The Sacrifice Game (56 page)

( 86 )

M
arena got the
Mission: Impossible
–style team together again—herself, me, Taro, Ashley
₂
, Dr. Lisuarte, Grgur, Hernán, and Ana Vergara. Our main goal was, of course, to track down and capture Jed
₁
and interrogate him about the Domino Cascade. We’d also be trying, concurrently, to identify the Cascade and divert it directly. So far, though, we hadn’t recognized even a single one of the “dominos.” Finally, the members other than me had a third directive that I suspected—to keep a close eye on me. That is, me, Jed
₃
. Marena was still worried that I might make the same decision as Jed
₁
—even without an overdose of tsam lic—and then there would be two Game-savvy homicidal maniacs running around. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that no matter how sentimental Marena might get about me, it wouldn’t matter to the Firm. As soon as I’d delivered the goods—the full deposition, the Game, and Jed
₁
, in increasing order of importance—Warren would slate me for cleansing. Still, I went along with it all for now.

Jed
₁
could have been anywhere in the world, including Antarctica, Indiana, Peru, or even Peru, Indiana. There had been a hint, though. Jed
₁
would be happy that the end of the world would kill the Mano Blanco guys and that damn nun. He’d want to let them know ahead of time and suffer. So I had feelers out watching them. And of course, I was watching all the nudibranch sites. He’d be happy to be in a place where he could take a last look at his favorite genus of animals, nudibranchs—but that could be at almost any of the reefs in the Caribbean, on the Pacific Coast, or even Southeast Asia or Australia. However, since Jed
₁
and I shared versions of the same mind, I was at least able to compete with him on a high level, with almost a kind of virtual ESP.

I played four Games against the absent Jed
₁
. Unfortunately, somehow—despite my using the Human Game algorithms against his less powerful ones—he was able to anticipate my moves. And he kept eluding me.

Finally, on the Second Day of the Dead—that is, Friday—we got the certified decryption of
Why I Did It.
Marena and I read it without saying anything. There were sixty-two pages of Executive Solutions research attached, confirming that what Jed had identified as the first dominoes had, indeed, fallen.

Marena and I—the rest of the team were setting up a temporary office in the Holopaw compound—were alone on the sofa in her office, and we sat for two minutes without saying anything. I know because I was facing the clock collection on her big desk and this gaudy ormolu French Directoire thing had a big old second-counting annular ring that kept whirling around like a damn salad spinner. We sat for another two minutes without saying anything.

“Maybe nothing else is going to happen,” I said, finally. “Maybe he’s just blowing smoke at us.”

“Um . . . yeah, I hope so,” she said. “I don’t think so. Though.”

“No.”

We sat without saying anything, this time for two and a half minutes.

“Hey,” I asked, “are you sure Jed-Sub-One never told you
how
he thought the world would end?”

“No, I told you,” she said, “he said he didn’t know. I mean, before. And then when he was, you know, he didn’t say how.”

“I mean, did he ever just guess at it, or say anything about what it’d be like for, like, the People of Earth, or whoever?”

“I don’t know,” Marena said. “Painlessly, or whatever, I guess.”

“He said that?”

“Uh, something like that,” she said. “Or that people wouldn’t notice—”

“Damn it,” I yelled, “I knew it!”

“What?”

“Well, just that, that would be something that’ll disappear the whole planet in a second.”

“I thought it might be some sleeping-gas-type thing.”

“No, no,” I said. “I wouldn’t ever say—I mean, he wouldn’t put it that way, that, that’s—no, he, he means some collider event. Like a strangelet. You know, like, a black hole thingy. Or something. Something that just vanishes the whole place without anybody noticing.”

“Okay. Wow, you’re right.”

“That’s a
huge
clue. We can work backwards from that.” I started off toward my temporary server station on the kitchen table.

“Sorry,” she called after me.

After an hour I thought I had a pretty good list of facilities. It started with CERN, which was, of course, the world’s biggest collider, and then went down through a hundred and sixty-one others until it trailed off in labs whose particle accelerators probably weren’t functional enough for the job. There were two big problems with it, though. One was that one didn’t know exactly what procedure old J
₁
was thinking of. The second was that the U.S., China, Europe, Israel, and the old USSR each probably had at least a handful of secret installations. And the third—okay, three problems—the third was just that even though he was still using the old version of the Game, the ol’ Jed-Sub-Onester was probably capable of doing the whole thing remotely. We had to start monitoring online traffic to each known lab, but there wouldn’t be much percentage in staking them out physically.

