Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

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.