The Sacrifice Game

(114)

We all watched the clock. 11:59:8, 11:59:9, Noon. All in. Les jeux sont faits, motherfuckers. It was the cosmic sell-by date:

I looked back at the RASP coordinates. Well, there they are, right next door. Might as well just relax. We’d experience another three point one minutes of what we like to call living, and then we’d feel a short sharp shock and maybe even a flash of heat, and then, well before we felt any pain, we wouldn’t exist anymore.

“Too bad we couldn’t just stop the test, huh?” Marena asked.

“Lindsay?” I asked. “Any ideas?”

“For that we’d have to call a meeting,” he said. “If we want to bring a few of the directors in here for-”

“Forget it,” I said. “Rerouting is the way we’re going to go. Sorry about the nonexistence thing.”

“Well, let’s try this anyway,” Marena said. She was looking at something called ELEVATOR FUNCTION and then RAIL LEVEL.

At first I thought the room was falling down into the cleft canyon of the underwaterworld, and I saw the numbered floors rising past us and saw they were real, or rather real images, and realized what Marena must have noticed already but hadn’t bothered to tell me, that we were actually, physically sinking, that the reason the place could be on the thirteenth floor and still be called a Safe Room was because the whole room was really an extra-large elevator. Weirdly, most of the cameras were still functioning, and the transparency macro was chugging along, so it was as though we were sinking through the transparent building into a transparent earth, with explosions flashing around and over us. On the ceiling, translucent wipes with those green wire-frame edges represented the horizontal doors sliding shut over us. We passed a few brightly lit subbasement floors and decelerated.

“Damn,” Marena said. “Maybe we’ll make it after all.” She sounded eager, but also like she didn’t want to get her hopes up.

“That’s great,” I mumbled. I must have sounded vague. Really, I wasn’t good for anything anymore. It was all I could do to keep straight what was realish and what was waking-dreamish.

“Check this out,” Marena’s voice went somewhere. “‘When at its lowest level, this facility was designed to withstand a force of twenty kilotons and slash or two thousand degrees Celsius for over twelve hours. This is roughly equivalent to detonation on the scale of the Nagasaki blast only six hundred yards away.’ Isn’t that great?”

“Is that the operating manual?” I asked.

“Yeah. ‘Cooling is achieved by the use of onboard vacuum sealers and conventional freon refrigeration. Nitrox is supplied from six units in the live floor, each with a capacity of, blah blah blah, ventilation is redundant with, blah, blah…’ Damn.”

This can’t be happening, I thought. Although, on the other hand, I guess if anybody would have something like this, it would be Lindsay. Paranoia was one of his most characterizing and endearing traits. There was stuff like this in Jed’s memories, things he’d heard about on good authority years ago, in Utah, like supposedly there’s a vault under the Church Office Building, the LDS headquarters on North Temple, that you could dip in the sun for twenty-score beats and pull it out and it would still be seventy-two degrees inside. I suppose at the time, Jed had thought it was just a suburban legend. Well, for once somebody wasn’t just paranoid, but was paranoid enough.

I blinked around. Everything was still sideways. All over the room’s six sides the last surveillance systems were going dead. Window after window closed down, but instead of just going to blue the confused system replaced them with video mirrors. We saw ourselves re-reflecting our reflections into serried ranks of identical Chacal-in-Jed 3 — in-Tony-Sic and Lindsay Warren and Marena Park toy figurines, with the table and chairs replicated in infinite rows curving away toward hidden vanishing points, like long freight trains disappearing over the curvature of the earth. Somewhere among the receding clone armies I thought I saw Maximon, wearing his old manto and and sombrero and smoking and smirking like I Told You So, but it was probably just me. I saw what Lindsay had meant about the Sealing Room. The room was a high-tech version of the marriage chapel they have in Mormon temples, which have huge enfiladed mirrors on all four walls, “set,” as they like to say, “to catch eternity.” Evidently the designers hadn’t thought that was cool enough for the New Age Moron weddings Lindsay and his pals planned to have here, though, because now the display programs were going into some preset routine where they pulled images from the ongoing recording stock and replayed them in palimpsests over the current “reflections,” so we could see ourselves enlarged, shrunk, from above, from the other side of the room, unreversed, in slow motion, in ultrafast motion, four-hundred-score beats before, one beat before, everything except a beat from now. I saw us walk in again, and I saw Marena run the video where she called Lindsay to resign from the Warren Group, right after the Chrononaut trailer preview. It was like being in the head of some obsessive-compulsive person who could think only about the three of us, stuck in our little lifeboat from here to eternity The room rattled like a little box in a big box and then seemed to settle. The screens flickered and went to blue, and it was like we were in a glass bathyscaphe deep in the ocean. Big red letters scrolled across the walls: EXIT AIRLOCKS ALIGNED. There was a click and a loud hiss. The air pressure changed and cool, oxygen-rich air welled up out of the floor, noisily. Excellent, I thought. Not with a wimp, but with a banger.

“-00:00:13:00,” the readout said. “-00:00:13.5”…

We sat, and looked around us, watching the fifty-two windows, the in-house and public news feeds on the south wall, the stars wheeling on the ceiling, the maps on the north wall, and the news videos and charts and graphs and flickering equations and scrolling code and a thousand other varieties of data. I figured that to an outside observer-God, if only there were ever an outside observer-we looked pretty much like three random blobs of videonarcotized trailer trash anywhere in the random world. Marena touched my wrist, like, Thanks for saving Max, or trying to.

We waited.

“-00:00:09.50,” it said,

“-00:00:09.00,

“-00:00:08.50…”