Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

“Forget it,” he said.

“Lindsay…” Marena started. She paused. “Look, you just have to believe us on this one. It really is going to, you know, be like I said.”

“What?”

“It’s going to disappear EVERYTHING!”

“That’s ridiculous,” Lindsay said. “Jesus won’t allow that. Let alone the other gods.”

“The Sweeper’s going to go over a certain probability range,” Marena said. “And it’ll just suck in everything, you, me, the Grand Canyon, Jupiter, the Horsehead Nebula, the Sombrero Galaxy, Planet Qo’noS, the Roy Rogers Cometary Globule, everything.”

“So it won’t hurt,” he said.

“Not only will it not hurt, but you won’t even notice it.”

“This is malarky.”

“Fine,” I said. “Well, just to see what we can do… look, the fact is, we’re going to have to torture you.”

“Go ahead. The White God is going to get me through this one just like He’s done every time.”

“Look, Lindsay,” she said. “Boss. Why is it so important to you to run this test right this moment?”

“It’s not a test,” Lindsay said. “It’s air support.”

“For what? For an invasion of Pakistan?”

“That’s correct.”

“They’re invading right now?”

“Correct, Indian troops started crossing in from Srinagar as of-as of about eight minutes ago.”

“So I bet this is going to destroy Islamabad. That’s like two million people. If it weren’t going to destroy everything, I mean.”

“Miss Park, if we do not provide our allies this support, it’s not just going to be the end of the trail for the Warren Family. It’ll be the end of the United States of America.”

“Enough,” I said. “Get ready.” I took out my bone-scraper needle-it was really just an old woman’s hairpin-and an antiseptic towelette, sterilized it and Lindsay’s left elbow, and slid the pin into his ulnar nerve. There was a grunt deep inside him, and a half a flinch, but nothing else. He was tough.

I looked into his eyes. They looked back like two freshly drilled blue holes in the face of the Serpentine Glacier. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it was possible-maybe even likely-that Lindsay was one of those few people who have no fear whatsoever. Of course, even they respond to torture eventually. Like I say, no matter what you’ve heard, torture works. But it could take time. And there was no time. In fact, soon there’d be no time at all, anywhere. Two beads of sweat slid from his forehead into the hollow of his right cheek.

“We were afraid you were going to be difficult,” I said.

He didn’t answer. The ice holes looked back.

“So,” I said, “have you ever heard of Sampson Avard?”

“No.” He was lying. He was smooth, but there’d been a quarter-beat too much hesitation.

“I’ve got some letters from him that I put up for posting,” I said. I typed eighty-one characters into a Firefox window on the desktop, downloaded a PDF file from a very-far-offshore server, and flipped the window around and slid it over to him.

He looked at me for ten beats and then couldn’t resist looking down at the window. It was the real thing. He looked back at me.

“Well,” I said, “to answer your unspoken question, yes, I got that off the LDS vault server,” I said. “In Salt Lake. And, yes, we also have the other two hundred and nine sensitive files from the folder.”

“And he used the Game to do so, I’m reckoning,” Lindsay said, getting himself back together.

I nodded. Shut up, I thought. Contrary to media portrayals, a supervillain, or superhero or superantihero, should not explain to the other side what he’s about to do.

“And he gave the folder to your friend Quinones and Quinones gave it to you.”

I nodded.

“So, what’s it got to do with me?” he asked.

“You really don’t want this going out, do you?”

“I don’t care,” he said.

I pulled the window back, flipped it around again, and hit POST.

“Okay, it’s up,” I said. “Google it.”

He glared. At first I thought it was my imagination, but then I saw that it was happening: His ears were glowing pink.

“I only put up the first letter,” I said. “And, you know, it’s not, it’s not the worst one. My favorite’s the Joseph Smith eight-year-old girl rape stuff. Although the Elamites on Mars business is also pretty great. Right?”

His ears had become a true, deep red. That’s the trouble with being a WASP, I thought. Your eyes might be opaque, but your skin’s an open window.

“Fine,” he said. “The first password is RALSTON. All caps.”

I started typing.

We all watched the clock. 11:59:8, 11:59:9, Noon. All in. Les jeux sont faits, motherfuckers. It was the cosmic sell-by date:

I looked back at the RASP coordinates. Well, there they are, right next door. Might as well just relax. We’d experience another three point one minutes of what we like to call living, and then we’d feel a short sharp shock and maybe even a flash of heat, and then, well before we felt any pain, we wouldn’t exist anymore.

“Too bad we couldn’t just stop the test, huh?” Marena asked.

“Lindsay?” I asked. “Any ideas?”

“For that we’d have to call a meeting,” he said. “If we want to bring a few of the directors in here for-”

“Forget it,” I said. “Rerouting is the way we’re going to go. Sorry about the nonexistence thing.”

“Well, let’s try this anyway,” Marena said. She was looking at something called ELEVATOR FUNCTION and then RAIL LEVEL.

At first I thought the room was falling down into the cleft canyon of the underwaterworld, and I saw the numbered floors rising past us and saw they were real, or rather real images, and realized what Marena must have noticed already but hadn’t bothered to tell me, that we were actually, physically sinking, that the reason the place could be on the thirteenth floor and still be called a Safe Room was because the whole room was really an extra-large elevator. Weirdly, most of the cameras were still functioning, and the transparency macro was chugging along, so it was as though we were sinking through the transparent building into a transparent earth, with explosions flashing around and over us. On the ceiling, translucent wipes with those green wire-frame edges represented the horizontal doors sliding shut over us. We passed a few brightly lit subbasement floors and decelerated.

“Damn,” Marena said. “Maybe we’ll make it after all.” She sounded eager, but also like she didn’t want to get her hopes up.

“That’s great,” I mumbled. I must have sounded vague. Really, I wasn’t good for anything anymore. It was all I could do to keep straight what was realish and what was waking-dreamish.

“Check this out,” Marena’s voice went somewhere. “‘When at its lowest level, this facility was designed to withstand a force of twenty kilotons and slash or two thousand degrees Celsius for over twelve hours. This is roughly equivalent to detonation on the scale of the Nagasaki blast only six hundred yards away.’ Isn’t that great?”

“Is that the operating manual?” I asked.

“Yeah. ‘Cooling is achieved by the use of onboard vacuum sealers and conventional freon refrigeration. Nitrox is supplied from six units in the live floor, each with a capacity of, blah blah blah, ventilation is redundant with, blah, blah…’ Damn.”

This can’t be happening, I thought. Although, on the other hand, I guess if anybody would have something like this, it would be Lindsay. Paranoia was one of his most characterizing and endearing traits. There was stuff like this in Jed’s memories, things he’d heard about on good authority years ago, in Utah, like supposedly there’s a vault under the Church Office Building, the LDS headquarters on North Temple, that you could dip in the sun for twenty-score beats and pull it out and it would still be seventy-two degrees inside. I suppose at the time, Jed had thought it was just a suburban legend. Well, for once somebody wasn’t just paranoid, but was paranoid enough.