The Sacrifice Game

(86)

Marena got the Mission: Impossible — style team together again-herself, me, Taro, Ashley 2, Dr. Lisuarte, Grgur, Hernan, 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.”