Future Sports

by Gardner Dozois

  The car from the airport had tinted windows, a bar, and an office unit. It drove along an oceanfront boulevard lined with ragged palms. There were tourist hotels and condominiums, there were street vendors and pedicab ranks, there were people running and people walking little dogs, there were beggars and security company prowl cars. There were holographic advertisements for cameras and computers and condoms and cannabarillos. The alphabet was different. The other difference was the immense truncated cone of a corporate arcology standing across the near horizon like God. Hammadi could not have said what part of the world he was in.

  They gave him an apartment on the fifty-fifth floor with a veranda overlooking the ocean. The only thing he did not like about it was that he could not turn the television off. He went out onto the balcony to look at the ocean and saw that all the surrounding balconies were occupied by naked fat women lying on their backs in the sun. Toward evening a woman opened the door Larsby had told him only he could open. She was dressed in a leather pouch and paisley bodytint.

  “Excuse me, can I help you?” Hammadi asked. The woman stood there a full minute, smiling at him in a way that was both pitying and relieved. She closed the door and he never saw her again. His training began the next day.

  The first two weeks he did not run at all. He was measured, weighed, analyzed, sectioned, taken apart, and reassembled. He had electrodes connected to his skull and sat for hours in a darkened room telling a synthetic voice which of two lights flashed first, he arranged shapes and matched up grids on holographic displays, he was lowered into sensdep tanks and exposed to different-colored lights, he was shot full of injections that made him feel angry or sleepy or horny or induced bizarre hallucinations or made him feel like crying continuously or that he had seen the face of God and forgotten what it looked like. The man in the Nehru suit made him sign a consent form, and when he woke up from surgery he was thirty centimeters taller and had plastic parallel interface ports under his ears and at the back of his neck and along his spine and inner thighs. He stroked the soft plastic with his fingers. It made him want to cry.

  Every day he asked Larsby when he was going to run.

  “You’ll be in full training soon enough,” Larsby said. “Don’t worry, this is all just to find out what we need to design a training program specially for you that will bring you to your optimum performance peak. By the way, sign this.” It was another consent form.

  “What is it for?”

  “It’s just a general consent for us to introduce performance-enhancing agents into your food.”

  “Wait, please. Do you mean you want me to take drugs? Mr. Larsby, Islam prohibits the abuse of drugs.”

  Larsby pursed his lips. “Well, they’re not exactly drugs; in fact, they’re not drugs at all, they’re naturally occurring chemicals, well, synthetic copies of them, found in the body, that stimulate muscle development, neural responses, and overall growth. Really, you shouldn’t call them drugs at all.”

  Hammadi signed the form. He could not tell when they started to put the performance enhancers in his meals. At the end of the two weeks of testing Larsby sent Hammadi for five days of sun, sand, surf, sleep, and sex at a Company beach resort down the coast. When he returned, having enjoyed all of these bar one, Larsby summoned him to his office.

  “Got something for you.” A panel slid open in the wall. Hanging there, in this year’s latest pastels and black, with all the logos in all the right places, was a Toussaint Mantene bodysuit. Hammadi tried it on in a small dressing room hidden behind another wooden panel in Larsby’s office. As he sealed it shut he felt it move and settle around his contours, felt the temperature control mechanism adjust to his optimum heat-transfer pattern, felt the inbuilt film circuitry mesh with his parallel interfacers. Energy poured through him, burned up his spine, along his nerves and sinews. He had never experienced such a total, dynamic communion with his body before. He wanted to run and run and never stop. He looked at himself in the mirror, remembered the pride with which his father had presented him with the cheap Filipino copy.

  The training began. Hammadi had thought he would be running every day with the other Company-sponsored athletes. Again he was wrong. Most of the competitive races were run in computer simulation. The few others he did meet in out-of-training hours were mostly boys like himself, lifted from lives of disadvantage and insignificance by the hand of Toussaint Mantene. Different skin, different hair, different eyes, same lives. They had too much in common to be able to communicate. Hammadi trained alone, under the silver dome with its tiers upon tiers of flipped-up seats and the lights that were supposed to stimulate sunlight but never quite did.

