The air in the back of a high school classroom is always a chaotic sort of comfortable, especially during the ten-minute break between periods.
A dozen boys huddled around Zack's desk, eyes glued to a replay of the latest Formula 1 race. The roar of the V6 turbo-hybrid engine blasting from the iPad Pro's speakers, layered with the distinct high-pitched whine of the MGU-K, cut through the ambient classroom chatter like a knife.
"I think we can officially call it now—Hamilton's eighth title is in the bag..."
"Wait, no! Someone crashed! Yellow flag!"
"Verstappen's pitting for fresh rubber! Is he through? Yes! He's past him! He did it!"
"Holy sh—! That's insane!"
"That late braking! He absolutely forced Lewis off the line!"
"This is F1! Wheel-to-wheel, let's go!"
The commentator's frantic screaming merged with the boys' ecstatic shouts. Zack, swept up in the adrenaline, cranked the volume to the max. The high-decibel engine notes exploded right against the back of the head of a teenage boy slumped over the front desk.
Roan's eyes remained shut, but his brow twitched.
The moment the sound hit his ears, his mind cleared. He didn't just hear noise; he caught a microscopic dissonance in the iPad's output—a faint mechanical stutter. It was the Honda power unit. The revs didn't quite match during the downshift.
The shift was too aggressive; the engine braking kicked in marginally too early. The rhythm was flawed.
"The final lap of the 2021 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix! Max Verstappen is the World Champion! What a dramatic finish!"
The legendary commentary ignited the room's hormones. The boys nodded like frantic disciples witnessing a miracle.
"Checo is a legend!"
"Du du du du, Max Verstappen!"
Roan didn't share the excitement. He let out a soft, internal sigh. Zack, you're a menace. Leading a pack of amateurs who only cared about the spectacle—what was the point?
To the "cloud fans," it was a god-tier overtake. To Roan, it was a messy corner handled with a tire advantage that masked a series of errors. If they got this worked up over a recording, a live broadcast would probably give them cardiac arrest.
He didn't want to wake up. It was exhausting. But the noise was becoming the auditory equivalent of fingernails dragging across a chalkboard.
Then, his body signaled a warning. He was in "Ultraman's final two minutes" territory—the red light on his metaphorical chest was flashing "low battery."
He reached into his backpack, past the ice packs and cooling gear, and pulled out a chilled can of Coca-Cola. Cr-ack. He tilted his head back, taking a massive gulp. The icy liquid slid down his throat and hit his stomach, turning the flashing red light in his mind back to a steady, calm blue.
Better.
"Verstappen turned in late on that corner."
Roan's voice wasn't loud, but it possessed a strange, piercing quality that sliced through the cheers.
"He missed the braking point by ten meters. It dropped his apex speed by at least 10 km/h. To force the car to rotate, he locked the front left. That's a flat spot right there."
The air in the room suddenly went dead. It was as if someone had pulled the plug on a loud party.
Roan swirled the red can in his hand, delivering his final verdict. "He got the move done, but that was purely down to the tire offset. His rhythm was worse than the previous lap. He was daydreaming."
Every head turned. They stared at Roan—calm, slumped, and nursing his Coke.
After a beat of silence, the room erupted into a wave of mocking laughter.
"Oh look, our Legend has graced us with his presence!"
Jax, a boy in the front row, made an exaggerated gesture of turning an invisible steering wheel, spit flying in the afternoon sun. "What's the matter, Roan? Win a few more World Championships in your sleep? That was a career-defining overtake by Max, and you're calling it daydreaming?"
More laughter followed.
"Give it a rest, man. You lose your breath running to the cafeteria. You get dizzy just standing up too fast during morning roll call, yet you're worried about a World Champion's braking point?"
"Those guys pull 5Gs with their necks. What can your body pull? Half a G before you pass out? Careful, or you'll spray that Coke all over your visor when you hit the gas."
"Haha! His head would literally turn into a Coke bottle! Boom!"
Zack looked sheepish, trying to play peacemaker. "Hey, come on, Roan's just talking..."
