwak

Jessie Kwak is a freelance writer who loves nothing more than slipping nerdy references into her clients’ business copy. She’s a recent Portland immigrant, and you can follow her bikey-crafty adventures at Bicitoro.com, and on Twitter (@JKwak). Her story “Bikes to New Sarjun” will be continued in the next volume.

Gretchen Storm remembers her first taste of a bike’s freedom back on Arquelle. She remembers scraped knees and bloody palms, she remembers flying down hills after her cousins, training wheels skidding in the gravel as the older kids vanished in the distance. She remembers her mother washing gravel out of her gouged knees, murmuring over the sound of Gretchen’s sobs while trying to differentiate the black of blood from the black of tiny sharp pebbles.

The half-starved colony kids in Gretchen’s classroom will never know that this is the memory she holds so vivid and shining at the forefront of her thoughts when she tells them that they, too, will get bicycles. She’s willing to admit she must have a bit of a sadistic streak, just a touch, but she knows that after the first humbling tumbles and scrapes, these kids will taste freedom, too.

Freedom for the ones walking miles to the schoolhouse, the miles to the well. With bicycles, they can carry more produce to market, and maybe a few more of those empty desks will be filled with smart kids who get pulled out to help with harvest.

Freedom is in the air, all right. High in the atmosphere. Dazzling and bright, freedom is one of the hundreds of glittering points of light that glide across the night skies of New Sarjun. Freedom is trapped, abandoned by a now-dissolved shipping company; nearly two hundred bicycles bound up in an orbiting cargo module drifting untethered and aimless and waiting—forever, maybe—for someone to come claim them.

#

Gretchen is in a bind. Her Bikes to New Sarjun project had struck a chord throughout the Durga System, even back on Arquelle, the capitol planet. Her employer, Hypatia Educational Facilities Corporation, had even offered to match donations; when the PR team ran wild with a retouched photo of her at the head of a classroom full of smudge-faced colony kids—Hypatia Corp: Freedom from debt, free to change the world—the donations had come pouring in.

The Hypatia Corp superintendent on New Sarjun hinted that if things went well (and Gretchen continued to make Hypatia Corp look good) Gretchen might be in a position to renegotiate her contract, slice a few years off her indenture, maybe, or get hired on at one of Hypatia’s schools in the central planets. And that would have been fantastic, truly.

Things were not going well.

When Gretchen found a company willing to ship the bikes from Arquelle for almost a third less than the closest competitor, she’d leapt at the opportunity. The money she’d saved on shipping bought nearly fifty more bikes, nearly fifty more chances at a better life for some colony kid. It would have been stupid to pass it up.

She was flying high as the arrival date neared—until a letter arrived from New Sarjun Customs Enforcement, informing her that her lowest-bidder shipping company had been dissolved for import tax evasion.

We regret to inform you that your shipment will be held on orbit until salvage fees are paid.

On orbit.

Hypatia Corp was not going to like being associated with this.

The local customs agent told her she could pay Customs Enforcement to bring it down—at a rate double her yearly salary. “If that’s too expensive, there are always the independent salvage operations,” he said, handing her a list. “These are ones we’ve cleared for operations. We can’t guarantee their quality, however.”

In a town like this, it seems everyone knows someone who flies salvage ops for cash. “My uncle will do it for cheap,” said Paulo Kulikutan, the shining star among her students. The one who always showed up for class, always had his homework done, always knew the answers. Even, apparently, if the answer were not quite legal.

And so, if Gretchen is honest with herself, Paulo is the innocent reason she’s found herself hurtling god-knows-where in the back of a spinner, bound and hooded and sandwiched between two thugs, nauseated by fish on the breath of the one, by the cologne-drenched reek of last night’s moonshine wafting from the pores of the other.

#

The address Paulo gave for his uncle’s salvage company was in a shady section of the docks, a shabby office Gretchen almost missed, tucked as it was between the misspelled posters of a fried noodle stand and the sizzlingly graphic neon of a porn shop. Beto Kulikutan wore an ikat-print lumosilk shirt open to the navel, smooth skin and a flash of gold medallion visible beneath. He didn’t bother to stand when she came in, just leaned back in his chair, gold-tipped boots on his desk crumpling papers beneath.

“Ain’t the usual,” Beto said after she told him her story.

“You bring down the bikes, you can keep whatever else is up there,” Gretchen said. “That’s the only way I can pay you.” In her mind she saw containers full of medical supplies and school sports equipment and textbooks. She quelled feelings of guilt.

