Analog SFF, June 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I was doing it because nobody had faulted him when at fifteen, he'd coasted to first place in the Wyoming high school championship, then won again and again and again. Instead, they'd rewarded him: running was now paying his way through college.

  Last year had been more of the same under the coach who'd preceded me. But no longer. Not if I had anything to say. Today, Dylan couldn't slow down. He would have tried by now and found it didn't work. Hell, at the start of that final lap, I'd tried. But I'd just kept on running, like an out-of-control Energizer bunny: going and going and going.

  How much longer? Four minutes? That would be about 700 steps. Seventy would be a tenth of the way. I could imagine keeping up the pace for that much longer—barely. Once, Dylan had admitted to thinking that way in practice, when I pushed him harder than any coach ever had before. Now I could hear him, softly counting. “Cut that out,” I said, and he gasped at the unexpected sound in his ear.

  I felt as though I should be wheezing from the effort, but my voice was nearly normal. “You're trying to disengage,” I said, “but you have to stay in the moment. Welcome the pain. Tell yourself you're going to punish the parts of your body that hurt by make them hurt more. That's what real racing is about."

  Ahead, the course slanted into a ravine. It was a good chance for a breather, but we sped downhill, barely on the edge of control, legs and lungs working as hard as ever. At the bottom, a slight stutter-step set us up to leap a narrow creek with dry feet, then we were dashing up the other side.

  “The finish is at the top,” I said. “Now is when great racers run like there's no tomorrow. None of that half-assed, cruise-in-for-the-cameras crap you've been getting away with all your life. This time it's going to be the real thing."

  Not that he had any choice. We were in what, in our present condition, passed for a full sprint, dashing uphill. It felt like running through molasses, but the runner we'd been shadowing for the last 800 meters—the one with the fringe of salt-and-pepper hair surrounding a Friar Tuck bald spot—didn't have what it took and we shot by him like he was standing still.

  Now we were at the top, and there was the finish line and the clock. Dylan gasped again, and it took me a moment to figure out why. Then I realized that the time was, for him, far too slow. Minutes too slow. It was a good finishing time for me—a spectacular one, in fact—but there was no way Dylan could work so hard and not be a lot faster.

  For the moment, though, it was enough to be across and no longer running, gasping for air that still would not come fast enough, walking—pacing because if we didn't keep moving, we'd keel over in a dead faint. Except, of course, that I was the only one who'd actually run a race like this anytime in his life. The only one who'd truly been at risk of fainting, because Dylan always finished looking as though he could do it over again—always held something back because he didn't want to look like this at the finish.

  He was saying something, but I couldn't catch it. Most likely, he was still confused about the time, because the illusion was so gripping that the first time you tried it, it was hard to remember what was really happening.

  I cut the feed and finally there was enough air. In fact, there was a lot of it, and we were no longer pacing. We were sitting in my office and I was unjacking the virtual reality players that had been so unbelievably good that halfway through, I too had had trouble not believing I was out there in the grass and mud and that it wasn't my lungs, or at least not my lungs in the here-and-now, that were about to explode. As it was, my pulse had quickened and I was bathed in a thin sheen of real sweat. I could even swear that I felt residual fatigue in my legs, though that had to be simply an afterimage of the VR, which had been more real than any game program Dylan would ever have encountered: so real it had never crossed his mind that he could make the whole thing end simply by ripping off the headset and telling me what he thought of my little “experiment” in racing strategy.

  But now he was thoroughly back in the present. “You tricked me!” he protested, as though coaches hadn't been tricking athletes since the dawn of sport.

  I grinned. “No permanent harm. I wanted you to understand how much you'd been slacking. Just because you're fast doesn't mean you're anywhere close to your potential."

  “But who cares, if the time sucks? I could jog faster than that. Who the hell was I, anyway?"

  I could feel the grin stretching. “Me. Last weekend, in the national masters championships, with an honest-to-goodness gold medal on the line.” The medal had only been in the 55-59 age group, but that was beside the point. It's been a while since I could keep up with the forty-year-olds.

  I didn't add that the decision to record the experience might have made the difference between gold and silver. I'd never beaten Friar Tuck before, but I'd known I couldn't show Dylan the recording unless I went after him with everything I had. “Learn to race like that and you can take it to the next level. Maybe even beat the Kenyans in the Olympics. Continue backing off from the pain, and you'll never truly amount to anything.” I let that sink in. “As for the gadget, it's a VR trainer. A friend made it for me, and I used it to record my race."

  Dylan didn't ask where the device came from, and I didn't tell him. There is an old thought experiment, called “six degrees of separation,” which postulates that nobody on the planet is more than a half-dozen “friends of friends” removed from anyone else. I have no idea whether it's correct, but if it is, it must rely strongly on what I think of as nexus people: those whose connections run in multiple, unexpected directions.

  I'm one of them. I've always been into athletics—running paid my own way through college—but the connections that got me the VR gadget involved basketball and computer games. Last summer, I'd been complaining to my old college roommate, Derrick, that the basketball team could have won the NCAA tournament if only it could shoot free throws. I'm not sure exactly what I said—multiple beers had been poured and I was merely telling him about my new job and the school's overall athletic prowess. But six months later, the headsets arrived. They came with a recording of some NBA star doing his thing at the free-throw line, and by the time I'd played it a few times, I felt as though I could hit nothing but net every time.

