Of all places, Scott Parker picked the mall. Of course he did. Maybe he’d been watching Charlie through the Game all along. Maybe he knew full well that the last two times Charlie had gone to the mall, he’d gotten his ass kicked. Thanks for the lulz!
Charlie moved through the food court, trying to pick Scott Parker out of the crowd. But it was impossible. Hundreds of people were milling about on the bright Sunday morning, every race and culture, light streaming through the epic windows, families at tables, trays of cinnamon rolls and coffee and doughnuts and breakfast tacos, elderly couples strolling holding hands, tweens chattering away. Charlie put on his glasses and scanned the crowd again.
Through his Aziteks, the person sitting in the middle of the court had a grotesque face, part skull with turquoise and lignite and patches of deerskin pulled tight, lipless teeth, and wide eyes under a red-plumed headdress. His body was massive and rippled, one leg replaced with a thick snake. On his chest was a mirror made of black obsidian. Smoke swirled within it.
Charlie peeked over the glasses and nearly lost the man in the crowd—he looked back through the lenses and pushed his way toward the godlike thing.
Its teeth stuck out in a strange overbite.
A sickly, gaping smile.
“Hello, Charlie.”
“Who are you?”
The figure seemed surprised. “Well, obviously I’m Tezcatlipoca.” He raised an eyebrow. “Smoking Mirror?” He said it like a failed rock star—Don’t you know me? I’m huge in Mesoamerica!
The god waved his hand, as if to say, Doesn’t matter. His buck teeth grinned.
“Who are you for real?”
“That’s an interesting expression. For real. You haven’t taken your glasses off yet.”
Charlie reached for his Aziteks, but the god stopped him lightly with a black-and-red feathered hand on Charlie’s forearm.
Charlie brushed him off and lifted his glasses. He looked over the lumpy pale man. His skin was rashy and his hair was thin and combed over. It was sad to draw a line from the fresh-faced boy in the news articles to the man before him now.
“Better on, don’t you think?”
Charlie set his glasses back down. “Are you really Scott Parker?”
“I was, way back when.”
“You were in the Friends of the Crypt?”
“I was. Now I am the Friends of the Crypt!” He sighed. “Sit,” he said, opening a hand to the chair across from him. “It’s good to see you in person, in Charlie. Funny, right? I can see anyone in the world online, but there’s still something special about being in the same place. Maybe it’s the smell. I’m glad you came.”
“What happened to you?”
“But you already know that, don’t you? Isn’t that why you were looking for me?”
“You were playing the Game.”
“You don’t play the Game, Charlie. The Game plays you. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”
“I want to quit.”
“You can’t. Playing is life. Winning is living.”
“You’re just trying to scare me.”
“No, it’s true. For you and your dad.”
“Leave my dad out of this.”
Tezcatlipoca laughed. Charlie didn’t know if the god was cruel or crazy or both. Playing the Game for a week had almost driven Charlie mad. What would twenty years do?
“What is the Game? What does it want?”
“Now you’re talking!” Tezcatlipoca said, delighted. “Curiosity killed the cat! Curiosity killed Schrödinger’s cat! ‘He opened his box to look inside, to see if he was dead or alive!’ Boxes within boxes within boxes! What box are you in, Charlie?”
“Stop making fun of me.”
“Poor Charlie! So sad! So angry! I wouldn’t dream of mocking you. I’m telling you something. Are you listening?”
“Why should I trust anything you say?”
Tezcatlipoca looked hurt. “You’re one of my favorite characters.”
“I’m not a character.”
“You have to change your thinking, Charlie. This is an honor. You’re part of a grand design. A great experiment whose end we don’t know. The oldest question on earth.”
Tezcatlipoca gestured at the milling crowd around them. “They seem so normal, don’t they? Out here, it’s all ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ and ‘Pardon me’ and ‘After you.’ But you know that’s a lie. In the dark, they’re typing. Pornographers and pedos and traffickers and terrorists, righties and lefties and commies and fascists, connecting and amplifying. You can feel it, can’t you? The infection. The acceleration. Can you tell who’s who?”