“Ain’t you Paulo’s teacher? This under the table work don’t seem like something a teacher oughta do.”

“My kids need those bikes,” she said. “And I bet you could get quite the haul.” In her mind she imagined other destitute program directors just like herself, staring up at the sky and wondering how to retrieve their Sewing Machines to New Sarjun, their Water Purifiers to New Sarjun.

She shook the thought away. If those imaginary program directors had any sense, they’d be doing just what she was doing right now.

Beto Kulikutan wove his fingers behind his head and gave her a long, hard look. “You pay fuel.”

“Done.”

“And you don’t ask questions bout what we find.”

Gretchen was fine with that. She very desperately did not want to know.

#

They haven’t harnessed her in. Gretchen is thrown around like a rag doll, the spinner’s dizzying lurches cushioned by one meaty shoulder on the right, one bony shoulder on the left. She wonders if Beto Kulikutan is driving, but she was hooded when she was thrown inside. The spinner skids around another corner and she smashes into the skinny thug once more. His response is a needle-sharp elbow to the ribs. Gretchen rights herself just as the spinner banks to the left, and the meaty one’s arm braces across her sternum.

“Who are you working for?” Meathead, the cologne-drenched thug on the right, still has a Arquellian accent.

“The Carama County School District.” Gretchen’s voice comes out muffled through the hood. It’s the fifth, eighth time she’s said it—she’s losing track in her terror. It’s not the right answer, though, because Scrawny backhands her.

“Nah, sweetheart. Who sent you?” She has no idea—absolutely none—what they’re hoping the answer will be. She hears a high-pitched whine at the flick of a switch—it sounds like one of the laser guns you see in vids—and what she imagines to be the gun’s barrel presses against her jaw.

“No one!” Gretchen screams.

The spinner screeches to a halt, and Gretchen slams into the seat in front of her, sliding to the floor in a heap.

#

Light stabs at her eyes as the hood is ripped away. A staticky blur of colors slowly resolves itself into recognizable shapes: a bolted-down metal desk; on top, a coat draped over a globe-like object; Beto Kulikutan in peacock blue beside.

An old man perches on the desk’s edge, and Gretchen recognizes his face from news vids. In the vids there’s always a still shot of him through the window of some luxury spinner, captioned with things like: “Four mutilated bodies found in Dockside. Suspected link to local mob boss Willem Jaantzen.”

Jaantzen sees the fear on her face and smiles.

Gretchen can see tomorrow’s news vid: “Hypatia Corp teacher found mutilated in Dockside.” She’s beyond fucked. She tries to swallow, speak, but her throat is blazing dry with fear.

“The dear needs a drink of water,” Jaantzen says, but no one moves to get her one. He folds his hands on one knee. “So. You’re the ‘teacher.’”

“Hypatia Corp,” Gretchen blurts out. “Carama County School District.”

Jaantzen nods to Meathead, who sets his hands with unsettling gentleness on Gretchen’s shoulders. “You don’t like things easy, do you?”

“Fourth level—I teach, I teach math, and—” Meathead drums his fingers on her collar bones.

“You seem like a smart girl, Ms. Storm. So explain to me why you sent my men to pick up a cargo module full of these.” Jaantzen plucks the coat off the desk.

Gretchen’s eyes go wide.

A sealed sphere sits there, it’s just about the size of an astronaut’s helmet and inside there’s a creature that could be a human fetus—if humans had fish tails and leathery wings tipped with razor-sharp claws. It’s floating in a liquid that glows a faintly pulsing pink. Dead, Gretchen thinks, but when she leans to take a closer look it opens its eyes and stares right at her.

Gretchen shrieks.

Jaantzen puts his face close to the creature’s and turns to look at Gretchen, too. Two pairs of equally alien eyes regard her. “Explain clearly, now,” Jaantzen says. “I never did get along well in class.”

“I just wanted the bikes. I don’t know about any other cargo.”

“No?”

Meathead begins to squeeze, a massage gone bad. Keep it together, Gretchen, but what can she possibly tell them, what do they—

“And what,” Jaantzen says, “the fuck is this thing?”

Her right collar bone screams with fire in the spot where she broke it in a bike crash—god damn those miserable things.

“Is this ‘teacher’ a customs agent in disguise?” Jaantzen leans forward until she can smell the mint on his breath. The creature tilts its head at her through the curve of its bowl.

“No!” Meathead squeezes until tears come to her eyes. “I mean I don’t—I don’t work for them. But they told me about you!”

Jaantzen glances at Meathead and the pressure on her collar bones lessens. Slightly. “About us?”

