Rabbits

by Terry Miles

  It must have been a comet or asteroid strike of some kind that had knocked our planet out of orbit, or perhaps our galaxy had bumped into another larger system out in space. Whatever had happened, one thing was perfectly clear: Everything was over, and all that was left was the dying.

  No matter what we’re doing—sitting still on our couches or lying in our beds—every single one of us is moving through the universe at somewhere around 1.3 million miles per hour. We have no idea just how terrifyingly exposed we are—tiny things on a tiny world stuck inside a relatively small galaxy whipping through deep space at an alarming rate of speed. Anything apocalyptic could happen at any time.

  And now it finally had.

  My fingers missed the lamppost I’d lunged for by inches, and I continued my ascent up into a cool, seemingly endless blue that would eventually become a thick, infinite, inky black.

  Just as I left the atmosphere and entered the darkness that marked the edge of deep space, I spotted the tower, soaring up from below.

  Babel. Babylon. Ziggurat.

  These were the names that popped into my mind when I first saw it, rising up from the blue-green surface of the Earth into the cool black nothingness of space.

  I wondered why we couldn’t see this thing from Earth. How had we never discovered it? I tried to see the bottom, to figure out its geographic location, but I wasn’t able to see enough of the Earth’s surface to place the tower among the familiar shapes of the continents.

  As I continued speeding upward I wondered what it was going to feel like to inhale the empty vacuum of space. Then, as if on cue, everything dimmed and I began drifting away from consciousness. At that moment, my outstretched hand brushed against the wall of the monolithic thing, and some kind of panel or door opened.

  In that split second, just before I’d completely moved past the tower and into the permanent darkness, I was somehow able to grab on to the edge of the doorway and pull myself into the enormous black structure.

  Once inside, the door slid shut behind me, and I found myself standing in what appeared to be an elevator made out of the same material as the exterior surface.

  The elevator was completely empty except for a symbol set into the wall at eye level: a small circle balanced on the tip of a triangle. It reminded me of a keyhole someone might peep through in an old movie. There was a soft white glow emanating from the circle.

  It was a button.

  I had no idea if it would take me up or down. I pressed it, and after a moment, the elevator began ascending.

  I’d been going up for what felt like a minute or so when the light coming from the circle began to change color, slowly morphing from a soft white to a bright red. At that point, the elevator sped up and began shaking violently, then we changed direction with a forceful lurch and I was thrown to the ground.

  I was now moving horizontally, pinned to the side wall as the elevator continued to accelerate.

  After what felt like an eternity, the elevator eventually slowed down, finally coming to a complete stop.

  I stood up, leaned against the side to catch my breath, and waited for the doors to open.

  Then, without warning, the elevator was descending.

  It felt like a controlled descent at first, but the elevator began gathering more and more speed, finally accelerating into a terrifying, high-powered thrust toward oblivion. I was slammed into the ceiling, a sharp pain radiating from my neck and back, and still the elevator’s speed continued to increase.

  Looking down at the smooth black floor as I sped toward extinction, I thought about my parents in that capsized ferry.

  I always imagined them together at the end, holding hands, floating in the ferry’s dining area, breathing their last breaths from that final inch of air along what would have been the floor of the boat. I pictured them staring up at the tiles of that floor, at the scuff marks made by hundreds of people’s shoes as those people had waited impatiently in line to get food or maybe buy a magazine. What would my parents have given in that moment to have been stuck in traffic, or in a long supermarket line behind some asshole trying to use expired coupons again?

  Then suddenly I was sitting with Annie and Emily Connors, back in that truck on that lonely country road, the fuzzy static of the radio the only sound.

  I opened my mouth to warn Emily about what was going to happen, but before I could speak, the world ended in an explosion of wild light, heat, and rumble.

  * * *

  —

  I woke up covered in sweat, with no air in my lungs.

  I’d forgotten how to breathe.

  It was like that feeling you get when your mind tricks you into believing you’ve momentarily forgotten how to swallow.

  I jumped up and smashed my knee against the glass corner of my coffee table as I rushed through my living room. The sharp sudden pain in my knee forced an involuntary scream from my lips, and my lungs were suddenly working again.

  I yanked open the sliding door and stepped out onto the balcony, filling my chest with crisp rainy air in enormous panicked gulps.

  The cool bracing wind and wet concrete beneath my feet slowly brought me back to reality.

  Of course it had been a dream—a recurring dream I’d been having, off and on, for as long as I could remember.

  Aside from the beginning of the dream, which was always slightly different, once the world lost all gravity and I began to float it was the same: outer space, the black monolith, the elevator, everything.

  I looked into the kitchen at the clock on my microwave. It read 4:44 a.m.

  There’s a theory among those of us interested in (read: obsessed with) the game of Rabbits—something we call fours.

