Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

Damn. There was still something in a crevice of my mind that I had to remember to remember.

“You know,” Marena said, “you’re really not going to enjoy hanging out with me if you keep thinking about her.”

“Who?”

“Lady Koh.”

I said, “Come to think of it, it’s true. I guess I’ve thought about her once or twice a day.” Maybe once or twice every hour. Ten minutes. One minute. A lot.

I’d been trying to contact No Way without any success. Lately I’d also been trying to contact Pablo Xoc, the headman from Xcanac, the village near Ix Ruinas-but he seemed to have disappeared.

A lot of things seemed to have disappeared.

Still, the world seemed reasonably durable around us, with carpeting, reasonably tasteful chairs, oceans, trees, plasma screens, mugs emblazoned with our corporate logo, the whole ball of low-melting-point wax. Kind of like the Cantor Fitzgerald offices at the World Trade Center, I thought. Just by virtue of its total banality, everything had an air of permanence. But it was totally illusory, of course. And Marena was increasingly desperate and Lindsay was constantly unyielding.

I reckoned I’d try one last heist.

I figured I’d run a Game-assisted hack-and-search of Warren files to see if I could find a “lever”-maybe a smoking gun (likely about their human testing) that could be used to blackmail the corporation and force them to stop the test.

I started by snooping through Marena’s former division’s computer network, using some passkeys she’d snuck in before leaving the company. Immediately, and slightly “ironically,” as they use the word these days, I found some files she wouldn’t have wanted me to see, videos that confirmed my long-standing suspicion that Marena’d recruited me from the beginning. As my privilege kept escalating, the unanswered questions escalated into vast, intertangled enigmas. One of the oddest was a file showing that Warren’s KIMERA Division-a branch of the Firm that I hadn’t heard of before-was also evidently interested in nudibranchs, with an installation of five thousand-gallon tanks in a building at the Stake. Did they get the idea from me somehow? Or is it just another synergy? Whatever it was, I didn’t have time to stop and investigate this any further, and, reluctantly, I moved on. I found another file that made it look to the reader as though LEON was going to be taking over and running the world, a la Neuromancer and its many descendants.

“Look,” Marena said, “remember, one thing the Neo-Teo project has going for it is that the Sacrifice Game actually works. You can’t say that about Allah.”

“I guess not.”

“The Game gets your life under control, you’re happy and peaceful-or ‘placeful,’ as they call it-without drugs, you see things coming a mile away, you’re instantly part of a simpatico community… it’s a whole thing. It’s the whole thing. And it appeals to smart people.”

Marena’s face had taken on yet another aspect. This time she looked as though she was standing in extreme cold, not chattering, but freezing, and suddenly unconscious that anyone else was in the room.

“You mean, like, religion doesn’t?”

“Heh. Well, you got me there.”

Marena left to see Max in a school production of Seascape and said she’d be back in two hours to deal with the Apocalypse. I put in an order at Porlock’s Artisinal Charcuterie, took a hot shower-as close as I could get to a proper sweat bath around here-and took three full doses of tsam lic. Following the offering formula I’d learned in Olde Mayaland, I pierced my skimpy, mutilated half-foreskin-a difficult thing for me to make myself do, because of my early history of hemophilia-with an ancient jade artificial stingray spine, polished by forty generations of hands and genitals, that had been a gift from Hun Xoc, and which (along with the 9 Death pot and a few other mementi) was among the few items from Jed 2 ’s tomb that I still had. I scattered, or-let’s say to be fancy, lustrated-the blood onto a petition letter to One Ocelot, which asked for a clear vision in my playing of the Sacrifice Game. I went in the bathroom, disabled the smoke detector, turned on the exhaust fan, and burned the letter in a dish of (smuggled) charcoal and copal. As the drug began to bring on its special brand of awareness, I slipped on a new type of Warren ultralite data-glove (which they were planning to market as the “Holopaw”) and called up the on-screen version of Ix Professional, which, as in Taro’s lab, had also been integrated with most major programming languages and search engines.

“Teech Aj Chak-’Ik’al la’ ulehmb’altaj ‘uyax ahal-kaab Ajaw K’iinal…” I said, rooting myself in the software. “You, Hurricane, who sparked Lord Heat’s first dawning…”

This time, even though I was still casting the skulls and sending out a runner-both of which were now more along the lines of cellular automata than humans, centipedes, or whatever-I wasn’t exactly asking the Game a question about the Unrevealed. Instead, right now I was using it as a sort of combination decrypter and next-generation search engine, something that would let me hack into Warren’s network and lead me through its masses of data to what I wanted to find. I don’t think anyone who wasn’t using the Game could even have gotten a three-digit foot in the door. But with it, I managed to work my way through several layers of encryption to the company’s primary secure server and to a long list of “auxiliary assets,” which seemed to be like a shareholders’ report, but too dirty for the actual shareholders to see. At first there was so much to look through that I had to guess where to start. The Warren Group’s holdings included companies dealing in “everything from aerospace to zooplasty”-including, I noticed, a shell corporation that owned a controlling piece of Executive Solutions, “making at least that part of the deal nicely in-house.” I tried these files under “Lindsay Warren.” An index came up that included a list of all the meetings Lindsay attended personally. I searched the transcripts of this list for the phrase Parcheesi Project. The first file in the results was dated 11/01/01. I opened its first video component, “Introductory Remarks by LSW.”

On the screen I saw Lindsay standing at a lectern in front of a giant video wall flashing news clips, PowerPoint pie charts, and other trappings of early-twenty-first-century corporate presentations.

“Since Nine-Eleven,” Lindsay said, now in front of a slow-motion video of the imploding towers, “there has been a realization-at the highest level-that America needs a new warrior ideology, one that can compete directly with Islam’s.

“As many of you know, in our own participations in these discussions, we’ve stressed that images of the Stars and Stripes and Uncle Sam and stories about George Washington weren’t going to do the trick.” The picture behind Lindsay faded to one of marching mujahideen. “All that fooferaw was too associated with oldsters, too easy to make fun of. Basically it just wasn’t sexy. What we need on this ranch is something more stylish. More mystical. More youthy.”

The image behind Lindsay changed to the great Ciudadela pyramid at Chichen Itza.

“Now, in our last presentation to the Joint Chiefs, which I don’t need to tell you went very, very well, we made the case that the Boy Scouts had the right idea, using Native American words and concepts… but of course even us Eagle Scouts never really knew what we were talking about.”

There was a scattering of polite laughter.

“But today,” Lindsay said, “we can pick it back up and take it farther than it’s ever been, utilizing every one of our areas of expertise-new media, old media, postmedia media, psychotechnology…”