“…Hey, Mom? You really don’t have to come pick me up every day. It’s not that far from our house to school, after all,” Risa said to her mother, who sat beside her in the driver’s seat of the minivan, as she wondered how many times she’d told her that already.
From her school in Chitose-Karasuyama, it was half an hour to Sangenjaya, the station closest to her house on the Keio Line, followed by a transfer to the Tokyu-Setagaya Line. More than a few students in the gymnastics club commuted by train for over an hour, so it was pretty embarrassing to be picked up by car every day, even now that she was in grade nine.
“What are you talking about?” Her mother took her eyes off the road to glance at Risa and continued rapid-fire, “You’re a candidate for the national team, okay, Rii? What would you do if you got hurt riding on a crowded train? The truth is, I’d rather you didn’t ride the train in the morning, either.”
“Quit it. I’m still only on the junior team,” she protested in a small voice and immediately got twice the lecture in response.
“Don’t worry. I just know you’ll make the national team at the individual event championships in July. Didn’t you hear Coach Ojima praising you to the high heavens today?”
“Ojima always says nice things. Head Coach Atoh would’ve been yelling at me,” she muttered, quietly enough that her words were lost in the road noise, and she yanked the zipper of her tracksuit jacket all the way up to her neck. She reclined her seat a little and closed her eyes. “Sorry, Mom. Let me sleep a bit till we get home.”
“That’s fine. I’ll drive on the slow side, then,” her mother said, and she started to ease up on the accelerator.
“It’s okay.” Risa hurriedly shook her head. “Normal’s fine. Just drive like normal.”
Her mother was apparently unbothered by the time that, out of excessive concern for the sleeping Risa, she had driven about ten kilometers slower than the legal speed limit along Setagaya Street and had people honking at her.
She should just put it in automatic drive mode, Risa thought, but the AI driving seemed to make her mother anxious.
Of course, she was happy her mother had been rooting for her and her grand dream of making it to the Olympics ever since she was a child.
There weren’t as many expenses in artistic gymnastics as in rhythmic gymnastics or ballet, and since she was part of her school’s gymnastics club, the fees were only a thousand yen a month. But with the cost of protective gear, leotards, and similar requisites, on top of travel to meets, it still added up to a fair amount every month. After she was selected for the junior national team, she started to receive a stipend, but she could never have kept going without the support of her parents.
Lately, though, she’d felt like her mother’s enthusiasm had left the realm of what was normal. Her mother would watch videos of meets from all over, uploaded onto the net, and complain about the gymnasts, saying things like “Her legs aren’t quite straight,” or “She’s got too much meat on her.” And she got incandescently furious if Risa bought snacks or junk food. She would give Risa notes about Risa’s performance at practice and at meets, and recently, she was even considering making Risa quit the school gymnastics club and transfer to a more famous club. Almost like she was seeing herself in Risa.
And if that’s how she sees me… Turning her body to the left in the passenger seat, Risa squeezed her eyes tightly shut.
What would her mother say when Risa wasn’t able to make nationals, wasn’t able to break through that wall, when she was forced to quit gymnastics? Would she reward all her hard work thus far and encourage her in her pursuit of a new objective? Or…would she toss Risa aside the way she so easily turned her back on Risa’s father and kicked him out of the house after he had an affair at work and was let go by a major manufacturer?
She shuddered at the thought.
“Oh no!” Her mother’s usual kind voice came immediately. “Are you a bit chilly? I’m sorry, Rii. I’ll turn the temperature up.”
Risa said nothing in response.
✦ ✦ ✦
After eating a supper carefully calibrated for nutrition and calories, and then doing her daily stretches and training under her mother’s watchful eye, Risa was finally able to get some time alone in the bath.
Her home in Setagaya Ward’s Taishido area was a single-family home built after her mother’s parents’ house was torn down. She had no memory of these grandparents, though, since they passed away before she was born. Her father’s parents were supposedly still alive and well, but she hadn’t seen them since her parents divorced, and she was forbidden to contact them in any way.
The bathroom had been the one place where her father refused to compromise when they were building the house, and while it was a modular bath with a sink attached, it was fairly large, nonetheless. The tub was also big, and even Risa, tall for a ninth-grader, was able to extend her legs out straight.
This time when she gently massaged her legs and soaked in the warm water was the most relaxing moment in her day. Because her mother worried about accidents while she was in the bath, she wasn’t allowed to take her Neurolinker off except for when she was washing herself, so that it could monitor her pulse and blood pressure. But this was still much better than being supervised by a camera. After gently kneading the knots out of her muscles, she leaned back in the tub and stretched out her legs.
An average ninth grade girl might have used this time to think about a boy she liked, but unfortunately, Risa had no such person in her life. In elementary school, a boy in her class had told her he liked her, and after she’d started at her current girls’ school, a boy from another school’s gymnastics club had asked her out, but she’d had absolutely no interest in either of them and simply turned them down apologetically.
Was the fact that she had no interest in romance because she was a gymnast or because she was a Burst Linker? There was an unspoken rule in the gymnastics club that romance was not allowed, but it wasn’t as though some girls weren’t secretly dating boys from other schools. Meanwhile, more than once in the Accelerated World, she’d seen Linkers who appeared to be a couple or heard rumors of such.
Maybe the Brain Burst program sapped the user’s romantic energy, in exchange for accelerating her thoughts a thousand times. She wasn’t particularly troubled by it at the moment even if that were the case, but how would she feel in the future, she wondered, as she sank down into the water up to her neck.
Many a female gymnast reached her peak around the age of twenty and retired from competition in her late twenties. The life of a gymnast would be dramatically extended if micromachine activation therapy, currently seen as the equivalent to doping, were permitted, but it would likely take another ten years for the international debate on that to reach any kind of conclusion.
Risa was fifteen now. If she had to retire in ten years, what would she do then? Set her sights on becoming a coach like her own club’s coaches? Or would she leave the world of gymnastics completely for a new life?
Whatever path forward she chose, she couldn’t picture a future in which she dated someone, married them, and had a kid… She also had no desire to live that future.
Mimosa had told her to look at the bigger world, but Risa honestly didn’t care about what came next, so long as she could do the Racoviţă quadruple flip at the Olympics. She wanted to see the view that this Romanian girl had seen that day seven years earlier, the only person in the world to have ever seen it. That was her sole desire, and she had worked single-mindedly toward it.
✦ ✦ ✦
