Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  He ported the drawing over to the other screens. Marena showed me hers:

  “This is a little mathy for me,” Boyle said. Moron, I thought.

  “One of the reasons p is so steep is because it includes internal feedback. Because of competition. You know how people who go into malls and offices and schools and wherever to shoot people, how lately they are competing with each other for larger and larger body counts? Of course, this is partly because now there are Web sites devoted to keeping score of this. But the point is that it creates a positive-feedback loop. People imitate former successes. And when they see something spectacular, say 9/11, they are inspired to try to top it. So you can chart the rate of growth of the doomster meme, if you like.”

  “So what you’re saying is it’s basically fashion,” Marena said. “Like the way, you know, serial killer was the big power profession in the 1990s, and then the thing to be in the zeros was a terrorist, and now the big deal is to be a doomster and take everybody down with you.”

  “Wait a minute,” Michael Weiner said. “How many people actually want to destroy everything?”

  “That’s right,” Boyle said. “Do you really think people are capable of that?”

  “Well, sure,” Marena said, “plenty of people are.”

  “Many people have indeed expressed this wish,” Taro said. “And not all of them are in mental institutions or in prison.”

  “Twenty years ago the cool thing was writing computer viruses,” Marena said. “Now it’s writing biological ones.”

  “So today anyone with even the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in biochemistry and a five-thousand-dollar home lab could probably create a system that could kill off all humans,” Taro said. “And there are over fifty million people worldwide with that level of knowledge; at least a few of them will want to do just that.”

  “Well, screw me dead,” Michael Weiner said.

  “So the deal is, it used to take a mad scientist,” Marena said. “Now you just need a mad biology major.” She was feeding catchy phrases into the transcript so that Lindsay or whoever could use them at board meetings or whatever.

  “You could say that,” Taro said. “Or another way to look at it is, imagine that you gave every single person in the world a doomsday bomb. It is quite certain that somebody would set his off within a few minutes. In fact, many people would probably be rushing to do it because each of them would want to be sure to be the one. And even allowing for more uncertainty than is necessary, these curves still converge on a point close to now. Or even more probably in a few months from now—”

  “And that’s right around the Maya ending date,” Marena said.

  “Yes. Although it is approximate, of course, in terms of exactly when the event will happen. But it is utterly convincing statistically. That is, it will happen, and within a fairly short time.”

  “But there are people trying to stop these guys,” Boyle said.

  “Yes,” Taro said, “that is the e curve. As you can see, it does not cross either of the others before they intersect.”

  “So what we need to do is raise the e curve,” Marena said. She’d torn the sides of her paper teacup into a long, precisely spiraled coil on which the circular base bobbed gently up and down.

  “We or somebody,” Taro said. “Yes. Sharply.”

  No one said anything for a second. I tore open one of the Jelly Belly packs, the ORIGINAL GOURMET Jelly BEAN, it said. TROPICAL fruit blend. I ate three Bellies, started feeling selfish, and dumped the rest of them out on the table. They were irregular spheroids in assorted jewel tones.

  “Anyone want some?” I asked.

  No one did.

  “Well, thanks for your input,” Boyle said. “But I need to just put in here, what everybody’s going to say to this is, there’s always been folks hollering about how the sky’s falling. And they’re always wrong. People are always saying it’s the end of the world. They said the atomic bomb would be the end of the world. People said the year 2000 was going to be the end of the world. They said that accelerator blast in Mexico had created a, a little black hole at the center of the earth, and that that was going to be the end of the world.”

  He looked around the table. Nobody said anything.

  Well, that was a little odd, I thought. I wouldn’t have expected this Boyle guy to be the one to object, just because he was such a Peter Priesthood. Generally, LDS types are a pretty credulous lot. They always think the end of the world is right around the corner. Now the dude was getting all skeptical. Well, maybe I was stereotyping again. Marena opened her mouth and then stopped herself. I had the feeling she’d been about to say something along the lines of “Stuff it, hayseed, you’re out of your depth.” I decided to lighten the mood.

  “Let’s not use that term,” I said. “It’s derogatory. Let’s just call it a ‘hole of color.’ ”

  Nobody laughed. Or smiled, or anything. I’m an idiot, I thought.

  Taro spoke up. “Well, yes. Various people have been telling everyone how the world is about to end, for a long time. And so far, as far as we know the world has not ended. But that is the fallacy of induction. You cannot—”

  “Could you explain that term?” Marena put in.

  “That is, it is like Russell’s chicken,” he said. “You have simply to ignore an argument that—”

  “Sorry, you’d better tell the record what the chicken is,” Marena said.

  “Oh,” Taro said. “Yes. Bertrand Russell tells the story of a chicken who believes that the farmer is his friend. After all, the farmer has fed the chicken every day of his life and has never done him any harm. The chicken believes the farmer will go on doing what he has done in the past. However … one day the farmer comes in and instead of feeding him, he chops his head off. The point is that induction is often false logic.”

  “I’m not sure I or the board am going to get that,” Boyle said.

