Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  There was a raplet on the door. Two people breezed in. One was a stocky Southeast Asian girl with glasses whom Taro introduced as Ashley Thieu, and the other, a demi-Maya-looking guy, was Tony Sic. We said hello in English and then Sic said in Yukateko that he understood I was from Alta Verapaz. I said yes. He had a really tight crew cut but he didn’t seem like an army type. He said he’d just come from playing soccer. He was wearing shorts and old Diadora RTX 18s, which, if I remembered right, was a pretty serious professional shoe, and you could smell his fresh manly sweat. I breathed through my mouth.

  “Is that your green car out there?” he asked in English.

  “ Yes,” I said.

  “Nice.”

  “Thanks. It’s not green in terms of mileage, though.”

  “My older brother had one of those, in Mérida. Except it was composed out of many wrecked ones, like the Frankenstein.”

  I told him how I’d worked at the museum in Mérida for two months. He asked if I meant the one on Calle 48 and I said no, it’s on 58, and he smiled.

  We went out through another door into a bare hallway. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all bare DuraStone block, which was supposed to make it hard to hide any wires or transmitters that might let you fake a test. Sic opened a solid steel door and went alone into his room. They put me in one four doors down. There was nothing in the concrete room except a bare fluorescent bulb in the ceiling, an old LCD monitor, an uncomfy chair, a battery-operated, transmitter-free video camera, an EEG recorder, and a Formica task surface with a touch-screen board already set up.

  Damn, I thought, they’re taking this seriously. They must be having some kind of problem. And they need to call in the expert. Right? Right.

  Ashley glued the EEG ’trodes to my head—she had some trouble with all the hair—and said, “Okay, we’re going to leave you.” She meant “leave you in here all alone.” I’m not claustrophobic, I was going to say, but instead I just mumbled as usual. Sic and I were going to play against the exact same data at the same time, and Taro was going to run the exam and watch us both on video. Otherwise there was no connection between the two rooms, so there was no chance one of us could influence the other. Sic and I weren’t exactly playing against each other, but just racing, both treating Taro as an ordinary client and playing, as usual, on his behalf against an absent god.

  I got out my tobacco, rubbed it in, and rooted myself. In his own isolation room Sic did the same.

  “Are we all ready?” Taro asked over the speaker. His voice had been converted to a synthesized one so that he couldn’t give us any information through vocal clues. Sic must have said yes. I said yes. So, I thought, I’ll just blow away this character on the first round. No sweat.

  The test-case video came up on the screen.

  [5]

  It was a live streaming feed taken from a security camera placed above a square or plaza in what was evidently an Islamic or largely Islamic country. It was already night there, but the place was lit with harsh blue light, I guessed from military searchlights. A big crowd of men in dirty white tunics filled the lower half of the screen. Blood from self-inflicted head cuts ran down their necks in lines, like black enamel. In the middle there was a high chain-link fence with ten or fifteen soldiers standing behind it. The soldiers had mustaches, khakis, and what looked like SA-120s, but I couldn’t see any insignia. They had that stiff look of trying not to look nervous. Then behind the soldiers there was what looked like a government building, maybe an embassy, white with white pilasters and a pair of dark Victorian-looking wood doors. There were signs on it, but they were too blurry to read. The sound was off and blue rectangles flickered over the bottom and top right corners of the screen, blocking out whatever crawls the news service had put in. And although a few people in the crowd were holding up homemade signs, either they were turned the other way or the writing was being pixelated out. Damn, I should have done my homework, I thought. Somebody who knew a little more about Islamic-world men’s fashion and facial-hair styles could probably key this right down—still, okay, just think, where the hell is it? Well, it looks like there’s no sunlight left there at all and assuming we’re in real time, which I bet, that makes it probably too late to be the Middle East, since it’s still daylight all the way to longitude seventy degrees, so I’m guessing we’re looking at northern India. In fact, I’d bet it’s in or near Bangladesh, since that’s the hot spot right now. Okay. And their heads are bashed because … well, so there’s no Islamic holiday, no Hindu holiday that I know of … so they’re protesting something specific.

