The Sacrifice Game

(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?”

“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 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 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. He, too, was in a powder-blue lab coat. Hmm, what kind of blue powder was that, originally? I wondered. Blueberry powder? Bluebird powder? Damn, I was as high as a radiosonde balloon. Focus.

“Mr. DeLanda?” he asked. “I’m sorry to seem uncaring here, but we also still need to do some business.”

“Right,” I started to say. “Business is…” I managed not to finish the thought.

“Larry, I don’t think this is the best time,” Marena said. She sounded real. I mean, like she was really feeling it. Had they rehearsed this? Was she just being Good Cop?

Whatever.

“I understand,” Boyle said, “but let’s just get a few things out of the way.”

“Listen-”

“Also, Elder Lindsay wants to congratulate you.” I couldn’t tell whether the you was singular or plural. “He’s standing by the conference-”

“Larry, no, we have to give him a break. Seriously. He’s not in any condition to talk about this right now.” Yeah, why the rush? I wondered. If they caught the doomster already, what was the problem? All they wanted out of the Game was a whole lot of bucks for the Warren Group. To be followed, inevitably, by world domination and a new millennium of corporate totalitarian soft dystopia. A whole Stanislaw Lem thing. But without the humor. But surely that can wait a day or two. Right?

“Miss, Ms. Park,” Boyle said, “ as we did in the rehearsals, we do need to continue the debriefing.”

“I don’t think I’m conditioned, uh, any condition, in any…” I said.

“Let’s meet again in twenty-four hours,” Marena said. “Doctor? What do you think?”

Lisuarte started to say something but Boyle cut her off. “Marena, we’re all efforting to make this as nonconfrontive as possible, but there-”

“Stop it!” Marena said. “He’s just had, he’s having, a huge fucking shock, I mean, absolute trauma, and he’s handling it-I mean, how would you guys handle it? He’s lost months, and the two transfers, we don’t know what that’s like, I mean, come on, even on top of the Tony Sic thing, he’s had an experience like, you know, and he’s got a lot of meds on board. I absoshittinglutely in sist. I insist.”

“I have to agree with that,” Dr. Lisuarte said. “He’s close to dozing off.”

“I agree with Marena,” Taro’s reassuringly precise voice said.

“Anyway, nobody’s going anywhere,” Marena said. “We can start up again in twenty-four hours. I think that’s fair.”

Laurence gave in. I had an impression of people signing off on the decision and making plans to call each other in twelve hours. Dr. Lisuarte’s nurse, who looked familiar but I guess didn’t have a name, wheeled over a cantilevered table and set down a big Let’s Fuck with Jed Kit, a compartmentalized tray full of pills and elixirs and electuaries and a large-bore Tuohy needle that looked as blunt and clumsy as a left-handed safety pin. Going to vax me into a staring askeletonite with Williams syndrome. Raggedy Jeddy. My earth-sized head floated upward in the nurse’s hands, and as Dr. Lisuarte started to de-’trode it, icy rainstorms of solvent broke out across the coast of its northern continent. I dozed.