The Sacrifice Game (53 page)

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 Díaz, 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 compañeros 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.