In or Out

Later that month, Harris Darrow would reflect that it was a turning point in his life, the key to a door he hadn’t realized he’d been looking for, a treatment, if not quite a cure, for the vague malaise that had been following him like a shadow since birth, but at the time he thought it was the end of the world when he got mugged.

His date stood him up at the Gargantua Club, in Lowtown. Not his usual haunt. Not his usual neighbourhood. The vibe of the cracked bricks and littered streets, in the concrete shadow of the freeway above, didn’t mesh with his lower-middle-plus-class suit. But maybe that was a sign of how desperate his dry spell had become. He didn’t catch a lady’s eye but he did grab the attention of a trio of gents, proportioned roughly like front-end loaders, with enough chrome to match.

All in all, it was a very polite affair. He left, they followed, and they asked him for his things. And, he complied. There was no doubt in his mind they could have torn him in half – especially the one with the industrial-grade pneumatic arm. Better to just give up his wallet, phone, AR visor, and blazer. They left him his shoes, and a word of advice to stick to his world.

He’d have taken them up on it, only he was lost. He didn’t have access to any maps, couldn’t call anyone, and PubliTrans, he learned, had a much more restricted schedule in these parts of town. And as a (merely) lower-middle exec, he definitely couldn’t afford a private car. So realizing he was lost, he refused to accept it, and he took a wrong turn.

Walking deeper into the twisted nest of alleys, and ever further from the coils of freeway above, which demarcated the world of the almost-haves – his world, with his mediocre job and comfortable slippers and streaming subscriptions – from this pit of the never-will-haves, brought him down a tight set of crumbling steps and into a cramped avenue. The buildings running along it looked forlorn, and the pavement was cracked so hard it must have buckled at some point. But his hammering heart eased up a bit when he saw the people milling in the street.

There were maybe two dozen of them, roughly lined up, stern faced, and all paying attention to a mustached man in a muscle shirt, a man with metal legs that had the vague malice of military design. Like a platoon with their drill sergeant. Only, this must have been some kind of diversity army, because the “soldiers” looked like they actually came from all walks of life.

There was a pinch-faced old woman clutching a big leather purse and a snot nosed kid in a tattered Triplezilla t-shirt. There was a guy that looked like he carried all his worldly possessions with him under his faded green coat, and an exec-looking guy who wore the latest suit by Hobbard – a suit Harris couldn’t afford if he saved for three years straight.

And then there was a young woman with a cyber hand, an animated cobra tattoo on her neck, and a violently violet faux hawk. She spared a glance at Harris and frowned.

“You in or out?”

He had no idea what possessed him to say, “I’m in,” and next thing he knew he was lining up beside her.

“Okay people!” shouted the drill sergeant man. “You know the drill: kill your internet, turn off your AR, and if you have enhanced prosthetics and are able to do so, put them in low-power or maintenance mode.”

People started flicking their devices off, and the ominous red lights on the sergeant’s legs began pulsing a mellower yellow.

“What is this?” Harris whispered.

The cobra tattoo woman put her synthetic hand into sleep mode and arched an eyebrow at him. “First time?”

“Um…”

“Turn your devices off.”

“I don’t have any. I was mugged.”

For some reason that made her grin. “This is a race, Chuckles.”

“A race? What race?”

She grinned again, and then fell into a crouch when the sergeant called “On your marks!”

Harris’s eyes widened. “What race? What’s going on!?”

“See you at the finish line,” she said. And then at the sergeant’s signal, she bolted. They all did, leaving only Harris and the metal-legged leader.

“Buddy,” said the sergeant. “You want an answer? You gotta move it.” And then he started running too.

Harris sprinted after them. The answer didn’t matter so much as the fact that he was still lost in Lowtown, and if these people weren’t exactly friendly at least they weren’t hostile.

The run wrecked him. Within minutes he felt a burn searing up and down his sides, and pain in his feet and knees, all of which might have been bearable if he wasn’t also gasping, and fighting to keep his lunch from escaping. His diet of NutriBod pills sure sculpted his body to look like he worked out, but it turned out that really was only skin deep.

He could barely follow the rearmost of the racers, but just when he thought he was going to pass out, or that maybe getting mugged again was preferable to continuing, he turned a corner and ran into the group. The sergeant caught him before he could stumble, people clapped him on the back, and cobra-tattoo gave him water.

And to boot, they were at the Parkville-Henderson intersection, which was loaded not just with shops, but also had regular PubliTrans service. He was saved.

“Who won?” Harris asked between gasps. He flopped onto a concrete bench and relished how the cold stone chilled his heat-spiked skin.

The cobra-tattoo woman smirked. “That’s not how it works.”

“What do you mean? It’s a race, isn’t it?”

She shared a look with the sergeant guy before answering.

“Not all who wander, and all that,” he said. He gave her one significant nod. “Onboard him.”

“It’s not that kind of race,” she said, taking a seat beside him. The other runners parted ways, as though they received some unspoken signal. Some went back to the roughest parts of Lowtown, others went left or right, and – yup, Harris called it – the exec guy had a private hovercar descend from on high to carry him back to heaven.

“I don’t get it.”

