If you think it’s bad now, take a look at this future world where illegal aliens are so hated, genetically-engineered, superfast predators try to kill them while they travel in ferociously quick racecars. Calling Hollywood: Fast and the Furious meets Jurassic Park at ten times the speed.

And we haven’t even gotten to

The jetpack zombies.

It’s a forgotten obscurity called “The Zen of Speed,” and it’s about an eccentric teen cabbie (or Uber driver, I guess you could say) in a far-future superapocalyptic world. Here, young cabbies are wired to their very-fast cars and will explode if they don’t do their jobs right.

Their jobs? Get people across these zones filled with extremely-fast genetically engineered animals that were designed thousands of years ago to hunt and kill illegal aliens, but now are just out there roaming around.

Above: a genetically warped horse and a far-future Dobermann are just a few of the predators.

The teenage protagonist, Rev, gets himself in a jam where he has to smuggle a girl into a city, past a wasteland of elaborate raptorlike things and violent mammal species that move incredibly fast… and the problem is, these creatures have evolved to kill immigrant DNA, just like hers.

In the far future, it’s vehicles like these that will keep you safe from the speedpredator animals out there. (Images are concept art studies only. No photos from the series are available yet.)

The short story is notorious for its own backstory, one in which major Hollywood players had to prove they cared about racing enough to win the rights, so they had to drive a 200-mph Indianapolis-500-styled Formula One car at top speed in order to get the writer to give them the legal power to make the story into a movie.

Rather famously, this is the reason legendary producer Don Simpson (of TOP GUN) actually died, though it rarely gets reported correctly. After his passing, no one wanted to touch the movie under the circumstances, so the rights sit waiting for someone to snatch them up.

Now for your reading and imagination pleasures…

“The Zen of Speed” short story is below at the bottom, along with a bevy of concept art studies on how it all might look.