Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

“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?”

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 powder 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 SAMARANA 7104.

I pecked it out on the lengthening password list in my own phone. I wished I still had Jed 1 ’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.