In 2047 the American prison population is approaching 5 million. Something must be done to ease the overcrowding. A superprison has been built in the desert of Southeastern New Mexico to help with this problem, but to no avail. Besides, the site, Northeast of Alamogordo, is right next to an area of unstable wormholes that keep zapping in and out of a small slice of the desert. (Some byproducts of nuclear testing take decades to manifest.)
Finally a novel solution to the prison population problem is concocted: A stock car race through the wormhole canyons. It is very popular with all facets of society: The politicians like it because it is a cheap way to siphon off the excess prisoners, the liberal voters dug it because the winner of the race is granted clemency, the conservatives liked it because it is a combination of Nascar and Faces of Death. And the prisoners liked it because anything is better than rotting in a cell in New Mexico. The rules were very simple: Build your own car (from vehicles donated to the prison), race around the course through the arroyos, mesas and spires and try to dodge the various shimmering lights that will swallow up you and your car and deposit you back in the exact spot, but in some random time in the past or future. In fact the surviving racers have brought back pictures of bizarre rock formations where vehicles were deposited into the middle of a mesa and were fused with the rock on a cellular level. The track was clear when they were swallowed up, but 2 million years ago that mesa was 10 feet to the South (that darn wobble the Earth has) and so that unfortunate racer is part of the course now. But for the lucky ones a message was carved into one of the spires from the future welcoming all the survivors who get beamed into the less barbaric tomorrow.
The racing action is a bit hard to follow, as cameras and spectators are somewhat reluctant to get within miles of the course, but satellite technology is sufficent by then to gain a rough idea of who is who, where is where, and who has become when. The main fun is the cameras on board the cars, who capture the wild racing action, the lovely rainbow shimmers that overtake various vehicles, and for just a moment a glimpse of the shining future, or perhaps a very startled dinosaur before the camera is yanked out of range.
Not all racers are transported so far, of course. The randomness of the worm holes means that some cars are zapped to the near future or the recent past. Some are even flattened and shot out of the normal range of the course. Few of these are ever noticed, or even recovered. But one flew 5 miles North East and landed exactly 100 years in the past - outside of a sleepy little crossroads named "Roswell".
Back to the land of Dreams.