Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

I blinked around. Everything was still sideways. All over the room’s six sides the last surveillance systems were going dead. Window after window closed down, but instead of just going to blue the confused system replaced them with video mirrors. We saw ourselves re-reflecting our reflections into serried ranks of identical Chacal-in-Jed 3 — in-Tony-Sic and Lindsay Warren and Marena Park toy figurines, with the table and chairs replicated in infinite rows curving away toward hidden vanishing points, like long freight trains disappearing over the curvature of the earth. Somewhere among the receding clone armies I thought I saw Maximon, wearing his old manto and and sombrero and smoking and smirking like I Told You So, but it was probably just me. I saw what Lindsay had meant about the Sealing Room. The room was a high-tech version of the marriage chapel they have in Mormon temples, which have huge enfiladed mirrors on all four walls, “set,” as they like to say, “to catch eternity.” Evidently the designers hadn’t thought that was cool enough for the New Age Moron weddings Lindsay and his pals planned to have here, though, because now the display programs were going into some preset routine where they pulled images from the ongoing recording stock and replayed them in palimpsests over the current “reflections,” so we could see ourselves enlarged, shrunk, from above, from the other side of the room, unreversed, in slow motion, in ultrafast motion, four-hundred-score beats before, one beat before, everything except a beat from now. I saw us walk in again, and I saw Marena run the video where she called Lindsay to resign from the Warren Group, right after the Chrononaut trailer preview. It was like being in the head of some obsessive-compulsive person who could think only about the three of us, stuck in our little lifeboat from here to eternity The room rattled like a little box in a big box and then seemed to settle. The screens flickered and went to blue, and it was like we were in a glass bathyscaphe deep in the ocean. Big red letters scrolled across the walls: EXIT AIRLOCKS ALIGNED. There was a click and a loud hiss. The air pressure changed and cool, oxygen-rich air welled up out of the floor, noisily. Excellent, I thought. Not with a wimp, but with a banger.

“-00:00:13:00,” the readout said. “-00:00:13.5”…

We sat, and looked around us, watching the fifty-two windows, the in-house and public news feeds on the south wall, the stars wheeling on the ceiling, the maps on the north wall, and the news videos and charts and graphs and flickering equations and scrolling code and a thousand other varieties of data. I figured that to an outside observer-God, if only there were ever an outside observer-we looked pretty much like three random blobs of videonarcotized trailer trash anywhere in the random world. Marena touched my wrist, like, Thanks for saving Max, or trying to.

We waited.

“-00:00:09.50,” it said,

“-00:00:09.00,

“-00:00:08.50…”

Most of the drone cameras got knocked out by the first shock wave, but there were a few dozen that had stationed themselves at a five-score-rope-length circumference, and the screens in the Safe Room automatically switched to them, and then when those got knocked out they switched to an octet of drones at the quarter-jornada mark, and so on, so we got a gods’-eyes view of the blast.

I’d never seen an explosion before. That is, as Chacal I hadn’t, even though there are sometimes all-natural ones, dust explosions in caves and volcanic incursions into oil pockets and so on. So to me it was new. Somewhere what was left of Jed-in-Me compared it to the many explosions he’d seen, many on video and a couple in his real life, and now I could hear him again, for the first time in a long time, thinking that it seemed bizarrely slow, that explosions in films are always shot in high-speed and then slowed down, but that this one, maybe because of the size or the convection or air pressure or whatever, would actually have to be sped up to look convincing. And I heard, or felt, echoes of the many metaphors they use in English to describe explosions, words like flower and mushroom. But to me it seemed to be taking place very fast-I wasn’t used to the speed of this world in general-and more than a flower or mushroom it seemed to me to be a tree, the Tree of Four Hundred Times Four Hundred Branches, the Tree with the Mirror Leaves. The canopy of dirt and carbonized flesh and smoke and sand and steam and barium isotopes and four hundred times four hundred other materials branched out two-score rope-lengths over us-and we could still see it from underneath on some of the drone cameras, as well as from the side and even from a seventy-degree angle over it-in such a wide, embracing curve that I couldn’t help feeling it was welcoming and motherly, like the Tree, and we felt its voice, a long growl through the millions of cubic rope-lengths of packed earth around us.

I felt burning in those head-caves where tears would be made if I were the sort of person who would make them, and then the groan faded, and it seemed the three of us were still alive. The collider had been cut in half by a premature release of millions of BTUs of spontaneously generated heat, and despite the loss of life upstairs, the outcome had been, by his lights, a huge relief, and maybe everything would be okay, so to speak… and then, although Jed-in-Me was stronger than he’d been in a long time, he seemed to wilt and go silent, as though his consciousness had fainted from the excitement.

When my attention slid back to them, Marena and Lindsay were, oddly, having something like a civil conversation. Lindsay said the air supply was fine-“for three little breathers, adequate for over a month,” was how he put it-and that it would be better to hold off for two days on using the tram system because the air over the terminus, a jornada away at a facility on the highway to Belize City, might still be toxic. Marena-who I thought might almost want to thank me, at some point, for saving Max, despite everything else, but who seemed unsure, to say the least, of how to behave with me-said, “We can’t be sure about the O 2.”

“What?” I asked. I started untaping her.

“We got, our seal got breached. I can smell it.”

“Oh. Right.”

Even down here we were getting a whiff of oxidized polymers and carbonized flesh. And we’d have to worry about earth gases getting in. They aren’t good for you. Anyway, our own air would leak out pretty fast. We couldn’t stay.

“I can’t find the hole,” Marena said. She’d gotten herself the rest of the way loose and was feeling around the west door. “I think it’s on the other side of the, the inner door vaulty thingie.”

“I wouldn’t open it right now,” I said.

“I’m not.” She untaped Lindsay and as he massaged his ankles she went back to typing.

I rolled over. There were three red dots on the blue Zeonex floor, and as they came into focus I saw they were beads from Marena’s necklace, which must have broken during the unpleasantness. I laid my head down. Beds and whatever are great, but really, I thought, there’s nothing so comfortable as a nice flat floor. The blue screens shut down, meaning the system wasn’t finding any outside electricity and wanted to be thrifty. Emergency lights came on, just a few red and white LEDs in the floor and ceiling. It was quiet. Like all military elevator shafts, the one above us had a set of baffles that slid over us as we went down. But I could still feel an occasional explosion through the thousands of tons of clay, as soft as that earthquake in Oaxaca that rocked me to sleep “We have to cruise,” Marena said.