The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  “Listen, Lindseed,” I whispered, “call them off now. Seriously.”

  “This is Lindsay Warren, stay there!” he yelled at them. “FLOOR GUARDS, STAND FAST!” They paused. “I’ll page you in a second,” he said.

  We turned our back on them and went in. The door sealed itself behind us. Lindsay led us into the box, past the Great Glass Elevator and the windows looking down on the interior of the Hyperbowl. A stage with a proprietary Sleeker-friendly surface stage had rolled out over the ball pit and they were doing some kind of elaborate rite, or what they would call a halftime show or awards ceremony. The recipient of whatever it was—some of the signage said it was the Oskars, but since they spelled it that way I figured they had had trouble with the actual Oscars, which might still be going on somewhere—was standing on a scaffold in a tiara, giving a speech about how lucky and well-meaning she was. The VVIP SkyBox was empty, with signs of recent recreational use.

  “Let’s talk in the Blue Bin, or whatever you call it.”

  Lindsay punched a code into a panel on the far wall. The door slid to the side with a little sizzle. It was probably just a sound effect they’d put in to make the whole thing seem more cool. I made sure I’d remembered the code and then made the three of them go in first.

  Lindsay’s Blue Room—which was really known as the Safe Room, or the Sealing Room—was steel-lined on all four sides and had no windows. It had only been slightly face-lifted since Jed1 had been here, so it was still about two rope-lengths square, with a one-rope-length ceiling and only two doors, one directly opposite the door we’d come through. There was a square black-granite conference table in the center of the room, off-angle so that you could sit at it and see all four walls, and in the center of the table, about an arm square, a DHI holo-block layout of the Game, with the center bin taken up by a small model of the temple district and stadium complex of Neo-Teo. It was turned off, with only a single green light marking our position in the stadium, but I could still see that it had been vastly improved. The only other solid things in the room were twelve black chairs. The ceiling was white and emanated a cheap-feeling ethereal glow, and the walls looked like blue silk. Each had what looked like a big oil painting in a wide black frame. Directly across from us, that is, on the western wall, there was a scene of Lehi arriving in the Promised Land in an odd sort of boat like a wooden submarine. On our right there was a bigger canvas of Christ in America. It showed Jesus upstage left, his hands outstretched showing his wounds, and behind him the Pyramid of the Castillo at Chichen Itza. A group of rather Anglo-looking ancient Maya surrounded Christ, regarding him with varied attitudes of gratitude and awe. One of the women was wearing a huipil that was almost authentic, but the men sported anachronistic gold neck-plates and quetzal-plumed pickelhaubes like nineteenth-century Prussian officers. On our left another mural showed Nephi Making Gold Plates. Behind him, Teotihuacán burned, except, judging from the fall foliage around him, Teotihuacán seemed to be somewhere in Upstate New York. The last painting, above the door we’d come through, showed the Angel Moroni appearing to Joseph Smith, pointing out the buried Plates of Nephi with his radiant finger.

  “Have a sit,” I said to Lindsay, pointing to the center chair on the table’s southeast side. “Keep your fingers off the tabletop.” Be more careful, I thought. I fingered the detonator buttons on my phone. “Put your hands through the arms of the chair and on your thighs. Please.”

  He did. As he raised his arms his jacket pulled a bit on the Bom and he winced a little.

  “Push your chair back an arm. Two feet. Right.” I took a crushed roll of clear packing tape out of my lapel pocket and tossed it to Marena. She did not catch it. “It is just tape,” I said. I got her to pick it up off the floor and tape Lindsay’s wrists to the arms of the Aeron. After some explanation, I got him to cross his feet behind the chair’s stalk, and Marena taped them to the base. I also had her run two loops around his chest and around the headrest. The Bom would not go off from pressure, but I did not want him weakening its hold on his flesh by slamming back and forth. I took off my live badge, slid it over to her, and had her exchange it with Lindsay’s. I had Marena sit in the central southwest and tape her own ankles. She slipped her feet out of shoes that, according to Jed’s irksome memory for trivia, were vintage albino-boa-skin Roger Viviers. I was about to tell her to put them back on and then decided against it. I did her last wrist myself, not getting too close. She was tricky. But she believed I could do what she wanted. I think.

