The Universe of WipEout

[NeroIcaras]

*Retrieved from Pinnacle: the premier datacast for spaceflight historians and enthusiasts across the Solar System! Vol. 87, issue 11 (published November 29, 2216)*

Racing on the final frontier: the history of off-world circuits in AG racing
by Ulrich Schnauss-Vermoelen (chief editor, Ganymede outpost)

“Welcome to Katmoda 12, the most technologically advanced racing circuit in history. Tell me, racing fans: is there any greater proof of Belmondo’s ideology than seeing the Earth, left behind for good, rising over the horizon?”

- Introduction to the inaugural race at the Katmoda 12 lunar complex, 2156 F9000 season rd. 11 of 12

The recent history of humankind has been inextricably linked with space exploration. From the first manned space missions way back in the 20th century, to the exploration and colonization of the Moon and Mars, space exploration is perhaps the greatest representation of humanity’s ability to expand and push the limits of possibility. It is this similar pioneering spirit that has so entwined anti-gravity technology and spaceflight. Of course, spaceflight has been around significantly longer than anti-gravity technology: by the time the earliest AG prototypes were being tested by the world’s militaries in the early 2010s, humanity had already ventured to the Moon and established the first International Space Station, one of the first semi-permanent colonies in space. Indeed, at this juncture, plans were already seriously underway by the world’s great superpowers - the United States of America, European and Russian Federations, and the People’s Republic of China - to begin establishing the first lunar bases.

While AG development went through its turbulent early history under Belmondo and Hoffman in the late 2020s and early 2030s, space exploration was going from strength to strength. Spurred on by the oil wars and looming energy crisis, the first lunar base, America’s Artemis Base Camp, completed construction in 2027. Further bases by China and Russia (the ILRS - International Lunar Research Station, 2029) and Europe (Tycho Base, 2032) expanded humanity’s lunar footprint. Officially, the bases were intended for ‘scientific research’ and ‘international cooperation’. As with the fuel taxing conspiracies on Earth, though, the world’s governments really wanted the Moon for another reason entirely: helium-3 mining. As a fuel source, helium-3 was far more plentiful on the Moon than Earth, much easier to extract and far more efficient than Earth’s dwindling supplies of petroleum and natural gas. Access to cislunar space by other countries and private companies was heavily regulated, and by the time of humanity’s first Mars landing by the CNSA in 2037, the helium-3 arms race was in full swing. The oil industry was in the early stages of collapsing by this point, brought on by the rapid adoption of anti-gravity technology: thus, the pressure to keep helium-3 as a monopolised resource continued to rise.

The advent of AG racing as the Earth’s fastest growing sport did not go unnoticed. Prior to the inaugural season of the F3600 league championships, the newly established Race Commission approached the United Nations to request the construction of a lunar racetrack. It would be a spartan affair, constructed around a European mining facility in the Aristarchus crater: the European Federation, naturally, would be paid handsomely for the privilege of hosting the race. Unsurprisingly, given the developing ‘cold war’ between the superpowers and the secrecy surrounding the extent of the helium-3 mining programs, the proposal was swiftly vetoed. Undeterred, the Race Commission turned to the Chinese government, requesting permission to build a racetrack just outside their newly established Huoxing (“Firestar”, or “Mars”) research complex around Mars’ Gusev crater. Mars, as a relatively new frontier for colonization, was under nowhere near the amount of regulation as the Moon. Promised an exorbitant amount of money from datacasts and construction subsidies, the CNSA and CCP readily agreed, and construction began in late 2045. Due to Mars’ extreme distance from Earth, construction was slow. As even the fastest muon-fusion spacecraft took almost two months to reach Mars, the Firestar circuit was painstakingly constructed over almost seven years. It would barely be finished in time for the inaugural season finale in 2052. In comparison, the next-longest F3600 circuit construction process (for Silverstream in Greenland) took just over two years.

Firestar proved wildly popular with datacast audiences and pilots. Despite the immense cost and logistical difficulties (the race had to be held in December, three months after the race at Silverstream, and several transport craft had to be leased to the Race Commission for an exorbitant sum), the F3600 season finale was a particular hit, and featured prominently across both AG racing and spaceflight datacasts as a symbol of human ingenuity. That first race in 2052 was won by John Dekka of AG Systems, and would become the scene of the F3600’s most dramatic events. The first of these, ironically, would very nearly cause the fall of Firestar for good.

