by James Frey
“We’ve shown you the strange story of the commune in northern Wisconsin that’s offered what they are calling, quote, ‘free love to anyone who needs it.’ At first derided as not much more than a sex scheme, what’s developed is a place teeming with people who want nothing more than hugs and good food and personal contact before the end.
“But our next story is not one of these feel-good stories. Without further comment, here is Mills Power.”
“Thank you, Stephanie. We live in a mind-boggling moment of history. Maybe even the end of history. As a reporter, I have to say that it sometimes feels like a blessing, but mostly, and quite frankly, I’m terrified—”
“Me too, Mills.”
“Yes, well . . . I’m here to talk about a video that appeared only yesterday on YouTube. It already has over eleven million views. In the last hour alone, eight hundred and ninety-nine thousand and thirty-four people have watched it.”
“I’ve seen it. The young man in it is very . . . disturbing.”
“Yes. But my sources at the CIA and the FBI told me that An Liu is legitimate. He was at Stonehenge when it . . . changed. According to my most trusted source, he was drugged and strapped to a gurney but still managed to escape from a British destroyer all by himself, killing dozens of sailors, stealing a stealth-equipped helicopter, and nearly sinking the ship.”
“My God.”
“So what I’m saying is this: Believe this Shang ‘Player’ called An Liu. Believe this crazy thing he’s calling Endgame. Believe that there are eight teenagers, including him, who need to be killed to stop Abaddon. Believe him. Scream his message from the rooftops. Translate what he said and what I’m saying now into every language and tell everyone. Use his information. If you are military, law enforcement, or even a criminal organization, please help to hunt these people down, and help to kill them all. Maybe what he’s saying is not true, but even if it has a one-hundredth-of-one-percent chance of being true, shouldn’t we try? Shouldn’t we sacrifice these eight souls and pray that it will save billions? . . . Shouldn’t we try, Stephanie?”
“Yes. Yes, Mills! We should! We should try to kill these people! Kill them! Please, people of Earth! Kill them all!”
Visita Rectificando Interiora Lapidem
HILAL IBN ISA AL-SALT
Converted Warehouse off Bledsoe, Sunrise Manor, Nevada, United States
When Hilal arrives at Stella Vyctory’s headquarters, he finds her door open. He goes inside. Calls for Stella but gets no reply. On the table is a laptop, its screen frozen on a login page, a pink Post-it on its metal edge. Written in Amharic, the note reads, The weight of the ark. Hilal knows this figure—358.13 pounds—by rote. He enters it into the computer’s login page but it rejects him. He tries again, spelling the number out, and this time the screen glows to life. On it is a PDF document also written in Amharic. He settles into a chair and reads:
Hilal—I am sorry, but I had to leave at the last minute. My army is embarking on an operation that requires my attention, and I had to travel from Las Vegas immediately.
But Hilal—I know that you were successful and . . . There are not words. I cannot begin to tell you the feelings that I’m having, all of them good and full and spilling over with joy. You are an honor to the Ancient Truth. If it lives through the dark days to come, it will be because of you, the Aksumite, Hilal ibn Isa al-Salt.
You have killed Ea, and I am overcome with happiness.
Thank you. A thousand thank-yous, ten thousand, a million, an infinite cosmos of thank-yous.
There are not words.
Please, treat my home as your own. Rest for a while, if you can. Use anything, take anything, eat anything. Arm yourself for the next round.
I will reach out to you in the days that come, but for now I will be incommunicado. My current mission is essential. I will tell you more about it when we speak.
I hope Rima told you to take the book, which I forgot to mention earlier. Study it before you move. I wish I could tell you more about it, but the truth is I don’t know much. All I know is that it is important—to you, to Endgame, to stopping the Makers.
Eternally and unconditionally yours,
Stella
Hilal is saddened that Stella is not there, but he does as she suggests. He draws a bath in her large, modern tub and takes off his clothing and his bandages and stands at the sink and stares at his reflection in the mirror. The steam swirls around the room and fogs his reflection.
His skin grafts are stretched and scarred and curdled, his entire head is hairless, and his right ear burned completely off leaving only a hole, like a lizard’s. This is to say nothing of the eyes, still mismatched, and the perfect teeth accenting all of it, still straight and glaringly white.
He is monstrous.
But he is still here. And he is the Aksumite champion. The hero of Endgame that no one will know or appreciate. The young man who has given humanity back their innocence.
He hopes that humanity will find it.
He turns off the water. Slides into the tub. Stifles a scream by biting his forearm as his burned shoulders submerge. Takes a breath and submerges his head. He screams there, bubbles blowing, at the top of his lungs. Screams for pain and for victory.
For Vyctory.
He comes out of the water. He positions a washcloth behind his head and lies back and closes his eyes. “There is no healing without pain. No cleanliness without filth. No forgiveness without death.”
He sits there for 28 minutes and 42 seconds and, except for the rise and fall of his chest, he doesn’t move.
