“What about my roof?”
“You put your savings into the essence trickery. Except there was a problem. Through some complicated difficulties that I can’t begin to describe, your savings never reached the proper accounts. Our banking system is a nightmare, and they have vanished, and you have fallen into deep debt. A debt that will require the selling of your home to make amends. As per the Bankruptcy Act of 2017.”
I leaned forward.
The television launched into a documentary about the New Oligarchs and the subsequent resurgence of order in the world.
“I’m ruined,” I muttered.
“You’re reborn,” he countered. “Fresh into the world with nothing but your skin and basic nature.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
Gilchrist said nothing, pulling himself out of the booth.
“What? Do you want me to join a political movement now?” I felt almost hopeful, asking, “Am I supposed to run off with you now? Join the cyber-guerrillas or whoever it is?”
He said, “Hardly.”
I cursed him.
He said, “This is a gift, sir. A gift. And like any charity, its value relies on whatever the recipient gains in the end.”
I cursed him once more.
The youngster grinned and winked, and I suddenly recognized that expression. The witch-queen showed me the same look today.
The door to the kitchen swung open.
As my feast was being carried closer, Gilchrist bent low, and with a quiet conspiratorial whisper said, “You can’t afford this meal. But it might be your last. My advice? Eat your fill. Then put this dried beef inside a clean pocket. And when nobody seems to be watching, run. Run, run, run.”
Copyright © 2010 Robert Reed
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Short Stories
THE PRIZE BEYOND GOLD
Ian Creasey
“Sliding Down the Asymptote” was the working title for Ian Creasey’s latest story. The author tells us that “the idea came when I watched the Olympics and noticed how often the TV pictures showed the current competitors’ times against the world record for the event. It occurred to me that in future, it should become ever harder to break any record, as all the records approach closer and closer to the boundaries of what’s physically possible. And so I decided to write a story in the traditional SF mode of extrapolating a trend to its limit.”
Three days before the race, when Delroy had finished warming down from a training run, his coach summoned him for a talk. Delroy could tell it was something big. Michito’s job—assisted by his Enhanced empathy—was to become exquisitely sensitive to his athlete’s mood, so as to help get the best out of him. The attunement sometimes became mutual, and Delroy now discerned a rare eagerness in Michito’s almost-natural face.
“The weather forecast for race day has reached certainty,” said Michito. “Temperature: perfect. Humidity: perfect. Wind speed: just below the permissible maximum. Wind direction—”
“Perfect?” said Delroy.
“Behind you all the way.” Michito grinned in delight. “It’s the final star in the constellation. You’re in great shape, the weather will be ideal, we’re two thousand meters above sea level”—Michito made a sweeping gesture, encompassing the many other factors affecting performance—“and it all adds up to one thing.”
“I’m going to win?” Delroy didn’t understand Michito’s glee: the weather would be the same for all the runners.
“Yes, but never mind that. Forget winning—you have a chance at the record!”
Michito paused to let it sink in. Records were something that athletes and coaches normally never discussed, because they’d stood so long that they were effectively unbeatable. The record for the men’s 100 meters had remained at 8.341 seconds for the past seventy years.
A pulse of exhilaration surged through Delroy. His posture stiffened, as if already preparing for the starting gun. “Really? The world record?”
“Yes, the one and only. The prize beyond gold.”
Michito’s excitement spilled out, infecting Delroy, whose own excitement blazed in return and stoked a feedback loop. They were practically getting high on it. Indeed, this giddy rush was as close to getting high as Delroy had ever experienced. In his entire life he’d never once taken any kind of drug. The rules were strict on that, as on so many other things.
Abruptly, Michito reverted to his habitual seriousness. “A chance, I said. A real chance. But only if everything’s as smooth as an angel’s feather. We need absolute perfection. There can be no deviations, no distractions.”
This was standard rhetoric for any important race. Yet Michito’s demeanor indicated something beyond the usual rigorous regime.
“I think it would be best if you stayed here at the training ground,” Michito went on, “instead of going back to the villa tonight. This is a more controlled environment, with much less risk—”
“What could possibly happen to me?”
“I want to keep you away from other people, and it’s easier to do that here. You’ll be in purdah, seeing no one except your coaching team. I know it’ll be frustrating, but it’s only three days.”
Delroy grimaced, though he didn’t argue. Michito knew what was best. Aside from the usual health and attractiveness tweaks, Michito’s main Enhancement was an uncanny empathy that let him predict Delroy’s responses, and thus determine the optimum conditions for success. If he felt purdah was necessary, then it must be necessary. It was only another line in the script Delroy had been following all his life.
The script had two phases, as familiar as his two legs. Sometimes, when he rehearsed stride patterns out on the track, the script echoed in his head with every step: left, right; left, right—race, train; race, train....
Michito said, “This is bigger than any medal. The Olympics are like a moon that’s always in the sky, waxing every four years; but the record is a comet that blazes just once across the heavens, before disappearing forever. This could be the only time in your career when all the right circumstances combine: the chance might never come again.