AG Systems’ second pilot, Daniel Chang, was a mysterious individual. Born in China on an unknown date in 2023, the reclusive pilot suddenly seemed to ‘appear’ as a high-ranking pilot in AG-Systems’ first academy class, and was the teammate of John Dekka at AG Systems when the league began in 2052. Chang was a quiet individual who rarely socialized. The Race Commission’s then-director, Dirk Breakwater, perhaps summed him up best in the 2053 season review:

“You know, AG Systems’ pilots are a team of total opposites, perhaps even more so than Qirex. Chang’s just as silent as Dekka is brash. Sure, Chang’s performance this season was much better than 2052, but you’d be forgiven for thinking the complete opposite, seeing the way he acts. Most pilots would be jumping up and down on their first podium appearance: at Karbonis this year, Chang looked like he couldn’t get away from the cameras fast enough. The guy’s a ghost. At least John [Dekka]’s loud and outgoing enough for the both of them.”

Chang would play second fiddle to Dekka with varying degrees of success over the next few years, until the Firestar round of the 2056 championship. Kel Solaar had an unbeatable lead over Arial Tetsuo in the standings, but Dekka and Chang were still close enough to fight for second place. During the race, Chang was sitting comfortably in third behind the battling pair of Solaar and Dekka when his AG repulsor drive shut down inexplicably just before the first jump on the very beginning of lap 12. The stricken craft flew off the circuit at several hundred kilometers per hour before smashing into a cliff face at the side of the track and suffering extreme structural damage. When rescue crews reached the mangled craft, they found Chang already dead. The Chinese pilot, already mortally wounded in the impact, had suffocated due to Mars’s unbreathable atmosphere. Evidently, both the ejection and life-support mechanisms of Chang’s craft had been tampered with.

Despite that year’s championship being declared void, and the 2057 season being canceled in order for the Race Commission to conduct a lengthy investigation, no conclusive verdict was ever reached. After his death, it was revealed that Chang had defected from China’s top secret, highly dangerous military AG program in the mid-2040s and sought refuge under AG Systems. Coded transmissions from Chinese IP addresses were found on Chang’s personal comms servers, but they have never been deciphered, and it looks as if Chang also ignored them. Theories range from AG Systems terminating him to avoid Chinese suspicion, to a conspiracy to discredit the Firestar research base and even a covered-up assassination by the Chinese government in revenge for his defection. All parties denied any knowledge relating to Chang’s death, and to this day it remains one of AG racing’s great mysteries.

The F3600 league returned in 2058, though Firestar would not host another race until 2063. The track was not renewed under the F5000 formula, and held the final race of the F3600 league in the 2084 season finale. The Firestar base itself was destroyed during the Chinese Dissolution at the end of the 21st century, though the circuit escaped with minimal damage. Today, it is a district of Gusev City under the Martian Republic, and a protected reserve visited by millions of tourists every year. The Martian Exhibition Endurance has been held on the circuit every year on October 30th since 2158, to celebrate the day the Martian Republic officially seceded from Earth.

There were no more extraterrestrial circuits in AG racing until 2156, with the advent of the F9000 league, in which two came along at once. The first of these was the circuit Devilia, constructed on the planet Novon, a planet discovered orbiting in the inner edge of the Solar System’s Oort Cloud. Under the jurisdiction of Tandalph Connors, US Race Commission official and CEO of the interplanetary transport company TanAir 1, construction of Devilia was again slow and painstaking. Novon orbited the Sun at a distance of almost 2,000 astronomical units (2,000 times the distance from Earth to the Sun, or roughly 300 billion kilometers). Consequently, even with more than a century of improvements on catalysed fusion propulsion, it still took more than three months to reach the planet. This was not helped by rumors of money laundering and unsafe working conditions by TanAir 1, who carried out much of the construction process. Connors claimed there were lifeforms on Novon who would appreciate investment from Earth: the scientific community loudly ridiculed this, as Novon was airless, freezing and much too far from the Sun to support life. Undeterred, the F9000 Race Commission constructed the circuit in time for the 2156 season finale.

