The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  “So, wait,” I said, “you’re going to make a movie in a week? And distribute it?”

  “No, no, of course not, we—no, we don’t need to make a whole movie. Just the trailer. Right? Just enough to make Jed-Sub-One believe it’s really going to happen.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Right? And then he’ll get jealous and, and he’ll contact us, and he’ll screw up the call routing somehow, and we’ll grab him.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “But you ought to know, right? You of all people.”

  “Well . . .”

  “Come on. Let’s make you a star.”

  ( 87 )

  On 11/4/12, at 2:05:49 I was standing on an X made from DayGlo–green gaffer’s tape, in front of a green screen, wearing green bandages where some of the costume details would go, talking to a green target that they moved around.

  I knew film shoots weren’t glamorous, but in these days of hegemonic computer graphics they’re even less glamorous. Once in a while they yelled instructions at me. Fortunately, in these days, you don’t really need to know how to act. As to the product, at least it was classy enough that they spoke some subtitled Yucatec Mayan, but when the Maya characters spoke English, like when the Jed character talked with 2JS, say, they talked in that faux-historical way, without contractions, like they hadn’t invented contractions yet.

  On the thirteenth, Marena leaked the trailer onto YouTube. Chrononaut: Maya would star Tony Sic—me—playing self. The release date was set for summer of 2013. The trailer used some of the footage taken by the small film crew on the creep into Guatemala and the downloading and from the debriefing, and also some stock footage of the Disney World Horror and other contemporary events, mixing it all up with some scenes “acted” by me in front of the green screen and worked up with computer-generated imagery to re-create some scenes from my experiences in “Ancient Mayaland.” It implied that the film would tell a simplified and heavily censored version of my “time trip.” Naturally, it was an abomination, but Marena said, “We’re into survival now, so who cares?” Of course, most bloggers didn’t believe the claims made in the trailer. But a few people who’d worked out some of the more esoteric aspects of Maya civilization, and who’d gotten some gossip about the research on time projection and consciousnes-transfer, believed it was accurate. And the debate, of course, increased the clip’s notoriety. Forty-eight hours after posting, it had gotten over five million “full views from unique visitors.” Our line was very much in the water.

  But Lindsay Warren was furious. Marena’s six-and-a-quarter-minute trailer—a trailer—had cost forty-three million barely approved Warren dollars. One point two million of that was for eighty-nine seconds of screen time by January Jones. Who turned out to be really nice, by the way. Even more enragingly, though, the project had basically preempted the much more expensive 3-D feature film that—along with games, novelizations, and other related media—Warren Studios had been working on for months, and which it had planned to release in June of 2013. Assuming, that is, that the world continued to exist after 12-21-12. And, even more enragingly, Marena had revealed Warren proprietary information. For example, details were coming out about Warren’s clandestine human testing of the CTP, which would, to say the least, cast the company in a bad light. Another example was the Hippogriff Incident, when a Guate helicopter was shot down as the team returned from Ix Ruinas. This and other revelations would open Warren up to an avalanche of private lawsuits and even, probably, criminal charges. And as though that weren’t enough, the film had even given away some details about the Sacrifice Game—which, from the Warren Group’s point of view, was entirely proprietary and which represented an investment of several billion dollars.

  So despite the fact that Marena and Taro contended that the release of Chrononaut was absolutely necessary to keep the universe from disappearing, it seemed that Lindsay, despite his general confidence in the efficacy of the Sacrifice Game, didn’t believe it. Either he still thought that Madison was, as “predicted” in the Codex Nuremberg, the only doomster, or because he wasn’t convinced by Why I Did It, or simply on account of his Mormonism and acceptance of Mormon cosmology. Or, alternately, it’s possible that Lindsay was confident that his own separate investigative division—sinisterly referred to as “HR,” for Human Resources—would be capable of tracking down Jed1 without needing the film to smoke him out.

