So, how did it come to this? Or, to put it more relevantly, How Do I Know This Is the Right Thing to Do?
Well, briefly, because I do. That is, I understand all the considerations involved, the math, you might even call it. Unlike almost anyone else, I can visualize the numbers involved, and unlike absolutely anyone else, I can comprehend what those numbers will lead to. And if you could follow it all, youd agree with me. And youd do exactly the same thing.
More clearly, I can understand how much human life is out there, and how much is coming. And I understand-and most of all accept-that over 99.8 percent of it, now, in the future, and always, is and will be sheer unrelieved agony. Pain. And no matter how many distractions and evasions people come up with, no matter how much gets spent on the denial industry, any honest person with an IQ over room temperature-that is, anyone worth asking-will admit that, to put it in the most ordinary and bathetic language possible, life sucks. Im doing us all a mercy. And thats the beginning, end, and entire sum and substance.
I know, I know. Dont do us any favors. But this wasnt something I wanted. And it isnt something Im making up. In fact, this ability-the ability to comprehend-didnt even come to me naturally, the way things do to crazy people. In a way, it took over thirteen hundred years. And also, I didnt make this decision so much for you and me, anyway. Im doing it more for the kids. The coming generations. Yes, you and I are already well and royally fucked, but we can, at least, refrain from bringing any further consciousnesses into existence. Its the right thing to do. And actually, there are a lot of people-not just Schopenhauerian philosophers and their wannabe counterparts-who even know its the right thing. But they havent done anything about it. I think I have the will to do it-and the means, but especially the will-because I saw it with my own eyes. Or at least, I saw it with my intraregarding eye, through the lens of the Game.
Anthropologists would classify the Sacrifice Game as a sortilege divination game, something that uses counts of pebbles or seeds to investigate the future or, more rarely, the past. Playing it well feels like playing Parcheesi against God and winning. Although the Sacrifice Game is to Parcheesi as cooking a Peking duck is to getting a bag of Skittles out of a vending machine.
Id been playing the Game since I was little. As some of you might guess from my middle names (below), Im an ethnic Maya, a twenty-first-century descendant of those guys who built all those palaces in Mexico and Guatemala with the big wacko pyramids with the scary stairs and then, presumably, abandoned them. We tend to be confused with Aztecs, Toltecs, or Venusians. When I was five, when we lived in a village called Tozal, in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, my mother, who was a na hme a sun-adderess, that is, kind of lesser shamaness-taught me a version of it that her mother had taught her, and which had survived, handed down in increasingly simplified forms, for hundreds of years. Two years later, in 1982, a Guate government death squad called the Mano Blanco disappeared my parents along with about a quarter of the village. Supposedly my mother died when they made her drink gasoline. I was in a hospital
at the time for my hemophilia and eventually got adopted by a Mormon family in Utah. I kept up with the Game in my dreadful teen years and then in college I helped work out some of the theory of it with a professor of mine named Taro Mora. Unlike most economics/game-theory mumbo-jumbo, it really did do something, and eventually I learned to use it to make quite a bit of money in corn futures. Taro didnt come up with a mathematical solution for it, though, so the Game never worked well on computers. I went back to Guate a few times and tried to help bring the perps from the old regime to semijustice, but it was frustrating. I also became a frustrated opisthobranchologist and a few other frustrated things, but I never thought Id do anything spectacular. And then, three hundred and thirteen days ago, on the fourth Owl and the fourth Yellowness of 12.19.18.17.16, or we could say December 23, I was approached by a woman named Marena Park.
Or actually, at the time I thought I was approaching her, but thats another kettle of verrucomicrobia we dont need to get into right now. She was-and is-an executive at the entertainment division of the Warren Group (or family, as they like to say) of companies. It turned out she was a kind-of-famous game designer who was now, a bit oddly, I thought, coordinating a research project with my old mentor, Taro. And she wanted me to consult with them about a software version of the Sacrifice Game. And I would have said no, but theyd gotten hold of some new data: a description of the Game the way it was played at the height of the Maya Classic Period, thirteen hundred and forty-six years before.
The account of the Game was in a Maya codex, a screenfold book, that had just been photographed, and it had more in it than just a fuller version of the Game. There were goals-which you might, with a bit of tabloidal exaggeration, call predictions-going all the way up to the thirteenth baktun-that is, the so-called End of Time date in 2012. Of course, like a lot of entertainment companies, they were all very interested in the whole 2012 thing. Like they say, Mayan calendars sell like theres no tomorrow. And, almost needless to say, Id never been into it. It had always been a bunch of New Age losers and disappointed Y2K conspiracy kooks sitting around in extra-large Jedi costumes and making up disaster scenarios out of Captain Future. But when I saw the new codex, the Codex Nuremburg-well, basically, among other things, it predicted the attack on Disney World six days later, on the twenty-ninth. Which, despite some recent contenders, is still, with 104,774 confirmed deaths and half a million casualties, the most deadly terrorist act so far. Not counting this one, of course.