The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  Jed1 looked over his shoulder at me. “Hi, Tony, nothing.” I felt something large and rocklike push me to the side. It was Grgur.

  I looked back just in time to see Marena give a brutal low kick to Jed1’s knee. I winced and jumped forward. I don’t know if I was planning to protect Jed1 or help her finish the job. Neither thing happened, though. Jed1 was backing away through the room, throwing whatever was handy at the three of us.

  “Jed’s gone psycho,” Marena shrieked. Her voice wailed feeedbackily through every speaker in the house

  “GRAB HIM RIGHT NOW, NOW, NOW . . .”

  ( 84 )

  And at that, I knew they were going to kill him.

  Another thing I knew, though, was that Marena’s earlobe-mounted phone, and the whole house’s phone and Internet systems, weren’t running off the increasingly sketchy post–Disney World Horror local towers. Instead, there was a pair of direct-uplink dishes on the roof. And they ran on the house’s electricity.

  I toe-mushed my latex sandals off my feet and padded out, into the kitchen, and through a little pantry. It was Florida around here, so there wasn’t any basement, and the house’s gut brains were all in a little room behind a commercial water cooler. I’d already identified both the regular main circuit breaker and the big isolator switch that cut the line to a natural gas-powered backup generator that lurked in a shed in the backyard. Just to make a cleaner break, I cut the generator first and then the house main. There was a second of real dark and then a few battery-powered night-lights came on. Well offstage, Marena’s voice shouted something.

  That ought to give him a few extra minutes, I thought. I’ll try some of his cold e-mail accounts later. My cold e-mail accounts. Our. I opened the kitchen door, jogged across the backyard—which wasn’t the yard with the pool and the pepper hedges and everything, but just a swath of centipede grass surrounded by dready yew bushes—and vaulted—well, vaulted sounds a little too graceful—over a steel fence post into the neighbors’ yard. I lost footing and rolled over. If they catch me, they’re going to ice me pretty fast after this, I thought. A few days of interrogation, tops. Still, I was less terrified than I would have expected I’d be. Maybe Tony’s brain—the less conscious part of it that was still there the way he’d left it—was less cowardly than the Jed mind it had appropriated. Or maybe it felt like I didn’t need to worry because I wasn’t really me. I got up again and ran around the neighbors’ big faux-Spanish-Colonial pile toward Oshkechabi Street. I’m doing great, I thought. Got to ditch the phone, though. And check again for implanted chips—oh, hell. I only got the vaguest impression of something behind me before there was something around me, crushing my chest, and as I realized that one of the guards had tackled me the grass tilted up and mashed me in the face.

  Too late.

  ( 85 )

  “Well,” I said, “if you’d let me meet with him, like I’d been begging to do, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  “Or else it would have still happened,” Marena said. “Or something even worse.”

  We were checking out Jed1’s house, or rather aquarium. There were wads of Kleenex and drilled-and-smashed hard drives lying all over. What a fucking slob, I thought. Marena and I had come out onto the sort of porch because I couldn’t bear to watch Ana’s team tear up the place.

  “Okay,” I said, “but—look, what was I supposed to think? It sounded like you were going to kill him, in fact I bet you were going to kill him, and I didn’t know why, so, so, so—”

  “Okay, okay,” she said, “let’s not just keep going over and over this. We’ll find him, and you’re going to help us find him, and we won’t kill him, and everything’ll be fine.”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said.

  It was me, I thought again. I am such a fuckup. I’m evil, I’m vile, I’m evillive vileeliv, I’m—

  No. No, it’s not me. That me is a different me. The me I am is not that person any more. Better. Anyway, don’t dwell on it. Fix it. Find him and neutralize him. And don’t get sentimental.

  Someone I know of but whom I’ve never seen face-to-face, I thought. Idiot. Who else could it have been? Obviously mirrors don’t count. Idiota, tonto, pendejo—

  Cancel, cancel. Not helpful.