  Let’s see, I’m also guessing this isn’t one of the big cities … so say this is the town hall, not an embassy. And the fierce Muslim hordes want—what do they want? They don’t just want to trash the place … no, pues, they want to be let into the building. Right? Maybe because they’re afraid that when the war starts the Hindu majority is going to lynch them.

  Something like that. Not that any of this gave me a whole lot of insight into what they were going to do.

  We watched, memorizing the scene. One minute later the screen went blank.

  “All right,” the voice with Taro’s words said. “We would like each of you to answer three questions. One: Will the mob climb the fence and attack the structure? Two: If this will happen, when? And three: If this happens, will they be successful and take the building? You each have thirty minutes. Do either of you have any questions?”

  Uh, yeah, I thought, is a brown Crayola the same as a number-2 pencil, or—

  “All right, no questions,” he said. “Please begin.” I scattered my virtual seeds over the board. They bounced a little high, but it wouldn’t really matter. The point was that there was randomness in the subject of the query, that is, the event in Asia, and there was also randomness on the board. Of course, Taro’s team would also be running conventional software on the video and whatever other data they could get from the site. They’d use the same crowd-pattern catastrophe-modeling programs the DHS uses for riot response, and also anything the LEON project had cooked up. Still, I could do better. Right? I set my running stone in the center bin.

  Basically, the object of the Sacrifice Game is to catch the runner. If you’re playing a one-runner game, that means that one person only gets one piece, and his opponent gets many. This strikes some people as odd, even though there’s a whole class of board games that are still played in the twenty-first century that are very similar. Some of the most popular ones are called Hare and Hounds, or Goat and Wolves, or that sort of thing. They’re a bigger deal in Asia. Anyway, they’re all classified as highly asymmetric games. And in all of them one person plays with a few fast or powerful pieces and the other plays with a whole lot of slower or weaker pursuers. If you’re the runner—or the prey, or the quarry, or however you’d translate it—your object is to get away from the hunters, or “capturers.” In Hare and Hounds, which is played on a checkers grid, this can mean just getting to the other side of the board. In the Sacrifice Game you begin on the starting date, at the center of the board, and to win you need to get to one of the four escape squares, which are at the corners. But doing that isn’t easy, not just because of all the hunters, but because your movements are partly controlled by a randomizer. Also, in the Game, the runner leaves a record of where it’s been. Every time it rests on a square, or rather a point, you leave a stone there to mark the spot. That trail is like real history, as opposed to the rest of the board, which is like an oceanic maze of possibility. Each time you move, it marks a date. So in a way the board is like one of those perpetual calendars they used to have with the four rings and all the pegs, like there were seven pegs for each day of the week and thirty-one pegs for the days of the month and whatever. So each time you move in space, you’re also leaving a trail in represented time. And if you can read along that trail and extrapolate it and guess the next move, you’re thinking into the future.

  Any great game creates its own sort of trancelike state in serious players, and the Sacrifice Game has a particular flavor to it that’s hard to
describe. Maybe when you were little you played Parcheesi, or one of its slightly streamlined proprietary versions like Sorry! or Aggravation. And maybe you remember how exciting it was, shaking the dice and moving the little pegs or marbles out of your home base and into the circuit, how it felt finally bouncing your last man toward home just a few spaces ahead of your opponent, and how there was nothing in the world more frustrating than getting knocked back to base just when you were coming to the end of your long odyssey, and how the only thing that made that bearable was that it paled next to the pleasure of doing the same thing to someone else. And there was no question of stopping the Game or even of leaving the room for a moment. The Game was the essential reality. And even though Parcheesi, the way it’s played in the West, is a kid’s game, it’s still the core of a huge number of adult games, for instance backgammon. And of course Monopoly, which is still the most popular branded board game in the world, is a form of Parcheesi. Anyway, there’s a basic excitement in those constructions that’s hard to pin down and harder to resist.

