“Look,” I say. “Are we doing this?”
“I guess so,” he says.
He raises his left hand. I raise my right. We clench our fists and say the words together.
“One…”
“Two…”
“Three…”
“Shoot.”
I’m planning to go with Rock, right up until we shoot. But then I remember that he’s me. He’s probably thinking the same thing. So it’s Paper, right? But what if he’s thinking that too? He could be figuring I’ll go with Paper and shooting Scissors. So that brings me back to Rock, which is good because by the time I work my way through all of that it’s too late and my fist is still clenched.
I look down.
His hand is held out flat.
“Sorry, brother,” he says.
Yeah, sorry.
Thanks for that, asshole.
004
KNEELING THERE ON the decking, my face six inches from the disassembler field interface, looking at the prospect of being converted into slurry for the hungry colonists of Niflheim, I find myself once again contemplating the question of whether I made the right call when I pressed my thumb down onto that reader pad back in Gwen Johansen’s office nine years ago.
Even now, though, I have to say—yeah, I did. No question about it, really.
I didn’t go home after I left Gwen’s office. I would’ve liked to, because I was hungry and tired and could’ve used a shower. I couldn’t, though, for the same reason that I couldn’t say no to Gwen’s oh-so-tempting offer of half-assed immortality. I’d gotten onto Darius Blank’s shit list, you see—and as far as I could tell, I didn’t have any reasonable way to get back off of it.
The root of this particular problem, like the root of pretty much all of my problems, now that I think of it, was Berto.
Berto was the only person on the Drakkar that I’d known before I gave Gwen my DNA and signed my life away. We met in school, where he was tall, smart, athletic, and weirdly good-looking considering how he turned out, and I was … well, I was pretty much what I am now, only smaller. We bonded over our common love of the flight simulator, which he mastered in about an hour and which I was still crashing when we graduated, and our hatred of the school administrators, who hated me right back for obsessing about history when I could have been studying something useful, but despite all our best efforts loved Berto like the son they’d never had. In form ten, Berto’s calculus instructor told him he should reconsider spending so much time with me if he wanted to reach his full potential.
I think Berto took that as just another challenge.
The thing you have to understand about Berto is that he was one of those obnoxious kids who was prodigy-level good at nearly everything he ever tried. When we were fifteen, his mom bought him a pog-ball racket. He didn’t take lessons. He didn’t join a recreational league. He spent a couple of months banging balls off of the wall of the admin building after classes to figure out how it worked, did one season on the school team, then turned around and entered a pro-am tournament. Nobody had any idea who he was when he showed up for his first match. He won that one going away, and by the end of the week he’d finished second in his age bracket. The next year, he won the amateur division. The summer after we graduated, he started playing for money. By the time he dropped the game to start serious flight training two years later, he was the tenth-ranked player on the planet.
All of which would have been apropos of nothing, except that nine years after that, I was living in an extremely unfashionable apartment in an extremely unfashionable part of Kiruna, and Berto had been selected for the crew of the Drakkar. We were sitting in a café called Shaky Joe’s, sipping tea and killing time while we waited for a ball game to start on the viewscreen over the bar, when he mentioned that he was considering coming out of retirement for one last run at the spring pro-am before disappearing into the unknown forever.
“Think about it,” he said. “If I take that trophy after all this time, I’ll be a legend. They’ll still be talking about me a hundred years from now.”
I opened my mouth to tell him that he’d be a legend, all right, but it wouldn’t be because he’d won a global tournament and then ridden off into the sunset. It would be because he thought he could do that after being out of the game for nine years, and then he’d lost his first match to some eighteen-year-old by a hundred points.
I didn’t say that, though. I didn’t because it suddenly occurred to me that while I knew that for the past nine years he’d been spending nearly every minute that he wasn’t in the air or in orbit hanging around with me, most of the people in Kiruna did not. They still remembered twenty-year-old Berto Gomez beating seasoned pros and hardly seeming to break a sweat doing it. They remembered him doing things with a racket that people hadn’t realized could be done up until then, and they remembered commentators calling him the most naturally talented player they’d ever seen. They didn’t have any idea that he basically hadn’t touched a racket in the past nine years.
“Yeah,” I said. “Do it, man. You’ll be a freaking legend.”
So, he did. He registered for the tournament, and one of the news feeds picked up the story and did an interview with him that they paired with footage from his last tournament, which he’d won without dropping a single game.
Meanwhile, I scraped up every credit I had, and a bunch that I didn’t, and I placed a bet on Berto to lose his first match.
I don’t have a great defense for this decision, except to say that the market for amateur historians in Kiruna wasn’t great, I had no real prospects for any kind of gainful employment, and the idea of living out the rest of my life on a basic subsidy was so depressing that I couldn’t contemplate it.
Was it worse than the prospect of being dissolved headfirst? Maybe not, but I wasn’t thinking along those lines yet.
You can probably see where this is going.
By the time Berto won the goddamned tournament, I was so far underwater from doubling down and doubling down again that even if I’d somehow found an actual paying job somewhere, it would have taken me half a lifetime to get back to the surface.
The person I was underwater to, specifically, was Darius Blank.
Vids are full of stories about guys who fall behind on their gambling debts and get murdered for it, but that’s not actually how it usually works. After all, while it may be hard to collect a debt from a live guy, it’s indisputably even harder to collect from a dead one—and in the end, collecting the debt is all somebody like Darius Blank really cares about. I wasn’t worried about him killing me. I guess I had some vague idea that he’d garnish my subsidy, and maybe make me work as his valet or something. It would be unpleasant, but I’d survive.