The ring, I thought. The racetrack. It’s a supercollider. A secret one at the Stake, underneath the circular racetrack that surrounded the Hyperbowl complex. And they were using it to test the RABS.
Well, huh.
Normally this would have been good news, since Lindsay would be able to stop the test there himself without having to convince anyone else in the company to give up the contract. Over the next two days, using relayed phones and e-mails, Marena, and Taro and I tried to convince him.
Boyle, certainly, didn’t believe us at all.
“He believed in Madison,” I said, at 2:00 A.M. She was sitting on the foot of the hospital bed, squnching my foot.
“Yeah, but Madison wasn’t on their payroll,” Marena said. “Anyway, the State Department’s pushing Linseed to do the test.”
It turned out that the RABS worked by creating a miniature white hole at a targeted spot on earth—or in outer space, where they did the first couple of tests, or on Io or wherever. The 3-D or 4-D or whatever universe is like the surface of a balloon—I mean, to oversimplify just a little—and the strangelet is letting the air out of it. Eventually it shrinks into a dot and we’re screwed. It’s like a pinhole in a balloon—this world is like the surface of a balloon floating through higher dimensions. Or you could say that it’s letting the air out of our universe, spacewise . . .
Damn. There was still something in a crevice of my mind that I had to remember to remember.
“You know,” Marena said, “you’re really not going to enjoy hanging out with me if you keep thinking about her.”
“Who?”
“Lady Koh.”
I said, “Come to think of it, it’s true. I guess I’ve thought about her once or twice a day.” Maybe once or twice every hour. Ten minutes. One minute. A lot.
I’d been trying to contact No Way without any success. Lately I’d also been trying to contact Pablo Xoc, the headman from Xcanac, the village near Ix Ruinas—but he seemed to have disappeared.
A lot of things seemed to have disappeared.
Still, the world seemed reasonably durable around us, with carpeting, reasonably tasteful chairs, oceans, trees, plasma screens, mugs emblazoned with our corporate logo, the whole ball of low-melting-point wax. Kind of like the Cantor Fitzgerald offices at the World Trade Center, I thought. Just by virtue of its total banality, everything had an air of permanence. But it was totally illusory, of course. And Marena was increasingly desperate and Lindsay was constantly unyielding.
I reckoned I’d try one last heist.
( 93 )
I figured I’d run a Game-assisted hack-and-search of Warren files to see if I could find a “lever”—maybe a smoking gun (likely about their human testing) that could be used to blackmail the corporation and force them to stop the test.
I started by snooping through Marena’s former division’s computer network, using some passkeys she’d snuck in before leaving the company. Immediately, and slightly “ironically,” as they use the word these days, I found some files she wouldn’t have wanted me to see, videos that confirmed my long-standing suspicion that Marena’d recruited me from the beginning. As my privilege kept escalating, the unanswered questions escalated into vast, intertangled enigmas. One of the oddest was a file showing that Warren’s KIMERA Division—a branch of the Firm that I hadn’t heard of before—was also evidently interested in nudibranchs, with an installation of five thousand-gallon tanks in a building at the Stake. Did they get the idea from me somehow? Or is it just another synergy? Whatever it was, I didn’t have time to stop and investigate this any further, and, reluctantly, I moved on. I found another file that made it look to the reader as though LEON was going to be taking over and running the world, à la Neuromancer and its many descendants.
“Look,” Marena said, “remember, one thing the Neo-Teo project has going for it is that the Sacrifice Game actually works. You can’t say that about Allah.”
“I guess not.”
“The Game gets your life under control, you’re happy and peaceful—or ‘placeful,’ as they call it—without drugs, you see things coming a mile away, you’re instantly part of a simpatico community . . . it’s a whole thing. It’s the whole thing. And it appeals to smart people.”
Marena’s face had taken on yet another aspect. This time she looked as though she was standing in extreme cold, not chattering, but freezing, and suddenly unconscious that anyone else was in the room.
“You mean, like, religion doesn’t?”
“Heh. Well, you got me there.”
