In the Courts of the Sun (21 page)

[15]

E
leven 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, Ashley
₂
.
“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.”
“ Yeah.”
“Hey, speaking of that, do we have doomsday insurance?”
“Dude, I know it’s all ridiculous,” she said. “It’s a
corporation
.”
“Right. Okay.”
“Okay, the first thing is, on the hæmophilia thing, do you know whether any of those medications counteract any known psychiatric medications?”
“I’m told not,” I said.
“Are you currently taking any medications that are not on the prescription list you gave us?”
“No.”
“Any other drugs?”
“Caffeine.”
“We don’t have to put that in.”
“Like, fifteen cups a day.”
“Hmm. I’ll leave it out anyway. But you really ought to ease up a little.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“Right.” She scribbled a notation on her screen. “Um, the other thing is there’s another medical item. It says that when you got to the U.S., they classified you, um, they list you as having ‘posttraumatic stress disorder presenting as similar to Asperger’s.’ ”
“That’s true,” I said.
“Does that still affect your behavior?”
“Well, not in a dysfunctional way, as far as I’m concerned,” I said. “Why, do I seem weird?”
“Not to me,” she said, “no, but, you know, that’s me.”
“Hmm. Well, I can seem weird. So they tell me. They say I’m more interested in objects than people.”
“Is that true?”
“I’m not interested in objects either.”
“So what are you interested in?”
“Wait, what’s the difference again? People are the things that move around and say stuff, right?”
“I’ll just tell them I’ve asked you about it and you’re okay,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“It’s fine. I have a syndrome myself.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it’s called Laurin-Sandrow syndrome.”
“Is that serious?” I asked.
“No, it’s a very mild instance. It’s undetectable.”
“Oh. Good.”
“How are you guys doing?” Boyle’s voice asked. We turned. He and Taro had come over.
“We’re done,” Marena said.
“Is Tony Sic around?”
“He’s at that Care Space thing,” she said.
“How are you doing with the four stones?” Taro asked me.
“Not so well,” I said. Oops, I thought. Watch it. These are your employers, Jeddo. You’re supposed to radiate an aura of cautious optimism. “I do have another idea, though,” I started to say. “Maybe—”
“I am thinking that we would need to use five stones even to get a handle on the problem,” Taro said.
“How can we get a what, a nine-stone game going?” Boyle asked.
“We would not even know where to start,” Taro said. “Each stone—each new stone is like putting another wheel on the Enigma machine.”
I didn’t think Boyle got the reference. “We have to keep moving,” he said to Taro, leading him toward the stairs. Marena went with them. “Text me when you’re done down here,” she said to me. I made a little wave.
I sat back down.
Hmm.
Something odd was going on. What was Tony Sic doing again? Oh, right. He was in the Care Space.
It sounded kind of familiar to me. Maybe I’d been to a Care Space at some point. It had to be some sort of children’s hospital or outpatient center. One of Lindsay Warren’s nonprofits. Back in Salt Lake, maybe? Except that didn’t quite have the right ring to it. That is, I wasn’t associating it with the hæmo thing.
Maybe it’s the Stake’s day care center. Does Sic have kids? He didn’t say he didn’t. Hmm.
Except that didn’t ring right either. It felt like Care Space had to do with something else, something more abstract. Something mathematical.
I put another plug in my cheek. Say what you want about nicotine, but it does light a fire under a few gray cells.
The Care Space thing reminded me of something else. Two things. Something from last night that I didn’t know and didn’t check out. Freaky Friday? Somebody’d mentioned
Freaky Friday
. Which was what? It was just a dumb comedy movie that they remade as an even dumber comedy movie. Something that was going to happen on a Friday? Maybe that was just some local festival. Think about that one later. What else happened last night that was odd? Besides everything.
Well, it was a little odd when Taro brought up time travel at the end of that conversation. Or rather, it wasn’t odd for Taro. Like a lot of math people, he and I had always talked about stuff like that. He gets speculative. But there had been something that seemed odd about it at the time. What was it? Taro said there wasn’t any future. Because there weren’t any time travelers. Okay. And then Boyle asked . . . right. He asked whether that wasn’t because of Novikov.
Hmm. Well, the thing was, I happened to know what Novikov was. It was the Novikov self-consistency principle, which was a way to do time manipulations without the old and discredited many-universes theory. Basically it was a theorem about how time travel didn’t necessarily cause physical contradictions. But how come Boyle knew about it? He wasn’t a math person. He was kind of a dullard, in fact. And nobody questioned him on it either. And for that matter, why didn’t somebody object that maybe time travel was impossible? Even that Michael Weiner guy let it go by. And he was looking for ways to put in his two cents.
And something else, some reference I didn’t get and hadn’t checked up on—
Care Space. No.
Kerr
space.
Roy Kerr.
Kerr space
time
.
Firefox, I clicked.
Kerr space,
I Googled. There were thousands of hits. I clicked the first one.
Kerr Black Holes as Wormholes,
Wikipedia said.
Because of its two event horizons, it might be possible to avoid hitting the singularity of a spinning black hole, if the black hole had a Kerr metric.
Dios perro,
I thought. God dog.
No es posible, no es posible.
A little tingle started down in my lower back. It wasn’t a tzam lic twinge, it was just the normal cold goose bumpy sizzle you get with a major revelation.
SSC, I thought, out of nowhere. A1 had said something like “The SSC was running.”