Future Tense Fiction

by The Editors of Future Tense

  Svetlana nodded. “I know. After IOC decide about you,” she tapped her knee, “they decide about me. I want you to go.” Because if starfish DNA was OK, then your own DNA had to be, right?

  “I want you to go,” Jinky said. “But…maybe if you blew the triple salto?”

  Svetlana took a second, then laughed. “For you, Jinky! You go to Olympics, I will blew my triple salto and give up any gold medal on the uneven.”

  Jinky wanted to say “blow,” but she wasn’t an asshole. Then they both didn’t look at Svetlana’s knee. It was all about whether there was enough time for the knee to recover, about the balance between keeping up some training and not reinjuring.

  There were rumors that the Chinese were experimenting on their athletes. Changing the DNA of kids. Jinky thought about asking Svetlana if she’d heard anything, but a guy came out of a room down the hall.

  Just a regular guy in blue jeans and a Longhorns T-shirt who smiled at them while he got a soda and a pack of M&Ms. Everything about him was big and soft. “Hey cuties,” he said.

  Jinky looked down and Svetlana said politely, “Izvinite, ya ne govoryu po-angliyski.”

  The guy laughed a little nervously and gave them a little wave. When his door closed behind him, Jinky folded into laughter. “What did you say?”

  “I say, ‘Why fat slob like you talk to pretty girls like us?’” Svetlana said.

  “For real?”

  “No, not for real. I just say I don’t speak English. But next time I remember and say it. I promise.”

  “Sveta.” A girl walked out of the room. “Oh! Hi!” It was Renata Nikolaev, the Russian vault specialist. She still had her hair pulled back tight and her competition makeup on. She said something to Svetlana in Russian.

  Jinky’s phone buzzed, Olivia texting wondering where she was.

  She typed:

  talking to Moracheva

  “I have to go,” Svetlana said. “I promise my boyfriend I call him.”

  Of course Svetlana had a boyfriend. “Where is he?”

  “He is in Nürburgring right now for practice. He is Formula One driver. He is 20, the youngest, and alternate for his team. You know Formula One?” Svetlana mimed driving a car.

  Jinky had heard of it, but she didn’t know anything about race cars, or care, to be honest. But she nodded.

  “He is alternate for second driver for Red Bull,” Svetlana said. “So he is like me, traveling all the time. But we FaceTime.”

  Svetlana got up, a little awkwardly because of her knee. Jinky did too. It was like speaking with the queen or something. When it was over, it was over.

  “Hey,” Svetlana said, “Let me give you my number. Is U.S. number.”

  Jinky handed Svetlana her phone and watched her put her number in the contacts. “I’ll let you know as soon as we hear,” Jinky said.

  Svetlana nodded, sharp. Then she hugged Jinky. Startled, Jinky hugged back. They were the only two.

  “Do not forget the Coke.” Svetlana wiped her eyes. “Text me, OK Starfish Girl?” Then she put her game face back on and went into the hotel room.

  Jinky picked up her can of Coke and went back downstairs to share it with Olivia.

  They flew toward Iowa, where it would be flat and green. The whole team had gotten seats close to each other on the plane, so that was something.

  Jinky Googled “Svetlana Moracheva boyfriend” and found someone named Honza Broucek. He had a thick neck and short reddish hair and didn’t look anything like Jinky would have guessed. How did Svetlana meet him? Jinky felt as if she never met anybody. She was home-schooled by a tutor and spent three hours in the gym in the morning and four in the afternoon.

  There were images of them after some race, Broucek with his arm around Svetlana’s waist. They looked so happy. Broucek looked better when he was wearing a racing uniform; in the image, he was wearing a black racing suit and he looked handsome.

  In the seat next to her, Olivia stretched, pulling one leg up straight in front of her. “My ankles are swelling,” she observed.

  “Airplanes suck,” Jinky said. “Want the window?”

  That was Sunday. The ruling was expected on Monday.

