Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

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, Caculha Huracan, the Heart of Heaven, Quetzalcoatl?”

Faux Dvorak 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, Teotihuacan, 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.

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 slightly 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.

“Really?”

“We’ll all die.”

“So stop the test.”

“I can’t do that,” he said. “Get on the phone to the Pentagon.”

“Never mind.”

“You want to die right now?” he asked.

“It’s fine,” I said. “Marena and I have a lover’s death pact, and you’re an evil bastard.”