“Yes.”
I tried to say that was great, or something, but again, nothing came out. By neutralized do you mean “blew him away with a double-tap to the right side of his face,” or what? It was one of those Commander Weasel words that Marena wouldn’t normally use. Just play along, I thought. Until you’re not being recorded twenty different ways. Wait.
“His name was Madison Czerwick.” Lisuarte, it came to me. The voice’s name is Dr. Lisuarte. Right.
That’s great, I tried to say again. For the EEG’s sake I tried to feel the relief I should have felt-that I would have felt if I didn’t know better-but I don’t think the graph changed appreciably. It’s hard to fool the graph.
So they got the guy, I thought. And they still took the trouble to dig me up and upload me. Well, that was gratifying.
Either that or they weren’t sure they’d gotten the whole scoop about the Sacrifice Game from the Lodestone Cross cache. Which they hadn’t.
It took Dr. Lisuarte another ten minutes to check my short-term memory, perception, and motor skills. Things seemed roughly up to code. Maybe I should tell them about the second doomster, I thought, while she was making me brush my teeth over a sort of portable sink. In case my brain fries out unexpectedly or something. It’s the decent thing to do. Except Koh’d been pretty clear that I’d have to hunt him or her down myself. And that she or he might be somebody I knew. Not knew face-to-face, she’d said-right? — but maybe knew secondhand, or on the phone, or something, which meant maybe one of the Warren people or maybe-well, it meant that I didn’t want to spill anything about it until I got my ducks in a row. I asked for a mirror and they said they wanted to see how I did it without a mirror to check my motor skills. Which weren’t good, I thought, in fact I wasn’t even brushing my teeth right, I was poking my cheek, I was spitting in front of people, which I never did, I wasn’t minding the taste of Tom’s Propolis and Myrrh, which has got to be the world’s most revolting, and I was holding the toothbrush like it was a pen, which is not the right way. And for that matter, why was I using my right hand? I always used my left hand. I mean, I was left-handed. Maybe the uploading had reversed my polarity, like I was a dilithium crystal? Except that wouldn’t happen, it doesn’t go that deep, it’s just memories. Maybe I was looking at myself in a mirror. That had to be it. I winced my eyes closed and brushed again. Nope. Same same. I spat. I rinsed. I drank again. I felt my head. It was shaved, of course, and stuck all over with prickly electrodes. My hand got grabbed before it could feel any more.
“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. 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
