by Neil Clarke
In truth, he had no idea. At SFO, he’d been ushered into a private jet with tinted windows. The last leg of the journey had been in an autocopter’s opaque passenger pod. The Race’s location, like everything else about it, was a closely guarded secret.
But his gesture distracted the woman long enough for Jyri to steal a glance at her impossibly muscled legs. Definitely a myostatin knockout—a gene edit for muscle hypertrophy. Crude, but effective. He would have to watch out for her.
Suddenly, she zeroed in on something over Jyri’s shoulder.
“Excuse me, need to catch up with someone. Nice talking to you.”
Before he could say anything, she elbowed past him, filling a gap in the scrum around Marcus Simak, the CEO of SynCell—the largest cultured meat company in the world. She launched into a well-rehearsed pitch. Jyri swore. He, too, had been stalking Simak, waiting for an opening.
His mouth was dry. This was the most coveted part of the event: access to the world’s most powerful tech CEOs, who could change your destiny with a flick of their fingers. He would only get one more shot before they started literally running away from him. Even worse, he wanted to run, too. Every muscle in his body felt like a loaded spring. The synthetic urge pounded in his temples, mixing with the din of the crowd.
Jyri fought it down, forced himself to take a thick minty sip of his smoothie and scanned the runners in the white mesh suits—ghost-like in the pre-dawn light—for a new target.
It was easy to divide the crowd into three groups: the entrepreneurs, like Jyri, here to show off their tech, hungry-eyed and ill at ease in their biohacked bodies; the hangers-on, company VPs and celebrities, with their Instagramfilter complexions and fluorescent tattoos; and finally, the Whales like Simak: the god-emperors of A.I., synbio, agrotech, and space.
Jyri spotted Maxine Zheng, Simak’s upstart rival, just 10 feet away. Fresh-faced, petite, and wiry, her vast robotic cloud labs powered the Second Biotech Revolution—including Jyri’s own startup, CarrotStick.
Jyri edged into the group caught in Zheng’s trillion-dollar gravity. Up close, her skin had a glistening dolphin-like sheen. Allegedly, the Whales’ edits included cetacean genes that protected them from cancer and other hoi polloi ailments.
Zheng was talking to a tall young man who was deathly pale but had the build of an Ethiopian runner: long legs and a bellows-like chest.
“That’s neat,” she said. “But I’m honestly more into neurotech, these days.”
That was Jyri’s cue. He pushed forward, the one-liner pitch ready. Hi, I’m Jyri Salo from CarrotStick. We re-engineer your dopamine receptors to hack motivation—
“Jyri!”
A strong hand gripped his shoulder. He turned around and almost swore aloud.
Not here, not now.
Alessandro Botticelli’s white teeth flashed against a dark curly beard. He wore thick rings in stubby fingers, and his tattooed forearms rippled with muscle. His calves could have been carved from red granite. The ruddy hue of his skin was new. Probably an edit increasing red blood cell production for aerobic endurance, but these days you never knew.
“It’s so good to see you, man!” The Italian gripped Jyri’s hand and pulled him into a bear hug. “I can’t believe you made it here, how are you doing, are you still working on that little company of ours? I love it!”
The familiar lilting accent made Jyri’s teeth hurt. He cringed. That little company. Of ours. Had he no shame?
“Doing great,” he said aloud, jaw clenched.
“That’s awesome, man,” Alessandro said. “Congrats. Me, I’ve just been so busy, it started to get too much, you know. So I decide to get in shape, really in shape. Maxine said I should do this, so here I am! It’s going to be sick!”
Jyri could not face the white teeth, the green eyes, and looked away.
“I’m happy for you,” he said.
“Hey, man, thanks! Do you want an intro? She’s right there, and she’d probably be into what you’ve been working on.”
Zheng was behind a wall of muscled bodies again. Jyri took a deep breath to say yes but tasted old anger. He shook his head.
“That’s fine. We chatted already.”
The Italian slapped him on the shoulder, hard.
“Awesome! Hey, we should really catch up! Maybe after this thing?”
