The image behind Lindsay changed to the great Ciudadela pyramid at Chichen Itza.

“Now, in our last presentation to the Joint Chiefs, which I don’t need to tell you went very, very well, we made the case that the Boy Scouts had the right idea, using Native American words and concepts… but of course even us Eagle Scouts never really knew what we were talking about.”

There was a scattering of polite laughter.

“But today,” Lindsay said, “we can pick it back up and take it farther than it’s ever been, utilizing every one of our areas of expertise-new media, old media, postmedia media, psychotechnology…”

So, I saw, Lindsay hadn’t first become interested in the Sacrifice Game because he was an investor in computer-game companies or because of the Mormon mythology about pre-Columbian America. Rather, in the months following the attack, the Pentagon had wanted to investigate ways of instilling a “suicide ethic” in soldiers to parallel that of the jihad. They’d already sponsored studies of suicide-bomb cultures and other microsocieties where self-immolation is still a primary virtue, and found that “a touch of martyrdom” makes these societies much more stable, much less internally contentious, and more energetic in achieving their goals-basically, more powerful. The idea was to “harness a terrorist mindset for an antiterror agenda.” And in their bid for the next phase of the study, the Warren group had argued that the American Indian “cultures of austerity” were even more hard-core than the Islamist ones. After they won the contract, the team went looking for “the symbols that made them tick,” and came across Taro’s work on Parcheesi/patolli.

As was fairly well known at the time, DARPA was already funding highly speculative research, most of it still dealing with remote viewers, or psychics. But by ’03 this seemed to have hit a dead end and the Defense Department redirected several billions of research dollars to several companies, including Warren, which were experimenting with “more up-to-date exotica,” or “outside-the-box solutions to global terrorism.” These included long-term simulation, consciousness transfer, singularity projection, and other inquiries into the possibility of stopping terrorist or rogue military strikes before they happened. And as I already knew, Taro’s weather-simulation research had already been partly funded by the Joint Chiefs’ SAGA (Studies, Analysis, and Gaming Agency). So, I guessed, when Lindsay read the report on the Sacrifice Game, he must have felt that a number of diverse strands were coming together-in a way that to someone like him may have suggested a divine agenda.

At any rate, starting in 2005, my own name begins to come up frequently. It appears in over two thousand files compiled at that time, some going back beyond my first meeting with Michael Weiner to Guatemalan court documents on the going back to the massacre of Jed’s village. Apparently the Parcheesi Project had been keeping close track of me (as well as several other possible candidates) for a long time. There were recordings of Taro working on the Game with me when I was still in high school. After a few minutes of snooping, I found a file of the first time I met Marena. As I suspected at the time, her phone was recording everything. I watched my own face peering down into it as I studied the pages of the Codex and then watched myself leave for the bathroom as Marena made a videoconference call. The call was to Lindsay.

From their conversation it’s clear that at least since 2010, when the Codex Nuremberg was first photographed and Lindsay’s group first clearly visualized the Parcheesi Project-basically the whole R amp; D division that investigated the Sacrifice Game-I had been identified as one of five possible persons to get “downloaded” into an as-yet-undetermined subject in 664. Now, in 2012, Marena is telling Lindsay that she thinks I am “absolutely the best one,” and tells Lindsay about my Disney World “prediction.” Lindsay says he’s still “only sixty percent sure about this Game thing, and about five percent confident about this Jed character,” but that he’ll wait and see what happens.

Naturally, I was quivering with rage; however, I managed to “stay in Gametime” and follow the thread, looking through file after file. After the Disney World Horror-which no one besides us had expected-Marena and her team went into overdrive. Reasoning that I would refuse if they asked me to do what they wanted, Marena manipulated me into volunteering.

Bitch, I thought. Of course it was an auditory hallucination, but it sounded like the mosquito in the room said something like “We’ll get her. ”

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.”