Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  The report also said that currently, Russian and Kazakh refiners produce about a hundred grams of polonium-210 per year, mainly for medical and antistatic applications. At least thirty times that amount had been released over Orlando, an amount that, on the commercial market, would cost over two and a half billion dollars. And that wasn’t even counting the larger amount of the (cheaper) 209 isotope that was released at the same time. Somebody over there had to have been producing a lot more polonium than anybody knew about. And even if they’d produced it cheaply, and even if it had been bartered for and not paid for in cash, or even if Dr. X was, say, a direct heir or successor of the original producer, a huge amount of wealth must have changed hands somewhere along the line.

  Of course, this was pretty much what we knew already, with just a little more detail. And of course the DHS and dozens of other U.S. and allied intelligence services were already following the same lead. But it didn’t mean it wasn’t the right thing for us to work on. We just had to do it better.

  And we would, I thought. The advantage we had—besides the Sacrifice Game—was that we were actually trying to find the real perp, which all those other agencies didn’t really care about. The only thing they actually took seriously was increasing their own funding. They needed to hire as many new people as possible, take as long as possible, and, most of all, spend as much money as possible. We were lean and efficient. Maybe Dr. X had moved some gold around, I thought. Unminted gold. I’d better go through all those mining companies again, I thought. Maybe something in Africa. I closed down the laptop—it insisted on checking out my iris print even to let me turn it off—and checked out CNN.

  News wasn’t good. In the U.S., unemployment had hit 25 percent. The administration had released an official statement that God was chastising us for our immorality and secularism. States like Texas and Kentucky had made silence mandatory in the morning and at noon during the president-led prayer sessions on the South Lawn of the White House, and today thirty million people had joined in by video. As of last week the army, navy, and marines had been restructured into a single service that would respond to a single command from the executive branch, and the air force and NASA were “soon to be folded into the new system.” About two hundred thousand members of the armed services had been discharged, and their positions were being outsourced to private contractors. Moody’s had downgraded U.S. Treasury bonds to a single A. Spot gold barreled through five thousand dollars an ounce. Yesterday, in Chester, Illinois, inmates had taken over the Menard Correctional Center, and instead of trying to negotiate, a SWAT team had lobbed in incendiary grenades and burned down the buildings with everyone inside them. So far the police’s decision had received a 90 percent approval rating on YouCount.gov. Dearborn, Michigan, was now under sharia law. On the international scene, more than two million refugees had now crossed from Bangladesh into India. Our old friends Guatemala and Belize were at it again, although I already knew that, because now, on most days, you could hear them shelling each other’s suspected troop positions along the border. Bioengineers at Zion-Tech, in Haifa, were claiming to have bred the spotless red heifer. And—and I realize it’s almost getting comical at this point, at least for those with hard hearts, like mine—Hurricane Twinkie was strengthening over Cuba.

  Of course, the good news for us with all this—the ill wind that was blowing us pretty good—was that with so much expletive-deleted going down, the Hippogriff incident might get lost in the shuffle. Laurence had said that the U.S. three-letter agencies—and of course the Belizean, Guatemalan, Mexican, and British Protectoral intelligence services—were working so many cases right now that they probably couldn’t spare more than a couple people to look at it. Especially when they figured it would probably turn out to be just some billionaire narcotrafico getting out of Guatemala in a hurry. As bizarre as it sounds, we might get off scot-free. Maybe the insurance companies would even reimburse us for the Hippogriff.

  Just before sunrise I walked back to the lab. Marena and Taro were already there. Michael smelled like he was still there. That is, he hadn’t slept. So, less than entirely welcoming, was Laurence Boyle, who—now that we’d had some apparent success—seemed to have gone back to being a cost-begrudging corporate bean pincher. Inside the bright white world of the glove box, they’d spread out the last six pages of one of the three screenfold books. Creepily, the unbroken lines of enciphered text were in my own handwriting. The pages had been photographed by the various cameras clustered on the lid of the box, and Jed2’s last letter—they were taking them in reverse order—had already been deciphered. Meanwhile, on the other side of the box, one of the sort of canopic jars had been opened, and gloved hands were scraping samples out of the scrungy-looking mass of resin inside it. In an hour they’d be getting couriered to Lotos Labs, in Salt Lake, for analysis.

