The Sacrifice Game Read online

  The account of the Game was in a Maya codex, a screenfold book, that had just been photographed, and it had more in it than just a fuller version of the Game. There were “goals”—which you might, with a bit of tabloidal exaggeration, call predictions—going all the way up to the thirteenth b’aktun—that is, the so-called End of Time date in 2012. Of course, like a lot of entertainment companies, they were all very interested in the whole 2012 thing. Like they say, Mayan calendars sell like there’s no tomorrow. And, almost needless to say, I’d never been into it. It had always been a bunch of New Age losers and disappointed Y2K conspiracy kooks sitting around in extra-large Jedi costumes and making up disaster scenarios out of Captain Future. But when I saw the new codex, the Codex Nuremburg—well, basically, among other things, it predicted the attack on Disney World six days later, on the twenty-ninth. Which, despite some recent contenders, is still, with 104,774 confirmed deaths and half a million casualties, the most deadly terrorist act so far. Not counting this one, of course.

  So, to make a long—oops, too late—well, to at least cut the story off at the knees: after the DWH, the Disney World Horror, I got deeper in with Marena’s people, and even met the head of the whole conglomerate, Lindsay Warren. The discouraging thing was that Taro’s team and I didn’t do too well at figuring out how to play the version of the Game we’d gotten from the Codex. But I found out they had another approach to it in the works, something pretty bizarre, or, well, at least pretty futuristic, although I guess not much more so than the Mars mission, glow-in-the-dark poodles, or your latest flexible-screen phone. They were planning to get data directly from the old days, and somebody from our era was going to go and pick it up. It wasn’t exactly time travel. In fact, there are reasons why real time travel, where you’d send someone’s body back to the past, was almost certainly always going to be impossible, no matter how advanced technology became. But there is a way to send energy. Basically, you can make something like a high-quality print of all the connections in Person A’s brain that encode his memories, and then print that pattern onto Person B’s brain. And—if you’ve adequately “wiped down” Person B’s own memories, so that he doesn’t get confused—Person B will believe he is Person A. Of course, you could use this process just to move consciousnesses around in the present day—and that’s something I figured Warren Labs was gearing up for—but in this case, Person B would be in the past. Specifically, he’d be a Maya ahau—a king—who’d know or at least have access to the full version of the Game, or more technically, to the “nine-stone” version. And he’d have the resources to preserve that knowledge so that, thirteen centuries later, we could dig it up. And then we might be able to use that to save ourselves from whatever’s lurking at the business end of 2012.

  At first—or at least this is how it seemed to me at the time—the team hadn’t been thinking of me as a candidate for projection into the past. Their first choice had been a younger student of Taro’s named Tony Sic, who was from Mérida, in the Yucatán, and who spoke Yukatekan Mayan, and who’d worked at the CPR, the Comunidad de Población en Resistencia, in Ixcán, and who was even pretty good at the Game, although of course not so good as I was. But I convinced them I was the better bet. Either that or, as I’ve lately come to suspect, they were thinking of sending me all along. Still, what matters is that my consciousness got successfully downloaded, sent through what they called a desktop wormhole, and projected back to AD 664.

  Still, things, as things do, started to go wrong before my duplicate self—whom I guess we could call Jed2—even got there. He was supposed to arrive in the brain of an ahau named 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the king of the city of Ixnichi Sotz, or Ix for short, in the Sierra de Chama region, in the center of what’s now Guatemala. He could just take over, watch some experts play the Game, and document everything. No sweat. Instead—according to Jed2’s letters—he’d turned up in the head of a star athlete named Chacal, who played the local big-time sport, hipball. It was something like how you’d imagine soccer if soccer balls weighed thirty pounds and were studded with razor blades. Chacal was about to roll himself down the local pyramid’s steps as an especially humiliating sacrifice, as a kind of proxy to keep 9 Fanged Hummingbird in power.

