state…
“I thought I would be able to see that golden age,” Sic was saying. “And that would have been beyond my dream. But as it turned out, someone else was chosen to do this. And I was not even able to feel jealousy because I could tell this was best. Not just because of Taro’s reasons but also from the Sacrifice Game, from plays of the Game I made myself, I could see that there would be a doom bringer, and that stopping him, that would be too important to take any chances.”
I tried to look into Sic’s eyes as though he were living and present. It felt like I was looking into a mirror, and that I could understand his face the way I’d understand my own face in the mirror, and that what I’d thought was haggardness looked more like the aftermath of extreme disappointment and resignation.
Maybe that was all it was, maybe Tony was simply a good person, a real hero, acting with conspicuous bravery, the sort of person that made me feel like a coward, a sleazeball, and a parasite Except don’t think that, my other side said. You’re doing the right thing. Right? Right. And it doesn’t matter why. The people you save won’t care about your motives. It just doesn’t feel to you like your motives are good because you can’t, you can’t stand feeling all self-righteous. Right? So don’t worry about it. Anyway, maybe Sic’s not even that exceptional. Maybe he’s just one of those people who wanted to be great. And who, like most people, gave up a little early. Everybody wants to go viral these days. It’s like how everyday people commit increasingly spectacular live-streaming suicides. When they do surveys of terminally ill people, they still want to be famous even if they’re not around. Or there was that study where seventy percent of ninth-graders actually thought they’d be celebrities, that is, they really believed they’d become famous, people just can’t bear being average anymore. And I guess Sic was one of them. He’d wanted that so much, to be the Neil Armstrong of the past, to be the hero, to be the first person to see it. He wanted to be at the head of something, the first of something, at the forefront of science, so that then when they gave him a chance to be the hero in a different way, he took it. Maybe you’d do the same thing. You’ve done close to that, anyway “And there are two other reasons,” Sic said. He explained that he had a huge family-there were eight sisters, one of whom was in late stages of Tay-Sachs disease and needed two hundred thousand U.S. dollars per fucking annum in medical care-and that they were now all rich people. And last, there was something he didn’t want much to talk about. Suddenly I got a flash image of a face, the face of a Latino girl who looked around eight years old, a face I was pretty sure I’d never seen as Jed, and the face had an expression of sheer, hopeless terror.
“I have been carrying,” Sic said, “some very traumatic memories from the time I was working for Marcos. They are memories which I cannot erase and which I do not feel I can live with anymore.”
He didn’t elaborate. But I got the sense-although it wasn’t a memory, just a feeling-that the Latino girl was someone Sic had killed. And that he hadn’t done it in a way that he was proud of. Just a feeling.
Well, you can’t fake that, I thought. No way. I was sure he was real, and I was sure that he was telling the truth. Maybe it was because he was me, now, or maybe it was that I’d even picked up a drop of the way Koh could see into people, although of course I didn’t think I’d ever get close to her level, or maybe I just had a capacity for empathy now that I’d never had in my shaken-up Jed 1 brain. At any rate, I was sure.
So, bad memories. He’s right, I thought. They’re a bitch. Well, he’s erased them now.
“En cualquier caso,” he said, “le deseo suerte. No incurra en ningunas equivocaciones.” He reached forward and the screen went back to the blue field with the red dot.
Don’t worry, Tony, I thought. I won’t screw it up.
“Jed? How are you doing?” Marena asked.
“I’m fine,” I said.
Okay, I thought. Look. You know what you’d do if you were actually smart? You’d go along with it. You’d get Lindsay Warren to trust you. You’d become one of them, sitting around that table with the rest of the Syndicate, pulling the strings. And then, one fine day, if you haven’t become totally corrupted, you can turn around, use your great spider-powers with great spider-responsibility, and open up the system and really benefit the world. Right? Get to Lindsay and make him an offer Except, be realistic, my other side argued back. Don’t kid yourself. They don’t need another partner. Especially not somebody like you. You’re an ex-radical, emotionally unstable multiple drug addict. You’re fucked. Oh Christ, oh Christ, I am so very, very fucked Hold it. Cancel, cancel. You’re not expendable yet. In fact, they’ve got you insured for upward of a hundred million dollars U.S. Right? So But the second you become expendable, well, you’ll be expended. You’re screwed, Jude. You’ll lose, just like you always have, loser, loser, loser Stop that. Not helpful. Breathe.
