The Agreement

    The designs came in dreams; not as words, not as images, but as pure thought patterns. The latticework of abstract concept shifted and warped and folded and resolved into understandings, and those understandings were later made real. The true origin of those forms was never discovered by a multitude of observers, although a subliminal signature was always included in the design somewhere. That was part of the agreement.

-

    Days during the design process were a ritual. Alistair awoke at six-thirty, did some basic exercises, washed his face and shaved. He dressed in a white button-down shirt and dark trousers, selected a pair of shoes and buckled on the overweight wristwatch that the sponsor provided to senior members of the team. He made his tea to precise measurements, toasted bread purchased from the same bakery he had favored for ten years, and read through the BBC News on his smartphone while spreading orange marmalade or raspberry jam on the toast. After quietly eating his toast and drinking his tea, he took a bottle of mineral water and sat at his computer. At exactly eight he picked up his stylus.

    He closed his eyes.

    For hours his hand interpreted the concepts in his dreams. His body was motionless during his trance while the stylus traced along the tablet surface, translating those mental currents into pixels and code that were sent over an encrypted gigabit connection to engineers and technicians who ran machines in workshops which sculpted titanium and tailored carbon fiber into elegant shapes.

    When assembled, those pieces – airfoils, suspension joints, inlets sized according to certain rules, a precisely shaped and positioned engine bay and cockpit – formed a car. That car won races, won races as a function of destiny, won races as his designs had done for years.

    When the church bell in his small village outside Milton Keynes tolled noon he slipped out of the trance. Lunch was always a small sandwich and a simple salad, taken looking out a window over the fields; at one PM he resumed. The stylus was laid down again at five PM. He went for a walk, picked up some groceries if necessary, often stopped for dinner at the same pub he had favored for ten years. He returned home, listened to music – Mahler symphonies, Brahms chamber pieces, live recordings of the second Miles Davis quintet or Thelonious Monk – or read books on philosophy, then went to sleep.

    The designs came in dreams: ethereal, transcendent, perfect.

-

    He spoke on the phone with the engineers and technicians several times a week. He occasionally made the trip to the works in Milton Keynes to meet with team members in person and see the cars come together, abstract pieces slowly assembled in a space that was part operating room and part starship hangar. When the power unit specialists reported on developments that suggested chassis updates or the simulation specialists highlighted a particular quirk in their predictions, he nodded and asked for notes to be forwarded, mostly for show; he knew that these changes will be fully coordinated and developed without his input over the next few nights.

    The engineers had enough respect for the results to not ask exactly how he worked. 

    They never learned about the agreement.

-

    Alistair had started as a prodigy, a designer with an extraordinary ability to balance forces and translate human intention into car movement. He had interned with McLaren, worked in the Weissach wind tunnels, been engineer in charge of suspension tuning at Williams, sat as apprentice and assistant to the greats of that era.

    The first and second cars he created as chief designer moved a midpack team into regular contention for podiums. The third, after he was acquired by a team somewhat further up the grid, came within two points of winning the constructor’s championship. The fourth had that accolade in hand by mid-September. His designs dominated.

    But after a few years he lost his feel for the balances. The aerodynamics got to be too intense, the tires became unpredictable under new rules and ever more radical power curves, the drivers always cried for something to be more precise one day and more gradual the next.

    His formerly genial demeanor became ragged as he pushed his genius to its limits. He became hypersensitive to flaw, once berating a helpless machinist when he witnessed a poorly-treated piece of aluminum crack on a milling machine. His college-sweetheart wife, already sick of the long hours and endless travel to one concrete monstrosity of a race facility after another, couldn’t abide his increasingly unpredictable moods; she filed for divorce and later took up with a wellness guru in Copenhagen.

    Eventually even his towering talent and skill faltered and he faced the truth: he needed help. And he understood that the help he desired could only be arranged a certain way, and he knew that the price would be very high.

-

    The address appeared to him in a dream. The next day he loaded it into his nav computer and aimed his tuned Porsche 911 toward southern Wales.

    It was near sunset when Alistair arrived at the ancient house. He rang the small bell by the door. He suddenly realized that he has no clue what to say.

    The door was opened by an old man, vaguely familiar to Alistair although he couldn’t place him. The man looked at him and said, “Come back tomorrow morning,” and closed the door.

