A Track of Color Among the Wars

by Rodrigo Culagovski

The concrete ramps curve through the forest, down and down the hillside, under the trees, with bridges over ravines and high, sloping sides on the harder turns. The twisting track is covered in graffiti—pig heads and post-humanist symbols, and flowers. So many flowers.

The local, misspent youths climb up the mountain—they can’t afford the private mag-shuttles—sweating and out of breath with their boards on their backs and rolls of stolen solarfoil that they unroll and plug into. When the lights beep green and play their cheery da-da-dah, they yell their antiwar cry and jump their boards onto the track with tricks and spins and wipeouts, laughing.

The boards are modded fractal runners scavenged from military transports from the microwars that their fathers, sisters, and grandfathers died and killed each other in. The thirteen and fourteen-year olds spend their nights fixing the boards’ electronics, patching up broken pieces with epoxy instead of studying infantry tactics or zero-day exploits like they’re supposed to. They pass around the decades-old AR rig they traded three months of protein rations for and watch their drawings dance in mid-air above their boards.

Then down, down, around they flow. The old luge-track shakes and shimmies, ecstatic to once more be part of a race, thirsting for the movement, the speed, the falls. It’s supposed to be left over from something called Olympics, when people came from other parts of the world to play games with each other instead of shoot and bomb and burn, but this sounds like a fairy tale to the kids—nobody really believes it. The track is here, though—that’s enough.

They don’t race each other, they race themselves, daring to go faster, farther, trick the ground-effect so they jump over the gaps in the concrete where the cement has worn down and you can make out the rusted steel bones that shouldn’t be visible at all, under the branches grown low with nobody to prune them so they hit you on the head if you don’t squeeze flat on your back like a high-speed limbo.

The track is more broken-down each year. They know that some day—if they live long enough and don’t get caught up in the old war or one of the new ones, piloting incendiary drones, patching up battledogs, or sweating in some mobile command center one step ahead of the tactical nukes—they’ll climb, out of breath, with their hand-painted, patched-together boards on their backs and it will all have crumbled and won’t be a track anymore, just a relic, a bunch of rotten concrete with flecks of color falling off. The races will be over.

But not today, not this day so cold you can see your breath. The track is here, under the forest, the light glowing green through the tree leaves, late-morning birds crying out to each other like the racers as they slide down and down, spinning around the painted concrete in the hills above the old town between wars.

Rodrigo is a Chilean architect, designer, and web developer. He misses his Commodore 64. Pronouns he/him/él. SFWA | Codex | ALCiFF
On Bluesky as @culagovski.net