Okay. Look. The worry, the well-justified worry, is they might just ice you as soon as they’re sure they’ve gotten everything usable out of you. Just like what probably really happened to Tony. Someday you’ll get drowsy from something you ate, say, and you’ll lie down and you just won’t wake up. Even if Marena doesn’t want that to happen. For that matter, Marena might be being unrealistic herself. And Taro, for that matter. They both could just disappear. Or, best case scenario, after the 4 Ahau date they’ll just scoop the incriminating bits out of your head and toss you out in the street. Or they might kill you, of course. Except I don’t even think they’d do that. They want to keep Marena on board. And she does actually like me. Doesn’t she? She may not be the most trustworthy person in the world, but she won’t want to just see me get murdered. Really, she’s not that cold. And anyway, even if they get everything about the Game out of me, if I make them think there’s more to get, they’ll still keep me around for a long time. Long enough to figure out what to do. Unless keeping me around means putting me in cryo storage. If they can do that yet. I wouldn’t put it past them. Or really, no, realistically, they’ll probably just dose me up with whatever recipe’ll keep me permanently docile but not quite vegetablized enough to upset Marena and Taro. Right?
Hell, hell, hell, hell Okay, okay. I think we know the downside. Let’s just keep that from happening. Stay indispensable, stay on the inside, keep enough dirt on them ready to dump so that they’re hesitant, and most of all, use the Game. If they’re not as good at it as you are, you can stay ahead of them. Right? Just be smarter than they are. Even if they’ve got LEON working on it full-time. Even if you teach LEON some things yourself. Just don’t teach it everything. Keep that silicon bastard where he ought to be, in the dark. Twilight, anyway. You can do this, you can survive.
Right? Except for you to survive, the world has to still exist.
And without you the real doomster’s going to get away with it. Right? Even if you tell Taro everything, they’ll probably blow it. Maybe you need to just find the real doomster on your own. Except you can’t, probably. You’ll need LEON. You need their investigative resources, at least. And you may need their security resources to take the bastard out. You need to go along with them for the duration. Use the system, work up a LEON-aided version of the Human Game, and find the fucker and nail him. Right?
And maybe by then you’ll be inside. That’s how you’ll stay alive. You want to be part of the syndicate. You’re one of them. Or, let’s say, one of THEM. And you’ll rise through the ranks and then, once you’re in charge of the bad guys, you can turn the place around. Use your power and position for good. Be Spiderman. With great power comes great responsibility, great deeds, great tolerance for platitudes… just don’t sweat it right now. What you need to do is, you need to cool down, clean up, regroup and reorient, and get in a position where you can at least be clear about what you’ve got.
But I’ve got this urge, I thought back. I had this urge to tell them everything, the Human-Game algorithms, what Koh had said, the scoop on the real doomster, everything. Don’t, my other side said. That’s the meds talking. Just keep the key stuff to yourself. Even if they know you’re holding out on them about something, what can they do? Dose you with amobarbital and try to worm it out of you while you babble? No, I don’t think they’ll do that. Not with Marena around. Not with Taro around, probably, for that matter. Even if M and T both know I’m… no, they still won’t want to go Guantanamo on me that fast. They’ll stay close by, work soft on me for a few days, and then… well, and then, if you really hold out, at some point they’ll give Lindsay’s goons a go at you. But for the time being, just play along like every other nonloser does. Right? And then in a few days, if things get flaky, you can break away if you have to. Go underground if you have to. Do whatever you have to. Stay one step ahead of them. Just like the granola package says, never surrender. Awaken your Giant Within. Be Tony Robbins. Right? Right. Okay, here goes.
I sat still. I didn’t say anything. The video had lasted two minutes and twenty seconds. Now it was two minutes after that, and I was so tranqued up, so filled with equanimity, that if it had turned out I was in the body of a baboon, I’d have just lain back in my cage and told Marena, “Hey, be a doll and toss me a banana.”
“Jed? We still need to talk a bit about the Game,” a Midwestern-sounding male voice said. I rolled my giant stone head to the right to look at him. Yeah, that guy, I thought. Finally, I remembered his name: Laurence Boyle.
