We went back and forth that way for a while, just like old times, each always knowing where the other’s shot would go. I felt my body relax into the rhythms of the court, and I enjoyed it for a few minutes. I could almost forget why I was there, all that had happened before. Almost.
The sun was going down when Jim spoke.
“Did they pay you in diamonds, too, Matt?”
“Yeah. When did you figure it?”
“The moment I got away. Who else could they call? It’s a good thing for you they didn’t know enough to realize you would have done it for free.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “You know more about this whole mess than I do.”
He tossed me the ball and stared at me.
“You don’t know what this is all about, do you?”
I walked over to the gym bag, put the ball inside, and grabbed a towel. As I dried my face, I said, “Not really. I know it’s about putting you back in jail. That’s enough for me.”
He laughed. “That’s amazing. Come on; I’ll show you what your new friends were up to.”
I dropped the towel into the bag and pulled out the shotgun. “Hold up, Jim.”
He turned and looked first at the gun, then at me.
“You couldn’t kill me before. You had to rely on the cops to take me where someone else could kill me.” He shook his head, then turned around again and started walking. “Bring your toy and come see just what you’re rescuing.”
I kept the shotgun pointed at him and followed him into the building.
The walls of the place were piled high with old sports and recreation equipment: disassembled trampolines, tumbling mats, broken-down pool tables and ping-pong tables, boxes and boxes and boxes of who knows what. Jim had cleared a sizable section of the concrete floor and set up some old pool tables as work surfaces. The computers and microscope, a few racks of labeled vials, and some odd gear I did not recognize sat on three of the tables. On the fourth was a man who looked like a derelict on a three-day binge and who smelled worse, his arms and legs spread and bound by rope to the legs of the pool table. When I got closer I could see the blood dried around his eye sockets, ears, and mouth.
“Dead?” I said.
“Yeah,” Jim answered. “I thought I had this thing figured out, but my first cut at it was too much for the body. The head bleeds out as soon as the machines start working.”
“Your first cut at what?”
“Ah,” Jim laughed, “that is what our new blue friends are so eager to cover up, isn’t it? What they have built is really quite remarkable. A lot of people must have died before they got it right. You see, their nano-machines infiltrate the brain and bond to all the sensory connections and the key emotion centers. The machines record what you see and how you feel, then transmit it in real time in compressed form to a receiver like this one—” he pointed to the piece of equipment I had not recognized “—which decodes it into a signal they can interpret and use.” He patted the box. “I confess I don’t have their encoding standard completely worked out yet, but I’ll get it.”
“What’s the point of all this, Jim?”
He laughed again. “Don’t you see? We’re the product here, Matt. Pump these nano-machines into one of us, and we become a walking show for the amusement of the aliens and their customers. Set up receivers around the planet, fill us all with the nano-machines, and they’ve got seven billion channels that are always on!” He paced in front of the equipment, visibly excited by the pure tech aspects of it, all implications irrelevant in the face of the technical challenge.
“So why did they need you? If they had this all figured out, why not just release the machines?”
“Because though the nano-machines may work, the signal they produce is trash. Two-thirds of the manufactured goods on this planet contain a processor and a transmitter, and all those processors are talking all the time. Our atmosphere is positively drenched with transmissions. Wherever they tested must have had way fewer transmissions or transmissions at different frequencies, because when they tried out the prototype here the broadcasts from the nano-machines were garbled—total garbage.”