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.

Right? Except for you to survive, the world has to still exist.

And without you the real doomster’s going to get away with it. Right? Even if you tell Taro everything, they’ll probably blow it. Maybe you need to just find the real doomster on your own. Except you can’t, probably. You’ll need LEON. You need their investigative resources, at least. And you may need their security resources to take the bastard out. You need to go along with them for the duration. Use the system, work up a LEON-aided version of the Human Game, and find the fucker and nail him. Right?

And maybe by then you’ll be inside. That’s how you’ll stay alive. You want to be part of the syndicate. You’re one of them. Or, let’s say, one of THEM. And you’ll rise through the ranks and then, once you’re in charge of the bad guys, you can turn the place around. Use your power and position for good. Be Spiderman. With great power comes great responsibility, great deeds, great tolerance for platitudes… just don’t sweat it right now. What you need to do is, you need to cool down, clean up, regroup and reorient, and get in a position where you can at least be clear about what you’ve got.

But I’ve got this urge, I thought back. I had this urge to tell them everything, the Human-Game algorithms, what Koh had said, the scoop on the real doomster, everything. Don’t, my other side said. That’s the meds talking. Just keep the key stuff to yourself. Even if they know you’re holding out on them about something, what can they do? Dose you with amobarbital and try to worm it out of you while you babble? No, I don’t think they’ll do that. Not with Marena around. Not with Taro around, probably, for that matter. Even if M and T both know I’m… no, they still won’t want to go Guantanamo on me that fast. They’ll stay close by, work soft on me for a few days, and then… well, and then, if you really hold out, at some point they’ll give Lindsay’s goons a go at you. But for the time being, just play along like every other nonloser does. Right? And then in a few days, if things get flaky, you can break away if you have to. Go underground if you have to. Do whatever you have to. Stay one step ahead of them. Just like the granola package says, never surrender. Awaken your Giant Within. Be Tony Robbins. Right? Right. Okay, here goes.

I sat still. I didn’t say anything. The video had lasted two minutes and twenty seconds. Now it was two minutes after that, and I was so tranqued up, so filled with equanimity, that if it had turned out I was in the body of a baboon, I’d have just lain back in my cage and told Marena, “Hey, be a doll and toss me a banana.”

“Jed? We still need to talk a bit about the Game,” a Midwestern-sounding male voice said. I rolled my giant stone head to the right to look at him. Yeah, that guy, I thought. Finally, I remembered his name: Laurence Boyle. He, too, was in a powder-blue lab coat. Hmm, what kind of blue powder was that, originally? I wondered. Blueberry powder? Bluebird powder? Damn, I was as high as a radiosonde balloon. Focus.

“Mr. DeLanda?” he asked. “I’m sorry to seem uncaring here, but we also still need to do some business.”

“Right,” I started to say. “Business is…” I managed not to finish the thought.

“Larry, I don’t think this is the best time,” Marena said. She sounded real. I mean, like she was really feeling it. Had they rehearsed this? Was she just being Good Cop?

Whatever.

“I understand,” Boyle said, “but let’s just get a few things out of the way.”

“Listen-”

“Also, Elder Lindsay wants to congratulate you.” I couldn’t tell whether the you was singular or plural. “He’s standing by the conference-”

“Larry, no, we have to give him a break. Seriously. He’s not in any condition to talk about this right now.” Yeah, why the rush? I wondered. If they caught the doomster already, what was the problem? All they wanted out of the Game was a whole lot of bucks for the Warren Group. To be followed, inevitably, by world domination and a new millennium of corporate totalitarian soft dystopia. A whole Stanislaw Lem thing. But without the humor. But surely that can wait a day or two. Right?

“Miss, Ms. Park,” Boyle said, “ as we did in the rehearsals, we do need to continue the debriefing.”

“I don’t think I’m conditioned, uh, any condition, in any…” I said.

“Let’s meet again in twenty-four hours,” Marena said. “Doctor? What do you think?”

Lisuarte started to say something but Boyle cut her off. “Marena, we’re all efforting to make this as nonconfrontive as possible, but there-”

“Stop it!” Marena said. “He’s just had, he’s having, a huge fucking shock, I mean, absolute trauma, and he’s handling it-I mean, how would you guys handle it? He’s lost months, and the two transfers, we don’t know what that’s like, I mean, come on, even on top of the Tony Sic thing, he’s had an experience like, you know, and he’s got a lot of meds on board. I absoshittinglutely in sist. I insist.”

“I have to agree with that,” Dr. Lisuarte said. “He’s close to dozing off.”

“I agree with Marena,” Taro’s reassuringly precise voice said.

“Anyway, nobody’s going anywhere,” Marena said. “We can start up again in twenty-four hours. I think that’s fair.”

Laurence gave in. I had an impression of people signing off on the decision and making plans to call each other in twelve hours. Dr. Lisuarte’s nurse, who looked familiar but I guess didn’t have a name, wheeled over a cantilevered table and set down a big Let’s Fuck with Jed Kit, a compartmentalized tray full of pills and elixirs and electuaries and a large-bore Tuohy needle that looked as blunt and clumsy as a left-handed safety pin. Going to vax me into a staring askeletonite with Williams syndrome. Raggedy Jeddy. My earth-sized head floated upward in the nurse’s hands, and as Dr. Lisuarte started to de-’trode it, icy rainstorms of solvent broke out across the coast of its northern continent. I dozed.

We convoyed to Marena’s house. It was in a gated community in an expensive suburb of Orlando that, two months after the Disney World Horror, had been tested and cleared for radiation and cleared as safe. When I walked into Marena’s living room, I noticed, through a window, a guard standing outside, leaning against Marena’s Jaguar. With the other goon guy, who I think was named Hernan, in the vestibule, and Google skulking around somewhere, that made three. I was beginning to wonder whether they were keeping others out or us in. I staggered into the bathroom because I thought I remembered there was a steam room in there, but before I could turn it on I fell asleep in the dry sarcophagal tub.