by Terry Miles
I almost laughed. Since when the fuck was Chloe not going to push?
“I’m serious,” I said.
Chloe looked up from her computer. Something in my eyes must have let her know I wasn’t kidding, because her tone changed immediately. “Fuck, for real?”
“Yeah, for real.”
“You don’t remember calling me earlier?”
“Nope.”
“Not at all?”
“Nothing…and there’s more.”
“What?”
“Before I came here, I used the bathroom at The Kingfish Cafe.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Sounds impossible, I know.”
Chloe screwed up her face. “It doesn’t sound impossible. Just disgusting.”
“It doesn’t strike you as odd that I just used the bathroom of a restaurant that permanently closed six years ago?”
“It strikes me as odd that you, of all people, would use a public bathroom when you’re like five minutes from your apartment.”
“When did The Kingfish reopen?”
“What do you mean? The Kingfish isn’t closed.”
“It closed in 2015.”
“Umm…no, it didn’t. We ate there a week ago. Red velvet cake. Remember?”
I shook my head. No.
“K? What’s going on?”
I definitely didn’t remember eating red velvet cake or anything else, because The Kingfish Cafe had permanently closed. There were articles about it in The Stranger and The Seattle Times. It was big news at the time for locals—especially for people like me who lived in Capitol Hill.
Chloe came over and sat down beside me on the couch.
“It’s happening again, isn’t it?” she asked.
“It’s not like that,” I snapped.
“Hey, I’m sorry, but if you remember, the last time something like this happened, you almost died.”
I looked across at the television, where our reflections stared back at us from the black screen.
Chloe had her hands on her knees, her back straight and stiff, and she was staring at me, worried.
Looking at my own reflection, I could see why she was concerned. My eyes were wild and my arms were crossed tight, way too high up on my chest.
“I’m fine,” I said as I uncrossed my arms and did my best to look relaxed.
The incident she was referring to happened a few years ago. It was one of the worst days of my life—right up there with my parents’ death and the accident with Annie and Emily Connors.
It was the day I discovered the building with the missing floor.
* * *
—
In 2016, we’d begun hearing rumors that the ninth iteration of the game had finally started, and I immediately became so obsessed with playing that I ignored every other aspect of my life and almost stopped sleeping entirely.
During this period, I experienced severe mental lapses, panic attacks, and inexplicable losses of time. I attributed all of this to months of relentless sleep deprivation, so I made an appointment to see a therapist with experience treating acute insomnia.
I arrived a bit before my appointment and killed time in the lobby drinking tea and listening to a podcast that featured a group of stand-up comedians drinking red wine and talking about the first season of Friday Night Lights.
When it was finally time for my appointment, I walked upstairs to the fifth floor and spent an hour sharing my most intimate thoughts and feelings with a complete stranger. I told her about the loss of my parents and how I’d been arrested in that theater basement after following a series of (what I believed at the time were) connected patterns and signs. We finished up with a discussion about the gray feeling I’d experienced as a child, and the accompanying acute sense of deep pressure that filled up the air, as if there was something dark hiding in the margins of the world, waiting to devour me.
She nodded in all the right places, and I felt a little better after speaking with her, but I wasn’t optimistic. I was pretty sure they didn’t have a section about “gray shadow things in the margins of the world” in the DSM-5.
After my appointment, I went home exhausted and even though it was the middle of the day, I crawled into my bed and fell asleep.
The next week, I returned to the therapist’s office ready to do it all over again, but something was wrong.
I couldn’t really explain what it was as I stared up at the building from across the street, but something just felt off. I walked up the stairs to the same office I’d visited last week, and then it hit me.
There was no fifth floor.
I hurried back downstairs to the lobby and examined the building’s directory. My therapist’s name wasn’t there. A quick online search revealed that her office was located in a different building about a block away.
As I was walking over to the other building, a tingling feeling in the pit of my stomach forced me to stop. My breathing became shallow and forced as a familiar anxious emptiness began to fill me. I couldn’t go any farther.
I turned and looked back at the building I’d just left.
The fifth floor was back.
I started running, determined to make it up to my therapist’s office this time, but something else had changed. The street was darker now, the traffic sounds muted. It was as if somebody had placed a dark filter in front of my eyes and a thick gauzy fabric over my ears. I remember feeling like there was something unnatural about the silence—a sense of impatience.
And then the familiar static and blur of the gray feeling slid into my head, and a creeping darkness shadowed my peripheral vision.
I’m not sure how I knew, but I understood—with one hundred percent certainty—if that darkness somehow managed to reach me, something terrible was going to happen.
