OPTIMIZED
6. Heads Up
Mel has asked her to meet for coffee, and although Kira rues the loss of fifteen minutes’ training, she agrees to meet in Starbucks across the street from the gym complex. She hopes desperately Mel isn’t going to mention the locker room incident.
Word got round quickly. Kira just loves to do handstands. Naked handstands. For no reason at all. She just can’t help herself. Go on, Kira, do a handstand for us. Kira flushes slightly at the thought, and then, instinctively conscious of her biometrics, calms herself. She breathes slowly, evenly, and feels her heart slow infinitesimally back to its nominal pulse rate. Good. She is in control.
It won’t last, she thinks. The half-life of gossip is short. Next week there will be some other scandal to talk about.
Kira is, as always, precisely on time—her schedule is accurate to the second, thanks to BodyClock—and she stifles a frown of irritation as she watches Mel sashay in, a full forty-five seconds late. Kira nurses her mineral water while Mel orders a double latte. Double thumbs down, thinks Kira dispassionately, as she watches Mel pour sugar into the already poisonous mixture.
Mel joins her at the table and they exchange the usual greetings. Unusually, Mel isn’t smiling.
“Kira, I need to ask you something.”
“Sure,” she replies, distantly. Kira considers her options for the afternoon’s practices. Perhaps she will double up on some other routines to make up for lost time spent here with Mel. Perhaps she’ll try a new one. There are quite a few uploads from community members that could be challenging, and—
“Jack asked me out.”
Part of Kira immediately snaps to full alertness. That scene in the Blue Badger flashes into her memory. Jack deep in conversation with Mel, laughing. It sears her. “He did? And?”
“I just wanted to check it was OK with you, Kira. Jack’s a nice guy, but if you’ve still got, y’know, a thing —”
Kira considers this before replying. There is a tiny ache in her chest. It stabs at her, and she pushes it away. The heart is only a muscle, she thinks. “No. No thing. Nothing.”
“But the two of you were so close. What happened?” Mel leans across the little table. She seems genuinely concerned.
“It turned out we’re—incompatible. At a fundamental level. That’s all.” Biochemical imbalance detected. That pang of loss again.
“Well. If you’re sure—“
Kira stands from the table. She has been here for five minutes and thirty-two seconds. This is a waste of her precious time, she thinks about saying, but doesn’t. “Mel, it’s fine. I promise. Thanks for the heads up, but knock yourself out. Now I’ve got to go. Practice won’t do itself!” She gives the other girl a quick hug and quickly walks out of the coffee shop, heading, as always, for the gym, legs moving with clockwork precision.
Jack is not good for her, and that’s that. The numbers don’t lie. Still, she hungers for sex, a nagging gap in her life, and the hunger is getting more irresistible, unquelled by occasional sessions with her vibe. It’s only natural, she thinks. Her body is speaking to her. She feels like a Ferrari trapped idling on city streets, and she longs to rev to full throttle.
She’s tried everything.
She’s tried getting it on with a few of the other college guys, but either they don’t turn her on in the way she needs, or there is the same warning beep in her ear, the increasingly familiar message, delivered in the soft and neutral synthetic voice, the voice she has learned to trust implicitly. When she hears the warning, she backs away fast, leaving them confused and disappointed. Word spreads briefly that not only does Kira love to do naked handstands, but she’s also a cockteaser. She will not compromise her metrics, though. She can’t afford to now. She is too close.
She will not feed the college rumor mill. But what’s the alternative?
She travels across town to pick-up bars the college crowd avoids. She’s apprehensive at first. She poses on bar stools, inviting; desperate and horny and lost. Kira appears still and calm, outside, her finely honed muscles keeping her automatically so, but inside she is seething with intense, unfocused lust, and she has never felt so hot and wet.
She is as selective as she can be, but even the most buffed men don’t seem to work. Sometimes a guy will turn her on, and she feels she’s about to break through, and ecstasy beckons her at last … but then, cutting through the passionate warm glow of a kiss, the familiar soft warning: Biochemical imbalance detected.
Once—desperate—she ignores the warnings, and lets a gym trainer with muscles as hard as hers lead her to a motel. It leaves her feeling dirty and unsatisfied, and as she lies back letting him thrust into her, she hears not only the soft synthetic warnings but the imagined cries of her followers ringing in her ears:
Don’t do it!
No Miss Magic, please no! Stop!
Keep control. You’re not an animal.
So disappointed in you.
Double thumbs down.
She doesn’t even come; she leaves quickly, and never asks his name. She disgusts herself. She cries herself to sleep, mortified that she has so cavalierly endangered her own biometrics and let down her followers. What would they think? Exactly like an animal. What would AlphaWoman say, if she knew?
