The Mechanic

      Grease looked at the car and knew that if he couldn't transform it into a machine that a human could drive in two days, Angie Masters would die on turn 3.
      He was the oldest of the mechanic androids left in service. It had been seventy years from his first activation. His internal power pack had been replaced twice, and he was well overdue for another. The millions of tiny servos in his hands were worn out, and they were unsteady for much of the work he knew how to do. There was no money to replace them. Angie needed a second set of tires if she was to finish the race, and he had ignored her wishes for him and bought them instead.
      He walked around the car once more, staring at it.
      He avoided thinking about Sharon too much. When the car had hit the wall, he was the first on the scene to pull her out, both of them covered in fire-retardant foam. The next day she fell into a coma. Complications with the concussion, it was said. Angie was with her now, at the bedside, for as long as it would last.
      But Sharon had qualified. The car had finished its last lap. With four laps at 340.57 mph, she placed 45th of 46.
      And now Angie wanted to drive the car.
      He took the oil-smeared cap from his steel head, the cloth white and blue striped, his name in cursive red letters across it. He threw it across the garage in frustration.
      After a minute or so, he went over to the corner, picked it up, dusted it off, and replaced it.
      He stared at the car again, in abstract concentration. It had passed inspection once before the qualifying. The ARRA would not inspect it again before the race. So he had some leeway to play with. When the car was taken to the Parc Ferm‚, the field where the cars would be inspected after the race, all his handiwork would be discovered, of course. But he had a plan for that, too.
      The inner guts of the Envi, the computer that had cost the last of the Masters' family fortune, were strewn across the hood. Angie had spent most of the previous night ripping them from the car and smashing them to pieces with a crowbar. He knew she blamed it for her mother's lingering state, which he knew was irreversible. His emotions, hidden away in the below-zero circuitry of his steel-titanium body, were ever realistic, however much they cropped up into his thinking.
      The car had skidded slightly in the rain, a chaotic variable that even the Envi could not completely encompass in its billions of calculations, and Sharon had immediately taken control back from the computer's merciless, perfect driving style. She had braked and it looked, at least to Grease and Angie, that she would at most lose a second or two from the slip. Not smash into the banked wall. Not burn.
      The Envi's decision, in its meticulous logs, was that she had overcompensated. Linked to her brain, seeing through her eyes, blinded by the smoke and the rain, it had taken back control and accelerated her directly into a wall it was sure was the ideal path.
      Grease took up a small, madly blinking part of circuit board and crushed it in his fist. He threw it back on the hood. A waste, he thought, of many things; silicon and engineering, Sharon and dreams.
      He had taught two generations of Masters how to drive like the great old racing legends. Harold Masters: rich, eccentric, tragically quadriplegic, had purchased him, the only computer of any complexity the great man had ever owned. He had fed Grease a diet of racing films two hundred years old. Interviews of drivers describing their styles, reference books on reference books on the maintenance and design of anything on wheels.
      Grease used that knowledge, first building a pair of sky-blue Chevelles, and under clear Arizona skies he taught the young, cocky Sharon how to race. He showed her how to control at high speeds, how to steer in traffic, how to pass at the beginning, middle, and end of all the different shapes of turns and their various apexes, how to use the slipstream and how to command the track, how to out-brake a more cautious opponent.
      And at every practice run, Harold Masters watched, from his prison of a wheelchair, the old scarred ruin of his face smiling at the distant high-pitched whine of engines. Sharon loved him, and Grease did whatever was necessary to make her and him happy. He built more cars, faster ones, and Sharon learned them all.
      But the man had died years ago and Grease was alone at the dusty track he had constructed for them, for over a year. Sharon had left, and when she came back, she had a child. Angie would be the second Masters that he would teach the art of driving.
      All of it was highly illegal and why Sharon had decided to compete in the ARRA was not something Grease had understood at first. No human drove, unless they wished the penalty of death. They were passengers, to be transported in their vehicles, piloted by comps that could make no mistake, could never crash. Only the professional racers, with the minds of chessmasters, ever touched a wheel, and even that was really a headset wired into their brains, to guide the comp within the hood. It alone made the driving decisions, guiding the cars around, the contest for the humans being guessing at the variability of the surface of the road, the condition of the tires, the humidity; a crapshoot on a molecular level. The brain only made the strategic moves, and every car finished within micrometers and milliseconds of the others.
      Maybe Sharon had really wanted to change things, Grease thought, like her father, who had been one of the last real drivers, before his accident. Harold Masters had never stopped lobbying against the laws, the ones that made auto racing the joke it was now, he'd said. Not until his damaged organs gave out for the last time.
      Now it was Angie.
