Satguar relaxed her grip on the handlebars.

“What are you doing?” Mannow, her tandem bike mate, asked.

“Trusting my sense of balance.”

She closed her eyes and felt the texture and tilt of the road surface speak to her body.

She knew the race course’s twists and turns, having driven them dozens of times.

Satguar smelled an approaching rain storm, sensing it only minutes from soaking the tandem teams competing for the Terraform Corp Grand Prize.

She pressed her torso to the bike’s frame, bending her head to reduce the bike’s friction profile and leaned hard, pedaling in unison with her partner.

She could hear the three teams ahead of struggling to exit the hairpin turn that rose thirty-five degrees for 500 metres.

Remembering the breathing techniques her parents taught her at age three, Satguar released her thoughts from attachment to external stimuli and triggered the reserve of hormones and energy solution stored in undetectable pouches surgically attached to switch neurons, nicknamed “zippers,” she had trained years to activate for a moment like this.

They sped by the three teams in rapid succession.

They crossed the finish line an hour later, ten minutes ahead of the closest team.

As they held up the trophy, Satguar broke her normal determined look and grinned.

The motto of Terraform Corp, “Satisfaction Guaranteed,” the inspiration for her name, Satguar, stood three metres high, given to her by her parents, an American female astronaut and Russian male cosmonaut, who conceived Satguar in the ISS at the same time they came up with the idea for Terraform Corp.

They had the foetus removed after the mission and raised in a surrogate mother, an astronaut trainee, to hide the pregnancy, waiting until the right moment to announce the first human child conceived in space, low-orbit or otherwise.