The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  Hell, hell, hell, hell—

  Okay, okay. I think we know the downside. Let’s just keep that from happening. Stay indispensable, stay on the inside, keep enough dirt on them ready to dump so that they’re hesitant, and most of all, use the Game. If they’re not as good at it as you are, you can stay ahead of them. Right? Just be smarter than they are. Even if they’ve got LEON working on it full-time. Even if you teach LEON some things yourself. Just don’t teach it everything. Keep that silicon bastard where he ought to be, in the dark. Twilight, anyway. You can do this, you can survive.

  Right? Except for you to survive, the world has to still exist.

  And without you the real doomster’s going to get away with it. Right? Even if you tell Taro everything, they’ll probably blow it. Maybe you need to just find the real doomster on your own. Except you can’t, probably. You’ll need LEON. You need their investigative resources, at least. And you may need their security resources to take the bastard out. You need to go along with them for the duration. Use the system, work up a LEON-aided version of the Human Game, and find the fucker and nail him. Right?

  And maybe by then you’ll be inside. That’s how you’ll stay alive. You want to be part of the syndicate. You’re one of them. Or, let’s say, one of THEM. And you’ll rise through the ranks and then, once you’re in charge of the bad guys, you can turn the place around. Use your power and position for good. Be Spiderman. With great power comes great responsibility, great deeds, great tolerance for platitudes . . . just don’t sweat it right now. What you need to do is, you need to cool down, clean up, regroup and reorient, and get in a position where you can at least be clear about what you’ve got.

  But I’ve got this urge, I thought back. I had this urge to tell them everything, the Human-Game algorithms, what Koh had said, the scoop on the real doomster, everything. Don’t, my other side said. That’s the meds talking. Just keep the key stuff to yourself. Even if they know you’re holding out on them about something, what can they do? Dose you with amobarbital and try to worm it out of you while you babble? No, I don’t think they’ll do that. Not with Marena around. Not with Taro around, probably, for that matter. Even if M and T both know I’m . . . no, they still won’t want to go Guantánamo on me that fast. They’ll stay close by, work soft on me for a few days, and then . . . well, and then, if you really hold out, at some point they’ll give Lindsay’s goons a go at you. But for the time being, just play along like every other nonloser does. Right? And then in a few days, if things get flaky, you can break away if you have to. Go underground if you have to. Do whatever you have to. Stay one step ahead of them. Just like the granola package says, never surrender. Awaken your Giant Within. Be Tony Robbins. Right? Right. Okay, here goes.

  I sat still. I didn’t say anything. The video had lasted two minutes and twenty seconds. Now it was two minutes after that, and I was so tranqued up, so filled with equanimity, that if it had turned out I was in the body of a baboon, I’d have just lain back in my cage and told Marena, “Hey, be a doll and toss me a banana.”

  “Jed? We still need to talk a bit about the Game,” a Midwestern-sounding male voice said. I rolled my giant stone head to the right to look at him. Yeah, that guy, I thought. Finally, I remembered his name: Laurence Boyle. He, too, was in a powder-blue lab coat. Hmm, what kind of blue powder was that, originally? I wondered. Blueberry powder? Bluebird powder? Damn, I was as high as a radiosonde balloon. Focus.

  “Mr. DeLanda?” he asked. “I’m sorry to seem uncaring here, but we also still need to do some business.”

  “Right,” I started to say. “Business is . . .” I managed not to finish the thought.

  “Larry, I don’t think this is the best time,” Marena said. She sounded real. I mean, like she was really feeling it. Had they rehearsed this? Was she just being Good Cop?

  Whatever.

  “I understand,” Boyle said, “but let’s just get a few things out of the way.”

  “Listen—”

  “Also, Elder Lindsay wants to congratulate you.” I couldn’t tell whether the you was singular or plural. “He’s standing by the conference—”

  “Larry, no, we have to give him a break. Seriously. He’s not in any condition to talk about this right now.” Yeah, why the rush? I wondered. If they caught the doomster already, what was the problem? All they wanted out of the Game was a whole lot of bucks for the Warren Group. To be followed, inevitably, by world domination and a new millennium of corporate totalitarian soft dystopia. A whole Stanislaw Lem thing. But without the humor. But surely that can wait a day or two. Right?

