Chapter 29 - Flight of the Man
The long walk to sector 32 of the Bangor ruins wasn't as uneventful as Crono had hoped. Two glasser mutants had to be dealt with before the time-travelers even made it past the tenth block heading north. Dispatching them hadn't been difficult. Lucca, with her new plasma pistol given to her by Director Doan, had done the job almost all by herself, landing all twelve shots she fired and leaving the red-skinned abominations reeling enough for Crono to finish them off with no real effort. Things had become more tense at the end of the eastern leg, when five glassers approached them from two directions. Crono, Marle, and Lucca all had to drop their backpacks to fight the fiends effectively, and the charge on Lucca's new gun had dropped to a dangerous level by the time the last glasser stopped twitching. Doan's pistol could fire up to twelve consecutive shots at normal power and speed before needing to recharge from its internal capacitor, which was a process that took up to a full minute. Lucca had been forced to fire only single shots near the end of the engagement, necessitating Marle to take a much larger role in the fight than any of them wanted. The battery pack that Lucca carried in her satchel had several hundred normal shots-worth of power, which could be employed whenever the gun's capacitor became low on energy. Marle only had the thirty-five crossbow bolts in her quiver. Wasting any of those on mutants here would leave fewer to deal with unknown threats in the ruins of Arris. Two of the five bolts she fired had been completely imbedded in the glasser corpses through their eyeballs and couldn't be recovered in any acceptable amount of time in the open ruins, so they were forced to leave them behind and continue on their way. A comparatively short walk further north brought them into the declared red zone of sector 32.
“There's the sign. Thank the Divine,” Marle said.
It was the rickety remains of a street sign, labeled “stop”, that Crono guessed had been placed erect by Director Doan sometime after he had sealed his vehicle away. It was implanted in a small pile of rubble in the middle of the street rather than where it would normally be on the side of the road, so he knew it had to have been placed deliberately as a landmark. A shadowy descent lie a short distance to their right, situated between two decaying buildings of stunted height.
“How's your gun, Lu? Ready to brave the shadows?” he asked.
Lucca tipped her glasses and held her gun aloft in one hand. “Good to go.”
“Let's hope this vehicle's still okay,” Marle said. “It's been sitting here for over thirty years, right?”
“Gotta think it's okay,” Crono said. “Mutants don't feed on machines. Just us. Let's keep our eyes open until we know the place is clear.”
Marle turned on the flashlight modification of her crossbow and gingerly led the way down into the dark, Crono and Lucca flanking her position from just behind. Going lights on was a bit of a risk since mutants were always attracted by the glare, but if the vehicle was here they had no choice but to clear out the area anyway. Crono made ready to slip off his backpack and draw his sword in an instant. Lucca kept her gun in a two-handed grip and slowly panned her aim, scanning for any threats.
The underground area was fairly small, perhaps no bigger than the entirety of Dormitory 7 back at the enclave. A brief examination showed the only outlet being the ramp they had just descended. Sitting off to the right side of the otherwise empty space was a large narrow object about forty feet in length covered by some type of tarp. Marle circled the object at a distance moving to her left, splashing the beams of her flashlights across the tarp and then focusing on the unrevealed shadows on the object's far side. Nothing was seen except bare concrete.
“Clear!” she called out.
“All right, let's get this tarp off and see what we're dealing with,” Crono said.
Marle kept her flashlights spotted on the unknown vehicle and occasionally looked back up the ramp for mutant threats while Crono and Lucca got to work on removing the tarp. Decades-worth of dust rolled off the covering as it came off, causing a fair bit of coughing for all present. Everyone was expecting to stare in great interest at whatever the dusty tarp finally revealed.
Instead they were completely transfixed.
The vehicle was quite unlike any they had ever seen. It didn't resemble a steam buggy so much as a giant dart. A two-tone dart of blue and gold with more wing than wheel. The narrow seating compartment was completely enclosed by a canopy of glass and was resting atop a strange hollow that dominated the whole front end of the vehicle. On either side of the hollow at the very front was a small metal wing angled downward that Crono had no clue as to the function of. Further back were two larger wings extending rearward from the vehicle's center that grew gradually wider until coming to an abrupt halt at the vehicle's far aft. Above the canopy was another slightly smaller hollow that tapered back to a sharp wedge at the very rear. Below and a bit in front of this wedge were three more hollows with apertures facing rearward. Most everything above the wings was painted in blue, while everything below the wings was painted in gold, both colors sparkling where Marle's flashlights played across the vehicle's surface. The lightning bolt and fireball emblem on the key Doan had given them was duplicated prominently on either side of the wedge fin. Crono felt the vehicle's metallic skin with fascination. It was totally smooth. Crono's gaping expression stared back at him from the blue.
“Lucca? Did you ever...?”
“No,” Lucca told him. “I never saw anything like this on the computers.”
“It's beautiful!” Marle said in wonder. “Whoever built this was as much an artist as an engineer.”
“No doubt,” Lucca chuckled. “I wonder at the practicality, though. It has almost no carrying capacity that I can see. Just what's under that canopy. I wonder if we can even all fit in there?”
Crono rose on the balls of his feet to peer inside the glass. “There's three seats, all in a row front to back,” he related. “Gonna be pretty tight with the packs, but I think we can do it.”
“Three seats? It's almost like it was made for us,” Marle mused.
Crono didn't believe in that level of coincidence. He was just happy enough that things seemed to be going their way. He checked the vehicle's skin around the canopy for any levers or controls that might get the canopy open, praying it wasn't stuck in place from the vehicle sitting around unused for thirty years. Nothing stuck out at him, though. The skin and the canopy both seemed unblemished.