  I think what happens is that the Game brings you right up against the rush of chaos. You’re surfing the wave of probability itself, where the two sides of the universe, the determined and the random, crash together and crest, but in this little world it’s almost manageable, you’ve just got the two dice making the different waves, the basic roll-frequency wave with the peak at seven, and then the hit-odds wave with a cliff at two and a peak at twelve. Even to someone who doesn’t know a thing about the math, it’s a hypnotic motion, like you felt when you were little and you stared at an old barber pole, wondering where the stripes went when they left the cylinder, or, if you’re of a certain age, the pulsing label on a Vertigo LP.

  Taro’s voice came over the speaker again.

  “Time,” he said.

  I looked at the board. My runner was two points from the northwest corner. It didn’t look good for him. That is, in the short run. There was something farther out, a sense that the whole scene was hurrying toward a deadline, but I just couldn’t fix on it. Damn.

  “The protesters are going to break through the fence roughly two and a half hours from now,” I said. “They will try to take the building but they won’t succeed. A lot of them, I’ll say more than fifty, are going to get killed or seriously wounded.”

  Taro said all right. I unplugged my head before Ashley could get in and walked out into the conference area.

  The protest march was on the wall screen, this time with the sound on, and they were all watching it. It turned out that it was going on in some town north of Calcutta, and the building was an office of the Assam Rifles, that is, the northeastern counterinsurgency force, and the crowd of mohajirs, that is, Muslim refugees, was actually trying to rescue some leader of theirs who was being held inside. I wasn’t crazy about missing that angle. But there were, supposedly, Hindu mobs threatening them somewhere offscreen.

  Sic came in with Taro. They sat at the table. It was an awkward moment.

  “Well, what did you come up with?” Sic asked me.

  I said what I thought. He said he’d guessed that they were going to rush the building in less than half an hour and that they were going to take it successfully. I said “Mmmm” with as much professional friendliness as I could bring to the line.

  Taro said that the conventional professional assessments from both the NSA observer and his own software both indicated that the demonstrators would disperse before there were any casualties. We all nodded. Ashley Thieu got up and brought back a tray with hot chocolate, Mint Milanos, and a selection of cheap, faggy herbal teas. On the screen the only major change so far was that somebody had climbed up on something and was speechifying in Urdu. We all sat around like a bunch of undergraduates watching election results. In fact it felt specifically like the presidential election of 2000, when it just didn’t ever end and every time you wanted to go and crash, another sprig of hope sprouted up, and you just kept watching and biting your nails and hoping and hoping even though somehow you knew in your heart that it was going to end in a disaster.

  Twenty minutes later, one of the men climbed the fence. A guard fired his carbine into the air with an impotent-sounding pop. Two seconds later the fence was covered with people and there were a few more pops. Someone fell off the fence, but you couldn’t tell whether he’d been shot or just slipped. It wasn’t easy to see what went on after that, since the fence covered two-thirds of the screen, but less than five minutes later, someone draped a homemade flag, with white Arabic writing on a black field, out of a second-floor window.

  They were in. I was screwed. Sic had got it right. I’d messed up. I couldn’t even look at Taro. I was about to leave and see if I could throw up, but nobody else seemed to be moving. I picked at a coral burn on my left index finger. It wasn’t healing. Goddamn Millepora alcicornis. I should just rip those shits out of the tank and let them suffocate. I said I was going outside to get a little hot air.

  “Let’s keep watching,” Sic said. “It’s not over yet.”

  I said I would and linked my phone to the room system. It took me a minute to find the elevator again, and by the time I got outside I was ultraventilating.

  The steambathish air revived me a little. How do people stand all that air-conditioning? I’d understand it if they were all from Finland or wherever, but they’re not. Sic’s a tropical person and he seemed fine.

  Damn. Sic. Bastard.