Marena left to see Max in a school production of Seascape and said she’d be back in two hours to deal with the Apocalypse. I put in an order at Porlock’s Artisinal Charcuterie, took a hot shower—as close as I could get to a proper sweat bath around here—and took three full doses of tsam lic. Following the offering formula I’d learned in Olde Mayaland, I pierced my skimpy, mutilated half-foreskin—a difficult thing for me to make myself do, because of my early history of hemophilia—with an ancient jade artificial stingray spine, polished by forty generations of hands and genitals, that had been a gift from Hun Xoc, and which (along with the 9 Death pot and a few other mementi) was among the few items from Jed2’s tomb that I still had. I scattered, or—let’s say to be fancy, lustrated—the blood onto a petition letter to One Ocelot, which asked for a clear vision in my playing of the Sacrifice Game. I went in the bathroom, disabled the smoke detector, turned on the exhaust fan, and burned the letter in a dish of (smuggled) charcoal and copal. As the drug began to bring on its special brand of awareness, I slipped on a new type of Warren ultralite data-glove (which they were planning to market as the “Holopaw”) and called up the on-screen version of Ix Professional, which, as in Taro’s lab, had also been integrated with most major programming languages and search engines.
“Teech Aj Chak-’Ik’al la’ ulehmb’altaj ‘uyax ahal-kaab Ajaw K’iinal . . .” I said, rooting myself in the software. “You, Hurricane, who sparked Lord Heat’s first dawning . . .”
This time, even though I was still casting the skulls and sending out a runner—both of which were now more along the lines of cellular automata than humans, centipedes, or whatever—I wasn’t exactly asking the Game a question about the Unrevealed. Instead, right now I was using it as a sort of combination decrypter and next-generation search engine, something that would let me hack into Warren’s network and lead me through its masses of data to what I wanted to find. I don’t think anyone who wasn’t using the Game could even have gotten a three-digit foot in the door. But with it, I managed to work my way through several layers of encryption to the company’s primary secure server and to a long list of “auxiliary assets,” which seemed to be like a shareholders’ report, but too dirty for the actual shareholders to see. At first there was so much to look through that I had to guess where to start. The Warren Group’s holdings included companies dealing in “everything from aerospace to zooplasty”—including, I noticed, a shell corporation that owned a controlling piece of Executive Solutions, “making at least that part of the deal nicely in-house.” I tried these files under “Lindsay Warren.” An index came up that included a list of all the meetings Lindsay attended personally. I searched the transcripts of this list for the phrase Parcheesi Project. The first file in the results was dated 11/01/01. I opened its first video component, “Introductory Remarks by LSW.”
On the screen I saw Lindsay standing at a lectern in front of a giant video wall flashing news clips, PowerPoint pie charts, and other trappings of early-twenty-first-century corporate presentations.
“Since Nine-Eleven,” Lindsay said, now in front of a slow-motion video of the imploding towers, “there has been a realization—at the highest level—that America needs a new warrior ideology, one that can compete directly with Islam’s.
“As many of you know, in our own participations in these discussions, we’ve stressed that images of the Stars and Stripes and Uncle Sam and stories about George Washington weren’t
going to do the trick.” The picture behind Lindsay faded to one of marching mujahideen. “All that fooferaw was too associated with oldsters, too easy to make fun of. Basically it just wasn’t sexy. What we need on this ranch is something more stylish. More mystical. More youthy.”
The image behind Lindsay changed to the great Ciudadela pyramid at Chichen Itza.
( 94 )
“Now, in our last presentation to the Joint Chiefs, which I don’t need to tell you went very, very well, we made the case that the Boy Scouts had the right idea, using Native American words and concepts . . . but of course even us Eagle Scouts never really knew what we were talking about.”
There was a scattering of polite laughter.
“But today,” Lindsay said, “we can pick it back up and take it farther than it’s ever been, utilizing every one of our areas of expertise—new media, old media, postmedia media, psychotechnology . . .”
