The Sacrifice Game
( Jed DeLanda - 2 )
Brian D'amato
Brian D'Amato
The Sacrifice Game
Manet alta menta repostum
Harold Steketee Sr. 1887-1984
There are strange things done ’neath the midnight sun…
ZERO
Simple Experiments with Everyday Household Objects
Concept Sketch for Neo-Teo-Double Mul OC-A
Marena Park, Warren Interactive Entertainment
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Why I Did It
By Joachim (“Jed”) Carlos Xul Mixoc DeLanda
For General Release To post at noon, EST, on December 19, 2012 Contact: None
Indiantown, Florida, USA
4 Lamat, 12 Sac, 12.19.19.15.9
4 Sundog, 12 Whiteness, on the ninth K’in of the fifteenth Uinal of the nineteenth and last Tun of the nineteenth and last K’atun of the twelfth and last B’aktun
Thursday, October 30, 2012 5:42:08 P.M.
To All, Whom It Concerns:
… five… four… three… almost there… one… zero… tap.
Whoa.
That’s it. I’ve done it.
Let me catch my breath here for a second.
Okay.
I didn’t expect it, but just now, at the moment I tapped that icon, I–I guess I should say even I-felt a twinge, and more than a twinge, of that gray free-falling terror, that it was really happening, and that it wasn’t reversible. Was there any guilt in the twinge? Hmm. Remorse, yes. Nausea that it had come to this? Sure. But guilt? I guess not. It won’t hurt, for one thing. In fact, you won’t even notice.
What I just did was-all I did-was I bought a hundred standard five-thousand-bushel corn contracts for February delivery, effective at the opening of the Chicago Board of Trade tomorrow. At 5:41:59 P.M. a bushel was at $7.10, so this only-“only”-took $3,550,000.00 out of my main Schwab account. I realize it doesn’t sound like this transaction could be a very big event. Certainly not something that will end the whole place. I mean, end the world. And I don’t mean just the world as we know it either. I mean the world, like everything.
But it will. According to calculations using Warren’s latest (2.3 Beta) version of the Sacrifice Game software-a spectacularly accurate proprietary prediction tool, of which a little more later-the trade’s going to drive up the price at the worst possible time. This will set off a very unfortunate sequence of events. Eighteen minutes from now, the second domino-that is, that’s what I’m calling the second key event out of what I’m visualizing as a row of dominoes that will culminate in the end of us humans-the second domino will tip over as the Board of Trade software notices after-hours trading spiraling up at geometric rate that, just before it pulls the plug, will reach U.S. $1,244.02 per second. The third domino will fall exactly four hours and 21.02 minutes from now, as the Hang Seng sees a similar thing happening and suspends its own trading in all corn, wheat, barley, soy, and of course rice. And then, tomorrow morning, when the CBT opens at the ungodsly hour of 6:00 A.M., the fourth domino will fall as every hick trader and his adelphogamic brother jumps on the hay wagon and tries to buy as much-as many? — as much piles of staples as they can get their flippers on. At 8:48 P.M., Central time, the CBT will suspend all trading-Domino Number Five-and, on November 2, three trading days from now, the first of the food riots will start, in Deqen Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, in Yunan, China. That’ll be the sixth domino. By the next morning, over sixteen thousand people will have died in the riots, mainly in Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Guangzhou-and those will inspire another, much larger riot in Gujarat-but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. And anyway, by Number Seven you’ll have seen a lot of all this on the news. So let’s skip ahead to the morning of-well, you’ve already heard about the date. It’s the big one, the one that’s caused so much storm and stress. The last domino-it’s a bigger number than nine, but smaller than, say, thirty-one-will fall on December 21, 2012, or in our reckoning, that is, 12.19.19.17.19, of the fourth Overlord and the third Gold Sun. And on that date, just like a whole lot of kooks, New Agers, and pantophobics have babbled about for what seems like another thirteen b’aktuns already, that’ll be it, the last of the last, the EOE, as we call it at the Warren Family of Caring Companies. The End of Everything.
