Damien Broderick - K-Machines (Players in the Contest of Worlds)

"Name and date of birth."

"August Se" I began.

"Name first." The overweight clerk was testy and trigger happy. She'd been sitting all summer morning on a sweating plastic seat at this counter, had probably munched a brown-bag lunch high in sugar out back in some cramped room filled with mops or dusty filing cabinets crammed with yellowing records that nobody ever looked at because it was all in the database, and now her blood sugar was plummeting perilously.

"My name," I said patiently, "is August. My birthday is"

"Surname or given name? I haven't got all day."

Actually she did have all day. What else was she going to do except punch in this information that was already contained in the documents I'd handed her? She had pushed them to one side, naturally, without a glance. I could have strung this game out for a while, for the amusement value. But when I turned my head a fraction, I saw the line of bored and irritated students snaking away behind me. I'd been creeping forward in the same line myself, developing much the same mood, for about half an hour, after two hours first thing in the morning in another interview with the police concerning the disappearance of Great-aunt Tansy and the death of her friend Mrs. Sadie Abbott in the freak accidental destruction of our Northcote house. They wanted to know where I was living now, and my current phone number, as did the insurance assessor, and I could hardly tell them that I was sleeping in a different universe where the phone company's service didn't yet extend. My temper was frayed.

"Listen to me carefully," I said. "My name is August Seebeck. I was born"

"Zayback with a zed?"

"You spell my surname s-e-e-b-e-c-k. It's Estonian."

"Kid, I don't give a rat's ass if it's Lower Slobovian. D.O.B.?"

"My date of birth," I said automatically, as you do, "is also August, the" I broke off, shook my head in confusion. What? Wait a minute. I flipped out last year's laminated student ID card. Back then I hadn't known I was a Player in the Contest of Worlds. It showed a slightly grim picture of me beetling my brows at the digital camera, above my name, spelled correctly for a change. The date embossed on the background security hologram was February 12. What? Seamlessly, then, as these things do and the rules change, the fact retrofitted itself into my memory. Hot high-summer Southern Hemisphere birthday parties, splashing in the plastic pool, laughing a lot as Aunt Tansy looked on from the shade of the veranda, shoving and hugging Dugald O'Brien the golden Lab who was...

Who was my father Dramen, actually, under a kind of disguise, but weeks earlier that ludicrous and impossible truth had worked its way neatly into remembrance past with no further bobbles or boggles, however dismaying it seemed. I pushed the card back in my pocket, a bit shaken by a different impossible thought. I'd started to tell her I was born in August, which was no part of any calendar I'd ever heard of until this moment when it tumbled out my mouth. It was ridiculous, like imagining a month called "Steve" or "Bruce." There were eleven months in the year, always had been. Ask anyone. Now there were twelve. Shit, they'd squeezed in an entirely new month. An extra month, named after me. I shook my head, trying not to grin. Up came more facts, unbidden. On February 12, 1809, Charles Darwin had been born in this Earth, and a few thousand kilometers away, in Kentucky, so had Abraham Lincoln.

You know, Lune had said something along those lines. And I hadn't understood her. Who would? It was insane. More symmetrical that way, she'd said. Revise the Seebeck family rhyme, not to mention... what, the seasons? Or had she said the calendar? And something more, something scary as shit, my unconscious told me, scuttling away from it, eyes closed. Six doughty womenbut I only had five sisters. I slammed the door shut on that before it got a foot in. All this in a long moment, with the clerk tapping her toe impatiently.

Okay, anyway, so that meantgiven the precession of the equinoxes, the fact that the seasons were reversed here in Australia, so local February was the new astrological Augustthat I was now an Aquarius, perhaps the paradigmatic Aquarian, and so

"Date. Of. Birth."

"Twelfth of February," I told the clerk, and added the late-twentieth-century birth year embossed on the ID card. Of course, who could possibly know if that year meant anything, truly had anything to do with my birth? As far as I could tell, I might indeed be twenty-something years old, which is how I looked and felt, or half a million. Half a trillion, maybe, long before this world's Sun had coalesced out of frigid interstellar gas, long, long before the planet under my feet accreted from cosmic leftovers and started spinning days solar and sidereal. I felt a jolt in my gloved right hand, shook my head, waited for my pulse to come back under control.

She was looking indignantly at the top sheet I'd passed her. "This says you've completed three years of your medical degree and now you want to change your major."

"I do."

"Damn it, you only have one more semester before you graduate as a Bachelor of Medicine. Six months. What's wrong with you kids today?"

"I don't seem to have the patience and human kindness to be a clerk, let alone a medico."

The clerk narrowed her eyes. Perhaps she detected some tincture of irony, or even of sarcasm. I gazed back blithely. She shook her head, clicked keys, peered at the flat screen.

"The philosophy courses you have listed here are all filled, you'll have to go back to the department and choose a different schedule. Next."

I stayed put. "Dr. Blackford has confirmed my standing with his graduate program. I'll be taking an accelerated bridging semester. His signature is on the second form."

"Philosophy! What sort of job do you think you're going to get withAll right, that's in order." She scribbled an initial, clicked more keys, stamped a form, passed it back to me. "Take this to room 102 and get two photographs. They'll prepare a card for you, Mr. Zay-back. And don't come back moaning to me when you're flipping burgers and watching all the young doctors cruise by in SUVs. Next."

I nodded to her with a certain sudden access of respect, taking my forms. Maybe she did care about her faceless, ever-changing temporary charges. Maybe her own heart's desire had been medical school, but she simply hadn't made the cut, hadn't scored highly enough on rigid tests designed, apparently, by nerd-clever Aspergers. Poor woman. Ah well, there were trillions more like her, breaking their hearts in menial jobs, grousing behind stained counters and eating themselves sick on a billion worlds, a googolplex of worlds maybe, and all of them, when it came down to it, no more significant than scene-setting in the greater scheme of things. In the Contest.

Whatever that was.

Room 102 and its jaded photographer could wait. I went out into the blazing cloudless summer sun, looking for Lune.

She leaned against the bole of a tree in the courtyard, the milk coffee perfection of her skin freckled by a thousand shady leaves. Lune seemed utterly relaxed, arms loose, hands clasped easily in front of her. Another woman stood half in the sunlight, eyes squinted against brightness, speaking with apparent urgency. I loped across the grass, glare from the Edward Kelly Law Library windows spearing my eyes.

"Ah, the wonderboy." The woman seemed to be in her mid-thirties, mature but attractive, dressed for a day of the office, probably behind a large polished executive desk.

Lune lifted her right hand with a kind of carefree grace, took my left, aware of my sensitivity or, more exactly, residual anxiety about my own gloved right hand. I squeezed her fingers. "More bureaucratic bullshit, and miles to go before I sleep," I told her. To the woman I said: "Hello, I'm August Seebeck."