The Sacrifice Game (52 page)

“We’d better take those off in a minute,” Lisuarte’s voice said. “Please don’t touch them right—”

“Jed? Do you have any questions right away?” Marena’s voice asked, behind me this time.

“Uh, yeah,” I rasped. “Did Kamsky win the WCC against Anand?” My voice was weird. It was way hoarse, which argued for a long time under respiratory anesthetic. But it was weirder than that, there was kind of a heavier accent to it. Maybe like a Yucatecan accent. It’s a subtle thing, but still—

“Let me check on that,” Marena’s voice said, humoring me.

“Are we at the Stake?”

Lisuarte’s voice seemed to hesitate, but I imagined, I think correctly, Marena nodding at her in a who’s-the-boss-here? way, and a beat later Lisuarte said, “No, we’re in Holopaw.”

“Holopaw?”

“Right.”

“You mean, like on Balam, uh, Cat Lake?” It was a nonplace town about, I’d guess, twenty miles southeast of Orlando.

“Correct,” she said.

“Kamsky lost five and a half to six and a half,” Marena said. “According to the Chess Federation site.” She’d come around into view, but she was wearing one of those poufy hairnets and a lab mask with an earphone-and-microphone rig on it, and the little bit of her face that I could see was a funny powdery lavender shade. It had to be the OR lights.

“I’m sure the Federation is correct,” I said.

“Jed?” Marena said. “Listen, we need you to focus now for a minute.”

“Right,” I said. “No problem.” Damn, it wasn’t even just the accent, it didn’t even sound like my voice. I have a surprisingly deep and/or authoritative voice for my charming but relatively unthreatening physical presence. But this was a tenor. Looking back on it, of course, I should have guessed what had happened a long time before this point. But even if you’re the most rational person out there—as I figured I was, given the competition—there’s a kind of denial about things like this that kicks in automatically. Well, not that a lot of people have experienced any “things like this.” But say you’ve lost an arm or something, it can take days to convince yourself that it’s happened. Or if you’ve had a certain kind of stroke, you might never have any further contact with the whole left side of your body, but until your dying day, nobody’s going to be able to convince you of the fact. Denial isn’t just the Ventura Freeway of Egypt. It’s the essential condition of all supra-single-cellular existence.

“Okay, before we do anything else, we should go over the most important algorithms and procedures from the Human Game, you know, the City Game.”

I nodded. How’d they know about the Human Game? I wondered. Had they gotten me to chat in my sleep? I mean, of course they had me wired up the wazoo, but they still can’t read stuff that specifically. Can they? No, no way. Or had I blabbed about it in the Lodestone Cross letters, about how we were looking forward to somehow getting it going? I didn’t think so—

“Just in case there are any complex memories that you might not retain consistently,” she said.

“Okay, I want to get up first, though,” I said.

“Well, you’re still under some sedation,” she said. “It’d be better to do it right away like in the rehearsals. Remember?”

“Right,” I said. Better give them something, I thought. Just don’t give them the big stuff until you’ve worked it out yourself whether—

28.

Huh.

I saw the number 28, in black, against three light blue stripes on a white field.

Wait a second.

Twenty-eight. Mérida Fútbol Club. Right-handed. Yucatecan.

Oh. Oh Chri-

It wasn’t my body. It was Tony Sic’s.

( 81 )

I
screamed:

“WHERE’S THE OTHER ME?”

Now, in general, I try to have a snide remark ready for any situation. It doesn’t have to be funny, just smug and mean-spirited. But not this time. I just screamed. And on top of that, despite terror, astonishment, apocalyptic rage, and everything else going on in there, my brain also found room to think of the scene of Ronald Reagan waking up in a similar room and similarly screaming, “Where’s the rest of me?”

“Where’s Jed?”
I shouted. My God, I thought. My God. I’d known these were very serious people, crony defense contractors and private ops goons who could disappear you in a second, but I hadn’t quite imagined that they were capable of this. Not this. Not this. Not this.

I started to lurch up, but more than a couple sets of squeakily gloved hands—“gently but firmly,” as they used to say in handbooks about milking cows—pulled me back. One set reclamped the blood-oxygen thingie on my nondominant ring finger and another felt like what must have been an IV farther up the same arm.

“Is he dead?”
I shrieked. My God, my God. I’d thought I’d imagined every nefarious trick that the Warren Family of Caring Companies could possibly pull, and now here was an all-new one. And I’d thought that Marena and Taro—I mean, had Taro signed off on this? Was Marena really this much of an antifreeze-blooded murdering psychopathette? Tony Sic’s brain, I thought. Jesus. That
choza
with the Fresca logo, I thought. That wasn’t one of mine. It was one of Tony’s very early memories. And that woman, Consuela, was Tony’s mother. Holy
mierdi
—

“Jed’s fine,” Lisuarte said.