“Let me see it,” Lucca said. “Marle, get the light in tight, would you?”
Lucca saw it before Crono did: an almost invisible square-shaped switch the size of his thumb that was contoured perfectly with the vehicle's skin. Lucca pressed the switch inward about half an inch, and a light thudding sound was heard coming from somewhere just inside the canopy. A moment later, the canopy began rising sideways to the vehicle's left in a slow smooth motion.
“That's some really precise engineering there,” Lucca remarked approvingly.
Crono wasted no time climbing into the vehicle's front seat, pulling his backpack in behind him and stuffing it as best he could in the confined space.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Lucca protested.
“I got the key, I call the seat,” Crono smirked back at her.
Lucca scoffed. “You're such a child, Crono! You've never even driven a steam buggy before. I know dad wouldn't let you even touch the wheel of ours, Anne be praised.”
“First time for everything. How hard can it be?” Crono settled himself and regarded the controls in front of him. As expected, the vehicle had a wheel - of sorts - directly in front of him, and there were a couple of pedals he could feel with his feet below. But the wheel was quite small and wasn't shaped anything like a circle, though it did turn a bit, and the pedals wouldn't depress. There was also a lot more. A square pane of glass, probably a viewscreen of some sort, faced him from between his legs, and there were dozens of buttons and switches on the consoles to either side of the strangely shaped wheel. The controls altogether looked more like a small computer terminal than the simple control scheme of dials and levers found on a steam buggy of his time. Maybe this wouldn't be quite as easy as he thought.
“See? Everything's computerized,” Lucca said smugly. “That means this is my show. Come on, switch out and let me show you how it's done. We'll be driving off inside of an hour.”
Crono grumbled. Lucca was probably right. Computers tripped him up almost as much as they did Marle if he attempted anything beyond the most basic operations. Still, if he was going to be driving a vehicle for the first time, he wanted it to be this one. Nothing for it but to put in the key and see. He'd examine the controls further once he turned the vehicle on and then pass the task on to Lucca – maybe - if he couldn't figure it out. Bringing the long key out of his pocket, he inserted it into what looked like a matching slot just above the presumed viewscreen and turned it.
A glowing circle appeared around the key as soon as it was fully turned. The buttons and switches all around Crono then started lighting up in groups, and a low pitched whine began to sound from somewhere behind the canopy.
“All right, Crono, don't start getting any funny ideas,” Lucca warned.
Crono laughed. Computerized or not, the functions of the wheel and the pedals would certainly be the same as on a steam buggy. Why would that be changed? He might not even need to use the other stuff anyway.
“Come on, you two. Find yourselves a seat,” Crono said eagerly. “The sooner we can get to Arris, the better.”
“I agree with Crono,” Marle said, deftly scrambling into the seat behind his. “The noise from this thing is bound to attract mutants if we don't leave in a hurry. We can figure things out as we go.”
“Figure things out as we go?!” Lucca said, flabbergasted. “There's a difference between knowing how a vehicle drives and knowing how it actually functions! I don't even know what kind of engine it uses!”
“You want to take it apart? Fill out the rest of your diary dissecting this thing while glassers are wandering about looking for their next meal?” Crono asked disdainfully.
“Well, no, but I...”
“Ain't no one takin' the Comet apart!” came a shrill voice.
In the next instant, the steering wheel and the floor pedals all retracted from Crono's reach. Crono, Marle, and Lucca all looked around in sudden alarm. Who was that who just spoke?
Crono tried to get out of the vehicle quickly to investigate the sudden intrusion, but the tight fit impeded his efforts. No one else was supposed to be out here. He knew there were no active scavenging runs going on, and sector 32 was a red zone anyway. No one could cross into a red zone without Director Doan's express permission. Could it be a traveler from outside of the Bangor enclave, perhaps? Such travelers were exceedingly rare.
“Who's there?!” Lucca called out to the dark surroundings. “This is a red zone! We thought we were the only ones here!”
“What you talkin' 'bout, girl? You blind or somethin'?” came the unknown voice again. “You in the presence of 'da Man.”
Crono looked around in befuddlement. The voice didn't seem to be coming from anywhere around them, it seemed to be coming from the vehicle itself. But that didn't make any sense. Crono and the others had checked the vehicle thoroughly. There was no one hiding inside the hollows, and for the life of him Crono couldn't imagine anywhere else on the vehicle large enough to hold a man even if there was some access he wasn't aware of. He assumed the entire rear end behind the canopy held the engines or other vital equipment.
“Da... who?” Lucca said uncertainly.
“Da Man, baby!” the voice crowed. “Alias for old Johnny Comet! Grand Champion of '97, '98, and '99! Fastest racer there ever was, or ever will be.”
Racer?
Crono looked down at the controls. A face was staring back at him. From the viewscreen.
“Wait,” Marle called out. “Where exactly are you?”
“I'm all around you, baby!”
There was no question. The visage in the viewscreen had just talked. It was a cartoonish depiction of a dark-skinned man with an exceptionally odd hairstyle consisting of a strip of black strands in the middle of an otherwise bald scalp, sticking almost straight up as if reaching for something. He was wearing wildly angled opaque glasses and an orange vest that looked to be made of metal rather than cloth, the bulb of a large flashlight device prominently displayed in the center of his chest. Oddest of all were the things he was wearing on his back. They appeared to be tires.
“Uh... Lucca?” Crono uttered.
Lucca bent over where Crono was sitting from outside of the open canopy, staring at the odd visage with evident disbelief. Marle got out of her seat to goggle at the face from over Crono's opposite shoulder.