Gretchen takes a pair of ragged breaths. “They gave me a list, salvage operations that would get the bikes.” The slick bastard shifts to sit on his desk, flipping the coat back over the captured creature. The screaming pain in her collar bone slackens. Okay. “When I found out about the bikes being held on orbit, I went to Customs. I couldn’t afford what they wanted as a salvage fee, we’re a non-profit, we’re all on donations. It’s for the kids.” Jaantzen looks dangerously bored. “They gave me a list of salvage ops that might do it.”

“And Customs told you to entice them with salvage from the other cargo modules?”

“I thought that would convince you.”

“We were on the list?”

Meathead squeezes. “Yes!” Gretchen screams.

“And you chose us why?”

Because of Paulo, but there’s no way she’ll say that. Behind Jaantzen, she sees Beto watching her. His face is carefully uninterested, but one gold-tipped boot is tapping. Nervous, you bastard?

“I called some others, no one else would do it.” That was true enough, and Jaantzen seems appeased for the moment. With her, at least.

“This was careless of you, Mr. Kulikutan,” Jaantzen says, and Beto’s dark face loses a shade.

“Aw, boss—”

“Did you let the pretty lady get your guard down?”

“You have to believe me,” Gretchen says. Yes, let the pretty lady get your guard down. “I can give you the list.”

“You will.” Jaantzen gives her a long, evaluating look. Meathead’s hands are still on her shoulders, but all pressure is gone. “You are quite far in over your head, Ms. Storm. And you’ll have farther to go, I think.”

A surge of hope. Meathead pats her on the shoulder. Hope and dread, really, churning there in the pit of her stomach. She’ll throw up, she knows it, if Scrawny gets anywhere close to her with his fish sandwich breath. “What do you want from me?”

“Someone in Customs Enforcement has just tried to set us up. You, my dear, are going to find out who.” Jaantzen stands, buttons his suit jacket. “We’ll be calling.”

The hood smothers her once more.

#

The handcuffs stay off this time, at least, though Beto’s driving—it was Beto in the pilot seat earlier—is as ruthless as before. Gretchen tightens her harness.

Beto skids to a stop in front of her house, and Meathead lets her out. “Walk ya to the door,” says Beto, holding out an elbow she doesn’t take. He doesn’t miss a stride. “So these bicycles, you just bring em in kids sizes, or what?”

Gretchen glances over her shoulder at him. “You want to ride one?”

“Yeah, you know. I had one back in New Manila. Gave me 14 stitches.” He grins, shoving up his sleeve up to the elbow so she can see the scar snaking along his forearm. “Dangerous little shits. Fun, though. Ain’t freedom if there ain’t a bit of danger.”

“I suppose.” They’re at her doorway now, and he leans casually in as she fumbles for her keys. He’s angled so he blocks her view of the spinner. His expression shifts, suddenly serious. “You done me good leaving Paulo out of things. Thank you.”

“Oh. I—”

“You seen that alien or whatever it is. Something’s going on goes deeper than a customs sting.” His voice is soft, his gaze searching her face. “You got a pen?” Then the laughter is back in his expression, and he takes both the pen and the hand it’s in with a flourish. He jots a string of numbers on her palm, along with the words u need me.

“Give me a call sometime, you get lonely. It can get lonely, ain’t it, you in over your head with no one to talk to.”

He flashes her a wink and turns to thump his chest to the other thugs as he walks back. Gretchen can hear Scrawny hooting as she closes her door: “Man, she outta your league, man.”

She sinks down with her back against the door. Her collar bone aches, lip stings and tastes of blood, but it’s the palm of her hand that has her attention. It tingles from the press of Beto’s fingers, like they’re—what? A spark of hope? Or a deeper, spiraling trap? “U need me.” Can she trust him? She thinks not.

But she’s survived this adventure thus far and she thinks, just maybe, she can trust herself to see it through.

The ink is smudging already, seeping out into the lines in her palm. She copies the number down before it’s smeared beyond deciphering.

Maybe trust is the new price of freedom, she thinks.

Trust that as you fly with reckless abandon down those hills your brakes won’t fail, your frame won’t crack, or at least someone will be there to slap some stitches on when you lay yourself down in the gravel.

#

TO BE CONTINUED...

Credits

Butt Dial

Elly Blue

Elly Blue lives, writes, rides bikes, and schemes about the future in Portland, Oregon. Sass her on Twitter at @ellyblue. Please submit your original feminist bicycle science fiction stories for the next issue to her directly at elly@takingthelane.com

Dodging traffic around the Capitol took skill and laser-like focus, so it wasn’t until she hopped off the saddle, pulled her comm clip out of her back pocket, and stuck it to her wrist implant to check the time that Vi noticed the announcement: Call ended.