  The theory goes like this: Rabbits players, and perhaps also would-be Rabbits players, notice one specific time on the clock, 4:44 (afternoon and/or morning), more often than people not connected to or interested in the game. This has to be complete nonsense, of course—an example of nothing more than confirmation bias—but I do notice that specific time constantly, and can’t help but think of Rabbits whenever it happens.

  * * *

  —

  The first thing I did after I noticed the time was compose a text to Baron. Whenever one of us sees that specific time on a clock, we text each other: 444.

  Once the fog left my brain, and I remembered that Baron was gone, I deleted the text message and crawled back under the covers.

  I missed my friend.

  After a few minutes of tossing and turning, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to get back to sleep, so I got up to make coffee, and then started looking into Minister Jesselman’s suicide.

  * * *

  —

  The incident had taken place on the Cardiff University campus in Wales. Nobody interviewed could agree about what Jesselman had meant by “the door is open”—although most people believed it was related either to his open-border immigration policy (his campaign had used the phrase in their election materials a couple of years back) or to a personal scandal he’d been involved in featuring some kind of English sex cult.

  Outside of The Phrase, there was nothing that appeared to connect the incident to Rabbits—but it had to be connected. There was no way our discovering that video was a coincidence.

  I closed my laptop and started digging around to see what I might make for breakfast. I had my choice of expired watery yogurt, questionable homemade granola with way too many raisins, or bananas, some too green, the others too black. While I was trying to decide, Chloe called and told me to meet her at a restaurant downtown for brunch. I told her I’d be right there.

  * * *

  —

  “I found something this morning,” Chloe said in between bites of overcooked home fries and undercooked pancakes.

  The restaurant was an old pub that served greasy spoon–style food
during the day. Chloe and I had been there a few times before. The dark wooden walls and sticky floors always made me nostalgic for college. Outside of the eggs Benedict, the food was uniformly terrible. I always had one of their Benedicts, but Chloe clung to the futile hope that she’d eventually find something else on the menu that might pass as edible.

  The place was almost completely empty. Most of the morning regulars had already passed through on their way to work.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Remember when the Magician handed me those pages with the names of players who’d died or went missing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I remembered seeing one of those names in a couple of Rabbits forums recently, so I looked her up.”

  “And?”

  “She was a player from Cameroon who died under mysterious circumstances, bitten by a spider that wasn’t indigenous to the area. Her best friend was raising hell about how something was fishy, and then one day, she just disappeared.”

  “That’s weird,” I said, “but it might just be coincidence.”

  “It’s not good, K. Girl dies, friend goes missing. Shit like this is happening all over the world.”

  I grabbed my coffee and moved over to Chloe’s side of the booth. “You sure?”

  Chloe nodded.

  “How?”

  “A couple of legit Rabbits obsessives I know run a popular darknet forum called TuringLeft.”

  “Isn’t that site in Spanish?”

  “Yeah, they’re based in Madrid. My friend helps moderate. I asked her if she’d heard anything about people connected to Rabbits going missing and maybe even dying. She told me that players are worried something’s wrong with the game. This morning, when I logged in, there was a message splashed across the front page of that forum in ten languages.”

  “What message?”

  “This one,” she said as she pulled up a screen capture on her computer. Sprawled across the forum’s home page in a bright red spray paint font was a message that read:

  “Shit,” I said.

  Chloe closed her computer and took a sip of my coffee (she’d finished hers a while ago).

  “This is it, isn’t it?” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What Scarpio warned me about. He said if we don’t fix the game before it starts, we’re all truly fucked. What if this is just the beginning of us getting well and truly fucked?”

  “Maybe,” Chloe said.

  She sat there thinking for a moment.

  “But…what if this is all part of it?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, false corruption of the game, people disappearing. That doesn’t feel out of line with Rabbits, does it?”

  “Maybe not…but this stuff still feels different.”

  “Well, didn’t you say different iterations of the game had different…vibes or something?”

  “I said that?”

  “During one of your sessions, you explained how each version of the game teaches you how to play it as you’re playing, like the novel Gravity’s Rainbow teaches you how to read it as you’re reading. You went on to use Pynchon’s novels to describe some clue from the sixth iteration of the game.”

  This was starting to sound familiar. Maybe Chloe really had been paying attention during my information sessions.

  “Jesus, I sound pretentious. I haven’t even read Gravity’s Rainbow.”

  “For real?”

  “I’ve tried a bunch of times. I’m saving it for the old-age home, along with Proust.”

  “Sometimes you are so fucking on the nose,” Chloe said.

  I smiled. She had me there.

  “Still, I’m worried about the Magician,” Chloe said. “I haven’t seen him since he told us not to play the game.”

  “Isn’t there anybody you can ask?”

  Chloe shook her head.

