Hiiragi sat there for a long moment, breathing hard. Then she dismounted, legs trembling, and looked back at the shaft. Nine hundred meters of impossible turns. And she’d conquered every one.
The K-DRIVE’s screen flickered, then displayed words she hadn’t programmed:
She opened the maintenance panel one last time. The black-box recorder was still blinking.
She straddled the bike, felt its warmth through her racing suit. “K-DRIVE,” she said, “execute final route: Spiral Down.” Hiiragi--39-s Practice Diary -Final- -K-DRIVE--
The tunnel swallowed her. G-forces pressed her chest against the tank. The K-DRIVE banked left, then right, its stabilizers screaming as they fought to keep her glued to the curved wall. A normal bike would have spun out. A normal rider would have blacked out.
If she crashed, there’d be no diary entry after this one.
“Shut up and hold on,” she said, but she was grinning. Hiiragi sat there for a long moment, breathing hard
“One last ride,” she whispered.
The AI, which she’d programmed years ago with a voice chip from a broken toy, responded in its childish, crackling tone: “You got this, Hiiragi. Let’s fly.”
Silence.
She didn’t stop.
Hiiragi knelt beside the bike and opened the maintenance panel. Inside, tucked next to the flux capacitor, was a folded piece of paper—the first page of her original diary, written in smudged pencil.
“Goodbye, partner.”