I’d been playing the Game since I was little. As some of you might guess from my middle names (below), I’m 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 T’ozal, in Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, my mother, who was a na h’me — 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 didn’t 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 I’d 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 that’s another kettle of verrucomicrobia we don’t 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 they’d 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 b’aktun-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 there’s no tomorrow. And, almost needless to say, I’d 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.

So, to make a long-oops, too late-well, to at least cut the story off at the knees: after the DWH, the Disney World Horror, I got deeper in with Marena’s people, and even met the head of the whole conglomerate, Lindsay Warren. The discouraging thing was that Taro’s team and I didn’t do too well at figuring out how to play the version of the Game we’d gotten from the Codex. But I found out they had another approach to it in the works, something pretty bizarre, or, well, at least pretty futuristic, although I guess not much more so than the Mars mission, glow-in-the-dark poodles, or your latest flexible-screen phone. They were planning to get data directly from the old days, and somebody from our era was going to go and pick it up. It wasn’t exactly time travel. In fact, there are reasons why real time travel, where you’d send someone’s body back to the past, was almost certainly always going to be impossible, no matter how advanced technology became. But there is a way to send energy. Basically, you can make something like a high-quality print of all the connections in Person A’s brain that encode his memories, and then print that pattern onto Person B’s brain. And-if you’ve adequately “wiped down” Person B’s own memories, so that he doesn’t get confused-Person B will believe he is Person A. Of course, you could use this process just to move consciousnesses around in the present day-and that’s something I figured Warren Labs was gearing up for-but in this case, Person B would be in the past. Specifically, he’d be a Maya ahau — a king-who’d know or at least have access to the full version of the Game, or more technically, to the “nine-stone” version. And he’d have the resources to preserve that knowledge so that, thirteen centuries later, we could dig it up. And then we might be able to use that to save ourselves from whatever’s lurking at the business end of 2012.

At first-or at least this is how it seemed to me at the time-the team hadn’t been thinking of me as a candidate for projection into the past. Their first choice had been a younger student of Taro’s named Tony Sic, who was from Merida, in the Yucatan, and who spoke Yukatekan Mayan, and who’d worked at the CPR, the Comunidad de Poblacion en Resistencia, in Ixcan, and who was even pretty good at the Game, although of course not so good as I was. But I convinced them I was the better bet. Either that or, as I’ve lately come to suspect, they were thinking of sending me all along. Still, what matters is that my consciousness got successfully downloaded, sent through what they called a desktop wormhole, and projected back to AD 664.

Still, things, as things do, started to go wrong before my duplicate self-whom I guess we could call Jed 2 — even got there. He was supposed to arrive in the brain of an ahau named 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the king of the city of Ixnichi Sotz, or Ix for short, in the Sierra de Chama region, in the center of what’s now Guatemala. He could just take over, watch some experts play the Game, and document everything. No sweat. Instead-according to Jed 2 ’s letters-he’d turned up in the head of a star athlete named Chacal, who played the local big-time sport, hipball. It was something like how you’d imagine soccer if soccer balls weighed thirty pounds and were studded with razor blades. Chacal was about to roll himself down the local pyramid’s steps as an especially humiliating sacrifice, as a kind of proxy to keep 9 Fanged Hummingbird in power.

But maybe I’m getting into more detail than we need here. The basics are that Jed 2 — uncharacteristically-was resourceful enough to worm his way out of his sacrifice predicament, find out something about the Game, and, amazingly, make it all the way to Teotihuacan, the capital of the Mexican highlands at that time, to score some drugs.

The issue was that the high levels of the Game make demands on the human brain that the brain can’t meet without chemical help. And in AD 664, which was the only time Jed 2 was going to get to hang out in Olde Mayaland, the main sources of the drugs had been monopolized by the two ruling clans of Teotihuacan. In fact, evidently this was one of the reasons for Teotihuacan’s eight-hundred-year longevity as a capital city, but this has already taken up a pretty big fraction of the time you have left so maybe you don’t need to learn any more history right now. Jed 2 made his way to Teotihucan and met with a personage who was illustrated in the Codex, a sort of nun named Ahau-na Koh, or just Lady Koh. And through her, he got hold of some of the Game drugs, but in the process he seems to have set off the fire that finally destroyed the city. Although his letter’s a little reticent on this point. In fact his letters are frustrating in general and sometimes I suspect him, or myself, of editorializing. At any rate Jed 2 and Lady Koh’s retinue made it at least as far as one of our prearranged search zones in Oaxaca, 270 miles from Teotihuacan. He buried the first cache of notes and Game drugs and, as planned, marked the burial spot with lumps of magnetite. There was a plan for him to inter a second set, along with his own body and possibly recoverable polymerized brain, in one of the royal tombs of Ix, although it looks as though he didn’t get that far and now we’ll never know. But back here-I mean back here like back now, in time-in 2012, Marena’s team dug up the stuff without any trouble. Taro came up with a software version of the full nine-stone form of the Game and Warren’s Lotos division came up with a synthetic version of the two types of drugs. And when I learned to play the Game on them, I-along with Tony Sic and several others of Taro’s students in the Warren program-found that Jed 2 was right.