“Are you... the vehicle?” Lucca inquired.
The face appeared to scoff. “Vehicle?! Do I look like a garbage truck to you, Violet? I'm 'da Man! What would you go turnin' me on for if ya didn't know who I was?”
Lucca gaped in astonishment. “It's an artificial intelligence! Integrated into the computer systems of this vehicle! There's still one of them left!”
An artificial intelligence, Crono thought. Just like what the homicidal robots of Arris were said to possess to some degree. He very nearly went for his sword right then, but stopped the thought before the impulse reached his hand. Director Doan had used this very vehicle to escape Arris and its malfunctioning robots, after having sabotaged them to prevent any more machine on human carnage. There couldn't be any danger. That “worm” thing Doan had mentioned would have caused the vehicle to destroy itself if it were present the moment it left the vicinity of Arris. That meant he saw no reason to install it in the first place.
“You called yourself Johnny Comet, right?” he asked.
“In the sheet-metal, bro! You talkin' to the car who ain't never lost a race. Hit over a thousand my very first time on the track and I wasn't even tuned up yet. Nearest chump finished thirty seconds behind me.”
“A... thousand?” Marle asked with a frown.
“Ohhh, yeah, baby! Said it couldn't be done back in '97, but I showed them! Wanna see the reaction on their faces when I did it?”
The viewscreen shifted from the ridiculous cartoon visage to an image of a crowd with astounded faces. A healthy and very well dressed crowd that knew nothing of want or enertron sickness, from all appearances.
“You date from the age of the domes!” Lucca said. “That's incredible!”
The image shifted back. “You know it, sister. They made Johnny Comet to last. So what you doin' turnin' me on? Need a ride somewhere?”
“We need to get to the ruins of Arris,” Marle said. “Director Doan said you could get us there fast.”
The cartoonish figure's face grew in size, as if moving closer to the screen, and donned a wicked smile. “You need to get to Arris fast? You talkin' to the right car! Sweetness! Been awhile since I stretched my legs. The Trans-C ain't the same without 'da Man.”
“Trans-C? What's that?”
“Probably slang for the Transcontinental Highway,” Lucca said.
“Fast is good,” Crono said, feeling more confident by the second. “Well, if you can put your controls back where I can reach them, Johnny, we can be on our way. I'm assuming you moved them before? We shouldn't waste much time with mutants wandering around outside.”
Johnny Comet's gleeful expression disappeared.
“Oh, no, bro. That ain't the way it works,” the artificial intelligence said darkly. “Ain't no one drive Johnny Comet but Johnny Comet! Been my rule since some blue-haired maniac take me for a joyride back in '98 and scratched up my paint!”
Crono wasn't sure he heard that right.
“You can drive yourself?”
“Who you think you talkin' to? Ya want something done right, do it yourself! I'll show you how to get to Arris fast!”
The low whine coming from behind the canopy then abruptly raised in pitch, went down just as quickly, then raised up and down again several times. The vehicle shook where it sat on the pavement, as if it were a bull raring to charge.
“I think that's our cue to sit down,” Lucca remarked, looking white in the face.
“Buckle up ladies and gent. We gonna fly!” Johnny Comet said with manic enthusiasm.
Lucca quickly clambered into the back seat, while Crono and Marle pulled sturdy-looking straps down from the top of their seats across their chests and locked them in place to a securing ring across their stomachs, doing the same thing with straps to either side and from below per Johnny's instructions. The canopy of the blue and gold racer closed with a gentle thunk and sealed itself with an audible hiss. Crono's heart hammered in his chest. They weren't even moving, and somehow Crono knew the next few moments would be the most thrilling of his life. That anyone should have to be secured to a vehicle's seat with six straps implied an astonishing level of performance.
“You ready back there, Lu?”
“Oh yeah. Perfect. Back here I know I won't be the first one to die if we crash,” Lucca replied with a nervous laugh.
Crono snorted. “We're set here, Johnny. Ready when you are.”
“That's what I wanna hear!” Johnny Comet said. “Let's rock!”
A very loud piece of music suddenly began to play within the canopy, with intense chords and a rapidly kicking rhythm, and the vehicle known as Johnny Comet kicked out of its place of long slumber just as suddenly.
Crono saw three glasser mutants at the top of the ramp directly in their path.
“Look out!” he warned.
“Psh! Roadkill,” Johnny said dismissively.
Johnny Comet began his turn before reaching the ramp's apex, sliding his right side directly into the mutants and sending them flying across the street to crash violently into the buildings on the other side in a cloud of dust. The stop sign landmark was the next casualty. Johnny then blazed a path down the street heading south, turning east, then south, then west, then south again at a rate of speed far in excess of anything on the ground Crono could conceive. He cried out in delight at the vehicle's furious motion, the acceleration out of the turns, the way the seat straps and buckle pressed into his skin. The opening seconds of this mad dash to Arris had already exceeded his expectations. And for all of the risks taken maneuvering in such a way when the streets were filled with rubble, Johnny somehow didn't run into anything. The rubble might as well not even have been there.
It was like foot-racing in the streets of Truce City at peak pedestrian hours, never knowing precisely what was waiting for you around the next corner, only about fifty times as fast. A Truceian street racer often risked humiliation, detainment by the police, or actual injury every time they got truly serious on their makeshift racetrack. Johnny Comet risked a lot more than that at every corner and was laughing at the danger, letting it fuel his advance, fearing nothing except being too slow. This while not even racing anyone. Marle's joyous laughter filled the narrow cabin. Lucca's cries were a thin hair short of hysteria.
