by Terry Miles
“Well, as most of you know, The Prescott Competition Manifesto is extremely rare. The moment it’s posted to a crowd-sharing site, it’s removed faster than the big movie studios pull down their copyrighted works. It’s not much, but this clip is currently our best source of information available on the game.”
Another pause for dramatic effect.
“This particular clip was given to me by a friend of mine who almost won Eight.” This last bit was a lie. I’d bought the recording on the darknet for twenty-six dollars’ worth of Bitcoin.
A hush fell over the room.
They loved it when I mentioned anything related to the numbered iterations of the game, or the winners of those particular iterations, The Circle. And, of course, Hazel, the most infamous Rabbits player of all time.
Hazel wasn’t the only famous participant. There were the two well-known Canadian players, Nightshade and Sadie Palomino; ControlG, the winner of the tenth—and most recent—iteration of the game; the Brazilian anarchist who went by the number 6878; and, of course, Murmur, the deadliest of them all, allegedly sacrificing their spouse to gain an edge during Nine. But all of those players, as accomplished as they were, existed a tier below Hazel.
Hazel was my closer. I always saved a brief mention of Hazel for the end.
“Come on, tell us something we don’t know.” My friend Baron again.
This time he didn’t even turn around as he asked the question. I made a note to have a word with him about his commitment to earning his cut of the profits.
“Well, rumor has it there’s another force at work, operating behind the scenes of the game—something powerful, mysterious, and, occasionally, deadly. Something out there watching from somewhere else, staring into our world from an infinite darkness, waiting for the players to make a mistake.” I paused again for effect, and then continued, my voice a bit lower than before. “This warning was discovered written on the back of a Dewey decimal card in an old set of drawers in a thrift store in Ireland.”
I cleared my throat a little, then recited:
“Remember the game, or your world it dies.
“Remember to follow the patterns and signs.
“We wait in the shadows a-twisting your fate,
“While you crawl and you stumble blind into the gate.
“It’s all predetermined, no losses no gains,
“So play, little human, keep playing the game.”
“Wow, that’s dramatic.” The unseen man again.
I looked around and caught part of a green military-style jacket moving through the crowd.
“So, that’s the game,” I continued. “Rabbits.”
I looked around the room again slowly. “With unclear prizes for participation and sinister-sounding punishments for those who betray the secrecy and spirit of the game, it’s hard to believe anybody still actually plays.” I took a deep practiced breath before I continued. “Any other questions?”
“My friend says she has proof the game has started up again, the eleventh version.” This was somebody new, a woman wearing a red bandana, sitting on the floor and leaning against a Dragon’s Lair cabinet.
“With all due respect to your friend, experts agree the game has been dormant since the tenth iteration ended. We’re in a down cycle. Nobody knows if—or when—the game will start up again.”
“What about Hazel?” Baron Corduroy again, right on time.
“I’m afraid that’s all the time I have tonight.”
Moans from the crowd.
“But, if you’d like more information, there’s a brand-new downloadable PDF on my website.”
Normally at least half the crowd sticks around for an informal Q&A, which is when I’d finally share some of the stories I’d heard about Hazel or a number of other infamous Rabbits players, but there was a midnight screening of Donnie Darko at The Grand Illusion Cinema in about twenty minutes.
The Venn diagram of people interested in Rabbits and in Richard Kelly’s sci-fi thriller from 2001 is essentially just a circle.
I said goodbye to each of the participants in turn as they collected their electronics and hurried out into the rain to catch their movie.
After the last of them had exited the arcade, I opened a small green lockbox and counted the donations. Two hundred and two dollars. Not bad. I left the Magician his cut and slid the lockbox under the counter.
“Well, that was all kinds of bullshit.” It was the voice from earlier, the man in the green military-style jacket. Beneath his jacket he wore a thin black hoodie, which hid his face. He was playing Robotron: 2084, the game Baron had been playing throughout my presentation.
At some point while people were leaving, he and Baron must have switched places.
“Where’s Baron?” I asked.
“Who?”
“The guy who was playing this game earlier.”
“I think he went to see Donnie Darko.”
Of course he did. Baron couldn’t be bothered to pay attention while I talked about Rabbits, but he’d be more than happy to pay seven dollars to see a movie he’s seen at least eighty times.
“Not bad,” the man said, nodding toward the screen.
I moved closer and saw the score. It wasn’t bad at all. It was much higher than Baron could have managed, and Baron was the best Robotron player any of us had ever seen.
“I used to play these things all the time.” At this point, the man in the green jacket turned around and slipped off his hoodie.
I recognized him immediately.
There are two things worth noting here. Number one, the man playing Robotron in the Magician’s arcade—the man who’d asked me if I knew Alan Scarpio—was the famous reclusive billionaire philanthropist and alleged winner of the sixth iteration of Rabbits: Alan fucking Scarpio. The second thing worth noting is that although I’d mentioned earlier that I knew Alan Scarpio, I’d never met him before in my life.
