The Prize Beyond Gold

  * * *

  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 micro-managed. 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 calorie.

  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 metres, 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 splendour, with taut muscles under black skin. Delroy knew that his skin colour 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 colours 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 enquiring. 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.