OPTIMIZED
4. BodyCon
Over the next couple of weeks, Kira finds her metrics creeping ever higher, and by week four she sees that fully seventeen out of her thirty target metrics have been met. Her progress is now rated Quite Good against the general benchmarks, and she has edged into the upper half of the BodyClock leaderboard now. There is a flurry of excitement amongst her followers on the BodyClock community at these advances. But she is slightly downhearted to learn that Quite Good equates to no more than a seven out of ten. She resolves to work still harder to crack the rest. She knows she can do it. Her followers are equally adamant.
Come on. You’re getting closer, now.
Oh, honey. I feel for you so much! I was stuck on Quite Good for months. Nearly started self-harming…
She is faster, lither, fitter, stronger, and she feels like a million dollars. She’s posting pictures to the site to evidence her commitment, and is duly rewarded by the community.
Kudos! Getting there, Miss M.
You’re looking good…
Her followers are demanding. They are perfectionists, she thinks, whoever they are—but that can only be a good thing. She loves the accolades, and she cherishes the thumbs downs just as much, spurring her ever harder on.
I can just about make you out back there with my telescope... You’re going to have to do better than that if you want a thumbs up from me.
This last from AlphaWoman herself, with a wink at the end to soften the tone.
She replies: I WILL do better. Watch this space. Wink.
There are only two things that are slightly worrying Kira right now.
The first thing that worries her is that she has been obsessively tracking her ratings from Coach Jefferies, and she senses they are starting to plateau. The marginal improvements are getting ever more marginal. She seems to be approaching some sort of limit. She’s more toned than anyone in the class, now; her core is stronger and she is almost as agile as Mel. But there is something missing. Something technical, she thinks; not about fitness now, but about the fine details of the moves.
The second thing that worries her is Jack. He’s been a little moody with her lately, and there simply hasn’t been time for them to get together. She resolves to make this right, somehow.
She allocates ten minutes to call mom and dad. They ask her questions, and she answers them. She explains how fast she is progressing at gym now, and reels off a list of achievements, but she doesn’t mention the BodyClock. They wouldn’t understand. They aren’t even on Facebook. The line to Florida hisses with distance. They tell her they love her, and she reciprocates.
She allocates five minutes to update her neglected Facebook, but after logging in and scanning her so-called friends’ updates she feels she has nothing to share with these people. They wouldn’t understand either, and their timelines are full of meaningless chatter. There are photos of parties, groups of girls and boys grinning into the camera. Their flushed, intoxicated faces repel her. She distractedly ‘hi’s a few old school friends for form’s sake, posts a few insincere smiley faces, and quickly logs off.
There is an email in her inbox, from BodyClock. Kira clicks it open at once.
Hi Miss Magic,
You have chosen to Optimize for Gymnastics. To optimize your programme further, we suggest you add to your BodyClock system the new BodyCon accessory set. Only $99.99.
Keep on improving!
Team BodyClock
Well, another hundred bucks can’t hurt, can it?
That Saturday evening is a firestorm of sex. Kira has been hungering for something all week, and even when she’s lost in her exercises and routines, that thing has been lurking in her mind. She would like to think it’s Jack, but she knows her increasingly finely-tuned body is insisting on something deeper, more animal, less personal, than that. Whatever: she practically rips his clothes off, and then her own, and once she has, she pushes him onto his back on the bed and is on him like the athlete she is. She leans down and takes him in her mouth. He’s hard at once, and she draws on it luxuriously, relishing the taste of him.
Jack is grinning at her. “Something’s sure getting into you lately, miss sexy.” He isn’t used to her, sweet little Midwestern Kira, taking the lead, but that doesn’t matter to her right now. She’s in no mood to take it soft and docile.
“You,” she pants. “You get into me. Right now.” Kira stretches her legs, each straight out to the side in a single line, adopting a split straddle position that she used to find incredibly difficult. It seems like child’s play now. Gradually she lowers herself onto him, taking him as deep as it can go, and raises her arms above her head in ecstasy, her body a perfect inverted letter ‘T’ impaled on his cock, her pussy muscles grasping and rippling as if they had a mind of their own. The Kegels are doing her good, she thinks, distractedly, her hips rolling in perfect synch with his not-quite-as-powerful-as-remembered thrusts.
And as they lie together in the afterglow, the BodyClock starts to vibrate on her wrist, softly at first, then more urgently, and it begins to beep.
“Can’t you ever turn that fucking thing off?” says Jack, irritably, the moment spoiled.
“Sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with it.” Kira leans over and puts her arms around him, kissing him again, appeasing him as best she can. As she does, she chances a glance at the screen.
Alert! Biochemical imbalance detected.
‘Biochemical imbalance detected’ is briefly the talk of the community, and it garners her a significant number of thumbs down on her timeline. The followers are in the hundreds now, their chattering solicitous and strident in equal measure.
Were you with a guy last night? Damn. Bad luck. You must be incompatible.
Ditch him or it’ll affect your hormone balances.
Stress relief is all very well, but don’t go off track. Don’t get distracted. I’ve been there. Took weeks to recover…
RunDudeRun in Chicago pretty much nails it, she thinks: At this level, it’s all about chemistry, Miss Magic. Maybe he’s just not right for you physically. Follow the programme.
She sighs and resolves to make it up to Jack. Incompatible, indeed. But looking closely, she sees a few of her biometrics have actually declined since last night, and a couple of them quite significantly so. That won’t do at all.
Thumbs down.
