The Sacrifice Game (59 page)

( 91 )

A
nd I guess the deal is that when you fight with someone at the terminal level, when you’re really trying to kill, when you finally contact flesh and really get your hands in there, they seem so delicate and squooshy, and you can feel them react to the pain, and so if you’re not a natural sadist, which I guess this proved I wasn’t, you naturally pull your punches. Except you can’t pull back. In my overactive but currently not-terribly-original imagination he still seemed like he was me, like I was fighting a gooey mirror, and that made it—

Oops. Nearly got away there. Hang on. Just another minute. Hang. On. Ha. Ng. Where were they? The cavalry wasn’t showing up. And we were still going down. Even through the thick neoprene the water here felt about ten degrees below zero. Sic’s body was bigger and stronger, but he wasn’t a diver, so the deeper we got, the less well I could deal with it than the good old Jed
₁
body could.

I yelled into my microphone.
“Where the shit are you?”
It came out like “Warashuvarrooo?” Too late I realized that I hadn’t closed the other channels, so now Jed
₁
and Jed
₁
’s guards and the people on Jed
₁
’s boat and everybody between here and Key West could hear me loud and clear and knew I was desperate and alone.

Brop
. We sank.
Brop.
Ow. Another sinus popping.
Brop.

Sinking. Eight fathoms. Nine. Brop brop brop brop. Ten. Oh, hell.

He’s not committing suicide, I realized. He’s planning to kill me this way. He’ll let the pressure immobilize me, and then he’ll clip a weight to me and wave good-bye, and I’d sink down and—and where the fuck were they? Just leaving me. Lazy bastards. Setting me up to get killed so that they wouldn’t have to do it themselves, so they’d have a record and witnesses of somebody else doing—no, no. Cancel. Paranoia is not your friend in moments like this . . . except that it’s starting to seem pretty fucking plausible, they weren’t here, they weren’t—

BRORK
. Ow, shit. That smarts. Damn. Get his weights, I thought. And I got one hand on one of them, but then his hand got onto mine, and held it. And there was a weird sort of pause. I held his leg with my leg. I got my other hand into his belt. If you can’t get the weights, then just hang on, I thought. They’ll get here. If—

“I’m still scared,” Jed
₁
said.

“What?” I responded automatically. “You mean like—”

Oof. He’d gotten me in the stomach. I backed up, that is, toward the surface, and got hold of an ankle. Just stay on that. “You mean of, of . . . of, of, of dying,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. He kicked. It seemed that his foot connected with my right hand, but I couldn’t be sure.

“Then . . .
stop it
.” He kicked again. “Damn it, Other Jed, stop jabbing at me.” I couldn’t help smiling.

I clawed up, or down, over his body, past the belt and onto his harness’s cross-chest strap. Despite the cold, and in spite of all the other gazmos and gidgets sticking out, I felt that he had an erection. I nearly got level with his mask. His hands were on my gas hose, trying to disconnect it, but it was a SEAL-grade product made for just this sort of thing, and he couldn’t do it. He twisted away again. He was as slippery as a giant nudibranch, and this time he pulled free. Through mainly pure luck I got the light on him and watched him fin down into the trench. Hell. I swam after him. My right leg felt weirdly warm. I got to him again. His fin got me in the face but my helmet/mask stayed on. I got his ankle, and then his knee, and then the other knee.

There was kind of a lull. Obviously both of us were completely exhausted and it was like we’d agreed to take a break.

“You know,” he said in his own falsetto, “even if you do . . . get the Domino . . . it’ll . . . it will just mean that . . . you and Marena’ll spend . . . what time you . . . have left in . . . a . . . cage.”

“Really?” I asked. Was that a clue? I wondered.
BPOK
. Ow. Sinuses popping. Pressure, pressure. Well, at least I now knew what those eight great tomatoes in that little bitty can felt—

Sprooong.

