Achilles choice

But Ling wasn’t as formidable as Catherine St. Clair, the English Medtech chemist who was not only a top fellrunner, but had worked on the five-man British Academy of Science team which garnered last year’s Nobel Prize in medicine. St. Clair was a strong chess player and a stunning redhead to boot. Jillian gritted her teeth.

So they marched in their pockets and rows, carrying their banners and singing their songs, saluting the crowd that overflowed the stands and spread out across the world. They were best of the best, three thousand of the finest minds and bodies that had ever strode the planet.

Within seven years, ninety-eight percent of them would be dead. There were just fifty open slots among the Linked.

As the anthems of two dozen nations and sixteen corporations played, they marched. Speeches were made. Fireworks were ignited, and a gigantic OneWorld hologram, the Council’s ultimate emblem, rotated overhead.

From the north corner of the stadium, a lone figure ran with the grace of a gazelle, carrying on high a torch which smoked and flickered in the still air.

The stadium fell into a hush, and every eye watched as a thin, pale man entered the stands and sprinted up a carpeted stair to touch the flame to the official Olympic torch.

The crowd relaxed into a collective sigh, and then exploded into applause.

The Olympics had begun.

Chapter 12

In the Arts and Entertainments auditorium eighteen thousand people sat in their patient rows.

Jillian Shomer scanned their faces, striving to read their minds, their hearts. If each of them were deepscanned, so that she could read their heart rates and blood pressures, skin temperatures and EEGs. would it help her to talk to them?

The question, the doubt, the yearning to touch the faceless audience, had plagued artists since the beginning of time. Technology had changed nothing.

“Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Jillian Shomer.

Division: Spirit. Presentation: Fractal Art.”

Picture: glaciers, advancing from different directions, meeting in a central fissure in the earth, grinding the countryside into gravel and splinters.

As the holographic images materialized in the dome of the main theater, Jillian distanced herself from reality, allowed herself to pretend that she had not created these images through countless hours of programming. She became instead a spectator, a student attending a phantasmal geology lecture.

The ice was spectacularly varicolored. Where two moving cliff faces struck one another, clouds of steam boiled forth. The image expanded swiftly. The camera POV glided into the steam; the curls and wisps and patterns of light became clear. The images revealed were not confined to curlicues and arcs: networks of edge and angle emerged. As they pushed deeper into the scene, the image paradoxically reverted to the macro image.

Here again was the ocean of crawling ice… but a hole seemed to have been torn in the bottom of the world. The floes crunched and swirled in a slowmotion whirlpool. The grinding scream of a million million tons of ice filled the auditorium. Darkness congealed into a dense strip of jumbled cubes and triangles that pulsed with the roar like an optical sound track.

The sound itself was a repeating pattern.

Geometric pulses shone so bright, loomed so large that they stunned the senses. Chunks of angle broke free, coalesced into glaciers once again. The glaciers crashed, gouged mountains from their path, and tore simplified redwoods up by their roots.

The image expanded once again, pushed into the trees themselves. The pattern of the leaves was a re peating pattern, its angles and cool green geometries fading to outline to produce crystals, ice ciystals which were once again glaciers.

And again two walls of ice met screaming. The computer simulation expanded the scene, took the judges and audience to some new aspect of that primal scape. With color, depth, shape, sound, and movement Jihian conjured up the infinite variations of pattern within pattern, until the repetitions became a musical movement, the entire ebb and flow of change the heartbeat of an enormous creature from ages past, the living fire of its breath a dance of creation and destruction.

She’d found the core of this while exploring something nearly outside her field: the torpid formation and flow of plasma between the core and rim of a spiral galaxy: the laws that govern a transgalactic lightning bolt. Her very simple equation might not describe such a process in all detail, but as the basis for a visual display… In Jillian’s humble opinion, it made the Mandelbrot Set look like a six-year-old’s first attempt at needlepoint.

The sequence ended. The lights came up full.

Nervous at the lack of response, Jillian stood, looking out at the thousands of spectators, perhaps twelve thousand who had come to witness her presentation.

Finally, someone near the judges’ box began to applaud, and the clapping became infectious, until the entire auditorium rocked with applause.