Marena’s deception upset me more than it should have. I knew it anyway, I thought. Just not this much. Not this much. I looked up where she was on the employee locator and found she was on her way home from the school play with Max. I almost called her to confront her, but instead I kept flipping through Jed-rich files, moving on to their “ CHOCULA PROJECT-IX–IX RUINAS-EXTRACTION” folder. It contained hundreds of gigs of text and at least eighty hours of video. On the first one, I saw that I was definitely sedated just before the uploading, as they hustled me into the caves while the soldiers arrived. Skimming through the Extraction files, I reconstructed a lot of what had been going on “offstage” during the dig. Evidently a contact of Lindsay’s in the Guatemalan military, whom the file identifies as “Felix,” convinced the Guate troops to move their training exercises away from the area of the site during the downloading and exploration phases in April. Then, in September, the same person managed to divert military police patrols from the dig zone, allowing the Chocula team to stay undetected as long as it did. However, when the diggers began blasting into the tomb I was buried in-even though they used thunder as cover for the sound-some military satellite detected the explosions’ chemical discharges and somehow the information got to Felix’s superiors. Felix immediately warned Lindsay and, covering himself, dispatched troops to the site. By this time, it was a foregone conclusion that the core team would have to be extracted by air.
The Hippogriff extraction had been planned to the second, and its probability of failure, it seems, had been worked out to less than one percent. Remote-piloted vehicles, controlled from the Stake, were already fueled and loaded at several hidden airstrips in Belize, ready to launch and take out any aircraft that got too near, and even to clear ground artillery if necessary. It came very close to going off smoothly, and while the two Guate helicopters that unexpectedly intercepted the Hippogriff were a terrible glitch, they never really had a chance. The incident, with the deaths of the officers, had greatly exacerbated the Belize/Guate conflict. Moving on chronologically, I found that two days after most of the Chocula team got safely back to Orlando, Lindsay called a major board meeting of the Warren Group. I pulled up the video. This time Lindsay was sitting at a table with a much smaller group, ten or twelve people, all men, in what looked like the safe room at the Hyperbowl.
“The great religions,” Lindsay said, “used every available medium of their time to get their message across. They hired the greatest architects, composers, and artists. Well, in the twentieth century they lost that edge. America, in fact the West in general, or for that matter the world in general, is in the middle of its greatest spiritual crisis since the Reformation. And how is religion responding? Falteringly, feebly, and fragmentarily. No single strong, clear vision has emerged. Well, Warren has been a leader in the spirituality field since the 1970s, and now we’re poised to take on the third millennium.”
Lindsay went on to mention some other religions, new and old, that have recently begun working seriously with new media and progressive marketers, developing state-of-the-art psychological software to help keep and gain converts. But the Ix franchise, he says, will take this to the next level. “It will provide all the meaning people need, through every medium available.” Finally, he said, “Every religion needs a Mecca.”
Leaning back in his ErgoChair, Lindsay claimed that his simulations team had used the newly augmented version of the Game to work out a feasibility study in which it was possible for the Stake development to become an autonomous country, sandwiched between the hostile borders of Belize and Guatemala, “the first major designer country not on an island.”
“Both countries are pretty destitute,” Lindsay said, “and they’d be happy to sell off some land if the moonstone people can come up with justifications that would get the decision by their parliaments. Well, they’re going to come to realize that having our Mayan project”-he pronouned “Mayan” to rhyme with “Sayin’”-“and few other boutique states nearby”-he pronounced it “byoo-teek”-“is going to make them bigger, not littler.”
I flipped forward through the speech, catching bites here and there. Lindsay said that although this new “private state” will be immensely profitable-and although the online version of Ix II has already become the U.S. military’s leading source of psychological referrals for recruitment-the object here is not to use Neo-Teo as a breeding ground for dedicated workers and eager, fearless soldiers. The main motivation, he said, is to create a society “in line with the Warren Predictive Demographics Division’s projections for the near future” (which they arrived at partly by using LEON software with the 2011 version of the Game). According to the research team’s sociohistorical modeling, world population will continue to increase for at least another fifty years before peaking. Well before that time, however, people of above-average worth will be contracting for various types of “fail-safe life extension: that is, systems that monitor clients’ health in real time, and keep them constantly within reach of a dedicated paramedic team that will rush them to a hospital, or, in terminal cases, to mobile cryogenic facilities. In cases of advanced age, the clients will be kept on increasingly sophisticated life-support systems, and dosed with increasingly powerful anti-Alzheimer’s and brain-cell regeneration drugs. And all that’s nothing,” Lindsay said, “compared to new uses of the consciousness transfer protocol, which could, they tell me, go on forever.”