He gets out and puts on a robe and takes Ea’s old book and sits on the edge of Stella’s king-sized bed. He uses the remote to turn on the television. He looks for a news channel—finds Fox News—and mutes it. He watches the images there—ones of death and destruction and fear, and ones of hope and beauty and love—for a few minutes, all in silence, the book heavy on his thighs.
He thinks of Eben, of home, of his line. He needs to call his master, but first he needs to figure out what Vyctory has given him.
Hilal turns his attention to the book.
He leafs through the pages. They’re made of a kind of plastic or vellum that feels indestructible, immune to time or the elements. He tries a corner and finds it impossible to tear or crease. Yet they are indisputably ancient. None of the strange writing inside makes any sense to Hilal, and even though Ea said that the volume contains all the wisdom of the ancient world, Hilal can’t find any languages he recognizes.
And there are the pictures. All exact and perfect, as if drawn by a robot. There are diagrams and plans for all kinds of ancient structures and city layouts and stone monuments and spaceship tethers and strange portals and landing strips and gold mines and refueling depots. He recognizes many structures from his studies of antiquity, and fails to recognize many, many more, all swallowed by time or water or war or the plants and vines of jungles or the shifting sands of deserts or the rippled ground of earthquakes. And there are pictures of machines that he doesn’t understand, of schemes that look mechanical or genetic in nature, of constellations and spirals and three-dimensional webs depicting mysterious connections of unidentifiable things—perhaps earthbound energy grids, or the interrelationships of species, or dark-matter pathways linking the stars, or the messy bush of evolution that belongs to the genus Homo.
The book is unquestionably a treasure, but to Hilal it is completely impenetrable.
Opaque.
His skin shivers: I should show it to the device from the ark!
He retrieves this and it glows to life and he puts the book back on his lap and he holds the device over the writing.
And the device does something unexpected. Whenever it is pointed at the book its screen is black, as if the book interferes with it somehow. Hilal swings the device through the room, sees the familiar throbbing ball that marks Sky Key in the Himalayas, sees the list of coordinates, including those of the remaining Players, sees only one caduceu
s, which he now knows is Stella, wherever she might be.
Hilal slides the book to the floor and, still holding the device over it, starts at the beginning and flips through page by page. One by one. Every now and then the blackness flickers with light, yet it gives him nothing. But after he’s flipped for nearly 20 minutes, something happens.
Over one page and one page only, a language appears on the device’s screen. It is ancient Egyptian, which Hilal knows fluently. As he moves the device across the lettering, the hieroglyphs change as well.
It is translating.
He reads:
And we will talk of the Great Puzzle, the Endgame, and it will be originated when we so decry, for reasons unknown and unknowable to the humans of Earth, but it will be just and right and final. And the Endgame will have three stages. And at each stage it will be told that the game can continue or be stopped.
Hilal’s heart skips several beats when he reads this.
Is there still some hope?
He reads on.
The Beginning Stage will be marked by the Calling, when the twelve will come and meet. The Beginning Stage will end when the first Player finds Earth Key and triggers the onset of the second stage. If during this first stage all the Players decide not to Play, then the game will not continue.
Hilal pauses. He wonders: If the others had listened to him on that fateful night in the Qin Lin Mountains and sat in peace and talked to one another about their histories and shared their knowledge, then would they have decided to take this course of action? Not to Play? Could they have come together then, really come together, in mind as well as body, when Earth needed them most? Could they have chosen wisdom over history, over violence, over training?
But he remembers the Shang, and the Donghu, and the Sumerian with her velvet tongue, and the brash Minoan, and Hilal knows: No. We had to Play.
There was too much pent-up violence there. Too much hubris. Too much eagerness to kill. He keeps reading.
The Middle Stage will begin with the announcement of the uncovering of Earth Key and will continue until the living Sky Key is united with Earth Key.
The living Sky Key?
This will initiate the End Stage, which will rain destruction on the race of humans for many, many Earth years. But if a Player can destroy the living Sky Key before it is united with Earth Key, then the game will be ended. This is not expected to pass, for the living Sky Key will belong to one of the Players. The living Sky Key will always be an innocent, a child, and his or her sacrifice will not come easily. If this child is not sacrificed on the altar of the game, then the Event will come quickly, and the End Stage will begin.
A lump forms in Hilal’s throat. He looks up from the book, his mouth agape. Could this innocent . . . could this poor innocent child who is in the Himalayas be with Shari Chopra?
He does not read on.
He stares blankly at the wall, the mirror, the television, the muted news.
Will Hilal have to kill a child in order to save the world?
And as if to answer his question, there, on the television, appears an animated title reading ENDGAME: IS IT REAL? And there is An Liu, crazed-looking and sunken-eyed, a dark necklace clinging to his neck and chest strung with—Hilal squints—yes, strung with human flesh and hair.
The Shang’s lips move.
He speaks.
Hilal hastens to turn up the volume. An is calm and insistent and assured. No sign of the tics he showed at the Calling. Were they an act? Was he fooling them? Hilal listens, as rapt as the now 145,785,934 people who have watched the video.
He listens.
He sees the pictures of the other Players, including him.