      Grease had watched Angie the other day, timing her as she went barreling around the track, fueled by some inner hate. He knew she could take the hairpin of turn 3 almost without braking, that she had the real talent, the skill, that he only knew about from his recorded images and had not ever really seen in Sharon. Hers had been competence hammered out by an android; Angie was a rocket to be guided before she destroyed herself.
      He could not stop her. But he could help her.
      So he went to work.
      Grease knew design, and he knew emotion, in a raw way. He was not like the garage-size comps that produced ever-more perfect racing coupes and engines each year. He worked on his cars with his own metallic hands, as unsteady as they were, his pinioned forearms covered in oil and grease. He knew where everything went, without the benefit of eyes that could measure a bolt from a quarter-mile away. He looked at things and estimated, like any man, or with a tape measure. He loved his cars, for he had made them with his own hands, as he loved Sharon and her daughter, their engines kept running by him.
      He removed the last vestiges of the car's circuitry. Long into that night, he finished remodeling the survival shell with a close approximation of the interior of a 1982 Formula racing car. He sealed it over in death black, so no electric eyes would see inside, or notice that the blond-haired teenager to enter was not her mother. In the comp's place he put a transponder, that would transmit everything the Envi would have transmitted to the referee-comp telemetry system: speed, engine temperature, car status. The next day he aligned the active suspension and replaced the engine, coaxing more horsepower from the new one. They generally only lasted one race, from the terrible internal pressures they went through.
      He put the body, removed of the horrific dent in its left side, in a wind tunnel. Watching the white flows of air dance along its surface, he adjusted the rear wings to give the car the down-force Angie was used to; much less than any comp-driven car. The other wings he watched the air define with their flows, and adjusted by eye. She would have her speed. And she would have her danger, for this car would fly off a cliff into the Mediterranean if she let her mind from the wheel for a second. The track in Rome was long and designed by a madman, not an oval or a road track, but both and more, an Escher nightmare of banks and dips and hills.
      Grease occasionally wondered why Harold Masters had made him to duplicate that track here in the desert. It was almost as if he had foreseen this very race. He knew the old man's desire; Sharon would be the one to bring back the human element in racing. He had not lived long enough to see it, though. Or Angie.
      Grease sat in the car's seat, and felt out the space where the Envi had been with his metallic fingers. That's where I will have to be, he thought. Along with the explosives. He wondered what death was like, and came to the conclusion that it would probably be like any other sensation—interesting, perhaps triggering one of his few emotional impulses. He would have to keep Angie from it, however, if he could. She wasn't quite as old as he was.

      The girl came to see the car the day before the race, as Grease was rolling it out onto the practice track, into the bright desert sun. Her eyes were puffy from tears, her driving blouse rumpled.
      He looked at her. "It's ready for a run," he said.
      She nodded, almost absently.
      "She stopped breathing," she said.
      He didn't say anything for ten seconds.
      "I'm sorry."
      "I know."
      She wrapped her arms around his cold frame, his uniform stained from the work of the night before. He held her for a time, unsure of what to think.
      After awhile, she moved away, her head down. It raised again only when she came to the car.
      They walked around it and he explained what he had done to it.
      "They'll see all of this when they inspect after," she said, sighing.
      "I'm not a miracle worker. I could only make it less obvious."
      She smiled, but only a little.
      When she was in her three-layered overalls and fireproof gear, he strapped her into the seat and showed her the controls in the cramped space. She knew them; they had raced more than the sky-blue Chevelles, there on that track. Now she commanded a great black beast that hugged the ground, the inverted wing beneath its skirts giving it incredible traction, all of it more closely related to a jet than an automobile.
      Grease watched her destroy the remains of Sharon's rain tires in four laps. He did not need a watch to time her. 29.5 seconds best, 120.1 overall, 359.7 mph. She was fast and she didn't slip once. He was capable of pride and he felt it. She took the chicanes, the little twists in the track made to slow down the cars' average speed, at over 200, which he thought just might do.
      He got her out of the car and her only comment was that it under-steered a little.
      "Besides that, are you ready?" he asked.
      "Yes."
      "You have to pace yourself to win. It's a hundred and fifty laps, not four. You've only done it once."
      "I know that," she said. "You didn't buy the new hands for yourself."
      "There wasn't any money left."
      She lowered her head. She looked at her own wrists, the tendons and nerves in them augmented with the tiny slivers of metal necessary to link her to the Envi. "I know. After..."
      "I'm going with you," he interrupted.
      "Huh?" She stared at him, her eyes much like the sky or the old Chevelles.
      He doffed his cap, cradling it carefully in his hands. "You know you won't last the race without a comp. You're quick—you're young—but they will never make a mistake. You drive and I maintain the works."
