Chapter Four – Oxfordshire
Aleksandr Volkov – Obsidian HQ, Oxfordshire
Morning cut through the tinted glass like a scalpel.
Obsidian’s engineering suite was all edges and light: walls of screens, neat coils of cables, the quiet thrum of servers working harder than any human.
The company’s slogan stared down from the far wall—Precision.
Power. Perfection.—as if it were a judge and not a motto.
I slid into the simulator shell and let the belts bite across my shoulders. The cockpit hugged me with the familiar pressure of expectation. Up in the control room on the other side of floor-to-ceiling glass, Mac stood with a tablet, headset on, coffee cooling on a metal tray.
“Singapore baseline loaded,” he said. “Night race conditions, medium track temp. We’ll run three laps at banker pace, then push.”
“Copy.”
The wraparound screens bloomed into circuit: neon against black, floodlights flaring off painted kerbs, the city rising like a cage beyond the barriers. The motor in the platform hummed, the wheel alive under my hands. I breathed once, deep, and rolled the throttle in.
Turn One came at me like an accusation. Brake. Trail. Feed. The car in here wasn’t a car at all—an algorithm’s best guess at a monster I knew better than I knew my own heartbeat. Still, my hands did what they always did. Apex by feel. Power by faith.
“Entry’s a hair tight,” Mac said, voice flat, no judgement. “Turn Five, you’re pinching. Give it another foot of track.”
“Copy.”
Lap two. The city flickered around me; the halo frame sliced lights into bars. Somewhere behind the veneer of immersion, the platform hissed; fans pushed warm air at my knees. I placed the car where it should live.
“You’re early on throttle at Seven,” Mac said. “Back the rotation in, then go.”
“I am going.”
“Not yet.”
The word sat under my ribs a moment too long. I ran the braking markers again, line again, throttled earlier just to prove a point and fought the simulated snap when the rear protested. I caught it. Of course I caught it.
“Alright,” he murmured, like I’d won an argument he hadn’t voiced. “Again.”
By the end of lap three the delta strip at the top of my world was wrong.
Not red, not catastrophic—just a thin, smug line of green in places I hadn’t earned and a flicker of yellow where I never saw it in reality.
I knew this circuit. I knew where the car should breathe and where it should bite.
The model was perfect. The model was lying.
I exited the box and lifted my visor, the room snapping back from neon night to cold morning.
Mac was already scrolling. “Your hands are fast,” he said. “Your head’s… somewhere else, lad.”
“I am right here.”
He didn’t argue, which is how I knew he didn’t believe me. “Again after debrief.”
We took the windowed corridor to the briefing room, past glassed-in bays where floor panels shone like piano keys and technicians moved like surgeons. Obsidian didn’t do clutter. Even the air smelled expensive—ionised and cut with metal.
The debrief table was chrome and dark glass.
I sat where I always sat; Mac to my right; two power-unit engineers across; a vehicle-dynamics lead who never smiled to my left.
Callum Drake, my team-mate, slouched at the far end, scrolling through something on his phone with one boot hooked over the chair leg.
He looked like he’d rather be anywhere else, but he was listening—the twitch of his jaw gave him away.
He caught my eye, gave a lazy nod that might have been respect or resentment, and went back to pretending not to care.
Norton Ross arrived last, as if the world had waited. Team shirt tailored tight to his frame, chrome piping catching the light, smile engineered to reassure shareholders at a distance of a hundred metres.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, and then, with a nod in my direction, “and the conscience of the operation.”
“Simulator felt off through mid,” I said before he could shape the mood. “Especially Seven through Nine. Torque’s staged wrong on exit.”
Vehicle Dynamics cleared his throat. “The model’s built on Melbourne data and last year’s Singapore overlay. Within expected variance.”
“It’s not right.”
Ross folded himself into a chair, hands easy, voice easier. “And yet, Aleks, even when things feel not right you tend to make them look very right. Lap times?”