The next evening, after the most brutal study day she’s yet endured, she has to work doubly hard to get her biometrics up to scratch again. There are indeed multiple thumbs down to absorb along with the homilies and sympathetic words of advice and caustic asides of: civilians, they’re not worth a damn. She replies to them all, apologizing and promising to do better.
Amid the messages, there is one that stands out: Why don’t you just ask? For no reason she can name, she marks it with a star.
And there is a new email in her inbox, from BodyClock.
Hi Miss Magic
To optimize your programme, we suggest you add to your BodyClock system the new HeadsUP accessory. Only $99.99. Click here to buy now.
Keep on improving!
Team BodyClock
She isn’t sure what that is, but if the last upgrade is anything to go by, it will be a no brainer. And she needs something new to distract her, another way to improve, and something to take her mind off all the rest of it. Her Visa card is on its last legs as she clicks ‘buy now’. Kira smiles to herself, does a few extra Kegels, and goes to bed early, knowing that in two days or so her new treasures will arrive.
There is always a way to improve.
Kira has never worn contact lenses of any type before, and it takes several fumbling attempts to get them in. They seem to be of a similar material to the positional bands on her limbs, she thinks; entirely transparent with just a hint of complex embedded circuitry. She hasn’t thought about the bands for weeks, and she checks to make sure she’s still wearing them. Of course she is.
Once her eyes have stopped watering, a new world opens to her, and she understands immediately.
It is as described: a heads-up display, synched to the rest of the BodyClock system. She is seeing real time information now, and real time feedback from the BodyClock community too. The display doesn’t interfere at all with her normal vision, but it’s insistently present slightly to the right of her main field of sight. She turns this way, then that, and the display is always there. She closes her eyes, and sees bright numbers and letters against her dark eyelids.
The wealth of information is impressive. All her biosigns are there, along with her activity feed, her ratings, her progress bars. Her messages and followers too. She watches as a stream of new followers clock in, presumably intrigued by her new HeadsUP.
She scans the manual, and finds one final unexpected treasure in the HeadsUP bundle. Kira stands, and speaks softly into her BodyClock watch. “Calibrate voice recognition,” she says.
It’s the second meet of the season, against Western State, and Kira approaches the mat with Coach Jeffries at her side. At the bench, she takes off her sweats and moves her right hand to the BodyClock on her left wrist. It trembles for a second before she swiftly detaches it and pops it into her sweats pocket. This is always a moment of fear. What if it gets lost? She hates to be without her BodyClock.
The BodyClock microphone pickup is hidden in the band circling her neck, and she can subvocalize a few commands already. The advantages over the smartphone interface are obvious. Soon she will have total, instantaneous control. But there’s a lot to learn. A few words wrong earlier, and she’d nearly trapped herself in an infinite isometric loop. She’d had to scrabble through the manual for the reboot command.
For now, she plays safe, and taps the smartphone to prompt her without needing to look. A complex chord sounds briefly in her ear, a memory of a memory. She puts the phone away and stands silently while the coach talks to her, and she approaches the mat.
Exactly on cue, she springs into her routine.
Kira is beyond the zone; she’s in her program, following the now-unheard tones and clicks with mindless precision, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, but her touch and balance are unconsciously slaved to her routine. She whirls and spins through an insanely athletic set of moves, hardly needing to breathe, until she alights like a descending angel on the mat and bows. She returns upright and receives the applause without even a blink of recognition until Coach Jeffries walks on and grasps her hand. With a start, she comes to and steps lightly off the mat.
The coach is talking to her, praising her. She smiles at him. Nobody will notice her little ritual and the zone-out, and even if they do, it doesn’t matter at all; this is what top-level athletes do, isn’t it?
She rushes to strap her BodyClock back on as the scores come in, and they are great. With Mel still to perform, always a lock for the team, they’ll beat Western State by a small but significant margin for the first time in six years. The opposing team claps in grudging recognition as she walks back to the bench. Mel hugs her, beaming.
Even Jack has come to watch, and he gives Kira an ironic smile and a thumbs up. Kira briefly wonders how he feels about it all, now, and what he sees when he watches her. She pushes the distracting thought away.
She dresses and checks her HeadsUP. Great scores from the judges at the meet, but far more importantly her HeadsUP is a bustle of activity. Her vitals are perfect. Thumbs ups and messages are pouring in from her followers, more than she’s ever seen. Later, she will sit down and reply to them all.
Kira feels a rising flood of love for the community, her followers. Her people.