    Alistair spent a restless night at a local inn. The next morning he returned to the old man’s house and rang the bell. The old man opened the door, looked at him again, and said, simply, “Late August. The rest will follow," and again closed the door.

    That meant exactly one thing to Alistair.

-

    They did not meet at the crossroads, but rather in the garden of the Manoir de Lébioles hotel to the west of of Spa-Francorchamps, on the Monday morning after the Belgian Grand Prix. That was a condition of the Prince.

    His steps were soundless. He wore an impeccably fitted navy blue suit with a dark crimson tie. “Alistair,” he said, in a soft voice that sounded of millennia of such conversations in many languages.

    Alistair looked up into the Prince’s eyes. Scarlet glowed behind the irises. A breeze carried the scent of a particularly fine strain of ozone. “I suppose I was expecting something more sulfuric,” Alistair said as the lump in his throat subsided.

    The Prince smiled. “Preconceptions are such awful things. I prefer to be a bit more current. Sulfur is so very steam era.”

    The negotiations were short and to the point, as both expected. In exchange for a life that to any observer would appear isolated and morose, and then the standard payment – an anguished, deprived soul – at that life’s end, Alistair would receive the ability to create magnificent, endlessly successful racing cars.

    The Prince extended his hand. Alistair slowly reached to grip it. He felt the flow of plasma under the Prince’s perfectly dry skin. The frustration of the last season was drawn away, replaced by a serene clarity tinted with a slight darkness.

    Alistair saw the Prince off. As the flawless silver BMW 3.0CS drove away, he turned and walked back to his Porsche. The short run back to the team’s transporters somehow felt both promising and ominous.

-

    The engineers in Milton Keynes didn’t usually grasp the depth of the designs or the interrelatedness of every part, but comprehension was not necessary; they only needed to heed the guidance and fit together everything in the physical world as perfectly as Alistair’s conceptual currents indicated.

    There were still variables outside even his control. Sometimes the powerplants – always just another component in Alistair’s mind – were excellent; occasionally they were peaky or soft; one season they were absolute monsters that tended to explode spectacularly every few races. The drivers, that rotating cast of prima donnas and eccentrics with reflexes bettered only by their egos, were often less than perfect. Race tactics sometimes gave away what should have been wins. But the series of designs that came from Alistair’s hand were beyond improvement; the cars were wonderfully wieldy, dynamically maximized precision instruments that took what would normally be compromises and turned them into collaborative forces.

    Those designs could be approached, almost matched; the squad from Stuttgart in particular, with banks of supercomputers and divisions of well-schooled engineers working in motivated coordination, were worthy rivals for a few solid years. But eventually a minor misfiguring would find its way into the design and they would slide back, and the navy and crimson racers would reassert their singular dominance.

-

    When his cars scored one of their regular victories the yammering media hordes fell over themselves to praise the drivers, who responded with feigned modesty and an eye-rolling tendency to dedicate their triumphs to various people.

    Alistair politely tolerated this, but always knew that those victories were his. When the driver won, it was his win. His car, his work, had won. Any of the top ten drivers on the grid could have taken one of his designs to victory on a random weekend, finding success that would have required far more talent and luck in any other machine.

    His salary was boosted to titanic proportions, although he lived what that media consistently described as a monastic existence. He attended races partially as a job obligation but more simply to admire the result of those days at the tablet with his eyes closed.

    He was a cordial but private presence around town and at the pub. On free weekends he would go for long bicycle rides in the countryside; it helped clear his thoughts.

    His cognitive mind was quite able to modulate and configure the nighttime floods of raw information. His sense of ethics quietly accepted the agreement and its implementation as a personal decision. His idea of self lived with the idea that he was a very capable conduit for something so otherworldly.

    Most of the time, at least.

-

    Alistair awoke with a scream. The pulsating kaleidoscopic flow in his head dropped out. It was a little more than two years after the day with the Prince, two fantastically successful seasons later, early days working on the AF11, two forty-five in the morning.

    He was gripping the sides of his mattress. The sheets were kicked to the floor. His eyes stared out into space. Eventually he composed himself, rolled out of bed, went to the kitchen. He reached to the back of the freezer for a bottle of Tanqueray, unscrewed the cap, knocked back a slug of the ice-cold fluid. He leaned back against the countertop.