As I skated my cursor over the transcript of Lindsay’s speech, a link came up to “Neo-Teo/TTT/LDS.” Clicking it brought up an even deeper level of lunacy: a third video, also taken in the safe room but this time beginning with Lindsay praying with three other men in front of a DHI altar. In this one, Lindsay’s “infectious but paralogistic babbling” is about how the cosmogram of the Game was somehow also the True Cross of the Native American Prophet, the angel Moroni. “And I believe that this is the Stone of Abraham, the Pearl of Great Price that the Prophet Joseph intended us to find,” Lindsay says. “After all, the original Urim and Thummim were a pair of dice, or I suppose I should say dreidels. And when we master that great Game of God, surely we will be raised up, as the dross is cast down, raised up live through the Tree of Nephi to the garden of Adam the Christ, to a life everlasting of the body as well as of the soul, to live in Maya and become as gods.”
The three men answer, “Amen.”
Of course one’s natural first reaction to this was that Lindsay was a total crackpot. The obvious second reaction was to remind oneself that this hardly ever matters, and that Saint Paul, Joseph Smith, and Hitler were all even bigger crackpots, and did pretty well for themselves. And the third was to wonder what Lindsay was really talking about, in practical terms. He had to be up to a lot more down there than just building neon pyramids. There was no way he was going to get autonomous state status without being involved in some government thing, some military thing…
I searched for Guatemala, Belize, Chocula, Neo-Teo, Real Estate, Lobbying, and all possible combinations of those terms. Hundreds of files came up, but even just glancing them I could see that they were all relatively public-consumption stuff. The real dirt had to be somewhere else.
And what did he mean by “Live in Maya?” Well, put a pin in that for now.
I tried searching under moonstone, a word of Lindsay’s that I remembered hearing before somewhere-although now I couldn’t remember where. Moonstone didn’t work, but when I tried Moonstones (dimly recalling that it might be the name of an extinct breakfast cereal), a single folder came up. This one was encrypted under a whole different protocol, with a built-in autoimmune system that would destroy the file if it were accessed without a set of randomizer-card codes. However, after more work with the Sacrifice Game interface, I managed to break through and call up the folder. It had to be the most heavily protected data I’d ever seen or heard of, since there were thousands of decoy files around it and nothing to indicate it to anyone who didn’t know exactly the name they were looking for. Even then there were probably only ten or so outside drives that were like Marena’s old drive-which she’d cloned before turning in her old one to be destroyed-that belonged to officers of the corporation but weren’t inside Warren offices, and that could access it at all. The odds that anybody without my exact skills, motives, and life experience would ever get into it had to be vanishingly small.
At any rate, there were files on secret DARPA contracts going back to 1978, files relating to U.S. State Department black ops in Central America going back to the 1940s. Obviously, Lindsay had a tangle of ties to the military communities in both Belize and Guatemala, not to mention a rogue’s gallery of other countries. Whatever the overall goal of the project was, it was clearly ongoing. But at the moment I was only interested in one aspect of it. On an impulse, I searched this batch of files for Felix AND Garcia-Torres.
The search flagged over two hundred files. My heartbeat shifted into neutral. I took a Ziploc bag out of my pocket, dug the two still-damp Kleenex wads out of it, and ate them. Gak. Another slug of soda. Ahh. Good to the last drop.
The first file showed that Felix and Garcia-Torres were the same person, the same Corporal Jorge Garcia-Torres, now a commander in the Guatemalan Army Air Corps, who was at the top of my (s)hit list, responsible for my parents’ murder in the G2 massacre at my village. It was obvious that he was on Warren’s payroll. Damn it. I knew it, I finger-fucking knew it! Hot spit. You’re a dead guy, I’m going to work this connection until you die screaming, you fuck!!!
As I reconstructed it, Garcia-Torres and Lindsay knew each other from way back-at least since the 1970s, when the land that is now the Stake was one of John Hull’s training camps for the paramilitary squads who were helping run cocaine for Oliver North’s group “under the aegis of Bush the First.” Since then, Garcia-Torres-now a commander-had acted as Lindsay’s main contact in the Guatemalan military.
Despite the detaching qualities of the tsam lic, my teeth were chattering with rage. I was already getting that blue taste and that ringing in my carapace. I checked in on Marena again. She and Max were in her car, which meant she’d get here in a little over a half an hour if she didn’t stop for anything, which she wouldn’t. Come on, Jeddidiah. It’s in there. Find it. Find it.