Rabbits

by Terry Miles

“In Space Ace, everything is binary,” I continued. “Each series of moves you make has only two possible outcomes: You make the correct moves in the correct order and you continue; you get it wrong, you die.”

  I let that hang there ominously as I let my second life expire onscreen.

  “These days, we have vast open-world narrative experiences, games that don’t follow prescribed quests or storylines, seemingly endless virtual lands and expansive storyworlds that we can move through and explore for months without experiencing the same encounter twice. But what if there was something bigger? What if there was an open-world experience so enormous and complex that its canvas for gameplay was the world itself? Perhaps even the entire universe?”

  On the Space Ace machine, just before I was about to surrender the last of my three lives, I took control of my onscreen character (Dexter, who prefers to be called Ace) and guided him through what was left of the game.

  Once I’d completed Dexter’s quest (defeat the villainous Commander Borf), a brief victory movie played and then the credits began to roll. “This,” I said, timed perfectly with the reveal of the list of names on the screen, “is The Circle, circa the seventh iteration of the game.”

  Everybody gathered around the machine for a closer look.

  It was at this point that a couple of the newer attendees asked for their phones back so they could take a picture. I told them they could play Space Ace and take as many photos as they liked, but they had to wait until after the session.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Journey T-shirt said, raising his voice above the din of 8-bit audio that made up the sonic backdrop of the arcade.

  I knew this guy was trouble.

  Every once in a while I’d get somebody like this, a YouTube comment section complaint in human form, whose only reason for coming was to stir shit up.

  Normally I’d try to impress him with The Prescott Competition Manifesto, but I had the feeling if I didn’t give this guy a little something extra, and soon, there was a risk he was going to get seriously unruly. With this kind of conspiracy-hungry crowd, one dissenting voice with imagination could result in an angry mob quicker than suggesting the Kennedy assassination wasn’t anything other than one mentally damaged man in a tower.

  “You’re not really supposed to talk about Rabbits,” I said, lowering my voice a little.

  Everyone stopped talking at the word “Rabbits.” I rarely referred to the game by its unofficial name during these sessions.

  “Of course,” I continued, “speaking about the game in general terms is widely accepted—necessary, even—to attract new blood, but talking about specifics is out of bounds. Today, however, we’re going to shake things up a little.”

  They were all paying attention now—even Journey T-shirt.

  “The very nature of the game is secrecy, and the complex series of rules uncertain, but you can discover a great deal if you know where to look. An unexplained hacking challenge appears on a website that previously didn’t exist; a weird series of unnerving videos begins popping up on YouTube; the events of a short fictional horror story on Reddit are starting to come true in real life. Some or all of these things might be related to the game. How do we know? We don’t. We can only draw connections and hope we’re finding a way in.”

  I pulled out my phone and a small portable projector box I’d purchased online for fifteen bucks. I was on my way toward the back of the room to switch off the lights when the room went dark. Chloe had been here for my presentations many times in the past, but I had no idea she’d been paying attention. So far, she’d hit every one of Baron’s cues flawlessly. I wondered how she was feeling. Had she been looking around the room for Baron’s stupid grin every ten minutes or so like me?

  I dug through the images in my phone’s photo library and eventually found what I was looking for. Then I slipped my phone into the projector box, adjusted a small black slider, and two images of a painting appeared in sharp focus, side by side, on the back wall of the arcade.

  “This is a well-known painting called Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth,” I said. “I’ve seen the original hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s beautiful—one of my favorite works of art on Earth.”

  There were mumbles of recognition.

  “If you look carefully at these images, however, you’ll notice a slight discrepancy,” I continued. “The image on the left features two windows in the farmhouse in the top-right corner, and the image on the right features three.”

  More murmurs from the group.

  Half were most likely surprised and excited at the prospect of some unknown mystery I was about to unfurl, and the rest were probably murmuring in recognition because they’d heard rumors that some kind of puzzle or quest involving Christina’s World had been part of the ninth iteration of the game.

  “The farmhouse in what we consider the authentic, original version of Christina’s World features two dormer windows, just like the photograph on the left. The version in the photograph on the right, with three windows, is incorrect, so it has to be a fake. There is one significant problem with that theory, however…”

  I let that hang there dramatically for a moment.

  “You see, the photograph on the right—the impossible photograph featuring three dormer windows in the farmhouse—was taken at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, sometime near the end of the ninth iteration of the game.”

  There was genuine excitement, even among the regulars. This was more concrete detail regarding actual gameplay than I’d ever given in the past.

  “That’s impossible,” said Orange Goatee. “It has to be photoshopped.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But what if it wasn’t?”

  This felt like a moment when Baron might normally yell something out to add to the drama, but Chloe was silent.