  Come on, work with Marena. Make sure she’s okay. Because she’s not okay right now, that’s for sure. She doesn’t realize how much trouble she’s in. Warren’s paranoid. I mean, both the individual and the company are paranoid. No matter how much I doth protest, they’re going to think I’m going to make the same decision as Jed1. Especially after my little world-destroying misunderstanding the other day. They’ll keep me on a short leash, short like choking, and when I don’t have any more goodies for them, they’ll kill me. And Marena—I mean, they’ll do her, too, no matter how sophisticated she seems she’s still a little too trusting, she still thinks they’re her friends, she doesn’t realize they’ll do anybody, oh, Jesus we are so screwed—

  Cancel that, my interlocutor self said again. Don’t sell yourself short like one of your corn contracts. You’ve still got a few arrows in your bow or strings to your quiver or whatever the hell it is. Go along with it, stay close to Marena, win her over to your way of thinking, put in protection for both of you . . . I mean, you know all this, Jed, Jed slash Tony, Jed-Sub-Three, whoever you are now, just do it.

  I guess you’re right, I thought back.

  “. . . how to stop it,” Marena was saying. “Right?”

  “Sorry?”

  “What?”

  “Sorry, I tuned out,” I said.

  “I said, Jed-Sub-One thought the Cascade wouldn’t be stoppable because you couldn’t figure out how to stop it. Right?”

  “Well, yes,” I said, “if you mean that just doing random things and hoping one of them’ll work is too much of a shot in the dark. Presumably it’s a robust autocatalytic event chain with a variable n of—”

  “Okayokayokay, hang on.”

  “I tried to access his finances, but I couldn’t get much of it.”

  “The thing is he didn’t know about the Human Game, right? So it may be figure-outable with that, I mean, it might identify a whateveryouguyscallit, there may be, you know.”

  “A stopping mechanism.”

  “Right. And with the LEON version of that, the, I guess we’re calling it the Human Game, that should do it, right?”

  “I hope so. I mean, we hope—”

  “So, so let’s just put everything into finding Jed-Sub-One, and then, we’ll get out of him what, you know, whatever’s going on, and then we’ll bring in LEON and work from there.”

  “Get out of him, like, sweat him.”

  “Right. Why, do you mind?”

  “Oh, uh, no, no, definitely—”

  “Hang on.” Ana and one of her tech people were calling for us to come back in. We did. They’d really torn up the place, but so far, it looked like they hadn’t disconnected any of the fish tanks. They’d pulled up the rubbery jigsaw matting and were prying the old half-ton Chubb safe out of the concrete. Needless to say, Jed1 had reset the combination.

  “Any erasing or explosive triggers on this?” Ana asked.

  “Not that I know of. Unless I got even more paranoid after the Guate trip.”

  “No radioactive materials or anthrax powder or whatever?”

  “No, no, are you kidding? I wouldn’t—”

  “Anything that’s going to erase the hard drive on opening?”

  “No, I don’t think so. It’ll erase without the password, though.”

  “Right. Any ideas on the password? Any favorite pet names, TV characters—”

  “No, I don’t do it that way, it’s like with the safe combination, every Sunday when I do my Grandessa Game I just grab a new sixteen digits off a randomizer and reset it to that.”

  “What’s a Grandessa Game?”

  “Well, a Grandessa . . .” Hell, I thought. It felt violating, getting interrogated. But I’d screwed up. Pretty regally, in fact. You deserve
it, Jed. Just co-fucking-operate. I started again. “A Grandessa’s just a word for a sort of pouch of like, seeds and stones that all Maya sun-adders have. And we use it to tell the suns, you know, like divination. So it’s kind of an abbreviated version of the Sacrifice Game. But I use it with a full Game board. And I do it at midnight on Sunday and that kind of maps out the next week.”

  “Why on Sunday, aren’t you on a Mayan calendar or something?”

  “Oh, well, you could do it anytime, it’s just a Catholic habit, my mother would get querents then because the farmers stay up late on Saturday, like a midnight Mass.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I do all my numbers then, investments, passwords, upcoming dates, all that. Of course, clients want lottery numbers.”

  “Right.”