I ran back into the building, sprinted through the lobby and hurried up the stairs. I focused all of my attention on looking down and taking one step at a time. I didn’t know what was going to happen if the fifth floor wasn’t there, but I had the feeling it was something extremely bad.
When I turned the final corner and saw the stairs leading up to the fifth floor, I tumbled forward, convinced they were going to disappear any second.
But they didn’t.
I took those stairs two at a time, and when I finally burst into my therapist’s office and had a seat in one of the small leather chairs in her waiting room, I was breathing like I’d been chased for miles by a chain saw maniac in a horror movie.
Everything appeared to be the same—the magazines on the table, the art on the walls, the view out the window.
Slowly, I began to relax.
I flipped through a couple of the magazines, but nothing held my interest.
I looked over at the high-rise office tower directly across the street.
The building I was sitting in was perfectly reflected in the mirrorlike glass of the office tower, and I began thinking about the way the old brick appeared reflected in the modern glass. I found the dichotomy between the old and the new comforting, and it momentarily made me feel like I was glimpsing something profound—some kind of deep insight into the connectedness and impermanence of all things. And yet, something wasn’t right. I felt a nagging tug on a thread somewhere deep in the back of my mind.
Then I saw it—and everything changed.
The old brick building reflected in that office tower across the street—the building I was currently sitting in, waiting for my therapist to see me—had only four floors.
I was completely frozen in place, unable to move.
At that moment, the dark gray shadows poured into the room from beneath the door and oozed into my mind from the screaming black cracks of another world, and tiny wiggling things crept up from my stomach and took over my body.
And everything went
black.
* * *
—
I woke up in the hospital with two sprained wrists and several bruised ribs. Chloe was there. Apparently I’d called her at some point after I’d been arrested. She told me I’d been accosting people on the street, wild-eyed and manic, demanding they count the floors of the building and tell me how many there were.
I couldn’t remember anything after I’d seen the reflection of the building with four floors.
The doctors explained that I’d experienced a complete mental break. Chloe helped me hire a lawyer, and he managed to persuade an overworked judge to release me under my own recognizance.
Chloe made me promise to stop playing the game immediately, and I reluctantly agreed.
I made it almost three months.
* * *
—
What if Chloe was right? What if it was happening again?
I knew that The Kingfish Cafe had closed six years earlier, but when I grabbed my phone and looked it up, I couldn’t find any of the articles I’d read back then that detailed the closure. All I could find were glowing Yelp reviews—most of them written by people who’d visited the restaurant at some point during the past six years.
That night, Chloe stayed at my place until two in the morning. She told me it was because she’d had a bit too much to drink, but I know Chloe, and two glasses of wine definitely didn’t qualify as too much of anything. She was clearly worried that I was headed for some kind of mental break. And, if I’m being honest, I was worried right along with her.
11
HANG IN THERE, TIGER
“Something big is going on over at WorGames,” Baron said, waggling his spoon in my direction like an orchestra conductor setting the tempo of an extremely odd time signature.
He’d shown up at my place around eight thirty in the morning. I’d done my best to ignore the buzzer, but Baron was persistent. He burst into my kitchen carrying a bag of groceries that contained a bowl of chia pudding, six Gala apples, a tub of vanilla ice cream, beef jerky, and a Diet Coke. He was either stoned out of his mind or completely sober; it was impossible to tell with him.
“What do you mean?” I asked, unable to stifle a yawn. I’d barely managed two hours of sleep the night before.
“I was talking to my friend Valentine. She’s a project manager over there.”
“And?”
“And last year they brought in Sidney Farrow.”
“Holy shit,” I said. “For real?”
“For realz, but nobody could talk about it.”
“Damn.”
“Yeah. Val told me they made everyone sign an NDA as thick as a New York City phone book from 1986.”
“That’s very specific.”
“You know what this means?”
“No idea.”
“I’m going to be working with Sidney Farrow.”
“How? What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Valentine got me a job at WorGames.”
“Doing what?”
“Testing a new bleeding-edge title that runs on some high-tech augmented reality game engine.”
“I’m jealous,” I said as I started making myself a cup of heart-stoppingly strong coffee.
Jealous was an understatement. Sidney Farrow’s games meant everything to me when I was growing up. While other kids had pictures of boy bands and motorcycles on their walls, I was all about Shigeru Miyamoto and Sidney Farrow.
* * *
—
Sidney Farrow’s story was remarkably similar to Hawk Worricker’s.
Sidney had entered the world of videogame design a month before she was set to graduate from Stanford, but unlike most people hired directly out of college, Sidney Farrow had already achieved significant real-world success.
While still in school, she’d created one of the most popular online games in the world. It was something called Targetta—a MMORPG. Sidney’s game was one of the first MMORPGs created outside of a corporate environment. She’d financed her entire vision by licensing her original platform to two large gaming companies.