  Larsby monitored the training sessions from a glass box that descended from the roof. It had not taken Hammadi long to realize that despite the whispered comments on the speaker they had implanted in his mastoid bone, Larsby was his coach only insofar as he was the man who had speculated in buying up the contract of a promising street runner and invested his time and effort in bringing him to the point where he might someday win him and the Company a lot of money. He had heard from the other Toussaint Mantene athletes of the fortunes in shares and influence points that changed hands at the intercorporate athletics meets.

  His real coach was the computer. It regulated his calorific, mineral, nutrient, trace, and vitamin intake; it programmed his hours of sleep; it monitored his body functions and vital signs from the moment he pulled his bodysuit on in the morning to when he left it lying in a pile outside the personal-hygiene cubicle at night; it produced optimum performance parameters for every action he made while running and programmed them into his muscles through the bodysuit interfacers; it compared his movements and responses with a holographic ideal synthesized from the performances of past champions; it checked Hammadi’s real-time performance against his optimized model a thousand times a second and tightened up a neural firing curve here, flattened out a troublesome brainwave pattern there, adjusted the levels of alpha dopamines and K-endorphin groupings so that he was neither too happy nor too sad, too much in pain or not feeling the burn enough.

  He saw the other athletes flying off to competition every other week and asked Larsby when he could run for the Company.

  “You’ve got a way to go yet, son,” Larsby said in his always reasonable, always right voice. “Lot to learn, boy. Lot of mistakes to put right. But you’ll get there, don’t you worry about that.”

  “When?”

  “When I say so.”

  Months passed, the passage of the anonymous seasons apparent only in secondary, human responses: the changing fashions of the girls who roller-skated along the palm-lined boulevards, the jet surfers and power skiers putting on colorful wet suits, the fat peely women who sunbathed naked on their balconies resetting their apartment lighting to UVB and making appointments to have their melanomas frozen off. Hammadi sent letters and flat-light holograms of himself to his family. In the letters he received in reply his father would say how proud he was that the son of such a humble man could hope to rise so high. His mother would be constantly amazed at how tall he was growing, how broad, how strong, why she hardly knew him for the same Hammadi. She would always remind him that God honored those who honored Him. Hammadi looked at himself in the mirror in his personal-hygiene cubicle, the long, deep look he had until now avoided. He saw what the radical replacement surgery, the growth factors, the daily physiotherapy, the muscular development hormones, the high-energy diet, the muscle-pattern optimization treatment had done to him. He hardly recognized himself for the same Hammadi.

  Now when he trained, he was driven by a deep and dark energy. It seemed like determination. It was anger, anger that his father had always, only, loved him for what he could become, not what he was. Larsby noticed the new, driving energy. “So what’s the secret then, boy?” he asked. “The computer models never predicted you’d hit this kind of form at this stage in training.”

  “I looked at myself in the mirror and saw that I was not what
I thought I was.”

  “You keep taking that look,” said Larsby. “And keep liking what you’re seeing. I think maybe we might try you at the next race meet.”

  Hammadi was flown in another windowless plane to another arcology by another oceanside and another track under its silver dome with tiers upon tiers of seats and lighting that was meant to simulate daylight but never quite did.

  “You’re entered in the two hundred,” Larsby told him. They were walking the track, letting the real-time analyzers in Hammadi’s shoes produce a model of the running surface. “Given the range of entrants, the computer assigned the highest probability of an optimum performance in that event. Friday. Twelve-thirty.”

  Hammadi stopped walking.

  “Could you not have entered me in an event that is not going to be run on a Friday?”

  “You have some problem with Friday?”

  Hammadi had known Larsby long enough to read a full spectrum of expressions into his practiced blandness.

  “It’s the Holy Day. I can’t run on the Holy Day, it would be dishonoring to God.”

