Jeremy was in his seat in the studio waiting for the interview to start when Shinichi, the sports news anchor, got that slightly
distant look anchors get during an incoming message. Then suddenly Shinichi smiled, his professional good humor momentarily replaced by the real thing. He slapped Jeremy on the shoulder.
2
“Last minute opening. They want you to run. Amazing!”
3
His eyes lit on Jeremy’s kitbag.
4
“You do have everything you need, don’t you?”
5
Jeremy nodded. The bag was really just a prop, but he kept it packed as if he were going to run every day. When he failed at the quota lottery, he had thought that his one time in the Olympic stadium, marching in the opening ceremony, had been his last. Nevertheless, he kept training, packing in sweat-soaked hours between the endless interviews, blogs, picoblogs, interactives, and all the other appearances and promotions he did to boost the team’s profile. If Jeremy couldn’t run, he could still serve the team. The team media people loved his dedication to workouts; they said he was so authentic.
6
But he wasn’t doing it for them.
7
He hurried to the pre-competition area, security guards looking at him in amazement as they scanned his pass.
8
The charging room smelled of machine oil with a tang of hot metal. But there was something else.
9
Jeremy sniffed the air carefully: liniment1. Here there was another human athlete preparing to compete against a field of machines. Jeremy followed his nose through the room full of tables, each bearing a robot athlete lying down, surrounded by a busy group of technicians. Some tables had a cluster of tubes and wires emerging from the floor with a red rectangle painted around it and the word “Danger” stenciled on the smooth concrete. As Jeremy detoured around one, he came upon a robothlete that smelled of burnt insulation. The technicians sat near the table chatting. This must be the reason he had been summoned from the studio.
10
Jeremy pushed through a curtain that created a makeshift changing area in one corner of a huge work area. The corner was free of tools, computer terminals, and machinery. In fact, the whole corner was empty except for a woman with blond hair in tight braids, dressed in running gear.
11
“Hi, I’m Amy,” the woman said with a smile. She looked at the sports bag slung over Jeremy’s shoulder. “Are you running with me today?”
12
Jeremy nodded. There were no men’s or women’s events anymore. The performance difference between robots and humans was so great that male/female differences no longer mattered.
13
Amy gestured beyond the curtain toward the charging room. “I’ll go check out the opposition while you change.”
14
There was a requirement that each Olympic event have a minimum of one human starter—they called it “the quota.” In truth the quota was also the maximum. People came to the Olympics to see the best, and robothletes were the best. This would be the first event of the 2052 Games with two humans competing. It would probably be the last.
15
Jeremy was out on the starting blocks, looking down the field at the hurdles when it finally began to sink in. He was really about to compete in the Olympics. He was going to get his chance. And the crowd was cheering—chanting “JEREMY, AMY…JEREMY, AMY.” Jeremy could feel the rhythm of the chant in the air pulsing against his skin. The crowd wanted to watch the best, but they also loved to cheer for the underdog, and there was no doubt about which athletes were the underdogs.
16
The robothlete’s “muscles”—brushless motors, actuators run by rare Earth magnets, pistons driven by high-pressure nitrogen—didn’t accumulate fatigue acids as they ran. Robothletes didn’t take years to learn the rhythms of racing or how to judge the pacing between hurdles; they just downloaded the programs from their most successful predecessors and measured distances with laser and ultrasonic rangefinders. Decades had passed since a human had beaten a robothlete.
17
“On your marks, ready…”
18
The starting pistol cracked. Jeremy sprang off the blocks faster than he ever had before. He catapulted ahead of Amy. Even so, the robothletes raced ahead of him.
19
Jeremy came up on the first hurdle so fast that he was afraid he had overshot his mark, but he flowed over it as if it weren’t there. He could hear the whir of motors and the blasts of exhaust gas from the robothlete to one side of him. They reached the second hurdle and jumped together, but the robothlete took it just a millimeter too low, grazing the top of the hurdle. Perhaps its handlers had tweaked the software to shave milliseconds off its time, but the risk didn’t pay off. The robothlete landed badly and went down. It didn’t get up. Running robots were not programmed to get up; a fall guaranteed a loss, so there was no point in trying. Jeremy twisted in midair to avoid the fallen machine, landed still running, gauged his distance, and drove himself even harder for the next hurdle.