Unlike its sister extraplanetary circuit, Katmoda 12, Devilia was spartan and highly technical. Novon’s sparse facilities led to an uncomfortable stay, with Tigron pilot Sveta Kirovski comparing it to “a prisoner-of-war camp… you must remain suited at all times outside of the habitation zones. Why we come to this godforsaken spack at the edge of the universe is anyone’s guess. Seeing the Sun as another tiny pinprick in the vast sky has inspired the loneliest feelings in my life.” Indeed, Devilia’s uncomfortable living arrangements, as well as undulating track design and unprecedented point-to-point nature, made it highly unpopular among pilots and datacast audiences alike. The only pilots known to enjoy it were Van-Uber’s Songen Grey, who claimed the planet’s isolation from Earth and its colonies “gave him an unparalleled freedom of thought, an expansion of consciousness like nothing else…” and the EG-R pilots, who performed exceedingly well at Devilia compared to any other circuit. It was a long-running joke that the conditions of Devilia reminded them of EG-R’s ‘crazy cyborg vats and tanks’ although the existence of such facilities was never proven.

Nevertheless, Devilia was struck from the F9000 calendar after the 2161 season, following record lows in datacast audiences. After the fall of the F9000, Tandalph Connors’ money laundering, illegal dealings and use of Novon as ‘an untouchable refuge of highly illegal business practices and experiments’ were exposed. Much of the circuit was destroyed in an immense explosion in early 2171. The source of the explosion remains unclear, although many believe it was either an attempt by TanAir 1 to bury still-uncovered evidence of their violations, or the detonation of a highly rumoured and secretive EG-R facility on the planet, conducting unknown experiments. The planet remains abandoned to this day, and has not been visited officially since 2162, when circuit operations were legally shut down.

In stark contrast to Devilia, the Katmoda 12 circuit on the Moon was considered to be the ‘jewel in the F9000’s crown’. After the lifting of the Lunar Helium Embargo following the devastating final Energy Wars in the late 2080s, commercial and residential colonisation of the Moon began in earnest. Therefore, the bombastic and extravagant F9000 Race Commission viewed it as the perfect place to build a racing circuit. Unveiled in 2154, Katmoda 12 was a highly technical, lavish and enormous circuit complex. Built around the lunar city of Crisium, the largest city in the basin of Mare Crisium and one of the United Lunar Republics’ largest cities, it was well loved by pilots and audiences alike, similar to Firestar more than a century earlier. 2168 champion and Auricom pilot Pascale Rouser was a particular advocate for the circuit:

“I was stunned the first time we went there. Imagine stepping out and seeing that small civilisation spread out before you - the famous domes, the floating city, the alien remains. And beyond it and around it, Katmoda 12 snakes across our heavenly neighbour."

While in-person attendance was limited due to the high cost of commercial lunar travel (physical audiences mostly consisting of race officials, affluent businessmen and datacast celebrities), Katmoda 12 represented the F9000’s largest datacast audiences of the season, and this only increased in 2162 when it became the official season finale. Indeed, the 2164’s championship’s incredibly close showdown between Xios’s Natasha Belmondo, Piranha’s Jann Shlaudecker and Tigron’s Omarr Khumala remains the highest-viewed AG race of all time, at a peak of 7.1 billion concurrent viewers. Following the fall of the F9000 league and the turbulent global collapse that followed, Katmoda 12 was a repeated target of attacks by anti-AG terrorists and splinter factions of the dissolved Overtel Corporation. These were swiftly rebuffed by the military forces of the ULR, largely unaffected by the devastation on Earth. Today, Katmoda 12 has been integrated into a high-end business and residential district, and the city of Katmoda is one of the newest in the burgeoning United Lunar Republics.

Whether through increased cost, difficult logistics or the collapse of much space-based infrastructure during the Global Collapse, AG racing has not ventured outside of Earth’s gravitational confines since the 2169 season finale at Katmoda. In documents unclassified after the dissolvement of Overtel, plans were discovered for the inclusion of more circuits. As well as the highly-protested city circuit plans in London, Hokkaido and Nairobi, the F9000 Race Commission had apparently entered discussion with the European Federation and Martian Republic to build a racetrack on disputed Martian territory. This was speculated to be an artificial measure to increase tensions between Earth-based colonies and the Martian Republic, so that Overtel’s partners and shell companies could profit from the sale of weapon systems under the pretense of track construction and security.

While the history of off-world AG racetracks is fraught with corruption and intrigue, that pioneering spirit remains strong among racing fans and spaceflight enthusiasts alike. After all, isn’t leaving Earth behind and proving mankind’s permanence with Belmondo’s own technology the purest expression of anti-gravity racing’s very ideals? According to top-secret rumors among the FX400 Race Commission, it’s likely that many high-ranking officials agree… watch this space! (pun fully intended).