  Larsby looked at Hammadi as he might some dead thing washed up on the beach from deep in the ocean.

  “Okay, so, I respect your religion. I respect every man who believes in something, but Hammadi, you say God’s made you fast, that’s the secret of your success. I can accept that, you have a remarkable talent, but answer this: which would honor God more, to use the gift he has given you to show a world which, frankly, does not believe, the strength of your belief, or let that light be hidden, so that no one will see what God can accomplish through you?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about this. Give me time, will you?”

  “Son, you take all the time you need.”

  Hammadi went to his apartment. He sat on the balcony overlooking the palms and the ocean. He thought about what his mother said about God honoring those who honored Him, and her accusations that her father had confused the will of Allah with his own will. He prayed. He waited on God, but no finger of fire wrote blazing letters across the yellow tropical storm clouds that clung to the horizon.

  He went back to Larsby and said, “I’ll run. If I am honoring God, He will bless me. If I am dishonoring God, I will not succeed.”

  Friday. Race day. Hammadi’s bloodstream had been boosted with synthetic hemoglobin assistors and doped with adenosine triphosphates. By race time his nervous system was boiling with artificially induced fury. He ran onto the track, and as the trackside tech team ran final checks on his biological, physiological, and informational systems, the cameras looked on, hovering like blue flies on their silent ducted fans. Then the adenosine triphosphate kicked in fully and all he cared about, all he lived for, was to annihilate every other runner on that track. In the blocks the pulser ticked in the corner of his field of vision registering world, Pan-Olympic, Corporation, and personal records. The starter was a ringing blip in his ears and a flash of red across his vision. Cortical electrical activity peaked momentarily to multi-volt levels and sent him burning away from the blocks in a split second of controlled epileptic spasm. The PCP pump in the base of his skull trickled 3-4-morphatropine and tyrocine salicylate into his brain stem; he felt he was growing in size until he filled the entire stadium. He could compete the two hundred meters in a single stride. Larsby’s voice in his ear spoke through a wash of mantras designed to erase everything unneedful from his attention except winning. He was running like a god, with the great easy strides Allah takes across Creation, galaxies in a single step. Yet, somehow, there were others in front of him. Under his bodysuit his muscles moved into new configurations as the interfacers fed new response patterns to the changing tactical situation.

  It was begun and ended in less than ten seconds.

  He had come in third.

  Larsby was ecstatic. “Third! Third! In your first competition! Boy, you beat runners been competing for three, four, five years, runners who’ve won Pan-Olympic medals. I don’t know what it was you did, boy, but you ran yourself right off our projections.”

  Hammadi was disconsolate. Third. He felt he had failed father, God, Company. He had never felt the down after a PCP high before. He picked his way through the other crashed, shivering athletes for a place to hide and cry.

  In his apartment there was a letter forwarded from his father. There was a photograph of what looked like several hundred people crammed into the front room of his old home, all cheering and waving. His mother was nowhere to be seen, presumably making mint tea for the men. He might have honored everything else, but he had failed his mother.

  * * *

  He is beyond it now. Behind him lies the laughter of the condominiums and the dark, desperate pulse beat of the tourist hotels. The city is a cluster of lights, soft as powder, at the end of the beach, like the jeweled hilt of a sword. He runs on into the night, under the moon and the orbiting factories, past the dark olive groves and fig orchards and the houses of the humble, the olive farmers, the sardine fishermen, people whose lives have been largely passed over by the twenty-first century, except for the satellite dishes on their roofs and the squatter camps of refugees from the war in the south in the shade of their grandfather’s olives. No lights here, these are a people who rise and set with the sun, but from the cardboard and plastic shanties Hammadi can hear the solar-charged televisions the government hands out. He wonders, do they recognize this running figure in its sleek primaries and corporate logos as the same man they cheered on to victory and national glory on those twenty-centimeter screens that are the only sources of light in the fetid, filthy shanties? The same sweet, glossy smell that haunts the condominiums carries to him from the shoreline squats. The condo people buy their highs with smartcards, the shanty people get them free, courtesy of the government as an exercise in social engineering, but they all end the same. Long-term synTHC users display symptoms similar to Alzheimer’s. The government’s generosity to its dispossessed gently shepherds the refugee problem to its own self-imposed final solution.

