by Terry Miles
“It could be the game,” Travis said. He was carefully analyzing something on his computer screen.
“What game?” I asked. “The secret CIA thing?”
“It’s more than that, K,” Beverly said as she hopped off the sofa and made her way over to where Travis was working at his desk. “It’s something else, something much bigger.” She grabbed a chair and sat down next to Travis.
“What do you mean, ‘bigger’?” I said, but they completely ignored me, whispering to each other as they examined the image of Sonic the Hedgehog and the accompanying text on Travis’s monitor.
After a minute or so, Travis stood up, took a photograph of the pixelated image, then turned to me and smiled. “We’re going to see the Magician.”
Half an hour later, I walked into the Magician’s arcade for the first time.
* * *
—
The Magician took a couple of minutes to examine the image, then turned his attention to the photocopied instruction manual.
When he’d apparently seen enough, he stood up from behind his desk, walked across the room, and shut the door to his office.
When he sat back down, he carefully rested his elbows on his desk and slowly put his fingers together in a kind of steeple. “How much do you know about the game?”
Travis and Beverly burst into their favorite theories—how you had to follow any and all patterns you were able to find in real life to see where they led; how nobody was completely sure if it was real or not; how the CIA was probably using it to recruit agents (or maybe it was the NSA); and how some people were players and others were just observers.
The Magician just sat there, listening, until Travis and Beverly stopped talking.
“Anything else?” the Magician asked.
“It’s supposed to be incredibly dangerous. And”—Travis lowered his voice—“some people have died while playing it.”
Travis’s words brought me right back to the night of the accident, right back into that truck with Annie and Emily Connors. I felt my face flush with emotion as I tried to ignore the images skip-framing through my mind like an action movie.
I looked over and saw the Magician looking back at me, his face expressionless.
“Like Travis said, nobody knows if it’s real,” Beverly said. “I mean, at least, not for sure.”
“Well,” said the Magician, turning his attention away from me and back to Beverly and Travis, “the players certainly know.”
He let that possibility hang there in the air for a moment.
Could a game like this really exist? Were there actually players? What if this was the same thing Emily Connors had been talking about way back when?
Something in the Magician’s eyes reminded me of the look on Emily’s face the night of the accident.
“Is it Rabbits?” I asked.
The Magician turned to face me. He appeared surprised.
“Where did you hear that name?” The look of surprise on his face had changed into something else—a kind of half smile that I found very difficult to gauge.
“I don’t remember,” I lied.
I wasn’t ready to share that information with a conspiracy-obsessed stranger I’d just met in an arcade.
The Magician took a moment to process this information, then nodded to Travis and Beverly. “What do you two know about Rabbits?”
“What’s Rabbits?” Travis asked.
“Nothing,” Beverly said, staring at me with a new kind of respect. “Wait, is that the name of the game? Rabbits?”
The Magician turned back to me. When it became clear that I wasn’t going to offer anything else, he continued. “The game doesn’t have a name—at least, not officially—but Rabbits has become a kind of…an unofficial moniker. Something to separate it from…everything else.”
“What do you mean by ‘everything else’?” I asked.
“Everything that isn’t Rabbits.”
* * *
—
My curiosity about the game began the night of the accident with Annie and Emily Connors, but if I had to go back and pinpoint the exact moment my complete and total obsession started, it was right there, in the Magician’s office. Hearing the name Rabbits once again connected to a mysterious game felt like some kind of validation—as if that name and all of the strangeness I’d felt the last time I’d heard it wasn’t just something I’d imagined.
Ever since that night in the truck with Annie and Emily Connors, I’d been convinced that Rabbits was something I’d either made up or misremembered, but in that moment, sitting there in the Magician’s office, I felt a shift in my mind and I allowed myself to imagine something I’d never seriously considered.
Rabbits might actually be real.
* * *
—
“It’s clearly fake, some kind of bootleg copy or something,” Travis said.
“Sonic isn’t listed as a monster in the manual,” Beverly added, holding up the copy of the instruction booklet I’d printed out.
The Magician again examined the photograph Travis had taken, then sat back and sank into his chair. “I’ll need to see everything you have on this.”
“Sure,” I said. “I can bring it by sometime in the next few days.”
“What’s wrong with right now?” the Magician asked.
“Oh,” I replied. “I wasn’t expecting to—”
“If that’s okay?” he continued.
I’m not sure why, but I had the feeling this was an important moment. Was the Magician actually in a hurry to examine my copy of the game, or was he simply testing me in order to find out how interested I was in Rabbits? Was I serious or was I just a tourist?
