The light caught the edge of the glove and glistened. Kip covered it with his hand. Fireproof, race-worn, sweat and grease baked into the seams. They smelled terrible. It didn’t matter. He’d never wear them again.
Smoke and steam hissed. Metal crunched. Dirt hung in the air, tangled with oil and burned rubber. Raw. Acrid. Kip thought, briefly, if the engine goes, it’ll be expensive to replace. Then he exhaled, shrugged, almost laughed. It didn’t matter anymore.
The relic — and it was a relic — a 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass with a bent frame, a discarded crate engine, and a transmission that thought it was a manual even though it wasn’t. After tonight it would be left behind, given away for parts. End of an era. Beginning of the next chapter. His, and humanity’s. But tonight, he just wanted it to finish the race.
Still, he weighed the possibilities: warped head, valve failure, a cylinder wall blowing out in a burst of flame. An explosion ending his time in the bullring ten minutes early. “Hang in there, girl,” he said. “Just a few more minutes and you can retire.” Even if retirement was a lie the chassis didn’t care about.
Everything — the road course, the demolition derby stadium, the motorcycle passes over eroded mountain curves — all of it shaped by entropy. Fitting, he thought, for what came next. Not so much for ‘Ole Yeller. The Olds ’68. Yellow. Loud only in the way an old horse groans when asked to start on a cold morning.
Money and time no longer mattered. His next step into the annals of history — his and everyone else’s — would take place millions of miles from Earth. Home. Prospector 1, the greatest gift made possible by AI, had brought the world together to gather the resources needed to repair the damage already done. Endless minerals to clean the atmosphere, the oceans, the land. Fusion solved energy, but created its own ecological and geopolitical fractures. Scared. Damaged. Polluted. In reaching for salvation, humanity nearly tore itself apart.
But right now, none of that mattered more than ‘Ole Yeller surviving tonight’s final joust. Kip grimaced, remembering the bent axle — maybe a bigger concern than the engine. Maybe not. Maybe three legs were enough for this old horse to finish. Stranger things had happened.
The trip to Psyche-16 would take a little over a year. Eight months mining. Almost twice as long returning. Everything could have been automated, but the question was always who controlled the automation. So they chose an international crew from the lunar nations. None perfect. All seasoned. Veterans with bodies that might actually appreciate low gravity. Waking up injured without knowing why — that was aging, Kip reflected.
Automation had once seemed elegant. No life support. No shielding. No question of whether humans could survive the journey. But after the failure of Archangel’s Mirror, crewed was the only viable path. The world couldn’t wait for treasure to return to a dying planet. And no one trusted that the payload couldn’t be weaponized again. A crew of diplomats was the compromise. Or the hope.
Psyche-16’s resources were immeasurable. Enough to collapse economies if handled poorly. Not gold — gold would be worth a nickel. The real bounty was the critical minerals needed for fusion. Clean. Sustainable. The crux of humanity’s attempt to become humane again.
Right now, though, Kip had a different race to finish.
Chaos. Smoke. Family. Friends. Fans. Reaching the finish line — in first place — was all that mattered. His eyes burned; something had gotten in them. The stadium lights felt too bright. There’s only one reason to do this, he reminded himself, in case he didn’t win. The axle ground louder. The car bounced harder with every revolution.
Drivers, fans, organizers — all here for the same reason. It was visceral. Real. The smell of bad food and flat soda. But that wasn’t the attraction. Even if no one realized it, Kip knew: everyone was here to win. Even if winning meant cheering for the right driver. Or watching a bunch of silly people smash their cars together.
He laughed at the absurdity. Maybe that was the truth. A bullfight in a bullring where no one — not the cars, not the drivers — walks away unscathed.