“But he doesn’t know? The other me doesn’t know?”

She didn’t answer. I tried to see who else was in the room, but when I rolled my head around it felt like one of those colossal Olmec basalt helmeted ballplayer heads. Still, I got the impression of about a dozen people. Technicians? Nurses? Male nurses? Warren goons? Was that scary Grgur guy here?

Got to get out.

I started to slide off the exam table—vaguely planning to jump up, punch out the guards, steal some ID, get out of the building, and light out for the Territory—but I found myself sinking back down like I was wearing lead exercise weights, or not even, but like I had lead blood. Like even my earlobes were tired.

“Jed,” Marena said. Her hand was on my forehead and the sleeve of her powder-blue lab coat pulled back so you could see a Warren live-badge bracelet. “You have to stay relaxed, there’s still, uh, motor pathways coming in—”

“Your brain’s still building connections to the new memories,” Lisuarte said. “If you—”

“Wait, he doesn’t know?” I asked again. “Jed, I mean, the other Jed, he doesn’t know about me?”

“Jed’s good,” Marena said. “And, no, he doesn’t even know we went back to the site yet. But we are going to tell him. Or if you want you can tell him.”

Damn, so I was going to get to meet myself. I’d thought I’d taken care of this with that 2 Jeweled Skull creep. And now it’s even more . . . hell, hell, hell. Well, we’d have a lot to talk about, I guess.

Well, so much for Tony. Poor sucker. He’d been twenty-eight years old. He’d never even had a chance. I’d never been crazy about the guy, but now I was almost feeling tears for him simmering behind my eyes. What the hell was he thinking? Did he have some kind of debilitating depression I hadn’t picked up on? Was he terminally ill? Or had they given him some new kind of ultraspecific drug that increased his natural death wish and still left him cogent enough to defend his decision on video? Or maybe they’d brainwashed him over years and years. He’d been with the company for almost a decade, right? Jesus Christ, these Warren guys, they make the Carlyle Group look like Oxfam. They’ll do you in a second. Bastards.

And why him? Wouldn’t it have been better if it were somebody I’d never met?

Well, maybe that just hadn’t been possible. They couldn’t foresee everything, they were making it up as they went along too. They might not even have made the decision until a few days ago. And they’d needed someone who spoke Chol. Language is too basic. The mind encodes it way below the level of the sort of memories that we can (now) just pass around. And they’d needed a brain that was already proven to be smart enough, in the right kind of way, to be good at the Sacrifice Game. He hadn’t been so good as I was, of course, but he was getting there. So there weren’t too many candidates beside Sic to begin with. And as I should have expected, they’d been grooming Sic for years.

“Dude,” I said. “You—guys—just—murdered—Tony.”

“He volunteered,” Marena said.

“What, like some, some, some, some, like some, some, some suicide bomber?”

“All right, you could say that, I’m not going to debate you about it.”

“And you thought I wouldn’t mind?”

“No, but, I’d say, well, yes, it’s a bit of a surprise for most of us that you’re quite this upset. Look, Tony Sic made a deal and in a way it doesn’t really have much to do with you. He was figuring on a suicide mission of some kind.”

“You mean he thought he’d be going to Mayaland and wouldn’t be able to get back.”

“Well, yeah, he hoped he’d get to go. But when you went instead, he accepted it. He’d already made the deal.”

I didn’t answer. Nobody else said anything.

“I want to see my face,” I said.

Marena got out a quality-paperback-size Samsung tablet, switched it to mirror function, and handed it to me. It felt like I was lifting a three-inch-thick plate of polonium-210, but I got it into position and it “reflected” my face. Sic’s face.

It was handsome in a rustic John Leguizamo–ish style, except for the shaved head with its white plague spots of about two hundred silicon-glued electrodes. I’d just seen it on the video, of course, but I’d never really seen it. That is, when it’s in a mirror, you look at a face in a different way. And I don’t mean because it’s reversed—and the mirror function on her tablet defaulted to reversing the image as though it were a real mirror—but because you know your consciousness is in there, and in the face’s microreactions, you think you can almost see it. I’m inside there, I thought. I’m inside. It’s me inside.

“Oh, my God,” I went. “Oh my God, oh my God.” And I think I said it a few more times. Finally I started saying, “I can’t believe you did this, I can’t believe you did this, I can’t be—”

“Jed,
listen,
” Marena said. She pulled off her—or do you have to say “doffed”?—she doffed her mask. It was Marena, all right, a little more creased and careworn than I’d remembered her while I was “away,” but no wonder. “
Listen
. Did you really want the other Jed killed? Is that what you wanted? That would have made you happier?”

“No, but I mean, of course I signed up for that, and, no, I’m glad he’s around, of course, but still.”