      "You can't ride in the car! There isn't any room."
      "There's space. The Envi isn't there."
      She stared at him again. "No. You..."
      He smiled a little, the sun glinting off his face, his black eyes, the edge of his metal jaw.
      "I can't teach you anymore. I can only guide you." He paused. "I won't put you into the wall, Angie."
      She tried to grin it off. "You're not powerful enough, Grease. You're... old. They're all new and fast. They'll outclass you... and I'll lose you, dammit! You've already decided, haven't you?"
      "Something like that," he admitted.
      Angie Masters sat down in the dirt, and let her fingers trail through it some. She pushed her hair away from her face angrily. She didn't look at him for some time and he didn't say anything.
      Finally, she said, without looking towards him, "You can't go back, once you put yourself into the car, right? It doesn't work both ways, does it."
      "If you win, maybe. I don't know. You'll still have a car with a decent set of brains in any case."
      She laughed a little, nervously, and wiped at her eyes. "I don't want to lose you and Mom in the same week, ok? That's all."
      "I might say the same."
      She smiled and looked up.
      "Damn you. I wish you were... you know."
      "I wouldn't be any use to you tomorrow if I was."
      Silence covered them both then. He worked on the camber angle, and before the sun was down completely, she said the car was balanced. Evening came.

      "Welcome back, televiewers, to the 146th International Automated Auto Racing Association's main event—the Albano 600. The breaking news of the day is the recovery of Sharon Masters after her disastrous crash during qualifying runs three days ago. While interviews with her were not forthcoming, the 45th-placed black Chevrolet is warming up on the track right now, with the rest of the field..."
      Angie gripped the wheel. The course was cold and gray and lonely, and whether a soul could be discerned to reside within the other cars on the track, or among the gray walls without a single spectator about them that lined her universe, it did not matter. She was alone.
      You have me, Grease said in her mind.
      She smiled then, and the green flag was shown ahead, waved by a rigid robotic arm.
      The panels around her lit up, and he kept her wings balanced, the correct course for her to follow in her mind's eye, and her engine running.
      They made it around turn 3, and while the other cars moved along the ideal path with methodical patience, she blasted past them, causing several to spin madly out of control, their programming not including scenarios where the vehicle behind them was overtaking them at such great speeds. Where they slowed down, she went into sixth gear. She made her mistakes, of course. When she did, the small blinking metal box under the steering column, between her legs, took over and saved her.
      Millions of viewers stared agape at their screens, and when she had passed all forty-four in twenty laps, the voice in her head spoke again, through the three-dimensional visual display before her eyes.
      I think we're going to win. Everything looks good. Watch the engine temperature—I keep having to cut you back.
      "Grease!"
      What?
      "Shut up and let me drive."
      If he had been more than a machine, he would have laughed. They took the checkered flag sixty minutes later. The victory lap was short, for Angie could feel the tension in his voice.
      Listen, Angie. When the car is taken to be inspected, it's going to explode.
      The wheel jerked slightly in her hands.
      "What?"
      I put other things in this car. It'll be ruled sabotage from the evidence. I did have money for the hands, Angie, but I bought the explosives instead. They'll have to declare you the winner anyway. You'll have the prize money. Use it and live.
      "Explode? There's a bomb? Grease, I have to get you out!"
      You can't take me with you. I'm attached to it. I have to time things well. The inspectors will only get a few scratches. I can't say that much for the rest of the field.
      "Grease!"
      They drove slowly around the track, the excited voices of the commentators leaking onto her communications screen. A new record, they were saying.
      It's your last race. Others will suspect what you did, and follow your example. Your grandfather will get what he wanted—a real race. Perhaps he looks down on you now.
      There wasn't enough room for her to move her hands in the shell, so the tears slipped down her face, unchecked. "Why? Why didn't you tell me this?"
      Because it would have taken away your edge. Remember the old plan. Your mother will not die before this race ends. Slow down; there's a crowd.
      And indeed there was. A knot of people by the track; reporters, looming black mechanical cameras, steel-plated officials. They began to surround the car as it entered victory lane.
      "I'm going to tell them."
      No. You won't. Goodbye, Angie. Get inside before they see you without your helmet.
      "No!"
      And then the canopy was pulled back, and she was helped out, into a world full of shouted questions and bright lights. She wanted to take off the helmet, and let the cold air bite at her face, but the illusion had to be kept. She said nothing to any of them, paying little heed to the barrage of questions they threw at her. It was too easy not to look back at the car as she struggled to get through the crowd.
      But she did, before she escaped the press. The last time she saw him, he was being towed to the Parc Ferm.