The Universe of WipEout

[NeroIcaras]

Hello again to anybody (if there's anybody) reading this! I decided to write a slightly more personal and close-up account of one of the great rivalries of the F5000 era: Qirex's bombastic Finn, Jarvi Kukkonen, versus the mysterious and calculating Brazilian Piranha pilot, Luis Mosquera dos Santos. All content is my own fictional imagining of the WipEout universe: please don't conflate these for real, lore-based characters. While they do exist within the WipEout universe, they are entirely fictional characters of my own creation. With that said, enjoy!

Famous Rivalries: Jarvi Kukkonen vs Luis Mosquera dos Santos

“...and that’s Qirex’s young protege - that’s Kukkonen - he’s going for the Piranha! Can he, will he…yes! With inches to spare, the crazy Finn scrapes past Lin! Jarvi Kukkonen wins the first race of his career, no doubt the first of many, here at Vostok Island!”
- Vostok Island race commentary, 2105 F5000 season rd. 7 of 8

“...dos Santos wasn’t a name on anyone’s lips last year, but everyone sure as hell knows him now. With his win last week at Sagarmatha, the question everyone’s asking is not if, but when dos Santos will win a title, and who’s going to be his competition?”
- The Official F5000 League Datasheet, vol. 22, issue 4 (April 2106)

The early days of the F5000 saw the continuation of the titanic battle between old foes Qirex and Auricom. From the league’s inaugural season in 2085 to 2100, Qirex and Auricom won six titles apiece, with AG Systems scraping two titles courtesy of Masahiro Tanaguchi and famed French-Canadian pilot Lucy Lavoie. Piranha, of course, won their debut showing with Xueyi Lin and the dominant 2097-season chassis before reverting to a more standardized craft for the following year. German pilot Pascal Engelhart retired at the end of the 2100 season after winning five world titles; the most since Kel Solaar retired nearly forty years earlier. The status of his titles (three for Qirex and two for Auricom) left the former team resentful of his exit and the latter wary of his sudden defection: the German later claimed the constant suspicion from Auricom and the bitterness of Qirex as the reason for his retirement.

“I am simply a pilot; an uncommonly gifted and lucky pilot, perhaps, but I am still a human being inside my g-suit and cockpit harness. The vitriol between these two great names has driven me from this sport I used to love; it has to stop, and it has to stop now.” Engelhart said in a press conference the following year.

Indeed, as more and more old faces of the F3600 and F5000 retired, it looked as if that was it for the old Auricom vs. Qirex rivalry. Piranha returned in full force with Portugal’s Ariel Monteiro, and the rapid improvement of AG-Systems saw Frenchman Nicolas Renaudin win four titles in seven years. While Auricom were doomed to languish in the midfield for another two decades, Qirex’s resurgence came much sooner - and against a most unlikely opponent.

Jarvi Kukkonen was born an only child in the port city of Jakobstad, Finland on July 10th, 2079: his father was a Finnish Navy patrolman, and from a young age Jarvi took after his father and developed an interest in mechanics. By the time he was ten, he had assembled his own boat, and would regularly race around Jakobstad harbour at breakneck speeds. One day, while he was unloading a trawler at the docks, young Jarvi caught sight of an F5000 league race on a fisherman’s holo-unit. Entranced by the lurid lights and glittering speed of AG racing, he ran straight home and begged his parents to let him buy a junior craft, and start competing in the local cadet leagues; he’d certainly saved up enough money from his time at the docks. To his surprise, both parents said no; his father considered it a frivolous, daredevil’s sport, and they were deadset on getting Kukkonen into what they considered an honorable career in the Navy. It was clear they weren’t going to budge. So he bought a craft in secret and stashed it in an abandoned warehouse across town. Taking the alias of Juha Mikkelsen (an old school-friend, he would later reveal), Kukkonen began winning enough cadet category races - both sanctioned and illegal - across Finland to amass a sizable nest egg. On his seventeenth birthday, he returned to his home for a final, bitter goodbye to his parents, and left Jakobstad for good. He never spoke to his parents again, to the best of everyone’s knowledge - why he refused contact remains a mystery.

