The Mind-Riders Read Free Page B

ways—into the consumer dream, into the night-ridden street.
    I wasn’t ever afraid of the height.
    Living on the thirty-ninth floor for the best part of twenty years, in a capsule like a wormhole with one side all glass, is enough to cure anyone of acrophobia—or drive them mad. But I never had it. I liked the height. I guess I’m an acrophile, with no inborn fear of falling. I liked to be high up above the filthy street in 3912 Capstack 232, with the illusion of floating amid the towers of light, suspended in some kind of limbo, in the middle of it all and yet quite apart. Alone.
    But for now, it was back to the world and eyes diving into the holo. The viewpoint was hovering over the ringside, looking down and across a neutral corner. The sim that Paul Herrera was running was, as usual, dark-skinned with silver trunks. The challenger, Angeli, wore the white skin and the royal blue gear.
    Except for color, the two sims were identical. There was very little of the Negro about the features of the black body—they were the same neutral blend of racial characters as those of the white. The skin color differed only so you could tell the boxers apart with the utmost ease. Pound for pound, inch for inch, the bodies were matched dead equal. The fight was fair—as fair as computer programming and human ingenuity could make it. Even the rules were programmed into the simulation-pattern. Herrera and Angeli could make the sims do just about anything, so long as it was in the rules. If either of them tried to throw a foul punch or hang on when the break was called they would tie themselves in knots. It paid to stay legitimate—trying to make a sim do what it wasn’t programmed to do threw your mind into confusion, and you left yourself open to get hurt. In sim boxing, all fights go by the book.
    And the best man always wins.
    The best handler, that is.
    The bodies in the ring were just patterns of light, but to me and many millions of others they looked real. What’s anybody but a pattern of light on your retina? They looked real, and they behaved as if they were real. To the men handling them they even felt real. They hurt when they were hit. They bruised and they cut, and their nonexistent bones could be broken. Everything was for real, until it was all over—and then Herrera and Angeli could step right out of their battered, agonized, maltreated bodies right back into their own sweet selves. No scars—except mental ones, which don’t show. Sim boxers feel the pain, but they aren’t supposed to get damaged. That’s the theory. As to what goes on inside people’s heads—well, that’s not Network’s business and it isn’t in the retail-indexed package, except for emotional resonance.
    In the days when men used to take their flesh with them into the ring it might be the strongest man that won, or the fastest, or the one with the longest reach, or the one who didn’t cut as easily as the next man. But in the sim, all men were guaranteed equal, and the only difference was how well you could use what the machine had given you. A spastic dwarf and a walking mountain could hook up together and fight level. The man who won might be the cleverer, or the more skillful, but most likely he was the man who most desperately wanted to win, who could extract from the sim everything which it was programmed to give, and add the indefinable something extra that sorts out the winners from the losers.
    And that man was Paul Herrera. Every time, for as many years as anyone could remember. Except maybe me.
    Herrera had been a winner now for eighteen years. It would have been unthinkable, fifty years ago, for a boxer to last so long. Herrera had grown old as champion—but that didn’t matter because he kept the same body with the same abilities. Eternal youth—physically, at least. As long as his mind didn’t begin to crack or fade, as long as his spirit didn’t