  But Hammadi is the Sufi, the Dervish of Allah, translated into a purer, higher form of worship that gathers body mind emotion and spirit together in one living declaration of the power of God. This was the part of him the Company could never subcontract, the state of exaltation they could never simulate for all their chemicals and computers and conditioning, the part where divinity and humanity touched, the unknown fire that drove Hammadi al-Bourhan off their graphs and models and extrapolations.

  * * *

  Every other week he was flown to a competition against another company. Hammadi made steady progress up the ratings from also-ran and third to third and second to second and first. Larsby’s wins on the credit-and-influence stakes grew smaller and smaller as the odds against Hammadi al-Bourhan grew shorter and shorter, but Larsby’s eyes were set on a greater horizon. In ten months it would be the Pan-Olympiad and the chance of glory against the gathered corporations. Hammadi saw that horizon also, but his immediate concern was with a man called Bradley Nullabiri. He had met him first in a training simulation, the man who was to become his closest and deadliest rival. Bradley Nullabiri, Bayer-Mainoff GmBH, born December 21, 2002, Alice Springs, Australia; one of the final generation of pure-bred aboriginals: he studied that black man, ran and ran and ran that simulated two hundred meters against him until there was nothing about him as an athlete or a human that he felt he did not know. Then he flew on a suborbital Sänger with Larsby and his twenty-person tech team to run against him in the flesh.

  He lost. They met again, in the return meet, when it was Bradley Nullabiri’s turn to fly in with his coach and tech team. Hammadi lost. There was one more thing about Bradley Nullabiri that the files didn’t cover: Bradley Nullabiri was also a man who had been touched by the hand of God, his gods, the stalking ones, the ancient ones, who had drawn his two-hundred-thousand-year heritage behind them out of the Dreamtime. In every respect they were the same. Except one, and that was the one that made Bradle
y Nullabiri unbeatable.

  Bradley Nullabiri knew he was unbeatable.

  “Question of attitude,” Larsby said. “Nothing magical about it. You just got to believe you’re more unbeatable than he is.”

  Hammadi spent the three weeks until their next meeting in the company of the psychologists who never got around to explaining what their tests were for or how he had scored in them. Team al-Bourhan was loaded into an aerospacer and disgorged after the forty-minute flight to do battle with Bradley Nullabiri. Media interest was by now so hyped they were charging two hundred thousand a minute for advertising. The race went to a freeze-frame finish. Hammadi lost by three-hundredths of a second.

  “Forget Bradley Nullabiri,” Larsby told a depressed Hammadi on the flight home. “You got to concentrate on the Pan-Olympics. Every waking and sleeping minute, you’re thinking of nothing but Pan-Olympic gold, Pan-Olympic gold, Pan-Olympic gold.”

  “Bradley Nullabiri will be there.”

  “So will Hammadi al-Bourhan. Pan-Olympics are different.”

  His father, in his regular letters, gave the same advice: Allah would never permit the Godless to triumph over His Chosen, it was ordained that he would win gold at the Pan-Olympics and bring everlasting glory to Islam, his country and the name of al-Bourhan. Incidentally, thanks to the money the Company put into a trust fund from his account, they had recently moved into a newer and bigger house, thank you, son.

  Hammadi no longer replied to his father’s letters.

  Twenty minutes into the flight, just before the aerospacer went into free fall at the apex of its orbit, Hammadi realized that either he hadn’t been told, or hadn’t asked, where they were going. The new diamond-fiber doped ceramoplastic ankle joints that enabled him to withstand even more acceleration away from the blocks ached dully in free fall.