For years now, when people heard that I was a Maya, they’d ask me what woo-wooey supernatural event was going to happen on that day, and I’d usually say something like “Nothing you need to know about.” Or, often, just “Nothing.” Well, now something’s going to happen. Or, in an active sense, “Nothing.” Only, there won’t be anything supernatural about it. I’ll have done it all myself. With my little cursor. Whatever humans are alive on earth, including the lady next door, the pope, you, the president, myself, and even the crew of seven aboard the International Space Station-who’ll last a little longer than the others, but not much-will be the last humans ever. And, possibly, the last consciousnesses ever. I hope.
Why?
Well, because, it won’t matter why, will it? In fact this whole exercise-I mean, writing this-seems pointless. I mean, to write a deposition for posterity when, if all goes well, as it will, there won’t be any posterity. There won’t even be any extraterrestrial archaeologists coming around to ask questions about the collapse of humanity. Most people will barely have time to read this before they wink out into zeroness. Still, I do feel that at least some of you, short-lived or not, deserve an explanation.
So, how did it come to this? Or, to put it more relevantly, How Do I Know This Is the Right Thing to Do?
Well, briefly, because I do. That is, I understand all the considerations involved, the math, you might even call it. Unlike almost anyone else, I can visualize the numbers involved, and unlike absolutely anyone else, I can comprehend what those numbers will lead to. And if you could follow it all, you’d agree with me. And you’d do exactly the same thing.
More clearly, I can understand how much human life is out there, and how much is coming. And I understand-and most of all accept-that over 99.8 percent of it, now, in the future, and always, is and will be sheer unrelieved agony. Pain. And no matter how many distractions and evasions people come up with, no matter how much gets spent on the denial industry, any honest person with an IQ over room temperature-that is, anyone worth asking-will admit that, to put it in the most ordinary and bathetic language possible, life sucks. I’m doing us all a mercy. And that’s the beginning, end, and entire sum and substance.
I know, I know. Don’t do us any favors. But this wasn’t something I wanted. And it isn’t something I’m making up. In fact, this ability-the ability to comprehend-didn’t even come to me naturally, the way things do to crazy people. In a way, it took over thirteen hundred years. And also, I didn’t make this decision so much for you and me, anyway. I’m doing it more for the kids. The coming generations. Yes, you and I are already well and royally fucked, but we can, at least, refrain from bringing any further consciousnesses into existence. It’s the right thing to do. And actually, there are a lot of people-not just Schopenhauerian philosophers and their wannabe counterparts-who even know it’s the right thing. But they haven’t done anything about it. I think I have the will to do it-and the means, but especially the will-because I saw it with my own eyes. Or at least, I saw it with my intraregarding eye, through the lens of the Game.
Anthropologists would classify the Sacrifice Game as a sortilege divination game, something that uses counts of pebbles or seeds to investigate the future or, more rarely, the past. Playing it well feels like playing Parcheesi against God and winning. Although the Sacrifice Game is to Parcheesi as cooking a Peking duck is to getting a bag of Skittles out of a vending machine.<
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I’d been playing the Game since I was little. As some of you might guess from my middle names (below), I’m an ethnic Maya, a twenty-first-century descendant of those guys who built all those palaces in Mexico and Guatemala with the big wacko pyramids with the scary stairs and then, presumably, abandoned them. We tend to be confused with Aztecs, Toltecs, or Venusians. When I was five, when we lived in a village called T’ozal, in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, my mother, who was a na h’me — a “sun-adderess,” that is, kind of lesser shamaness-taught me a version of it that her mother had taught her, and which had survived, handed down in increasingly simplified forms, for hundreds of years. Two years later, in 1982, a Guate government death squad called the Mano Blanco disappeared my parents along with about a quarter of the village. Supposedly my mother died when they made her drink gasoline. I was in a hospital at the time for my hemophilia and eventually got adopted by a Mormon family in Utah. I kept up with the Game in my dreadful teen years and then in college I helped work out some of the theory of it with a professor of mine named Taro Mora. Unlike most economics/game-theory mumbo-jumbo, it really did do something, and eventually I learned to use it to make quite a bit of money in corn futures. Taro didn’t come up with a mathematical solution for it, though, so the Game never worked well on computers. I went back to Guate a few times and tried to help bring the perps from the old regime to semijustice, but it was frustrating. I also became a frustrated opisthobranchologist and a few other frustrated things, but I never thought I’d do anything spectacular. And then, three hundred and thirteen days ago, on the fourth Owl and the fourth Yellowness of 12.19.18.17.16, or we could say December 23, I was approached by a woman named Marena Park.