    For lack of a better way to communicate at that moment, he started yelling at the ceiling. “ENOUGH! ENOUGH! I AM DONE WITH YOU, YOU MONSTER! I WILL RECLAIM MY INDEPENDENT SOUL! I AM MY OWN MASTER! I RENOUNCE!”

    The next morning he sat and started scribbling, eyes open, Aphex Twin on in the background. He worked for two weeks, barely breaking for food or sleep. He reached back into himself to grasp at his old talents and tie them to the unholy inspirations of the past few years. The gigabit connection to Milton Keynes glowed with information.

    The car was a disaster. The suspension geometry fought against itself at certain loads; it was skittish in low-speed corners and trucklike when the wings and venturis started to work. When the front wheels were turned past a certain angle the radiators would be starved for air. Top-speed runs down straights would occasionally induce a resonance in the frame which encouraged the crank to blow out the bottom of the block. The drivers barely maintained their diplomatic façade in front of the media, and sensitive ears heard them howling about its hopeless drivability in the garages. The race engineers were between baffled and panicked. Communications from sponsors took on a sour tone.

    By Silverstone Alistair was waiting at the edge of a muddy British parking lot as the silver BMW arrived. The Prince walked over with a mild scowl, grumbling about the human ego and the dirt on his shoes and pants; he was used to both in these situations.

    They walked together for a while. “Remember,” the Prince said in his age-softened voice, “no one is doing this for you. You are the creator; what you produce is very much of your own. The nature of the agreement simply allows you access to everything outside of yourself, to all the truths and relationships present in the universe.”

    Alistair nodded and let himself come to terms with this clarification.

    Towards the end of the season the team picked up two wins.

-

    The seasons became predictable: the design was set by the end of winter, the car was intimidatingly fast from the early practice sessions, the permitted updates kept it up front, other teams had to win on inspired racecraft or sheer luck when possible. Sometimes someone drew close, more often the navy blue and scarlet cars were unrivaled. 

-

    A quiet November morning, tea steeping, bread in the toaster. Alistair is scrolling through the news; his thumb stops the screen at a death notice. A Pritzker-winning architect, famed for his audacious designs across Britain, had passed after a long but puzzlingly lonely life with his last few years spent in near-exile from society. A single photo from a conference decades ago accompanies the story.

    The man standing between I.M. Pei and Philip Johnson in the photo is the old man from Wales.

-

    “Yes, I understand that the carbon weave is more difficult to execute this way. Yes, it is ABSOLUTELY necessary. There’s a modulus factor that results in a very particular degree of bending along a certain plane. No, it’s way too much to get into now; just get it down, maybe run the resin a bit thinner to prevent distortion.”

-

    Six years into the agreement, an irritated Alistair arranged for a meeting in Barcelona after the Gran Premio. The two discreetly walked along a side street. The slight smell of ozone prompted one or two café dwellers to instinctively check the clear sky for thunderclouds.

    “I have questions, as you might have guessed. We’re four races in and the Ferraris are completely dominating. I can tell that they’re on some kind of higher level. Are you double-dealing on me?”

    The Prince smirked. “Alistair, my dear, why so accusatory? Surely you understand that I’m not the only force in this game.”

    Alistair’s snap response caught in his teeth. A pause, and his eyes narrowed. “But that means…”

    A wave of a hand, a knowing chuckle. “They are Italian, after all. There’s some history of note there. But be patient; they are as human as you, and your kind just are not that good at handling the divine. Especially in groups that large. Give it a few weeks.”

    The prediction held. Faith started to be taken for granted, hubris and small mistakes began to build, and by Montreal the red cars started to end up in walls or the garage. Alistair’s dark blue machines were then again at the forefront.

-

    One evening in March; outside the sound of a motor cut abruptly, followed by a knock. Alistair put down his Hegel and answered the door. A young man, perhaps a bit older than twenty, Indian or Pakistani or Bangladeshi, dressed in an Alpinestars motorcycle suit and holding a helmet, stood before him. He was resolute, fearful, wordless.

    Alistair said, “Come back tomorrow," and closed the door.

    The message for him was part of the dream.

