The Sacrifice Game Read Free

of the whole conglomerate, Lindsay Warren. The discouraging thing was that Taro’s team and I didn’t do too well at figuring out how to play the version of the Game we’d gotten from the Codex. But I found out they had another approach to it in the works, something pretty bizarre, or, well, at least pretty futuristic, although I guess not much more so than the Mars mission, glow-in-the-dark poodles, or your latest flexible-screen phone. They were planning to get data directly from the old days, and somebody from our era was going to go and pick it up. It wasn’t exactly time travel. In fact, there are reasons why real time travel, where you’d send someone’s body back to the past, was almost certainly always going to be impossible, no matter how advanced technology became. But there is a way to send energy. Basically, you can make something like a high-quality print of all the connections in Person A’s brain that encode his memories, and then print that pattern onto Person B’s brain. And—if you’ve adequately “wiped down” Person B’s own memories, so that he doesn’t get confused—Person B will believe he is Person A. Of course, you could use this process just to move consciousnesses around in the present day—and that’s something I figured Warren Labs was gearing up for—but in this case, Person B would be in the past. Specifically, he’d be a Maya
ahau
—a king—who’d know or at least have access to the full version of the Game, or more technically, to the “nine-stone” version. And he’d have the resources to preserve that knowledge so that, thirteen centuries later, we could dig it up. And then we might be able to use that to save ourselves from whatever’s lurking at the business end of 2012.
At first—or at least this is how it seemed to me at the time—the team hadn’t been thinking of me as a candidate for projection into the past. Their first choice had been a younger student of Taro’s named Tony Sic, who was from Mérida, in the Yucatán, and who spoke Yukatekan Mayan, and who’d worked at the CPR, the
Comunidad de Población en Resistencia,
in Ixcán, and who was even pretty good at the Game, although of course not so good as I was. But I convinced them I was the better bet. Either that or, as I’ve lately come to suspect, they were thinking of sending me all along. Still, what matters is that my consciousness got successfully downloaded, sent through what they called a desktop wormhole, and projected back to AD 664.
Still, things, as things do, started to go wrong before my duplicate self—whom I guess we could call Jed 2 —even got there. He was supposed to arrive in the brain of an
ahau
named 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the king of the city of Ixnichi Sotz, or Ix for short, in the Sierra de Chama region, in the center of what’s now Guatemala. He could just take over, watch some experts play the Game, and document everything. No sweat. Instead—according to Jed 2 ’s letters—he’d turned up in the head of a star athlete named Chacal, who played the local big-time sport, hipball. It was something like how you’d imagine soccer if soccer balls weighed thirty pounds and were studded with razor blades. Chacal was about to roll himself down the local pyramid’s steps as an especially humiliating sacrifice, as a kind of proxy to keep 9 Fanged Hummingbird in power.
But maybe I’m getting into more detail than we need here. The basics are that Jed 2 —uncharacteristically—was resourceful enough to worm his way out of his sacrifice predicament, find out something about the Game, and, amazingly, make it all the way to Teotihuacan, the capital of the Mexican highlands at that time, to score some drugs.
     

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    T he issue was that the high levels of the Game make demands on the human brain that the brain can’t meet without chemical help. And in AD 664, which was the only time Jed 2 was going to get to hang out in Olde Mayaland, the main sources of the drugs had