  “You want to read your note?” Michael asked.

  I tried to think of something sarcastic to say, but finally I just nodded. He put the deciphered text up on the screen.

  I felt very odd. I could imagine my own voice but not much of what my twin had done and seen. And on the one hand I felt embarrassed that he hadn’t managed everything, but on the other hand I could hardly believe that I or he had managed as much as I or he had, and I couldn’t help feeling proud of myself, even though, or maybe because, I personally hadn’t had to do any of the work …

  [deciphered]

  NEW KEY WORD: JBNNUIIDSXJWNNQOBEOOFLCOPRTXSVQCD-FEHJRMR

  Jed DeLanda

  On the road to Flayed Hill

  (Monte Alban, Oaxaca)

  Chocula Team

  Ix Ruinas, Alta Verapaz, RG

  Wednesday, March 31, AD 664, about 11:00 A.M.

  Dear Marena, Taro, Michael, Jed1, et al.:

  Forty-six of us, the inner remnants of our division, made it through the suburbs of Teotihuacan, and eighteen suns ago we reached 14 Wounded’s men at the rendezvous point. 14 has lost nearly half of his division, and his scouts said the remains of the Puma clans, who have reorganized under Severed Right Hand, attacked and slaughtered whatever Eagle and Rattler Children are still in the Teotihuacan Valley. Now they are coming after us. A circle of destruction and fire, much of it apparently self-inflicted, seems to be spreading outward from the ruins of the metropolis, like a growing sinkhole. We pass through villages that have starved themselves to death because they believe that, since the world has ended, there’s no reason to eat.

  However, there are still living people everywhere. Many of them are now homeless, or uninterested in returning to their homes, and they attach themselves to our caravan. So our numbers continue to grow.

  Most of them are not fighters. But this morning, Lady Koh has sent out about a hundred heralds—I’m using the word to convey a job title that combines “runners,” “recruiters,” and “missionaries”—to rustle up combat-age vingtaines out of whatever groups of Star Rattler pilgrims there still are in the unburnt parts of the lake country. They’re also taking word to the heads of a few towns that have converted en masse to the path of the Rattler that Lady Koh wants them to meet her at Akpaktapec, a Oaxacan Rattler town two days west. We’ll gather as many converted families around us as possible as a buffer and then march east to Flayed Hill, where the Cloud House has offered us sanctuary as fellow enemies of the Pumas. From there, if possible, we’ll take an inland route, well off the beaten path, east and south to Ix.

  I suppose all this is to say that my chances of reaching Ix again are low. So I’ve decided to put this first cross here, ahead of schedule, before something worse happens. I haven’t yet mastered what I came to master. But I hope (obviously) that there’s enough information in the notes for you to reconstruct the Game and that the Game drug components make their way through the years sufficiently intact for you to reconstruct them chemically or even clonally. To say something cringeworthily corny, if they do, maybe this will all be worthwhile, despite what things look like from here. Anyway, sorry for the mournful tone—more later if possible—

  Best,

>   JDL2

  Encls.

  P.S. Jed—could you pick up some more of those Pyramides for Maximón? Thanks, J2.

  [66]

  “Now, this is the burning, the clearing,” I said in Ch’olan. I took a plug of tobacco, chewed it, and rubbed some into the stain on my inner thigh.