“I need your help,” he said.
“What for?” I replied.
“Something is wrong with Rabbits, and I need you to help me fix it.”
And with that, Alan Scarpio went right back to playing his game.
2
SO WHAT? IT’S A FUCKING WOODPECKER
In case you’re wondering, my name is K. That’s it. Just K. One letter.
Two things I’ll tell you: First, K is short for something. And second, I’ll never tell you what that something is. You’ll just have to find a way to cope with that disappointment.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest: A place that, at the time, I considered the wettest and loneliest corner of the Earth. A place that, many years later, I would romanticize as a kind of dark green gloomy world of ancient secrets and hidden lives, and a place that I now see as a kind of perfectly disturbing amalgamation of all of those things.
I’m old enough to remember cabinet videogames in arcades, but young enough to have trouble recalling a time without the Internet.
As a child, my parents believed I had what’s called an eidetic memory: a remarkable ability to retain images, words, and patterns in extensive detail. Back then they used the term “photographic memory,” which is inaccurate. Photographic memory doesn’t exist, and even if it does, I didn’t have it. I was just able to remember certain things, picture them clearly, and recall them later. I couldn’t remember everything, just stuff connected to patterns I found interesting. It wasn’t a math trick. Although I may have been able to drop a box of toothpicks on the floor and tell you how many there were, you weren’t getting the square root of anything from me.
Because I was the kid who could remember weird shit, I was occasionally able to distract a couple of the angry bullies in my class long enough to make them forget to kick my ass, but that only worked about fifty percent of the time—a percentage that quickly plummeted to zero
when I reached high school and the ability to focus on details and pick out complex connections became less of an occasional act of self-preservation and more of an obsession.
It was this obsession with finding patterns and cracking codes (that may or may not have actually been codes at all) that resulted in me being labeled “slightly neurodiverse”—a diagnosis that landed me on a number of different medications and a handful of different therapists’ couches. It was also this obsession that eventually led me into the world of Rabbits.
When asked to pinpoint the precise moment they’d heard about the game, people often can’t remember. Maybe they’d seen something on some obscure online bulletin board, or read a snippet of a conversation about hidden “kill screens” in arcade games from the 1980s. Or perhaps it was a friend of a friend talking about a kid who’d died while playing a strange Atari 2600 game that nobody can remember actually existing.
I remember exactly where I was standing when I first heard the name Rabbits.
It was at a party in Lakewood, Washington.
* * *
—
Growing up in Olympia, Washington, just about an hour south of Seattle, I’d heard the stories about Polybius: the video arcade game that allegedly killed some kids in Oregon. But this mysterious game was different, more enigmatic, and perhaps even more sinister. Like Polybius, this game had whispers surrounding it that included men in gray suits and potential mind-altering consequences for participation. But unlike Polybius, nobody was actually talking about this game—at least not until I attended that party.
Bill and Madeline Connors were close family friends who hosted a Fourth of July celebration every year. They had two daughters, Annie and Emily—one and three years older than me respectively.
The Connors sisters had the best taste in music, and they always wore the coolest clothes—a lot of belts, and a lot of hats. At this particular party, they were both wearing tall, striped Dr. Seuss–looking hats that they’d bought at what they assured me was the hippest store on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. I took their word for it. At the time, I’d never been farther south than Oakland, to attend sailing camp.
While our parents were in the backyard playing a drunken game of lawn darts, I entered the house to get a Coke (something I was never allowed to drink at home) and overheard Annie and Emily talking.
They were huddled in front of the family computer staring at something on the screen.
“Did you figure out how to load EverQuest, or what?” Annie asked.
“I have something better,” Emily replied, bringing up a screen I recognized. I had a pretty clear view from where I was hiding, just inside the kitchen doorway. They were looking at a Usenet newsgroup.
Annie leaned in to get a better look. “What’s alt dot binaries dot games?”
“Gaming group,” Emily replied, striking a few keys with expert precision.
“What’s binaries?”
“Be quiet.”
“Zelda pictures?”
“Not quite.”
“Another dancing baby?”
“Just listen.” Emily gently placed her hand over her sister’s mouth and pressed the space bar.
A video file started to play. It appeared to be a clip from an old wildlife documentary. The voice on the screen was talking about something called the imperial woodpecker.
“So what? It’s a fucking woodpecker. Let’s go back outside. Luke Milligan is here,” Annie said, tugging at her sister’s sleeve.
“Luke Milligan’s an asshole. He tried to put his hand up Nina’s shirt in chem.”
“Really?” Annie was clearly disappointed.
“Besides, it’s not just any woodpecker,” Emily said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, look at them all. There must be at least fifty woodpeckers in those last three scenes.”
“Yeah, so what? They’re big?”