  I clipped Lindsay’s live badge to my chest and sat cross-legged in the center of the northwest.

  Whew. A breather. Finally. I spat out my plastic cheek inserts and rubbed the fake fingerprints off my hands, switching my phone from one to the other. Do not let go of that, I thought.

  “Okay,” Lindsay said. “Now, what kind of a deal are you looking for?”

  ( 112 )

  Lindsay was certainly less surprised about all this than one might have thought. I suppose that like any businessman, he was always expecting a shakedown. And in fact, that was probably the right thing to expect from a domehead like Jed. But from me it was not, or rather from me it would not be for money. He was about to get shaken down for the main event.

  “The first thing we need to do is harden this room,” I said.

  I tapped the tabletop. The granite effect disappeared and a keyboard and standard interface screen—Warren proprietary, but basically like Windows—bloomed on its north quadrant. The tabletop functioned as a single large touchscreen, leading to a station that could control hundreds of Warren’s networks. I got to Lindsay’s personal desktop, to MENU, to SEALING ROOM SYSTEMS, and to ISOLATE SEALING ROOM SYSTEMS, before I had to ask for Lindsay for a password. He gave me one and it worked. When I closed the vault-style doors over the standard door behind us I could almost feel the steel dead bolts sliding shut. I did the same thing with the rest of the floor, locking down the Great Glass Elevator, the six other elevators, and even, contrary to regulations in nonprivate countries, the fire doors to the stairs. According to the room’s HELP file, they could not be opened from outside, even if there were a fire. Lindsay had probably guessed that I would make contact at some point, although he had not expected this situation. On the one hand, I could not get out of here. But on the other hand, Ana’s group couldn’t use any of the usual hostage-grabbing tactics, or even exotic ones like CCV, that is, Cognition-Compromising Vapor, or stupid-making gas. So far, Lindsay’s millennial paranoia, especially his care in constructing his refuge, was working against him. I looked at my watch. It was 3:23 P.M.

  “I’m awfully busy,” Lindsay said. He sounded less worried than one might think.

  “I know,” I said. “Do not worry. If everything goes well, I am not going to interfere with the invasion.”

  Lindsay and Marena both reacted to this, although I had the sense that only Lindsay knew what I was talking about.

  “All right,” I said. “Well, as always, the first thing is to get drugs. I understand there is a new formulation of the tsam lic.”

  “That’s correct,” Lindsay said.

  “There should be some in a wall safe in this room.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Let’s see,” I said.

  After some back-and-forth, he told me how to open the safe. The door swung out of the blue-silk-looking wall without any booby traps. There were a few interesting-looking things inside—storage chips, wrapped cash, jewelry rolls, the Vase of the Seven Xibalban Gods that used to be in the Art Institute of Chicago—but all I took out was a pharmacy bottle labeled 41-037. It was full of white gelcaps.

  “Where is the bar?” I asked.

  Lindsay told me. It opened the same way. It was a whole little alcove with hot and cold running everything, so I got a glass of warm water. I opened one of the gel caps and tasted the powder. Even though it was a synthetic version, my tongue could still tell that it was the real deal, and more potent than ever. I swallowed the powde
r and pocketed the rest of the capsules. I drank the water.

  By now the Hyperbowl took up most of our field of view. It had been refaced and enlarged and was now an impossibly huge truncated cone, stepped like a pyramid but too squat and too big, a gold-glass-sheathed tumor that supposedly seated 255,300 people. A ring of 365 vertical white lasers, bright enough to be visible in daylight, beamed from the roof up into space in an update of the Lichtdom, Albert Speer’s searchlight pillars at the Party Conference at the Zeppelintribune in 1934. Despite its hugeitude, though, the stadium was just part of a larger sports district. Off to the north I could see something like the Disney Mad Hatter’s Tea Party Ride. A little east of that, gladiators in furry suits fought in big clear balls. The whole thing had a sense of continuous, controlled combat, a cross between extreme fighting, a rave party, and an elegant promenade. Most people had sandals with some kind of Sleeker striations on the soles that functioned as skates. Some of them were pushing carts with gliders instead of wheels. I tried to read their clans by the color coding, but I got the feeling that clan membership was decided more by competition and adoption than by birth. Anyway, most people from the powerful clans were probably inside waiting for the Big Hipball Game, the ball game that would, presumably, launch the new era. Everyone else would watch it on whatever the new 3-D system was—probably a better view, at this point, but reality still had a certain prestige. The pipes sounded again three octaves up, and I recognized what they were playing: the introduction to “Stairway to Heaven.” Christ, I thought, what is this, the Class of 1978 Junior Prom? Evidently the revolution hadn’t been exclusively a highbrow event.