“Sure.” Jyri’s stomach was an acid pit. He waved a hand at Alessandro and walked away, stumbling to the edge of the crowd. He took a long draught of his smoothie, but could barely get the viscous mixture down. He forced himself to drink it anyway. It was a dirty secret of ultrarunning that gorging gave you an advantage. Besides, it washed the taste of bile away.
Jyri had met Alessandro at one of the first networking events he had attended after he came over from Finland with little more than an idea. They bonded over their shared running hobby, Alessandro offered help with fundraising, and before Jyri knew it, the Italian was an equal co-founder of CarrotStick.
There was a time when they spent nearly every waking hour together, whiteboarding ideas, filing patents, sweating over pitch decks and grinding through endless investor meetings. It was a true Valley bromance. And then, when they got an offer to join the hottest accelerator in the Bay Area, Alessandro bailed on him, suddenly announcing he wasn’t going to be able to do CarrotStick full-time. A VC firm they had pitched together had circled back to offer Alessandro a job. Apparently they had been impressed by his drive, and he claimed it was a better match for his life’s mission. Whatever that was.
The accelerator turned CarrotStick down—given its “founder commitment issues”—and left Jyri scrambling for funding while burning through his savings and doing around-the-clock lab work. Alessandro wore his unchanging grin through the negotiations over his founder shares. He wore Jyri down, never raising his voice, and finally Jyri gave in to what advisers later told him was a ridiculous equity stake for an inactive founder.
Afterward, Jyri blocked Alessandro on every social media app. Every now and then, a piece of news leaked through his friends’ feeds. Alessandro’s new startup broke all sorts of Series A financing records; his popular science feed won a prize; he married a young VR yoga instructor who frequented both the exercise classes and fantasies of millions of men and women around the world.
Most gallingly, despite Jyri’s efforts at a news blockade, he’d watched Alessandro brag in interviews about how his creativity and hard work had led to an early small success: a company called CarrotStick.
Jyri wouldn’t let Alessandro ruin this, he decided. He’d get to Zheng on his own, no matter what. Fists clenched, he turned back to look at the crowd—and met the eyes of a woman sitting on a sun-bleached bench nearby.
Jyri frowned. She was neither an aide or a runner: She wore a loose, shapeless black dress that left her arms bare. They bore faded tattoos of bats. Her ashen hair stuck out in pigtails. She twirled an e-cigarette between her fingers. A knowing smile flickered on her lips.
Then it clicked. This had to be La Gama, the Doe. She was one of the legendary ultrarunners who had competed against the Tarahumara Indians in the canyons of northern Mexico, before climate change pushed them out and they gave up their millennia-long tradition of running.
Twelve years ago, the Whales had hired her to plan the biennial Races. She took all her experience from running races like Barkley Marathons and Badwater, and created an entirely new kind of contest for superhuman athletes. La Gama decided who ran based on an elaborate application that included biomarkers, genome sequences, and patents for the contestant’s enhancements.
She stood up. Jyri’s heart sank. The networking was over. Now, the only way to stand out from the startup pack and catch the Whales’ attention was by running.
A hush spread across the square. The Whales turned to look at her, and all the other runners followed suit. For a moment, the only sound was the listless chirping of crickets.
“Running,” she said, “used to be how we hunted. We evolved to chase t
hings until they fell down from sheer exhaustion. The legacy is still there, in our upright spine, nuchal ligament, and Achilles tendons.
“All your lives, you have hunted with your brains. I want you to hunt and kill with your legs. Meet your prey.”
She lifted a hand and hooked her fingers. A large pack of robots slunk out of the surrounding chalk-white ruins. Each was the size of a large antelope, had gazelle-like legs, and a black headless body. Hair at the back of Jyri’s neck stood up. They moved too sinuously to be prey.
“Meet Goats 1 to 50,” La Gama said. “They have full batteries. As do you. This Race is a persistence hunt. No stages, no set distances, no water stations, no time limit, no rest: Just run a goat down. The first one to bring back the contents of its belly wins.”
She laid a hand on the smooth rump of the bot next to her, on a small cave painting-like drawing. A shutter irised opened on its side, then snapped shut before Jyri could see what was within.