Originally aiming for FEISAR’s Study HQ (then located in Augsburg, Germany), Kukkonen soon realised that the competition was too well stacked, and the European team’s results far too lacking for his liking. Over the next three years, Kukkonen (still under his Mikkelsen alias) won several junior trophies and championships, including the 2099 edition of the Madrid-Riga endurance. The attention of the AG racing world was piqued; who was this mysterious stranger, laying waste to the European racing scene and promptly vanishing? That question was swiftly answered by 2103, when Kukkonen appeared on the F5000 grid, racing not for FEISAR but for Qirex! Although he joined during a short slump in the team’s fortunes, Kukkonen put up some respectable performances against world champion teammate Ariel Monteiro. By the time of his first race win at the end of the 2105 season, the Finn was already hotly-tipped as a future world champion.

Enter his nemesis, Brazilian pilot Luis Mosquera dos Santos. Born in the favelas of Manaus, dos Santos gave his birthday as February 22nd, 2083; however, significant doubt over the legality of his identification papers leaves most information about dos Santos himself as an uncertainty. The Brazilian remained tight-lipped about his past throughout his career, and it was only after his death in 2174 that details of his misspent youth among the Brazilian criminal underground emerged. Dos Santos had been a getaway pilot and smuggler for the Brazilian communist triad A Mao Que Agarra (“The Grasping Hand”). As a piloting prodigy, the young dos Santos was able to carry large quantities of illegal goods across South America in record time, and his youth made him much less likely to arouse suspicion. Little is known of how dos Santos split from the triad; however, it is thought that a failed plot to detonate a ‘backpack’ miniature nuclear device in Sao Paulo in June 2102 resulted in the fracturing of the group. Nevertheless, a few months later dos Santos was able to register for Piranha Advancements under a false identity along with his older brother, Guilherme. It is still unknown whether Luis Mosquera dos Santos is his real name, or whether the Brazilian operated under an alias for his entire life.

After acing Piranha’s piloting exam, the mysterious and enigmatic dos Santos trained in earnest, and was eventually called up to pilot Piranha’s 2105 craft alongside aging champion Xueyi Lin. Pairing an established talent with such a wildcard young rookie seemed a strange decision. While Lin won that year’s world championship (her last of two titles), dos Santos remained fairly anonymous all year, his best finishes a trio of third places in Canada, Germany and Ukraine. While his brother Guilherme was well-liked among the pit crew he found himself in, dos Santos was a far more taciturn individual, preferring solitude. One of his chief technicians was quoted as saying “...I have no idea how he responds to our feedback so well, considering I’ve heard him speak maybe twenty words all year.”

Unbeknownst to dos Santos, Kukkonen and their respective teams, the stage was set for a rivalry that would define both their careers for decades to come.

The 2106 season was expected to be a straight fight between Qirex and Piranha; Kukkonen would be fighting his Austrian teammate Pieter Wuelfrath for the title, while dos Santos was expected to form line astern behind another title bid for Lin. Talon’s Reach, the season opener, was a rather uneventful affair; the Qirex pilots finished first and second, with Lin bringing up the final podium spot and Santos scraping into fifth behind the AG-Sys of Nicolas Renaudin. The Nepalese round of the championship is where things got interesting. After Lin was eliminated by an early plasma bolt from Kukkonen, dos Santos embarked on a rampage of revenge against the Finn; the two of them battled for lap after lap over the lead of the race, neither giving an inch. Eventually, the Brazilian fired a missile at point-blank range into the left hull of his opponent’s Qirex: Kukkonen, heavily damaged and dropping back to third, could only watch as dos Santos took a dominant maiden victory. Following that round of the championship, the rankings looked like this:

1. P. WUELFRATH (AUT): 17pts.
Qirex-RD
2. L. M. DOS SANTOS (BRA): 12pts.
Piranha Adv.
3. J. KUKKONEN (FIN): 12pts.
Qirex-RD
4. N. RENAUDIN (FRA) 6pts.
AG-Systems

