The first time I saw you, you laced up your skates, adjusted your knee mods, and I was just another unremarkable face as you fluttered to the ice. My mother snapped at me to watch you, but it was like asking a mallard to observe a flamingo. Our legs didn’t work the same. You’d been competing across the national circuit, in Boston and Orlando and Frisco, and this was my first competition.
They whispered that you were trained in China, where they apparently install the bionics under the skin rather than above it, flouting the bans on invasive mod tech. No matter that your parents were Singaporean. It was a comforting idea, that you were a china doll android, face painted into a smile and body preprogrammed to succeed. To replace. Maybe they would have said the same about me, if I was any good.
I placed second in my flight (three flights beneath yours) and Coach was extremely pleased, as was my mother—she even took me out for sushi afterward. The women at the table next to us kept shooting us dirty looks. I was confused until I saw the signs folded against their tables. They were part of the group always protesting outside the rink; their signs said KEEP METAL OUT OF KIDS and SPORTS ARE A HUMAN ENDEAVOR.
How silly, I thought. The mods weren’t in us. Noninvasive meant they were only structural support for our joints and optimizers for our muscles, pressurizing to keep oxygen-rich blood gushing through our veins, contracting to limit muscle oscillation, redirecting energy for the most efficient slices.
As I draped my napkin over my lap, the sound of a knife sharpening escaped the kitchen. It reminded me of the slice of your skates. I thought of you that whole dinner: the bend of your wrist, the delicate splay of your fingers, the way your smile tightened after two consecutive triple axels.
Triple axels were once a moonshot for seasoned Olympians. You were two human endeavors in one—the desire to outdo, outperform, outskate; the creativity to design technology that would let us do it.
The next day, I asked Coach if I could have the same model of mods as you. It was a desire born of aesthetics rather than function. I liked the way the metal veins snaked up your calves. He refused—rightly. I shudder to think what would have happened if I moved off the impact absorption joints before I had proper form instilled in my muscle memory. But at that moment, I was incensed. I didn’t care if the mods broke my body, as long as it looked like yours.
Ironically, I hated yours as soon as I tried them—BionIces are, if I’m going to be honest, more pretty than practical, for anyone who’s not you. Only you could convert that diffused energy to explosiveness. The rest of us plebeians opt for something more supportive, with less facetious advertising; the ad-copters make BionIces look so comfortable.
To my mother’s great joy, you only lived a few cities away from me. Every LA county comp, she could point at you. That’s what hard work looks like, she’d say.
It got worse when our mothers became friends, taking every comp as an opportunity to jabber away in Cantonese at the top of the bleachers. That was when you became truly inescapable. At home, my mother would get off the phone with yours and come straight to my room, asking did I know you spent three hours at the rink before school, and that you had bought a new training apparatus so you could stretch before bed? I learned that you struggled in history, that your brother’s journalism gig had gotten automated by the latest lamBERT model, and that you cried after you jokingly told him to switch to figure skating (for job stability) and he threw a plate at you. I knew when you had your first period. Your mother was worried that so much figure skating had frozen your eggs or something—did ginseng soup actually have menstrual stimulation effects, she asked. You were pieced to me like this, from the lips of mothers who didn’t know where they ended and their children began, who felt their pain earnestly enough to claim ownership of it, gossiping rights included.
We knew each other without ever exchanging a word, but you formalized our relationship in speech anyway in Arcadia, while we waited for the previous flight to get off the warmup rink. Do you think you could beat me, you asked, which, for the record, is an insane thing to say to someone. When I didn’t reply (or did I give a half-hearted grunt?), you continued, I think I could beat you.
You did beat me. But it was close; I think you knew it would be. I suspected it bothered you, to see my face right beneath yours on the holo-boards, to watch me clamber to the podium before you, when I wouldn’t have even made top twenty a year ago.