  At any rate, Marena gave up her position at Warren. Ana had to quit working for Executive Solutions and hire herself out directly to me and Marena (who, since I couldn’t access any of Jed1’s accounts, was now paying for everything herself). I was still bound by my Warren contract, but I started missing meetings with Warren staff—although of course, HR, the Warren investigative division, was now closely shadowing me, Marena, and everyone else on the team. Also, according to Marena’s connections inside the Warren Corporation, these events set the Warren board of directors against Lindsay, whom they began to try to phase out in favor of Laurence Boyle.

  Over the next two days, Marena worked with me on a series of posts to my Web site that would hint to Jed1 that I had returned from the past with a still-more-effective iteration in the ever-increasingly powerful Sacrifice Game. The idea was for Jed1 to suspect that this upgrade would overcome his plans. But even if he didn’t get as worried as we hoped he would about that, he’d still want to learn what had happened during the Human Game. For that matter, he’d be desperate to learn how to play the Human Game, even if he knew he’d disappear before he could ever use it. The Game was the central mystery of his life—of our life, let’s say—and no matter how his character had changed, he’d never be able to leave it unsolved.

  Most cleverly, though—and this was Marena’s idea—the posts were pretty well hidden, but went out twice a day, and each one had a little more information than the last. We wouldn’t be able to see where he’d accessed them from—he’d be way too careful for that—but if we got Jed1 talking about them, we might be able to suss out which post he’d seen last, and even maybe when he’d seen it, and that might give us a sense of how on the ball he was, Net-wise. It wasn’t much but it was all we had for now.

  Otherwise, I just kept doing interviews about the trailer—teleconference only—to prop up the perception that I was soon to be the next Chris Hemsworth. I did okay, but in between gigs I kept getting bouts of unnecessary surliness. Sillily, my biggest emotional problem was that I knew Marena thought No Way had sold us out to the Guate military, but that she was just plain wrong. She thought I was in denial about this, but I knew him and there was just no way he’d do that. He’s dead, I thought. Still, I’d have to deal with that later. If there was a later.

  As per my recommendations we kept putting out little bits of propaganda. For instance, at 4:55 EST on Sunday night, we posted something—coded, and in a very difficult-to-find location—about Kristen Stewart, the Twilight girl. We kept waiting to hear from the Jedster. Finally, on November 16, a caller ID popped up on Marena’s most private line: JED.

  ( 88 )

  “Hi, it’s Jed,” Jed1 said. His voice was heavily processed to eliminate background clues, but Ana’s telephone technicians quickly determined that it was really him. You could hear that he was smiling.

  Ana was all over it. “Okay, the second relay’s in.” This was the telephone code locator. “That’s—that’s U.S., so, it’s in, um—”

  Antonio said, “Pawleys Island. North Carolina. Jed’s old beach house.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Ana snapped, “Probably.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s about a two-hour drive from there.”

  “Got it,” Ana said. “Okay, Antonio, you take the big chopper. We’ll find a car there.”

  “Never mind, I’ll put in a bike.”

  “Like, a chopper in the chopper?” I said.

  “Right.”

  “Good deal,
” Ana said. “Just, keep an eye out for decoy relays. And bombs and the usual shit.”

  “He’s not going to have any booby traps,” I said.

  “Not your style, huh?” she said. I stared. “It’s classier to just vaporize the whole place, right?”

  “Okay, let’s not bust Jed’s balls,” Marena said. “Jed-Sub-Three’s.”

  “What’s left of them,” I said.

  “Sorry,” Ana said.

  The team also ascertained that Jed1 was using a chain of physical relays—pairs of telephones set up in different locations around the country—to make the call difficult to trace, since by the time each location was tracked down, and the next one in the chain was identified, he’d be long gone. Even so, this was a huge step forward for the team, and I—trying to ignore the oddity of talking with myself—took over the call.

  I said, “Aren’t you curious about what’s going to happen in the future?”

  “There isn’t any future.”

  “Don’t you want to meet Kristen Stewart?” I asked. “We just signed her for the sequel.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh.” Hmm, I thought.