  “Miss, Ms. Park,” Boyle said, “as we did in the rehearsals, we do need to continue the debriefing.”

  “I don’t think I’m conditioned, uh, any condition, in any . . .” I said.

  “Let’s meet again in twenty-four hours,” Marena said. “Doctor? What do you think?”

  Lisuarte started to say something but Boyle cut her off. “Marena, we’re all efforting to make this as nonconfrontive as possible, but there—”

  “Stop it!” Marena said. “He’s just had, he’s having, a huge fucking shock, I mean, absolute trauma, and he’s handling it—I mean, how would you guys handle it? He’s lost months, and the two transfers, we don’t know what that’s like, I mean, come on, even on top of the Tony Sic thing, he’s had an experience like, you know, and he’s got a lot of meds on board. I absoshittinglutely insist. I insist.”

  “I have to agree with that,” Dr. Lisuarte said. “He’s close to dozing off.”

  “I agree with Marena,” Taro’s reassuringly precise voice said.

  “Anyway, nobody’s going anywhere,” Marena said. “We can start up again in twenty-four hours. I think that’s fair.”

  Laurence gave in. I had an impression of people signing off on the decision and making plans to call each other in twelve hours. Dr. Lisuarte’s nurse, who looked familiar but I guess didn’t have a name, wheeled over a cantilevered table and set down a big Let’s Fuck with Jed Kit, a compartmentalized tray full of pills and elixirs and electuaries and a large-bore Tuohy needle that looked as blunt and clumsy as a left-handed safety pin. Going to vax me into a staring askeletonite with Williams syndrome. Raggedy Jeddy. My earth-sized head floated upward in the nurse’s hands, and as Dr. Lisuarte started to de-’trode it, icy rainstorms of solvent broke out across the coast of its northern continent. I dozed.

  ( 82 )

  We convoyed to Marena’s house. It was in a gated community in an expensive suburb of Orlando that, two months after the Disney World Horror, had been tested and cleared for radiation and cleared as safe. When I walked into Marena’s living room, I noticed, through a window, a guard standing outside, leaning against Marena’s Jaguar. With the other goon guy, who I think was named Hernán, in the vestibule, and Google skulking around somewhere, that made three. I was beginning to wonder whether they were keeping others out or us in. I staggered into the bathroom because I thought I remembered there was a steam room in there, but before I could turn it on I fell asleep in the dry sarcophagal tub.

  It seemed like I slept for the next thirty hours, although I remember various combinations of my Toxic Co-workers turning up a few times to get in a little perfectly casual debriefing. Boyle reminded me a few times that everything I’d learned in AD 664 was the property of the Warren Corporation. I’d gotten cranky and Marena’d tried, with only some success, to act as the peacemaker. Lindsay checked in and Marena and I both talked with him on speakerphone. I was a little surprised that she didn’t want to talk with him privately. He smarmed on about how great it was to have me back. Then he asked whether I’d seen any Hebrews there. Marena and I rolled our eyes. It’s a Mormon thing.

  I said, “No, you over me, I saw none.”

  “Well, they must have been there someplace.”

  We sat down with two double espressos after that.

  “Can you tell me about Tony Sic now?”

  Marena said, “I don’t know what he was t
hinking.”

  “Try.”

  “He had serious financial problems. Like the suicide bombers, his large family has been amply taken care of.”

  “Why do I get, like, almost none of him? I got a lot of Chacal.”

  “Because, you know, with Sic the CTP team was working directly with the two brains on the table, at the same time. With Chacal there was physical distance, there was a, a humongous time distance—”

  “Okay, I know, I know,” I said. It’s true, I was just whining. The thing was, in spite of the video, Sic’s motivation in sacrificing himself was still something of a mystery to me. Maybe I’m just too much of a jerk to ever understand.

  It was the thirty-first, around eight P.M. Halloween Night. Max wasn’t going out trick-or-treating. I guess that was one of those things that, now, seemed like giving the kids realistic toy guns. He was going to a midnight Harry Potter party, though, and he was in his Dementor outfit, minus the face hood.

