Free The Goliath Stone by Larry Niven, Matthew Joseph Harrington

just smiled. After a moment he smiled back. “I don’t know. It may not be part of the … program upgrade we got. It may kick in when we drop below a certain nutrient threshold, in which case it’s likely to be all at once.” He shook his head. “Have to ask him after the marathon.”
    “So that’s four hours, and two more after it starts. Want to see if we can make it happen on its own?”
    *   *   *
    Sometime after noon he realized he hadn’t been getting horny unless she already was. And it didn’t take skin contact.
    Good heavens, he had telemetry .
    It didn’t seem all that important to discuss it right away.
    *   *   *
    They got fed, and used the screens for TV around what should have been just before the end of the marathon. Runners had been chipping fragments of a minute off the record for ages, and in 2048 it had been one hour and fifty-one minutes—just seven minutes longer than a consecutive series of four-minute miles. They both figured there was a chance of the nanos allowing someone to accomplish just that.
    What they heard when the TV came on was announcers who were incomprehensible beneath the screaming of the crowd. What they saw was a cluster of officials around one runner, with other runners just coming visible in the distance, and a caption across the bottom of the screen:
    JNAIT - MYCROFT YELLOWHORSE - 1H16'09.71".
    “ Mycroft ?” said Toby.
    “ Yellowhorse ?” said May.
    They looked at each other and said, in unison, “That’s him!”
    Twenty-six consecutive three -minute miles.
    Distance runners were allowed to wear chiller gloves these days, to relieve exhaustion, but Yellowhorse didn’t. He wore a black body stocking with a piston-driven aerating arrangement, apparently powered by the motion of his arms and legs. It was a plausible reason for being able to keep up the speed normally limited to a hundred-yard dash. Even so, he was being examined in every way that could be accomplished in public.
    Every so often the crowd would start to calm down, and he would raise his hand and wave and start them up again. Toby noticed his palms were the same color as the backs of his hands.
    “Mycroft,” Toby said. “Heinlein again.”
    “No. The original. Doyle. The brother Sherlock went to for advice, who worked miracles just sitting and thinking,” May said.
    “What was it that bothered you about ‘Yellowhorse’?” Toby said.
    “Western tribal custom. When you go into battle, you put a yellow handprint on your horse for every enemy you’ve killed. Over a thousand men died at Lee Ultra while Connors was there.”
    A Russian, who like most of the other runners appeared to be made out of rods, cables, and a convincing coating of human tissue, crossed the finish at 1H43'55.03", and the only one who took notice was Connors, who ran after him and congratulated him. The Russian wore the expression of a man who had just realized he’d been shot.
    “I bet JNAIT ends up selling a lot of those suits,” May said.
    “Huh. I want odds before I take the other end of that bet,” said Toby.
    The screen switched to a view of the skydiving event that had preceded the race, and showed Yellowhorse getting the only perfect score by pulling the rip panels on his parawing seventy feet up. His right toe had hit the two-centimeter target dead center, and he rolled to his feet in dead silence, followed a moment later by a roar that overloaded the microphone of the announcer.
    “If I’d seen that,” Toby said, “I’d have known it was Connors then. The man was in so much pain he wasn’t afraid to die. I guess he still isn’t.”
    “Different reason,” May said.
    A runner from China crossed the finish line with no expression at all, which may have meant he was furious at having broken the 2048 Olympic record just for a bronze. The winners were taken to the award stand, while “The Land Endures” played over the speakers: “Only the rocks last forever…”
    “Maybe not,” Toby