  “Look, get your heads together and poke me on HarpoCrazy,” he said. It was an anonymous-messaging site that I, or he, had used before for talking to the posse at La Sierra. Ordinarily it wasn’t anything that the Warren code spooks couldn’t crack, of course, but he’d be covering his digital trail anyway, way before the message ever got to the site. So I guess he just wanted to make sure nobody else would come across the exchange. One thing HarpoCrazy did do well was keep their text off search engines. Supposedly the NSA has a whole division that just keeps on breaking into the site, twenty-four hours a day.

  “Uh, okay,” I said. “HarpoCrazy.”

  He hung up.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Marena asked. “You have to keep him on the phone!”

  “He just screwed up,” I said.

  “How?”

  “He just told us where he is without realizing it.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Or because he didn’t think about it. He got that Kristen Stewart post. And he wasn’t looking for it. So he must have played the Game and just found it. I mean, the weekly Grandessa Game.”

  “Okay, that’s terrific, so that tells you what?”

  “Well, I do that, I mean, you know, he does that right after midnight Mass. That means it’s already Sunday there.”

  “Where he is.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s only Saturday.”

  “Right, so, where does that mean he is?”

  She thought for about a half-second. “So it’s super-early there? So it’s in the Pacific. Near the international date line.”

  “Correct. Right here, we’re, you know, we’re Coordinated Universal Time minus five hours. But wherever he is, it’s UTC plus fourteen.”

  “So it’s an island. It’s, it’s some nudibranch thing?”

  “Correct. And there was a big new species discovery out there, and it came out in the JMS, uh, the Journal of Malacological Studies, in December, I mean, it was the December issue, but it got published in October. Mexichromae zenobia. That’s a kind of possibly eusocial ’branch, uh, nudibranch—”

  “Right, right, so where is he?” Her thumb hovered twitchily over the CALL icon on her tablet.

  “Guess.”

  “Come on, don’t bust my ovaries, where where where where where?”

  “Where’s Zenobia from?”

  The Recent Solar Obscuration as Witnessed at Ixmul

  Curious Antiquities of British Honduras

  By Subscription • Lambeth • 1831

  ( 89 )

  Google-Earth “Palmyra Atoll” and at first you won’t see anything there, but if you zoom down to the maximum you’ll bring up a linked pair of tiny islands, looking up at you like a white domino mask. If we’d had to stick to commercial travel, it would have taken us eighty-one hours to cover the 6,750 miles. But Marena’d been mending some fences with Lindsay and Boyle and she’d convinced them to lend us one of his Gulfstreams and a crew of three. They took us from Orlando to Twentynine Palms in five hours, and from there we got on one of their decommissioned C-17 Globemasters and flew to Wheeler Base in Wahiawa, in the center of Oahu, in eleven hours, and from there it took five and a half hours to get to Kiribati. We took a cigarette boat to Palmyra and met Ana’s crew, who were on a stealthier boat called the Gotengo, just before sunset.

  As I’d explained, a bit breathlessly, to Marena, Jed1 had to have used the Game to find that hidden post on Kristen Stewart. And he said, “I just got that,” which meant he’d found it during his Game of the Week. Which he does on Sunday night at seven P.M. And the only place where it was already seven o’clock was in the Line Islands, which are practically sitting on the international date line. And the most interesting spot in the Line Islands was Palmyra Atoll, because that’s where the newly discovered possibly eusocial nudibranchs were. Although when you spell it all out it seems a lot less magical.

  The Gotengo rode low in the water, and weirdly slushily, I guess because it was some new kind of stealth thing, all Kevlar and carbon fiber. It was forty-two feet, which would normally seem like a lot to a reef bum like me, but most of that was under the waterline, and the eight of us—Marena, Ana, and five male security contractors, or let’s just be blunt and call them mercenaries, and me—kept bumping each other as we squatted in the ungenerous deck space. Actually, Gotengo wasn’t the boat’s real name, or rather it didn’t have a name, just numbers and a two-terabyte spec disk that told you things like how it was built by VT Halmatic and that it was tested for ninety knots, which is huge. But we wouldn’t be doing any racing.