  “Now I am borrowing the breath of today, of Ox la hun Ok, Ox la uaxac K’ayab, 13 Dog, 18 Tortoise, of the tenth sun of the third tun of the nineteenth uinal of the nineteenth k’atun of the twelfth b’ak’tun, at noon on the eighth of April in the Year of Our Lord 2012, the sixty-first anniversary of my mother’s birth, and two hundred and fifty-seven suns before the last sun of the last b’ak’tun. Now I ask the saint of today, Santa Constantina, and I ask Saint Simón, whose name to us who are his friends is Maximón, to guard this square of earth, to watch this field.”

  I rooted myself at the hub of the revolving worlds. “Quinchapo wa ’k’ani, pley saki piley,” I said. “This is the sowing, the planting, now I am scattering the red skulls, white skulls.”

  I clicked SCATTER. Three hundred and sixty so-called virtual seeds rattled down onto the 2.8 million OLED pixels that covered one wall of the dark, ergonomically luxurious isolation room, which was forty feet under the Stake Hyperbowl’s playing field. LEON hesitated, lost in thought.

  I stretched back in the new, comfy, tacky, expensive shiatsu recliner. An itch flared up under the blood-pressure cuff on my left arm and I scratched it. Well, here we are again, I thought. I should have known it would all come down to the online world in the end. Because, after all, I’m still just a code monkey. We all are. Toiling away in the data mines. Drag. I should’ve been the one that got to see it. Our ancient world, I mean. Yeah, shoulda been Jed2. Lucky bastard. He saw the whole thing. Jewels and muls. Ocellated turkeys and turquoise ocelots. Feather canyons every—

  LEON beeped.

  It moved a red skull one tun northward, to April 28, and tagged it as k’ak’ilix. That is, kind of Anything Can Happen Day. Like on the Mouse Club. YOUR MOVE, it said in the File window.

  Hmm.

  Over the last three weeks we’d set up LEON so that it could work as a search engine. That is, in addition to the Game window, you could also open windows on the data its autodidactic engines were looking at, and you could use your own moves to steer its searches. Taro’s kids had also improved the interface, so that when we played against LEON we’d have more of a feeling of playing a human opponent. Still, the most LEON could do was make the correct moves. That is, not the insightful moves, or even the best moves. Just the correct ones, what you’d call the “book moves,” if there were a book. And the thing is, in a high-level game of anything—chess, Go, Cootie—the book move isn’t always that different from a bad move. Sometimes it’s even the losing move.

  Taro had been visibly disappointed at how things had turned out, how there was no algorithm, no secret formula, nothing that you could teach to a computer and have it solve all your problems. Taro’d wanted some kind of closure. LEON was his baby. He’d wanted that bundle to contain some solutions to his equations, and he’d wanted it so much he almost expected it. Instead, all we got was a whole lot more game lore and game strategies and those five jars of drugs and critter parts. Which wouldn’t increase LEON’s computing power any more than pouring coffee on its hard drive. I tried to tell him how playing the Game isn’t any one thing you can point to, how it was a whole way of being, how there’s no secret to it any more than there’s a secret to playing the cello, but he wasn’t in a mood to hear it. He was a total scientist. If a problem didn’t have a solution you could write on a blackboard, it wasn’t part of his Welterklärungsmodell.

  And really, why should we even have thought it would work on a computer anyway? The Game had been designed as a lens for the mind, not for some as yet uninvented gadget. To get a computer to play it the way a human would, you’d have to build a computer as massively parallel as a human brain. And even LEON was still a long way from that level. No matter how much more computers know than we do, and no matter how fast they process it, to them it’s still just zeros and ones.

  Naturally, as soon as we read about the drugs and before they’d even started analyzing them, I was practically trying to eat the stuff right out of the jar, like Marshmallow Fluff. And naturally they didn’t let me.