Roan wasn't angry. He scanned the group with a look of mild exhaustion, the way a mathematician looks at a toddler failing basic addition.
"That race wasn't won by late braking. It was won by strategy and the FIA," Roan said flatly. He paused, then added, "I don't drive because I don't have the money, not because I don't have the skill."
He leaned back down, searching for the warm, comfortable spot on his desk.
"Give me the same seat, and I'm the fastest on the grid."
The laughter peaked. Even the girls walking past the classroom shook their heads, marveling at the sheer, delusional confidence of the high school male.
Fortunately, the bell rang, cutting the farce short.
The English teacher marched in, her heels clicking against the floor—the kind of sound that promised misery if you didn't pay attention.
Roan was unbothered. He expertly adjusted his position, stuffing Zack's backpack behind him to create a specific angle between the chair and the desk. It was a replica of the semi-reclined position of a formula cockpit.
For most people, standing was natural. For Roan, being upright felt like wearing invisible lead weights. Gravity pressed down on his spine; only by reclining could the pressure recede, allowing his brain to focus entirely.
He stared out the window at a passing bird, his pupils slightly dilated. To anyone else, he was spacing out.
But in his mind, the flow of time slowed to a crawl.
His consciousness had already logged into a server that didn't exist in the physical world: iRacing. A 6000 iRating top-split qualifying session. Suzuka Circuit, Japan.
The actual race was twelve hours away, but he was already pre-loading the track data.
T1. High-speed right-hander. He closed his eyes, mentally adjusting his entry angle. Rhythm normal. Delta holding at +0.03.
Three laps in. T11. Left hand downshifts. Left foot heavy on the brake. The delicate control of trail braking caused his left foot, clad in a generic sneaker, to tense slightly.
Just as his mental car clipped the apex and hit the exit curbing, a sense of crisis tripped his neural reflexes. It was a muscle-memory warning developed over thousands of hours in the sim—the car's center of gravity was shifting.
In a car, you'd counter-steer right to catch the slide.
In a classroom...
Roan tilted his head five centimeters to the right. He didn't even open his eyes.
Whoosh—Snap!
A half-piece of chalk whistled past his ear with angry velocity, striking Zack square in the forehead behind him.
"Ow! What the—!" Zack yelped.
Deathly silence fell over the room.
The English teacher stood at the podium, face like stone. She slowly wiped the chalk dust from her fingers, her gaze sweeping the room before locking onto Roan.
"Roan!"
She didn't scream, but the weight of her voice forced every other student to bury their noses in their textbooks.
"Don't think that just because you ace Math and Physics you can sleep in my class! If you spent half the time you spend napping on your vocabulary, your English grade wouldn't be a zero!"
She slammed her palm against the empty blackboard.
"You're at the prime of your life! How can you sleep through it?! Have some ambition!"
This was a private school. Most students were "silver spoon" kids who paid their way in. Roan was different—he was a scholarship ringer, recruited by the school to boost their university entrance statistics.
The faculty knew it. As long as he delivered in their subjects, they looked the other way. Only the English teacher couldn't stand it. Her "star pupil" refused to play by the rules.
Roan opened his eyes, feeling the weight of the room.
The "zero" wasn't because he lacked the skill. It was because the exam didn't ask about tire thermal degradation curves or the English terminology for track surface feedback. He could hold his own in a technical debate with F1 engineers on international forums—he'd learned his vocabulary from Guenther Steiner's team radio, after all.
But he couldn't be bothered to fill out a bubble sheet for relative clauses.
To Roan, the world was split into two categories: knowledge that made a car faster, and garbage. Garbage belonged in the bin, not his head.
The sunlight bit at his eyes. He remained in his reclined, "paralyzed" posture.
"Teacher, I want to have ambition," he yawned, his voice laced with genuine fatigue. "But standing up is just so... tiring."
Roan sighed. Not because of the lecture, but because that distraction had cost his mental lap time 0.05 seconds.
This was Roan's reality: his mind was a physics engine, and it never stopped running.