  Derrick didn't know the basketball coach and asked me not to show him the headsets. But I'd also told Derrick about Dylan and his Olympic potential. Officially, I was beta-testing the interface for a hush-hush video game. Unofficially, I was living a coach's dream.

  Coaches have always wished they could read their athletes’ minds. Now I could do the next best thing, because one of the headsets doubled as a recorder.

  “Do you want a shot at the Olympics?” I asked.

  Dylan nodded. What athlete didn't?

  “Then I want you to wear this thing during workouts and races.” I handed him the recorder, a nicely miniaturized contraption about the size of a music player. I showed him how it worked and handed him one of the recording chips. “Bring this back next week.” Distance runners by necessity do a lot of their training out of sight of the coach, but with the headset, I could monitor every step he took. It really was a coach's dream.

  * * * *

  That week, Dylan showed a new fire in his training. He'd always been the fastest on the team, but never the emotional leader. Now I wondered whether he might mature into next year's captain. It was hard to tell because Dylan had a lot to learn, not just about running but about emotional maturity, and the chip didn't really allow me to read his mind. It merely captured sensory inputs.

  The collegiate cross-country season had ended several weeks before my masters race, so we were now gearing up for track, where Dylan's event was the 10,000 meters. As the weeks progressed, he continued using the chip, but now he seemed to have two modes. One was the slacker, who always kept enough in reserve to look good to whoever might be watching. The other was new: an overachiever who did his workouts slightly faster than called for. I could shift him from one mode to the other by catching him at it, but it was like
flipping a switch: “A” or “B,” with no midpoint. That puzzled me until I realized that both behaviors represented the same thing. He was still showboating; he'd just found a new way to do it.

  For Dylan's remaining collegiate career, the new mode wasn't necessarily a bad thing. But in the long run, that overachiever stuff is worse than slacking because it burns you out and increases the risk of injuries.

  My job doesn't require me to worry about the long run. I'm paid to bring glory to the university by winning collegiate meets, not to train iffy Olympians. College coaches are notorious for wringing as much as possible out of their athletes during their years of eligibility, with no thought of what happens later, but I've never been one who could advance his own career over the bodies of the kids he's supposed to mentor. Call me altruistic; call me a fool. I'm either good enough to do both the paid job and the real one, or I'll find a new career. One advantage of being a nexus person is that I know how to do so, if necessary.

  From the chips, it was obvious that Dylan's showboating was at its worst when the women's team was training at the same time. In retrospect, I should have addressed the underlying immaturity directly, but instead I chose to focus on his running. My theory was that if I could help him mature there, he would in due course do so in the rest of his life, as well. It's an approach that's worked for plenty of other athletes, but if there was ever a decision I wish I could reverse, this was it.

  I began by changing his schedule to avoid the women. Then I told him that the best way to show off was by impressing me, via the chip. “What I want to see is discipline,” I said. “The closer you can get to doing exactly what I tell you, the more impressed I'll be."

  Every Friday, Dylan handed me that week's chip, and I spent my weekends playing back every minute of it. Since he ran eighty miles a week, that was a sizeable time commitment, but luckily my wife is the understanding type. Our daughter had gone off to college two years ago (on a track scholarship, what else?) and I was the one who most strongly felt the empty-nest syndrome. If I wanted to adopt Dylan as a special problem child, my wife was willing to humor me. Someday, I owe the woman a trip around the world, but probably not before I retire. Until then, there will always be some Dylan who I can't abandon for that long.

  For a month, he ran strong. Then in the fifth week, I felt a pain in his right knee. He'd said nothing about it, but when it comes to injuries, athletes fall into two camps: hypochondriacs who fret that each twinge is the one that will ruin their careers, and macho-types who'll tell you they're fine, even when they obviously aren't. Dylan had never been a hypochondriac, and with me tantalizing him with dreams of glory, it was no surprise he'd gone macho.

  One of the hardest parts of coaching is figuring out whether such injuries are worth worrying about, and there have been myriad occasions on which I'd wished I knew exactly what an ache or pain felt like. Now, I could. I played the chip over and over again, concentrating on how it felt at each part of his stride. Eventually I decided it was trivial, and the next week proved me right when the pain vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared.

  But the experience set me thinking. A few days later I called up Derrick and told him the story.

  “Can you imagine what it would be like if every doctor had one of these?” I asked. “No more, ‘Does it hurt when I do this?’ You'd just wear the headset, then give the chip to the doctor."

  Derrick is the opposite of a nexus person, deeply wrapped up in his own narrow field. But that doesn't mean he has no imagination. “EMTs would love it, too,” he said.

  “Parents could use it with young children."

  “Cops could screen drunk drivers."

  That set off a brainstorming session that I cut short a few minutes later with a question that had been nagging at me ever since I'd played the recording of Dylan's knee.

