Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

THUB-bub

THUB-bub

Are you getting up, Mr. Wolf? It’s twelve o’clock. I got rhythm, I got myugaaallllummmaorm. Thub. Aerror. Aearror. Bub bub. I died. I dead. Nn. Died. A. Bub.

Auriooonium. Raoiony oiny onny ooon oon oon.

Aorny oon oon. bub. Oun ou

The Remains of an Ancient Sovereign at Rest upon His Bier

Discovered at Aguateca by Graf von Stepanwald

Curious Antiquities of British Honduras

By Subscription Lambeth • 1831

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.