  On Monday, she texted Svetlana.

  jinky here

  Before she could type anything else, Svetlana fired back:

  wat they say

  She had been stoic. Sophie, her coach, cried during the conference call; IOC lawyers, U.S. lawyers, Gabby. The IOC threw out the claim that she wasn’t human but said they needed proof she wasn’t enhanced. That she didn’t recover from injuries better or have faster reflexes or wasn’t someway cheating. Until they had proof she would not be allowed to compete in the Paris Summer Olympics of 2024. She texted:

  suspended until proof

  not enhanced

  Svetlana texted back:

  fuck them

  Jinky’s legal team was already putting together a strategy. Jinky would have metabolic testing at Johns Hopkins and a researcher there wanted to test cell samples from Jinky for immune response and a bunch of other things like autophagy and oxidation and stuff that was supposed to tell them whether Jinky’s own body was a performance-enhancing drug.

  The lawyers talked about Oscar Pistorius, the South African double amputee who had to prove his carbon-fiber “blades” didn’t give him an advantage, even if they had more “spring” than human bone and muscle. Four years later, the IOC had banned Markus Rehm from the broad jump because they said his prosthetic foot, his blade, was an enhancement that gave him an unfair advantage.

  The hair-thin gold wires in her neck, combined with the starfish DNA, were a prosthetic that could possibly give her an as-yet-unspecified advantage.

  The lawyers kept saying that it wasn’t over, and Jinky believed them. She had beaten the odds before.

  It was bad news for Svetlana too. If they had declared Jinky not human, then Svetlana, who had no starfish DNA in her, couldn’t be declared a nonhuman starfish-person. They’d have to look at Svetlana’s case separately.

  But they had only decided Jinky was human, not whether or not she was enhanced. It wouldn’t be hard to argue that since Svetlana had had a similar procedure, she too might have an unfair advantage.

  Jinky had avoided thinking about what it meant if she wasn’t “human.” She had read an article that said chimpanzees share about 99 percent of their DNA with humans. Sometimes she wondered if she had a baby (someday), would it have starfish genes? She supposed it would. But if Jinky was human, then her baby would be too. Unless they changed their minds.

  She flew to Baltimore and had tests done. She ran on a treadmill while her CO2 output was measured. She had blood and tissue samples taken. She had a bone-marrow test to see how much the starfish DNA had migrated. She missed four days of training.

  The bone-marrow test sucked ass. Her bones were hard because she was young and trained all the time and laying there on her side while a doctor drilled into her pelvis hurt. They slapped gauze on her and sent her back to the airport. She found a spot of blood on her T-shirt when she changed that night.

  Svetlana texted:

  starfish girl

  sveta!

  my coach ask for ruling

  china going to file complaint 4 wks b4 big o

  when not enough time to do tests

  tell me when you hear

  of course!!!!!!!!

  Then she sent a starfish emoji and a heart.

  “Sophie?” Jinky asked. Sophie was in the coach’s office at the computer.

  “What is it, Jinks?”

  Sophie Wilson had been coaching Jinky for four years, now. Two years after the accident, Jinky had been competing again, but she wasn’t even back to the level of skill she’d had when she was 11. Sophie had invited her to come train at the facility. She’d watched Jinky in practice. “Every time you do a move, and your coach tells you something, the next time you are just a little bit better,” Sophie said. “You’re going to get back to your origi
nal skills and then some.”

  Sophie had a bagel with cream cheese on her desk and Jinky’s stomach rumbled. Jinky tried not to eat too many unrefined carbs. She could feel it the next day in practice if she did. She was heavier, slower.

  Focus, she thought. After the Olympics, you can have all the bagels you want. “I think I should do an interview.”

  Sophie didn’t understand.

  “You know, like on the news or something. Show I’m a regular person, not some kind of X-Man mutant.”

  Sophie shook her head. “The strategy is keep our heads down and wait for the science.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She had talked to Olivia and Svetlana and even called her mother.

  Her mother was an X-ray tech and she worked crazy hours but she had talked with Jinky until she had to leave for her shift. Jinky imagined her in her scrubs, sitting at the kitchen table. “Whatever you want to do, baby,” she said. “Your dad and I are proud of you. You know that.” It hadn’t really been much help but it made Jinky feel better.