“Yeah, they’re big, but that’s not it. This documentary was made in 1989, and the last reported sighting of an imperial woodpecker was in 1956.”
“Whoa.” Annie leaned in closer to the screen. “What does it mean?”
“It’s Rabbits,” Emily said, and shut down the computer.
“Rabbits?” Annie’s eyes were huge. She was fascinated.
So was I.
There was something about the way Emily had said the word “Rabbits” that felt like a secret—like something adults knew that children couldn’t possibly understand.
Emily looked around to make sure nobody was listening. The angle of the kitchen doorway kept me out of her line of sight. She lowered her voice. “It’s a secret game.”
Annie stared at the image of a woodpecker frozen on the screen. “What does it mean?”
“It means I’m going to be playing,” Emily said, matter-of-fact.
“How do you play?”
“It’s kind of complicated.”
“Like how?”
“Like we’re supposed to find things.”
“What things?”
“Things like patterns, discrepancies. Things that don’t make sense.”
“Patterns?” Annie said. She was doing her best to follow the conversation, but she clearly had no idea what the hell her sister was talking about.
Emily took a deep breath and collected her thoughts before continuing. “Okay, so, there’s a nature documentary released by a company that no longer exists, if it actually ever did.”
I stood there in the kitchen, completely enthralled, as Emily got into some pretty wild theories about that documentary.
The gist of it was pretty simple. There was a name listed in the end credits that didn’t have an accompanying occupation like makeup artist, boom op, best boy, or key grip.
One name was just hanging there, all alone on the screen—an “orphan name,” I think Emily called it. She told Annie she’d overheard a discussion about this and had brought it to the others on her gaming forum. They performed some numerology and math involving the letters of that person’s name, and eventually found something called The Night Station.
“What’s The Night Station?” Annie asked.
“That’s what we’re going to find out. Come on.”
I ducked out of the house and into the backyard just in time to miss being spotted by the two girls.
Emily told her parents that she and Annie were going to the store, and asked, half-heartedly, “Does anybody need anything?”
A few voices yelled out requests—cigarettes, ginger ale, chips and dip. Annie wrote everything down as Emily grabbed the keys to her mother’s truck.
Mrs. Connors’s voice rose above the others. “Take K with you.”
“Mom, there’s no room,” Emily complained.
“It’s a big truck, Em. Don’t be difficult.”
Emily exhaled and walked past me without making eye contact. “Come on, kid.”
“What makes you think I wanna go?” I said.
Annie grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the house.
I definitely wanted to go—not only because Annie was the first girl I’d ever kissed, but also because of what Emily had been talking about in the kitchen. The idea of a mysterious secret game called Rabbits.
This felt different. This was something big, something grown-up.
Holding Annie’s hand as she pulled me out to the old blue-and-white Chevy truck with the giant knobby tires took me right back to the moment she had kissed me.
Annie Connors was unconventionally pretty. Her eyes were just a bit too far apart, and her hair was extremely wavy and chaotic, but I found her beautiful, with a brash, powerful confidence that was both exciting and incredibly frightening.
A few weeks after my thirteenth birthday, our families were together celebrating Thanksgiving. Annie and I had been sent downstairs
to dig up a game called Trivial Pursuit. On our way to the storage room where we kept our old games, Annie suddenly yanked me over to the furnace next to my makeshift bedroom in our otherwise entirely unfinished basement, matter-of-factly pressed her body against mine, took my face in her hands, and kissed me.
She tasted like grape gummy worms. It was incredible.
“Well?” she’d asked, after the kiss.
I couldn’t speak, but I’m pretty sure my eyes answered with a resounding “holy shit, wow.”
* * *
—
“Get in.” Emily was already inside the truck picking out a cassette for the drive.
I crawled up into the cab, making sure I didn’t sit too close to Emily. Annie Connors was beautiful and mysterious enough; Emily was a whole other world.
“Hurry up, it’s almost time.” Emily had the big truck moving before Annie had shut the door.
I didn’t know much about cars, but the truck was at least a decade old. The ashtray beneath the stereo was overflowing with a blend of white-and-orange cigarette butts. On the floor, an old salt-and-vinegar-chip bag sat next to an empty bottle of Sprite, a few salty shards of greenish-white chips visible against the foil inside.
“The store’s open twenty-four hours,” I said, realizing as I was saying it that Emily knew that.
Everybody knew that.
Emily didn’t answer. She just popped a cassette into the stereo with a mechanical whir and click, and a series of tiny blue and pink lights from the stereo lit up the cab of the truck. Then Tori Amos began singing “Crucify,” and Emily guided the huge truck down the long, winding driveway and out onto the street.
* * *
—
We passed the store without stopping. Emily didn’t even slow down.
I remained silent. I didn’t want to open my mouth and risk saying something that might affect what was happening. This was an adventure—my first “wild hare up your ass” adventure—and there was no way I was going to risk saying anything to fuck it up.