La Gama slapped her hands. “That’s it. The sun is coming up, and so, like lions and gazelles, you had all better be running.”
The starting line was unmarked. They simply assembled in rows on the narrow road that snaked up toward the hills. The goatbot herd scampered past them and stopped on the crest of the first slope. The rising sun painted the cliffs purple.
They all knew the basic rules. No communications. No support crews. No pacers. Most importantly, no cybernetic enhancements or prosthetics—nothing with silicon or electricity. But anything biological was fair game: They were the Grail knights of the Second Biotech Age. They had backpacks with water and energy gels, and that was it.
Jyri peeked at the row of white-clad bodies. Alessandro’s eyes were closed and his lips were moving. Was that hypocrite praying?
La Gama lifted the e-cig to her lips.
Jyri’s anger mixed with the need to run, almost unbearable now. Every last bit of CarrotStick’s cash and crypto had gone into fine-tuning his body—and more importantly, his brain.
The key ingredient was motivation.
La Gama took a deep pull from the e-cig. Its end glowed electric blue. She blew out one menthol-smelling wisp of smoke. That was the starting pistol shot.
The runners exploded into motion. Jyri’s hungry feet devoured the road through the thin-soled Race shoes.
CarrotStick’s actual mission was to make smart drugs that hacked the brain’s reward circuits, and made you addicted to problem-solving, coding, A.I. algorithm design. It had been much harder than he had expected. The company’s runway was almost gone when one of his investors told Jyri about the Race. He realized they could just copy the dopamine receptor variants of the greatest ultra-athletes of all time—the relentless drive that carried them through a 100-mile race.
That drive was Jyri’s now. CarrotStick had manufactured a synthetic virus that carried the best receptor gene variant into his brain. Every step said yes in his mind. He felt like he could run forever.
The woman with the myostatin knockout legs was suddenly abreast of him, then edged ahead. On their own accord, Jyri’s feet sped up. He gulped deep breaths, held on to the drive’s reins. It was not time to push yet.
He slowed down and let her disappear over the hilltop ahead, just behind the goatbots.
Then Zheng, Simak, and the two other Whale CEOs zipped through the pack. Their legs and pumping arms were a blur. For them, this was a clash of the R&D departments of the vast companies whose avatars they’d become. It was pointless to compete with them. Their muscle cells were synthetic, their tissues fully superhuman.
At last, Jyri was over the first hill. The road turned left. The goatbots followed it, straight at the steep cliffs crested by white clouds. The Whales were tiny dots at their heels. The other runners followed, and the Race was on.
The sun blazed at their backs. The paved road turned into a rocky path. Jyri did not mind the climb. Early on in his training, he had done a lot of hill runs. It was a good way to get the biomechanics right.
He shifted his gait into full barefoot style, stepping down with the foot’s edge, not with the heel, gliding, elf-like. Others in the runner pack found the path tougher, and even without quickening his pace, Jyri started to leave them behind.
The last ruined house on the outskirts of the village was surrounded by skeletons of real goats. The main goatbot herd was nowhere to be seen, but Jyri kept pace with a handful of bots ahead. They veered to the right, onto an even rockier path leading diagonally up the cliffside.
“Let’s go get them, shall we?”
That slap on his shoulder, again. Alessandro. He was right at Jyri’s heels and then ahead, sending up puffs of dust as he went. He’d come out of nowhere. He had pulled the old ultrarunner trick: running on the very edge of the path so you could not see him from ahead.
Jyri’s gut churned at the sight of Alessandro’s broad, receding back. This was too much. But the voice of reason cautioned there was a long, long road ahead. The goatbots had to have at least 20 hours of charge, and the island could have hidden recharging stations. The rough terrain promised microfractures, accumulating pain.
Jyri took a tiny sip of water from his Camelbak, not enough to hydrate, just to trick his brain into keeping thirst at bay. An ultrarun was an ever-expanding tree of decisions. Drink or not. Speed up or not. He reached a compromise. He would open the valves a bit, just to see if he could gain on Alessandro, and slow down if the effort seemed too much.