“Yet if we can predict this opportunity, then so can other people. Now that the weather’s finalized, everyone knows you have a shot at the record. Journalists will be swarming like hornets. It’s the biggest sports story of the decade—and it goes beyond sports....”
Michito’s voice trailed off, but Delroy knew what he implied. Athletics records could only be set by standard, unenhanced humans—the so-called Ancestral Model. Since in most respects the Standards had long been surpassed by their Enhanced progeny, any new achievement by a Standard human was a major event, embraced by the Natural Life movement as evidence that the old model wasn’t entirely obsolete.
“And there’s one more thing we need to watch out for,” Michito said, pausing to emphasize his next word. “Sabotage. Not everyone will want you to break that record. We can’t take the risk of anyone getting to you. I’ve already arranged extra security here.”
Sabotage? It sounded unlikely. Was that a real danger, or just a phantom invoked to persuade Delroy to accept the purdah?
That was the problem with having a coach solely focused on making you perform. You never knew whether anything he said was true, or simply the lie with the maximum calculated motivational value.
Still, the truth didn’t matter. Only the record mattered.
The next day, Delroy had his head shaved. It was a routine pre-race procedure. His hair only generated the tiniest fraction of air-resistance drag, but every fraction counted.
It felt like being in prison. No, worse than that. In prison, you were locked up, but you didn’t have every hour of your day micromanaged. You could make small choices: eat cabbage or cauliflower; go to the exercise yard or the library. Delroy had no such freedom. The exercises were prescribed, specifying exactly how long to spend on every gym machine and track sprint. His diet was calculated down to each individual c
alorie.
He needed to be in impeccable condition to have any hope of surpassing the record. Over the centuries that athletics records had been measured, the times had got lower and lower. The lower the records became, the harder they were to beat, and the less often it happened. The intervals between new records stretched from years to decades to centuries. And the times themselves decreased on an asymptotic curve.
If he’d been allowed to talk to journalists, Delroy would have enjoyed using the word “asymptotic,” just to violate people’s expectations. People always thought Standards were dumb, because they didn’t have augmented intelligence; and people always thought athletes were dumb, because ... well, Delroy didn’t know why athletes were stereotypically stupid, but for some reason no one ever expected them to use a polysyllabic word like “asymptote.”
As to what it meant, Delroy couldn’t cite a mathematical definition, but he knew its practical effect. The record kept decreasing by smaller amounts, over longer periods, approaching the limit of human attainment: the absolute fastest that anyone could ever run—unaided, of course, by genetic engineering, post-natal resculpting, performance-enhancing substances, or any of the very long list of other techniques that had been banned to maintain the purity of the record books.
If Delroy set a new mark, it might almost be the asymptote itself—or within a thousandth of a second, the precision of the official records. The previous record had stood for seventy years, so Delroy’s record should last even longer, a fame persisting his entire lifetime ... unless he had his body resculpted into one of the post-natal Enhancements that included longevity extensions.
Fame for life, perhaps for eternity.
Contemplating this vision helped reconcile Delroy to the indignities of the training regime. Every aspect, no matter how arduous or annoying, contributed to shaving 0.008 seconds from his personal best: the improvement required to beat the record.
Everything was calculated, down to the last molecule of piss in his bladder. He mustn’t carry excess fluid on the day.
After saying goodbye to his hair, Delroy walked into the training-suite annex that housed Dop, his virtual copy. One wall of the room housed a screen projecting an image of Dop, now equally hairless. Since Dop was an atomic-scale emulation, and the screen was smoother than mirrorglass, the onscreen image was even more accurate than looking into a mirror. It showed Delroy at full height, 2.003 meters, and it displayed him naked. The effects of wearing different clothes could be simulated, but the optimum costume and footwear had been refined long ago, so there was usually little point in adding them. His body appeared in its full splendor, with taut muscles under black skin. Delroy knew that his skin color would once have made him subject to prejudice. Nowadays, differences between the Standards were negligible compared to the gulf dividing them from the various Enhanced clades. All colors of Standard suffered equal prejudice from those who derided the defects of the ancestral human form. Still, as the Natural Life movement said, if the Enhanced were really so superior, why were there so many different varieties? They couldn’t all be equally wonderful.
Sometimes, in the moments when he wanted something that he couldn’t have, Delroy might say to the emulator, “I’d love an ice cream sundae with fudge topping.” Then the wallscreen would split into two panels, showing alternate versions of Dop: one who followed the recommended regime, and one who lapsed into indulgence. These simulations were projected forward to race day, and compared. Without fail, the virtuous Dop would be in better shape—perhaps only by an infinitesimal fraction, but it all counted.
This didn’t stop Delroy inquiring. After all, you didn’t know unless you asked. He dreamed that one day he might say, “How about growing my hair into an enormous afro?” and the emulator would reply, “We hadn’t thought of that, yet we’ve run the calculations and it turns out that having a giant afro really will help you break the record!”
But after several negative responses, sometimes Delroy would simply stare at the screen and wonder how it felt to be a simulated person inside a computer. As an atom-by-atom emulation, in principle Dop could think and dream equally well as Delroy himself.
