The kid at the sim rigs
She is eleven, and she is not here for the jets. She is here because her dad is, and because there was a promise of chips.
At ten in the morning the aircraft are still in their garages, so they walk the village. There is a row of simulator rigs near the food halls with a screen above them showing a leaderboard, and a queue of adults waiting. Somebody hands her a headset because the queue is long and she is small and it seems like a kind thing to do.
She flies badly. Then slightly less badly. On her third run she puts a time on the board that beats two grown men behind her, and the whole row makes a noise about it, and something happens in her chest that she will not have words for until much later.
At one o'clock she watches a jet leave the ground four hundred feet from where she is standing, and she feels it come up through the concrete. At three she presses her face to the glass behind the garages and watches six people rebuild something in ninety seconds. At five she asks, in the tone of someone who has already decided, whether the person flying it started somewhere.
Half of every team in this sport is a gamer. That is not a marketing line — it is the actual structure of the competition. The rig she sat in at ten in the morning is the same discipline as the pod behind the glass, and the pod behind the glass is the same team as the aircraft.