Then you confirmed it bothered you when you debuted your quadruple loop at the next comp. After my celebration dinner—for second place, again—I forced my mother to drive me to the rink. I had your loop down by midnight; I know my mother told yours. Did she also tell you that I had to switch to a clunky pair of Bing-gus to get to the car, because my overstimulated right thigh gave out entirely?
You didn’t acknowledge my existence until you had to. Until I was a threat. Your eyes would linger on me, flicker downward to investigate my body. I wasn’t like you, faithful to your shimmering BionIces. My mods changed with every routine. Plyman’s for propulsion, Auroras for precision, Bing-gus for comfort in the earlier rounds I now breezed through. I’ll tell you a secret: I used suboptimal configurations, sometimes, just to keep you guessing.
At some point, I was invited to try pair skating. Coach didn’t say it, but I knew the reasoning: he wanted a champion, and I would never place first in singles so long as I was in proximity to you. My partner was a rink favorite. Coach was convinced that I and this jaguar-bodied boy could sweep nationals, if we could adapt to each other. But I didn’t want to adapt to him. Not when I could adapt to you.
I went frame by frame over your breakthrough Seattle quintuple loop, angling the holo to examine your every crevice, your every strained sinew as you arced off the ice. I took this mold of your body and poured mine into it, until my form could be overlaid upon yours with zero error. I perfected my spins. Set a record for airtime, too. It wasn’t the breakthrough in physicality or mod tech the newscomms made it out to be. You know as I do: at our intensity, it’s not about whether you can; it’s about whether you trust yourself to, whether you can smash a max propulsion foot against the ice and trust your wanting is strong enough to keep your bone from splintering.
I would have beaten you too, I know I would have beaten you, if they hadn’t released the arm mods. In retrospect, we should have thought it odd that BionIces and then all the others went to the trouble of developing a bionic that didn’t add much utility. If anything, they weighed us down. I remember complaining that mod developers were treating noninvasive as a limit to be pushed, a competition parallel to ours, using our endeavor as a prop to showcase theirs. Do they really think people tune in to see the shiniest new elbow brace, I said. They’ll put us in suits of armor next. But your mentor, the Olympic-skater-turned-BionIces-endorser, told you to wear them. So I wore them too. Did you even bother to check the holo-boards after that, or did you just march to the top podium?
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pursue a career in this. I’m not a gambler by nature, and forestalling an education, romance, and family for a near certainty of going down as a mote in skating history … well. Then your mother called up mine, mourning that you were switching to homeschooling to go pro (apparently the figure skating had only been meant as a means to game the college admissions system) and soon there were two mourning mothers. I couldn’t have lived with myself, knowing I turned down the chance to maneuver you off the podium and plant myself there in your stead.
Our sponsorship deals were announced very close to each other—already, the press was drooling for its next great rivalry. You signed with BionIces, of course. I had more options. A bidding war erupted around my sponsorship; I chose Aurora, because they forked over three times the salary of the highest paid basketball player. An unsustainable model, to throw so much money at a skater uncut on the professional circuit, but what would I have done, even if I knew better?
Our first pro comp, you got first. You were last on the ice, and you looked bored. You knew by then that you were a seventeen-year-old Sirius and the rest of us comets. I didn’t even make it into your orbit; I wasn’t anywhere near the podium.
I thought it was my mother, coming into the bathroom to comfort me. But it was you.
God, how can I describe seeing you in that moment? Vines of silver so intimately acquainted with your skin, the cold clinging to your residual goosebumps—even after we’re done with the rink, it’s never done with us. Sometime over the years, you had learned to apply eyeliner with a steadier hand, and it cut severely across your face.
Lose the arm mods, you told me. Did you say it out of respect for the sport, so as not to let mediocrity fester? Or were you simply too used to having me close to you, our names always uttered in the same breath, my face beside yours on the holo-boards, merging entirely when you tilted your head just so?
I never wore arm mods again. Aurora sent me missives to put them back on. They cut my money by half—funny, considering how much better I was doing. Leading up to Worlds, all of figure skating condensed into a single narrative: you and me.
