Free The Mind-Riders by Brian Stableford Page B

MiMaC begins to happen.
    To begin with, they just put up a punch bag. No opponent, programmed or handled. Ira Manuel had made no move to get hooked into the other control unit, and it looked like he was going to have an idle day. He had only come out for the introductions.
    I had one last look round the edges of the mask before they switched me in and I had to forget all about the outside world. I abandoned my body while the essential me—the mind, soul, ka and so on—became possessed of the sim body. The five-nine, two-hundred pound vehicle which God had issued me was traded in for six-three and two forty-five. All muscle, king-size and powerful.
    You’d think that the guy who’d be mentally best equipped for handling a sim would be the guy who’s own vital statistics are six-three and two forty-five, but that’s not so. You have to be aware of doing something different, to switch over to a new mental regime. Otherwise you make mistakes—you reproduce in the sim all the stupid habits your own body’s lapsed into, and you become confused by the limitations of the sim. Different kinds of possible and impossible are involved.
    I moved round the bag, handling lightly and comfortably, hitting out without power, trying to show off my speed and ease instead of burning up the energy carefully programmed into the sim. I felt good—not excited, but pleasant. At home.
    After the bag, Wolff put me through my paces with a selection of miscellaneous exercises and feats of strength—the kind of thing you have to do to be super sportsman of the year, all petty tests of coordination and control. It’s all a matter of making the best use of the sim’s abilities. For me, it was facile. Any one of a hundred Network handlers could do the same—this wasn’t where the real difference between one man and the next came in. Any Network hack could beat the super sportsman of the year, but what he couldn’t do is control his efforts into one set of skills and potentials well enough to get the absolute maximum out of a sim in terms of one specific set of demands. That takes talent as well as craft.
    Nevertheless, they kept me farting about with the play stuff for more than an hour, and they—apparently—didn’t get bored.
    Eventually, though, when I was beginning to get a little tired, and the sim was beginning to slow down—manifesting all the symptoms of fatigue exactly as if it were a real body—they decided it was time for something better.
    Instead of sending Manuel in they used a programmed sim—one that just shuffled around and blocked punches, without throwing any of its own. It couldn’t react much, and without a real mind inside it it couldn’t get involved. It was really only a glorified punch bag, but it had the advantage of being manipulable. Its reflexes could be turned up, its blocking made much faster, so that over a period of time you had to keep getting more out of yourself in order to keep putting punches through its defense.
    I started off slowly, well within myself. I didn’t go all out to impress anyone. I treated the shambling zombie with a certain amount of respect.
    They turned up the speed, as I knew they would. They were going to test me—to expose a few limitations, find out where work had to begin. I didn’t try to turn it into a competition—I was as interested in measuring my performance as they were. I continued to stay within myself, but I continued to put punches through the dummy’s defenses until they had the thing up within a thousandth of a second of optimum. By then I couldn’t hit it any more but, I was willing to lay odds that Ray Angeli had had to work for months before he had reached that kind of standard. That zombie could have gone fifteen rounds with Herrera and not taken too much punishment.
    I was well content with the shape I was in, though I knew I was going to attract some criticism