Pain. Twitch. Agggh. Oxygen toxicity convulsion. Ow, ow, it hurts, it really hurts. Where were they, where were they, where were they, where were they, where were they, where were they,
WHERE WERE THEY?!?!?!?!????
And was I floating up? Yes. I’d gotten the weights off. Surface, here we come. Too fast, though.
BPOK
. Ow. Ow and ow. So, I thought, if I’m heading into a world of pain, he must be heading into a zillion universes of agony. My hand definitely wasn’t working right. Where were they? The water temperature felt around absolute zero. Was I really bleeding that much? Or was it some fear thing? Well, serves you—him—whoever—right. Bastard. Ow. There must have been floodlights because I could see. The good guys, finally? If so they were too late, too late, too late, I was dead, he was dead, everybody on earth was dead, too late, too late, too late, because now I could see his silhouette against the dark green water, except it wasn’t a human silhouette, it was like some giant sort of black Siamese squid with way too many tentacles. Ow, fuckfuckfuck. I could feel the blood in my toes and fingertips starting to boil. We rose ten feet and now I could see that the tentacles were Jed
₁
’s blood. He’d gotten cut somewhere, somewhere exposed outside of the somewhat self-healing properties of neoprene, and the difference in pressure was squeezing the stuff out of him like a tube of toothpaste open at both ends. Eeks. The hemophiliac’s worst fear. I almost thought I saw a glimpse of his face, that is, my face, with an expression like he was looking at his dying child, if he’d had one. Almost a disgusted expression. By two fathoms after that, my own mask had filled with blood too. Somehow I got it off. Hold breath, I thought, but I couldn’t, and I inhaled a burning snake of seawater. This has got to be it, I thought. Good-bye, Columbethius. Bye, bye, Birdie. Hello, Deathy, well hel
lo
, Deathy. Just break the news to Mother. Cruel world anyway. So—

Owch. There were claws lifting me from behind. Maybe I was going to live long enough to at least experience the shame of how badly I’d fucked up. It felt like a year since I’d spotted Jed
₁
. Which meant it was at least ten minutes. What the hell had gone wrong? I mean besides everything else—Ow, ow. Can’t deal with this bends thing. Ow. They pulled me on board and set me facedown on a sort of stretcher. I threw up. Since I was still thinking I was going to die from pressure poisoning, about all I could do was focus on the kind of cross-hatching in the gray textured linoleum, with ripples of what looked like strong tea—diluted blood—washing over it. After all the water and, it seemed, some of my intestines, had been ejected, they turned me on my back. I got a glimpse of Jed
₁
lying next to me. He didn’t look good. I noticed that I could hear my teeth chattering, and meaningless talking—I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to understand what they were saying, so it sounded like it was in a language I didn’t know—and then heard a buzz and felt another buzz in my right calf and then figured out they were the same thing, electric scissors cutting through my suit. A female hand—Lisurate’s?—was holding a sort of cup thing over my groin, that is, on the left side of my doodads. Fuckshitfuck fuckdamshit, I thought. Evidently I’d been too hopped up on O
₂
and adrenaline to notice at the time, but the little weasel must’ve stabbed me with his dive knife. Going for the femoral artery. Which, if he nailed it, would have done me in within three minutes. So much for the bullshit reinforced wetsuit. Which I’d known wouldn’t work for shit. Ow. This sucks. Ouch. Jeezus. I’m not supposed to die like this. I’m a movie star, for crying out loud.

“Fear,” Dr. Lisuarte’s voice said. Fear of what? I wondered. Next to me Jed
₁
’s body half-clenched like a big fist and then relaxed again.

Oh,
clear
. Why do they say that? I noticed that they’d already hooked me up to a baggie of Tony Sic’s white-cell-enriched B+ plus Special Blend, which Dr. L had thoughtfully had me autodonate four days ago.

Well, hell. That was it. I was gone, I thought, or rather he was gone, or rather the world was gone, soon to be gone, anyway. I’d screwed up. Big-time. Biggest-time.
Todo por me culpa.
All my fault. I’m the biggest fuckup in all creation. Yep. Since the Big Bang itself, no entity in the universe had ever fucked up quite so utterly as I had. I heard the boat’s motor shift into first gear, and about two minutes after that I heard Dr. Lisuarte’s voice talking to the shore crew on the phone, confirming that Jed
₁
was dead.

( 92 )

T
he only thing that can ever be good about any hospital room is that it can be private, as this one was. In fact, this one was so private that it was even quiet. Sinisterly quiet, of course. I was already pretty sure I was in a forensic wing.

“How life-threatening is it?” I asked, trying to sound butch in front of Marena. Despite the fact that Sic’s body was younger, fitter, and handsomer—well, let’s say conventionally handsomer, catalog-handsomer—and also hemophilia-free, I still wanted my original body back, even just to say good-bye to it. I’d cried about it more than once.

“Not,” Doctor Lisuarte said. “Decompression grade two. However, your right arm is going to be in that cast for at least a month.” She explained that it was just the index metacarpal, but that it was shattered into four pieces and needed a lot of stability.

Finally they left. I could tell when the door was open that it was the forensic wing. There was a nonopenable square of nonbreakable “glass” looking out into a “courtyard” made of that 1960s-era icky white brick studded with air conditioners. Straining my head up I could see floors above and below. I guessed we were at least five floors up.