  There was a pause. I looked back at Marena. Her eyes caught mine for a second. Dammit, they said. This Boyle bastard’s trying to shoot us down. He doesn’t want this project to go through, probably because it’s taking budget away from his own bullshit division, so he tagged along and now he’s trying to get us to say something stupid or too optimistic or whatever, and when we do, then he’s going to go running back to Lindsay and spray poison in his ear.

  We looked back at Boyle. He started to say something, but Marena interrupted him.

  “Look,” she said. “There’s always some nutcase who’s been talking about how a big meteor’s going to hit the earth like, tomorrow. And so far it hasn’t happened. Lately. But if you looked up and saw a big giant meteor coming down, you wouldn’t say it couldn’t hit us just because all those nutcases jumped the gun. Right?”

  “Correct,” Taro said. “We need to evaluate the current world situation based only on its merits and not on what other people have said over the years. For instance, another piece of evidence is that we do not find any sign of extraterrestrial civilizations, despite odds in favor of their developing. Quite probably, they all blow themselves up when they get to roughly this stage of technological development.”

  Another icky pause manifested itself.

  “Hey, look at what you did,” Marena said. I realized she was talking to me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “They’re all organized.” She tapped on the table. “Check this out,” she said to everybody but me.

  I looked down. It was true, I’d arranged the Jelly Bellies in a wide grid, lining them up by color and pattern and, in the case of duplicates, by size.

  “Oh, my heck,” Boyle said.

  “Oh. Yeah,” I said. “They were messy. They were bugging me.” I swept the shits off the table and into my hand. “Sorry.”

  “And one of the best arguments in favor of Doom Soon,” Taro said—going on with his thoughts, as he did—“is simply that we are not encountering any time travelers from the future.”

  “Isn’t that because of the Novikov thing?” Boyle asked.

  “Well, maybe tha—” Marena broke in.

  “No,” Taro said, stopping Marena in midword. “No, tha
t does not apply to us in the present anyway. The most likely reason that there are no visitors from the future is simply because there is no future.”

  [15]

  Eleven hours later LEON was back online—it wasn’t quite clear who was protecting the facility at UCF, or whether it had its own generator, or whatever, but he was back—and Taro, Taro’s assistant Ashley , Tony Sic, three of Taro’s other student adders-in-training, and I were all in Taro’s makeshift lab at the Stake. It was really just a collection of brand-new Knoll open-plan cubicles, eye-popping new Sony monitors, and spanking-new Aeron ergosphere chairs, many of them still at least half stretch-wrapped, all hastily clustered in a big basement rehearsal hall under the Stake’s Tabernacle Auditorium Complex. In the sound of the keys clicking you could almost hear the panic.

  Laurence Boyle had wanted us to put all our energy into finding “Dr. X,” the presumed mastermind behind the Disney World Horror. “If you track them down, we’ll get a lot more funding for the next phase,” he’d said, although it wasn’t clear to me what the next phase was. But Taro and I guessed some other people behind the scenes had convinced Boyle that the best players should move right to the Doomster—that is, to whoever was going to create whatever was going to happen on December 21.

  At this point Taro had said—he’d even given a little pep talk, in his understated way—we had to assume the Codex was correct. There would be what he called a “dire event” on the twenty-first, and if preventing it was even possible, we had to move now. We needed to be detectives ahead of the fact. It felt to me like we’d somehow reached the absolute zero of the murder mystery genre—that is, we had to catch someone who hadn’t done anything yet, who hadn’t left any clues, and who could be anybody on the planet.

  And not only that, but we couldn’t just start looking for him—naturally, I thought of him as a him, although I tried to keep an open mind—without first working out a way of looking for him. To oversimplify, we basically had to write a program that would allow us to sift through the dataverse and, somehow, spot the Doomster.

  All of us players were using Sacrifice Game 3.2, a new version of the software that had been updated with data from the Orlando attack. Each of us was trying to play through the second-to-last date, the Disney date, and get to the same final position, the one that ended 357 days from now, on 4 Ahau. We were trying to crunch massive strings of digital data—mainly lists of millions of names, addresses, and occupations—through the Game’s 260-square grid. Each of us also had at least one other screen running. I had mine on Bloomberg—I like economic data more than the other kinds—and the crawl was saying that public dollar cost on the whole Disney World event was getting close to a trillion, and that didn’t even count insurance settlements. It also said my last batch of corn contracts had nearly tripled up. Hot damn. Big bucks in bad news. Get used to it, Jed, you really are a rich old bastard. Too bad there’s nothing to spend it on down here …

  God, what am I thinking? There’s also nothing to spend it on when you don’t exist. Get back to work.

  I called up LEON.

  Okay, I thought. Quit stalling. Time to dive.

  I got out my pouch of chawin’ terbaccy and put a plug in my cheek.

  I put in my passwords and challenged good ol’ LEON to a four-stone game, ending on 4 Ahau. Naturally, he said yes, since he wasn’t smart enough yet to be lazy.

