by Terry Miles
I was fairly tech savvy, but whatever Baron had been doing on my laptop appeared to involve some kind of root-level modification that was way outside my experience or ability to understand.
“What the fuck did you just do to my computer?”
“I was just following instructions,” Baron said. “Look.” He pointed to the screen.
“What is it?” Chloe rolled her chair over to where I had recently joined Baron at my desk.
“Tabitha Henry,” I said.
And there she was.
Her face occupied the center of the screen. It was a candid shot, probably taken from another old social media account. She was smiling in what appeared to be a Thai restaurant. There was some additional information surrounding that image, including links to Tabitha’s now-defunct Instagram and Twitter accounts, college transcripts, high school yearbook photos, library book withdrawal info, at least one bank statement, and her recent employment records.
“None of this social shit is live anymore,” Chloe said. “She must have deleted it.”
Baron shrugged and took another hit off his pipe. “Deleting wouldn’t do it. Probably hired a fucking cleaner.”
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
“A couple of guys I used to work with at Lehman Brothers owed me a favor.”
“You got this from broker bros?” Chloe asked.
“They got into some pretty fucked-up shit over there,” Baron replied.
“I’ll bet,” I said, staring at the screen.
The stock market was a sophisticated system that I’d enjoyed exploring for a while, but the behind-the-scenes workings of the deeply crooked world of corporate high finance were a web of fuckery that made advanced game theory look like eighth-grade math.
“Do you have any Bitcoin?” Baron asked as he took another hit of weed.
“A little.”
“I’m going to need to borrow it.”
“Okay. How much?”
“All of it.”
* * *
—
It took us a while to comb through the information. There was a whole bunch of useless material—dozens of photographs, expired links, and archived social posts—but not one mention of any kind of attack on the famous Hollywood actor.
There were some photographs that had clearly been taken on the day of that event—including three pictures of Tabitha Henry and Jeff Goldblum, the two of them standing on the familiar stage with the movie’s poster in the background. In all three pictures, they were smiling; clearly no attempted murder, and not one drop of blood.
“It looks like that attack never happened,” I said.
Baron nodded. “I told you it was fake.”
“I don’t know,” Chloe said. “That video is pretty fucking legit. Are you sure these photos aren’t the fakes?”
“Nah, these are real,” Baron said. “The metadata’s on point, and there are a bunch of other attempted-murder-free photos of the same event online.” He took another huge rip from his pipe and leaned in to stare at Tabitha’s face on the screen.
“What is your deal?” he asked, as he slowly zoomed in on the image.
But of course, Tabitha Henry’s pixelated face couldn’t answer any questions about her deal, or anything else.
* * *
—
Baron went home to do some work, and Chloe and I spent the next several hours making calls. Somehow Chloe managed to convince a representative from the movie studio that we hadn’t made up this insane story just to mess with her. The studio rep assured us that nobody who worked for their publicity department had ever been harmed in a manner consistent with what we’d described. When we asked her if she was sure, she told us that she was one hundred percent positive.
That attack never happened.
* * *
—
According to the information Baron’s finance guys sent over, Tabitha Henry was born in Queens, New York, graduated from UCLA with a degree in communications, then moved back to New York to work in digital advertising for a while before eventually returning to Los Angeles to start an immersive interactive theater company.
Tabitha’s company was called Rowing All the Boats. They ran a few popular escape rooms in Los Angeles. Their events always received rave reviews, and by the end of their first month of operation, they had a two-month-long waiting list. A few months after that, they were purchased by a company specializing in cutting-edge online-gaming technology called Chronicler Enterprises.
I called the number listed on the Rowing All the Boats website and left a message asking Tabitha Henry to return my call.
She called back a few hours later.
After some awkward small talk, I finally explained why I’d gotten in touch with her, how some friends and I had discovered a really weird movie clip, and that Tabitha herself was the star.
She gave me her email address and I sent her the file. A few minutes later she called us back, this time on video.
Tabitha’s hair was a bit shorter, her face a little bit fuller, but otherwise, she looked pretty much the same as she had in that clip with Jeff Goldblum.
“How the fuck did you do that? How did you copy my face and body?”
“We didn’t. We found it on somebody’s phone,” Chloe said.
“Whose phone?”
Chloe and I looked at each other.
“Well?” Tabitha was losing patience.
“A man named Alan Scarpio.”
“The billionaire?”
“Yes,” I said. “Do you know him?”
“No. He’s gone missing, right?”
“That’s right,” Chloe said.
“What’s a missing billionaire doing with a fake video of me on his phone?”
“We don’t know,” I said. “That’s why we’re calling.”
