| ||||||||
Being a pilot is a thing, like most things, that has many, many ups and many, many downs. Every time you fly you seriously hope that the ups outnumber the downs. When the down count is higher, it means you're never flying again. I've known guys who were the best pilots in North Tek, and most of them are now either dead or spattered against a mountainside or crippled bad.
The whole point of being a pilot in North Tek is to run the old S-mine field as fast as you can. Turn left when you should go down and BOOM. You're just so much debris in the upper atmosphere. Nasty way to die. Most guys don't practice in the field. They go zipping through Damanek canyon and around the Red Mountains. It's pretty safe at normal speed. That's about 200 kilometers per hour by us ship jocks' standards.
The main problem with going that fast is that your nerves are too slow. A lot of guys go this way. Their brains just kinda fry from trying to keep the ship together and dodge obstacles at the same time. They're wrecks- we don't have many of them though. When your nerves blow on you during a race or eve just a practice run, chances are you won't make the landing. If you do, you'll never fly again. Most likely you won't be able to drive a car again. It really sucks cause every single one of them happens to still be the same age as I am. Those cases scare us pilots.
The best way to keep your nerves is pretty dangerous too. You use artificial stimulants, stuff that's based on sugar and caffeine but sends you bouncing off the walls like pixy stix never could. The problem is the hype only lasts about fifteen minutes, and after that it drops you like you were on fire or something. That's the dangerous part. Your system gets so kicked up it starts burning surplus energy and then some. Sometimes you pass out cause you're burnt up totally. Other times you just start slowly slipping down, like narcolepsy or something. You can feel your brain buzzing then; cranking around but you still don't have any fuel for it. I've known guys who've become mine dust that way.
The stims are also addictive and that's another way to fry your brain. I mean, you can hardly blame anyone on stims. They make you hyper alert and all your emotions go shooting through the roof. Now that is awesome if you're having a good day or goin' to a party. Unfortunately, if you overdose on stims you can quite literally wreck your head. It's almost the same as blasting out your nerves only it's your brain that gets tired. You can loose parts of basic life, like short-term memory or sight. It's like a partial lobotomy. Pilots still deal and do the junk, though.
I suppose I may as well introduce myself, seeing as I'm telling a story about me. My name's Jet. Really it's just a nickname, cause my real name is Setamo Kientem. If you reverse those names, that's how it sounds in my culture, not that that's too important.
I'm a pilot myself, that's how I know all this stuff first hand. If you hadn't figured that out by now, I just told you. I'm not going to make up some lame lie about how I refuse stims and crap. If I refused them, I wouldn't even be alive. Besides that, they're kickin' if you got a relationship goin on or somethin'. Anyway, this story isn't about my life after all, just the race.
Ever see the first Star Wars movie? The races start out kinda like the race in that. There's always a big turnout, and with the mines up there, not everyone makes it through. Everyone bets on the races. That's why no one but the pilots see and check on their planes right up until race day. People worry about sabotage.
Every year we have about three really good pilots and every tear at least one of them gets scrubbed out either in practice or the actual race. Needless to say, the not-so-good pilots hardly ever make it to the next race. They usually wind up getting to be part of the grim statistics someone puts out after every race.
So it's a high-risk game, but if you can hold title as winner for two years, you become like a species-wide hero. We get people from as far east as Arasiki coming to watch us pilots risk our fur.
Not like we mind playing lunatic and gambling with our lives. Flying by the seat of your pants at speeds that would normally make you chuck through an S-mine field under the influence of a stim that at any moment might send you straight into dreamland -although it doesn't seem like it would be- is fun. Strap yourself to a roller coaster and get a guy to shoot at you while you go around. If you live through it, you'll know what I mean. Or maybe you won't, maybe it's strictly a pilot thing.
Once a pilot beats the race, it's just as addictive as any stim. You gotta fly again. It'd be like something reached up and clipped your arms off otherwise. That's how I got dragged into this, anyway. I ran and beat the race for the first time when I was fourteen. I didn't win, but I've been racing ever since then.
The race itself only takes about twenty minutes, which seems really short at the time. You spend the rest of the year training. You race the mountains as fast as you can, sleep and build up a tolerance to the stim's crashing stage- that's your life if you're a pilot. When you go on test runs around the Red Mountains, you keep someone in ground contact. That way, if you go down, hopefully you'll be rescued.
You also race a different route every time. Just to keep you on your toes, and make sure no one wins just because of memorization.
