The Sacrifice Game

(92)

The 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 cliches…

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.