So, I saw, Lindsay hadn’t first become interested in the Sacrifice Game because he was an investor in computer-game companies or because of the Mormon mythology about pre-Columbian America. Rather, in the months following the attack, the Pentagon had wanted to investigate ways of instilling a “suicide ethic” in soldiers to parallel that of the jihad. They’d already sponsored studies of suicide-bomb cultures and other microsocieties where self-immolation is still a primary virtue, and found that “a touch of martyrdom” makes these societies much more stable, much less internally contentious, and more energetic in achieving their goals—basically, more powerful. The idea was to “harness a terrorist mindset for an antiterror agenda.” And in their bid for the next phase of the study, the Warren group had argued that the American Indian “cultures of austerity” were even more hard-core than the Islamist ones. After they won the contract, the team went looking for “the symbols that made them tick,” and came across Taro’s work on Parcheesi/patolli.
As was fairly well known at the time, DARPA was already funding highly speculative research, most of it still dealing with remote viewers, or psychics. But by ’03 this seemed to have hit a dead end and the Defense Department redirected several billions of research dollars to several companies, including Warren, which were experimenting with “more up-to-date exotica,” or “outside-the-box solutions to global terrorism.” These included long-term simulation, consciousness transfer, singularity projection, and other inquiries into the possibility of stopping terrorist or rogue military strikes before they happened. And as I already knew, Taro’s weather-simulation research had already been partly funded by the Joint Chiefs’ SAGA (Studies, Analysis, and Gaming Agency). So, I guessed, when Lindsay read the report on the Sacrifice Game, he must have felt that a number of diverse strands were coming together—in a way that to someone like him may have suggested a divine agenda.
At any rate, starting in 2005, my own name begins to come up frequently. It appears in over two thousand files compiled at that time, some going back beyond my first meeting with Michael Weiner to Guatemalan court documents on the going back to the massacre of Jed’s village. Apparently the Parcheesi Project had been keeping close track of me (as well as several other possible candidates) for a long time. There were recordings of Taro working on the Game with me when I was still in high school. After a few minutes of snooping, I found a file of the first time I met Marena. As I suspected at the time, her phone was recording everything. I watched my own face peering down into it as I studied the pages of the Codex and then watched myself leave for the bathroom as Marena made a videoconference call. The call was to Lindsay.
From their conversation it’s clear that at least since 2010, when the Codex Nuremberg was first photographed and Lindsay’s group first clearly visualized the Parcheesi Project—basically the whole R & D division that investigated the Sacrifice Game—I had been identified as one of five possible persons to get “downloaded” into an as-yet-undetermined subject in 664. Now, in 2012, Marena is telling Lindsay that she thinks I am “absolutely the best one,” and tells Lindsay about my Disney World “prediction.” Lindsay says he’s still “only sixty percent sure about this Game thing, and about five percent confident about this Jed character,” but that he’ll wait and see what happens.
Naturally, I was quivering with rage; however, I managed to “stay in Gametime” and follow the thread, looking through file after file. After the Disney World Horror—which no one besides us had expected—Marena and her team went into overdrive. Reasoning that I would refuse if they asked me to do what they wanted, Marena manipulated me into volunteering.
Bitch, I thought. Of course it was an auditory hallucination, but it sounded like the mosquito in the room said something like “We’ll get her.”
( 95 )
Marena’s deception upset me more than it should have. I knew it anyway, I thought. Just not this much. Not this much. I looked up where she was on the employee locator and found she was on her way home from the school play with Max. I almost called her to confront her, but instead I kept flipping through Jed-rich files, moving on to their “CHOCULA PROJECT—IX—IX RUINAS—EXTRACTION” folder. It contained hundreds of gigs of text and at least eighty hours of video. On the first one, I saw that I was definitely sedated just before the uploading, as they hustled me into the caves while the soldiers arrived. Skimming through the Extraction files, I reconstructed a lot of what had been going on “offstage” during the dig. Evidently a contact of Lindsay’s in the Guatemalan military, whom the file identifies as “Felix,” convinced the Guate troops to move their training exercises away from the area of the site during the downloading and exploration phases in April. Then, in September, the same person managed to divert military police patrols from the dig zone, allowing the Chocula team to stay undetected as long as it did. However, when the diggers began blasting into the tomb I was buried in—even though they used thunder as cover for the sound—some military satellite detected the explosions’ chemical discharges and somehow the information got to Felix’s superiors. Felix immediately warned Lindsay and, covering himself, dispatched troops to the site. By this time, it was a foregone conclusion that the core team would have to be extracted by air.
