Chapter Sixty-Two – Attempting Common Sense

Chapter Sixty-Two – Attempting Common Sense

“The average hover vehicle isn’t that much more expensive than what you would have paid for a new car in 2025, accounting for inflation.

The difficulty lies in all the fees, taxes, and hidden costs that come after the vehicle has been locked into a payment plan. The driver needs a license, needs to enter the gacha with the Ministry of Transportation for permission to use the airroads, and needs to pay for the three different insurances necessary to use a vehicle. That doesn’t include refueling cost, either for fossil-fuel powered vehicles, or the KW/H rate for electric vehicles. Nor does it take into account the cost of things such as parking spaces and obligatory maintenance, or the cost of the subscription services that allow the driver to use their mirrors or anti-collisions assistance.”

–The True Costs: An Analysis of the Roads of Today, 2041

***

My grip on the handles tightened and I grit my teeth as I narrowly avoided braining myself on the overhang over the hotel’s entrance hangar.

I shot out over the city and through a lane of busy traffic. Automatic proximity horns blared in warning as I cut in between two vans, then turned so that I just barely managed to slip in between two skyscrapers.

I threw my weight to the side and slowed down to a hovering stop over the city. “Oh, shit,” I breathed.

You might want to consider letting the hovercycle’s autopilot take care of any future flying.

“Yeah?” I asked as my heart started to calm down. I glanced down and felt a bit of vertigo tugging at my stomach as I saw the ground far, far below. I was over a few skyscrapers, the lights pouring out of their layered windows acted like an arrow to the street below, only broken up by sky bridges that lead from one building to another.

A lane of traffic some fifty metres down created a blurry mess of cars in every shade of monochrome in the foreground.

I swallowed past the wriggling in my chest and took a few more breaths while focusing on the horizon, instead of the drop. It helped a bit. “I didn’t think I had a fear of heights, you know,” I said.

Perhaps the different circumstances are what’s causing your vertigo?

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. I’d never seen the city from this high up without being in a hovercar, or atop a nice, stable building. This was different. I was basically straddling a piece of high-tech machinery that was between me and a very long fall. “I think I wanna learn how to fly this thing, a little.”

Certainly. I’ll turn on the flight-assist mode. It will correct any major mistakes you make and give you some hints. It isn’t as capable as actual learning software, but it should assist.

A few images appeared over my vision, especially as I looked down. A superimposed image of the handles being twisted back and forth to tell me how to give the hovercycle fuel, and instructions on how to use the pedals to aim the cycle up and down. “Neat,” I said. “We’ll go slow, I think. Ah, can you point me towards our destination?”

Do you intend to arrive there the standard way, or did you intend to arrive in a more violent fashion?

“Let’s go in through the front door,” I said.

Understood. Mapping your trajectory now.

I blinked as a second overlay appeared before me, an opaque line that cut across the city, then down in between the maze of skyscrapers. “Simple enough,” I said.

I did start off slow. Even the mom-vans below me were zipping by as I worked to angle the front of my hovercycle along the line I saw, then gave it a bit of gas. I overshot the first turn a little, but there was more than enough room to realign myself, and on the second I turned a little more aggressively, some of the little jets at the front of the cycle burping out little lines of flame that helped the bike turn. There were levers near the handles that controlled those, but for now the bike was controlling them automatically.

The line leading me on veered off and around one of those more artsy skyscrapers, the sort that didn’t want to be just another large rectangle covered in neon ads, and instead turned into some modernism mish-mash of vague shapes squished together and covered in neon ads.

I hugged the walls of the skyscrapers to slip around a row of hovercars, then levelled off next to an entrance in the bottom quarter of a building.

My bike dipped down, the rear wheel touching the pavement with a lurch just as I came up to an automatic toll-booth.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Do you want to hack into that booth?

“Eh, I guess? Wait, what would set off fewer alarms?” I asked. The parking garage was… a parking garage. A lot of lifts designed to hold cars on multiple floors, and tight roads that probably made it a bitch to find a place to stash someone’s car.

Are you genuinely concerned about stealth?

“Well, it’s my gimmick, isn’t it?”

I thought your gimmick was more trying to be stealthy and failing, but I’m always eager to see you try new things.

I grumbled as I rolled my hovercycle closer to the toll booth, then let the booth scan the bike. I was about to tell Myalis that I’d pay normally, to avoid setting off any anti-hack alarms, when the cost of the parking flashed up on screen. “Oh fuck no, we’re not paying that,” I said.