  Wait a beat, I thought. Had I thought that, or was it Jed? I barely knew what a junior prom was. The last thing I needed was for Jed to start butting in again. Well, worry about that later.

  “So, Lindsay?” I asked. “Let us play Password.”

  “What password is that?” he asked.

  “Let’s just get into the sysop desk first.”

  “All right,” he said. I slid a phone over to him—not my own, but one of the three fresh ones I’d brought along. I liberated his right hand. He spent some time flexing the circulation back into it, as though he was reluctant to start, and I was about turn up his dorsal joy-buzzer when he typed thirteen keys and slid it back to me. It said SAMARANA7104.

  I pecked it out on the lengthening password list in my own phone. I wished I still had Jed1’s brain’s facility for remembering everything. But why get hung up on details?

  I typed in the password one-handed on the desktop. Marena snuck a look at what I was doing but there was a chunk of DHI model between her and my hand.

  A menu came up labeled SEALING ROOM PROFILES. It looked pretty simple. Lindsay’s programmers had made the interface so user-sycophantic anybody could do it.

  I touched an item called SET VIDEO WALLS. The big “paintings” of Christ in America and whatever disappeared and the walls went to black. The ceiling light dimmed and a vast A-chord came from an angelic choir everywhere at once.

  The walls began to fill up with stars and, one after another, Mercury, Venus, Earth, and the other neighborly planets, all complacently rouletting around the solar drain. The room’s walls, ceiling, and even floor were entirely covered with a seamless mosaic of DHI video panels, so a huge number of interface windows, from any source, could be called up and displayed simultaneously. Since Jed had last seen it, the system had been upgraded with iris-sensing xographic panels that could display in 3-D, and the current show was overusing the effect, trying to make us feel like we were really floating through a friendlier version of outer space.

  “The Great White God of Ancient America still lives!” an impossibly deep voice said. An image of a tall, Caucasian Jesus rose out of outer space. “The divine personage that emerges from the discoveries of archaeologists now stands out as an unassailable reality.”

  “I don’t think that is the right channel,” I said.

  “Try Five,” Lindsay said.

  “This being,” the room said, “known to the Mayans as Kukulcan, to the Mexicans as Quetzalcoatl, was also known as Wixpechocha in Chiapas . . .”

  “Jeez, Lindsay,” Marena said. “You’re really into this bullshit, aren’t you?”

  I found Channel Five. A long menu came up.

  “Who was this Great White God who appeared to the ancient Americans?” James Oreo Vader-Jones asked. “The Father of the Maya, Caculhá Huracán, the Heart of Heaven, Quetzalcoatl?”

  Faux Dvorák music welled up.

  “Who was the Feathered Serpent, the White and bearded Lord of Light? He is Jesus the Christ, the Savior of all Mankind.”

  “How do we turn this off?” I asked.

  “I’ll do it,” Lindsay said.

  “We are not going to untape you,” I said.

  “Try END TOUR PRESENTATION,” he said.

  “I mean, I hate to break it to you,” Marena said, “but Jesus Hershel Christ did not fly over to Central America and rap with the Oldmexes or the Latexes or whoever, and he definitely was not Itchy Coo-Coo or Kukluxfranandoli or whatever the shit his name was, the whole thing is just ri-fucking-diculous.”