We were everywhere. Montreal. Vienna. Oslo. Sydney. Time became amorphous, days and nights flickering in and out at random, but there was one constant: you, towering above me, your gold medals winking. Your pink sweatpants meant I was at the right airport gate, bound for the next country in the babble of locations that had long congealed in my memory—or to LAX. Home for us both. When my mother’s heart grew too arrhythmic to accompany me, you remained my Polaris, gleaming two rows away, tens of thousands of feet above the ground. Our mothers took the train together to the airport, gossiping as they waited for us, the same anxious face copied from one and pasted on the other. The same scoldings, too. We were amazing, and their friends were always asking for tips on rearing successful children, but were we trying to scare them out of their minds, hitting the ice like that?
We were long past quintuple loops; now, we made history each time our skates ground onto the ice, our braids of muscle and wire converting hypotheticals into impossible realities. I took my airtime record back. I debuted the sextuple axel. There wasn’t even a word yet for what you did. They would have named it after you, but the announcers never did learn how to say your name properly. It became the spiral, but we all know it was your monument.
Worlds ended in a tie. A perfect tie. Along the singular dimension of the number line, we occupied the same space, fitted and fused together. For our efforts, Team USA won three spots in the Olympics. The third eventually went to some nice blonde, but come on. She didn’t matter.
I found you in the hotel bar that night. I didn’t think you the type for a cosmo, but your jaw dropped when I ordered a straight shot. I ordered four more, because I wanted to shock you, and nothing I did on the ice could have that effect on you anymore; one-upmanship was our only language.
The bar’s holo-screen was tuned to the competition’s closing event, a demonstration of the next-gen mod prototype. Injective mods, metal displacing flesh. I’d been sent tickets for front row seats. You must have, too. Neither of us asked the other why she’d elected for a wobbling bar stool instead.
You said, sometimes I think I’m perpetuating a stereotype. The Asian automaton, like the moving geisha dolls in those old movies. I’m half wires already. I’m a technology. And I don’t want figure skating to be a technology.
You hiccupped.
It’s not really a problem until it’s a trend, I said. Which means there can only be one of us.
Oh, fuck them, you said, and kissed me.
Were you the one who leaked the bar photo? I didn’t have reason to believe it at the time, but I later found out (through my mother, if you can believe it) that you’d quarreled with your mother the previous night. She wanted you to stop destroying your body for national spectacle and settle down with a nice man after the Olympics. You wanted to wreck her. I don’t agree with your reasoning, but I do admire your methods. I convinced myself that if I tied with you again, you would kiss me again. I thought a lot about what you’d do if I beat you. I thought about it every time I crashed onto the ice—somehow, the impact at once reawakens every bruise you’ve ever gotten—and just wanted to lie there, lullabied by the hiss of skates against ice.
The ISU legalized a slew of outrageously dangerous elements—including lifting the ban on invasive techniques—ahead of the Olympics. They claimed that the recent advancements in mod tech warranted a higher ceiling to encourage healthy competitiveness, but they were scared we would tie again. The next-gen mod tech was never even implemented, thanks to you.
You were called a hypocrite for that op-ed. Injective mods have no place in competitive figure skating, you wrote. There is a difference between technology-enhanced performance and doped-up cyborgs.
I was asked for comment. The reporter was gleeful, waiting for me to add to the chorus calling my rival a hypocrite, a gatekeeper, a closeted luddite, among less savory things; all that, because you’d stated the obvious, that mods were supposed to serve us, not reconstitute us. I said: if the ISU legalizes injective mods, I won’t skate the Olympics. And if I don’t skate the Olympics, there won’t be an Olympics.