Shit.

She’d been so careful since the last time, when her comm had accidentally connected with that little badly-placed magnet that powered her brand new bike’s computer and called Van at the Champion colony on Mars. There’d been no answer, of course, but the charge for that three minute long voice message of rumbling jets and butt static had been nearly $8,000. The bill had come just after she’d dropped three months of her new paycheck on the new bike and the new server bank, and she’d almost lost the lease on her new, shiny apartment.

Eighteen months later, after she was well on her way to forgetting that such a small sum would ever have pushed her to the edge, an old fashioned letter arrived by slow boat (Van was always such a cheapskate) telling her that it was definitely over, had been over since before it ever ended, even if she didn’t want to hear it, and it was no use trying to start things up again or ask for help because it was so beyond over.

The letter included, on a separate sheet of decaying onionskin newsprint, the kind that had been recycled so many times it was really only good for shopping lists, a short summary of Vi’s positive qualities (strong class consciousness; great head for code) and a much longer list of her negative ones (unreliable, cowardly, hair too frizzy, a noisy eater, and so on). Vi had rolled her eyes and tossed the letter in the recycler, but kept the list as a remedy against nostalgia. She’d also deleted all trace of Van from her comm and started keeping it in her left pocket, away from that stupid magnet.

But today the comm had ended up on the right again. She’d put it there to make way for the hard drive she’d hastily stuffed in her left pocket, to protect it from that same magnet, as she’d dashed out of the office to get on her bike and come to this meeting.

Oh well. No use dwelling on old times. And anyway, it was time to make her big security pitch to the Presitariat. The data in that hard drive was worth far, far more than even the cost of a three minute voicemail to Mars.

She docked her bike at one of the charge stations at the Capitol Building. Her high-end bike looked incongruous there, hovering six inches off the trash-littered concrete, its polished hub plugged into the cracked and faded blue plastic dock. She’d bought the best one she could afford on her new salary, not to be flashy but to make sure it lasted a long time. She still couldn’t quite believe her new life.

As she approached the entrance checkpoint she was preoccupied with tucking her com back into her right pocket—move it after the meeting, she reminded herself firmly—pulling off her helmet and shaking out her hair, breathing deep and mentally running through the three point speech she’d practiced all morning (“now we can put our fears to rest,” and so on). Some sort of ruckus was happening at the gate, she noticed peripherally. As she approached, she saw a flashing light and uniformed guards running. One of them ran up to her, looking concerned. “We’re on lock down, ma’am, you’ll have to go.” She glanced back at her bike and he followed her gaze. “That’s yours? You’re in the system then, you’ll have to stay.”

He took her arm and ushered her through security, scanning her thoroughly. “What’s this?” he asked when he got to the hard drive.

“A new toy for the Presitariat,” she told him and he gave her an exasperated look. “Security department,” she added.

“Might be too late for that. Who’s your contact here?”

“Olan at the central council office.”

“Okay, we’ll go right there, they may want you.”

He took her to a large foyer, which was decked out in faded floorpaper and stained wallboards, and left her there, alone. She put her bag on a table and stood up straight, rolled her shoulders and pushed out her arms, her blood still singing from the ride over. The chairs all looked like their springs had popped, so she stayed standing, counting the doors (three), sculptures (twelve), and windows (zero).

It could be a while, she thought. She took the hard drive out of her pocket, put it on the scratched table next to her bag, and moved her comm from her right pocket to her left. She scanned the chairs, looking for clues as to which one might be least uncomfortable. Her mind skipped back a beat and she thought, “might be too late for that.”

Vi felt the sweat cooling on her skin, clammy under her clothes.

Could that be who she had butt dialed?

Oh no.

Surely not.

She jammed her hand into her empty right pocket so hard she broke a nail, then fished the comm out of her left pocket. Her hands shook so much it took her three tries to make a connection with the node on her wrist. By the time the screen came up, she could barely bring herself to look. She knew what she’d see—that 6,033 character combination crafted to be so perfectly random, so perfectly unhackable. She’d saved it in a locked and password-protected text document on her comm, to be shared with the three heads of state with the worried eyes with whom she’d planned to meet that day.

But the link must have been live, and some horrific, unlikely sequence of events had caused her butt to give that doomsday number a call.