  “I think we need to get in front of this,” Jinky said. Which, honestly, sounded hella smart, right?

  “Let me talk to Gabby,” Sophie said.

  They kicked around possible ways to do an interview. An AMA on Reddit was dismissed. Nobody wanted Jinky fielding questions like “Which would you rather fight, 100 horses the size of a duck or one duck the size of a horse?” The New York Times and the Washington Post were considered but who read newspapers anymore?

  Eventually Jinky’s agent (whom she had met exactly three times) called them with an offer from Amazon Prime. Amazon had a sports program called, without originality, Amazon Sports. One of the hosts was Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight although he wasn’t a gymnastics guy so Sylvia Guest would do a 20-minute interview.

  Jinky texted Svetlana:

  what should i wear

  american teen

  And she sent an image of a girl in a cute dress and followed it up with one more text:

  soft

  Olivia sniffed, “How’s your bestie?”

  “She’s not,” Jinky said. “You are. Bitch. I’ve only talked to her a couple of times.”

  Olivia shrugged like it didn’t matter.

  But Svetlana was used to the spotlight so it made sense to ask her. There were images of her with Serena Williams at a charity event in London. Maybe Jinky should do things like that too? Go to places? How did you even get invited?

  Jinky didn’t have a lot of clothes that weren’t tracksuits and leotards and sweats so she and Olivia went shopping. Jinky had a college fund for money from any endorsements but it was locked in trust until she was 18. With all the money her parents were putting out for her training, she felt weird if she asked for spending money. Her parents had sold their house to cover her medical expenses.

  They went to the mall. Jinky was a girl’s size 12 to 14. There were some things in Juniors but they all looked like prom dresses. It’s like they needed a shop for “gymnasts who need to wear something for a televised interview.”

  Olivia found a yellow mini dress and made Jinky try it on. It wasn’t a prom dress. “It makes you glow,” Olivia said. She dragged Jinky to the jewelry counter and picked out a cute necklace and some earrings.

  “You look fab, girl,” Olivia pronounced.

  Back at the gym, they had a remote video setup, basic, but fine. Jinky sat in front of a green screen and looked at a monitor. She was sweating, she could feel it. Olivia had done her makeup. Jinky liked the winged eyeliner so much she was going to ask Olivia to do it for her for competitions. Her nails were done and she’d gotten her lucky starfish stencil on her thumb, this time with a little blue rhinestone in the center.

  It was a performance except she couldn’t go through it in her head like she could a routine. She closed her eyes and tried to calm down.

  And then she was on. Sylvia Guest was blond and polished and Anglo and Jinky felt weird and brown and freaky.

  “Hi Jinky! Great to have you on!” Sylvia chirped.

  There were questions that everybody always asked. What do you eat? Jinky gave her usual response, that no one had ever told her she needed to lose weight but she tried to eat healthy. She had yogurt with fruit and almonds before she worked out in the morning. She ate chicken and salmon and steamed vegetables for dinner. The whole team liked to go get ice cream. Her favorite dish was her mother’s chicken adobo, the national dish of the Philippines.

  What was her training schedule like? She worked out three hours in the morning, took a break and did her schooling, and then four hours in the afternoon. She had Sundays off. Her favorite book was To Kill a Mockingbird. (Not true: She and Olivia traded gay romance novels.)

  What did she think of the IOC decision?

  “I’m glad I’m human,” she said, and that got a laugh from Sylvia Guest.

  “We’ll do a montage of clips of your accident and recovery,” Sylvia said.

  Jinky nodded.

  “What about the pending decision about whether or not changing your DNA has given you an unfair advantage?”

  Nobody had ever said it that way. “Unfair advantage.” It was always performance enhancement. Like she’d taken steroids or something. She smiled, but to her embarrassment, she could feel that her eyes were welling up.