Almost before he was conscious of it, the shattered archway marking the entrance to Bangor from the road Crono remembered walking under that first day in the city was past them, and Johnny Comet and his passengers were on the Transcontinental Highway heading east. The giant road to Arris stretched to the horizon in front of them.
Goodbye, Bangor. Stay safe until we can fix things.
The racer's radical lateral motions then diminished to a more stately juking between holes in the road's pavement, and Crono felt himself being pressed even harder into the back of his seat. He was expecting greater acceleration outside of the ruins, but not like this. It felt like two heavy men were sitting on his chest trying to force his breath out. This thing was now traveling faster than one of Marle's crossbow bolts could fly.
Crono willed himself not to worry. The most hazardous part of the trip, outside of Arris itself, was probably behind them now. There were no sharp corners he remembered seeing on the computer generated map back in the enclave. Just a gradual turn southeast as the highway carved through the eastern half of the Tarvor mountains, and then it was over two-thousand miles of straight empty road and bridge. At these speeds, if Johnny could sustain them, they might reach Arris in as little as two days, three at the most. Crono had to laugh at the notion of a three month trip reduced to as many days.
So why did it feel like he was forgetting something important?
“The beam! By Creation, the beam!” Lucca cried out at the top of her lungs.
There was no time to comment on what was coming. Barely any time to lament the thing Crono had forgotten about. The giant slab of steel, a remnant of one of Bangor Dome's main structural members, thrown out here in the explosive chaos of the Day of Lavos, was lying across all eight lanes of the road directly in front of them. They would hit it in under two seconds. Crono's life flashed before him.
Johnny Comet skirted left, leaving the road and running up the short hill the time travelers had climbed over their first time here to get around the immense obstacle. He wasn't on the hill long.
Crono, Marle, and Lucca screamed. The ground could no longer be seen, nor could it be felt through the vibration in the cabin. Johnny Comet had gone completely airborne.
So this is how it ends, Crono thought, staring straight ahead into the open sky. Their quest to save the future brought to an unceremonious close barely outside of Bangor by a talking vehicle that suddenly aspired to become a bird. He supposed it was no less lunacy than everything else he had been through of late. Crono wondered what he could say to his father when he saw him.
And then Johnny Comet was down. They weren't dead. The giant beam was behind them, and the now unobstructed lanes of the Transcontinental Highway lie ahead of them. They were back on the road! Off the road and then in the air for several seconds, and Crono barely felt the moment of their landing. How had Johnny done that?
“Whooo yeah! Five-point-two seconds of Johnny Comet airtime!” the figure in the viewscreen gloated. “Told you we was gonna fly. Who 'da Man?”
Marle's elation filled the compartment. “We flew! We were flying! This is incredible!”
“This is insaaaane!” Lucca yelled, a measure less than elated.
“Insane? What you talkin' 'bout, Violet?” said Johnny. “We haven't even hit the big straight yet. This is nothin'. You wanted to get to Arris fast? I can get you there today!”
“Uh, I'll settle for merely tomorrow.”
Crono's thoughts mirrored Lucca's audible unease. Today? Surely Johnny could not be serious. It was a journey of over three-thousand miles!
But Crono's doubts were beginning to falter as Johnny Comet continued his blistering pace on the gently curving road, driving faster and faster as the craters along the pavement grew less frequent. The road then shrank from eight lanes to six. Johnny stopped juking entirely and kept to the center lane of the right-hand set of three, increasing his speed even further. As gradual as the turn to the southeast was, Crono still felt himself pressed against the side of his seat. Insane was about right. And thrilling.
“Johnny, how fast are we going?” Crono asked breathlessly. “I can't even begin to guess, this is so crazy.”
“What, you don't see the speedo?” Johnny answered. “We just passed 800 kph. Nothin' crazy 'bout that. Slowest chump I knew could do that in his sleep.”
Crono blanched. He still didn't know the metric measuring system of the future all that well, but 800 kilometers per hour sounded ridiculous. “Uh, Lucca? How fast is that in miles per hour?”
“Oh, um, just under five-hundred,” Lucca said with a fearful chuckle. “Totally not crazy, that. I can come up with a much better word once I stop shaking in my straps.”
Five-hundred miles in an hour! Crono thought numbly. Johnny wasn't boasting in the least. Not only would they get to Arris today, they would probably arrive with half-a-day to spare. He suddenly understood why Director Doan's tone had been so dry last night. “Rather quickly” didn't begin to describe this experience.
“Miles per hour?” Johnny inquired curiously. “Old-fashioned, huh? I'm down with that. How's about I put my mph above my head here, and you can go 'whoooa' with every tick of my awesome vel-os-eh-tay?”
A number then appeared above the gleeful visage of Johnny Comet's cartoonish avatar. It read “504 mph”. And that figure was continuing to climb.
We really don't need to go faster than this, Crono thought. But the greater part of him – perhaps not the wiser, but the greater – wanted to know what this talking vehicle's upper limit was. Crono had always pushed his own limits on the streets of Truce, and made a habit of knowing the upper limits of the people he raced. He couldn't imagine the knowledge being useful in this instance, but he still wanted to know.
The Transcontinental Highway began to straighten, and the cresting of one more shallow rise revealed the longest roadway Crono had ever seen. A slight downhill grade marked the path, which extended to a point in the far distance Crono wasn't sure an eagle could make out from here. From the map, he knew this was the beginning of the straight that would lead almost directly to Arris. No turns. No hills. Just thousands of miles of straight pavement. If Johnny was going to demonstrate the upper levels of his performance, it would be here.