Mac’s tablet threw numbers to the big screen. “Within a tenth of baseline on softs, two tenths up on fall-off. He’s pinching entry at Five. We’ll iron it.”
I watched the traces stream past: throttle, brake, steering. In the lines, the car looked like a cathedral drawn by a patient god. In my hands, it had briefly felt like a lie.
“I want to see the torque map they’ve loaded into baseline,” I said.
The engineers exchanged a single glance. Tiny. Practised.
“It’s the same map you had in Melbourne,” the guy from Dynamics said. “Adjusted for ambient.”
“Then it’s wrong.”
Ross smiled as if we were discussing menu choices. “What’s wrong, specifically?”
“Feel.”
He spread his hands. “A priceless instrument, feel. But the model points elsewhere. Let’s not go… chasing ghosts.”
The phrase slid between my ribs the way a blade might: cold, precise, familiar. Elena’s voice, not his. Do rumours ever start with something real?
“Run it again,” I said. “I’ll find the time without you.”
“We’d never dream of stopping you finding time,” Ross replied, silk over steel. “But remember we’re not in Singapore tonight. We’re in Brackley, and we have a calendar. Press at three. Sponsor walk-through at four. Social clips at five. Smile and slow movements. Don’t frighten the interns.”
A vein in my jaw ticked. “I’d rather drive.”
“And we’d rather win hearts while we’re winning races.” He grinned. “Imagine the efficiency.”
Mac nudged a bottle of water towards me. The cap clicked under my thumb; I drank. When I put it down, my hand was steady again.
“Another run,” I said. “Give me the cold track map and a green surface.”
“We’ll slot it in before the press get here,” Mac said in his rough Scottish accent.
Ross rose, smoothing an imaginary crease. “That’s the spirit.”
As he passed my chair, he laid two fingers on my shoulder. A touch that said ‘my driver’ for anyone watching. For me, it just felt like weight.
From the far end of the table, Callum stretched and let his chair rock back.
“Well,” he said lightly, “always a pleasure watching perfection in motion.”
The room gave a polite ripple of laughter, thin as paper. Ross smiled like he’d rehearsed it.
But when I glanced at Callum, his eyes weren’t smiling. He met my gaze for a heartbeat, then dropped it back to his phone.
“Keep up the good work, everyone,” Ross said as he strode from the room. And just like that, the meeting dissolved.
The second run came closer. I hit the kerbs with the assurance the car liked. I breathed where the circuit asked. The delta obeyed.
“Better,” Mac said into the quiet. “That’s you. Bank it.”
I lifted from the belts and wiped a forearm across my temple. The simulator heat clung, stale and artificial. “It never feels like the car.”
“It isn’t.”
“That’s the problem.”
He watched me a moment, and in that moment he looked older than he let himself be. “You’re thinking about something that isn’t the track.”
“It’s handled.”
“By who?”
I stared past him at the wall where the motto glared. “By me.”
He didn’t push. He never did, not head-on. “Lunch. Then you’ve got cameras.”
“Joy.”
He cracked a smile, brief as a twitch. “We can swap if you want. I’ll do the pretty boy poses; you can spend all afternoon reconciling power unit logs.”
“Tempting.”
He knocked on the side of the sim once, two sharp knuckles on carbon. “Eat.”
The PR studio had been carved out of a corner of the building that got the most flattering light. Terri fussed with collar and crest until the logo sat centre chest and every sponsor read clearly.
“We’re going for human,” she said. “Relaxed, confident, not cold. Think… approachable mountain.”
“Mountains aren’t approachable.”
“Of course they are. People climb them all the time.”
Three short interviews. Smiling answers to smiling questions.
A slow-motion shot of me walking past the car with a reflective look on my face.
B-roll of my hands on a steering wheel that wasn’t connected to anything.
A sound bite about Melbourne. A softer one about “respecting the field.” A clean one about “the fans.”
“Perfect,” the videographer said. “Could we get one more take of the smile at the end?”