Sidney’s work in artificial intelligence and self-generating world-building was groundbreaking, and a number of her initial open-source engine and narrative design concepts are still being used today.
“You know, Sidney Farrow was raised in a cult,” Baron said.
“It was a communal EST group, not a cult.”
“What the fuck is EST?”
“Erhard Seminars Training. It was big in the seventies and early eighties. Transform yourself by realizing you’re responsible for everything in your life.”
“So, pretty much exactly a cult.”
I shrugged. I didn’t have the energy to argue—especially considering the fact that he wasn’t wrong. I was only taking the other side of the argument because it was Sidney Farrow.
“How do you know that shit?” Baron asked, as he moved from the kitchen into the living room.
“I read books.”
“Those mind cults practice thought control, NLP 2.0 shit; some even brand each other,” Baron said as he went through a stack of magazines and papers on my coffee table, looking for something to amuse him as he ate his chia pudding.
“There’s no evidence any of that happened with Sidney Farrow’s group.”
Baron picked up an old copy of Games and Gamers magazine from the coffee table—an issue from sometime in the late nineties.
“She’s cool,” Baron said.
Sidney Farrow was on the cover, and he was right; she was super cool.
She had wavy red hair, bright green eyes, and a knowing smirk that slightly turned up one side of her mouth. She was wearing Super Mario coveralls over a worn white vintage Atari T-shirt. There was a black anarchy symbol pinned onto one side of the coverall’s straps and a yellow X-Men logo button on the other.
Sidney Farrow was the one person in the world I most wanted to meet—although a certain reclusive billionaire with whom I’d recently had coffee ran a pretty close second.
* * *
—
Chloe came over to my place an hour or so after Baron showed up, and the three of us spent the rest of the day trying to dig up information on Alan Scarpio. Unsurprisingly, we were unable to find anyone connected to Scarpio who was willing to speak with us.
“What the hell do we do now?” Chloe asked.
“Dinner?” I suggested. We hadn’t eaten much of anything all day.
“I don’t know about you guys,” Baron said, “but I haven’t slept, and I’ve gotta get up early for Sidney Farrow tomorrow.”
“Lucky bastard,” Chloe said. She was a huge Farrow fan too.
“Why don’t the three of us touch base sometime tomorrow?” I said as I followed Baron to the door.
“Sounds good,” Baron said.
I shut the door and walked back into the living room, closed my eyes, and sank into the couch beside Chloe.
The lack of sleep was starting to catch up with me as well.
I jumped a little when Chloe gently placed her hands on my shoulders, but my reaction didn’t scare her away. She just squeezed harder.
“It’s gonna be okay, tiger,” she said. “Hang in there.”
Chloe and I often sent each other two memes. One was the infamous photograph of the little “hang in there” kitten dangling from a rope, and the other was a picture of a single white towel hanging on a rack. Towel was our panic signal—a nod to Douglas Adams.
In case of emergency, if one of us really needed to speak to the other, we sent the towel. The kitten was reserved for situations that warranted some light absurd commentary. It was a kind of visual tone poem to general fucked-uppery. “Hang in there” never actually required a response. Towel was another story.
Towel always required a response.
* * *
—
Chloe and I sat side by side on my couch and shared an enormous caprese salad while we looked into the current status of the game. If Rabbits really was broken, and Alan Scarpio felt like I might be able to help fix it somehow, we needed to find out exactly what the hell was going on.
Chloe was scrolling through a couple of references in the comments section of a weird YouTube video when she uncovered a website she thought might be something.
* * *
—
Like Fight Club, the number one rule when it comes to Rabbits is: You don’t talk about Rabbits. Period. The result of this intense secrecy is that it’s fairly difficult to find information about the game online, and even if you’re experienced at seeking out Rabbits-related material, most of what you dig up will be either untrue or distorted enough to be completely useless.
There are whispers of severe retribution for players who talk about Rabbits publicly—retribution that includes extreme hacking, swatting, doxxing, and worse. According to the rumors, marriages have been destroyed, people sent to prison, and immense fortunes lost.
* * *
—
Chloe was the best online researcher I knew. From breaking into her high school’s computer system and “adjusting” grades in order to make a little extra lunch money to helping her college friends hack their significant others’ passwords to see if they’d been cheating, Chloe had a remarkable knack for navigating the hidden corners of the virtual world. If there was Rabbits information hidden out there between the cracks, Chloe had a pretty good chance of unearthing it—and covering our tracks after the fact.
It didn’t take her long to find something.
“Check it out,” she said, flipping her laptop around to show me the screen.
The title of the website was: Rabbits Players X.