Kukkonen, an unusual hothead among his Finnish contemporaries, was quick to rage at dos Santos for his unnecessary closeness while firing the missile; the unflappable Brazilian replied that the Finn should do his talking “on the track, where it really counts.” This set the tone for the rest of the season: the Finn and Brazilian would engage in a year-long feud, exchanging weapon fire and terse words all season long. Despite winning two more races, Kukkonen’s constant fighting meant he was unable to truly challenge his teammate Wuelfrath, who walked away with the 2106 title by 55 points to the Finn’s 48. Of particular note was a lengthy and desperate battle between dos Santos and Kukkonen at Gare d’Europa; with Wuelfrath a distant fourth, the two pilots were once again fighting for the lead. Both on the edge of their shield energy levels, dos Santos knew his time was up when he saw Kukkonen’s rocket appear in his rear cameras. Instead of attempting to dodge the blast, dos Santos slowed and spun his craft around mid-corner, so the explosion not only destroyed his craft, but took Kukkonen’s Qirex with it. Despite an official enquiry ruling dos Santos’s maneuver “legal evasive action”, Kukkonen viewed the incident as “the cheating that robbed me of a championship” and vowed revenge against dos Santos. Heading into 2107, the message was clear: this was personal.

The year was dominated by hard-fought, venomous battles. Once again, the two pilots took more points off each other than they could afford, allowing Renaudin to win his fourth and final title for AG-Systems. Kukkonen became famous for his lengthy tirades against dos Santos and the Piranha team’s “perversion” of AG racing’s purity and precision, while the seldom-spoken dos Santos often remarked bitterly about how the lead pilot of one of AG racing’s greatest teams was mewling like a frightened kitten about aggression that was fully legal, as per the Race Commission's lengthy regulations. Datacast ratings for both Piranha and Qirex were sky-high, and both teams showed blistering speed in pre-season testing: 2108 was to be the grudge match between Kukkonen and dos Santos, and everyone knew it.

At Talon’s Reach, the two of them streaked off into the distance, exchanging fastest lap after fastest lap. The Brazilian pilot held off his Finnish rival to win that day, only to find the situation reversed in Sagarmatha as Kukkonen won by over half a minute, one of the largest winning margins in league history. The next round, at the Valparaiso circuit in Chile, was widely regarded as dos Santos’s favourite track, and the closest thing the Piranha team had to a home crowd. Perhaps that’s why Kukkonen seemed to take it as his mission to ensure dos Santos never reached the podium. Barely a corner of the circuit went by without the two exchanging weapon fire; dos Santos ended the race in a retrieval pod, while Kukkonen barely limped home to a fifth-place finish. AG-Systems pilot Russell Cox managed to take the race win; it would be the only race of the 2108 season not won by either Kukkonen or dos Santos.

The rest of the season was a dogfight between the two sworn enemies. Kukkonen would win in France and at Vostok Island, his self-proclaimed ‘favourite’ circuit. Dos Santos would strike back with further wins in Germany and Ukraine. Soon, the season finale rolled around at Spilskinanke, and the ranking tables were practically aflame with tension:

1. L. M. DOS SANTOS (BRA): 51pts.
Piranha Adv.
2. J. KUKKONEN (FIN): 51pts.
Qirex-RD
3. P. WUELFRATH (AUT): 35pts.
Qirex-RD
4. R. COX (GBR): 28pts.
AG-Systems

This was a level of closeness the championship hadn’t seen since the Lavoie/Engelhart battles nearly two decades earlier, and the first time the championship had been tied going into the final round since 2091. Datacast ratings were practically booted into the stratosphere; an estimated 4.3 billion people tuned in around the world (and off of it) for the epic conclusion to the 2108 season.

Dos Santos had qualified on pole position, but Kukkonen was right next to him, and as usual, the two rocketed away from the rest of the grid, setting lap times several seconds faster than even their teammates. Exchanging speed pad after speed pad, weapon after weapon, the two pilots were separated by mere tenths of a second, even as they were fifteen seconds clear of Wuelfrath and Cox battling away for third. A missile followed by a barrage of mines from the Piranha seemed to leave Kukkonen a few seconds adrift, but the singularly focused Finn would set four fastest laps of the race - including a Spilskinanke lap record - in succession to get himself right back onto dos Santos’s rear thrusters. They entered the final lap together, with dos Santos holding a scant 0.06 second lead over the Qirex. Side-by-side, they seemed to flow in perfect sync around the sharp angles of the American venue: only one could win however, and it was Kukkonen who led out of the final jump, winning his maiden world championship by less than two tenths of a second. On the podium, scenes were mixed. Kukkonen screamed and whooped, buoyed on by the elation of the Qirex team. Dos Santos, on the other hand, received a more touching and intimate moment as his second-place trophy was handed to him by his brother Guilherme, with a brief nod. To the billions watching, the elder brother’s nod seemed to be just a formality. To the dos Santos brothers and Piranha, however, the meaning couldn’t be clearer. You’ll get ‘em next year.