It looked like Tabitha wasn’t sure who she should be mad at, or how mad she should be.
“What in the actual fuck?” she said. We could hear her playing the video clip again while she was speaking with us. “It’s so realistic. It’s creeping me out.”
“You’re sure you don’t remember anything like this happening?” I asked.
“Are you serious?” Tabitha’s eyes were huge. “You think I could forget something like this?”
She held her phone up to a desktop computer and showed us the section of the video where the publicity assistant’s arm was slashed. “Look at all of that blood. Would there really be that much blood?”
“I understand this must be…strange for you,” I said.
“Ya think?”
“I can send you all the information we have, if you like.”
“Yeah. I’ll need all your information.”
“If you have any questions, please get in touch.”
“Thanks. I’m sure I’ll have questions. I mean, you do know this isn’t me in this video, right?” She stared at the two of us. “Right?”
“Right,” I said. “Of course.”
“This is so weird.” Tabitha started watching the video again. “Wait, did Devon put you up to this?”
“I’m sorry, but we don’t know any Devon.”
“Right—except that’s exactly what somebody who knows Devon would say.”
I looked at Chloe. She shrugged.
Tabitha Henry, for the moment at least, appeared to be a dead end.
9
EVERYTHING THAT ISN’T RABBITS
“This is fascinating.” The Magician pressed the space bar on his laptop and the video stopped playing.
We’d rushed over to the arcade shortly after we’d spoken with Tabitha. The Magician had watched the video three times in a row.
“Is it Rabbits?” I asked, doing my best to keep the excitement out of my voice.
“The hall
marks are definitely there,” he said, “but it’s hard to say. I’m going to have to think about this.”
Then he kicked us out of his office and shut the door.
* * *
—
Is it Rabbits?
I’d asked the Magician the exact same question a number of times in the past.
The first time was the day we met.
I was a senior in college then, completely obsessed with games and gaming, and barely interested in the subjects that actually affected my grade-point average. Thankfully, I’d retained enough of my childhood ability to recall things in detail that I was able to memorize names and dates well enough to keep my academic scholarship. And as long as I remained on scholarship I wouldn’t have to get a job, which meant more time to play games.
Of course it was a game that eventually led me to the Magician.
* * *
—
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s called Wizard’s Quest Four; it works on this Apple II clone.”
Andrew Goshaluk pulled a floppy disk from an old Rolodex-style case and slipped it into a cream-colored drive from another age.
“How old is that computer?”
“Fucking ancient, mate.”
Andrew Goshaluk was slightly overweight, about five foot nine, with straw-colored feathered hair and gold-framed serial killer glasses. We’d met when we were seniors in high school and ended up at the University of Washington together. He was studying computer science and I was working on a degree in English literature with a minor in game theory.
Andrew had come over from London with his father after his mother and sister were killed in a train accident. Although a mutual interest in games had brought us together, my own parents’ subsequent death and the fact that we’d both recently experienced such significant family tragedies made us inseparable in college.
Back in high school, Andrew and I were what you’d call hardcore gamers. We played everything from The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy to Risk, chess, and the strategy board game Go, but role-playing games were by far our favorites. Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller were our top two.
By the time we hit college, not all that much had changed. Outside of the occasional unavoidable party or concert, we did almost nothing but play games.
It had been ages since I’d heard Emily Connors use the term “Rabbits” in relation to a secret game that somehow involved extinct woodpeckers and orphaned movie credits, since I’d heard that strange voice cutting through the radio static on something Emily called The Night Station—a voice that I would continue to hear in my dreams, always repeating the same thing over and over, the unmistakable phrase I’d heard that night, on that dark winding country road—a phrase I’d later learn was deeply connected to the mysterious game unofficially known as Rabbits. The Door Is Open.
Shortly after playing Wizard’s Quest Four on that old Apple computer with Andrew Goshaluk in one of our computer science labs, I encountered that phrase for the second time.
“Check it out.” Andrew pressed the return key, and Wizard’s Quest Four booted up.
There was a small box in the center of the screen that included some really primitive graphics—at that moment it was a purple wizard who looked like he was dropping some seeds—but the majority of the game was plain text.
As Andrew tapped the arrows on his keyboard and guided the characters through the first stage of their dungeon adventure, 8-bit classical music blared from the computer’s tiny speaker: a short song playing on a loop that sounded slightly medieval.
“What are you doing?” I asked, not sure I actually wanted to know the answer. Andrew had a habit of falling into some pretty deep research spirals when it came to computer games.
“What do you think? I’m playing a game.”
“A dungeon crawl from the seventies?”
“Come on, K, look at this thing.”
“What about it?”