“Here it comes, kiddos,” the artificial intelligence said eagerly. “The straight of Tylair. Longest stretch of road there ever was. Called it the big three-K back in the day. Ain't no excuses here. This patch of pavement show who be fast and who be slow.”
“Be fast, Johnny,” Crono said with a boyish grin. After all, he had actually flown in this thing for over five seconds and somehow survived. He could handle this.
Johnny Comet's avatar then folded its body at impossible angles and suddenly took on the form of a... tricycle. A tricycle with Johnny's head in place of the handlebars and with pink wings extending out the side of its body. The wide tires formerly on its back now touched the virtual ground in the form of a tricycle's rear axle, and two long pipes, perhaps exhausts, angled out above facing rearward. It was an incomparably odd picture, but one that promised impending excitement.
“Goin' for my personal best, then. Sonic booooom!”
Crono was then thrown back in his seat with such force it was like the two proverbial men sitting on his chest suddenly became five. The whine of the vehicle's strange engine rose to a painful pitch, and the sudden change of music in the cabin was almost entirely drowned out. Johnny's speed increased from 500 to 700 mph in mere seconds. Crono's response was about what the self-aware vehicle had prophesied.
“Whoooa!”
“Crono, what have you doooone?” Lucca wailed.
Johnny Comet streaked down the road at a velocity that Crono could only imagine was akin to a shooting star. He had no other frame of reference aside from the number displayed on the vehicle's viewscreen. Seven-fifty. Eight-hundred. Eight-fifty. Each passing second seemed to increase the number by twenty, and the rate of acceleration wasn't slowing. The road went by in a blur. The engine howled. The seats shook.
“Uh... maybe we should slow down,” Marle said, sounding disquieted for the first time.
“Slow down?! I haven't even hit a thousand yet!” Johnny said. “I thought you guys wanted to go fast?”
“This isn't fast!” Lucca shrieked. “This is demented!”
“Any chump can go supersonic. The real mark of greatness is for a car to break the big one-nine-double-oh. That's 1,180 mph for you old-fashioned folk. Me, my record's 1,940 kph, meanin' 1,206 for you guys. I'm gonna break that today for sure!”
“S,somebody stop this thing!” Marle cried.
But there was no stopping Johnny Comet, and Crono didn't dare start pushing buttons while the crazy vehicle was traveling at these speeds. The four-digit barrier was soon breached, and the mph continued to climb. Crono then saw the surrounding land disappear, and all that remained were the lanes of pavement in front of them. They had crossed onto the giant bridge that spanned the remnants of the Tylair Ocean. Guardrails to either side passed them by in a mist of gray.
Lucca's moaning abruptly ceased. Crono didn't have to see why. He thought about passing out himself. Time seemed to slow down all around him. The cabin grew strangely quieter, and the pressure on his body eased. The speed indicator was close to 1,200 mph.
“Whoooo, yeah!” Johnny finally crowed. “Twelve-oh-nine, baby! Who's da' Man, huh?! Who's da' Man?!
“Uh... you are?” Crono managed. He didn't know what else to say. Just that he had to get this speed demon to stop before he got everyone killed.
“I can't heeeear you!”
“You are!” Crono and Marle cried in unison.
Johnny Comet's avatar then reverted back to it's man-like form, apparently satisfied, and pointed at himself with both thumbs. “And don't you forget it, baby!”
Satisfied or not, Johnny took his sweet time decelerating from his record-breaking 1,209 mile-per-hour run. It was a long while before Crono could stop shaking.
* * *
One of the great things about being the author of your own story was that you had the power of Creation – which was to say omission – over incidents that painted you in a negative light. Fainting was a completely understandable occurrence given the situation Lucca had been in. She had an intimate knowledge, academically speaking, of what happened to things that collided with other things at a high rate of speed. It wasn't her fault that the laws of physics demanded bad things happen to a human skull that hit a solid object at anything faster than a brisk trot, let alone a hundred times as fast. Lucca had no qualms about omitting Marle's use of magic to keep said author in the realm of the conscious shortly after the ludicrous 1,209 mile-per-hour speed record was set. After all, such things weren't supposed to happen to the heroine.
Since then, her diary would record the unaltered tale of Johnny Comet reducing his speed – after much persuasion and shameless flattery – to a “mere” 300 miles-per-hour to time their arrival at Arris shortly after dark. Lucca, Crono, and Marle had decided that arriving after dark was the best way of avoiding unnecessary encounters with robots in the ruins, though it made the task of finding an entrance into the Arris enclave more challenging. Better to be slow and unnoticed than to be quick and dead, the thinking went.
The following hours were spent making almost normal conversation with the vehicle's undaunted artificial intelligence, which Lucca tackled with a vigor to make up for her earlier spell of fright. Speaking with a genuine programmed intelligence, with the capacity for self-awareness and an ability to make its own decisions, was a tremendous opportunity. A relic of a now bygone era, for Lucca it represented everything a machine could aspire to be. She couldn't help but think of GATO speaking in its own voice instead of playing records of other people's voices, and not even needing a change of program card to conduct itself differently and adapting to the situation at hand. It was an avenue of research she wanted to undertake sometime after all of this Lavos business was behind her.
“So you replenish the fuel for your boosters by harvesting hydrogen directly out of the atmosphere through your intakes?” Lucca asked. “That's amazing! And because your jet engines operate from a fusion cell, you can never run out of fuel. You can just keep going and going.”