    The next morning at ten before eight the young man reappeared. By all indications he had tried to sleep under the bridge a quarter-mile away.

    Alistair said, “End of May. The rest will follow,” and again closed the door.

    Alistair felt for the young man, but he understood.

    The young man mounted his Yamaha sportbike and rode home to Manchester. That night, after a last fight with his girlfriend over the phone, he opened his laptop and a third bottle of Fuller’s 1845 and made arrangements to be on the Isle of Man during the Tourist Trophy races.

-

    He retired at age 68 as the formula was set to change substantially for the next year. He had done enough, more in a sense of completion than of fatigue, and was all too aware that the organic complexity of modern Formula One designs were already testing the capacity of even his phenomenal mind to translate the dark inspirations. The valedictories heralding twenty-some seasons of consistent competitiveness and success grew almost tiresome.

    He continued to follow the sport from a remove. Eventually the navy blue and scarlet missiles that racked up cubic meters of trophies fell from the top of the order. Some said that the magic was gone; no one who said that understood how true it was.

-

    He was content, if absolutely alone, in his idle years. The enormity of his bank balance barely registered on his everyday life, although he did acquire a small second home near Aix-en-Provence and, in a nod to his esteemed rivals, purchased a new Mercedes E-Class every few years; he also picked up a museum-quality example of the limited-production 911 he had revered as an adolescent.

    When not out on his bicycle in the countryside or casually experimenting with trying to cook some of the foods he had tasted around the world, he toyed with the idea of designing a street-legal sports car. He sat for the occasional interview, recalling fond trackside moments and gently explaining that the creative process was a mystery even to him and claiming that he had no favorite design among his work; he took everything as a sum, a sigma, a symphony in many movements. He admitted that the AF9 was perhaps the prettiest.

    An offer to write a book was respectfully declined.

-

    A motorsports writer in Shenzhen doing a technical analysis of the AF18 some years later puzzles over the curious arrangement of some lines, reads a report about the unusual weave of the carbon fiber in a wing. She feels a chill on her neck, but shakes her head and gets up to turn on her Nespresso machine. By the time she sits down with her coffee the pattern is no longer perceptible.

-

    Eventually, years later, it is time. He is alone in his room in the hospital on the edge of Avignon, the windows open, the sun growing orange in the late afternoon. The bed is turned so he can look over the fields.

    He smells a particularly fine strain of ozone and looks up at his guest.

    As always, the Prince is in his exquisite dark blue suit and scarlet tie. His face has not changed since that day in Belgium decades ago. He bows gently, as is his habit when final terms come due. It is time to harvest that lifetime of anguished isolation and regret.

    “You are a curious one,” he says in his same soft voice. “You’ve never betrayed the slightest bit of sadness or sorrow with being so completely alone. So it is; some can keep these things deep inside.” He looks at the sun as it eases down to the horizon. “I tend to prefer those, actually. They’re so much more thoroughly extended and developed, so much more powerful in their repressed pain.” He straightens his tie. “Anyway…”

    He extends his hand. Alistair slowly reaches out his. They grasp each other. Alistair feels the plasma flow again.

    The dignified little smile fades from the Prince’s face. He grips harder.

    There is no darkness to transfer. There is no anguish, no regret, nothing.

    The scarlet behind the irises flickers brighter. “I am expecting my balance under our agreement.”

    “I’m sorry,” said Alistair. “You never understood. All I ever wanted in this life was to create something perfect, something that would win; and I did, over and over.” A gentle, almost apologetic shrug. “Each of those cars, each of those victories, they were what gave me a sense of meaning; I never needed or, really, had room for anyone else. Being alone was a blessing of sorts. Take what I did and it was more than enough; I could never ask for more.

    “This was a beautiful life.”

    The Prince lets the hand slip. His fury is at a simmer, but he is not beneath granting a slow nod of respect. “I told myself long ago that I would be more careful dealing with artists. I didn’t expect one in such a, shall we say, technical discipline.”

    He turns and walks soundlessly from the room. A few minutes later the silver BMW pulls from the parking lot.

    Alistair smiles, at peace. The last breath quietly flows from his lungs. His soul lifts free and dissipates, its energies dispersing among the cosmos, joining the latticework.

    He had won one last time.