At the corner of the block, he stopped in a cafe to erase the lingering taste of tomatoes stewed in mutton grease by drinking two coffees and crunching down half a tub of Tic Tacs. He was just starting his second espresso when everything became strange. The light dimmed as in an eclipse of the sun, a wind entered through the open doorway, the pages of a newspaper lying abandoned on a table turned over one by one, as though by the hand of an invisible reader. Outside in the street, someone cried out jaggedly above the seething sound that had insinuated itself into the laden silence. A fusillade of ice pellets erupted upwards from the pavement and then the sky broke, dropping waves of sound that shook the ground and made the water in Zen’s glass ripple lightly. Next the initial fusillade of hail turned to a hard rain and within moments the sewers were gorged. The water backed up, deluging the street where people caught in the storm held up briefcases or newspapers to protect their heads and gazed across at the lights of the cafe on the other bank of the impassable torrent, while those safe inside cackled and jeered, savouring their sanctuary.
And then it was all over. The rain ceased, the flood subsided and the sun came out. By the time Zen had paid and left, the streets were already steaming themselves dry. The accumulated odours from the clogged drains combined with the water vapour to create a pale miasmal veil through which he made his way back up the hill to the Questura.
Nine and a half thousand kilometres away to the north-west, Jake Daniels awoke. Early light seeped through the hardwood venetians. Jake paused to check central processing performance and run a defrag, then rolled off the mattress and stood up. The barely audible breathing from the far side of the bed maintained its steady rhythm. He navigated the shallows of the bedroom and stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind him quietly. Madrona was great, but right now he needed his space.
He was fixing coffee and listening to the city’s fabled all-girl band, the Westward Ho’s, when his phone came to life. Inevitably, it was Martin. Martin was great too, except he didn’t do down-time.
‘Yo.’
‘We need to dialogue, Jake.’
‘Shoot.’
‘Pete Newman, that lawyer who’s been over in Europe providing logistical support on the movie angle? He’s missing.’
‘Missing what?’
‘No, he disappeared three days ago, presumed kidnapped. So we need to progress alternative strategies to minimise how this incident might impact our mission.’
‘Like when?’
‘Right away. There are significant granularity issues that need to be addressed and the solutions migrated to the rest of our people here and then cascaded down to the folks we’re teaming with at the location.’
‘Huh?’
‘Someone has to sweat the small stuff. I’m thinking I may need to go out there myself. You okay with lunch?’
‘Whatever.’
Jake poured himself a mug of coffee, cradled his BlackBerry in the other hand and headed on out to the deck. The sun was just starting to show above the hills behind. Out towards the lake, a thick layer of gunge had toned down the pricey vista of stacked conifers and sloppy water to the kind of generic blur you only notice if it isn’t there. Some dark agent in the guise of a crow hit the far end of the cedar planking in a clumsy clatter and then did the pimp roll over to a lump of wiener or marshmallow from last evening’s cookout. Jake lay back in a colonial rocker, breathed in the salty air and took stock. All in all, he was cool with this latest development. A totally necessary feature of any killer game was that whenever you thought you were home and free, really weird shit happened. And seeing who was the gamemaster on this particular adventure, the surprises were always going to be world-class. Which was okay. Jake had a few surprises in store himself.
Gaming had pretty well been his whole life ever since he discovered the early classics like Mario and Pac-Man at college. Crude and unsophisticated as those pioneering efforts had been in retrospect, they had spoken to him as nothing else before. The urge to add further levels and features to the games available, elegantly enough not to crash the Down’s syndrome software on which the platform was built, had led him to switch majors from engineering to computer programming. He turned out to be a natural code warrior and a couple of years after graduating landed a job at the Redmond campus. Jake hadn’t been one of the fabled Founding Fathers, but he was heavily vested and by the late 1990s his stock options, having split several times, amounted to a very sweet pile indeed. Then he got lucky, or maybe smart.
One day in the summer of 1998 he had been waiting to meet his stockbroker at a downtown restaurant that ran a sweepstake on what the Dow Jones industrial average would be at year’s end. The bids were displayed on a board at the rear of the bar, and as Jake stared at the numbers he felt one of those familiar gut wobblies, like when you know that there’s this monster fatal error lurking somewhere in the program you just wrote. So when his broker showed up he told her to dump his stock, thereby quite possibly contributing to the spectacular Nasdaq collapse a few weeks later. Then, instead of trying to reinvent himself as a vulture capitalist or pissing his capital away on some start-up dotcom company dedicated to revolutionising the way America buys toilet paper, he had put it all into real estate in time to clean up on the biggest property boom the city had ever seen. This had brought him an even bigger fortune, but best of all it had brought him Madrona, who had been working as a greeter for the firm that managed his portfolio of investments. Okay, he was forty-five and she was twenty-three, but so what? Ageing was an option and Jake had opted out.