“Oh, yeah. I ride the wind, baby.” Johnny Comet replied proudly. “Might have still been goin' these past thirty years if there were anyone left to race. Most of my old buds got melted right where they were on the day that rain o' fire come stormin' down, and the few who didn't got sent to the scrap pile to keep those underground enclaves a runnin'.”
“How many of you were there?” Crono asked with fascination. Naturally, anything to do with racing caught Crono's interest.
“A full circuit, brother. First racers started showin' up in the mid seventies, though none of them lot were AI. Just a bunch of workin' class chaps that took it in their minds to go soupin' up their cars to see how quick they could drive between the domes.” Johnny chuckled. “Drove the cops bananas, what with them guys weavin' back and forth through traffic lookin' for the glory of a checkered flag, and then doin' it all again goin' the other way. It was all the rage, man. For every one of that lot the cops threw behind bars, there were two more lookin' to join in the action. People even started recordin' the races and placing bets on who won. Things got so crazy by the nineties that the government in Keepers Dome decided to make an official circuit and cleared the highways every couple months for people to race. Them's were the glory days, brother. That's when they stopped usin' cars you could buy off the lot and started buildin' bonafide racers from the ground up. Changed all the rules about what a car could be. Only restrictions were they had to carry at least two passengers and couldn't fly more than a hundred meters. Other than that, it was anything goes. Jet engines. Fusion cells. The works.”
Including wings, Lucca thought. Not for flying, but to help keep the car on the road. Looking at Johnny Comet's design, Lucca now understood the aerodynamic principles at work. Each set of wings generated downforce, which was essential for the vehicle's stability at high speeds. Those same wings could also be used to generate lift in an emergency, such as when Johnny jumped that hill to get over the giant steel beam lying across the road. A slight and continual adjustment of those wings in mid-air would account for the way Johnny had landed back on the road with hardly any impact. It was the kind of stunt no human driver would have been able to manage.
“And that's when they started putting artificial intelligences into the cars,” Lucca reasoned.
“You got it, sister. I come around back in '97. Some guys wanted to shatter every record in the books by puttin' an AI behind the wheel, so they gathered up every credit between them and put me together. Broke a thousand kph in my first race, dusting everyone. That brought about the AI era, and every team worth its rubber put one into their cars hopin' to take me down. Nope! Didn't happen. Grand Champion of '97 right here.” Johnny made a thumbing gesture to himself through his avatar. “Then teams started puttin' hydrogen boosters into their cars to get that added edge, only they did the same with me as soon as my crew chief got wind of what they was doin'. Nope! Supersonic, baby! Grand Champion of 98' right here.” Another thumb point. “Then my rivals get it into their heads to break 1,900 on the kph meter, and I was the only one to actually go and do it. Right here on the three-K. Boom! Grand Champion of 99'. Fastest racer there ever was or ever will be, that's Johnny Comet!”
“Are you saying you're the last one, Johnny?” Marle asked. “The last racer?”
“'Fraid so. Wandered the highways for years. Never saw another. Then I run into Brother Frank. Said he'd protect me from scavengers as long as I did what he said. Seemed like a good deal, so he hid me away in Arris for a bit, then later in Bangor. Better than the scrap heap. Then the three of you turn me on, and here we are.”
“Then Frank did us and the world a great service keeping you in one piece,” Lucca said with a smile. “Especially in Arris. Did he do something to prevent you from going crazy like the robots did? I'm still trying to understand how that happened.”
Johnny's avatar shrugged. “All Brother Frank did was turn me on. As for those robot psychos in Arris, I don't know nothin' about that. Brother Frank said some song they was hearing was drivin' them batty. All I heard over the comms was static. Whatever that song was, it had no effect on ol' Johnny Comet. Maybe 'cause all I know or care about is racin'. Don't have no weapons, neither.”
That made sense, Lucca thought. If the directive the robots received from this “song” demanded the destruction of all humans, a machine like Johnny Comet wouldn't serve any practical use. He would just be ignored by whatever the source of the song was.
“What about the robots themselves?” Crono asked. “Director Doan only gave us a few basic descriptions. Is there anything you can tell us about them?”
“Yeah, they shoot you on sight, man! What, you think I'm some kind of encyclopedia on anything other than racin'? You want those kind of details, you're lookin' for one of them double-sixers.”
“Double-sixers?” Marle inquired.
“General-purpose robot, generation sixty-six,” Johnny said. “Top-o'-the-line 'bot from '95. Know everythin' about everythin' since the Great War them 'bots do. Problem is the song got to them, too. Brother Frank was the last guy to speak to one without gettin' his head blown off. You want my advice? If it's metallic and it moves, you best be movin' yourself and hope it don't see you.”
A dome-era robot that survived the Day of Lavos? This was news to Lucca. She knew nothing about the sixty-six series, but she had read a few articles describing much older robots in the general-purpose category, including a few schematics. Perhaps the survivors of Arris had been able to scavenge the remains of these advanced robots and put them back together as their level of robotics knowledge allowed.
“Can you show us a picture of a sixty-six, Johnny?” Lucca asked.
“Can do.”
A half-solid, half-wireframe schematic then appeared on the viewscreen set into the back of Marle's seat. Lucca's breath caught. The seven-foot-tall robot was bipedal, with a round bronze-colored body that eschewed sharp angles everywhere Lucca could see. Sturdy metal plates covered every section of the robot aside from the upper legs and arms, which were wrapped in a dark synthetic material that covered the elbow and knee joints. Scattered rivets precisely measured from one another kept the plates in place. A large hose curved upward from a protrusion on the machine's left breastplate and was inserted high into the robot's torso just below the head, and a more vertical protrusion, perhaps a cooling vent, fronted the right breastplate. The head was squat and without a face, with one large plate covering the cranium and two sizable optic mechanisms facing front. Sticking up out of the head was a cylindrical protrusion Lucca thought to be a radio receiver and transmitter. Most notable to Lucca, and the most human-looking part of the robot, were its hands, which were five-fingered and looked to have all the joints and articulation of a human hand.
