Speed Limits [79/100]

'A final question Marie, and this comes from one of the audience. It asks, what do we have to give to this world to make it worth living for?'

Limits were nothing but walls to her. They were unspoken rules put into practice because of a fear of failure and death. To her, to Marie, Life was an open-ended question overfilled with presumptuous smart-asses who always thought that their answer was the best the world had to offer. They were fools, they were naysayers, and they were selfish bastards who truly believed that because they couldn't overcome a certain limit, nobody else should. Perhaps, we are limited because we believe that we can't achieve but to Marie, it was because nobody else ever bothered to try. 

Her father was a racer and her mother was an artist, an unlikely combination who would've never met each other if not for a commissioned artwork of the final race of the grand prix. Her mother was to capture the soul, the exuberance and the thrill of the finale but instead, she captured the heart of the world's best racer, or at least one of them. Her father was great, he was a legend, but he grew old and the titans have a propensity to fall prey to eager young gods. He didn't know when to quit, and so he fell from grace, defeated by new blood and a new world that didn't want to live with his archaic ways. It helped that Marie was born then, to a world and a family that was just starting to move on.

Marie grew up in love with art and filled with the teachings of her parents - that nothing is impossible. Paints were expressions of emotions and the outdoors were freedoms for soulful recreations. She would see the pictures of her father in his glory days and maybe spot a trophy or two of his around the house but she would only truly learn his identity when she had visited her uncle and found his old sports car stashed away. That day, her father took Marie for a ride, against the wishes of her mother, and from that day onwards, Marie became addicted to the rush of speed because she feel in love with the motion of the world blurring around her. Dyed in Red, Black and Gold, Marie once more adorned her father's colors and stepped out into the world to challenge new gods. 

No one could beat her, not on the straight, and never on the bend. Marie had an unreal confidence in handling cars and it dwarfed all those that challenged her. She preferred speed above all, and her car became infamous because no one else could handle it but her. Many said she was going to crash and burn but she just spat in their faces and shouted that 'if I can't live my life free as I choose it to be, I would rather be dead'. Death meant little to her but Life, Life meant everything because in Life, she could do anything she ever dreamed off. She pushed all her limits and then one day, the limits pushed back.

The crash rocketed to the top five in all of automative crash history and it seized top spot for being the most dramatic. How Marie survived the impact that completely shattered her car and then the explosion that filled the screens of the top news for weeks was simply just a miracle. In the intensive care unit, she lay for a month, burnt, fractured, and pierced, she could barely move and yet she never closed the doors on her dreams. Recovery was a long road filled with failures and the pressures of the world beating on her scars. Time was limited, that much she knew and so within the year, she found herself once more in a car, not on a racetrack, but on a desert strip that would see the world's fastest car to victory. 

Jet engine strapped to the back of a molecular enhanced chassis designed to withstand the furious wind that would strip the metal off any normal car, Marie sat within the experimental vehicle and contemplated the will she had wrote to her kin. The doctor's had advised against her piloting this juggernaut of speed but Marie had insisted, even demanded, that they sign the approval. She had used every means at her disposal to see to it that it was her hands on the wheel and no one else. She knew there was a line of drivers waiting outside for the chance to replace her and she knew they had made a second car but this was to be her divine moment and she would have never let anything take it away from her. 

There was a ninety percent chance she would not survive the trial and most of that doubt came from the state of her physical being, although many had said her emotional health was just as bad. They would have said "no" but everyone knew that would kill her as much as actually attempting the trial, and so they let her grasp the wheel and take on fate. The countdown began and Marie pushed the ignition, starting the jet engine pulsing towards maximum output. The green light blazed and the horn screamed, the car shot off from the start line and raged towards the infinite dust of the desert. Below her, advanced titanium wheels, made to be almost unbreakable, tore the hard sand from the earth and the car pounded through sound barriers and towards the fastest any human had every gone. 

Muscles refused to move and bones felt crippled like the dust in the wind. Teeth ground into each other, straining facial muscles and the frown on Marie's face was her overpowering determination to overcome death and life itself. Under the pressure and force that struck her like a thousand hammers forging the ultimate weapon, she lost her vision but her hands kept holding on. She remembered her dad sitting next to her in a car, many years ago, and he had smiled as she perfected her corners and throttled down the straight. The joy of a life lived and a legacy continued, that was what his smile meant to Marie and that was the smile she wore as tears streamed down the sides of her cheeks. Speed was her life and she sacrificed everything to live her life the way she wanted, the way that made it all worth living for.