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.