It was mechanical perfection. Something even Lucca wasn't sure she could improve upon for all of her imagination and industriousness. The ultimate evolution of GATO. A mechanical being with the self-awareness of Johnny Comet, but also one with the versatility of a human, and loaded with knowledge of every kind to serve and protect the people it was designed to aid. Such a thing had to be Creation sent. Inspired by the Divine and built by man to do good.
Burn.
Lucca suddenly felt faint, and not from her earlier episode. What was that just now?
It's perfect. And it was corrupted to kill. Someone must pay. Burn them all!
It was her mind's voice. The same one that confronted her in the ruins of Bangor after running out of the classified archive, trying to come to grips with the reality of humanity's doom. But the voice felt different, somehow. A dark fragment of Lucca's soul that wasn't simply berating her weakness in the face of the truth, it was a part of her clinging to the edges of sanity. Silent fury and rage warred on the border between thought and action, and Lucca felt her body begin to shake.
Burn! Burn! Burn!
Lucca doffed her helmet and clutched at her forehead with growing alarm. Her breath was suddenly coming in fits. She felt... hot! Her forehead was fire. Her eyes smouldered. Her heart raged inside her chest. A tingling sensation crept across her whole body as if she had been thrown into a forge and was beginning to succumb to the flames. What was going on?
“Lucca, are you okay? What's wrong?” came Marle's concerned voice.
Lucca could only grunt in response. How could she answer? She didn't even know what was happening to her.
“Here, give me your hand. I'll channel some magic. Whatever it is, I'll take care of it.”
Unthinking, Lucca extended her left hand. Marle grabbed hold of it from her seat.
“You're burning up!” Marle said in astonishment. “Hold on, Lucca. I'll concentrate a bit harder.”
The stifling heat radiating from Lucca's skin then was draped over as if from a damp towel guarding against an August sun at the beach. Her breathing returned to normal. Her eyes cooled. Her heart steadied. And she suddenly felt exhausted.
“What's going on back there?” asked Crono with evident worry.
“That's strange,” Marle said, sounding oddly pained. “There's nothing wrong with her that I can sense. Just the opposite, she was overflowing with energy just now. I actually had to siphon strength away from her to calm her down.”
Crono looked baffled as he stared at Lucca from the front seat. Lucca could only gaze back with failing eyelids.
“Johnny, I think we all need to take a break,” Crono said. “We've been riding for hours in this tiny compartment. Lucca needs some fresh air before we go any further.”
“I'm down with that.” Johnny said. “Gonna have to slow down soon anyway. We're only a few hundred klicks away from Death Peak. The force o' that insane eruption that made it did some damage to the bridge. Gotta go over that bit with care. It's a good spot to get out and take a look if ya wanna sightsee. No other view like it.”
Lucca took a deep breath and forced herself to stay awake. She had a pretty good idea what the view was going to be like, but the fresh air could only do her good, whatever had just happened to warrant a second magical intervention from Marle. She needed to think of how she could even explain this one in her diary, if she cared to share it at all.
* * *
The breeze was deceptively peaceful.
The westerly wind was just cool enough for Marle to have to dig her blanket from Landis out of her backpack and drape it across her shoulders as she gazed mesmerized to the east from where she sat. Crono and Lucca sat to either side of her on the concrete median divide of the bridge, separating the three right-hand lanes Johnny Comet had been driving down from the less appealing left hand lanes that had borne the brunt of Lavos' emergent wrath. Much of the left-most lane no longer had a guardrail to restrain careless vehicles from toppling over the side, and there were a few spots where there was no left-most lane at all. It was a long way to fall. Before the Day of Lavos, the surface of the Tylair Ocean had lain about a hundred feet below the bridge. Now, the surface was actually the solid mud-caked crust of the earth, almost 1,500 feet further down. All that now remained of the Tylair Ocean in this region was a pockmarked series of shallow lakes littering the surface, mocking a greatness that would never again be. The ruined seascape extended to the horizon in all directions, but it was to the east where Marle and the others were focusing their attention.
In the far distance, a maelstrom of gray was in perpetual battle against the surrounding sky. Continual flashes of lightning lit up the spiraling clouds from within, hinting at appalling climatic violence beyond the veil of gloom. It was a hurricane that never went anywhere, doomed to watch over a place that hadn't existed before 300 years ago. Death Peak. The mountain itself couldn't be seen from this distance. The lightning occasionally exposed a shadow reaching over the very edge of the horizon, but that was the only glimpse any of them could see. The highest point of a caldera that was dozens of miles in diameter, and who knew how many miles deep. It was from this place that Lavos had bathed the world in fire, condemning the human race to extinction.
Marle wrapped her blanket more tightly around her. Just looking at the distant storm chilled her skin, knowing what it represented, knowing that she somehow had to find a way to stop it from happening. There was no need to get any closer to it. Marle couldn't imagine a reason anyone would want to get closer to it. A traveler would have to climb down to the muddy seabed, navigate around hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny lakes between here and the mountain, and then somehow make an ascent to Death Peak in the midst of hurricane-force winds. Marle wasn't sure why Director Doan was so adamant they not go there. No one in their right mind would even make the attempt.
