Larry Niven - Achilles choice

“Fascinating. Save this for me, for after the competition, would you? Pushkin seems to have been a first-class mind.”

Abner was watching one of the judo team tussle with the Grappler. “They must have found flaws. He wasn’t well rounded. Overall, he barely took a bronze.”

“Flaws? Then why classify it? Why not let everybody look at it, and judge for themselves? The idea is to reduce the level of violent crimes.”

Abner looked weary. “Is it?”

She didn’t answer. Abner left her to her rigors.

The Council’s motives were not her own. Council, or Inner Circle, or Old Bastard: if crime control was secondary to Them, then what did they consider important?

She shouldn’t have read Pushkin’s paper. It had been classified. Abner had put himself at risk to give it to her, and she was in trouble enough already.

She couldn’t discuss it with Abner. Abner was ill. Soon enough he would be raving in pain or babbling helplessly as his brain was electrostimulated into morpheme overload. What Jillian discussed with Abner would not remain private. If he spoke of the paper, it would be too late for anyone to punish him, and she could deny knowledge of its restricted status. They couldn’t squash people for every little infraction.

They? Or Donny’s Olympic “Old Bastard”?

Jillian found she was building a mental image of him. Mirroring her emotional state, the first image was an octopus with a human face. She laughed at herself, but the laughter was darkly fringed.

Octopus? Big, oversized head, brain, intellect. Tentacles branched and branched again, in the fashion of fractals. An infinity of tentacles, a tentacle in every aspect of human culture. Augmented intelligence too high for meaningful measurement. Insanely ambitious. A strength of ego that only longevity and invulnerability-immortality-could create or support. Awesomely intuitive, pathologically ruthless, and possessed of a genius for organization.

Seventy years ago, he’d already been powerful enough to see his path to the top of the Council. He may have created the Council.

A programmer? An engineer? Likely to have those talents, among others. He must have mastered cybernetic technology early. The technology that made it possible for the Council to govern the world. The Old Bastard might have built the Council, and the technology, too!

When she thought of all that such a person would have to have done, and all that he had to be, it was difficult not to admire him. And for that admiration to shift from the general to the specific, from an intellectual position to a disturbingly emotional one, to a physical warmth— Shut it down, Jillian. At the core of all of that organization and intellect there lurks the very essence of chaos.

Beverly would have said, All right, Miss Hot Pants. Could we by God get back to business?

But Beverly was being held for ransom. Jillian could still work, but being forced to use generic programming was like being blinded or deafened.

There had to be a better way. There had to.

“Holly?”

“Jillian. How you doing?” Holly looked up. She had been staring at her screen, her hands folded in her lap.

“Not ready to fight Osa yet. I thought I could work on my thesis while I heal, but… hell. I need a new direction. How are you doing? Can we take the death out of Boost?”

“I don’t have a short answer—”

“I was wondering if… Holly, you know I’m working with chaos theory?”

“Sure.”

“Some problems are unsolvable because they’re very sensitive to initial conditions. What if I were to do a fractal analysis of Boost, using your data?”

Holly’s eyes were not hostile, but wary. “And what if I’ve been trying to trisect the angle?”

“If you could prove it was impossible, you’d get gold.” Holly stared. “No fertilizer, Holly, it can be very important to prove something’s impossible.”

“No fertilizer?”

Jillian flushed and shrugged.

Holly grinned happily at Jillian’s embarrassment. “Repeat after me. Shhh—come on, the whole world won’t stare in horror if you use the S word.”

Jillian wagged her head, but giggled. “I just can’t.”

“Girl, I don’t know what we’re going to do with you. All right. What do you need?”

“Well, when they learned that about weather control, it started a whole new science. You can’t predict weather more than three, four days ahead. Could that be true of a Boosted athlete’s body chemistry?”

“What is it you want?”

“Let’s play a little. If we find something, you’ll still have to finish the work yourself. You’d have to invest a few months learning fractal geometry. If we find nothing but blind alleys, you invest nothing. See? And maybe I can come at something from a different angle.”

For the next couple of days they worked at Holly’s computer, with Holly on the keyboard.

That was justifiable. It was Holly’s equipment, and she was familiar with it. Jillian had not told Holly how bad it could be if They caught Jillian using Holly’s systems.

So Jillian watched Holly at work, and speculated aloud, and asked questions.

“How expensive would it be to just Link everybody? Every Boosted Olympic contender. That’s the price we’re trying to undercut.”

Holly laughed. She had a number already in file… a ballpark guess. A good deal of what made the Linked what they were, was proprietary. But it was an outrageous sum.

“Sonofagun—”

“Gun? Come on, will you. Try again. Rhymes with witch—”

“Holly!”

“Oh, all right.”

“Now, let’s see. We shouldn’t have trouble beating that. How about prosthetics?”

“Haven’t you noticed Abner’s prosthetics? The trouble is, when your nerves go, they don’t reach the prosthetics.”

“Mmm. Waldos? Teleoperated limbs. Transmitter in the brain. Send signals directly to the limbs.”

“Losing your limbs isn’t the biggest problem, Jillian. Deterioration goes on. I’m trying to… Well, one thing at a time. Waldos?”

“Yeah. What’s the state-of-the-art with waldos? Why don’t they see more use? I used to wonder why the old Rockwell Shuttle didn’t have a waldo hand in the cargo bay. Do they cost too much? How dependable are they?”

They probed.

Your basic waldo was a hand-shaped machine that moved the way your hand moved. It could be any size; it could be inhumanly strong or inhumanly delicate. Waldos were generally used in the most alien environments: the Moon, asteroids, underseas, the ground receptors for orbiting solar collectors (patches of desert running at 360 degrees Fahrenheit), the interiors of fusion plants.

The tractor-mounted waldos used undersea seemed the best model. Those would not be subject to lightspeed delays or deterioration due to radiation. They weren’t cheap, as it turned out. Still… arms and legs moved by transmitters in the brain should cost factor-of-fifty less than continually monitoring a Donny Crawford from orbit.

“But waldos aren’t that dependable, either,” Holly pointed out.

“Let’s get some figures on that.”

“What kind?”

“Holly, if my waldo sometimes spills the coffee, that’s okay. I might accept low reliability there, even if a bigger waldo would be spilling molten metal all over a foundry.”

“Well, darn. See what you mean.” Holly went after industrial accident reports, current.

“How fast is this technology improving?”

Holly summoned older records. Industrial accidents seemed to come in spurts. Holly said, “Graphs of chaotic events tend to have spikes in them, don’t they?”

“Yeah. Say you’re inoculating against AIDS or cancer. All of a sudden people are getting sick again, and you can’t figure why. It’s just the way of things. Let’s print these out, shall we?” The graphs didn’t look quite right.