The first thing I saw was a red dot on an indigo field.
“Please focus on the red dot,” a bonesetterly-I mean, doctorly-female voice said.
I did.
“Please follow the dot,” the voice said. The dot slid up, down, to the left-I mean, right-and then to the left.
“That’s good,” the woman said. Her name wasn’t coming through, but I knew who it was: It was the project’s head doctor. Right. And I knew where I was. Well, not exactly where. But I mean I knew that I was in the twenty-first century, and in some modern facility, a dimly lit, medium-sized room with scents of Phisohex and latex and some, but not all, other components of That Hospital Smell. Definitely not a hospital, though, I thought. There were at least several well-washed but not recently washed bodies in the microatmosphere, but no smells of ejected foul liquids, foul semiliquids, and foul solids, or that special cleaner for what they call an “appliance.” So more like a small clinic or a corporate or school nurse’s office. Hmm. Somewhere nearby a pink-noise generator was generating pink noise. Something about the sound, or lack of other sounds, or lack of certain types of echoes, or something, conveyed that we were underground. As my ears focused, they identified the sound of several sets of fingers discreetly tapping on membrane keyboards. So more like a clean room, I thought. A Warren building. At the Stake, in Belize? No, I didn’t think so. Something about the smells, the sweat or dust or types of pollen or whatever, didn’t whisper, as they always do however faintly, “Central America.” I used to fantasize about saving the day in some vague and debilitating way and waking up surrounded by sexily starched nurses and going, “What happened? Where am I?” Well, not this time, I thought. There wasn’t even the dissociation we’d figured I’d experience. Not yet, anyway. I knew that I’d been in Chacal, in the seventh century, and that now I was Jed again-Jed 3, let’s say-and I was back.
That’s good, the voice said, or something to that effect. The dot vanished. And by now the field of my effective vision had widened enough for me to see that it was on a big, big OLED monitor angled over me on a ceiling-mounted arm.
Okay. I stretched. I wiggled my left, I mean, right set of toes, and then the other set. I moved my head back but my C3 vertebra didn’t crack the way it usually did. I swallowed.
Hmm.
Well, fuck me with a pre-Columbian ceremonial jade battle saw. The world was still here.
Big disappointment.
Kidding. Actually, I can deal with the world. Its apex-predator inhabitants aren’t anything to write home about, but The cold disk of a stethoscope materialized on my chest.
“Take a deep breath, please,” the doctor said. I did.
“It’s October twenty-eighth,” the female doctor’s voice said. “2012.”
2 Kimi, 9 Sak, my brain went, automatically but, for some reason not nearly so automatically as usual. That is, 2 Death, 9 Whiteness, in the sixth k’in of the fifteenth uinal of the nineteenth and last tun of the nineteenth and last k’atun of the twelfth and last b’aktun. Fifty-four shopping days left before 4 Ahau. Okay. And it meant I’d lost two hundred and twenty-two days. That is, all the memories I’d picked up in the months between the downloading in March and today were as gone as an unsaved Angry Birds score. In a way-in fact, in more than just a way-that Jed, Jed 1, the one who’d lived on until yesterday, that Jed was dead.
Oh, well, okay. Easy come, easy go. If I’d had any brilliant insights or late-breaking commodities tips or anything, I would have left notes to myself. Which would show up tomorrow or so on my cold e-mail, that is, the account nobody but me knows about, not even my best friend, No Way, or my lawyer, Jerry Weir. Got to sneak out and get some fresh phones. Later.
The thing is-well, one of the many things is-at the same time that I was thinking about all the time I’d lost, or maybe a little before-when you’re as tranquilized as I undoubtedly was, it’s hard enough to remember what you were just thinking, let alone what order the thoughts came in-I got a microflash of a feeling of triumph and an image of a ball falling away from me between two vaguely sketched opposing players and into a goal, and a remembered sound of cheering. The big hipball game, I thought. Against the Ocelots. Except, no, not hipball, the dudes weren’t wearing any padding. And more definitively than that, I’d propelled the ball with my foot. Something from my childhood? Except I’d always sucked at soccer, and they didn’t even play it much in Utah anyway. Something I’d seen on TV and misfiled as my own memory? Maybe. And why did it come up? I thought back. When did it come up? Twenty-Eighth. Right. I guessed that it’d been triggered by the sound of the number “28.” Huh. Well, look, if that’s the worst jumble your consciousness is going to get after all this reshuffling, repackaging, reuploading, and other reabuse, count yourself ahead. Right?
“Exhale,” the voice said, or a word to that effect.
I did. Fabric resettled on my chest.
A latex-gloved hand touched mine. I almost-passably-automatically looked down and the little scene came into focus: It was handing me a Tyvek cup half-empty of water, with a single prolate ellipsoid of ice floating in it like a ghost’s turd. Evidently I was closer to vertical than I’d thought. I took it. My hand, and now, I saw, my bare forearm, had gotten a lot more muscular. Ripped, even. That’s from hipball, my brain said. No way, I responded, we are not still in Chacal’s body. Don’t bust my balls, brain. And they don’t play hipball in the twenty-first century either. Must’ve just been working out a lot while I was waiting for oblivion. I guess I’d wanted to pleasantly surprise myself. Except the arm had also grown an unprecedented crop of dark hair, which meant they’d upped my testosterone for some reason. Ask about it later. For now, just do the minimum and get out of here.
