Achilles choice

Abner watched her from a shadowed corner of the gymnasium. Jillian was already stretching and balancing her body, moving from yoga Plow into Cobra and then out into the full split of the Tortoise pose with a gymnast’s grace. He waited until she’d levered her legs out to a hundred and eighty degrees, rolled stomach then chest and chin down to the mat, before he extended a sheaf of papers with a hand-lettered cover.

“Pushkin’s paper,” he said. “I had some trouble finding it.”

She opened her eyes, peeped up at him. “Gimme.” She sighed into her long thigh muscles, ordering them to stop quivering, and hiked herself up to her elbows. She started reading.

The approach wasn’t like her own, but Pushkin’s ideas were fresh, and vital, and impressively presented. He had deserved that gold.

And there was something familiar about the paper, something about the way Pushkin phrased his thoughts. “Was this delivered in Russian?”

“Sure. Straighten your back.”

“Sorry. Who translated? The phrasing seems familiar.”

He took it back, thumbed it a bit. “… Doesn’t say. I don’t know.”

As she browsed it, she was jolted again and again by the careful, logical juxtaposing of ideas. But there was nothing she could use, in fact at this late date it was almost distracting. She handed it up to him.

“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. Jihian 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?”