  “Unfair?” she said. “I um…I mean, it’s hard to think that breaking my neck was an unfair advantage, you know? I mean, I couldn’t move my legs or feel anything. It was…”

  “What do you remember?”

  “I remember I was on my back, looking up at the, um, ceiling? You know those florescent lights in some places? The gym had these long lights and I was looking at them and I thought I had just had the wind knocked out of me because you know, sometimes when you screw up and you land you can’t even move for a second and you can’t, like, breathe? I thought it was like that. And then my mom was saying, don’t move. And she called me Janice. She only ever calls me that when I’m in trouble or something is really serious. She kept saying, ‘Lie still, Janice’ and I couldn’t do anything and I knew it was bad.

  “And then they wanted to try the stem cell procedure and they put these superthin gold wires in my spinal cord, like thinner than a hair. And the stem cells. After that I had this external thing they said was sort of like a pacemaker that sent little amounts of electricity into my spinal cord.”

  “Could you feel that?” Sylvia asked.

  Across from Jinky, beside the monitor, Sophie was there. She was nodding, the “You’re doing good” nod. “Keep going.”

  “I couldn’t feel anything. I didn’t think it was working. It was weeks before I felt anything.”

  “What did you feel first?” Sylvia asked.

  “Two days before the meet I screwed up my ankle. It always gives me problems. The first thing I felt was my ankle hurting.”

  “Wow, so the first thing you felt was pain?”

  Jinky blinked. Did a sore ankle even count as pain? Her ankle was sore all the time. She just ignored it. “It wasn’t pain,” she said. “It was feeling.”

  The interview got millions of hits. Jinky hated it. She hated how when she was talking about rehab (lots of details, Sophie had told her, make them know how hard it was) she started crying and almost ruined her makeup. It was cheesy and pathetic.

  Svetlana:

  you killed it

  honza sez hi

  he sez you kill it, too

  The news and social media covered the story all over again.

  In the end it made no difference. The results from John Hopkins suggested that maybe Jinky healed a little better than average but not particularly out of the norm for people, but it couldn’t prove that she didn’t have an advantage because it didn’t have samples from before her accident to see if that was just the way she was.

  24/7 Set.

  LIAM CHAN

  We’re here today with Russian gymnast Svetlana Moracheva. You’re expecting an IOC ruling very soon.
Given the ruling to ban Jinky Mendoza from the Paris Olympics for performance enhancement, what are your expectations?

  SVETLANA MORACHEVA

  (simultaneous translation from Russian) They will disqualify me. They can’t disqualify an American athlete and let a Russian one with a similar issue compete. It would be like Cold War days when the Soviet judges vote down Americans and the Americans vote down Russians.

  LIAM CHAN

  Does the ruling seem fair?

  SVETLANA

  No, not at all. Jinky and I have worked hard to be the best. But life is not supposed to be fair.

  LIAM CHAN

  What are you going to do now? Are you appealing?

  SVETLANA

  I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m going to do. But for the Olympics, this is something they will have to figure out. Athletes are like race cars, you know? It used to be that we were just cars that people have that they race. Then they start making cars that are only for racing and now, a Formula One car isn’t really a car. It is a jet airplane with no wings.

  So the Formula One people are always trying to make a faster car and the officials are trying to stop certain things. Like the suspension can only be like this, and you cannot have shark-fin engines and then you can. There are Formula One cars and there are stock cars and there are all sorts of kinds of races, you know?

  Now in the Olympics they must think about the same things. Jinky and me, we are like the shark-fin engine. We are banned. Maybe in 2028 we are not banned. People all over the world, they are trying to be the best and now they have a new way to be the best. They fix their DNA. Maybe when they are six or seven years old. Maybe before they are born. If you think doping is a problem, this is going to be even bigger.

  Jinky and me, we are really just normal people who work very hard. But Pandora is out of the box, you know? If you asked me when I was 10 years old, would I have my body changed to be an elite gymnast? I would say yes.

  LIAM

  What would you say now?

  SVETLANA

  I would say yes.

  “Yes,” Jinky whispered, watching. “Yes.”