S.L.A.G. Pilot

The Dream

Ask any child in the lower districts what they want to be, and half of them will say pilot before you've finished the question.
  It isn't hard to see why. A Trench Wars pilot climbs into a S.L.A.G., a machine most families could never afford to look at up close, let alone ride, and gets applauded for it by every screen WHRN can reach. Win, and your name gets said aloud by Dusty Beckworth and Pip Flocker on the evening broadcast, which in District Nine terms is closer to sainthood than most children will ever get near.
  Lose, and you still climbed into the machine. That part matters more to a child than it should.
  I've sat through enough matches now, as a chronicler rather than a fan, to know the actual risks better than most of the children cheering in the stands. Pilots break bones. Pilots lose whole seasons to injuries the healers won't fully explain to reporters. None of that has ever once dampened a District Nine child's ambition, in my considerable experience of District Nine children.

Why It Never Lets Go

I used to watch the District Nine boys race homemade S.L.A.G.s down Gear Lane, cobbled together from crates and old cart wheels, making the cannon noises with their own mouths because they couldn't afford the real sound. Nobody taught them to do that. They simply couldn't help it.
  Part of it is the fame, I won't pretend otherwise. Teams like Stone and Steel or Team Trinity are closer to royalty than half the actual nobility Clockworks has produced. Part of it is the money, which is real and life-changing for a family that's never had either.
  But I think the deeper pull is simpler than fame or money. A pilot gets to be somebody the whole city watches on purpose, in a world that otherwise looks straight through children from the lower districts every day of their lives. For one match, somebody with nothing gets to matter to everybody.
  I've documented three different pilots now who started exactly where I did, in exactly the kind of district I did, cobbling together a cart-wheel S.L.A.G. on Gear Lane before they ever touched a real one. Banshee, of Stone and Steel, is the clearest example on record... a lower-district gnome who by every account still keeps a battered cart wheel from her childhood racer bolted to her locker wall, long after she stopped needing to prove anything to anybody.
  I asked her once, for the record, why she kept it.
  "So I remember what it cost to want something before I could afford it," she told me. I wrote that down exactly as she said it, because I couldn't have improved on it if I'd tried for a year.
  I've never once managed to make that documentation feel purely academic.
  Some jobs you write about because they're historically significant. This one, I write about because I remember standing at the edge of Gear Lane at seven years old, utterly certain it would be me someday.
  It wasn't. I don't think I mind as much as I used to.