“That was the smile.”
He laughed and didn’t ask again.
In the corridor, Terri matched my stride, tablet hugged to her chest. “One small thing.”
“Nothing’s ever small.”
“Ross wants you at a sponsor dinner on Thursday with Charles Laurent and a few others. Black tie. He figures it’ll play well given the… noise.”
My fingers flexed, the watch suddenly heavy around my wrist. “Which noise?”
She tried and failed not to flinch. “The kind that sells papers.”
“Cancel it.”
“I can move it,” she said gently. “I can’t cancel it.”
We reached the lift. The doors opened onto our reflections: a man carved into an emblem and his eager assistant.
“One week to Singapore,” she added. “Plenty of time to reset. You’ll be yourself by then.”
“I am myself.”
“Then be the version they can use.”
The doors slid shut. My face became a smear in brushed steel.
That night London spread itself out under my windows: a patient animal, breathing in light. The penthouse was quiet in the way expensive places are—sound softened by distance and design. I left the TV on mute and let the captions talk to an empty room.
A highlight reel flickered: start lights, Turn One chaos, a surge of black and chrome leaving everything behind. Me on a podium I’d stood on too often to remember; a hand lifted; a bottle sprayed; a smile that didn’t reach my eyes.
The programme cut to the press conference. The subtitles put mine and Elena’s words in neat white letters:
RUMOURS DON’T WIN RACES.
DO THEY EVER START WITH SOMETHING REAL?
The camera found my face at that moment. Calm. Remote. A statue that talked.
I turned the screen off and the flat went dark enough to fit my mood. The fridge hummed. Somewhere below, a siren dopplered past, a blue and red smear against glass.
I tried to sleep. The bed was too soft. The pillow too perfect. Every time I closed my eyes I saw floodlights strobing across the halo and heard a voice at my ear that didn’t belong there:
Keep digging, and you’ll find something. Just make sure it’s not your own grave.
I got up before dawn and ran until the cold air burned the ache out of my lungs.
When I came back, the city had lightened from graphite to ash.
My phone blinked on the counter: schedules, a message from Ross with a link I didn’t open, a note from Mac—sim at ten, cold map loaded—and one I didn’t expect from an unknown number:
Congrats on the win. See you in Singapore.
No name. I deleted it and stared at the empty notification like it might admit it was still there.
Time moved the way it always does between races: days poured through a funnel of routine until only departure remained.
The factory swallowed me and spat me out; the sim negotiated with my hands until they made peace with a model that would never be flesh; the PR machine took its pictures and printed its posters.
Ross floated through it all, smiling the way men do when the numbers answer every question.
On the last afternoon, I stood in the wind-cut quiet beside the charter steps at a private terminal and watched mechanics heft flight cases like they weighed nothing.
The sky over Heathrow was a flat, patient grey.
The aircraft’s fuselage was white as a tooth.
A driver whose name I never learned took my bag and melted back into anonymity.
“Aleks?” Terri had to raise her voice above the turbines. “They’re ready for you.”
I nodded and climbed. At the top of the stairs I paused, one hand on the rail, and looked out at the runway lights beginning to bloom along the edge of the world.
Precision. Power. Perfection.
I said it in my head the way some men pray. The words tasted like metal.
Rumours don’t win races.
Maybe. But they ruin sleep.
I stepped into the cabin’s hush, took my seat, and buckled in.
Across the aisle Mac was already asleep, mouth slanted, headphones jammed into a pocket like a stubborn idea.
Terri tapped at her tablet; a spreadsheet glowed against her face.
At the front, Ross laughed softly at something a sponsor had said, the sound easy as water.
The door sealed. The engines wound up. London fell away in threads of gold.
Singapore ahead. Floodlights. Heat. A woman with a story and a stare that put hairline cracks in things I’d once believed were unbreakable.
I closed my eyes and mapped the circuit in my mind.
When the lights go out, there is only the car.
On the track, I’m in control.