The Sacrifice Game Read Online Free

dessert and then look ashamed at the empty plate, and that I was disappointed with myself for thinking that way. But at some point I decided that what really chilled everyone was simply how easy it had been, close to effortless, even, as though those Pillars of Dagon had been built expressly to the size of this Samson wannabe and all he had to do was stand between them and give a little push . . . or I guess one could almost just say how simply inexpensive it was, how all you have to do is hang out at the Halal White Castle or wherever young, underachieving, swollen-testicled hadjis congregate, cut a dozen or so of the most impressionable ones out of the herd, spring for a few thousand dollars’ worth of flight lessons and a round of X-Actos, and suddenly it’s the Decline of the West. For a little while, until their self-delusion apparatus kicked in again, quite a few people—despite all the time and effort people spend on making themselves feel like everything’s okay, despite how denial, in various forms, has always been the world’s biggest industry—folks came close to comprehending how much they lived in a house of cards, how much it was like they’d been keeping a glass bottle of lukewarm liquid trinitrotoluene on the edge of their coffee table and letting their kids and dogs run around, how—well, you get the picture. But on the other hand, if you were an aspiring destroyer—a “doomster,” as we call them down at the Warren Family—it gave you a sense of limitless possibility. It inspired you to go it one better.
    Which, incidentally, is one of the reasons I have to do this. 9/11 inspired a lot people, not just me and Madison. According to the Sacrifice Game Engine that we were now running on LEON, the Lab’s main AI engine, there are at least sixty aspiring doomsters out there who have a good shot at killing ten million or more people. I can practically see them, beavering away in their basements on homebrew viruses, packing the remains of tossed smoke detectors into dirty bombs, refining hundreds of pounds of ricin, and on and on. Madison was unusually talented but not unique. So if I don’t do this well, somebody else will do it, badly, in very short order. Any one of these losers could, and will, unleash his garbage at any moment. And from what I’ve had time to track with the Game, the scenarios aren’t encouraging. The odds are good that the next few decades, and more, are going to be characterized by wars, famines, depressions, government repression, torturous deaths, wasting diseases, parents eating children and vice versa, and on and on. Things are definitely going to get bad, and bad is worse than people realize.
    Like I say, the Game lets you read ahead and work out exactly what to program. By
read
I mean, in the sense of a great Go player reading a hundred moves ahead. But with the Sacrifice Game I was reading hundreds of thousands of moves ahead, in hundreds of thousands of much more complicated “games” all over the world, tracing a single chain through the latticework of contingency that would lead to—well, let’s just say it leads to what I think is definitely the best available way to do it. Definitive, painless, and, once begun, inexorable. Now,
that’s
progress. Eleven years, one month, and twenty days later, it took only one tap on a touch screen to trigger an event that, if there were anyone around to witness it, would make the World Trade Center event seem quaint. Now,
that’s
progress.
    Actually, there will be one near-witness: me. 4.564 hours—from the post time, the release time above, plus, say, four minutes for your reading up to this point—as I count down the quarter-seconds on the atomic clock, there’ll be a moment when, as I’m wondering whether I could have made a mistake in calculation and the whole thing will be a nonevent, for, I think a little less time than one of those quarter-seconds, more like, say, 700,000 microseconds—about