The foyer spun around her. She knew exactly what the security alert was—up in orbit, a team of robots was implementing a series of injections into hibernation tanks. Within minutes, the Champions would be awake, thousands of them. Within hours, they’d be on their way back to Earth with their arsenals, their building machines, their unparalleled organizing abilities, and their superhuman strength.

And if the new program worked like it should, they would obey the orders of the person who called them.

That would be Vi.

And Vi was only alive, only Earthside, only free because she’d signed an ironclad contract to the effect that this wouldn’t happen.

Nobody alive on Earth had ever met a Champion. Those desperate, dying C21 humans had created them to terraform their wreck of a planet back into livable condition and to organize, teach, and inspire its bedraggled residents. Once they’d done that successfully, the Champions had wanted to continue ruling and the humans had wanted their planet back. They negotiated an uneasy truce—if things got really bad, humans could call the Champions back, but the Champions would call the shots.

Most people assumed, perhaps rightly, that when they did return it would be to destroy humanity and start fresh. But Vi, who had spent most of her career doing odd jobs for limited cash and trying to hack into the Presitariat, and the last two years of it working for the Presitariat to hack into the Champion satellites, felt she had a more realistic view than most. Sorting back through the old codes, she’d found most of the protocols were beyond self-effacing, for all their toughness to crack. The weapons were all oriented outward—away from Earth, not, as she’d been taught in school, towards it. Learning that had given her pause. But she’d still fulfilled her contract, weaseling her way in to the satellites and producing the scripts that fulfilled humanity’s greatest fears, but that would put the Champions’ power to save or destroy squarely on the side of the team that needed them most—her employers, of course.

But if she’d done her job well, and she had, the Champions would be on her side, now.

What was her side, though? And when was the last time she’d really known that? It was before she’d signed the Presitariat’s contract, before she’d turned herself in, before she’d fled to the rebels and run away again. Before Van.

One of the doors opened, the middle one by the spiny blue sculpture. Olan walked in fast, alone, squinting with stress, the second-in-command rank insignia on his epaulettes around his ears. He wasted no time. “Viola, who did this?”

She shook her head and held her comm out for him to look. “What’s this?” He didn’t get it for a moment, and then he got it, and his mouth opened and closed and his face passed from astonishment to panic to anger.

“So that’s how it is, then.”

“An accident. I can show you, there’s a magnet...”

“Of course it was.” He didn’t believe her, wasn’t even trying to keep composure. “After all we’ve done for you. This was humanity’s chance to prove itself. You’ve ruined everything, you scheming criminal, you, you, you power hungry woman.”

It was the last word, the tone of it, that made the gears in her mind stop spinning helplessly and click together, engage. She couldn’t feel angry, not with the drugs, but she remembered what it felt like, and the thoughts that used to lead to that sudden flash of heat and action.

She straightened. She glanced down at her comm—it was flashing. The Champions were awake and they had sent her a message. A question, she knew, because she had programmed it: Should they come ready to build or to destroy?

Her mind flashed back to her old, squalid apartment, the fancy, new, uncomfortable one, Van’s promises, the rebels’ mistrust, the Presitariat’s lawyers, Van’s list, the hate in Olan’s face.

Humanity had its second chance and botched it, she thought. She could end it all. A clean slate, an empty Earth, everything bright and new again. The image had its appeal.

But she knew, with greater certainty than she’d known anything since she’d walked out on Van for the last time, days ahead of the raid, that she wasn’t going to do it. She couldn’t hate even this man in front of her enough to destroy his world.

“You won’t get away with this,” Olan spat. “Turning us over to your rebel friends? We’re prepared for that, you know. Or are you working for Brasilia? Or is this about your own petty ambitions?”

But she could see the road unfolding ahead of her, clear and open, free of traffic for once. Human negotiation might be inscrutable to her, but she was already mentally rehearsing the program sequences that would turn the Champions independent again, beholden to nobody, not even to her.

The Presitariat didn’t need to know that, though.

“It was all an accident, Olan.” She put her comm back in her pocket, the right one. “You’d better take me to the council. And get someone to bring me a console. We have a lot of work to do to make things right.”

Bikes in Space Volume Two

Second, expanded edition, September 2014

Originally published in print by © Elly Blue Publishing, May 2014

Edited and designed by Elly Blue

Cover illustration by Caroline Paquette

All work © its creators, 2014

Illustration credit:

Jeanne Hilary (chicken illustration) is founder and Creative Director of Bicycle Utopia, a transmedia project about New York City from a bicycling perspective. bicycleutopianyc.com

Want to read more feminist bicycle science fiction? Find us at bikesinspace.com

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