  But maybe I’m getting into more detail than we need here. The basics are that Jed2—uncharacteristically—was resourceful enough to worm his way out of his sacrifice predicament, find out something about the Game, and, amazingly, make it all the way to Teotihuacan, the capital of the Mexican highlands at that time, to score some drugs.

  ( 1 )

  The issue was that the high levels of the Game make demands on the human brain that the brain can’t meet without chemical help. And in AD 664, which was the only time Jed2 was going to get to hang out in Olde Mayaland, the main sources of the drugs had been monopolized by the two ruling clans of Teotihuacan. In fact, evidently this was one of the reasons for Teotihuacan’s eight-hundred-year longevity as a capital city, but this has already taken up a pretty big fraction of the time you have left so maybe you don’t need to learn any more history right now. Jed2 made his way to Teotihucán and met with a personage who was illustrated in the Codex, a sort of nun named Ahau-na Koh, or just Lady Koh. And through her, he got hold of some of the Game drugs, but in the process he seems to have set off the fire that finally destroyed the city. Although his letter’s a little reticent on this point. In fact his letters are frustrating in general and sometimes I suspect him, or myself, of editorializing. At any rate Jed2 and Lady Koh’s retinue made it at least as far as one of our prearranged search zones in Oaxaca, 270 miles from Teotihuacan. He buried the first cache of notes and Game drugs and, as planned, marked the burial spot with lumps of magnetite. There was a plan for him to inter a second set, along with his own body and possibly recoverable polymerized brain, in one of the royal tombs of Ix, although it looks as though he didn’t get that far and now we’ll never know. But back here—I mean back here like back now, in time—in 2012, Marena’s team dug up the stuff without any trouble. Taro came up with a software version of the full nine-stone form of the Game and Warren’s Lotos division came up with a synthetic version of the two types of drugs. And when I learned to play the Game on them, I—along with Tony Sic and several others of Taro’s students in the Warren program—found that Jed2 was right.

  I guess we could call the tsam lic compounds “smart drugs” if that didn’t make you think of G-Series Gatorade. They enabled one’s brain to behave less like a brain and more like—I don’t want to say like a computer, at least not like the sort of computer humans have invented, because it has a much more analogish, intuitive feel than that—but like some kind of cross between a superclock, a supercamera, and a super–slide rule. And we used it to avert the 2012 problem, or I guess now you have to say we thought we did. After a whole lot of hours using the Game to sift information—both from the Net in general and from NSA and other black databases—I tracked down a homegrown Canadian bioterrorist named Madison Czerwick who was just about to release a heavily tweaked version of a formerly military strain of Brucella abortus.

  Now, I realize all this sounds like I’m getting a little flighty, but the proof’s in the blood pudding, and in this case the Warren folks shared the information with the FBI and it checked out. And, using a multinational rapid response unit—just like in a Tom Clancy book, but without the colorful characters or expository dialogue—they grabbed Madison and isolated his tanks of bugs. And, when the lab at the CDC analyzed the stuff, it turned out that, yes, it really would have finished off almost all the human beings on earth, as well as the higher primates and a good fraction of lower primates, dogs, bears, pigs, and, for DNA-related reasons, toads, all right around the 2012 date. They even gave us all secret medals, which I guess are like invisible diamonds.

  Still, the Game can’t truly predict the future, since that can’t be done. That is, you could always just do something that would change whatever you saw. And even if you couldn’t do that, the Game�
�s not some magic teleidoscope that sees all ∞ random events. That’s impossible. It’s more like a lens that focuses your perception on the strings of events that follow your potential actions, an optimizer that helps create a successful outcome, whatever random events occur. It enables a leap in reasoning power. And as the world becomes more programmable every day—well, let’s say that as of now it’s programmable enough.