“This is a runtime library system, my friend. Total early eighties–style.”
“Okay, then. Let me ask you this.”
Andrew leaned back in his chair and waited for me to ask my follow-up question.
“Who gives a shit?”
Andrew smiled. “You’re funny.”
“I’m serious. Why are you playing this garbage game?” I was actually a little pissed off. We were in the middle of a really great Drakengard campaign, and we’d almost reached the final battle.
“Ah, now that’s the real question, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” I said, hoping he might get to the point. “But I thought you were going to look into that game Beverly and Travis were playing?”
“I am.” Andrew smiled as he pressed the return key. “We are,” he continued.
The screen changed, and we were now looking at two boxes side by side, one filled with text, the other with the graphic of an extremely long-armed dungeon monster.
“Please tell me what the fuck is going on. I have a French test in an hour.” I was getting impatient. French was killing me. It was easy enough for me to memorize the verbs and phrases, but there was just something about the pronunciation and the way everything fit together that wasn’t coming easily.
Andrew stood up and stretched. “I can’t feel sorry for you; I’m taking astrophysics this semester.”
“They call French a Romance language.”
“That sounds familiar.”
“It’s murdering my soul.”
“I’ve heard that can happen. Check it out.” He navigated to another screen on the computer and motioned for me to take his chair.
I sat down and leaned forward to examine the screen. “What the hell does this mean?”
“What do you think it means?”
“It’s fake.”
“It’s not.”
“Bullshit.”
“Oh yes, mon copain. This shit is real.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I checked it out.”
“For real?”
“For real real.”
I took another look. “There’s no way.”
The monster on the screen, one of the myriad creatures you might encounter while playing Wizard’s Quest Four, looked very familiar. As a kid, I’d seen its name and the trademark spiky hair thousands of times.
Staring back at me from that screen, in a computer game from 1983, was the main character from a videogame that wouldn’t exist until almost a decade later.
The monster on the screen was Sonic the Hedgehog.
* * *
—
The reason Andrew was playing Wizard’s Quest Four was because he’d been looking into another game, something our friends Beverly and Travis were playing that their friends at MIT had discovered: a game that existed in the real world, a game that the government was allegedly using to recruit secret agents.
It actually sounded plausible at the time.
Cold War films and literature from the 1980s—like the proto-hacker movie WarGames and the military science fiction novel Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card—posited a world where videogames intersected with the real world, where these games might actually train future soldiers or operatives to deal with potentially dangerous real-world scenarios like global-scale war or national security–threatening espionage.
The possibility that a game like this actually existed—a game that took place using the real world as its playing field—was intoxicating. This was everything I loved about role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, amplified by a thousand.
I very badly wanted it to be real.
I had no idea how it was possible, but Andrew appeared to be implying that this Sonic the Hedgehog anomaly was part of that mysterious game.
If it was fake, it was nothing but evidence of a forger
with a weirdly specific set of interests and skills. But if it was real, Andrew had uncovered an interesting anachronism: Sonic the Hedgehog was there, on that screen, as part of a game that had been released almost a decade before the character would be created by the brilliant game-design team over at Sega.
* * *
—
We immediately sprang into action and tried to figure out what was happening.
Was it possible that this was just a crazy coincidence? We asked everybody we knew with any kind of experience in game design or videogame history, but nobody had an answer.
We called Sega, but they had no idea what we were talking about and no interest in learning more. Everyone with a more than cursory understanding of the computer gaming industry thought what we were showing them was fake. Anyone outside of that industry didn’t care.
But I cared.
This thing felt strange—but strangely familiar. Something about it made me feel the way I’d felt the night of the accident with the Connors sisters, the night I first heard the word “Rabbits” connected to another mysterious game.
Andrew had gone just about as far as his curiosity would allow. He loved the idea of uncovering something cool, but actually taking the time to figure out what it might mean? That was way too much effort. He quickly moved on to solving another puzzle—some kind of marketing game related to Reebok—and I was left to dig into this weird Sonic anachronism on my own.
Andrew was out, but I was just getting started.
* * *
—
“What does it mean?” I asked the rail-thin brunette with the cat-eye glasses whose legs were currently draped over the back of a worn black leather sofa in a messy one-bedroom apartment. This was Beverly. She was lying on her back reading the photocopied instruction manual for Wizard’s Quest Four that I’d downloaded online and printed out.
“I’m not sure,” Beverly replied, and turned her head toward a good-looking young Black man wearing a Baltimore Orioles baseball cap and a T-shirt featuring the graphic of an old radio, with text below it that read: TURN UP THE EAGLES, THE NEIGHBORS ARE LISTENING. “What do you think, Travis?”