Or we could just convince every single one of them to shut down for a few months, I thought. Like, right, that’ll happen. Governments are so safety-minded.

Hell. I’d never thought I’d be sorry that I was intelligent.

By the next morning, Marena and Taro (on the phone) and I had talked it around another ten times. Lately she’d been thinking that instead of trying to track Jed
₁
down, we needed to get him to get him to reveal himself.

“Yeah, but, the trouble is,” I said, for the unknownth time, “it’s hard to smoke out somebody who’s that paranoid.”

“I know,” she said, “you said that.”

“No, but—well, that’s it.”

“Look, he has to—it has to be very subtle. We have to let him suspect something.” And, she went on—not in so many words, but in many, many more—his suspicions have to be as close as possible to the truth. Maybe he needed to think that we’d come back from Guatemala with a game-changer. Except he had to think it was even bigger than it was, that our new and improved version of the Sacrifice Game was definitely going to let us overcome his nefarious scheme. In fact, Taro suggested, maybe we should create a similar anomaly. “Something parallel to the events of the Domino Cascade,” he said. “Which would look to him . . . as though we have found a blocking strategy.”

I was noncommittal.

“His curiosity has to . . . get the better of him,” he said.

“And, uh, not just his curiosity,” Marena said. “But like, you know, his pride.”

“So, like the
How to Beat Bobby Fischer
strategy,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“We need to let Jed-Sub-One think that playing against us is going to give him an outlet for his creativity.”

“Correct,” Taro said. “He might even . . . as they say . . . he might spot a trap. But he needs to think that that trap. . . . is different from what it actually is. And then he may make an overplay.”

“Okay, then, listen,” Marena said. “In that case—well, let’s look at this a different way. What does Jed-Sub-One really hate?”

“The whole world,” I said.

“Okay, so his hate’s too generalized. So let’s give him a focus.”

“A focus like what?” I asked.

“Like a movie star. Everybody’s jealous of movie stars. Right?”

“Okay.”

“And that’s at least one thing I know how to do pretty well.”

“Make movies?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean you want to direct.”

“Oh, shut up, I’m saying, we’re all set up for, to—”

“So, wait,” I said, “you’re going to make a movie in a week? And distribute it?”

“No, no, of course not, we—no, we don’t need to make a whole movie. Just the trailer. Right? Just enough to make Jed-Sub-One believe it’s really going to happen.”

“Hmm.”

“Right? And then he’ll get jealous and, and he’ll contact us, and he’ll screw up the call routing somehow, and we’ll grab him.”

“Hmm.”

“Don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“But you ought to know, right? You of all people.”

“Well . . .”

“Come on. Let’s make you a star.”

( 87 )

O
n 11/4/12, at 2:05:49 I was standing on an
X
made from DayGlo–green gaffer’s tape, in front of a green screen, wearing green bandages where some of the costume details would go, talking to a green target that they moved around.

I knew film shoots weren’t glamorous, but in these days of hegemonic computer graphics they’re even less glamorous. Once in a while they yelled instructions at me. Fortunately, in these days, you don’t really need to know how to act. As to the product, at least it was classy enough that they spoke some subtitled Yucatec Mayan, but when the Maya characters spoke English, like when the Jed character talked with 2JS, say, they talked in that faux-historical way, without contractions, like they hadn’t invented contractions yet.

On the thirteenth, Marena leaked the trailer onto YouTube.
Chrononaut: Maya
would star Tony Sic—me—playing self. The release date was set for summer of 2013. The trailer used some of the footage taken by the small film crew on the creep into Guatemala and the downloading and from the debriefing, and also some stock footage of the Disney World Horror and other contemporary events, mixing it all up with some scenes “acted” by me in front of the green screen and worked up with computer-generated imagery to re-create some scenes from my experiences in “Ancient Mayaland.” It implied that the film would tell a simplified and heavily censored version of my “time trip.” Naturally, it was an abomination, but Marena said, “We’re into survival now, so who cares?” Of course, most bloggers didn’t believe the claims made in the trailer. But a few people who’d worked out some of the more esoteric aspects of Maya civilization, and who’d gotten some gossip about the research on time projection and consciousnes-transfer, believed it was accurate. And the debate, of course, increased the clip’s notoriety. Forty-eight hours after posting, it had gotten over five million “full views from unique visitors.” Our line was very much in the water.

