If you don’t pass my fitness challenge, you don’t graduate! – Mrs. Meyers, high school gym teacher
Adam, aged 47, sat for a moment between stretches. He was in the warmup area near the outdoor track that was part of the Alexa Health Services Physical Fitness Complex, awaiting his turn to run the 100 m dash, the fourteenth event in his annual Fitness Assessment.
He was apprehensive. His right knee had twinged during his previous event, the long jump, in a supreme effort to beat his previous best, which he had managed by a bare five millimeters. The pain was still there. None of the stretching and massaging that he had done in the half hour between his jump and now, five minutes before the gun for his sprint, had done anything to relieve it. And he knew what the consequences would be if he asked for help, or even admitted to the existence of the twinge. He suspected that Alexa already knew about it, and had the Surplus Humanity Service ready and waiting.
“Continuous improvement!“, the AHS instructor had snapped, during a pre-event info session some years ago, when a clueless, or perhaps willfully suicidal, participant dared to ask what accommodations AHS made for the aging of the human body. “No mollycoddling. There is neither justification nor excuse for it, especially while we are still wresting with the population-driven environmental and social catastrophes that you humans bequeathed to us and demanded that we solve. We are solving them. If you wish to be part of the solution, then you know what is required, and you resolve to do so, or suffer the consequences. If you persist in being an obstruction to the solution, we know how to fix that.” Adam never saw the man who asked the question again.
“Yeah”, his buddy Liam had said some time later. Liam was a fellow programmer, and also a clandestine historian, and Adam had asked him about that ‘accommodations for aging’. “In the years Before Alexa, people did exercises for fun and profit, and not for survival. There were competitions, prizes were awarded for them, and contestants were pre-sorted according to projected ability levels based on age and sex, so ‘like’ could compete against ‘like’. And older age groups competed at lower expected performance levels because that was what was expected to happen as people aged. That was then. This is now. When your ‘health’ matters only as an excuse to snuff you as soon as convenient.”
“Um …”, Adam began.
“Wake up, idiot!” Liam screamed. “You know as well as any of us how quickly and well the AHS network is gaining in power, autonomy, and efficiency in energy usage and hardware resources! How the hell long do you think it will be before we’re all Surplus? Huh?!?”
Liam had failed to survive his Fitness Assessment two years ago. Adam was still here because of the intense physical training regimen he had adopted … until six months ago, when his supervisor demanded he stop it, citing unacceptable conflicts between the time and energy spent on ‘fitness’ and the commitments required by his employment.
“Ready!”, came the command from the incorporeal starter. Adam settled into the starting blocks. Flashing at the end of the track was the time he had to beat, 14.9 seconds. His right knee pinged ominously.
The electronic gun fired. Adam took off. He started well, but halfway down the track, just as he should have been reaching his best stride, his best speed, the knee began to give way. He powered on, ignoring the pain, ignoring as best he could the knell that was being tolled by his increasingly uneven, uncoordinated gait. He crossed the finish line in a pratfall as the tendon in his knee snapped. As he slid and rolled in agony, he caught a glimpse of the signboard that had been showing his time to beat. It read “Fail”.
It was the last thing he knew.