  I looked around. Nobody was watching me. I rubbed some tobacco juice into my thigh. It looks a little like one might be jerking off. I made my little offerings to the directions and scattered the stones and seeds.

  I’d never even tried four stones before. There hadn’t really been any point. It would be like a Go player deciding to play on a 29 x 29 board, or a chess player making a board with 144 squares and two kings per side. If you played it, it wouldn’t even really be a game, just a higgledy-piggledy mishmosh of ignorant armies thrashing blindly in the wasteland. Well, even so, I thought. Do it—

  Damn, I thought. Glare.

  I cleared the screen, got up, and found Taro’s assistant, Ashley2.

  “Do you think we could turn off some of the overhead lights?” I asked her. They were the usual ghastly, flattening fluorescents.

  She said she’d ask around. I went back to my cubicle. Tony Sic passed me and said hi. I heard him jogging up the stairs behind me. Okay, here we are.

  Cubicle.

  Fuck.

  No matter what happens, I still spend 97 percent of my time sitting in front of a screen and entering data. I make a fortune, cities collapse, cities rebuild, I lose a fortune, worlds revolve, I make another fortune, gods appear, gods die, universes turn inside out, it doesn’t matter, I’ll still just be entering data. Face it, Jed, you’re a code monkey. Just pimp your cubicle, shut up, and enter that data—

  About half of the lights flickered out. Ahh. That’s better. I got back into playtime.

  It started slowly, like icebergs building up in some places and falling down in others, and mistier, because the masses seem to congeal out of fog or deliquesce back into it. Each new runner takes into account the moves of all the previous ones. It’s like it gathers up their strings of moves and collapses them into one, and when my fourth runner came out it was as though I’d jumped to a higher elevation and I could see for hundreds of miles in all directions, a whole Weddell Sea of false starts, detours, and dead ends, its outer rings compressed into shale by the curvature of the earth. Step, step. Step. Friday is dark, then two nothing days, then Monday is light. De todos modos. I was already at 1 Earth Rattler, 0 Mat, that is, April 2, 2012, closer to the end date than I’d ever gotten before without losing track. Wait. Step back. Okay, so the break was at 408. Try again. 948,389. Right. Looking clearer. The images started kicking in. They aren’t visions or anything, just memories of pictures off the TV or wherever, but they do get activated by a sense that something similar might be coming up. A long line of refugees, like a convention of balloon-men with all their bunches of plastic bottles, scooped water out of a sinkhole. I scattered the seeds again, reducing the potentials. A few of the smokier paths vanished. A few of the longer ones caved in. Come on. Fewer and fewer. Now there were only a hundred or so primary scenarios, and now there were only twenty, good, wait, no, I’d gone too fast, I’d missed a path, many paths, I’d gone right past without noticing the branchings, those twenty scenarios were only a few out of millions, hell, hell, hell, things looked bad, very bad. Okay. Go back. Here it is. Try it. Blocked. Okay. Try that one. Bloqueado. That other one. Bloqueado. Hell, hell. Desesperado. The icebergs crushed together around me with a sound like ten thousand pit bulls gnawing ten thousand veal shanks. There’s got to be a way to deal with this. This way. That way. Edge of a cliff. Sliding. Can’t think. That way. No. Bad road. Bridge out. Ninguna manera. No way. Bad road. Bad road. All roads lead to doom. Rome. Doom. Roome. Doooooooom …

  Hell.

  I clicked resign. On the screen, the board just winked out, but in my mind it was as though I’d tipped over the table and sent all the seeds and stones scattering over the linoleum floor. It said it was 4:33 p.M. I pushed back from the monitor, feeling physically bruised.

  “Hi,” Marena’s voice said.

  I turned around in my desk chair. It spun too far and I had to awkwardly brake it and get it facing her. Then I realized I should stand up because she was a female and everything, but she was already leaning against the wall of the cubicle and it seemed even more awkward, so I stayed where I was.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Hi,” I said. “Oh, yeah. I’m good.”

  “I got a memo—” she started to say, “one of—oh, wait, hey, did your guy get that rider from Hammerhead, Mako, and White?”

  “Oh. Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, we’re good.” I forgot to mention that yesterday I’d finally gotten my business-law guy—Jerry Weir, from Grey, Timber, and Weir—on the phone. He was ready to work, even with Western civilization melting down. Jerry would go over a brief on his deathbed. From the grave, even. He’d taken his red pen to the contract and told me not to
sign until they’d approved all his jottings. Astonishingly, they had. So now I was a part-time associate of the Warren Group, one of the world’s fastest-growing and most progressive employers. And, as I was living proof of, a diverse workplace.

  “I got a memo from Personnel and we still have to ask you a couple things,” Marena said.

  “Okay.”

  “Sorry. They wanted Dr. L to do it, but I said I’d do it. Unless you’d rather do it with her.”

  “Oh. No, no …”

  “It’s just for the insurance.” She unfolded her phone.

  “Fine,” I said. “It’s always prudent to have plenty of insurance.”