Larry Niven - Achilles choice

Her voice echoed in an empty world. Beverly was gone.

She would have to activate a new personality core, but that was no problem.

Was it?

Before that, hook into—

Jillian woke as if she had fallen asleep sitting upright. Her eyes felt dry, her mouth likewise; pain throbbed in her temples; her mind was muddled. It seemed hours since Beverly (died) faded away and left Jillian with no input to her mind.

Her cocoa was still warm. By the clock, seven minutes had passed.

She rocked and moaned. It had never been like this. Never had she felt the tension screwed up inside her like an ice sliver inserted at the base of the skull.

She fumbled for the small plastic wafer that contained Beverly’s personality. Within that clear card was a gigabyte of data, the essentials of the personality Jillian had labored since childhood to create.

She inserted it in the console.

I/O error 1154.

She peered at the card. Nothing had changed. Beverly was still in there, somewhere. Try again.

I/O error 1154.

What was error message 1154? Fingers shaking now, she typed the number in manually, watched as the message appeared on her holo screen:

1154: unfamiliar nomenclature. Please check program compatibility.

It was a standard console. She had loaded Beverly a thousand times and never seen that message.

On the fourth attempt, a new message appeared. Special message 9263: Olympiad participants are allotted computer time to complete their approved projects. The present line of questioning is judged inappropriate.

Jillian felt damp, sticky, frightened… but never surprised. At no time had she felt surprise.

So they couldn’t damage Beverly, huh? What a fool she had been. All they had to do was refuse to let Jillian load her Simulacrum into the console.

There weren’t any privately owned computers large enough or powerful enough to run Beverly.

For the first time in her life, Jillian was completely alone.

Cautiously, she asked: “Access A.D. 2034 Munich symposium on crime. National police agency of Japan white paper on civil actions. Statistics only.”

She chewed fingernails as she waited, an old habit she’d thought long since vanquished. Then the blue holo field fluttered, and numbers began to appear. She sighed relief, and risked another harmless inquiry:

“Cross-chart Australian situation comedy ratings with child abuse stats.”

Again, a moment’s pause, and then the field began to fill.

She’d been wondering anyway- “Do a bar graph. Olympic contenders, ratio of Corporate to national. Cross-reference against funding and wins—”

Contenders representing one or another nation totalled only eight percent this year, a steady drop from above fourteen percent sixteen years ago. In terms of population they should have had more like thirty percent. Funding for national contenders was generally higher… and still they didn’t take their share of wins.

Suspicions confirmed. The surviving nations offered more support for the Olympics because they wanted their prestige back. It wasn’t working well. Their contenders were beating themselves, giving in to their own lack of self-respect. It was part of what Jillian Shomer (USA) would be fighting.

But losing Beverly— Holding her breath, she slipped the cartridge back into the console.

I/O error 1154.

Should she wait for a ransom note?

No, the implications seemed clear enough. So long as she stayed completely away from the Council, or the strange case of Lilith Shomer

… actually, Jillian flattered herself that there were Counselors eagerly awaiting her results. She was potentially useful to them.

They’d play fair, she thought. If the Council barred her from material necessary to her thesis, it would cause the nastiest stink in years.

Right. And they couldn’t hurt Beverly, either.

If she fought too hard to uncover things the Council wanted hidden, she could simply have a training accident. If they could hurt a Donny Crawford, Jillian Shomer meant nothing.

She’d have Sean send some of her old files by courier. Last year she had downloaded massive amounts of raw data into personal files. She could sift through it without being hooked into the main lobe.

She sank her head down on her folded forearms. Beverly gone. Vital lines of inquiry sealed off. Claustrophobia.

What had her blasted obstinacy really accomplished?

There were questions to which Jillian Shomer could not get answers. But perhaps a Boosted and Linked Olympic gold-winner, one thoroughly co-opted by the Council, could open doors now sealed.

Could she risk it? Did she even have a chance to win, now that the Council disapproved of her line of questioning? If she Boosted, could the Council simply deny her the victory, guaranteeing her a slow death?

Jillian was shivering as if she were ill. They. The Council? She’d known of the Council since grade school; what she knew might not be fully true, but it was a starting point. Was it the Council who had snatched Beverly away? or some single Council member? or a faceless “Old Bastard”?

What was he, what were They, hiding about her mother?

“I’m going to win,” she whispered. She would find out, beyond a doubt, if she could win in Athens without Boost. If she couldn’t, if she had to become a part of the Lie in order to expose it, in order to find the truth…

In order to find Beverly again…

Then so be it.

“It’s actually a tougher grade than what you’ll face in Athens,” Abner said.

Looking up at the mountainside, at a jumbled rise of boulders and concrete steps, of handholds and narrow jogging tracks carved at a thirty percent incline, Jillian found his words easy to believe. “At least my attention isn’t split.”

She inhaled as Abner sealed a side edge of her feedback suit. Two layers of green and white nylon net sandwiched a thin layer of sensors. These would measure blood pressure, skin temperature, heartbeat, galvanic skin response, and other standard physiological indicators. In addition, Abner had arranged a full kinesthetic readout. By the time the day’s workout was over, they would know everything there was to know about her technique and physical fitness.

The fellrun track was built into the foothills of the Colorado Rockies. Most of the obstacles were natural, but the terrain had been modified. As her vital signs were relayed to Abner’s computer, he would select routes of greater or lesser difficulty, depending on what he needed to discover. Beacons planted in the rocks would guide her.

Abner flexed Jillian’s ankles, then her knees, then tested her hip flexors. Spine. Rotator cuffs. Wrists and fingers.

The sun was a few minutes past its zenith, and the wind whistling through the Rockies was stimulating, would begin to cool in an hour or so. Jillian’s feedback suit would maintain thermal equilibrium, so her shivering was caused less by wind chill than adrenaline.

Abner checked her every movement like a Grand Prix mechanic tuning the engine of a racing Ferrari.

“Fluid?”

She twisted her mouth a half an inch, found the nipple taped to the corner of her mouth. A slight pull got the flow going, pulling electrolyte fluid from the tube hugging her jawhine. Her slender backpack held power for the sensors and a minipump for three pints of solution.

“Fine, Abner.”

“This will be a two-hour trial,” he said.

Abner’s single-seat sled hummed above its magnetic rail. The sled was built like a low-slung wheelchair with a blue fiberglass cowling to protect him from weather. His feet stretched out into the nose.

He tested its balance almost unconsciously: lean too far to either side, and it slowed to a crawl. Ride it like a bicycle and the hovercraft could zip along the buried rail at forty miles an hour at the level, and ten miles an hour at a forty percent grade. Its rail wove up into the foothills, splitting and splitting again, weaving in a serpentine progression that allowed him to stay within sight of Jillian no matter what path she took.