I was groggy, and not in a pleasant way. My groin picked now to start aching. There were puncture wounds all over my body, which would still take a while to heal, even these days.

And of course I was tightly guarded. They wouldn’t even let me have any of my own phones or laptops, only Warren-approved versions that were impossible to take apart and filled with all kinds of nannyware.

The SBS people had interrogated the captured guard to see if Jed
₁
had said anything. They’d also stormed the boat looking for intel. After going through hard drives, and sweating the crew, they came up dry.

Well, let’s see, I thought. So the actual end of the earth will be the opposite of the bangs-and-whamos Jerry Bruckheimer version. There won’t be any fires, explosions, cartwheeling aircraft carriers, or cities flooded to the thirtieth floor. It’ll be the definition of unspectacular. It’ll be over in a fraction of a second. And nobody will even notice.

Hmm. So . . .

Without Jed
₁
to tell us what he’d done, how would we even know that the last domino wouldn’t fall early, like, say, now? We didn’t.

How did we know that this instant wouldn’t be the last, that two seconds from now we all wouldn’t exist and wouldn’t notice that we didn’t? I tried to think of each moment that passed with us still here as a little victory. We went around and around.

At one point I said, “It’ll be like—the thing it’ll be most like is just, when something distracts your attention from whatever it was on previously, and you forget what you were thinking about. Except not even that much.”

Taro said, “Not only will it not hurt . . . but one will not even notice it.”

“But somebody on, like, Io, who was looking at the earth, that person would notice it,” I said. “Although he’d disappear, too, in whatever minutes.” There was a feeling of oddity in the conversation, something about how we were racing to stop something that, if it happened, we wouldn’t even notice. Keep it real, I thought. It’s real. It’s a real threat. Focus.

“We will know
if
we have stopped it,” Taro said. “. . . But if we do not stop it . . . we will not know.”

“Kind of the physics equivalent of flesh-eating bacteria.”

“Hmm?”

“I mean, it’s going to reach a certain probability in there and then it’ll just suck in everything, you, me, the Grand Canyon, Jupiter, the Horsehead Nebula, the Sombrero Galaxy, the Roy Rogers Cometary Globule, everything.”

“No, no,” Marena said, “I’m not buying that, whatever Jed-Sub-One did in there, it’s not going to blow up everything, that’s ridiculous.”

“No, you’re wrong, it
will
blow the, the—it’ll blow the universe
in,
not
up
.”

So, now Marena and I, without all the resources of the Warren Corporation, worked to identify the Domino Cascade. Marena’d hoped the Game would work again, maybe better than it had worked before, Marena smuggled eight full doses of tsam lic into the forensic wing. On the first night I took two doses and followed Jed
₁
’s last clue. After a lot of false starts I started to see patterns that I thought could be links in the Cascade. Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, given who set it up, they tended to cluster around Warren Corporation–related events. The Game also helped me make sense of the wealth of code-breaking programs you can get these days, and it wasn’t too hard to get into at least the outer directories of some of their defense-contracting divisions. After a few hours I’d grabbed eight terabytes of data. At dawn I started the Hard Part—separating the cream from the milk, uh, the wheat from the chaff, the ideas from the clichés . . .

It turned out that, because of accelerating troubles with Pakistan—combined with a U.S. military that, thanks to the social unrest “Stateside,” was now barely usable overseas—DARPA had commissioned an accelerated testing schedule for a piece of Warren-proprietary “neoartillery” called RABS. The machine “followed the trend toward basing real weapons on 1950s-era science fiction”—notably battle bots, acoustic ordinance, the death maser, and the heat ray. RABS, which stands for “Remote Atomization Battlefield System,” was, according to the highly classified but still-in-adspeak brochure, “rather like a disintegrator.” The “cover explanation” for this acronym was “Reliability, Availability, Bang-for-the-buck, and Scalability.”

After another dose, I was able to intuitively check the math on the reactions required for the RABS to a degree that no one else, not even the cadre of particle physicists on the Warren payroll, had done so far. I calculated that instead of a one-in-ten-thousand chance of destroying the entire world (which, characteristically, the corporation found well worth taking), the very first RABS test, scheduled for December 19, had a one-in-one chance. Evidently Jed
₁
discovered the same thing, and then constructed the Domino Cascade by working backward from this relatively “easy access” doomsday event. All the way back to buying a few corn futures.

Unfortunately, the test didn’t require any unique equipment—that is, there were at least fifty particle accelerator facilities in the world that are capable of performing it, and it was too close to the test date to investigate them all. I kept moving ahead anyway, though. At the last moment, as the tsam lic peaked, I managed to remember what Koh’s ghost had told me on the Tree.

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.