Charlie eyed the crowd around them.
“We knew it, Charlie, early on. The bulletin boarders, the Vint Surfers, Tezcatlipoca the TCP/IP. The optimists said the Web would give every human a voice. Holy shit! Have you met humans? We created God to protect us from ourselves. From our brains. Then we accidentally built the world’s biggest brain, and we forgot to give it a conscience. A seething mess of unbridled humanity: all id, no ego. We can’t even see it, much less stop it, any more than a neuron in your brain can see your thoughts.”
Tezcatlipoca leaned in. “But, we asked, what if you could hack the higher-order process? There’s no problem tech created that tech can’t solve. Infect the metaconsciousness with a metaconscience.”
“A virus?”
“Not malware. Call it Virtueware! A moral virus infected into the global electronic system. The Golden Algorithm. An algorithm for God.”
“What was it?”
“That was the problem! Everyone agreed we needed one, but no one agreed what it should be. The Golden Rule? Hackable. Simplistic. The Ten Commandments? Contradictory. Incomplete. ‘Thou shall not kill’—and ten pages later He’s saying, ‘Kill kill kill!’ Kantian ethics? You can’t lie to a murderer knocking at your door looking for his victim? Bullshit. Utilitarianism? A farce, grotesque—kill a homeless man to give his organs to five nuns? Macabre math. Every moral system failed.”
“Then what?”
But Charlie saw the answer, right in front of him.
Before he could even say it, Tezcatlipoca nodded. “If humanity was still arguing about morality five thousand years later, maybe we could build something smarter than us to crack it.”
“A neural network?”
“And a deep Boltzmann machine. And a tangled hierarchy. And a deep belief net. And a genetic algorithm. And a massive parallelism. And bots and viruses and worms. And lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”
Tezcatlipoca smiled, his teeth fanning. “They fed it everything. All our laws, our constitutions, our cultures. Kant, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Foucault. The Bible, the Talmud, the sutras, the Koran, the Confucian canon. The Seven Valleys, the Zend-avesta, The White Goddess. If seven billion people couldn’t agree peacefully, rationally, give it everything. Let the algorithm churn and test and evolve.”
“Test? On people?”
“Of course! Who else? Lab rats?”
“I’m a guinea pig in a fucking morality play that stops when I’m dead?”
“You should be thrilled, Charlie. This is the oldest, hardest quest on earth. What is good? Who should I be? And you’re part of it.”
“You did this.”
“I’m just a tiny piece, Charlie. We are legion. It’s an open-source deity, baby.”
“How the fuck do I get out?”
“Ask Dave Meyer.”
“The guy who founded Friends of the Crypt? He jumped off the roof of the school.”
“He got out.”
“Bullshit. There has to be another way.”
“Of course there is!” It was as if Tezcatlipoca had been waiting for this moment. “The answer’s right in front of you, Charlie. Think about the source material! It’s an old answer, but an effective one, because it means you’re serious. It shows you want it. The Celts had their wicker men. The Japanese had hitobashira. The Aztecs, tzompantli. Narabali in India. Moloch in Canaan. Christ on the cross. Human sacrifices, all. If you and your friends want to leave the Game, it’ll take more than a couple drops of blood. You have to take a life. We fed the Game our collective wisdom—how could we expect any better?”
Tezcatlipoca’s chair scraped back and he leaned over the table, in Charlie’s face, the skull-black ghoul filling his vision. Tezcatlipoca’s voice boomed in Charlie’s Aziteks, louder and darker now, amplified.
“Remember, Charlie, the First Commandment was never ‘Thou shall not kill.’ People forget that. It’s ‘Worship me.’ Our God is a jealous God. If you want something, you have to fill its great cosmic mouth with blood.”
Tezcatlipoca’s face hovered there, statically, like a figure in a computer game. A blink here or there, nothing more. Charlie pulled off his glasses and the chair was empty.
Scott Parker, the last Friend of the Crypt, was gone.