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but I figured that I had no alternative, for the time being, but to play along. Even though it had to be a VE melodrama, I had to play my part as if it were real.
    What alternative was there? Even if the conviction that it was all a fraudulent game turned out to be wrong, it would make a convenient psychological defense against the horror of the truth. Even if I really were in the far future, it would be best to remain in denial a little longer. I had always been a highly skilled denier, and a devoted guerilla warrior against the excesses of truth. Why else would Damon Hart have hired me so frequently to do his dirty work?
    “Would you believe me if I told you that I’m an innocent man?” I said to the wonderful child. “The unfortunate victim of a miscarriage of justice.”
    “Given that your tone seems to indicate that you don’t believe it yourself,” she replied, “no.”
    “So why bring me back?” I asked, entering into the spirit of the game. “If I really have been in the freezer for a thousand years and more, why bring me back now ?”
    “It was a trial run,” she told me, brutally. “We were uncertain that we could revive individuals who had been in stasis for so long without their having suffered considerable side effects — not merely loss of memory but irredeemable deterioration of personality.”
    “My personality’s okay,” I was quick to assure her, although I was equally quick to doubt it. “Except for this sense I have of not quite being myself,” I added, after a pause for thought, perhaps a little too scrupulously. Then, after a further pause, I asked: “Why me?”
    “It seems you were one of only two long-term prisoners accepted into the Foundation’s care in times past who were put into SusAn within two hundred years of Adam Zimmerman,” she said. “When we interrogated our records you emerged as the second most obvious candidate for the trial. Perhaps I should say that, although we shall continue to investigate the extent of the mental side effects you have suffered, we are reasonably content with the way the trial has worked. We’ll need to form a better estimate of the extent of your loss of memory, but your coherency is reassuring. Your feeling of not being quite yourself may be a result of the IT we’ve installed. It would be helpful if you’d try to remember as much as you can. The records suggest that the loss of memory suffered by early revenants from SusAn was usually limited to a few days preceding their vitrification, and was often temporary.”
    “I’ll do my best,” I promised, knowing that I’d have to do it for my own sake. Even if this whole thing were an illusion, I’d need to recover all the memories I could recover as soon as possible. “Apart from the lost memories, you reckon I’m okay?”
    “So far as we can ascertain,” she said, judiciously. “We discovered some residual nanomachines bound to your bones and the glial cells of your brain whose intended function is mysterious, but they appear to be inactive. They’re probably vestigial — a side effect of the particular cryoprotective system used on your body. There’s no trace of similar contamination in the second trial subject, nor in Adam Zimmerman’s body.”
    I set aside the matter of the puzzling “contamination” for further contemplation at a future time. Assuming that this whole conversation must be a kind of test, there were easier points to be scored.
    “So you’re bringing Adam Zimmerman back,” I said, casually, in order to prove that my memory hadn’t been completely shot to bits. “Are you what’s become of the Ahasuerus Foundation? Has it taken you this long to conclude that you’re capable of fulfilling your mission statement?”
    “You know about the Ahasuerus Foundation,” Davida Berenike Columella observed, unnecessarily. It was an obvious prompt.
    “Damon Hart and I had some dealings with the Foundation,” I confirmed, obligingly. She obviously expected more