It was my sixteenth birthday, and everyone had given me a present except my uncle. As night approached, he beckoned me outside, whispering, “I have a country place no one knows about. It used to be a farm, before the Motor Law…”
That Sunday, eluding my father’s eyes, I hopped a turbine freight and rode it far past the edge of the city’s wireless, to where my white-haired uncle waited.
“This,” he pronounced, pointing at an old barn, “is your present!”
I followed him inside—
where, heaped upon the floor: a small mountain of rusted metal: sheets, rods and bolts:
“Motor parts.”
As I touched the artifacts, my uncle pressed a button; the mountain shook; and slid apart, revealing:
A brilliant red Barchetta
“From a better vanished time,” he said.
“Does it run?” I asked, choking from excitement, from the illegality of this possession and my uncle’s willingness to share it with me.
He smiled, and we got in.
The inside smelled of well-weathered leather. I reclined in the passenger’s seat. My uncle fired up the willing engine.
The barn doors opened—
And out we shot: through them and onto the nearest road, dust rising behind us, engine roaring and everything smelling of hot metal and oil mixing with scented country air…
Life was good.
Soon, my uncle took to letting me take the driver’s seat.
I can’t begin to describe what my first time was like. The adrenaline surge, the wind in my hair, the landscape a blur, every nerve aware: of the bond between man and machine, as we raced, spitting up gravel…
One day, I asked my uncle if I could take the Barchetta out on my own.
“Not yet,” he said. “You’re not experienced enough.”
Although I knew he was right, I craved making the machine my own. And one night, after passing across the edge of the city’s wireless, I slipped into the barn on my own; slid apart the metal heap on my own; and fired up the engine on my own—
Speeding along the roads alone—
Sunlight on chrome—
When suddenly, ahead of me, across the mountainside, I saw a gleaming alloy car two-lanes wide:
Police!
I spun around with shrieking tires, went screaming into the valley—
They joined my deadly race:
Both of us straining the limits of machine and man—
CRASH!!
…my body…
…pain…
…drilling and sawing…
mangled bones melded to bent metal. My heart is engine. My machine-body coated in blood. “I am Red Barchetta!” I roar, ripping free from the restraints in the goverment lab. Scientists run screaming. I crush; grind. Their flesh is nothing to me; their lab is nothing. Crumbled and burning: I leave it behind.
Racing back to my uncle’s farm, where I find him sitting by the fire—
“My mechanical god!”
Everyone but my uncle thinks I’m dead.
Every Sunday we go out wrecking. Alloy melded to burned police bodies. And, methodically, we are assembling a dream: a man-machine army to overturn the Motor Law!