  I hadn’t thought they’d be so uptight about it. I kept saying that we should take Jed2 at his word, estimate the dosage he’d taken, and give it a shot. But the good folks at Lotos Labs—the psychopharmaceutical arm of the Warren Research Group—wanted to test the stuff first. They said they’d concluded that the two active components in the “tzam lic experience” were a bufoteninlike tryptamine and a benzamide compound that was similar to artificial ampakines like CX717. Together, they somehow enabled a vastly increased level of neuronal firing in certain cortices of the brain. Maybe more importantly, the first tomographic tests on sea slugs recorded “unprecedented growth in synaptic plasticity,” that is, a huge increase in the number of new connections, and the types and lengths of new connections, made in the brain during the drugs’ period of bioavailablity. Over time, the stuff would actually change the shape of your brain.

  By the seventh they’d synthesized enough for animal testing. The first observation was that there seemed to be different phases as the drugs worked through the system. During the first phase it massively increased geographical memory and sense of direction. They spun the sea slugs around on potter’s wheels in a dark room and put them back into a new, lightless tank, and within a minute or so they stopped spinning around and swam to the east corner, where the feeder had been in the old tank. We watched videos of mice swimming through water labyrinths, and on their second try the little bastards remembered the way through the most complicated mazes the lab had room to build. The monkeys did even more amazing things. Normal macaques can walk on tightropes, but the doped-up ones could walk on wobbling tightropes, in the dark, and then, on command, jump onto another tightrope they’d walked over an hour before. Lisuarte said the equilibrioceptual and muscular effects reminded her of propranolol, which is a beta blocker that a lot of classical musicians take before concerts. During this phase, IQ increased slowly, to over a standard deviation above the individual’s baseline. This even happened with the slugs—which do have IQs, by the way, although none of them are quite Goethe level. The macaques learned dozens of new hand signs. They did jigsaw puzzles that would have stumped an average five-year-old. They staged a mass escape from their cages by having one of them pull a fire alarm on bath day. It was a whole Secret of NIMH scene.

  But as the intelligence phase peaked, performance began to increase in other, odder areas, skills that aren’t covered in IQ tests. For instance, the monkeys became hypersensitive to color. In general, people can only remember and distinguish a few thousand colors. People who work in, say, the textile printing industry can do around ten thousand. Macaques only manage a few hundred. But in the third hour of exposure to the drugs, that number quadrupled. Another thing was that the slugs and, to a lesser but significant extent, the mammals became much more sensitive to subsonic vibrations, and even to electrical currents in the water around them or running through the floors of their cages. When they groomed each other, one spark of static could make them scream. As they increased the dosage, the lab people also started seeing negative effects—that is, besides the usual and expected nausea, cold sweats, and sniffles. “In Macaca mulatta, onychophagia and trichophagia progressed to chronicity,” the report said. In other words, they started biting their nails and chewing and eating their fur. And “in Aplysia californica, repeated large doses led to cases of acute autosarcophagy.” That is, the slugs ate themselves until they died.

  Dr. Lisuarte and the Lotos people were in an awkward position. Certainly they weren’t strangers to the lucrative world of performance-enhancing drugs. In fact, there was talk that we might have done some inadvertent bio-prospecting. Maybe a damped-down version of the stuff would have a bright future as a civilian medication. But like a lot of b
ig companies Warren Group was heavily invested in the drug prohibition scam, to the point at which most of them probably really believed in it. And the whole Mormon thing didn’t help either. Basically, they were as square as robot shit. And this was despite the fact that everybody around here was a total dope head. Michael Weiner popped oxycontin like Pez when he wasn’t chugging Bundy out of the flask. Tony Sic still took steroids and androstenedione even though he’d stopped playing semipro soccer four years ago, and the lab’s interns were smoking sativa landrace and having fat-white-geek ecstasy parties six nights a week. Even Taro took modafinil. Marena’d gone back to a pack a day. The construction workers were cranked to the eyeballs, the construction workers’ kids were huffing toluene, and at least half of the Mormon staff loaded up on vodka and Red Bull when they thought no one was looking. So you’d think there’d have been some skepticism about the party line. But no.