But Lindsay Warren was furious. Marena’s six-and-a-quarter-minute trailer—a
trailer
—had cost forty-three million barely approved Warren dollars. One point two million of that was for eighty-nine seconds of screen time by January Jones. Who turned out to be really nice, by the way. Even more enragingly, though, the project had basically preempted the much more expensive 3-D feature film that—along with games, novelizations, and other related media—Warren Studios had been working on for months, and which it had planned to release in June of 2013. Assuming, that is, that the world continued to exist after 12-21-12. And, even more enragingly, Marena had revealed Warren proprietary information. For example, details were coming out about Warren’s clandestine human testing of the CTP, which would, to say the least, cast the company in a bad light. Another example was the Hippogriff Incident, when a Guate helicopter was shot down as the team returned from Ix Ruinas. This and other revelations would open Warren up to an avalanche of private lawsuits and even, probably, criminal charges. And as though that weren’t enough, the film had even given away some details about the Sacrifice Game—which, from the Warren Group’s point of view, was entirely proprietary and which represented an investment of several billion dollars.

So despite the fact that Marena and Taro contended that the release of
Chrononaut
was absolutely necessary to keep the universe from disappearing, it seemed that Lindsay, despite his general confidence in the efficacy of the Sacrifice Game, didn’t believe it. Either he still thought that Madison was, as “predicted” in the Codex Nuremberg, the only doomster, or because he wasn’t convinced by
Why I Did It,
or simply on account of his Mormonism and acceptance of Mormon cosmology. Or, alternately, it’s possible that Lindsay was confident that his own separate investigative division—sinisterly referred to as “HR,” for Human Resources—would be capable of tracking down Jed
₁
without needing the film to smoke him out.

At any rate, Marena gave up her position at Warren. Ana had to quit working for Executive Solutions and hire herself out directly to me and Marena (who, since I couldn’t access any of Jed
₁
’s accounts, was now paying for everything herself). I was still bound by my Warren contract, but I started missing meetings with Warren staff—although of course, HR, the Warren investigative division, was now closely shadowing me, Marena, and everyone else on the team. Also, according to Marena’s connections inside the Warren Corporation, these events set the Warren board of directors against Lindsay, whom they began to try to phase out in favor of Laurence Boyle.

Over the next two days, Marena worked with me on a series of posts to my Web site that would hint to Jed
₁
that I had returned from the past with a still-more-effective iteration in the ever-increasingly powerful Sacrifice Game. The idea was for Jed
₁
to suspect that this upgrade would overcome his plans. But even if he didn’t get as worried as we hoped he would about that, he’d still want to learn what had happened during the Human Game. For that matter, he’d be desperate to learn how to play the Human Game, even if he knew he’d disappear before he could ever use it. The Game was the central mystery of his life—of our life, let’s say—and no matter how his character had changed, he’d never be able to leave it unsolved.

Most cleverly, though—and this was Marena’s idea—the posts were pretty well hidden, but went out twice a day, and each one had a little more information than the last. We wouldn’t be able to see where he’d accessed them from—he’d be way too careful for that—but if we got Jed
₁
talking about them, we might be able to suss out which post he’d seen last, and even maybe when he’d seen it, and that might give us a sense of how on the ball he was, Net-wise. It wasn’t much but it was all we had for now.

Otherwise, I just kept doing interviews about the trailer—teleconference only—to prop up the perception that I was soon to be the next Chris Hemsworth. I did okay, but in between gigs I kept getting bouts of unnecessary surliness. Sillily, my biggest emotional problem was that I knew Marena thought No Way had sold us out to the Guate military, but that she was just plain wrong. She thought I was in denial about this, but I knew him and there was just no way he’d do that. He’s dead, I thought. Still, I’d have to deal with that later. If there was a later.

As per my recommendations we kept putting out little bits of propaganda. For instance, at 4:55 EST on Sunday night, we posted something—coded, and in a very difficult-to-find location—about Kristen Stewart, the
Twilight
girl. We kept waiting to hear from the Jedster. Finally, on November 16, a caller ID popped up on Marena’s most private line:
JED
.