  As of December 10—Madison Day—I still hadn’t taken the full leap. But two hundred and sixty-nine days ago, on March 28, I dove in. I played farther into the Game than, I’m sure, anyone—even One Ocelot, whoever he was—ever has. And at the extreme core of the meaning of today, I came to what felt like a sort of mountain with a cave at its peak, and inside that cave—which was bigger than the mountain itself and in fact bigger than all outdoors—I could see, or hear, or sense, the people of the future, all crying in well-informed fear of being born, begging not to be brought into the world. Or at least this is what I saw on a figurative or, you might say, symbolic level. To put it more abstractly, I experienced a massive growth in capability of empathy, which is a mental act that requires insight and imagination. I realized—really realized, for the first time—that no matter how many good or happy experiences a person has, the bad experiences still outweigh them. And this doesn’t just go for the majority. It’s true for everyone. And, more than that, when you’re talking about people who aren’t born yet, the possible good times they might have aren’t benefiting anyone—since they don’t exist yet—but they’re definitely getting a benefit if they miss whatever bad experiences they’re going to have. And I tried, but there wasn’t any way to chip into the crystalline logic of this: For a consciousness, coming into existence was always, everywhere, and for all future times, a net loss.

  Yes, it sounds like I just had an oversoaked tab of C20H25N3O and came out as leary as Timothy Loony. But, even according to buttoned-up-and-down corporate types—even according to the FBI, which has got to be the least imaginative bunch of bureaucrats on the rock—the Game actually works. And nothing I saw was outside the Game’s—but wait a second. I don’t need to defend myself against the charge. I’m not writing this to defend or excuse myself or to ask for forgiveness. I’m just writing it the way that, if you’re the captain, you have a duty to inform the crew members of a battleship about the state of their vessel. And even if not a single one of the ~ 6,900,000,000 of you gets the logic, it still doesn’t matter. If you could follow along and take this leap in understanding, you’d agree. You’d thank me. And if I weren’t around, you’d do it yourself.

  Of course, you wouldn’t want to hurt anybody. Painlessness would be Number One. And Number Two would be the fact that even though you had a lot of money, you still couldn’t afford, say, your own collection of atomic bombs. You’d have to work out a way to do it that would get a big payoff from a small amount of catalyst, something as easy and natural as, well, as—

  Well, let’s put it this way. On 12.19.8.9.19, 4 Thunderhead, 17 Flood, I naturally just gawped at the havoc along with everybody else. And as the initial shock faded, I started to wonder what about it besides the obvious—that it was all those people, that it was an attack on what you’d thought was previously safe ground—was even more disturbing than the sum of those things would imply. Was it that it took me as long as it did to realize it wasn’t just a holographic trailer for some new Jerry Bruckheimer movie? Was it that you could actually feel some kind of presence there, that Luciferian grin in the gray clouds? Or was it, conversely, that there wasn’t any presence, that behind the smoke there was just blankness, blankness, and even more blankness? For a while I thought it was just because it was beautiful, that it was the most spectacular event witnessed in living memory, even more than D-day or the atomic blasts, about the way the jets just disappeared and about those Beardsleyesque ostrich plumes of dust as the sand castles imploded, so that when it was over you found yourself not feeling the deaths but just that cheap after-the-fireworks feeling you get when you wolf down a big gooey dessert and then look ashamed at the empty plate, and that I was disappointed with myself for thinking that way. But at some point I decided that what really chilled everyone was simply how easy it had been, close to effortless, even, as though those Pillars of Dagon had been built expressly to the size of this Samson wannabe and all he had to do was stand between them and give a little push . . . or I guess one could almost just say how simply inexpensive it was, how all you have to do is hang out at the Halal White Castle or wherever young, underachieving, swollen-testicled hadjis congregate, cut a dozen or so of the most impressionable ones out of the herd, spring for a few thousand dollars’ worth of flight lessons and a round of X-Actos, and suddenly it’s the Decline of the West. For a little while, until their self-delusion apparatus kicked in again, quite a few people—despite all the time and effort people spend on making themselves feel like everything’s okay, despite how denial, in various forms, has always been the world’s biggest industry—folks came close to comprehending how much they lived in a house of cards, how much it was like they’d been keeping a glass bottle of lukewarm liquid trinitrotoluene on the edge of their coffee table and letting their kids and dogs run around, how—well, you get the picture. But on the other hand, if you were an aspiring destroyer—a “doomster,” as we call them down at the Warren Family—it gave you a sense of limitless possibility. It inspired you to go it one better.

  Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons I have to do this. 9/11 inspired a lot people, not just me and Madison. According to the Sacrifice Game Engine that we were now running on LEON, the Lab’s main AI engine, there are at least sixty aspiring doomsters out there who have a good shot at killing ten million or more people. I can practically see them, beavering away in their basements on homebrew viruses, packing the remains of tossed smoke detectors into dirty bombs, refining hundreds of pounds of ricin, and on and on. Madison was unusually talented but not unique. So if I don’t do this well, somebody else will do it, badly, in very short order. Any one of these losers could, and will, unleash his garbage at any moment. And from what I’ve had time to track with the Game, the scenarios aren’t encouraging. The odds are good that the next few decades, and more, are going to be characterized by wars, famines, depressions, government repression, torturous deaths, wasting diseases, parents eating children and vice versa, and on and on. Things are definitely going to get bad, and bad is worse than people realize.

  Like I say, the Game lets you read ahead and work out exactly what to program. By read I mean, in the sense of a great Go player reading a hundred moves ahead. But with the Sacrifice Game I was reading hundreds of thousands of moves ahead, in hundreds of thousands of much more complicated “games” all over the world, tracing a single chain through the latticework of contingency that would lead to—well, let’s just say it leads to what I think is definitely the best available way to do it. Definitive, painless, and, once begun, inexorable. Now, that’s progress. Eleven years, one month, and twenty days later, it took only one tap on a touch screen to trigger an event that, if there were anyone around to witness it, would make the World Trade Center event seem quaint. Now, that’s progress.

  Actually, there will be one near-witness: me. 4.564 hours—from the post time, the release time above, plus, say, four minutes for your reading up to this point—as I count down the quarter-seconds on the atomic clock, there’ll be a moment when, as I’m wondering whether I could have made a mistake in calculation and the whole thing will be a nonevent, for, I think a little less time than one of those quarter-seconds, more like, say, 700,000 microseconds—about two p’ip’ilob—two blinks, as we say in Mayan—I’ll see and feel things change around me, I’ll notice that something huge and strange is happening, and for about another quarter second, just before I cease to be, I’ll know that I hadn’t made a mistake, that I’d gotten it all exactly right.

  So, that’s my whole story. And there’s nothing left to do but wait for the bigger nothing.

&nb
sp; Probably you still don’t agree. But you would if—hmm, I almost said “if you were honest with yourself.” Well, what with everything else I don’t also want to put you down, but it’s true. Just look around a little, check out the world a bit, and it seems as obvious as a = a. The average person just wants to—

  Huh. Serendipity. Just while I was typing this bit, about the average person, I noticed a headline on my news screen:

  Bridge Demolition Provokes Soul-Searching in Akron

  AKRON, Ohio—Its official name, the one on maps and signs, is the All-America Bridge. But so many people have jumped off since it was built 32 years ago that it sometimes goes by a less-welcome nickname: the Suicide Bridge.

  Now the City of Akron has decided to do something about it, and plans to use more than fifteen million dollars of federal aid to destroy the bridge.

  Since the bridge was built in 1997, 468 people have died leaping from the bridge to their deaths in the Little Cuyahoga River Valley below. Police are called to the bridge to save would-be jumpers roughly twice a week. Neighbors below say bodies have damaged roofs. Four years ago, the city spent over a million dollars to build a safety fence, but this was circumvented by over sixty further jumpers. Mental health officials say the All-America Bridge has become a “magnet bridge”: one with a reputation for suicides, therefore drawing more troubled people to try to jump off it.