Batey Ascending

I was down, and it felt like I was out. I saw the skills that it took to make a league team and it wasn’t in me. They were on another level I couldn’t reach, so I started to give up. Just pack it in, find something else to do. Movies, walk-around, augmented reality; humanity was bouncing back hard and high with new tech and new ways to pass our time in space.

There was just something about New Batey that hit me, something about the way they set it up, the way people were passionate about it. Back on Earth I didn’t have much. I was lucky to get to watch TV from the hallway when my dad was taking up the whole living room with himself and a bottle.

But man, I loved sports. I played outside everyday trying to convince myself I was training to come up as an athlete. I was put down all the time as a dumb kid, never amount to anything, all that harmful jazz and I never believed it, but I thought, why worry about getting smart when I can show myself off another way?

The same way everyone on Gibraltar was holding tight to their past, to Earth’s history and the culture we left behind by resurrecting it up in space, I was doing the same. Things changed so much, but they also stayed the same. I felt like this was my real chance to finally make it.

And that’s when I met Dr. Arden. I met him as he was getting shoved out of a storage unit with a box full of weird scrap and tech objects that looked important. He’s a small guy with big red hair, taking up that post-apoc no-grooming style for what seemed like a while.

“Hey man,” I greeted. He looked up excited, like we were old friends reuniting or something, and rushed over to push the box into my arms. It was kind of heavy and I could tell he was looking for some help.

“Oh good,” he said, all nasal sound, “you came to help me! I - I thought those braids were part of your helmet.”

“What?”

“Anyway, you’re just in time,” he went on, just assuming my mistaken identity was right. “These - these impatient, scum… have deemed it necessary to evacuate my laboratory while I was in the middle of some breakthrough research for the team!”

“The team?”

“Yes, yes, your team! Now come on, while we have the time, I need to get into the locker room to finish up. Because SOME PEOPLE appreciate HARD WORK!” He bellowed it back to someone who just blew him off with their hand. I helped him anyway. Even someone with some harsh NCred could boost another person up from a charity effort. So why not. And a team? I figured it was worth checking out just for that.

And that’s how I met Team Absolute. Absolute Black, the front man and poster model, IND23, semi-cyborg who was born blind and disfigured replaced his face with a heavy duty mask, Tyger who was the rough young blood that couldn’t handle the speed or the angles of 3D flight, and Gorri, the leader.

“Arden!” Gorri shouted. He grabbed the scientist on his collar and kind of yanked him close, in a really assertive but friendly way. “Who’s the new guy?”

Arden looked back and forth between me and IND23 and got embarrassed. “Oh, just a high-Cred citizen helping me keep my possessions from scattering across the ground.” IND23 came and got the box from me. A pair of Flash Flight shoes kind of tumbled out from the top and I caught them.

“Be extremely careful with those, please!” Arden shouted. “Those are the culmination on all of my research into free flight and multi-adjustable vector speed!”

“Are they fast?” I asked. Arden’s eyes lit up as an answer. Then Gorri came and took them from me.

“You want to try them out?” he asked. I figured out what was going on. It was a Batey team, and I was in their locker room. It was tiny, not even half the size of my own room in the shared housing complex. Their team symbol was a capital A, short and simple, bold, and black print.

“Yeah,” I affirmed. We bantered a little about my experience, I had to admit I’ve only ever scored one point in an unofficial match against a league team.

“That’s probably one more point than they were ready to lose,” Gorri said. “All it takes is one. Whichever team has even just one point higher, zero to one, at the end, they’re the winners.”

“Yeah,” I uttered. “But, well, I just don’t do that well in a Sphere for too long, you know? Like, physically.” I shook my hands over my stomach to see if he was getting it.

“We’ve got solutions for that,” he disclosed. “First off, let me see what you can do.” He handed me the shoes. I felt raw power inside of them when I held them up. I slipped them on carefully, like I was handling glass slippers, and tapped them on. I was off the ground instantly. Like, way too fast, just a couple of inches but it felt like I just forgot the whole time in-between.

And then I started flying. Like really flying. The most I can say for any other Flash Flight shoe before then was that I was hovering really fast, losing my weight, and just coasting around at high speeds. This was true flight. And it kind of hurt.

When I got down, I was exhausted. “Your body is not adjusted to the G-force strength the boots can output yet,” Arden said. “But you handled them exceptionally! You even kept within the Sphere the whole time!”

“They threw you out for those?” I asked.

“What’s going on here?” A woman’s familiar voice was heard questioning the situation. When she walked in, I was still on the floor, and that’s not how I like to present myself to ladies. I forced myself to stand up and took a look at her.

The last time I saw my sister, we were still on Earth, but I still remembered her face. She had a stiff upper lip, never smiled, or frowned, always looking ahead to something more hopeful she couldn’t reach, always bitter at our life.

But I could tell, just at a glance, that she was still Chilly, a cold girl out on her own, up in space and now reunited with her only brother.

~~~