“Nice scenery,” Lucca quipped after a long moment. “I can see the postcard now. 'See the glorious sights of 2300. Death Peak: A scene of majesty that will blow you away.'”
“Well, your sense of humor seems fine,” Crono remarked. “You sure you're feeling all right otherwise?”
Lucca shrugged. “I guess. Putting down some grub and a whole canteen's done me good. Dare I say it, but I'm starting to develop a taste for rat. Makes me wonder if the food we'll get back home will even taste the same to us after all this.”
Marle exchanged a look with her. Lucca seemed okay at the moment, but Marle still didn't understand what had happened to her. Trying to heal the sudden unexplained malady only revealed that Lucca had positively been bursting with energy, and when Marle had reversed the magical weave to drain Lucca of that excess energy, the resulting blowback nearly caused Marle herself to faint. She was still nursing the remnants of a headache from the experience. It almost felt like... No, that was impossible. Lucca was just stressed from their insanely fast trip across the world, that was all. Marle then channeled another ice cube into being and handed it to Lucca, who popped it into her mouth with silent gratitude.
“We'll be having a feast no matter what it tastes like,” Crono said with a grin. “But first we actually have to get home. We're only about two hours out from Arris once we get back on the road. We should probably review what we know about the robots before setting out again.”
“Good idea. Let's whip out old reliable and take a look-see.”
“Old reliable”, of course, was Lucca's diary. Normally Marle would agree with that quaint description. It was certainly easier to use than a computer. Though lately the thick volume was pretty much indecipherable to anyone but Lucca. Blank pages were now at such a premium that she was making notes anywhere she could find space, and that meant important information on any particular subject could be found in any number of different places, and often not in chronological order. Thankfully, Lucca had sketched what she knew about the robots on one of her few remaining clean pages since it was such a vital subject. Two sketches appeared on the page she flipped to, and Marle and Crono scooted in close to get a good look.
The first sketch was a squat thing on four spindly legs that extended well past the robot's small body. “This little guy I call the 'bugger',” Lucca explained. “It's about three feet tall and was apparently designed to hunt down rats. Don't know for sure what kind of weapon it carries, but I'm guessing it's some kind of standard projectile, since plasma fire has a way of destroying the target's food value. This thing is probably pretty quick, so we can't count on outrunning one if it picks up our trail.”
“Are there any weak points I can aim at?” Marle asked.
“Just the eye, and there's only one, right at the body's center mass. You take that out it should be blinded, though it'll probably take a plasma shot or a good sword hit to put the bugger down for the count.”
Lucca then directed their attention to the sketch below the insectile machine. This one seemed to be bipedal, and carried two mouth-like apertures on its upper body on either side of the machine's head in place of where the shoulders and arms would be on a normal biped. “This one is just short of the height of an average human,” Lucca said. “Call it the 'hunter'. Those clamper things on the upper body hide weapon emplacements, probably plasma-based. These were the things the Arris enclave sent when they had mutant problems. It looks a bit awkward on its feet, so it doesn't move very quickly in all likelihood. It's probably meant to hold a position and lay down fire to anything that crosses its sights. We'll have to be especially wary of them. I'd rather not test the limits of Marle's healing talents by eating a plasma bolt.”
“Weaknesses?” asked Crono.
“The same. One eye. Bigger than on the bugger, so it'll be easier to hit. But I wouldn't advise challenging it from the front. Too much firepower to safely deal with. Its awkward stance suggests it could possibly be flanked, but I don't know how much good a sword will be against that. Its plating looks thicker than on the bugger from the images I saw, so expect that it is. Any sword strike would have to be aimed at the joints, and that's a narrower target than the eye is.”
Crono nodded soberly. “Best to avoid both of these things if we can. This won't be like fighting glassers or the like. These things will actually shoot back.”
“Only if we give them the chance,” Marle said. “I don't intend to let any of these machines see what they're shooting at if it comes down to a fight.”
“What about that other thing Johnny showed us a bit ago? That sixty-six model robot?”
Lucca looked uncomfortable. “If we see one, we should probably run like the Day of Lavos were upon us. Nothing short of a plasma bolt will make a dent in the plating it has, and there's no way to know how vulnerable its joints might be.”
“It didn't look like it had any weapons, though,” Marle pointed out.
“That was an old schematic, dating from around the time it was first built before the Day of Lavos. 1995 or so. If it's been corrupted by that 'song' Johnny mentioned, it could have any number of offensive abilities to suit its new directive. I think its two front chest plates open up, so it could be hiding weapons in there. That's what I saw in the schematic, anyway.”
“Avoid at all costs, then,” Crono said. “Is there anything else we should know?”
“Just that all the info we have is at least thirty years out of date. The only thing we know for certain is where the temporal gate is. We need to stay hidden and get to the gate as quick as we can. No unnecessary heroics.”
“It's as good a plan as we're going to have under the circumstances. Nothing for it but to make it happen.”
Lucca closed her diary, and Marle came to her feet and stretched, gazing into the swirling chaos to the east that was Death Peak. She wanted this image burned in her memory. The picture of what would happen and what would always endure if the future didn't change. Then she turned around and regarded the setting sun. As far as Marle was concerned this would be the last time the sun would be allowed to set on this ruined future. Once she was back in the past, all of the rules would change. A new future would be created, and the creature known as Lavos would never live to wreak such destruction as she had witnessed.
Thinking of Mary, doubtlessly hard at work back at the Bangor enclave, Marle collected herself and strode over to where the proudly shining Johnny Comet was parked on the road, waiting to drive everyone to their destiny.