“It will be interesting . . . for you to meet him,” Taro’s voice said.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,
interesting
?” I went. “Are you all
psychotic
?” I managed to roll my head to see where Taro’s voice had come from. He was just standing there. He was still in his mask. He was the type who’d forgotten he had it on. What does he really think about this? I wondered. His, what do I call it, I guess I’ll say his complicity, his complicity in the thing was bugging me almost more than Marena’s. Except, Taro’s always been too otherworldly to really think about this sort of thing. Too spergy. Probably he feels like as long as my consciousness is somewhere he’s done right by me, and as for Tony, well, Taro’s weird, I mean, sometimes I’d gotten the feeling that he thought of the whole EOE thing more as just part of an experiment than something to really worry about. He’s not a psycho, he’s not sadistic, but, it’s like everything’s an equation to him. And it felt weird talking to my old teacher this way, but once I’d started I couldn’t stop. “You just, you just murdered this like friend and colleague of yours and now you’re all like, doo-dee-doo, let’s all jump in the Mystery Machine with his reanimated corpse and go have drinks with—”

“Jed, listen, what are we talk—”

“That’s how you guys treat your friends? How do you treat your enemies? Maybe you give them—”

“Hey,”
she said. “Jed. What are we talking about here? I mean, ultimately. Are we talking about the survival of the entire planet?”

I was about to say “But you guys
caught
the doomster.” But then I remembered that I didn’t believe that Madison was the doomster, and the fact that I didn’t believe a word of what I was saying would show up on the polygraph.

And “polygraph” is putting it mildly, I thought. Try polyinnumerabillomyriadomultinominalograph. There were teams of experts, both software and meatware, and not just here in this room, but in several different labs, all watching and interpreting every snack, crapple, and pock in every lobe and fissure of my brain. Hell, they could probably see video of me playing hipball against the Ocelots and having sex with Lady Koh and—well, okay, they can’t quite do that yet. But they can sure tell whether I’m lying, and a lot more besides.

“Jed?” Marena asked. “Is that what we’re talking about?”

Don’t answer, my other side said. That is, “my other side” as in “my regular interlocutor in my endless internal dialogue.” If you talk, you’ll say one thing too much. Just stay as schtum as possible and get the hell out of these ’trodes before you blurt something out. Right?

Right.

With great effort, I made contact with a few of my opiate-sodden muscles and rolled my head around. I could see that I was roughly in the center of a room the size of an average high-school classroom, and that besides Lisuarte, Marena, Taro, Michael Weiner, Ashleys sub-2 and sub-3, and Lance Boyle—all of whom, besides Taro, had, uh, doffed their masks—there were six other people working at portable workstations set around the walls. I thought I recognized a couple of them through their masks, students of Taro’s who’d worked on the Sacrifice Game software. Still, I hadn’t thought this many people were in on the specifics of the project. One, how’d they expect them all to keep it secret? And, two, hell’s bells, I’ve spilled my guts. This was not an intimate spot for a panic attack, a lover’s quarrel, or any other sort of freakout. And with my brain opened up for general viewing, it–basically I’d feel more private if I were having a gynecological exam in a sold-out operating theater. Fuckity fuckity fu—

“Because,” Marena went on, “because, if we’re talking about the survival of the entire planet, then, that kind of changes things, doesn’t it, that is, we’re kind of in wartime here, in fact, you, it’s, it’s more serious than just wartime, we’re at the tipping point of like life on earth, and a zillion innocent standbyers are all about to just—just, look, yes, of course we feel bad about Tony, but we’re grateful, I mean, look, he’s somebody we worked with, he’s a member of our unit who volunteered for a suicide mission, he, with, with conspicuous bravery, and, okay, he’s saving the day. It’s his decision. Okay?”

Again, I thought of saying something that sounded fairly good at first—this time it was “Oh, thanks, GI Jane, well, at least we’ve stopped pretending this isn’t a military operation”—and again, after about two seconds of thought, I said nothing. For one thing, at this stage I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t more worried that it might
not
be a military operation and might be just a commercial one, or rather maybe I was hoping that there was still an iota of difference.

“And the other—look, Jed
₁
’s still alive too,” Marena said. “That’s more than you expected, right?”

I sort of grunted.

“What would you have done? Think about it.”

“I don’t know what I would have done,” I said. “Anyway, that’s a meaningless—”

She started to interrupt me but I cut her off.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because,” she said, “because the psych evaluations indicated that it’d be better to hold off on any major shocks until you got your bearings, you—”

“Because you wanted me to go through any and all Sacrifice Game data first,” I said. “And then after that you can just toss me out on the street.”

“Nonsense,” Marena went. “Just relax a little. I’m not telling you not to think about the Sic thing, but you do need to relax or we’ll all be in worse trouble.”

I started to snap back at her and then didn’t. Chill, I thought. She’s right, you have to relax. She’s—