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 Hmm.
I wasn’t proud of it, but I was starting to suspect she might be right about a few other things. Like, was I really all that upset? Or did I just think I was upset because that would be the right way to feel? Sometimes one does the right thing just to make oneself feel like a decent person. You don’t want to admit to yourself that you’re a jerk. So you moan and complain but inside, not very deep down, there’s less upsetness there than you’d expect, or want people to know.
Maybe they’re right, I thought. They know I’ll get over it.
For one thing, I was alive again. It was an unexpected plus. And one feels grateful to whoever makes you alive. For another thing, I was already starting to think again about how I’d go about finding and neutralizing the real doomster. When you’re on a mission you forget about your own problems, or you accept it when other people solve them for you. Third, the team knew from my Lodestone letters that my stint in AD 664 hadn’t exactly been characterized by nonviolence. So maybe they figured I wouldn’t mind another sort-of death in my retinue.
And, fourth-well, I’d had enough experience with Better Self-Delusion Through Chemistry that even though I was in an unfamiliar body, I could tell they had me doped up within an inch of total all-flowering ever-abiding anupadisesa-nibbanadhatu nirvana. I could even tell that the main ingredients were levorphanol and diazapam. And when you have enough of that stuff on board-enough to get that feeling like you’re a rack of spring lamb that’s been soaking for ten hours in warm mint butter-somebody can come up to you and spit in your eye, steal your girlfriend, step on your blue suede shoes, and call you a Republican, and even if he’s unarmed and smaller than you are, you just kind of placidly stand there and laugh it off because, well, things just don’t seem all that dire. And of course right now they were raising the level of the stuff in my IV, so in a few minutes I’d be a useless glob of “And you’re in a younger body,” Marena said, “and, look, it’s a healthier and frankly a better-looking body.”
“He probably has leukemia,” I said.
“He doesn’t,” she said. “He’s, your body, it’s fine. You’re in perfect health.”
“Great.”
“Yeah.”
“Is that why?”
“Why what?”
“Why you’ve got me in Tony. You wanted me to stay healthier longer because I’m such a big investment? And I don’t have hemophilia. And you didn’t want to take the chance that, you know, if something went wrong on the uploading, then Jed-okay, uh, the original, Jed-Sub-One, he might be too damaged to be an effective player. Right? But you could still keep him on as a backup. Right?”
There was a smudge of hesitation. “There were other-”
“Or maybe there was a little character trouble. Right?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“You didn’t like my PSD, the tsam lic addiction, obsessive-com… you thought Sic would be cleaner.”
Hesitation. Finally, Marena said, “Doctor?”
“Yes, there were some concerns,” Dr. Lisuarte’s voice said, farther behind me than before. “Some of Jed’s… I mean, you’re right, let’s call him Jed-Sub-One, uh… some of Jed-Sub-One’s reactions on the personality tests under the PET scan were, they weren’t-look, after a great deal of consideration we thought he might not be the best candidate for his own new…”
“Are you talking about the sociopathology scale?” I asked.
“Well, that’s… it’s one thing that won’t carry over,” she said. “Sic might have your memories but he wouldn’t have your personality. You might even feel that you do, but actually, you’ll be…”
She trailed off.
“So I’d be more empathetic?” I said. “More good-willed, selfless, all that stuff?”
“It’s not so simple as that, you were a good person before, it’s more about quantifying what sort of character would be the best receiver of Sacrifice Game-related, that is, basically this very powerful information…”
“You thought Sic would be easier to control,” I said.
“Again, no, that’s a huge oversimplification.”
“And you hate my character.”
“No, no, we’re just saying, you know, what I just said.”
“You’re saying my original brain developed a flaw in processing.”
“Look,” Marena’s voice said, “frankly, Jed-Sub-One hasn’t been acting quite normal. But you’ll have, you know, when you meet him, you’ll be able to…”
“Okay,” I said, “but I, I mean, Jed-Sub-One, sure, he may not ever have been normal, but he wouldn’t have killed Tony.”
“We didn’t kill Tony,” she said. “Look, let’s watch the video early.”
“Medically speaking-” Dr. Lisuarte started to say.
“No, I’m making a command decision here,” Marena said. “Show it. I’m serious.”
There was two seconds of pause. The red dot disappeared and Tony Sic’s shoulders and head came up on the monitor. He looked haggard, but not crazy or under duress. Of course, he wouldn’t. The time stamp at the bottom read 10-24-2:26:41 P.M. Four days ago. He looked straight at the camera.
“ Y pues, Joachim,” Tony said, “you’ll want to know why I made this decision.”
He paused. I looked at Marena.
“When I was growing up in Xtaretac”-that’s a Cholan-speaking town north of the old site of Quiruga, about sixty miles south of where I grew up-“I heard a lot about Justo Barrios, and Porfirio Diaz, and Pedro Cuzcat, and Che Guevara, and Subcommandante Marcos, and I wanted to do, I always thought I would do, something very important to bring my companeros back from the bottom, to where they were in the old days, when they built the great citadels and ruled their world. Later, even though I did well in school, that ambition came to seem like it would be very hard to fulfill. And then later, when I began working with Taro, it came to seem possible again.”
Hmm, I thought. Well, it sounds like he means it. But did he really? What if he was drugged? Or was he forced to say this stuff?
Or was it even really him?
Maybe it was a look-alike. Or not even a real person at all. Just a few years ago animation software couldn’t quite fool you, but now, it’s like, that stuff can whip up someone you know, from scratch, and you can’t tell the difference. The fact is, you don’t know anything. You’re in a Phil Dickian nightmare of total surveillance and total simulacronism where total paranoia is totally justified. You’d practically have to be the president to know what was really going on. No, in fact, whoever’s running the Deep State probably has him on strings, too, he’s probably got an explosive pacemaker that’ll go off unless he just reads the exact lines they give him, the real power, the deep