  “So, you don’t like the Domino’s theory?” Marena asked us. I think she meant the pizza. Maybe she’d asked me about it before and I didn’t remember.

  “Anything’s fine,” I said.

  Max made his two index fingers take a halt-step, the left one after the right one. It was the ASL sign for lame.

  “Okay,” Marena said. She floofed down between Max and me on the Chickly Shabby sofa. She was in blue Skele-Toes and a sort of fire-orange triangular shirtwaist. “Well, we could just order from Silk Thai.”

  “Is that the place with the fried water?” Max asked.

  “No, that’s the one with the Ho Mok, you know, the fish curry?”

  “Oh, yeah, right—what’s that thing, like, million-year-old eggs?”

  She finger-scrolled down on her tablet. “Uh, that’s, that’s Khai Yiao Ma Phat Kraphao Krop.”

  “And what’s that yellow spread stuff?”

  “Uh, that’s Nam Prik Kaeng,” she said, a bit suspiciously.

  “Okay,” he said, “let’s get that, and, uh, one Mok Yak Prik—”

  “Maxie, don’t even start.”

  “Or Uncle Jed might enjoy the Dum Ho Poon.”

  “That sounds great,” I said. “Hey, do they make that, uh, Dark Drab Krap?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “And the Nip Suk Dik is very nice—”

  “Hey, Maximilian,” Marena said. “I’m serious.”

  “And they do a fine Pak Man Kum,” he said, “very high-protein—”

  “Well, I’m afraid that’s a bit umami for my palate,” I said. “But if they have an Ai Kyu Gap, or, uh, Sik Phat Phuk, then—”

  “You guys, I’m not kidding,” Marena said. “If you don’t knock it off I’m going to text Seoul Train and order some Bibimbap and that’ll be it. And there’s nothing else in the house.”

  “No, no, okay,” Max said. “Sorry. So, we agree on two bowls of Pak Man Kum, and my Mom’ll have a Kwik Rim Job, and, uh—”

  “And one Gook Lik Kok,” I said.

  “Hey!” she went.

  I said sorry.

  “Listen, Max,” she said. “Sérieusement. Do you think you could just order a family-style vegetarian selection and do the order like a responsible adult?”

  “Sure. “

  “Okay.”

  “No Bung Plug Krak.”

  “Max!”

  “Okay, okay, jeez.”

  “You want to call them on the MasterCard phone?”

  “Yeah, where is it?”

  “It’s on Kitchen Island. In the Drawer of Many Things.”

  He Sleeked off.

  Damn, I can’t believe how domesticated I am, I thought. Well, believe it. The deal is, after two and a half days, anything seems normal. If I’d woken up with the head of a chicken, the tail of a beaver, the eyes of a gigantic insect, and the body of Megan Fox, it’d seem normal. Or the body of a chicken and the beaver of—I mean, anything. Being in yet another different body was one of those things like scuba diving or flying that for a long, long time people tried to imagine what it would be like to do, and then when they finally do it, it seems natural. It’s not that it’s so different from what at least a few of them had imagined, but since they’d imagined it in so many different ways, and some people had such high and varying hopes for it, there’s always a touch of disappointment. And there was always that feeling of something in back of my mind, something small but still a deal breaker, like a mosquito in the room.

  “Marena, seriously,” I said when Max was out of earshot. “I want to meet Jed-Sub-One early.”

  “Let’s stick to the schedule,” she said. She still hadn’t told Jed1 anything about me. At least, she’d sworn up and down that she hadn’t. The idea was that I should have my own head totally in order first, because of course he’d want to meet me and if he saw me all messed up then he’d get upset. But I also figured that they had some other, more serious reason.

  “We still need to satisfy Lance on the debriefing.” she said. “Then we can do whatevs.”

  “Right.”

  “Right.”

  “What did Dr. Lisuarte say?” I asked. Marena’d just been on the picture conference thingy with her.

  “Well—look. I have to let you know, the readings indicate that there’s a lot you’re not telling us.”