  “Would you really want to spend a whole day experiencing other people's pains?” I asked. It was one thing to play the chip of Dylan's knee pain again and again. It had never been more than a twinge. “That could get rather unpleasant."

  “Yeah,” Derrick said. “It needs a gain control.” There was a brief silence, and I pictured him staring out the window, thinking through a nifty technological problem, like he'd often done back in our dorm room. “Intensity of playback was a problem in the first prototypes,” he said a few seconds later. “The first was so powerful you could barely wrench yourself out of it before the end, even when it was something mundane, like looking out the window. Then I overcorrected, and got nothing more than a weird shadow image.” He paused again. “It would be easy enough to make it variable. Good idea."

  * * * *

  Two weeks later, Dylan ran his first race wearing the headset. He ran hard, though still not all-out. I told him so, and the following week he was better. Two weeks after that, he was better yet, and then we were on a roll until the NCAA finals loomed. The team had no chance—I'd recruited some good underclassmen but they needed another season or two to develop—but Dylan made the finals on individual merit.

  This time, I told him not to wear the headset. It didn't weigh much, but in a 10,000-meter race each unnecessary ounce costs you half a second, and the headset weighed six ounces. Dylan would either do well or he wouldn't. Either way, the season would be over.

  * * * *

  He was eighth, a major improvement from the year before. He'd have done better yet if he'd not ignored my advice and grabbed the lead in the first lap, where he stayed until he ran out of gas with a mile to go. It was another show-off move, but at least he was running hard, and we had all of next year to work on strategy. Overall, I was pleased. If he continued to improve, he had a shot at winning by his senior year.

  It was now summer, and Dylan went back to Wyoming with the recorder and a stack of chips. For the next few weeks, his regimen was simple: keep running, but take a few weeks off from hard workouts. Perhaps that's why I wasn't overly dismayed when, on the first Friday, he left a voice mail message saying he had no chip to send me.

  “Sorry, Coach,” he said. “I seem to have misplaced them."

  The chips looked a lot like the latest music and video cartridges, so I figured they were lost in a stack of look-alikes. I was out of blanks, but I didn't really need the ones we'd recorded during the winter and spring, so I erased a few, labeled them carefully as VR chips, and sent him enough to see him through the summer, along with a stern admonishment not to lose any more.

  Meanwhile, Derrick sent me a new pair of headsets, with variable gain control. “I realize you're doing fine with what you have,” he said, “but it was your idea, so I thought you might like to try it out."

  “Do you want the old ones back?"

  “Nah. Keep ‘em."

  As long as he was in a generous mood, I told him about the lost chips.

  “No problem. I've got a whole boxful. It's the type of thing that once you make the first one, it's not a lot more expensive to make a thousand. How many do you want?"

  I pulled a number out of the air and he promised to get them into the next day's mail.

  * * * *

  As luck would have it, I'd not reused the chip that had recorded Dylan's sore knee. The gain control on the new headsets was a simple dial, with an arrow indicating what I presumed to be the high-gain end. The thing about prototypes is that nobody invests time in fancy labeling; all that matters is that the designer knows what the controls do.

  Since there was some chance that the arrow indicated the low-gain direction rather than the high-gain one, I set the dial in the middle of its range and skimmed for the right segment of the chip. When I found it, the playback felt about like what I remembered.

  I turned the dial down and the pain decreased. I turned it up and yelped. Dylan's twinge had become an excruciating stab, his stride was a pounding rhythm that hit like a sledgehammer, and his breathing felt like the chugging of an old-fashioned steam engine. The entire experience was also more intense—far more real than reality itself, but with a
wrongness you didn't realize until afterward. If I'd not been playing back chips for months, I'd have sat there entranced until the playback ended.

  Nobody needed a gain control with that wide a range, but Derrick had never been one to do anything by half-measures.

  * * * *

  By August, Dylan was back on campus with the rest of the team, which needed to start practice well before the start of classes.

  He showed up with a sporty new car—a nice little gas/electric hybrid. At the time, I didn't think much of it because track and cross-country aren't the type of sports in which rich boosters buy such things for the stars. Runners are much more likely to get into trouble over trivia, such as cash or merchandise prizes in summer road races—anything of sufficient value to turn them into professionals.

  The main reason the car caught my attention was that it got me thinking about poverty. With gas prices heading toward ten dollars a gallon, the old gas-guzzlers have become dirt-cheap. That makes them the most common cars for students, even though most can barely afford to drive them. It's one of those ironic little poverty traps in which you can save a lot of money by buying a more efficient car, but only if you have the money to begin with. I wasn't sure how well-to-do Dylan's parents were, but his running was saving them a lot on tuition, so I figured they'd used it to give him a gift.

  * * * *

  Then, as it is sometimes prone to do, life became infinitely more complex.

  It began with a phone call from Derrick.

  “I've been trying to reach you for hours,” he began, breathlessly enough that he obviously believed every second mattered. “You know those VR headsets I gave you?"

  “Sure. They've worked wonders for my runner. This year I'm hoping he'll—"

  “Tell me some other time. I'm calling from a pay phone and I don't think anyone can trace me, but I don't want to talk any longer than I have to. I just want you to destroy them."