I sipped down a half-ounce. The water tasted a little different. I mean, from water. Grrg. My tongue flopped around, checking out the oral cavescape. Nnng. My sidewise tooth must have been fixed while I was out. That is, I’d always had my left canine tooth kind of negligently wedged in there, and now it felt right in line The voice said something like “Tell me your name.”
“Don’t start with the hard ones,” I said, or maybe wished I’d said after I said something even more lame. Or had she even really asked anything? Maybe I wasn’t quite so on the ball as I’d thought. I handed the cup back.
“How do you feel?” a different, male voice asked. Taro? No, somebody I didn’t like as much. Who? Don’t sweat it, I thought, it’ll come back.
“Surprised,” I tried to say. Only, nothing came out. At least I was trying to be honest. Almost my only emotion was simple surprise that it had worked. The uploading had always been less sure, by a big factor, than going the other way, that is, than the transmission into the Maya host mind. And even that hadn’t gone perfectly. I’d always half suspected that the Warren people had just been leading me on, that they’d never really expected the uploading to work, although realistically they’d put a lot more money and prep time into the ROC phase-as we were calling it, based on a phrase of Heinlein’s, the “Rigor of Colloids”-than they would have just to fool me. Probably they’d just had a lower expectation for it than they’d let on. And, really, they did want to get as much of a return on their investment as they could. I figured that by this point I’d cost about as much as two new aircraft carriers. One with a black-maple bowling alley.
In the first part of the recovery process, just before the uploading, my original memories-that is, all the higher-level long-term memories I’d built up in my brain over my lifetime-would have gotten “wiped down” by a series of medium-pulsed 2000-milliamp electroconvulsive shocks. Basically, they’d killed me, or vegetablized me. And then, in the second phase, my empty brain would have watched, or let’s say it would have experienced, a sped-up “quintesensory video”-as Taro had called it-of the memories that had been downloaded from the ancient brain that had been preserved in the sarcophagus under the Ocelots’ mul. And the living brain would rationalize or let’s say overinterpret that input to imagine it was really experiencing it. Essentially, it would fool itself into believing it had a Jed 2 — like identity. It was basically the same thing brains do with more random input when they’re creating a dream.
I felt a disposable sheet slide off my feet. “Tell me what you feel.” She rolled a spiked wheel up the sole of my foot.
“I feel one of those spiky reflex wheel things rolling up the sole of my foot,” I said.
“Hold on a second,” the doctorly voice said, not to me. There was one of those pauses where somebody else is doing something you can’t see. I stretched again, crackling the butcher’s paper on the examination table underneath me.
“Could you please tell me your mother’s first name?” Lisuarte asked.
“Consuela,” I said. “Oh, no, wait, it’s Flor.” Who the hell was Consuela? I didn’t know any Consuelas. I’d gotten a flash of a cinder-block house with a big hand-painted Fresca logo on the outside and two men inside it watching Telemundo on an old Quasar color TV, and me inside it-that is, I was seeing the place both from outside and inside-inside the house, looking out its open front, watching a woman come up the road outside with a blue plastic basket of washing on her head, and there wasn’t anything at all remarkable about any of it except that I realized I loved the woman but that she wasn’t my mother, that is, she wasn’t my real mother from Guatemala. She was someone’s mother, she “Jed?” Marena’s voice asked.
“Marena,” I croaked. “Hi!”
“Hi,” she said again, not so warmly as one would like. She didn’t come over to touch me either. Guess she didn’t want to be too lovey-dovey on camera, I thought. Either that or whatever thing we had wasn’t a big thing, or-no, that was definitely something to think about later on. Stay chilled. Any big emotions you have, they’ll show up on the graphs and you’ll have to explain them later “Jed? You’ll want to know that we identified and neutralized him,” Marena’s voice said.
“Who?” I asked, or rather made a raspy interrogative grunt. Oh, I remembered. The doomster. “The doomster?” It sounded like “Thhh dhhhmppstrdrdrdrrr?”
“Yes.”
I tried to say that was great, or something, but again, nothing came out. By neutralized do you mean “blew him away with a double-tap to the right side of his face,” or what? It was one of those Commander Weasel words that Marena wouldn’t normally use. Just play along, I thought. Until you’re not being recorded twenty different ways. Wait.
“His name was Madison Czerwick.” Lisuarte, it came to me. The voice’s name is Dr. Lisuarte. Right.
That’s great, I tried to say again. For the EEG’s sake I tried to feel the relief I should have felt-that I would have felt if I didn’t know better-but I don’t think the graph changed appreciably. It’s hard to fool the graph.
