The Sacrifice Game

(3)

“Hi there, welcome to Florida’s scenic Ronald Reagan Turnpike,” he or it said in the voice of, I think, Will Ferrell. Its wide black grin narrowed and widened roughly along with the consonants and the vertical black ovals that represented its eyes rotated thirty degrees in apical opposition, signifying childlike delight. “Could I jus’ get a peek at your handprint real quick please?” He held out his right “hand,” a thick four-fingered white glove with a round glass scanner in the center of the palm like a Jain dharmachakra.

“These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” I was about to say, but then I figured they must hear that a thousand times a day. Instead I just held out my hand, palm down. Green laser light flashed over it. Nanny Jackboots, I thought, except that I guess I should be glad now that I have stock in the company. Parts of the outfit he wore, and the whole Rolly Po-Po Program design, were Warren Group products. Marena’d shown me a brochure. It was from the Zerothruster division, which was all about mastering crowd psychology, and its current tagline was “The Fun, Fuzzy, and Family-Friendly Frontier of Nonconfrontational Law Enforcement.” Basically the outfits were the regular water-cooled Explosive Ordinance Disposal Advanced Bomb Suits made by the Westminster Group, but since 9/11, when they’d started supplying them as character suits for Disney and Six Flags and other parks, Zerothruster had been facelifting the Nomex/Kevlar with poodlefurry flocking in “varied and cheerful designer colors,” and adding big round outer heads that fit over the high collar and SCBA helmet and that featured “a wide array of designs customizable for cultural nonaggression and local correctness.” This one was a black-and-orange neotenized cat with a teal-blue T-shirt that meant, I guess, that it was the mascot of the Jacksonville Jaguars, and an oversized round badge that said F LORIDA H IGHWAY P ATROL.

“Good-o, guy, well, jus’ gimmie a sec here,” the thing’s next prerecording said. The thing’s left “hand” held a long angled stick with a camera on the end, and he started sweeping it under the ’Cuda. Was he watching the video with one of his eyes, or was someone or something else watching it?

“Hey, you’re good to go, have a good one,” the thing said. The words $14.50 RRT TOLL appeared on my bright new dashboard screen. Thanks, I thought. And enjoy being MicroHitler. For another fifty-two days. I merged law-abidingly onto the Turnpike. A blast of tianguiscore Dopplered by on the right at eight-five, coming from a Cutlass low-rider with curb sensors like catfish barbells and a young but obese Tejano hunched over the tiny steering wheel. Bet it could one-eighty on a peso at sixty-five. Well, I’m just an old square bourgie fart. Except why should I hurry? I least of all people ever to walk the earth. The Rapture’s coming and it’s todo por mi culpa. He zinged around an orange Yellow Van Lines truck and back into the right lane. Probably heading into the No-Go Zone, I thought. Some monster delirio. It’s not a party unless you burn the place down at the end. Well, I agree. Have fun, hermano. Maybe I’ll drop by on the way back from MP’s. One of the odder things about the No-Go Zone was that even though some places were still clocking in at over 40 curies per square kilometer, since it covered over four thousand square miles, and there were about four hundred different roads leading into it, and since squatters don’t much care about long-term health anyway, the police speculated that the population of the NGZ area had actually gone up since the Horror. I’d been there a couple of times to buy fake identity papers and it was actually kind of great, a whole sort of lawless Pirates’ Nassau Town with a smorgasbord of meth, horse, crank, dogfighting, and preteen BJs, but actually not all that dangerous because M13 and a couple of the smaller gangs wanted to keep the carriage trade and policed the place themselves. Next, since it was a personalized feed, I got the malacological news: Sun-Min Hsu and Tobi Ramadan had described a species of nudibranch from the Line Islands area that they said might be eusocial, that is, divided into castes like ants and bees, although I couldn’t imagine how that could be possible, and I actually do know a little bit about opisthobranches. Some people think nudibranchs are the world’s most beautiful living things, with all the extruded gills and polyps in Fantasia-Phiokol colors, and other people think they’re the ugliest, and most people haven’t heard of them at all. Although to some other critter-to a lobster, say-they probably look pretty drab. Anyway, they have some unusual characteristics, including the almost unique ability to devour their prey and, instead of digesting all of it, incorporate some of its useful cells-cnidarians’ stinger cells, for instance, or photosynthesizing algae-into their own bodies. I’d miss them. Except of course I wouldn’t, because I wouldn’t exist. And, experientially anyway, not existing is exactly equivalent to never having existed. So really we didn’t have a problem. Anyway, after the Jedcentric news, for some reason the car decided I’d heard all the news and now wanted to listen to a feed called Last Age of Heroes, which seemed to be having a Stones/Byrds/Doors festival. Debuting at Marker 31, DHSMV had initiated another decade of postdeconstruction on the granny laneINJURE/KILL A WORKER-$7,500 + 15 YEARS, a sign said, so temptingly that I couldn’t imagine anyone resisting the offer. At the Kissimmee exit I voice-texted Marena that I’d be there in ten minutes. Why give her any more time to stage the place? See what she’s really wearing, doing, reading, smoking, fucking, fisting, et ceteris paribus ad foetidus hepaticum. Right?

Marena’s house was just outside the south city limit of Orlando on Orchid Island, one of quite a few residential patches that weren’t only not abandoned, but were making a good-neighborly effort to muddle through as though things were normal. The faux-wrought-iron gate was open, but the dude came out of the guardhouse, made sure I was really me, and he was really polite about it. Classy. I tip-tired through the two S — curves of a long pink-concrete driveway flanked with close-packed pepper trees. There was a three-car garage, but Marena’s Cherokee was parked on the side of the big circle, with two other dark SUVs behind it, and I parked in the front of the line.

At some point, I forget when, Marena’d told me that Walt had built her house during Epcot’s early grand Utopian phase, and I’d thought she’d been exaggerating, but it turned out to be true, and the place was a nearly exact replica of some Frank Lloyd Wright house or other. From this side it looked a lot like the palaces at Uxmal, which is a Yucatec Maya city that was a big capital in the AD 900s, and which, incidentally, had been ruled by some of my ancestors, the Xiws.

I scrumbled out. Crack. Ow. Stiff. Getting old. Damn, it was stuffy. I repocketed my wallet and phone into my shirt and left my jacket on the passenger seat. Okay. Out of habit, I locked the doors. I looked up at NNE +30 degrees to see if I could spot Comet Ixchel but there was too much smaze. Okay, here goes. I toed on the microvibration, pushed away from the car, and skated-sorry, Sleeked™-across the cement. Sleeking felt like you were doing something between ice skating and old-time four-wheel roller skating, but since your feet were flat on the ground there was a sense like you were on a buttered Teflon tray. Basically, the deal was that the treads vibrated at a very high frequency, so they’d slip around even on an ordinary road surface, and then, when the vibe wasn’t on, the action of walking on them generated electricity that they’d store for later, so there weren’t any big battery packs. I guess if they’d come out when I was seven I would have gone monkey over them, but right now they weren’t plugging my wound. Instinctively-already-I cut off the vibration with my big toes and came to a hard stop at the single doorstep. The car must have rung an alarm because before I got to the door a medium-tall Latino guy opened it.

“… Uh, Jed,” he said. “Hi.”

“Hi,” I said. It was Tony Sic.