  Well, what do I do now? I was in the middle of about a square mile of would-be-tasteful cheap bricky campus architecture with lots of handicapped access and indigenous shrubs. I sat on a brick thing. The sky had smogged up to a gray-green greasy color, about Web-Safe #6699CC, and it gave the sprawlscape a sinister look, as though it had been translated into German. Bleakness, I thought. Bleak. Bleak. I couldn’t resist peeking at my phone. It looked like it had gotten tuned to a dead channel, but when I looked a little closer at the screen I could tell that the field of pinkish gray was a cloud of dust. People were yelling, and the commentator said he didn’t know what was going on. I watched. After a while some of the dust blew away, and I could just see that a lot of the building wasn’t there anymore. The commentator’s voice was saying that it “appeared” the building had been blown up. He didn’t say who’d done it, but even I—and I don’t know a whole lot about explosives—even I could tell that the blast was too big for one of the men to have carried the explosive in. Somebody inside the police station must have set the charge before the mob broke through and then detonated it when he thought it would hurt them the most.

  So what if I was off on the timing, I thought. Sic was way further off than that. Successful indeed. Hah! Gotcha, Sicko. I am de KING de la RING! I’m …

  Cool it, Jed. Pisado. People are dying out there. Now, if you squinted at the rubble, you could see what had to be two curled-up bodies at the bottom of the screen. They looked sculpted out of the same gray plasticine as everything else. Damn, I’m a clod. Hell. I hate it when you come up against your own character and find yourself, as usual, wanting. You wish you were more upset because that would make you a good person. Although maybe just wishing you were more upset is almost as good as actually being more upset.

  Isn’t it?

  [6]

  About two hours later—well, okay, at exactly 4:32:29 p.M., according to the windshield—I pulled up in front of the Warren Entertainment offices, on the west side of Lake Tohopekaliga, just south of Orlando. My big win against Sic had gotten me an interview with Marena Park, who was Taro’s boss and also the head of their Interactive Division. I’d Googled her on the drive over and it turned out she was new at Warren. She’d been the creative director of Disney’s Game World complex at Epcot until two years ago. Then Warren had hired her away to work on Neo-Teo, which was pretty much my favorite first-person shooter. Most hard-core Go people or poker people or whatever won’t even call computer games like that “games,” and really, strictly speaking, they’re not so much games as simulations, but I like some of them anyway for blowing off my toxic steam. Neo-Teo
was basically a dumbed-down consumer version of Maya mythology, where you’d sneak through pseudo-Puuc-style palaces grabbing trinkets of power and gutting jaguar demons with a spear. So there were a lot of inaccuracies and a cheesiness that drove me crazy at first, but there was something fiendishly addictive about it, and now if I wasn’t totally dependent I was definitely a user. And the look of it, which Ms. Park had designed, was actually pretty great. She’d definitely gotten those smoky coils and hook-and-barb lines like on the Classic Maya pots. Then she’d won an Oscar for production design on the movie version. Which all made one wonder, again, what someone like her was doing in charge of Taro’s project. She wasn’t a scientist. What was the connection? Except maybe I guess now all business is show business.

  There was a big sort of studio gate and I had to tell the security-hub thugs who I was. From the way they checked I got the feeling Ms. Park was a pretty big deal. The guard gave me a live badge and I clipped it onto my right wrist. I drove in and parked where he’d said. The complex was a menacingly tasteful scattering of low Dryvited buildings in a treesy office park with a giant green sculpture of three linked rings reflecting in a big reniform pond. The main building was six stories, higher than the others. Glass veils parted and I walked into heavily processed air. The big lobby had an overhanging clerestory of conference and exercise rooms and a giant potted Douglas fir with spherical video-display ornaments playing happy faces of Children of Many Lands. A woman greeter with hair greeted me by mispronounced name and steered me in around a sort of atrium that had a Healthy Gourmet Café and a big stone pizza hearth. A cruft of Generation Yuzz techies stroked around us, some on Segways and some on what I guessed were Sleekers.