So they got the guy, I thought. And they still took the trouble to dig me up and upload me. Well, that was gratifying.
Either that or they weren’t sure they’d gotten the whole scoop about the Sacrifice Game from the Lodestone Cross cache. Which they hadn’t.
It took Dr. Lisuarte another ten minutes to check my short-term memory, perception, and motor skills. Things seemed roughly up to code. Maybe I should tell them about the second doomster, I thought, while she was making me brush my teeth over a sort of portable sink. In case my brain fries out unexpectedly or something. It’s the decent thing to do. Except Koh’d been pretty clear that I’d have to hunt him or her down myself. And that she or he might be somebody I knew. Not knew face-to-face, she’d said-right? — but maybe knew secondhand, or on the phone, or something, which meant maybe one of the Warren people or maybe-well, it meant that I didn’t want to spill anything about it until I got my ducks in a row. I asked for a mirror and they said they wanted to see how I did it without a mirror to check my motor skills. Which weren’t good, I thought, in fact I wasn’t even brushing my teeth right, I was poking my cheek, I was spitting in front of people, which I never did, I wasn’t minding the taste of Tom’s Propolis and Myrrh, which has got to be the world’s most revolting, and I was holding the toothbrush like it was a pen, which is not the right way. And for that matter, why was I using my right hand? I always used my left hand. I mean, I was left-handed. Maybe the uploading had reversed my polarity, like I was a dilithium crystal? Except that wouldn’t happen, it doesn’t go that deep, it’s just memories. Maybe I was looking at myself in a mirror. That had to be it. I winced my eyes closed and brushed again. Nope. Same same. I spat. I rinsed. I drank again. I felt my head. It was shaved, of course, and stuck all over with prickly electrodes. My hand got grabbed before it could feel any more.
“We’d better take those off in a minute,” Lisuarte’s voice said. “Please don’t touch them right-”
“Jed? Do you have any questions right away?” Marena’s voice asked, behind me this time.
“Uh, yeah,” I rasped. “Did Kamsky win the WCC against Anand?” My voice was weird. It was way hoarse, which argued for a long time under respiratory anesthetic. But it was weirder than that, there was kind of a heavier accent to it. Maybe like a Yucatecan accent. It’s a subtle thing, but still “Let me check on that,” Marena’s voice said, humoring me.
“Are we at the Stake?”
Lisuarte’s voice seemed to hesitate, but I imagined, I think correctly, Marena nodding at her in a who’s-the-boss-here? way, and a beat later Lisuarte said, “No, we’re in Holopaw.”
“Holopaw?”
“Right.”
“You mean, like on Balam, uh, Cat Lake?” It was a nonplace town about, I’d guess, twenty miles southeast of Orlando.
“Correct,” she said.
“Kamsky lost five and a half to six and a half,” Marena said. “According to the Chess Federation site.” She’d come around into view, but she was wearing one of those poufy hairnets and a lab mask with an earphone-and-microphone rig on it, and the little bit of her face that I could see was a funny powdery lavender shade. It had to be the OR lights.
“I’m sure the Federation is correct,” I said.
“Jed?” Marena said. “Listen, we need you to focus now for a minute.”
“Right,” I said. “No problem.” Damn, it wasn’t even just the accent, it didn’t even sound like my voice. I have a surprisingly deep and/or authoritative voice for my charming but relatively unthreatening physical presence. But this was a tenor. Looking back on it, of course, I should have guessed what had happened a long time before this point. But even if you’re the most rational person out there-as I figured I was, given the competition-there’s a kind of denial about things like this that kicks in automatically. Well, not that a lot of people have experienced any “things like this.” But say you’ve lost an arm or something, it can take days to convince yourself that it’s happened. Or if you’ve had a certain kind of stroke, you might never have any further contact with the whole left side of your body, but until your dying day, nobody’s going to be able to convince you of the fact. Denial isn’t just the Ventura Freeway of Egypt. It’s the essential condition of all supra-single-cellular existence.
“Okay, before we do anything else, we should go over the most important algorithms and procedures from the Human Game, you know, the City Game.”
I nodded. How’d they know about the Human Game? I wondered. Had they gotten me to chat in my sleep? I mean, of course they had me wired up the wazoo, but they still can’t read stuff that specifically. Can they? No, no way. Or had I blabbed about it in the Lodestone Cross letters, about how we were looking forward to somehow getting it going? I didn’t think so “Just in case there are any complex memories that you might not retain consistently,” she said.
“Okay, I want to get up first, though,” I said.
“Well, you’re still under some sedation,” she said. “It’d be better to do it right away like in the rehearsals. Remember?”
“Right,” I said. Better give them something, I thought. Just don’t give them the big stuff until you’ve worked it out yourself whether 28.
Huh.
I saw the number 28, in black, against three light blue stripes on a white field.
Wait a second.
Twenty-eight. Merida Futbol Club. Right-handed. Yucatecan.
Oh. Oh Chri It wasn’t my body. It was Tony Sic’s.