Free The Sacrifice Game by Brian D’Amato

get through, well, that would be huge. There—
    “Okay. I think there’s something big going on, and it’s making you feel happy and powerful, but also you’re a bit worried about whether it’s going to come off. Am I right?”
    Damn. Okay, I thought. Don’t make any partial shrugs. No quick changes of expression. I checked my hands—that is, without looking at them, I thought about them. They were open with the fingers extended. Good. Okay. I focused on the bridge of her nose and, lowering my usual pitch a bit, said, “Yes.”
    “Okay, great. That’s progress. So what is it?”
    “That’s a second question,” I said.
    “Okay, fine. You go.”
    “Okay. You guys are watching me. Right?”
    “What do you mean us guys?”
    “The Warren Spook Corporation.”
    “They’re keeping an eye on all of us.”
    “That’s not a good—I mean, I can tell I’m under surveillance.”
    “So what’s the question?”
    “Well . . .”
    “Look, what do you think they’re going to do? The Game—you’re a Sacrifice Game specialist, right? It’s like you’re driving around with a trunkful of hydrogen bombs. We all are. They’re watching me too, I mean, of course, and, you know, I think Corporate’s being pretty reserved about it, frankly.”
    She had a point. “Well, you have a point.”
    “Okay, my turn,” she said. “What did you do to make yourself so excited?”
    “I wouldn’t say I’m excited.”
    “But you are happy about something. Or relieved.”
    “No, I’m not—I mean, I’m relieved about the EOE.”
    “What’s that stand for again?”
    “The End of Everything.”
    “Oh, right. Okay, you’re relieved that’s not happening?”‘
    “Um, yeah. That’s right.”
    “But that’s not new. You said something new was going on.”
    “I did?” I had? I wondered. When? Or was she doing some hypno-thing on me? Bitch. Just be cool. Okay.
    “Okay,” I said. “I went very long on some futures a little while ago and I’m doing super well on them. I’m completely on Easy Street.”
    She looked at me. I tried to look back. Her eyes seemed bottomless. Finally it felt like I was staring into a gale-force wind. Fine, let her win the stare-down. I looked over at the Neo-Teo model. Most of the window lights and signs and had gone out, and its walls were a convincing range of deep-night blacks and blues.
    “Well, that’s great,” she said finally. “Okay, ask me about Tony.”
    Huh. Well, maybe I’d passed, I thought. “Okay, well, are you and—”
    Hell.

( 9 )
     
    T he main phone, the one in my key pocket, had pulsed—silently, but it felt as loud as if were standing in a foghorn. Time to check on the, you know. The thing.
    I said something like “Hang on, I’ve got a call I’ve got to blow off,” or something. I pulled the thing out. The CBT site had automatically come up on the screen. I hesitated. I looked closer.
    Oh, Dios.
    They’d suspended after-hours trading. The third domino had fallen. Oh God, oh God. I—I guess I should say even I—felt a twinge, and more than a twinge, of that gray free-falling terror, another notch of acceptance that it was really happening, that it was not reversible. My nefarious plan was working to perfection.
Todo mi culpabilidad
.
    In a way, even—well, not in a way, forget the qualifiers—even I still couldn’t believe it. I know I said that because of the Game and everything I’d become uniquely able to comprehend astronomical figures, humanly unfathomable amounts of money, of grains of corn, of suffering . . . but even so, the thing that was going to happen—let alone the fact that I’d made it happen—the thing that would happen in about four and a half million seconds was I think more than any human or maybe any consciousness of any possible type could ever comprehend. By definition, for that matter. You’d need a brain the size of the Hyperbowl, one that had been living for millions of years, enough parallelism to weigh the mass of