And he is afraid.
Not for himself—Hilal is so disfigured that no one will recognize him, and he should be able to Play without this video affecting him at all.
He is afraid because of what this means.
The game is not private anymore.
It has been blown wide open.
The newscast plays the video again.
And again.
And Hilal watches again.
And again.
And he gets an idea. He fumbles with the remote—can he pause the television? Yes.
He waits until he sees the pictures of the Players that An has dug up, and pauses on Shari Chopra, the last Player Liu mentions. She stands in front of a church that Hilal recognizes immediately: the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain. The masterwork of the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí.
The Harappan is smiling.
In her arms is a baby girl.
And the baby smiles too.
On a hunch, Hilal takes the device and holds it up to the television, hoping that nothing will happen, hoping that it will be full of stars or nothingness.
But instead it fills with the pulsing ball that marks Sky Key.
He stands, walks to the screen bolted to Stella’s bedroom wall. Holds it directly over the girl. The ball remains. He moves it only a few inches to Shari. The ball disappears. The church in the background. Nothing. A tree on the edge. Nothing.
The girl.
The orange ball.
Sky Key.
Hilal drops the device and collapses to the floor, his legs folded underneath him.
To stop the game, a young girl will have to die.
A young girl that the Harappan loves, and will defend with everything inside her.
He prays for the girl, for the Players, for all of them.
They need to know.
It is the only option.
He gets out his smartphone. Launches YouTube. Finds An’s video.
146,235,587 views and counting.
People are devouring it.
He creates a new account, logs in, encodes his message, posts it.
And he is afraid.
Afraid of what he has done.
And of what will be done still.
didyouseekeplertwentytwob posted 1 minute ago
On the pad write the next twelve in sequence.
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AN LIU
Karaya Road, Beck Bagan, Ballygunge, Kolkata, India
“Nearly there, love. Nearly”—BLINKBLINK—“nearly there.”
It’s midmorning. The sun is a diffuse yellow ball hung in a featureless blanket of gray clouds. The disc inches higher over the low buildings of this teeming city. An wonders how our star—92,956,000 miles away, its light taking a full eight minutes to cross the frozen expanse of space before reaching Earth—can sometimes feel like it gives so much heat.
Especially on days like this.
Days that are already hot. How can they get hotter?
The air is thick with diesel fumes. An’s shirt—the same he’s been traveling in since he flew from Okinawa to Hong Kong to Kolkata, all on small charters that cost a fortune—is soaked through.
An rubs his nape with a white handkerchief, pushing the strands of Chiyoko’s hair necklace aside, working his fingers under it.
The handkerchief comes back wet and black from soot.
“Nearly there. Nearly there.”
He walks with head bent to the ground, a heavy backpack nearly as big as him strapped to his shoulders. Four more blocks of these nameless narrow streets and he will be at his next safe house. According to the Shang manifest, it is not as well stocked with weapons, but it is full of up-to-date computer and communications equipment. It even has a dedicated Ku-band SatLink teleport terminal that will enable him to link with any communications or mapping or weather satellite in the sky. And of course, this being India, where power is never assured, it has its own underground generators and a hidden solar array on the roof. It has water and food and a bulletproof Land Rover Defender and a supercharged Suzuki GSX-R1000.
It will
be the perfect seat from which to monitor the next act of the game.
One he will merely observe.
Observe what he has put in motion.
Observe and see SHIVERBLINKBLINKBLINK observe and see who is killed.
When.
And how soon.
Because it will be soon.
“Yes. Soon, love.”
He walks along the uneven sidewalk, dodging people here and here and here. So many people, just like in China, but different from China. More entropy and disorder. Contrast everywhere. High and low and rich and poor and clean and filthy and past and present and profane and sacred, so much odor and sound and spectacle and sensory overload.
No wonder this is a land that breeds ascetics, An thinks. It is too much to take in.
A mutt crosses his path. A one-armed boy covered in filth asks for money. To the boy’s left is a white cow, standing in the middle of the road, ankle-deep in food wrappers and empty water bottles and newspapers and shit. Opposite the cow a woman sits cross-legged on the curb, holding an English sign that reads I will save your soul for Rs 1000. Next to her is a thin man in a loincloth shaving another man with a straight razor. Someone yells something from up high in a building. Horns honk. Engines churn. People cry or laugh. And they talk. They talk and talk. Not just in English also but in Hindi and Urdu and Bengali and Assamese and Oriya and who knows what else.
An barely understands a word.
He puts his head down and tries to block it all out and rounds a corner onto a quieter side street and gets out his smartphone and looks at the map to double-check where he’s going. He’s on track.
Nearly there.
Nearly blink nearly there.
“Chiyoko.”
He touches her ear around his neck. It is so dry now, so lifeless.
“Chiyoko.”
He rubs the backs of his hands across his eyes.
Even though she is always with him, he needs to get his mind off Chiyoko. Off what her shiverBLINKBLINKBLINKshiver off what her SHIVERSHIVERSHIVERBLINK off what her uncle said about her.