Unwilling to admit it, newscomms reported that revenue blossomed around the upcoming Olympics, as if skeleton racing or alpine skiing or, God forbid, curling, were raking in dollars. But it was our dolls selling, books and films of us in production, our likenesses smiling down from every ad-copter and ImmerScreen. Somehow, two girls from the sunny suburbs of Southern California captured the attention of the world. I read the tell-all about us. Did you know that, apparently, your favorite food is pickled shark fin and my deadbeat father walked back into my life at my new figure skating fame?
I remember very little of the Olympics themselves. I remember I was in the air longer than I was on the ice. I remember not breathing once through your entire routine. Oh, and I remember we both skated to Prokofiev: you to Juliet’s theme and I to Romeo’s.
I stood atop the highest podium. You were gracious in your defeat. We’ll have more Olympics, you told me as we lined up for the medal ceremony. At least one more. I’m owed my victory, you said.
Only, you were wrong.
We both know it wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t spent your life insisting on BionIces—the tradeoff between support and explosiveness is not an equal one. I entered one more comp after you retired, just to show how useless it would be for me to continue. I skated by the old rules, and it was still a bulldoze.
I don’t regret quitting, even twenty years later, as I lay beside you now. Our ImmerScreen is tuned to the sports channel—we have been promised prime entertainment tonight, something to reinvigorate audiences to the fervor ignited when we skated the circuits. I am doubtful, but perhaps my arrogance blinds me. I am a rather devoted adherent to our mythology.
A skating rink clarifies into view. A figure flutters to the ice, and my heart stutters, because it’s you. The way you skated is inscribed on my bones. You were hesitant (just barely, darling) around the ten o’clock wall because a boy had bumped you into it, as your mother had complained. You tightened your jaw after an upright spin, because you’d pulled your abductor in middle school, and it didn’t heal quite right. I always paid close attention to your backflips, so I could catch you flex your hand afterward, tendons flashing into visibility.
Then the figure does a quintuple spiral. Prokofiev leaks from the speakers.
On an adjacent screen, a representative from BionIces is speaking. These SafeSmart Skaters are the product of years and years of work, he says. Countless skaters have generously contributed their abilities to their development; our company’s mods have empowered those skaters and given us the data to hone these androids.
After he’s done, the representative from Aurora comes up to introduce their robot—sorry, SafeSmart Skater.
So that was why they wanted me to wear arm mods so badly, I realize, noting the disjointed arm movements of Aurora’s skater. Not enough training data. Not enough of me in her. These skaters ape you and me so closely: twenty years after we left the ice, there have been none of our caliber. And the poor SafeSmart Skaters cannot invent their own maneuvers, so they pastiche the best.
No wonder our sponsorships paid so much. They were buying out the market. We should have known: the same way we sorted those CAPTCHA images to train autonomous cars, and actors let ad corps take facial scans for easy reanimation, and we gave up our words to lamBERT to hone our search results—our artform would also be fed into the machine by the unwilling hands of those who loved it most.
When I glance at you, your face is serene. I say, This is what you were afraid of, isn’t it? That they would make you into technology. How can you be so calm?
Oh, it’s terrible, you say, then laugh. I’m not technology. People didn’t watch us to see how high a humanoid can jump. They watched because I debuted a spin two weeks after you debuted yours. They watched because I kissed you.
This is a revolution in figure skating, the Aurora rep says. We can marvel at feats of human ingenuity, without the accompanying fear of injury.
You shift, and I massage your aching knee.
The fear of injury was not a problem to be solved; it was our whole lives. It was how we declared our devotion. We invented life-threatening maneuvers and destroyed cautionary rules—reconfigured figure skating itself—to find the most precise words, the prettiest letters. I did not skate to Prokofiev because Prokofiev routines statistically have a hundred percent chance of winning. I skated to Prokofiev because you existed, and I needed to do something about it.
It’s beautiful, in a way. Forever, these skaters will simply reiterate our intertwining, Aurora borrowing my voice to say I love you without knowing who I am or that I am saying it to you; every etching of the skates into the ice is poetry in an ink only you and I can make meaning of.