OPTIMIZED
5. The Zone
It’s five a.m. and Kira is running, pounding round the four hundred meter track. It’s her twelfth circuit, and every muscle is in perfect synch. She’s effortlessly keeping pace with the rhythm track in her ear, a fast and demanding pulse. She has never run so fast, so gracefully, and she’s not out of breath at all. Just a few weeks ago she would have struggled to stagger round just four circuits without the tell-tale sting of lactic acid in her thighs and the ragged catch of breath in her throat. Now, stamina is not an issue. Now, it’s all so easy for Kira. She’s in the zone.
The invisible positional bands are comfortable against her skin. She’s forgotten they’re even there. Nobody would notice them if they weren’t looking for them, and they would have to look very closely indeed.
A soft synthetic voice reminds her to keep her head up and not let her shoulders drop, and she takes instruction by reflex. A tiny adjustment to the angle of attack of her right foot on the track. A minute shift to the rhythm of her pumping arms. The rhythm in her ear ticks up a few beats per minute, and she accelerates smoothly into the bend. One step faster, effortlessly.
The familiar voice in her ear tells her that her time round the circuit averages a shade over one minute and seven seconds. She’s aware this is a sub-record pace by a small margin, because the voice in her ear tells her so, but that’s not the point. Running isn’t really her sport. This is just for fun.
The frequency of the clicks in her ear tick up one more notch, and a voice tells her there is a tiny error in the synchronization of the rhythm of her arms and her legs. Without the BodyClock she’d never have known. She corrects automatically, without thinking. The rhythm clicks on, insistent.
She feels superhuman. She could do this forever.
It’s five a.m., so nobody is watching, but if they were, she thinks they would be impressed.
It’s six thirty a.m. and Kira has finished her basic exercise routine; all the boring but necessary pushups, pull-ups, press-ups, crunches and Kegels achieved, all the basic boxes ticked with ease. What used to take two hours of pain is an hour of undemanding pleasure. It is all so easy. She pities her former self, struggling with such basic exercises. Now for the real stuff.
At first she’d struggled with the demands of the BodyCon system. It stretched her limbs to places they’d never been before; but that is the nature of optimization, she thinks, and now her limbs instinctively go exactly where they need to go.
In response to various suggestions from the community, she’s set up a little digital camera, and synched it to her activity feed so she can share video and pictures in real time. It took a bit of fiddling to get the angles and focus right, but now it sits on a tripod in the corner of the room. She gets many thumbs up for that. Her followers love to see what she can do, and she loves them for it.
Thanks for sharing with the community, Miss Magic.
Awesome alignment. You clocked that routine totally! Perfect hold! Double thumbs up!
Have you got this one in your routine? <link> It’s a killer. Only ever seen it done once.
Brilliant. You’re so beautiful.
She basks in the warm glow of the community.
She taps the smartphone to prompt her without needing to look. This morning’s programmed routine is fast and demanding. A series of short tones, mini-tunes almost, signify each move. She has learned them diligently, by repetition, and she responds without thinking now. She knows it’s important that no thought is involved; thinking creates distractions, imperfections, self-consciousness, noise, mistakes.
Three quick high beeps and she drops into the splits and arches her back, arms raised gracefully above her head. A high-low-high tone sends her effortlessly up and spinning into a double backflip, which segues into a graceful cartwheel, and she lands like a cat, arms out and head high. Her feet make no sound on the floor.
A single long note pitches Kira into a standing needle scale, once the bane of her life, and now a thing of beauty, she knows.
She is in the zone. A complex series of tones and Kira flips down into a three pointed backwards crab position, her toes pointed like a ballerina’s, one hand to floor and the other pointed straight up to the ceiling. It’s a difficult move, and the voice in her ears tells her to arch her back that little bit more, and she does, holding the position for thirty long seconds.
It’s seven thirty a.m. when she finishes, and the world is beginning to wake. Her vital signs are almost perfect, according to her profile, and she feels this in the core of her body. She positively glows with health. Followers are coming online, and she scans their messages. Many, many thumbs up now from those who’ve checked out her morning routine on the video feed. High ratings everywhere. Her progress is rated Good against all BodyClock benchmarks. She is climbing the leaderboard slowly but surely, just outside the top thousand now.
There are only three grades above Good, she now knows: Very Good and Excellent, and then the elusive Optimized. Her followers have told her that they have never yet seen an Optimized, and they are not entirely sure it even exists. Perhaps it is just an urban myth.
And amidst all the plaudits, the awesomes, the you go, girl’s, the smiley faces and words of praise and encouragement, she searches for the true nuggets that will drive her on.