Or actually, at the time I thought I was approaching her, but that’s another kettle of verrucomicrobia we don’t need to get into right now. She was-and is-an executive at the entertainment division of the Warren Group (or “family,” as they like to say) of companies. It turned out she was a kind-of-famous game designer who was now, a bit oddly, I thought, coordinating a research project with my old mentor, Taro. And she wanted me to consult with them about a software version of the Sacrifice Game. And I would have said no, but they’d gotten hold of some new data: a description of the Game the way it was played at the height of the Maya Classic Period, thirteen hundred and forty-six years before.
The account of the Game was in a Maya codex, a screenfold book, that had just been photographed, and it had more in it than just a fuller version of the Game. There were “goals”-which you might, with a bit of tabloidal exaggeration, call predictions-going all the way up to the thirteenth b’aktun-that is, the so-called End of Time date in 2012. Of course, like a lot of entertainment companies, they were all very interested in the whole 2012 thing. Like they say, Mayan calendars sell like there’s no tomorrow. And, almost needless to say, I’d never been into it. It had always been a bunch of New Age losers and disappointed Y2K conspiracy kooks sitting around in extra-large Jedi costumes and making up disaster scenarios out of Captain Future. But when I saw the new codex, the Codex Nuremburg-well, basically, among other things, it predicted the attack on Disney World six days later, on the twenty-ninth. Which, despite some recent contenders, is still, with 104,774 confirmed deaths and half a million casualties, the most deadly terrorist act so far. Not counting this one, of course.
So, to make a long-oops, too late-well, to at least cut the story off at the knees: after the DWH, the Disney World Horror, I got deeper in with Marena’s people, and even met the head of the whole conglomerate, Lindsay Warren. The discouraging thing was that Taro’s team and I didn’t do too well at figuring out how to play the version of the Game we’d gotten from the Codex. But I found out they had another approach to it in the works, something pretty bizarre, or, well, at least pretty futuristic, although I guess not much more so than the Mars mission, glow-in-the-dark poodles, or your latest flexible-screen phone. They were planning to get data directly from the old days, and somebody from our era was going to go and pick it up. It wasn’t exactly time travel. In fact, there are reasons why real time travel, where you’d send someone’s body back to the past, was almost certainly always going to be impossible, no matter how advanced technology became. But there is a way to send energy. Basically, you can make something like a high-quality print of all the connections in Person A’s brain that encode his memories, and then print that pattern onto Person B’s brain. And-if you’ve adequately “wiped down” Person B’s own memories, so that he doesn’t get confused-Person B will believe he is Person A. Of course, you could use this process just to move consciousnesses around in the present day-and that’s something I figured Warren Labs was gearing up for-but in this case, Person B would be in the past. Specifically, he’d be a Maya ahau — a king-who’d know or at least have access to the full version of the Game, or more technically, to the “nine-stone” version. And he’d have the resources to preserve that knowledge so that, thirteen centuries later, we could dig it up. And then we might be able to use that to save ourselves from whatever’s lurking at the business end of 2012.
At first-or at least this is how it seemed to me at the time-the team hadn’t been thinking of me as a candidate for projection into the past. Their first choice had been a younger student of Taro’s named Tony Sic, who was from Merida, in the Yucatan, and who spoke Yukatekan Mayan, and who’d worked at the CPR, the Comunidad de Poblacion en Resistencia, in Ixcan, and who was even pretty good at the Game, although of course not so good as I was. But I convinced them I was the better bet. Either that or, as I’ve lately come to suspect, they were thinking of sending me all along. Still, what matters is that my consciousness got successfully downloaded, sent through what they called a desktop wormhole, and projected back to AD 664.