  “Millions of people believe it,” Lindsay said. Don’t they have something more important to talk about? I wondered. It’s amazing how they chitchat around here. The world could be ending and they’d—well, in fact—never mind. Keep typing, I thought. Don’t look at the keyboard, it’ll just confuse you. Use Sic’s muscle memory. Damn. I was having trouble finding the command. I tried again. How many attempts before it turns itself off? On the screens we were being treated to a montage of aerial shots of other Mesoamerican sites, Cleft Sky, Teotihuacán, and Ix. I got that hometown feeling.

  “So what,” Marena said, “millions of people believe, like, I don’t know, they believe that Kenneth Branagh’s a talented actor. They believe anything anybody ever tells them. Whatever.” She was getting more nervous and less articulate. On the big video display the heavenly outer space had been replaced by postcardy shots of the Ciudadela at Chichen.

  “When the Crucifixion took place and the earthquake shook Palestine, even worse conflagrations swept over the Western Hemisphere . . .”

  Marena turned to me. “Doesn’t this stuff upset you?” she asked. She was trying to feel me out a bit.

  “Not really,” I said, trying to look like I knew what I was doing.

  “The Book of Mormon tells the story of the Christ in the New World . . .”

  Hah. Found it. Kill.

  The Christ in America show winked out. The walls went to black.

  “Thank the Lord,” Marena said. Actually, she was right. I hated what I’d seen of Christianity even more than Jed had. It had such a bad case of the cutes. I mean, just for one thing, crucifying someone on a world-tree is not the most painful thing you can do to him. Not to brag, but if I were going to get to be Supreme Ruler of the Entire Universe for doing it, I could hang out nailed to a cross all day and barely even notice. In fact, I bet I could roll jade earspools through my fingers on both hands and sing the Harpy Ball Brethren marching song over and over, all day, for three days.

  I touched HYPERBOWL LOCAL SURVEILLANCE.

  ( 113 )

  The model of Neo-Teo in the center of the table lit up. A corresponding map came up on the far wall. Numbered windows from hundreds of cameras all over the compound blossomed over the walls. There were panoramas of the temple and sports districts and other key locations, and even a view from a satellite exactly 11,088,000 inches directly overhead. A few showed the festivities down in the arena. The Celebrity who we’d seen before, whose name I still forget, was finishing a sappy offering chant. Next to it, on a live window running the big in-house show, we were being treated to close-ups of audience reactions, teenage boys laughing, teenage girls singing along, and fat women weeping happily, sobbing happily away, getting their daily catharsis. I checked out a view of the main lobby downstairs. The party seemed to be going on fine, only sligh
tly subdued after the Weiner incident. Another window, twenty-three, showed an overhead view of the rotary outside the East Gate, the one we had come through. A protest outside had already gotten out of hand, and Warren security guards with giant transparent shields were forming a sort of tortoise, almost like the Teotihuacanian infantry’s. Foam spray appeared out of an invisible fire hose and covered the dark mass of protesters with white flakes. I panned the camera back with the cursor. Belize police in electric ATVs were crowding around the edges of the rotary like overzealous T-cells.

  “A riot,” I said. “Fun.”

  I blew up a few of the windows that were most important to me personally: specifically, those showing the fire stairs, elevator shafts, and the floor below us. Doug was on twelve. Ana Vergara had a team in each of the stairways. She was in the one that led to the fire exit on the outside, that is, the nonstadium side, of the Safe Room. It was a whole little army with shotguns and assault carbines, and they had also gotten two whole destruction crews together, with electric rams and oxyacetylene torches and sensors and gas mines and paramedics and whatever, like they were ready to take on Kim Jong-uns secret redout under Mount Myohyang. I made sure I had good views up of the empty VIP box and the rest of the deserted thirteenth floor. Finally, I blew up two windows of the Safe Room itself, one showing the three of us from the north side, as though we were all reflected in a mirror that didn’t reverse, and another bigger window showing the whole room from a hidden lens somewhere overhead that made us look like three beetles feeding on a many-hued graham cracker.

  “Congratulations, Lindsay, you’re the last domino,” Marena said.

  “What’s that?” he asked, although I was sure that he knew.

  “Lindsay, listen,” I said. “If we can’t stop the test, we’re going to change the coordinates to zero-zero-zero.”

  “That means right here,” he said.