Her brother moved with a perfection that made her skin crawl. It was not the gracefulness of the dancer whose movement says this is how bodies move, why have you chosen not to? Engineers called the way his brother moved beautiful while pointing at erg-meter and time-reach graphs.
Engineers rarely showed videos.
To compute perfect movement paths was cheap, to modify nerve and muscle to follow it wasn't. But biomechanical optimality made workers more efficient and gave athletes an advantage, and for middle-aged men whose adulthood had been defined by everything-maxxing it was another doubling down on a long-adjudicated bet. Her brother belonged to the third category. He looked at videos of himself and seemed happy. She told herself and almost everybody else that she was happy for him. She did not watch the videos.
The part of her that thought in words saw the brother she had known her whole life. The part of her older than the species saw something other. Nothing alive had ever moved like he did.
She wanted to run. She had seen him run. Around the park and in her nightmares.
It was surely an exaggeration; her therapist agreed. The algorithmic perfection of traffic did not upset her, after all, and every piece of software she worked with was no less optimized than everything else in the world.
All of this was true so she made a guilty effort to spend time with him. Looking elsewhere as much as it was diplomatic and practical. Fighting all the time eyes that refused to enact such a suboptimal pattern.