In practice, that didn’t happen, but only because the law forbade creating a sentient emulation and keeping it prisoner to calculate projections of diets and exercises. Dop’s higher brain functions had been suppressed: he didn’t think at all.
Delroy found this disturbing. His whole training regime was based on Dop’s simulations. That was how it had worked for years: it had won him gold at the last Olympics, and now it would—God willing—give him the world record. Yet the fact that Dop didn’t think, that his mental capacities were erased, showed how little the intellect mattered.
Delroy was just a machine following a script, one that needed no thought whatsoever to obey. He only had to train, eat, drink, and run. No brain required.
Maybe athletes really were stupid.
He hated to think that he lived like a programmed automaton. It had almost destroyed his love for racing. In his youth, he’d wanted nothing more than to run, run, run. After he started winning races, he’d trained under a succession of coaches with ever more elaborate and restrictive regimes. As Delroy grew faster, and approached his own personal asymptote, further improvements grew more difficult and required more precise instruction, until finally he became the slave of a brainless emulation.
He’d gone along with it because it worked. You can’t argue with results. Yet after Olympic gold and—possibly—a world record, what on earth could come next?
“What next?” he asked Dop, on the big screen.
But the simulations always stopped at the end of the race.
On the day before the big race, Delroy rehearsed his sprints and starts while loudspeakers blared a carefully tailored simulation of cheering spectators, enabling Delroy to accustom himself to the exact pitch of the crowd’s roar. Everything proceeded with metronomic precision. It made Delroy feel like a clockwork toy, being wound tighter and tighter....
Michito sensed Delroy’s tension, but—unusually—didn’t defuse it. Perhaps the tension was necessary: its explosive release would help propel Delroy faster than ever before. After the training session, Michito and his aides hurried back inside to calibrate Delroy’s performance against the projections from Dop, and calculate any final tweaks to the diet and sleep regime for the few remaining hours.
Delroy stayed outside to linger in the warm afternoon air and enjoy the view. This would be the last time he saw it. Tomorrow he’d be far too focused on the race to even notice the environment, and afterward he’d go home to Los Angeles—returning as either a record-breaker or merely an Olympic champion still.
Around him lay the magnificent mountains overlooking Mexico City. A thin layer of cloud took the edge off the sun’s glare; specks outlined against the clouds might be birds, or might be Enhanced humans soaring across the sky. Wings were one of the most popular enhancements, despite the radical degree of surgery necessary for a post-natal conversion.
As he looked, one of the specks grew bigger. A figure descended, gliding toward the running track. Delroy frowned. Michito’s security team would deal with the intruder, so there was no sense in Delroy getting involved. He walked toward the changing rooms, his muscles tense as he anticipated a confrontation somewhere behind him. He almost broke into a jog, but restrained himself. His exercises had been parameterized to the last stride and drop of sweat; if he ran fifty meters back to the huts, he might infinitesimally overtax himself.
On his bare scalp he felt a draft of air from the beating of wings. The figure was following him. Unless Delroy sprinted, a flyer could easily outpace him anywhere, so he stopped and sat down on one of the lane-marker blocks, waiting for the intruder to land.
The interloper settled neatly onto the asphalt in front of him, and folded her wings. She wore a red woollen tunic; her feet were bare, with brown-skinned human toes rather than the birdlike claws that some of the aerial clades found convenie
nt. Delroy had seen winged humans before, but it always shocked him how small they were. She resembled a six-year-old child with hydrocephaly: the body had to be small, so that wings could support it; but the brain couldn’t shrink without losing capacities, so the disproportionate head sat on top of the slender body like a pumpkin on top of a carrot.
Delroy glanced to his right, then his left, wondering what had happened to the promised security patrol. Not that the flyer looked like a threat: she was tiny and appeared to be carrying no weapon. Still, she’d violated the pre-race purdah that Michito deemed essential.
“Your guardians have been detained for a little while,” the woman said, in a high-pitched, childlike voice. “Not very long. I only need a few minutes of your time.”
“And I only need to prepare without interference,” Delroy said forcefully. “If you wanted to talk to me, why didn’t you wait until after the race?”
“Because I wanted to be the first. After you break the record, you’ll be deluged with offers. It would be difficult for me to reach you, and if I did, I’d just be one voice among many. You’d have no reason to listen to me. But now, I can ask you to give me a chance. If I promise to leave after—say—ten minutes, will you hear me out?”
“I’m not sure I should,” said Delroy. “Michito told me to avoid all contact. I haven’t even spoken to my family.” An image from an old film arose vividly in his mind: sailors blocking up their ears against the siren voices of doom. There was no one here to tie him to the mast. Where had everyone gone?
“Michito is very protective, I know. He’s been detained with the others. But he needn’t worry. I have no intention of doing anything that’ll harm your chances. I want you to break that record, and I’m sure you will.”
“All right, all right,” said Delroy, not quite reassured, but grateful that she hadn’t already shot a bullet into his knee, which she could easily have done if she’d wished him ill. Her audacity deserved acknowledgment. A rebellious part of him welcomed the deviation from the script, the unplanned encounter that might lead anywhere.
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