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