The Hippogriff extraction had been planned to the second, and its probability of failure, it seems, had been worked out to less than one percent. Remote-piloted vehicles, controlled from the Stake, were already fueled and loaded at several hidden airstrips in Belize, ready to launch and take out any aircraft that got too near, and even to clear ground artillery if necessary. It came very close to going off smoothly, and while the two Guate helicopters that unexpectedly intercepted the Hippogriff were a terrible glitch, they never really had a chance. The incident, with the deaths of the officers, had greatly exacerbated the Belize/Guate conflict. Moving on chronologically, I found that two days after most of the Chocula team got safely back to Orlando, Lindsay called a major board meeting of the Warren Group. I pulled up the video. This time Lindsay was sitting at a table with a much smaller group, ten or twelve people, all men, in what looked like the safe room at the Hyperbowl.
“The great religions,” Lindsay said, “used every available medium of their time to get their message across. They hired the greatest architects, composers, and artists. Well, in the twentieth century they lost that edge. America, in fact the West in general, or for that matter the world in general, is in the middle of its greatest spiritual crisis since the Reformation. And how is religion responding? Falteringly, feebly, and fragmentarily. No single strong, clear vision has emerged. Well, Warren has been a leader in the spirituality field since the 1970s, and now we’re poised to take on the third millennium.”
Lindsay went on to mention some other religions, new and old, that have recently begun working seriously with new media and progressive marketers, developing state-of-the-art psychological software to help keep and gain converts. But the Ix franchise, he says, will take this to the next level. “It will provide all the meaning people need, through every medium available.” Finally, he said, “Every reli
gion needs a Mecca.”
Leaning back in his ErgoChair, Lindsay claimed that his simulations team had used the newly augmented version of the Game to work out a feasibility study in which it was possible for the Stake development to become an autonomous country, sandwiched between the hostile borders of Belize and Guatemala, “the first major designer country not on an island.”
“Both countries are pretty destitute,” Lindsay said, “and they’d be happy to sell off some land if the moonstone people can come up with justifications that would get the decision by their parliaments. Well, they’re going to come to realize that having our Mayan project”—he pronouned “Mayan” to rhyme with “Sayin’”—“and few other boutique states nearby”—he pronounced it “byoo-teek”—“is going to make them bigger, not littler.”
I flipped forward through the speech, catching bites here and there. Lindsay said that although this new “private state” will be immensely profitable—and although the online version of Ix II has already become the U.S. military’s leading source of psychological referrals for recruitment—the object here is not to use Neo-Teo as a breeding ground for dedicated workers and eager, fearless soldiers. The main motivation, he said, is to create a society “in line with the Warren Predictive Demographics Division’s projections for the near future” (which they arrived at partly by using LEON software with the 2011 version of the Game). According to the research team’s sociohistorical modeling, world population will continue to increase for at least another fifty years before peaking. Well before that time, however, people of above-average worth will be contracting for various types of “fail-safe life extension: that is, systems that monitor clients’ health in real time, and keep them constantly within reach of a dedicated paramedic team that will rush them to a hospital, or, in terminal cases, to mobile cryogenic facilities. In cases of advanced age, the clients will be kept on increasingly sophisticated life-support systems, and dosed with increasingly powerful anti-Alzheimer’s and brain-cell regeneration drugs. And all that’s nothing,” Lindsay said, “compared to new uses of the consciousness transfer protocol, which could, they tell me, go on forever.”
The Sacrifice Game Page 54