LeeSki_SkiMore's SciFi Site: Future.Novel: Lev.UP, page 24

The old boarder, who happily listened to the crunch-rattle of gravel as it was squeezed
between the fat tires and the old, crumbling road surface, to occasionally rocket up into
the pod's undercarriage, was one the of the first generation of Stormers. OBee, once
legend, was almost forgotten, grounded, with someone else's board locked down to the
chase pod. OBee had literally been halved as he lay in his board as the pod's driver tried
to get to a launch position. Then a freak had hit him, stolen his life, but left him living.
Stormers had joked about the pods, calling them "road coffins" until OBee's accident
when they stopped joking.
Stormers expected freaks, but in the storms not on the ground. A young OBee and his
driver had been chasing a newly formed tornado down the storm blown debris strewn
plain. Only moments before OBee was to launch, the funnel bounced backwards as if it
had rebounded from a giant wall. Back it skipped back along its path as if chasing the
pod. The pod was squashed, his board crushed, folded, turned into trash. OBee was
turned into a freak. His driver turned into a corpse.
Freak generators by nature, a tornado changed so fast that prophetware could only
predict small slices of one. And, then only a second or two in the future, depending on
the comps' flops. It also took a special type of people processor, feeling the storm, to
make a top boarder. Servo mechs and logic flops weren't able to intuit what the prophet
didn't show. VR stormers, safe and insured, had fun and fans, yet only those who rode
the real storms, betting it all, got to be on the pro.sportsnet.
Rescue from the un-insured zone, as well as having to pay for his medware had cost
OBee all his private shares, plus more than a few favors. OBee had been on the divi.dole
after that. He was so old he would still rather interact without the digital domain. He
was an ancient RAM. He was a real analog man.
Once, years before, hacked at by some Elem.Levs on a field trip from what had been
left of the east coast. OBee had tried to explain the storms to the bunch of little VR-
primed know-it-alls. OBee clipped and pasted old Turner holos, and Sanyoized Six-D
VR's, then loaded it all onto into the local net for the kids to see. OBee's display began
with black ink, and spectral colors, that spun into oblivion. The roar of a hundred jet
planes thundered through the young heads. Audio set to max.lev, OBee said, "The winds
can tear you and your ride apart, as if you were a spacer caught in the gravity of a black
hole just like an old science fiction treeware story."
"Treeware..!" The reference to the primitive medium had solicited giggles and
fidgets. A big- footed book army of VR Disneys had appeared that marched through
OBee's carefully crafted celestial maelstrom, while kidware pixel.speak anime icons ha-
ha-ha'd in crayon-colored heavens.
"A storm is as close to a ride down a black hole as we'll ever get," said OBee, "ask the
astro.edu.net how long it will be before we have a black hole to play in."
Then a rising chorus of kidware sang to OBee, "but. . ., but. . ., but, but, but!"
"Okay, okay, if we had Light+ travel, really soon, we could play in black holes, but we
won't, no matter what the corporations say," said the disappointed old, boarder, as he
went lev.down to limited access to cut off their taunts.
The last of the Elem.Levs wandered off. As they did they played in boarding VRs or
pinned up news.files of old men and crashes with the unknowing cruelty of children.
"After all," OBee had thought, charitably, "they only know the world from an elem.lev
point of view."
The tired old boarder was just slipping into sleep when a hacking at his data door woke
him up. His diagnosticware lev.up, OBee found a lingering elem.lev, sporting a punked up
VR boarder persona, hacked into his net, nibbling at his boarding files.
OBee's identity query had returned: Dumaurier, Eller.