  “But anyway, that just tells you when the last combination got set. It doesn’t have anything to do with the combination itself.”

  “Right, okay, never mind, we’ll deal with it.”

  I’ll bet you will, I thought. And I bet it’ll be with an oxyacetylene torch rather than with logic. I just hoped they wouldn’t ship the safe to Quantico or some other godforsaken place where it would attract the attention of politically motivated gangsters.

  “You’re sure there’s no other strongbox around?” Ana asked. I said no.

  “No other hides?”

  I shook my head.

  “What about all your safety deposit boxes?”

  “I’m sure he would have changed those,” I said. Come on, five isn’t “all,” I thought. Five is still a nonparanoid amount. “Unless he didn’t get the time to go to Vegas and deal with the one at the Bank of Nevada.”

  “Yeah, Bill’s already on his way to check on that one,” she said. I’d never heard of Bill, but I didn’t think he’d come up again anyway.

  “Great,” I said. And be sure to put my underwear up on eBay, I thought.

  “Hey, check this out,” another of the tech people said. I think his name was Chet Nguen. He called us over to my old desk, which had a new Samsung laptop on it. There weren’t any sensitive files on it, of course—those were all in the safe—but it did have the names of some recently modified files, and the last-touched file had automatically named itself after the first distinctive phrase in the contents, and, in the last five minutes, Chet had already deciphered the name out of EncryptX. It was a little on the ominous side: Why I Did It.

  ( 86 )

  Marena got the Mission: Impossible–style team together again—herself, me, Taro, Ashley2, Dr. Lisuarte, Grgur, Hernán, and Ana Vergara. Our main goal was, of course, to track down and capture Jed1 and interrogate him about the Domino Cascade. We’d also be trying, concurrently, to identify the Cascade and divert it directly. So far, though, we hadn’t recognized even a single one of the “dominos.” Finally, the members other than me had a third directive that I suspected—to keep a close eye on me. That is, me, Jed3. Marena was still worried that I might make the same decision as Jed1—even without an overdose of tsam lic—and then there would be two Game-savvy homicidal maniacs running around. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that no matter how sentimental Marena might get about me, it wouldn’t matter to the Firm. As soon as I’d delivered the goods—the full deposition, the Game, and Jed1, in increasing order of importance—Warren would slate me for cleansing. Still, I went along with it all for now.

  Jed1 could have been anywhere in the world, including Antarctica, Indiana, Peru, or even Peru, Indiana. There had been a hint, though. Jed1 would be happy that the end of the world would kill the Mano Blanco guys and that damn nun. He’d want to let them know ahead of time and suffer. So I had feelers out watching them. And of course, I was watching all the nudibranch sites. He’d be happy to be in a place where he could take a last look at his favorite genus of animals, nudibranchs—but that could be at almost any of the reefs in the Caribbean, on the Pacific Coast, or even Southeast Asia or Australia. However, since Jed1 and I shared versions of the same mind, I was at least able to compete with him on a high level, with almost a kind of virtual ESP.

  I played four Games against the absent Jed1. Unfortunately, somehow—despite my using the Human Game algorithms against his less powerful ones—he was able to anticipate my moves. And he kept eluding me.

  Finally, on the Second Day of the Dead—that is, Friday—we got the certified decryption of Why I Did It. Marena and I read it without saying anything. There were sixty-two pages of Executive Solutions research attached, confirming that what Jed had identified as the first dominoes had, indeed, fallen.

  Marena and I—the rest of the team were setting up a temporary office in the Holopaw compound—were alone on the sofa in her office, and we sat for two minutes without saying anything. I know because I was facing the clock collection on her big desk and this gaudy ormolu French Directoire thing had a big old second-counting annular ring that kept whirling around like a damn salad spinner. We sat for another two minutes without saying anything.

  “Maybe nothing else is going to happen,” I said, finally. “Maybe he’s just blowing smoke at us.”

  “Um . . . yeah, I hope so,” she said. “I don’t think so. Though.”

  “No.”

  We sat without saying anything, this time for two and a half minutes.

