The ashes of Charlie’s restaurant were long gone. Insurance wouldn’t pay to rebuild. The fire was too suspicious. Charlie dropped out of school and took a full-time job to help reopen the restaurant. His father had fought him hard on that, but Charlie refused to back down. Now the construction was moving along. Charlie and his father sat at the kitchen table, night after night, sketching out different possibilities for the new space. They fought over everything, but it was a mild, soft bickering.
Mary had come to see Charlie in the hospital. She fussed over his wound and kissed him gently. He told her everything. He learned that Tim would recover, but slowly. The Game had never delivered on Peter’s attempt to expose Tim’s parents, and their scheme went on. But Charlie figured Tim had suffered enough. Charlie hoped they got caught. But he wasn’t going to do it.
The night the Vindicators were on the rooftop of Turner High, Mary had been far away, in a part of town she’d never been to. It started when she’d received the call about Tim. The police had found him, nearly dead, on a street in the Byerly neighborhood. She had no interest in seeing him. But she was compelled to go somewhere else. Her mom had tried to stop her on the way out.
“They’ll sue. They’ll want money. Everyone will know. You’ll ruin us.”
“Maybe.” Mary’s voice wavered. “Maybe not.”
Her mother slapped her hard across the face.
Mary left. She drove to the address she’d memorized a long time ago.
An old lady answered the door. “I know you.” She put a hand to her heart. “I’ve seen your picture in the paper. You poor girl. What my Sammy did to you.”
Before she could say more, Mary held her and said, “No. No. That’s all wrong. I’m going to tell you everything. And when I do, you can do whatever you want. All that matters is you know the truth about your son.”
Inside, the house smelled of mothballs and tea. The old lady brought Mary a hot chocolate and sat her in a lumpy chair next to an end table with a lamp.
The old lady studied Mary, then hugged her and whispered, “You poor thing.” She touched the bruise on Mary’s cheek, which was hidden under makeup. “You tell me because you need to. And whatever it is, sweet girl, it will be okay.”
* * *
The thing Charlie remembered most vividly from that strange time was coming home from the hospital and seeing his dad in the kitchen for the first time, right back at the table, as if they’d retaken their exact spots from their last, awful fight.
His dad had said the oddest thing: “Now you know. Are you glad?” It was the first and only time they spoke about the dirty laundry.
Charlie had wanted to forgive his father completely, right then and there. To say that it was okay that he had cheated on them, that he’d lied and disappeared and gone weak at the exact moment Charlie and his mom needed him most. Charlie wanted to believe that it was none of his business and that he would have been better off not knowing, so things could go on as they had before. But he couldn’t say that and he didn’t believe it and he saw his father now clearly. Charlie saw himself now clearly, too. One day his dad would die and be gone. It would be unbearable. Charlie wanted to believe in perfection, something pure and eternal, but he didn’t and he couldn’t, on this plane or any other. But he could be okay with that. They would still find redemption, both of them, but it would be in each other. Charlie wanted to say all this but didn’t know how. So he hugged his father, harder than he had in years, hugged him and felt the stubble on his cheek and smelled his father’s soap and put his fingers through his hair and cried and held him so, so close, because he was here, because he loved him, because he was real.
102 GÖDEL, ESCHER, BACH
In the darkness, Peter became aware. He felt weightless, floating. For a moment, he wondered if his consciousness had been uploaded to the machine. That was the only true immortality. If every neuron in his brain was mapped to a corresponding bit, it would be a perfect representation of his life, his memories and beliefs, his dreams and nightmares. Would that be him, a continuity of awareness? Or would his old self die, and this new thing would be someone else, disconnected yet seamless?
But it wasn’t an electronic dream. He wiggled his fingers and toes. Every part of his body screamed with pain, but he was alive. He let his eyes open and saw the roof of the school high above him, then focused his mind on the sting of the net under him, taut thick cords of black nylon. His body was lashed where the real-world lines and nodes had torn into him on impact. The Game had foreseen all this, warned him, mapped out in an evolving stochastic web the possible outcomes of the rooftop confrontation.