Andrew’s interest in the game had faded when the investigation became too difficult, and Beverly and Travis would soon follow suit, but I was just getting started. I was definitely no tourist.
“I’ll be back in half an hour,” I said.
I made it back to the arcade in under twenty minutes.
I was really fucking interested.
I couldn’t wait to find out what the Magician was going to tell me about the game, but when I returned, out of breath from pedaling as fast as I could, he simply snatched the floppy disk from my hand and closed the door to his office.
I was about to knock—to ask him to give me a timeline or at least tell me something about what he had planned—when I heard a voice behind me.
“He’ll let you know if he finds anything.”
I turned around and met Chloe for the first time.
* * *
—
She was a few weeks shy of her twenty-first birthday, her hair platinum blond, shaggy-short, and choppy. She was wearing a ripped light gray suit jacket over a white T-shirt featuring a graphic of a pink cassette tape. The flashing lights of the arcade sparkled in her eyes as she half smiled and offered a cool, disinterested “Hey.”
“Hi,” I said. “I’m K.”
“Chloe,” she said, and shook my hand like she’d just survived a job interview.
“Do you work here?” I asked.
“Sometimes,” she said as she led me back downstairs to the arcade proper. “What’s your game?”
“Robotron,” I said.
“There’s a Robotron machine in the back. We’re just waiting on a new monitor.” She slipped a quarter into a pinball machine called Centaur.
“Awesome,” I said.
As I stood there watching Chloe prepare to play pinball, I felt like I needed to say something interesting, to let her know I was a kindred spirit.
“Did you know that Harry Williams created the tilt mechanism for pinball machines?” I said, and immediately regretted it.
Who could possibly give a shit?
“I did not know that,” she replied as she pulled back th
e plunger and launched her first ball onto the playing surface.
I watched her use her hips against the table to adjust the angle of the ball as it moved. She was good.
“So, how long have you worked in the arcade?”
“How long have you been interested in Rabbits?” she asked, ignoring my question. Chloe had a way of constantly reminding you she was going to cut through the bullshit, and that she’d appreciate if you did the same.
“I don’t know that I am interested. I’m just looking into things.”
“Really?” She was still playing her first ball. “Good luck with that,” she said as she saved the ball with a deft shake of the table, hit a difficult target, and started the game’s multi-ball feature.
* * *
—
It took three days for the Magician to get back in touch.
I went over to the arcade and found him playing a game called Space Ace.
Released in 1984, Space Ace was a follow-up of sorts to the much more successful Dragon’s Lair. Both games featured high-quality LaserDisc animation, and both were designed by legendary animator Don Bluth. Because those games relied on memorizing patterns, it didn’t take me more than a few days (and about twenty-five dollars in quarters) to figure out how to finish both of them.
Space Ace was the science fiction counterpart to the fantasy setting of Dragon’s Lair. Space Ace was fine, but I much preferred Dragon’s Lair. The character of Dirk the Daring was a lot more fun. He didn’t take himself too seriously.
“It’s a very interesting anomaly,” the Magician said, handing me the floppy disk I’d dropped off the last time I was there, “but I wasn’t able to find anything to connect it to the game.”
“Okay, thanks,” I said, disappointed.
I’d felt certain he was going to uncover something mysterious—maybe not proof this Sonic thing was connected to a strange and dangerous secret game running beneath the surface of our world, but I was pretty sure he’d find something.
I was about to leave when I looked over and saw Chloe watching me from the stairway the led up to the Magician’s office, and I suddenly caught the feeling that I was standing at the precipice of a whole new world. I could turn around, walk out of the arcade, and return to my regular life, already in progress, or I could do something else.
I went back over to the Magician and tapped him on the back of his shoulder.
“What can you tell me about Rabbits?” I asked.
He stopped playing the game for a moment and turned to face me.
His expression was unreadable, but I thought I detected a hint of menace beneath the surface, and I wondered—for just a moment—if I’d made a terrible mistake.
I was about to turn around and leave when he asked me a question.
“What is it that you would like to know?”
“Everything,” I blurted. Hint of menace or not, I just couldn’t help myself.
His expression softened and then he laughed as his onscreen character caught a blue baby that had just fallen from the sky.
I lowered my voice and leaned forward a little.
“Is Rabbits real?” I asked.
The Magician smiled, leaned forward a little himself and whispered. “Just wait.”
I stared at the action on the screen as the Magician continued his game.
“What are we waiting for?” I asked.
“The Circle,” he said.
“What’s The Circle?”
“It’s a list of the winners of the game, a kind of Rabbits hall of fame.”
“So people really can win the game?”
“Absolutely,” he said.
“And that list of winners is here, in this Space Ace machine?”