2109 dawned with lavish fanfare from the Qirex camp, as Kukkonen married his wife, Dutch pop singer Eva van de Vosse, better known as V3 - a member of the pan-European pop supergroup V5 (pronounced five-five). The wedding festivities continued for three days at a venue in Neo-Seoul and were garishly spattered across every datasheet and gossip ‘cast you could get your grubby mitts on. The message was clear: Kukkonen had the title, the glamour, and the advantage. Out at Piranha’s subterranean facility north of Sao Paulo, dos Santos was busy training for the season ahead. Fiona O’Rourke, a lead physician with the team at the time remarked that “...it was really quite something…Luis wouldn’t say a word to any of us, but he’d be in and out of the sensory dep tank for hours a day, flying lap after lap in the simulator, even muttering track directions under his breath in the canteen! Kukkonen beat him, sure… but he did something nobody else ever could. He got under Luis’s skin.”

With that, that F5000 circus headed to Canada for another season. Kukkonen and Wuelfrath were expected to take the fight to dos Santos, while new Piranha recruit Gustavo Coloque replaced the retired Xueyi Lin. Expectations were varied, but nobody had banked on such a disastrous start to the season for the defending world champion. The Finn looked uncharacteristically out-of-sorts as he lumbered distantly behind dos Santos and Wuelfrath, barely managing to hold off the Bolivian rookie as well as Auricom’s Stephen Broekman. By the end of the first three races, Kukkonen had just seven points: third in Canada, a measly fifth in Sagarmatha and an elimination in Valparaiso. By contrast, dos Santos was leading the championship with two wins and a second place: 27 points. Datasheets ran rampant: did Kukkonen think one title was enough? Was his married life interfering with his piloting? Had the pressure of 2108 finally gotten to him?

Whatever it was, Kukkonen shook himself out of it, going on to win in Germany, score successive podiums in France and Ukraine, and winning again at his beloved Vostok Island. Sadly, dos Santos kept his winning momentum, winning the title by 57 points to Wuelfrath’s 48, with Kukkonen a close third with 46. Eschewing his Finnish’s rival’s extravagant partying, dos Santos opted for a more modest function, inviting fellow pilots and dignitaries for a quiet evening at his home in Sao Paulo. Kukkonen, naturally, was not invited.

Kukkonen began 2110 as the senior pilot at Qirex, following Pieter Wuelfrath’s departure to AG Systems. Interestingly, his new teammate was none other than Pieter’s little brother Soren, whose FEISAR contract had been snapped in two by the lure of a lucrative three-year contract at the Russian squad. Kukkonen was reported to have a much friendlier attitude toward Soren, taking the younger German 'under his wing.' By contrast, tensions were simmering in the Piranha camp between dos Santos and his quick-tempered Bolivian teammate Coloque, who claimed that “Luis just clams up like a f**king monk, says nothing, and I’m supposed to believe the engineers get ‘feedback’ from that? It’s f**king team orders! His ship is better than mine and that s**t-eating silent son-of-a-b**ch knows it!”

Glowing appraisals aside, dos Santos was mostly unruffled by his teammate’s antics. Besides thin-lipped comments that Gustavo “needed to improve this year”, the Brazilian remained impartial on the thorny issue growing at Piranha’s heart. Indeed, it showed at Talon’s Reach: dos Santos displayed another flawless win over Kukkonen, leaving Coloque to squabble with Wuelfrath and Broekman for third. The Finn, however, showed off Qirex’s new heights by leaving dos Santos and Piranha in the dust for the rest of the year. Win after win poured in for Kukkonen, and he took the 2110 title by a simply massive margin:

1. J. KUKKONEN (FIN): 65pts.
Qirex-RD
2. L. M. DOS SANTOS (BRA): 41pts.
Piranha Adv.
3. S. WUELFRATH (AUT): 34pts.
Qirex-RD
4. G. COLOQUE (BOL): 25pts.
Piranha Adv.