He increased the beat of his mental metronome to 180 beats per minute. He grazed his shin on a rock—he would be paying for that for many hours. But the pain mixed with the dopamine drumbeat gave him a burst of speed. His head lifted high. He pumped his knees in perfect running form. Suddenly, he was just behind Alessandro, who grunted in surprise.
Jyri could not resist lightly brushing Alessandro’s shoulder as he edged past. Then he raced up the path, following the joyous zigzag dance of the goatbot ahead, toward the cliffs that now belonged only to him.
Fourteen hours into the race, Jyri lost the goatbot in the clouds.
The rapidly falling dusk made the island’s contours soft and dream-like. The ascent had been grueling. The paths were unmarked and strewn with sharp-edged rocks. On the worst stretches, he had to run bent almost double to avoid the spiky branches arcing over the path.
But the dopamine drive kept him on the bot’s trail all the way up to the plateau. It resembled a lunar landscape: large boulders, grey gravel. There were fields of tiny round pebbles that retained the sun’s heat and were like hot coals to run on.
He glimpsed other runners only once: two dots moving along the coastline far below, chasing a goatbot side by side. They might have been Zheng and Simak, and Jyri wondered what they were doing, racing so close together. Unable to give an inch to each other, perhaps. Or was it something else?
Otherwise, it was just him and the bot. By now, he had a feel for the artificial animal’s behavior. It stopped as if to rest whenever he slowed down, probably recharging in the sun. If he rushed it, it scrambled away.
That was the cruelty of La Gama’s scheme. The only way to narrow the gap was to be relentless. The goatbot’s pace was just above his fat-burning maximum heart rate of 140 bpm, and he was halfway through his energy gel packs.
A chilly wind picked up. Clouds started rolling across the plateau, swallowing the dark boulders. This was it, Jyri realized. The thing could not recharge in the mist. If he could get close and stay with it, it would be his.
He sprinted forward and followed the bot into the whiteness. It seemed like a demon now, making wild leaps over rocks that Jyri had to go around. Every now and then it melted into the fog, and Jyri’s thundering heart skipped a beat. The beat of the dopamine drum pushed him forward, faster and faster, roaring inside his head.
And then the goatbot stumbled.
There was a clatter of metal and rocks. Jyri snapped back to knife’s-edge alertness. The pebbles were wet and slippery, and he slowed down. A shape loomed ahead:
a boulder. He swung around, and saw the bot barely 50 feet away, struggling to get up, its legs scraping against stone. This was it, he had to push now, just a little—
His leg muscles burst into cold flame. Then they seized up. The cursed rigs, the runner’s rigor mortis.
No. I can do this.
The cold feeling spread into his brain, like the world’s worst ice cream headache. Keep pushing, damn it.
But he could not.
He.
Could.
Not.
A treacherous pebble twisted beneath his foot. He fell forward, pressed his chin to his chest, cradled his head. One elbow banged on a boulder and went numb as he came down with a bone-jarring thump.
Then everything was quiet, except for the taunting clatter of the goatbot’s hooves.
Jyri lay still, curled up on the damp stones. Everything hurt. But it wasn’t the pain that made vomit rise into his throat, it was the absence of something.
The running fire had died.
He didn’t want to get up.
He lay on the bare wet rock and tried to think through the pain, but thoughts fled him like the goatbot in the fog. He fumbled for the Camelbak’s tube with numb hands. It slipped and he let it go.
Lying down meant the end. He would be one of the Race’s failures, the non-finishers. From now on, investors he pitched to would give him one knowing look and pass. CarrotStick would die, and his future with it. He closed his eyes and fought back tears.
Only—it made no sense.
The drive to run was gone. Something was wrong with his dopamine receptors. Had his own immune system started rejecting them? He had undergone a regime to get his body to tolerate the new genes. Still, a sudden runaway immune reaction was not impossible. But he did not have a fever or any other symptoms.
That left one other possibility: a hostile biohack targeting the enhancement directly, maybe a biologic drug that blocked the receptor. And only someone with insight into CarrotStick’s IP could have designed that.
Alessandro. Those slaps on the shoulder. The rings he wore. Alessandro would know enough about CarrotStick’s receptors to leverage A.I. to design a molecule to target them.