  “Hey,” I asked, “are you sure Jed-Sub-One never told you how he thought the world would end?”

  “No, I told you,” she said, “he said he didn’t know. I mean, before. And then when he was, you know, he didn’t say how.”

  “I mean, did he ever just guess at it, or say anything about what it’d be like for, like, the People of Earth, or whoever?”

  “I don’t know,” Marena said. “Painlessly, or whatever, I guess.”

  “He said that?”

  “Uh, something like that,” she said. “Or that people wouldn’t notice—”

  “Damn it,” I yelled, “I knew it!”

  “What?”

  “Well, just that, that would be something that’ll disappear the whole planet in a second.”

  “I thought it might be some sleeping-gas-type thing.”

  “No, no,” I said. “I wouldn’t ever say—I mean, he wouldn’t put it that way, that, that’s—no, he, he means some collider event. Like a strangelet. You know, like, a black hole thingy. Or something. Something that just vanishes the whole place without anybody noticing.”

  “Okay. Wow, you’re right.”

  “That’s a huge clue. We can work backwards from that.” I started off toward my temporary server station on the kitchen table.

  “Sorry,” she called after me.

  After an hour I thought I had a pretty good list of facilities. It started with CERN, which was, of course, the world’s biggest collider, and then went down through a hundred and sixty-one others until it trailed off in labs whose particle accelerators probably weren’t functional enough for the job. There were two big problems with it, though. One was that one didn’t know exactly what procedure old J1 was thinking of. The second was that the U.S., China, Europe, Israel, and the old USSR each probably had at least a handful of secret installations. And the third—okay, three problems—the third was just that even though he was still using the old version of the Game, the ol’ Jed-Sub-Onester was probably capable of doing the whole thing remotely. We had to start monitoring online traffic to each known lab, but there wouldn’t be much percentage in staking them out physically.

  Or we could just convince every single one of them to shut down for a few months, I thought. Like, right, that’ll happen. Governments are so safety-minded.

  Hell. I’d never thought I’d be sorry that I was intelligent.

  By the next morning, Marena and Taro (on the phone) and I had talked it around another ten times. Lately she’d been thinking that instead of trying to track Jed1 down, we needed to get him to get him to reveal himself.

  “Yeah, but, the trouble is,” I said, for the unknownth time, “it’s hard to smoke out some
body who’s that paranoid.”

  “I know,” she said, “you said that.”

  “No, but—well, that’s it.”

  “Look, he has to—it has to be very subtle. We have to let him suspect something.” And, she went on—not in so many words, but in many, many more—his suspicions have to be as close as possible to the truth. Maybe he needed to think that we’d come back from Guatemala with a game-changer. Except he had to think it was even bigger than it was, that our new and improved version of the Sacrifice Game was definitely going to let us overcome his nefarious scheme. In fact, Taro suggested, maybe we should create a similar anomaly. “Something parallel to the events of the Domino Cascade,” he said. “Which would look to him . . . as though we have found a blocking strategy.”

  I was noncommittal.

  “His curiosity has to . . . get the better of him,” he said.

  “And, uh, not just his curiosity,” Marena said. “But like, you know, his pride.”

  “So, like the How to Beat Bobby Fischer strategy,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “We need to let Jed-Sub-One think that playing against us is going to give him an outlet for his creativity.”

  “Correct,” Taro said. “He might even . . . as they say . . . he might spot a trap. But he needs to think that that trap. . . . is different from what it actually is. And then he may make an overplay.”

  “Okay, then, listen,” Marena said. “In that case—well, let’s look at this a different way. What does Jed-Sub-One really hate?”

  “The whole world,” I said.

  “Okay, so his hate’s too generalized. So let’s give him a focus.”

  “A focus like what?” I asked.

  “Like a movie star. Everybody’s jealous of movie stars. Right?”

  “Okay.”

  “And that’s at least one thing I know how to do pretty well.”

  “Make movies?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You mean you want to direct.”

  “Oh, shut up, I’m saying, we’re all set up for, to—”