  “They’re talking about the storm,” Megalon said. Of course, “Megalon” wasn’t his real name, which I didn’t know. I did know, though, that he was an ex-commodore in the SBS, that is, the Special Boat Service, which is like the UK version of the Navy SEALs. He spoke in that low-key-but-still-working-class way British grunts all have, with a vestige of Australian. He was big and naturally jovial and he’d let his hair grow out a bit now that he was in the private sector, but he still had what they used to call military bearing and a tattoo with a stubby gladius and a banner that said something like BY STRENGTH AND GUILE. Good plan, I thought. He was talking about the people on Jed1’s charter, the Blue Sun, or rather I should say the Matango. You couldn’t see it from here, but the sonar said it was right out there, three thousand and twenty-eight ESE. Oh, and Megalon was telling us because he was talking on his in-ear phone to our audio lady, who was below with the captain and another IT person. Audio Lady—well, let’s use her dumb alias, Mothra—seemed really good. I’d tried listening to the raw audio coming in from the Matango, but it just sounded like a hyena in a wind tunnel. You had to be a veteran sound geek to take the stuff off the three differently tuned parabolic microphones, sort it out, denoise it, interpret it, and summarize it for the likes of the rest of us.

  “Reptar wants him to come up in a half hour. Ogra says no.” “Reptar” was the skipper of the Matango. Ogra was Jed1.

  “I used to like to go in a little after sunset,” I said. Most ’branchs don’t roll out of their crooks and nannies until dark. “Except—”

  “Hah!” Megalon went. “Okay, there they go.” He said that Ogra had gone in with two other divers, possibly bodyguards, and they were swimming south, without tow sleds, toward the extreme tip of the reef. “Eighteen minutes.” We wanted to spend as little time in the water as possible, and I’d said how my average dive was about seventy minutes. So if we could get there in forty-two minutes, and we wanted to catch them toward the end, when they were tired. I shifted on the little drop-down seat. Eeekch. My tow-harness’s crotch strap was chafing the tenderest segment of my perineal raphe, but I didn’t want to unzip and grub around in there in front of Marena and Ana. A trio of brown pelicans shuffled over us, boogying west. Way off in the east, a low scroll of c
louds was turning to what Joseph Conrad had called “that sinister olive.” I checked the little screen on my left wrist. It was six minutes to sundown on Friday, December 2, that is, sixty-three hours after we’d ID’d the boat. Weatherwise it was sixty-four degrees, with seventy percent relative humidity, wind southeast at eighteen miles per hour, and cloudy with a chance of annihilation. Tide was high water minus one hour and waves were two to three feet SW, and choppy. The clouds in the east were part of a late tropical storm building up over Antigua, forty miles away, and according to the Meg man they could be a problem—or “issue,” which I guess was worse than a problem—but it wasn’t yet.

  “So why’s he got guards unless he’s expecting us?” Marena asked.

  “Maybe it’s just for safety,” Megalon said. “With the current. Or maybe they’re just friends.”

  “Friends?” I asked.

  “Do you not have any friends?” he asked back.

  “No, it’s—I mean, haven’t we been monitoring all my friends? Like, all one of them?”

  “Yeah, we have,” Ana said. “Then they’d have to be new friends,” Megalon said. He pulled on a full face mask—yellow fiberglass face complete night-vision goggles and bolts at the temple. It had an exposed wire breathing apparatus that curved around from his neck and made him look like the Vincent Price Fly wearing a supersized Essix retainer.

  “That doesn’t sound likely,” I said. Must readjust groin area, I thought. Megalon’s voice sounded beefy and determined even over the com link. “Even if they’re females, we’re going to treat these friends as armed frogmen,” it said. “Grab, contain, and retrieve.”

  Sir, righto sir, I thought. Someone handed me a BandMask®, Bandkeepers®, and a SuperFlow® regulator. I started strapping the gear on, expertly, until Ana just took it from me and strapped it sadistically tight. ITCH! OUCH! IOUTCH! MUST! ADJUST! NOW! A glint of yellow flashed on the underside of the green cloud front just as my full face mask was closing down on me. Not a good sign. Marena was looking at it too so I half-stood up and sneaked my hand into the old crotch area behind my harness. Ahh. A little more. Damn, she was looking at me. What the hell. I sat back down, bobble-heading heavily under the mask.