“I know.”

Harris scowled. “Very helpful.” She chuckled. “I’m Harris, by the way.”

She took his hand. “Diana.”

“So, Diana. Help me get it.”

“This is the subrace,” she said, taking a sip of water. “You only race against yourself. You just happen to do it in the company of others who are doing the same.”

“Subrace? Sounds like kind of, um… isn’t that offensive?”

“Are you offended?”

Harris blinked. He wasn’t sure. He thought it sounded like subhuman, but he worried he didn’t get it, like maybe it was something clever, like the constant damn aptitude opportunities at the office that all but governed quarterly performance reviews.

“So if you’re not racing to win–”

“–You win on your terms. You can’t lose unless you choose to.”

“Fine, fine, whatever. If you’re not really racing against others, then why do it?”

“No,” she said, with a vigorous shake of her head. “You don’t ask. If someone tells you why they race, that’s fine, but you don’t ask. And nobody asks you either.”

“Oh. Sorry?”

She finished her water and tossed the bottle into the recycling. “Racing is invite only, and Pedro gave the green light, so this is your official invite: are you in?”

“But why? I just kind of bumbled in. And I’m not very good.”

“Bumbling in is pretty much how all of us joined subracing. And as for being crap, well, there’s only one way to improve.”

“Sure,” he said, surprised at how quickly he made his choice. “Yeah, I’m in.” Maybe it was the strange comforting soreness that was already seizing his body, a fresher rush than any of the latest pills. Maybe it was Diana. “How do I find you guys? Same place, or is there a website, or?”

“No,” she said, with another of those vigorous head shakes. “No websites. No online presence at all. Never. It’s word of mouth exclusively.”

She gave him the details of the next run, and then leapt off the bench and merged into the crowd before he could ask her for a coffee or contact details.

The next meet was three days later, and he found himself looking forward to it. Office-time dragged by extra slowly, and after he got replacement devices he tried looking up subracing. No shortage of hits, but indeed none of them in any way related to the Lowtown thing. Then he dug up an old gym membership and did some genuine jogging to shore up his form.

The next race was in the steelworks district of Lowtown. He saw a couple familiar faces and lots of strangers, but no Diana.

“You make it if you make it,” metal-legged Pedro said by way of explanation. “Focus on you.”

He ran. It was a longer race and it wrecked him again, because he had no idea how to pace himself, but there was something liberating about being untethered from his devices, from the world. He took particular joy in shutting down his health tracking app, which seemed best suited to telling him what supplements to buy next.

Weeks went by, races were run. Usually Diana was there and sometimes she wasn’t. And while she was good chatting, she wasn’t into coffee – but running took the sting out of that.

Pedro was a constant. The others, somewhere in between, but strange faces grew familiar. There was never much talking, but if you ran a stretch with someone – conquering private mountains alone, together – there was camaraderie.

It became more real than office life, where the gossip was always about which manager to avoid and which to woo this week. His co-workers spoke of “the race to the top” and the one time Harris mentioned he’d “actually been racing, like by running on the streets,” he might as well have just farted by the water vending machine for the reaction he got.

But he was undeterred. He liked subracing. Never thought he would, but he did. And he was confident others would too, if they just tried it. He saw an opportunity here to do something he never thought he’d be able to do: to help people.

His department had been suffering flagging performance and his boss’s boss wanted to find “the next big viral”, so Harris got the green light for a pilot project.

He installed a supercorneal stealth camera in his right eye, and caught the next race – at the historic Lowtown U riverside campus – on film. At the office, the film guys made an exciting cut of it, the sound guys added a thrilling track, and the story guys came up with an inspiring redemption arc for the enigmatic Pedro. Then the marketing guys sprayed and prayed, and the e-gods listened, because the thing caught fire.

Harris couldn’t wait to tell the others the good news.

The next meet was dead though. Nobody else showed up. Not Pedro, not Diana, not anyone. Even when Harris spent an hour waiting, just to make sure he got the right time. Even when Harris scoured the neighbourhood, just to make sure he got the right place.

His heart spiked. How was he supposed to find out about the next meet? Diana told him it was word of mouth only, and so far that had rung true.

His stomach sank. She’d also told him “No online presence at all. Never.”

That turned out to be painfully true, for he never saw Diana – never saw any of them – again.

Without any new footage, he lost control of the project. It made too big a marketing splash to throw away, so the corporate machine pivoted and turned it into a guerilla ad for an as yet unmade movie about marathons in the post-apocalypse, and about how sports can catalyze a people and build a foundation for civilization to thrive, and then later based on focus groups they added zombies and scrapped the sports thing.

Harris fell into a slump that lasted a solid couple of months. He decided to walk around his block one evening to clear his head, and somewhere along the way he found the endless blaring of tunes in his ear irritating, so he muted them. And the ads that appeared mid-air kept distracting him, so he turned off his AR. And then, his hands remembering old patterns long gone unused, he turned off all his peripherals and went offline. He didn’t really know Pedro, but if he was honest, he liked the redemption arc the writing guys came up with for him. Well, before marketing turned him into a cyborg dictator.

Unshackled from reality, Harris ran.