“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. Merida Futbol 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?”