OK, but are you really pushing yourself, Miss Magic?
Come on. You’ve got to be the best you can be! You owe it to yourself.
And from AlphaWoman: Should I be looking over my shoulder yet…? Wink.
Thumbs down. Yes. There is always a way to improve. She replies to AlphaWoman: Objects in the rear view mirror may appear closer than they are… Wink. She enjoys the banter of the community.
She breakfasts, showers, and prepares for class.
Kira’s routines today are, says Coach Jeffries, almost Mel-like. “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it,” he tells her. “Girls, take a look at Kira. Take a look at Mel. Watch them. Learn from them. That’s the standard we’re aiming for, here.”
There is mumbling from some of the other girls and Ella in particular is frowning angrily. Kira realizes how fat and unfit some of them appear to her now, and for a fleeting moment she finds it extraordinary that people like Ella should even be allowed into the same class as her and Mel. As always, Mel—the natural—just smiles her sunny smile, unfazed by praise or criticism alike, and punches Kira lightly in the arm. “Told you so!”
Jack mutters ‘hi’ in the corridor, but he hurries past without stopping to chat. He doesn’t meet her eyes.
Kira pushes the slight aside. She thinks he might be wrong for her, now. It is a difficult realization. She’s tried so hard to make time for him, to make love with him, to make him happy. He always knows how to turn her on, she thought, although perhaps it’s just that she is very easily turned on these days?
But always, unknown to Jack, the soft beeping in her ears and the synth voice intoning: Alert. Biochemical imbalance detected.
The last time hadn’t really worked for her. Even as he pushed into her, she eyed the monitors at her wrist anxiously. She’d desperately tried to ignore the beeping in her ears, but it was no good. Her body was speaking to her. Afterwards, as she lay with him, she could see that her endorphin count was nowhere where it needed to be. A puzzling anomaly. She scanned a few messages from her followers, distracted. Sensing her mood as always—he was intuitive that way—Jack sat up in bed, eyeing her. She couldn’t quite read the expression on his face.
“You hardly ever talk to me now, Kira. You’re so quiet. Is something wrong?”
“Mmm?”
Jack had sighed at that. “I said, you hardly ever talk to me. Even when you’re with me it’s like you’re not here.”
She hugged him, and scrabbled for excuses. “Sorry, just—y’know—focused. There’s a lot going on. Classes, gym…”
“Gym, gym, gym. It’s all I ever hear. Forget about gym, what about Jack? What about us?”
“Jack, I—”
He’d just turned away from her then, the first time ever. She knows he is lost to her now, and she is lost to him. There is a tiny ache in her heart at the thought.
Still, she hungers for sex. It’s only natural, she thinks. The human body needs sex. Her body needs sex. Maybe just not with Jack. She knows he is not good for her, because the numbers say so, and the numbers never lie.
In the locker room, she showers with the other women. They can see she’s been working out in some way, and there are a few jealous glances and black looks from those she knows she’s leaving behind. She ignores it. She is better than them. The chatter of college women fills the locker room, about men and TV stars and men and bands and professors and men and families and other trivial irrelevances. She tunes it out.
She has more important things on her mind than all that.
Toweling off, she registers that Mel is speaking to her, complimenting her again on her performance in practice and telling her that the varsity team is surely a shoo-in now. Kira knows she should smile at this, so she does. But her mind is already on the next set of practice routines and exercises, which will occupy the otherwise unproductive time of lunch break and useless chatter in the cafeteria. Another precious window of opportunity for self-improvement. She is not tired at all; she is ready for more. She is always ready for more, at any time. She wonders what instructions will be in store for her today. Kira turns, hangs up her towel, and reaches for her clothes.
She is in the zone, now, and the two high beeps in quick succession signify a move she loves. Without a thought, Kira drops her clothes, turns, and bends gracefully to the locker room floor, flexing smoothly up into a handstand, arms and back straight as an arrow—no trembling at all, she notes, reveling in her own core strength—and splays her legs straight out in a perfect ‘T’.
She is totally relaxed. She can see the other girls’ bare legs, and from this interesting new angle, she automatically notes the imperfections in their muscle tone, and is glad her body has no such flaws. Thumbs down, she thinks, and feels a thrill of satisfaction. She is in the zone. She holds the position effortlessly—perfectly still, her control impeccable, awaiting the next instruction.
There is no next instruction. There is no soft synthetic voice of encouragement. There are no thumbs up; no messages from her followers. There is only a moment of silence, and then a slow humiliating realization, as Mel’s phone beeps again with an incoming text.
Upside down, locked in her perfect position, Kira hears one of the other girls begin to laugh.