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.
‘Well?’ demanded Aldobrandini curtly.
‘Marcello’s on the phone. He says it’s urgent.’
‘Tell him to wait.’
The young man disappeared and the interview recommenced.
‘Saint John of Patmos has been variously described as an inspired visionary, a deranged drug addict and a delusional psychotic,’ Aldobrandini continued smoothly. ‘The work for which he is famous was only very narrowly accepted for inclusion in the biblical canon and has been the subject of controversy ever since. But the finer theological points do not concern me. What is incontrovertible is that in our post-9/11 world, the Book of Revelations touches many exposed cultural nerves. We all know that if terrorists gain access to nuclear or biological weapons, it will quite literally mean the end of the world. We also know that such a prospect would not give them a moment’s pause, and that we are therefore potentially facing imminent extinction. That knowledge provides the necessary human element which now makes Saint John’s eschatological ravings seem not merely relevant but even realistic.’
The young man reappeared.
‘Marcello again, maestro. He says it’s a matter of the highest priority and he must speak to you
