Achilles choice

Jillian helped Abner onto the docking platform, hustled him to a two-passenger robot monotram. It surged forward the moment they were seated.

Abner’s thin fingers tapped against the glass, and he sighed audibly.

“What is it?” Jillian asked as they drew up to one of the condos. It rose up out of an artificial hillside on enormous aluminum stilts. An escalator rippled up the side of the hill to the main entrance. Rain was deflected by a silver awning.

“All the rest of it was just rehearsal, Jill. I can’t help you anymore.”

Was he asking permission to die? Abner seemed translucent, ephemeral.

“It may be I don’t need you,” she said in a voice she might have used with a child. “But I want you to see me win.”

His hands slid down into his lap, were still. “All right.”

She kissed his cheek as the tram stopped and the door slid open. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Please.”

A silver-garbed young man offered to carry Jiiiian’s luggage for her, and she declined. She shrugged the strap over her shoulder and straightened up, stepping onto the escalator.

The little monotram disappeared around a curve.

Holly waited for her at the top of the escalator. “Where’s Abner going?”

“A Medtech Intensive. He’s going to need lifesupport soon.” The wind whipped a spray of rain into her face. With the tip of her tongue she tasted it. Salt. “Real soon.”

“Is he septic?”

She shrugged. “It’s a miracle he’s hung on this long. He’ll make it another month. Bet on it.”

They stood and watched the crowd gather and thin on the dock, ebbing and surging as a tide. Holly chuckled, calculatedly changing the mood. “I’ve never seen so much healthy flesh in all my life. I wonder if the rumors are true.”

Curiosity nudged Jillian out of her pensive mood. “What rumors?”

“Ah, you know.” Holly leaned over, stagewhispered conspiratorially. “They say that the most intense sex in the known universe takes place in the Olympic villages.”

“I’ve heard that. Are you planning a little personal inquiry?”

“Certainly. A series of controlled experiments in the name of science.”

“Double-blind, I suppose.”

“I’ll keep one eye open.”

A pair of gorgeous young male attendants escorted them to their separate rooms. Jillian’s, a tall, darkly Mediterranean lad who looked usefully fit, offered to help Jillian unpack. He also offered to rub her feet, massage her lower back, or perform any other service that might be required. He was cute, but she declined.

When the door closed, she began to unpack. She placed shoes beneath her bed, tested the bed, hung pantsuits and dresses in the closet, squirreled toiletries away in the bathroom. She busied herself around and around the room, unaware that she was being watched until Holly cleared her throat from the doorway.

“You know,” the biologist said thoughtfully, “you are definitely not the same anxious little girl I met eight weeks ago.”

Jillian sat on the bed, unnaturally aware of the play of every muscle as it flexed and knotted. She felt like a bundle of live wires. “What’s the difference?”

“You — ..” Holly closed her eyes, stared into the darkness for a few seconds before answering. “Your eyes don’t have any humor in them, but your mouth is smiling all the time. There’s just something a little distant about you. Detached.”

Jillian’s lips curled up, but there was no warmth in them. “Well, maybe I finally got the joke, Holly.”

Suddenly, Holly seemed very uncomfortable, found it difficult to meet Jillian’s gaze. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Well. Maybe so.”

Holly seemed in a hurry to leave, and Jillian did nothing to stop her.

Jillian stared down at her hands, felt the play of tendon and muscle in her forearms, closed her eyes to hear the slow thunder of her heartbeat.

The Boost was speeding up. She could feel the changes, feel her body growing and shifting. She wiggled her toes and could mentally isolate every tendon, muscle, and nerve fiber. Every breath reverberated hollowly in the cavern of her chest.

Where was Jillian Shomer? Here, on the edge of a bed in a strange room, in a strange place a world away from her beginnings?

And if not… then who was she?

She had wanted Abner to come with her, and was ashamed of the true reason. They spoke of companionship, of support, of coaching, directly of affection and obliquely of love. The truth was darker.

Abner was rotting inside. Impending death enshrouded him like a fetid cloak. Death was in his eyes, his movement, his precarious balance. It creaked in his voice.

Jillian Shomer, more vital than ever before, was morbidly fascinated. Abner was a living reminder of the hell which awaited her if she failed.

She felt as if she were falling through a black hole toward some ultimate encounter with a Jillian that had never been.

Jillian looked up at the wall clock, and jumped. Two hours had passed, time during which she sat motionless, listened to her body grow and change, felt the heat as her blood raced to remove toxins and rebuild tissue.

She shucked herself out of her clothes, lay back, told the ceiling light to shut down.