I guess we could call the tsam lic compounds “smart drugs” if that didn’t make you think of G-Series Gatorade. They enabled one’s brain to behave less like a brain and more like-I don’t want to say like a computer, at least not like the sort of computer humans have invented, because it has a much more analogish, intuitive feel than that-but like some kind of cross between a superclock, a supercamera, and a super-slide rule. And we used it to avert the 2012 problem, or I guess now you have to say we thought we did. After a whole lot of hours using the Game to sift information-both from the Net in general and from NSA and other black databases-I tracked down a homegrown Canadian bioterrorist named Madison Czerwick who was just about to release a heavily tweaked version of a formerly military strain of Brucella abortus.

Now, I realize all this sounds like I’m getting a little flighty, but the proof’s in the blood pudding, and in this case the Warren folks shared the information with the FBI and it checked out. And, using a multinational rapid response unit-just like in a Tom Clancy book, but without the colorful characters or expository dialogue-they grabbed Madison and isolated his tanks of bugs. And, when the lab at the CDC analyzed the stuff, it turned out that, yes, it really would have finished off almost all the human beings on earth, as well as the higher primates and a good fraction of lower primates, dogs, bears, pigs, and, for DNA-related reasons, toads, all right around the 2012 date. They even gave us all secret medals, which I guess are like invisible diamonds.

Still, the Game can’t truly predict the future, since that can’t be done. That is, you could always just do something that would change whatever you saw. And even if you couldn’t do that, the Game’s not some magic teleidoscope that sees all? random events. That’s impossible. It’s more like a lens that focuses your perception on the strings of events that follow your potential actions, an optimizer that helps create a successful outcome, whatever random events occur. It enables a leap in reasoning power. And as the world becomes more programmable every day-well, let’s say that as of now it’s programmable enough.

As of December 10-Madison Day-I still hadn’t taken the full leap. But two hundred and sixty-nine days ago, on March 28, I dove in. I played farther into the Game than, I’m sure, anyone-even One Ocelot, whoever he was-ever has. And at the extreme core of the meaning of today, I came to what felt like a sort of mountain with a cave at its peak, and inside that cave-which was bigger than the mountain itself and in fact bigger than all outdoors-I could see, or hear, or sense, the people of the future, all crying in well-informed fear of being born, begging not to be brought into the world. Or at least this is what I saw on a figurative or, you might say, symbolic level. To put it more abstractly, I experienced a massive growth in capability of empathy, which is a mental act that requires insight and imagination. I realized- really realized, for the first time-that no matter how many good or happy experiences a person has, the bad experiences still outweigh them. And this doesn’t just go for the majority. It’s true for everyone. And, more than that, when you’re talking about people who aren’t born yet, the possible good times they might have aren’t benefiting anyone-since they don’t exist yet-but they’re definitely getting a benefit if they miss whatever bad experiences they’re going to have. And I tried, but there wasn’t any way to chip into the crystalline logic of this: For a consciousness, coming into existence was always, everywhere, and for all future times, a net loss.

Yes, it sounds like I just had an oversoaked tab of C20H25N3O and came out as leary as Timothy Loony. But, even according to buttoned-up-and-down corporate types-even according to the FBI, which has got to be the least imaginative bunch of bureaucrats on the rock-the Game actually works. And nothing I saw was outside the Game’s-but wait a second. I don’t need to defend myself against the charge. I’m not writing this to defend or excuse myself or to ask for forgiveness. I’m just writing it the way that, if you’re the captain, you have a duty to inform the crew members of a battleship about the state of their vessel. And even if not a single one of the ~ 6,900,000,000 of you gets the logic, it still doesn’t matter. If you could follow along and take this leap in understanding, you’d agree. You’d thank me. And if I weren’t around, you’d do it yourself.

Of course, you wouldn’t want to hurt anybody. Painlessness would be Number One. And Number Two would be the fact that even though you had a lot of money, you still couldn’t afford, say, your own collection of atomic bombs. You’d have to work out a way to do it that would get a big payoff from a small amount of catalyst, something as easy and natural as, well, as Well, let’s put it this way. On 12.19.8.9.19, 4 Thunderhead, 17 Flood, I naturally just gawped at the havoc along with everybody else. And as the initial shock faded, I started to wonder what about it besides the obvious-that it was all those people, that it was an attack on what you’d thought was previously safe ground-was even more disturbing than the sum of those things would imply. Was it that it took me as long as it did to realize it wasn’t just a holographic trailer for some new Jerry Bruckheimer movie? Was it that you could actually feel some kind of presence there, that Luciferian grin in the gray clouds? Or was it, conversely, that there wasn’t any presence, that behind the smoke there was just blankness, blankness, and even more blankness? For a while I thought it was just because it was beautiful, that it was the most spectacular event witnessed in living memory, even more than D-day or the atomic blasts, about the way the jets just disappeared and about those Beardsleyesque ostrich plumes of dust as the sand castles imploded, so that when it was over you found yourself not feeling the deaths but just that cheap after-the-fireworks feeling you get when you wolf down a big gooey 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.