“One particular list, yes.”
The Magician continued to guide his onscreen character flawlessly through a series of complex moves, eventually defeating the evil Commander Borf and winning the game.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, The Circle is a mystery. Nobody knows who updates it, or where to find it. It can show up anywhere in the world at any time, but it most commonly appears when the current iteration of the game ends.”
“It just appears?”
“Yes,” he said as we watched the end credits of the game scrolling up the screen.
“And that’s what happened to this Space Ace machine?”
“Wait,” he said, and we watched as the last of the credits faded away, leaving behind an animated inky blue-black background filled with glowing space clouds and twinkly little stars.
A few seconds later, a list of names and numbers appeared.
“This,” he said, pointing at the screen, “is The Circle, circa the seventh iteration of the game.”
It looked just like the regular list of high scores on any videogame, except there were Roman numerals instead of regular numbers. Those Roman numerals, seven in total, were followed by seven names.
I leaned in and took a closer look at the screen.
I: Mickie Mouth
II: The Condor
III: Alison Cat
IV: Radio Knife
V: Carbon Thing
VI: Californiac
VII: Nova Trail
As I stood there staring at that Space Ace machine, I started thinking about how difficult it would be to add something like this to the game. Unlike other titles from this period, Space Ace was played using a closed LaserDisc system. All of the information was contained on that large silver disk. There was no real programming involved.
“How did they do it?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” the Magician asked.
“How could somebody create a brand-new LaserDisc for a videogame from 1984?”
“You’ll have to ask Chloe. She knows a lot more about the technical side of it all.”
We stood there for a moment as the game rebooted and the Space Ace intro started playing on the small screen. I wanted to slip a quarter into the machine immediately; I hadn’t played that game for ages.
“This list of players just appeared on that Space Ace machine out of nowhere?” I asked.
“One day, the end credits were exactly the same as any other version of the game. The next day, there was this.”
“Why this particular machine at that particular time?”
“There are many who claim that the game follows the players, that it knows exactly where they are and what they’re doing.”
“That’s kind of hard to believe,” I said.
“It’s good to be skeptical, K, but you’re entering a new world. There are some things that are going to appear, well—”
“Totally unbelievable?” I interrupted.
He laughed. “I was going to say a bit hard to believe, but yeah, maybe totally unbelievable is closer to the truth.”
“You really believe the game might be somehow tracking the people playing it?”
“I didn’t say I believe that; I said some people believe that’s the case.”
“Either way, all of this sounds—”
“Totally unbelievable?” He smiled.
“Okay, so how do you know The Circle is actually part of the game and not just a prank or something?”
“Because I know.”
“What does that mean?”
He stared at me for a moment, and then he spoke slowly, in a tone that sounded almost reverent. “I was playing the game.”
I wanted to ask so much more, but in that moment, all I managed to blurt out was: “Is all of this really…real?”
“Oh, it’s real.” The Magician turned and walked away from the game. “Follow me.”
He led me upstairs to his office where he pulled out a laptop covered in band stickers from the nineties: Urge Overkill, Nirvana, Pav
ement, and at least a dozen more I didn’t recognize.
He flipped open his computer and booted it up. When his password screen popped up, he just pressed enter.
“You don’t use a password?” I asked.
“Never. Passwords are easy to hack. All you’re doing is giving the world free information about yourself.”
“Not if you use random numbers and letters,” I said.
“Nothing’s random, K.” He navigated to a folder filled with images and showed them to me, one by one.
Each image featured a list of names and Roman numerals. One was a picture of a take-out menu from a pizza place, one a Billboard Hot 100 chart from the sixties, another was a list of box scores from a baseball game in 1979. The earliest image was a photograph taken of a wall in a laundromat in Seattle, featuring the stenciled graphic of a rabbit.
“These are all different versions of The Circle?” I asked, staring at each strange image in turn.
“Yeah, these particular versions were all found in North America, all validated. I’ve assembled them in chronological order. I have other collections from Europe and Asia.”
The first image was the Laundromat, followed by a picture of what appeared to be a modernist painting featuring the name Mickie Mouth, the winner of One, then a few more featuring the winners of Two, Four, and Five, ending with the Space Ace version from the Magician’s arcade and the final image: a screen capture from a GeoCities website for a pet food company named Tiny Morsels.
That website had been hacked and a message splashed across it in a spray-paint font. The message was a question that read:
“Who is Hazel?” I asked.
“Hazel won the eighth iteration of the game then allegedly abdicated their place in The Circle and disappeared.”
I stood there staring at the image on the screen as the Magician continued: “Hazel is, or was, the best Rabbits player who ever lived.”