Still, things, as things do, started to go wrong before my duplicate self-whom I guess we could call Jed 2 — even got there. He was supposed to arrive in the brain of an ahau named 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the king of the city of Ixnichi Sotz, or Ix for short, in the Sierra de Chama region, in the center of what’s now Guatemala. He could just take over, watch some experts play the Game, and document everything. No sweat. Instead-according to Jed 2 ’s letters-he’d turned up in the head of a star athlete named Chacal, who played the local big-time sport, hipball. It was something like how you’d imagine soccer if soccer balls weighed thirty pounds and were studded with razor blades. Chacal was about to roll himself down the local pyramid’s steps as an especially humiliating sacrifice, as a kind of proxy to keep 9 Fanged Hummingbird in power.
But maybe I’m getting into more detail than we need here. The basics are that Jed 2 — uncharacteristically-was resourceful enough to worm his way out of his sacrifice predicament, find out something about the Game, and, amazingly, make it all the way to Teotihuacan, the capital of the Mexican highlands at that time, to score some drugs.
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The issue was that the high levels of the Game make demands on the human brain that the brain can’t meet without chemical help. And in AD 664, which was the only time Jed 2 was going to get to hang out in Olde Mayaland, the main sources of the drugs had been monopolized by the two ruling clans of Teotihuacan. In fact, evidently this was one of the reasons for Teotihuacan’s eight-hundred-year longevity as a capital city, but this has already taken up a pretty big fraction of the time you have left so maybe you don’t need to learn any more history right now. Jed 2 made his way to Teotihucan and met with a personage who was illustrated in the Codex, a sort of nun named Ahau-na Koh, or just Lady Koh. And through her, he got hold of some of the Game drugs, but in the process he seems to have set off the fire that finally destroyed the city. Although his letter’s a little reticent on this point. In fact his letters are frustrating in general and sometimes I suspect him, or myself, of editorializing. At any rate Jed 2 and Lady Koh’s retinue made it at least as far as one of our prearranged search zones in Oaxaca, 270 miles from Teotihuacan. He buried the first cache of notes and Game drugs and, as planned, mark
ed the burial spot with lumps of magnetite. There was a plan for him to inter a second set, along with his own body and possibly recoverable polymerized brain, in one of the royal tombs of Ix, although it looks as though he didn’t get that far and now we’ll never know. But back here-I mean back here like back now, in time-in 2012, Marena’s team dug up the stuff without any trouble. Taro came up with a software version of the full nine-stone form of the Game and Warren’s Lotos division came up with a synthetic version of the two types of drugs. And when I learned to play the Game on them, I-along with Tony Sic and several others of Taro’s students in the Warren program-found that Jed 2 was right.
I guess we could call the tsam lic compounds “smart drugs” if that didn’t make you think of G-Series Gatorade. They enabled one’s brain to behave less like a brain and more like-I don’t want to say like a computer, at least not like the sort of computer humans have invented, because it has a much more analogish, intuitive feel than that-but like some kind of cross between a superclock, a supercamera, and a super-slide rule. And we used it to avert the 2012 problem, or I guess now you have to say we thought we did. After a whole lot of hours using the Game to sift information-both from the Net in general and from NSA and other black databases-I tracked down a homegrown Canadian bioterrorist named Madison Czerwick who was just about to release a heavily tweaked version of a formerly military strain of Brucella abortus.
Now, I realize all this sounds like I’m getting a little flighty, but the proof’s in the blood pudding, and in this case the Warren folks shared the information with the FBI and it checked out. And, using a multinational rapid response unit-just like in a Tom Clancy book, but without the colorful characters or expository dialogue-they grabbed Madison and isolated his tanks of bugs. And, when the lab at the CDC analyzed the stuff, it turned out that, yes, it really would have finished off almost all the human beings on earth, as well as the higher primates and a good fraction of lower primates, dogs, bears, pigs, and, for DNA-related reasons, toads, all right around the 2012 date. They even gave us all secret medals, which I guess are like invisible diamonds.
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