  “I’m sure he’s fine,” I said, doing my best to sound like I believed what I was saying. “He’s probably just out shopping for a new Asteroids cabinet or something.”

  “Maybe.” Chloe nodded, but she wasn’t convinced.

  I took a sip of coffee and looked out the window. Something had caught my eye—something was off—but I couldn’t figure out what it was.

  “Next time I see him, I’m going to tag him with a fucking tracking device.”

  “Good idea,” I said, and laughed.

  As I was laughing, I noticed the sky darken, and felt a familiar buzzing up through the lower half of my body.

  I realized what had been bothering me.

  In the distance, visible across the street and towering over a section of Seattle I knew like the back of my hand, was an enormous green glass skyscraper I’d never seen before in my life.

  Seattle is in a perpetual state of construction, but even though the skyline is a forest of cranes atop buildings in various stages of completion, there was no way I could have missed this thing. It was huge.

  “What is it?” Chloe asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Where the hell is our server with the check?”

  * * *

  —

  I was startled awake by my phone. I must have fallen asleep sometime after I got home from the restaurant. I stumbled around in the dark trying to track down the source of the blaring Pink Floyd song I’d chosen as my ringtone.

  “Hello?”

  “What the fuck, K?”

  It was Chloe.

  “What the fuck what?”

  “You forgot.”

  “Forgot what?”

  “What do you think?”

  “This conversation is starting to feel like a test I’m failing. What’s going on?”

  “Your horde of misfits is here at the arcade waiting for you.”

  “Shit,” I said, jumping out of bed, “I’ll be right over.”

  “Hurry up,” she said. “These animals are getting unruly.”

  20

  AN ASSHOLE IN A JOURNEY T-SHIRT

  “What do you know about the game?” I asked as I leaned back against a racing game by Namco (via Atari) called Pole Position, and crossed my arms.

  The group was mostly composed of the usual suspects, but there were a dozen or so new faces, which was always nice to see.

  “It’s a dangerous thing. They sweep this shit under the fucking rug, man, but the government knows everything.” It was a thin man in his early thirties who’d spoken. He’d grown a spotty orange goatee since I’d seen him last.

  “There are rumors about deaths connected to the game, yes,” I said. “Anybody else?”

  “It’s been going on for centuries.” It was Sally Berkman, our resident Advanced Dungeons & Dragons librarian. She’d been here last time, along with Orange Goatee.

  “There are many who believe that’s possible,” I said.

  “What do you believe?” Sally asked.

  “I think it’s probably true. There’s a consensus that the modern game began in 1959, but there’s growing evidence that Rabbits itself might be much older, going back centuries, millennia—or perhaps even longer.”

  It felt good to have something familiar to focus on in light of recent events. Standing in the arcade surrounded by the sights and sounds of the old machines made me feel better—not back to normal by any stretch, but as close to it as I’d felt for quite some time.

  “What I don’t understand, is…what makes you an expert?” A young man in a Journey T-shirt had spoken. He looked to be in his early twenties. I’d never seen him here before.

  It was nice when the new blood was engaged this early, but I had the feeling this guy was going to be a problem.

  “That’s a great question,” I said, “but it’s a question with a very complicated answer. Phone
s and other electronics into the box, please,” I said as I opened the large cedar chest with the graphic of the weird hunting scene stamped onto the top of it.

  Once everybody had relinquished their devices, I closed the chest, placed my hands on top of it, and leaned forward dramatically.

  “This is a game unlike any other,” I said, then stepped out from behind the chest and began to pace around the room.

  “What does it mean to play a game? Is it possible to play without knowing all the rules? Is it possible to play and not even know you’re playing, to be unaware of the potential danger you’re facing?” I let that last sentence hang in the air for a moment before I walked over and put my hands on two game cabinets sitting next to each other: Space Ace and Donkey Kong Jr.

  “Can anybody tell me the primary difference between these two games?” I said as I slipped a quarter into Space Ace and pressed the Player One Start button.

  “One’s a cartoon, obviously,” said Orange Goatee, which resulted in a smattering of laughter.

  “Yes, one is a cartoon, and that is important.” I let that linger, momentarily forgetting Baron wasn’t there. He’d been my plant for so long that I’d become accustomed to him stepping in to add flavor and drama when required.

  “It’s a closed system, LaserDisc,” Chloe called out from somewhere near the back of the room.

  “That’s right,” I said as I started playing the game. “Although Donkey Kong Jr.’s narrative is certainly not unlimited,” I continued, “there are far more potential outcomes and variables in that game compared to Don Bluth’s LaserDisc classic.”

  I stepped away from the Space Ace machine and allowed the first of my lives to expire.

  I could feel the unease from everybody assembled. I was standing in an arcade full of gamers. Watching a character die on the screen when you could simply run up and start playing was maddening.

  It was hard for me too—and I was the one responsible for it.