She is distracted and restless in her classes. She’s never felt Jack to be anything other than good for her, until now. But there it is. The numbers don’t lie, and doubt nags at her. In practice, she fumbles an admittedly difficult routine—but one she thought she’d almost mastered—and once almost falls from the balance beam.
Thumbs down.
The new box arrives the next morning. In it, Kira finds a set of thin, flexible bands, almost circular, one larger than the others by some measure. They are light, almost invisible see-through plastic, and looking very closely and turning them in the light she sees the fleeting silver image of some sort of inlaid circuitry. She puts them carefully back in the box. If she put them down somewhere, she thinks, she might never find them again.
She reads the leaflet carefully, and then reads it again to be sure. BodyCon stands for ‘Body Conscious’, of course. So they are sensor bands. There are two bands for the wrists, two for the upper arms, two for the ankles, two for her thighs, and one for her neck. Together, she reads, they are an ideal tool for gymnasts wishing to hone their positional skills. It is a simple matter of calibrating distances and orientations. There is also a small pair of Bluetooth earbuds.
Kira clips the various bands into place. They lie tight against her skin, and checking herself in the mirror, she can’t see them at all. Her BodyClock watch beeps; she sees a message there, ‘synchronizing’. It seems to take a while, but then another beep, and another message: ‘please calibrate’, and a schematic picture of a woman in the star position, legs and arms stretched out at perfect right angles. She does so, stretching out and holding the position, and is surprised to hear a familiar discordant tone from the BodyClock device. ‘CALIBRATE’, it scolds her. She stretches her limbs out at far as she can, every muscle straining, until at last the confirmatory beep. Relaxing, she sees the message ‘calibration confirmed’, and a tiny egg timer flashes for a moment as the device saves this to her profile. ‘Synch to social?’ asks the device, and she does so.
A new app has uploaded as part of all this, she sees. Clicking on her smartphone she sees with some excitement a series of pictures, each with familiar labels. All the gym positions she knows and many more besides are right here. Kira decides to start with something easy, something she knows she is good at, and selects a simple straddle planch.
The BodyClock starts beeping immediately, and the message on its tiny screen says: ‘Straddle Planch’. Startled slightly by the noise, Kira drops down and goes into the basic planch, an easy handstand in which the body is parallel with the ground, and spreads her legs, straight and also parallel to the ground. The watch beeps stridently, increasingly loud. She glances at the screen. ‘Legs insufficiently aligned’ is the flashing message, and this is then repeated in a soft synthetic voice. Charming, thinks Kira, but strains to stretch her legs wider, keeping them rigidly straight and pointing her toes for maximum elegance of line. She is not about to be told off by a stupid watch. The BodyClock is still beeping its warning. She pushes herself to the limits of her flexibility, straining every sinew, until at last the beeping stops. Kira drops to the ground. Her muscles are tingling with the effort, but she feels she has achieved something. Another step on the road to improvement.
The BodyClock is beeping again. ‘Repeat’, murmurs the watch. Kira does it again, straining harder from the beginning to get it exactly right, part of her wondering why she had never got it exactly right before; after all, it’s an exercise she’s done thousands of times. There is always a way to improve, she thinks, as she spreads her legs to the maximum limits of comfort.
Ten repeats, each a little better than the one before, and Kira crashes down in exhaustion. Her legs are jelly. ‘Well done’, the synthetic voice says, and the same words flash on the tiny screen.
And then another precious message: You have new followers.
Kira is stunned to see she has somehow acquired over a hundred new followers. Her total is well over five hundred, now. She wonders who they all are, and again feels the warm glow of being part of a whole new community, all sharing a common goal. She knows the community understands her. They are her friends, and they only have her best interests at heart. Messages and suggestions are flooding in.
Well done for choosing BodyCon! It’ll really keep you on track. You’ll never look back.
Clocked it! Good work! Keep on improving!
Love to see more, MM.
Great move. Maybe one inch further for perfection? Try this setting…
On her activity feed, she sees her own abstracted faceless figure—in the classic straddle planch position, perfectly digitally mapped by BodyCon and fed to the cloud from what she’s just been doing.
Woohoo! Great to really see you in action. Keep on sharing!
The app has helpfully graded the move 8.35 out of 10 against idealized benchmarks. She flushes to think there is more work to be done on such a simple position, but that is the nature of optimization.
And there by the side of the picture, the real-time community ratings. Around 60% of her followers have given her a thumbs up, 25% a hand-waggle, and 15% a thumbs down. Better, for sure. But not enough.
Don’t let us down, here. Be magic! Counting on you!
There is always a way to improve.
She sees the BodyClock system has now created a new set of advisory positional exercises for her to use with BodyCon. Scrolling, she sees the positional sets in neat order of priority, the routines becoming ever more challenging as she scrolls down. At least three hours’ worth of extra work per day, by the looks of it, all on top of the morning exercise regime she already has. Kira steels herself. She will not disappoint the community.
Because there is so much to remember, BodyClock will prompt her, says the report, using special tones and instructions associated with each exercise. It suggests that for discretion and privacy, she may wish to use the pair of earbuds provided, which are synched to the system. The positions need precision, and to do these routines she’ll need to maintain a perfect rhythm. To help her, the BodyClock will give her a running line of tones and clicks and occasional synthetic voice instructions. The earbuds will avoid the hassle and embarrassment of the watch’s beeping and squawking and nagging at her in public like some sort of demented electronic Coach Jeffries.
She pops the tiny speakers into her ears. They fit perfectly, and she notes that they don’t seem to impede her normal hearing in any way. Kira can hardly tell they’re there at all. She presses ‘activate’.