It was only once they were married that he found out Madrona came from a fundamentalist Bible Belt family and believed that when the end times came, believers would be spirited up to heaven in the Rapture while Jesus and the Antichrist duked it out in the scorched wasteland below. Up until then, religion had been pretty much off the radar for Jake, but the more he heard about the coming Apocalypse — and Madrona had told him plenty, particularly back in the early days — the more interested he got. He hadn’t bought into the sales talk and begging letters of the sleazy pastor out at the glass-and-plywood church where Madrona worshipped, but their promotional material plus some trawling on the web made the general scenario clear, and also that millions of other Americans, including the president, believed in it.
The God game was for sure the greatest total immersive reality challenge of all time, but these fundies were just hunkering down and trying to defend their corner instead of going out there and taking the initiative. That was always a losing strategy, and most of them were indeed losers, gambling on their free pass to eternity working when the time came. Maybe that was all they could do, but Jake was both rich and bored. To be honest, even the top-end, interactive, massively multiple role-playing stuff didn’t really cut it for him any more. The stakes were too low and he was too good. Why piss around within the limits of the current technology when there was this persistent universe game that had been running for thousands of years, with killer graphics, no sharding or instancing and unlimited bandwidth? Not to mention an opponent who could come up with off-the-wall moves like targeting the lawyer Martin had sent out to work with the treasure hunters in Cosenza.
When he took his mug back to the kitchen for a refill, Madrona had emerged, wearing the retro baby-doll nightie Jake had given her for her birthday. It ended about an inch below her crotch and was pinkly transparent with appliqued rabbits. It didn’t matter what she wore, or what she didn’t.
‘Cuddle,’ she said.
It was an imperative. The only problem with babes young enough to be your daughter was they had so much goddamn energy. Back when Jake was her age, he couldn’t get laid to save his life. Now his problem was rationing the available supply to meet Madrona’s demands. Still, the cost-per-fuck ratio was good, although Jake had an uneasy sense that it might develop a negative tilt some time in the future.
He tweaked his goatee and displayed an arc of perfect teeth.
‘Are you Rapture-ready?’ he said.
‘Are you happy with the script?’
‘It comes from the highest possible source.’
‘Who is the screenwriter?’
‘I was referring to the basic material, or Bible if you prefer. “Divinely inspired”, some critics have been kind enough to say.’
‘A bit long and rambling, though. Hitchcock said that to film a novel you first have to cut it down to a short story.’
‘Which is where all novels started out and most should have stopped. And it was Truffaut, actually.’
Annalise Kirchner consulted her notes in a frigid fluster.
‘Are you employing a theological consultant, maestro?’
‘No pieces of silver have yet changed hands, but the subject naturally comes up when I meet one of my many friends in the Vatican.’
‘How about alternative scenarios for the end of historical time? Do you plan to consult any scientists?’
‘I simply can’t be bothered. Atheists are such bores. They talk about God all the time.’
‘Do you see this movie as making some sort of statement, and if so, what is it?’
Luciano Aldobrandini sighed. The young woman was quite decorative, if you liked that sort of thing, but clearly an idiot. It was time for him to take charge.
‘Fraulein Kirchner, I have made many movies. Too many, some have said. Most of them were good, a few perhaps even great. But never have I faced a challenge such as this.’
The interviewer nodded empathetically. Behind her, the Austrian TV crew continued to monitor their equipment with disinterested concentration.
‘Of course, the Holy Scriptures are hardly a new field for this medium,’ Aldobrandini went on discursively. ‘But most of the attempts that have been made, from De Mille to Mel, have taken as their subject the life and death of Christ, since that represents a human drama with which audiences can easily identify. Others have treated episodes from the Old Testament, which are also relatively straightforward to adapt for the screen since they portray aspects of the great human epic of the Jewish people.’
He puffed on his cigar.
‘But neither the teachings and sufferings of Jesus, nor the trials and tribulations of the Jews, constitute in and of themselves the essence of the Biblical message. Like all great religions, Christianity has both a human and a superhuman — one might even say inhuman — face. Its mysteries are revealed in the natural world around us, but their fons et origo is supernatural and by definition passeth all understanding.’
‘So how can such mysteries be transferred to the cinema screen?’ asked the interviewer.
Luciano Aldobrandini did not like being interrupted when he was in full flight. He held up his hand like a traffic policeman.
‘All in due course. As I was saying, previous cinematic treatments of the Bible have focused on its human aspects. The two great bookends of scripture, its alpha and omega, are of course Genesis and Revelations.’
He laughed reminiscently.
‘As one of Dino’s friends, I was involved in a minor way with John Huston’s attempt to tackle the first of these back in the 1960s, and in my sentimental moments regret that I cannot be kinder about the result. But the second has never even been attempted, no doubt because parsing such a narrative for the lens has always appeared impossible.’
A young man appeared in the background, just behind the floodlights, waving frantically. The interviewer signalled the cameraman to pause the tape.