He clicked the link. A progress bar appeared. 1%... 4%...

He selected and chose the hardest difficulty: "Realistic." Then he picked his weapon: the 2015 Yamaha YZR-M1, the bike that Valentino Rossi had ridden to within a whisker of a tenth title. He queued up the first race of the European season: Jerez, Spain.

By lap five, his shirt was soaked with sweat. He was battling a pixelated Dani Pedrosa for 4th place. The crowd in the game was a blur of European flags—Spanish, Italian, French, German. He could hear them. No. He was them.

He installed it immediately. The splash screen glowed—a stylized Rossi vs. Marquez, elbows out, sparks flying. He grabbed his old racing gloves, worn thin at the palms, and put them on. His girlfriend, sleeping on the couch, stirred.

“Only the ghosts,” Leo replied.

“Racing again?” she whispered.

The rain hammered against the window of Leo’s cramped attic apartment in Milan. Outside, the real world was a wash of gray—endless lockdowns, canceled flights, and a racing season that had evaporated like morning dew. Leo, a former amateur rider whose knee had been shattered by a careless driver, hadn’t felt the rumble of an engine in three years.