The Immortality Game

He tried to say it aloud—I am Dr. Artyom Vladimirovich Grachev—but his mouth wouldn’t work. Through the whirlwind of pain, he narrowed his concentration to his mouth alone. It felt all wrong. Besides the pain in his gums, his teeth, his tongue, and any other part of himself that he turned his attention to, it all felt wrong. His jaw felt enormous. He tongue was so thick it filled his cavernous mouth, making it difficult to breathe. His teeth felt jumbled and clenched together in a manner completely unfamiliar to Tyoma.

The repetition of his name suddenly reminded him of another mantra he felt he had recently been repeating—When you wake, it may be in a new body. Thinking this brought back more memories. He was a scientist. The mantra was something he practiced each time he lay down for a mind recording. Could it be…?

No. It’s not possible. This body doesn’t feel like mine at all, even at a younger age. And I’d be in a crèche with lots of tubes sticking out of me. Tyoma tried to open his eyes, but they felt as if they had been welded shut. He focused on his right hand, tried to open and shut it, and found that it too felt all wrong. His hands had always been slender and agile, while this hand felt as meaty and thick as his alien tongue.

“Urgh.” The sound came from his mouth as he breathed out, yet the rumble was much too deep to be his own voice. What the hell has happened to me?

It struck him that the pain had lessened, if only a little. The worst was his head, where it felt as if someone were bludgeoning him with a mallet. He would never say that the pain was bearable, yet it was slowly receding.

Images flashed through his mind of chimps in the lab where they conducted the tests. When they writhed in their cages, was this what they were going through? He’d always known the testing had to be painful, though of course it was necessary if science were to advance, but was it truly this horrific?

There were faint sounds, voices, somewhere nearby but he couldn’t concentrate enough on them to understand anything.

He tried his eyes again, and this time with great effort he managed to open them. Painful light made him squeeze them shut again. He spent what felt like hours but was probably only minutes blinking shallowly to allow his eyes to adjust to the light. When he could keep his eyes open at last, everything was blurry. He saw colors and vague shapes, but he had no idea what he was seeing.

The pain had receded further, except for the pounding headache. He tried to lift an arm, felt it twitch and jerk several times before he managed to bring it up and drop the hand down onto his face. Not his hand. The hand. Because this hand felt about twice the size of his own. The process of lifting the arm taught him another lesson about this body. Despite the weakness he felt through the waves of pain, this body was also very strong. Many times stronger than he had ever been during his life.

With great effort, Tyoma lifted the hand from his face and stared at it. The hand was absolutely not his. It was the hand of a giant, calloused and hard where his own hands had always been pale and soft.

The pain in most of his body—the body, he corrected himself—had subsided to a dull throb, though his headache continued to pound inside his skull. He dropped the hand back onto his face and rubbed the thick fingers hard into his forehead. This can’t be, he thought. Nearly every test they had ever run using the mind data cards had indicated that the layering of data and reconfiguration and reconstitution of the mind synapses could only succeed in a true clone. He couldn’t possibly have awoken in someone else’s body. The contradiction between the thousands of tests he had conducted over the years and what he was experiencing now was nearly as painful as the damned headache that was making it so difficult to order his thoughts. Nearly every test… The one time a test succeeded, the chimp had been one with severe mental issues.

Sit up, he told himself. His arms flopped outwards, each movement uncoordinated and jerky. Lack of muscle memory, Tyoma thought. That was something he had specifically programmed for, knowing that even in a cloned body the muscles would be different from the original body’s. Finally he got his hands positioned correctly and strained hard to shove himself up to a sitting position.

Somewhere behind him he heard a cry—a female cry— and then, “This is like a bad vid. You just won’t stay down, will you?”