The Sacrifice Game Read Free Page A

been monopolized by the two ruling clans of Teotihuacan. In fact, evidently this was one of the reasons for Teotihuacan’s eight-hundred-year longevity as a capital city, but this has already taken up a pretty big fraction of the time you have left so maybe you don’t need to learn any more history right now. Jed 2 made his way to Teotihucán and met with a personage who was illustrated in the Codex, a sort of nun named Ahau-na Koh, or just Lady Koh. And through her, he got hold of some of the Game drugs, but in the process he seems to have set off the fire that finally destroyed the city. Although his letter’s a little reticent on this point. In fact his letters are frustrating in general and sometimes I suspect him, or myself, of editorializing. At any rate Jed 2 and Lady Koh’s retinue made it at least as far as one of our prearranged search zones in Oaxaca, 270 miles from Teotihuacan. He buried the first cache of notes and Game drugs and, as planned, marked the burial spot with lumps of magnetite. There was a plan for him to inter a second set, along with his own body and possibly recoverable polymerized brain, in one of the royal tombs of Ix, although it looks as though he didn’t get that far and now we’ll never know. But back here—I mean back here like back now, in time—in 2012, Marena’s team dug up the stuff without any trouble. Taro came up with a software version of the full nine-stone form of the Game and Warren’s Lotos division came up with a synthetic version of the two types of drugs. And when I learned to play the Game on them, I—along with Tony Sic and several others of Taro’s students in the Warren program—found that Jed 2 was right.
    I guess we could call the
tsam lic
compounds “smart drugs” if that didn’t make you think of G-Series Gatorade. They enabled one’s brain to behave less like a brain and more like—I don’t want to say like a computer, at least not like the sort of computer humans have invented, because it has a much more analogish, intuitive feel than that—but like some kind of cross between a superclock, a supercamera, and a super–slide rule. And we used it to avert the 2012 problem, or I guess now you have to say we thought we did. After a whole lot of hours using the Game to sift information—both from the Net in general and from NSA and other black databases—I tracked down a homegrown Canadian bioterrorist named Madison Czerwick who was just about to release a heavily tweaked version of a formerly military strain of
Brucella abortus
.
    Now, I realize all this sounds like I’m getting a little flighty, but the proof’s in the blood pudding, and in this case the Warren folks shared the information with the FBI and it checked out. And, using a multinational rapid response unit—just like in a Tom Clancy book, but without the colorful characters or expository dialogue—they grabbed Madison and isolated his tanks of bugs. And, when the lab at the CDC analyzed the stuff, it turned out that, yes, it really would have finished off almost all the human beings on earth, as well as the higher primates and a good fraction of lower primates, dogs, bears, pigs, and, for DNA-related reasons, toads, all right around the 2012 date. They even gave us all secret medals, which I guess are like invisible diamonds.
    Still, the Game can’t truly predict the future, since that can’t be done. That is, you could always just do something that would change whatever you saw. And even if you couldn’t do that, the Game’s not some magic teleidoscope that sees all ∞ random events. That’s impossible. It’s more like a lens that focuses your perception on the strings of events that follow your potential actions, an optimizer that helps create a successful outcome, whatever random events occur. It enables a leap in reasoning power. And as the world becomes more programmable every day—well, let’s say that as of now it’s programmable enough.
    As of December 10—Madison