  “There was a lot that went on back there.”

  “I know, but you’ll have to force yourself,” she said.

  I was about to say I didn’t have to do anything, and then I didn’t, and just made a puffing sound. There was still that mosquitoish thought back there someplace. Or maybe it was more of a feeling like you’re falling asleep in a house in the country and you start wondering whether you locked the door. You decide to forget about it and nearly drift off and then you get this picture of a door that’s just a little bit ajar, and you’re like, Forget it, forget it (ajar). Good night (ajar, ajar).

  “Look,” I said. “Why don’t we call—”

  There was an A-flat and F chime. Doorbell. Automatically—it must have been Sic’s body memory, because normally I just lie there like a two-toed sloth—I got up. “Wait, let the Gurg get it,” Marena said.

  “No, I’ve got it,” I said. I got into the front room about fifteen steps ahead of Gurgle—maybe he wasn’t that on the ball after all—and opened it just as whoever it was started to knock again. I opened my mouth to say hi—

  Whoa. Me. I mean, it was me. There was my gangly body and corny expectant smile, wiggling a bit in the video-friendly porch light.

  “Hey, Tony,” he said. “Hi.”

  “. . . Uh, hi,” I said. “Hi, Jed.”

  ( 83 )

  I motioned him inside and made a feeble gesture at the coatrack. I don’t know what I was thinking because of course, like me, he’d want to keep his coat in this icebox.

  “I’m in the orifice,” Marena’s voice called. I was pretty sure she was watching us—it seemed like she had cameras in every other Robie sconce—but she sounded casual, not at all worried that I was out here with her gentleman caller. Impotently, I followed protocol and pointed Jed1 toward the door to the living room, and watched as Marena swept across the room and planted—is that the right word?—her lips on his. Max Sleeked through the hall and vaulted over the desk. Marena gave me a funny look, held up a wait-one-minute finger, and closed the door in my face. I guess I hadn’t changed that much, after all. Big tough Jed, back from Mayaland.

  I tiptoed back to the guest bedroom. Maybe if they couldn’t hear me slink away, they’d forget about me.

  I could hear Marena chattering away and could tell by the thunk of stone on thick wood that they’d started up a Go game. Hmmm.

  Time trickled past. Every once in a while I sort of tiptoed back over to the door. I didn’t put my ear on it, though, since I figured everything you did in this house was on video.

  “Are you and he having a thing?” Jed1 asked.

  “No.”

  They must have moved into a different part of the room, because their voices go
t too muffled to hear, and I started feeling stupid standing there. I went into the sort of living zone and flopped on the sofa. Huh. Damn. It’s me in there and he doesn’t know it. This is odding me out. And I’m jealous, sort of. Except I suppose they couldn’t be involved if he was asking insecure questions about me. Then again, she’d just said we weren’t having a thing. Weren’t we? I went back to the guest bedroom again, turned off the main light, and started one of my pacing rituals. I was on my one hundred and fifty-fourth circuit when voices started coming out of the phone. I was about to pick it up and then realized they weren’t talking to me, and that Marena must have turned on the intercom so that I could hear her conversation with Jed1.

  “Don’t even tell me, you fuck, you, you, you . . . you think you’re going to make that decision—you can’t make that decision, you’re not some like, wise being, you’re just, you’re a loser.” Geez, I thought. Take it easy, that’s me you’re talking to. “You’re a boring windbaggy geek loser, you don’t know anybody worth knowing, nobody’s heard of you, you’ve never done anything remotely important, you’re—”

  I heard a little grunt. Had someone just gotten punched? And her voice had sounded so guttural. Like, desperate. I picked up the receiver, turned the speaker thing off, and walked out into the hall.

  “You shit,” Marena’s voice went. “I was, I was, I was practically falling in love with you and you were shit. You were worse than shit. You’re what shit would shit if it could shit.”

  I skidded a little bit in Tony Sic’s athletic socks as I rounded the corner of the hallway.

  “How do I stop it?”

  I opened the door and saw Other Jed, Jed1, looming over a very small-looking Marena.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” I asked like an idiot.