Alex would jump, thinking he’d saved his friends, unless Charlie stopped him. Charlie would stop him, unless Peter interfered. If Peter interfered, Charlie would kill him, to save his friends from the Game. He would think it was noble even, although he wouldn’t offer himself. The Game was retesting one of its favorite hypotheses: anyone is a murderer under the right conditions.
Peter had bet against the Game on that one, and it would cost him dearly in Blaxx. But he would recover, just as his wounds would recover.
It was child’s play for the Game to calculate acceleration, to instruct other players on the height and tension in the net, so that Peter would hit just far enough above the ground to stretch down and smack the earth but live. Peter would hit the net because Alex would stand wherever the Game guided him. Had Charlie looked down from the roof, all he would’ve seen was Peter unconscious on impact, the black nylon invisible from fifty feet above. But the Game also predicted correctly that Charlie wouldn’t even look—he would cradle Alex and carry him away.
Now, as Peter came to, Charlie and Alex long gone, he was laughing, partly because every inch of his body hurt, and partly because he knew he could now die and be reborn.
What was death, after all, but a police report in a system, which set in motion a series of events, boxes checked wherever appropriate? The Game would talk for the police to the principal, who was happy to learn the body was found and cared for before any media arrived. The Game would talk for the police to his father, who was offered the chance to ID the body by screen share since he was in Europe, before boarding a long flight back for the funeral. He accepted the policeman’s thoughtful recommendation that cremation was the way to go here. The electronic charts would confirm the body was ruined, the DNA certain, the urn labeling the remains as Peter’s delivered to the funeral home. Electronic signals would assure the right people that everything was accounted for, packaged, delivered, exchanged, disposed, departed.
The Game even provided a note, posted on Peter’s social media, recalling his run-in with Morrissey on the drug charges: You caught me. Better this than jail.
And what if someone opened the urn to see what was inside?
It would be ash.
And Peter was free, to go anywhere, to be anyone.
Free within the Game.
He was laughing also because a new mod had occurred to him while he lay there. The Game would honor Charlie’s deal, because Charlie had—to the best of his efforts—offered a killing to the gods. The Game had stopped the death, but Charlie didn’t know that. It didn’t make Charlie any less a willing executioner, which was all the Game wanted to see.
But Charlie had only bargained for himself and his friends’ freedom from the Game. Peter was already drafting the invitation in his mind, and the fun and games that would follow.
Do you love your son? Y/N?
Once, Peter had dreamed that if he couldn’t have his own dad, maybe Charlie’s dad would adopt him, too, be his surrogate father, but Charlie’s dad had hated Peter instantly, leaving him once again in the cold—with Charlie, the favored son, always in the light.
A day from now, or maybe a month, Arthur Lake would sit alone in front of a screen, his loved ones asleep, and the Game would ask, Would you like all your dreams to come true? You have a restaurant, yes, but would you like a second? A third? A new patio, an award, a
n empire?
And the eternal loop would continue, filled with unwitting playthings tossed and turned by the whimsy of the fates—for amusement or sport or no reason at all—asking questions that have always been asked and expecting an answer.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my friends and family who took time from their busy lives to read and debate this book in its early forms and make it better, especially Jared MacDonald for keeping me tech-honest (all mistakes and artistic licenses are mine), Ware Wendell for keeping me Austin-honest (even in my highly-invented Austin) and just generally honest (again, mea culpa), Atara Rich-Shea for spherical observations and collisions, Noam Weinstein for keeping me on waves and above the music, Martin Tobey for reading the very first draft and pointing me in the right direction—you have a storyteller’s eye. Thank you to Andrew Tobolowsky and Stephen Tobolowsky who gave me biblical insights and anecodotes—spiritual, historical, archeological, and literary (all theological conflations and departures mine). A tremendous debt of gratitude goes to my indomitable agent Jodi Reamer and my delightfully sublime or sublimely delightful editors Sara Goodman at St. Martin’s Press and Rachel Winterbottom at Gollancz, who bring scalpels and mallets and know when to use which. You challenged me always to dig deeper and reach farther, even when I didn’t know I could. Jodi, you are a force of nature, and I want you in any trench I find myself. Thank you to their incredible teams including Alec Shane and Jennie Conway—it takes a village to bring a book to life, and two to do it this nicely. Thank you to Dr. Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, whose whitepaper, “Remote Exploitation of an Unaltered Passenger Vehicle” was my research source for Charlie’s hilltop car hack by the reservoir. As to the sign hack, I don’t know who told a road sign in Dallas in May 2016 to comment that Donald Trump was a shape-shifting lizard, making national news, but it wasn’t the Vindicators. Their other message was “Work is Cancelled—Go Back Home,” which brought a smile to my face, even if it wasn’t true. Finally, my deepest thanks to my family. Writing a book is a lonely task that paradoxically can’t happen without the support of everyone around you. This is a book about parents and children, and I am eternally grateful for my own in both categories. And most of all, thank you to Jude, for more things than I have room to list or know how to say. You didn’t just read the book—you created the world that made the book worth existing in.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Danny Tobey is a fifth-generation Texan. He went to Harvard College, Yale Law School, and the University of Texas Southwestern medical school. Harvard gave Danny the Edward Eager prize "for the best creative writing." He wrote and edited the Harvard Lampoon and was anthologized in The Best of the Harvard Lampoon: 140 Years of American Humor. Danny’s first novel was the science fiction-fantasy thriller The Faculty Club. Danny is a noted expert on Artificial Intelligence. In 2019, the Library of Congress gave Danny the Burton Award for his work on AI and the law. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
1. The Game
2. The Vindicators
3. Class Over
4. Next Level
5. The Affair
6. The Sign
7. The Lizard King
8. The Uncanny Valley
9. The Sinner
10. Good Works
11. Digital Natives
12. House of Gold
13. House of Pain
14. The Covenant
15. In the Beginning
16. Isometric
17. The Breath of God
18. The Wrath of God
19. The Little Man
20. The Fire of God
21. Blood Code
22. Leviathan
23. Too Far
24. It Knows
25. Drop Box
26. The Eye of God
27. Warlock
28. Blood on the Wall
29. Black Box
30. Key
31. Ephemera
32. Reflection
33. Healed!
34. Cosmic Fire
35. Angel of Death
36. Child Sacrifice
37. The Cult of Pythagoras
38. Azazel
39. The Catacomb of Veils
40. The Game of Life
41. Unsearchable
42. Peter’s House
43. The Light
44. The Word of God
45. The Forest of Ever-Branching Trees
46. The Lamb
47. False Witness
48. Execution
49. Deliver Me
50. Second Sight
51. Good News!
52. Ones and Zeros
53. Father/Son/Ghosts
54. Midnight
55. Icon
56. Sunday Sunday Sunday
57. Motherboard
58. Holy Week
59. Schrödinger’s Cat
60. Vexation
61. Malicious and Nutritious
62. Plimpton 322
63. Before the Flood
64. Ground Truth
65. The Hand of God
66. Leviathan
67. Immovable Wall / Unstoppable Force
68. Roko’s Basilisk
69. Pieces
70. Everything Vibrates
71. Robin Goodfellow
72. Anonymous
73. Fun House / Mirror
74. Closed Loop
75. In My Father’s House …
76. … There are Many Houses
77. Mirrors on Mirrors
78. Black Hatters
79. Feast of Phools
80. Watcher
81. I am a Strange Loop
82. Conception
83. Dragon’s Lair
84. Grendel’s Den
85. St. Paul and the Magician
86. Control/Alter/Delete
87. Tablet on the Uncompounded Reality
88. Virus/Plague
89. Life Meter
90. Red Bull / Blue Teeth / Green Fire
91. Tablet/Scroll/Commentary
92. Audience Participation
93. Sisyphus
94. I Alone
95. The Golden Triangle
96. World’s Fair
97. Burning Man
98. The Fall of the Aztecs
99. The Game of Death
100. File Saved
101. Homecoming
102. Gödel, Escher, Bach
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
First published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
THE GOD GAME. Copyright © 2019 by Danny Tobey. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
www.stmartins.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-30614-2 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-27079-5 (international paperback)
ISBN 978-1-250-30615-9 (ebook)
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p; First Edition: January 2020
e-ISBN: 9781250306159