Post-championship, Kukkonen called the 2110 Qirex “the best ship I’ve ever flown” and applauded both the team for a fantastic engineering job, and his teammate Soren “for an exciting rookie season!” He then retired to his apartment in Moscow, producing a selection of moody jazz ballads with his wife under the title From Jakobstad With Verve: it became a top ten chart hit in his native Finland, as well as Belgium, France, Spain and Japan, and was highly requested at both seedy ‘real-jazz’ bars and authentic nu-jazz venues around the world.

2111 brought with it the promise of another exciting Kukkonen v. dos Santos showdown, with Piranha reporting huge gains in their craft’s speed over the off-season. However, the two had to contend with an unexpected third dynamic: Auricom’s Charlotte Worrall. The young Australian rookie stunned crowds by finishing second on debut at Talon’s Reach, and proved to be a thorn in the side of the two world champions. By the halfway point of the season, Kukkonen led the points’ standings on 25 points, with dos Santos and Worrall close behind on 23 and 21 respectively. Subsequently, the 2111 round at Gare d’Europa was a major one as the mid-season point of an intense championship hunt. But it would soon be famous for all the wrong reasons.

Kukkonen was on pole, with dos Santos beside him and the younger Wuelfrath bringing up third. For several laps, the three battled, and it seemed just like old times. However, closing in on the final laps of the race, Kukkonen led with Wuelfrath second and dos Santos third. The Brazilian, eager to gain the lead, fired a plasma bolt at Wuelfrath just as the latter dodged. As luck would have it, the plasma bolt hit Kukkonen’s Qirex just as he used a turbo off the last of the final sector’s jumps. His retrieval pod couldn’t handle the extra speed, and he was ejected into the air away from his stricken craft. Unfortunately, Gare d’Europa’s failing construction standards had been looming above the track for some time now, and with that extra speed, Kukkonen stuck a half-collapsed support beam at a little over six hundred kilometers an hour, ricocheting off the course and into the surrounding excavation area. Upon being extricated from the pod, Kukkonen was unresponsive. While his condition was life-threatening, tireless work by surgeons at Paris’s Saint-Louis hospital managed to save the Finnish pilot’s life: tragically, he was paralysed from the waist down, and would never fly an AG craft again.

For his part, dos Santos was noticeably shaken by Kukkonen’s injury, and dedicated his eventual 2111 title victory to him. The Brazilian would win again in 2112, before Soren Wuelfrath would beat him to the title the following year. After six more seasons nursing Piranha through a difficult transitional period into the F7200 league, Luis Mosquera dos Santos hung up his helmet at the end of the 2118 season, ending a fourteen-season long career. With three world championships and 23 league wins to his name, he is unquestionably the greatest Brazilian pilot in AG racing history. His protege, Japanese pilot Kumiko Ikeda, would win two world championships in 2122 for Piranha and 2123 for AG-Systems: furthermore, he inspired a generation of Brazilian pilots, from FEISAR’s Julio Correia to Assegai’s Aracely Diaz-Sequeira, to achieve success at the pinnacle of anti-gravity racing.

Jarvi Kukkonen would recover from his injuries after a long rehabilitation period. His winnings as well as royalties from From Jakobstad with Verve kept him secure financially. By the time he reappeared as a special analyst for Helsinki-Sat’s coverage of the F7200 league, the Finn was back to his affable and charming self, wheeling his hoverchair around the paddock with aplomb. While he stayed frosty towards the equally standoffish dos Santos, he maintained that his rival bore no responsibility for the accident. In fact, his campaign for better track safety saw major gains in both track regulations and pilot safety during the F7200, widely regarded as one of the safest periods in AG racing history. Kukkonen split from his first wife, Eva van der Vosse, in May 2124 on amicable terms. In 2128, he met his husband Martin Carnes on a speed-dating show while visiting the UK, and the two married at Kukkonen’s home in Moscow in the summer of 2133. They remained together until Kukkonen’s death in 2154, after complications from a protracted illness.

The rivalry between Jarvi Kukkonen and Luis Mosquera dos Santos remains an intriguing one for racing fans and historians alike; quite how two boys, from such difficult and nebulous backgrounds on opposite sides of the world, became bitter rivals in the fastest sport on earth is certainly a strange tale. There was no thawing of the relationship over common ground, no mellowing with age. Both pilots seemed determined to regard the other as a rival long after the years had passed - perhaps that’s the mark real racing leaves on our hearts, minds and souls.