  I took a deep breath and continued. “What if a top secret organization had existed for millennia? And what if that organization had more resources than the Vatican and the U.S. government combined?” I didn’t give anybody a chance to interrupt and answer my rhetorical question; I was on a roll. “And what if that organization was powerful enough to not only rent out the Museum of Modern Art, but also hire actors to fill the space for an entire day, create a fake version of Christina’s World, and hang it in place of the original?”

  “Sounds like something a wealthy and extremely resourceful person named James Moriarty might be able to pull off,” Sally Berkman said.

  “Exactly,” I replied. Sally was, of course, referring to the “Moriarty Factor,” a term Rabbits players used to describe some of the more elaborate and expensive scenes and situations attributed to whatever organization was behind the game. Secretly renting out MoMA and hiring a flood of actors to fill it up was just one of many rumored examples.

  “This is all wonderful, but how do we know you’ve actually played the game?” Journey T-shirt asked.

  “It sounds like you may have missed the ‘you don’t talk about Rabbits’ part of the presentation,” I said.

  A few people laughed.

  “If you really did play the game, prove it.” Journey T-Shirt really wasn’t going to stop.

  There were a few murmurs from the group.

  I started to speak, but a sudden sharp stab of static and pain took my breath away. My ears began ringing and my eyes began to blur. A warm tingly panic crawled up my body, and the room began to sway. I reached down and grabbed ahold of the desk to steady myself as I tried to calm my breathing. The tunnel vision would be next, and if that happened, there was no way I’d be able to continue.

  I was really starting to hate this asshole and his Journey T-shirt.

  “Is it true you have a copy of the PCM?” Chloe yelled out from somewhere in the back of the room.

  “It’s true,” I said as I scrambled to dig my reel-to-reel recorder
out of the old cedar chest. His disruptive spell clearly broken, Journey T-shirt shook his head and walked out of the arcade.

  “How many of you are familiar with The Prescott Competition Manifesto?” I asked.

  There were nods and words of recognition before I pressed play, and the familiar sound of Dr. Abigail Prescott’s voice filled the arcade.

  * * *

  —

  “You looked a little freaked out back there.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Chloe and I were sitting in the diner across from the arcade, in the same booth I’d sat in watching Alan Scarpio eat rhubarb pie.

  “Really? You told them about Christina’s World.”

  “I felt like I needed something to push them over the edge. Besides, Nine ended a long time ago.”

  “In 2017. Not that long ago, K.”

  “It’s fine,” I snapped. “Who fucking cares.” I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms.

  I knew what Chloe was saying, and she was right; I should never have revealed game-specific details related to Christina’s World in front of that group. There are certain things, like The Circle and The Prescott Competition Manifesto, that are generally considered acceptable topics of conversations among civilians (i.e., nonplayers). But to speak in detailed terms about part of a puzzle related to a recent iteration of the game? It wasn’t something people seriously interested in Rabbits did. It was considered disrespectful—and out of bounds.

  I unfolded my arms and put my head down on the table. “I don’t know what got into me,” I said. “I’m tired.”

  “I think you need to stop,” Chloe said.

  I looked up from the table.

  Chloe was staring at me, and in the entire time I’ve known her, I don’t remember ever seeing her this serious about anything.

  “Stop what?”

  “I’m not kidding, K. No more Rabbits.”

  Even though the Magician had demanded we stop playing, hearing Chloe say the same thing was sobering.

  “You’re really suggesting we give up now, when we’ve just started making some progress?”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “No more talking about Christina’s World, I promise.”

  “It’s not just Christina’s World, K. Baron’s dead. Players are going missing. You’re making up movies that don’t exist, and you saw how the Magician looked the last time we saw him. Something bad is happening.”

  Chloe was right, of course. Baron was gone, and I’d been experiencing events that were…deeply out of the ordinary. Crazy shit was definitely happening, but I felt like that was precisely why we needed to keep going.

  “Alan Scarpio told me something was wrong with the game,” I said. “Now that the eleventh iteration has started, we need to figure out what he meant before it’s too late.”

  “K…” Chloe said as she clasped her hands together on the table.

  “What?”

  “Don’t freak out.”

  “Okay…”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise,” I said.

  “You know, you’re the only person who saw Alan Scarpio.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So…maybe it was like the Richard Linklater movie or The Kingfish Cafe.”

  “What are you saying, Chloe?”

  But I knew exactly what she was saying.

  “I’m worried you might be experiencing some kind of…relapse. I don’t want to have to visit you in that section of the hospital again. I’m not going to let what happened to my sister happen to you.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not going to happen.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “I’m serious. No way. I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not fucking fine,” Chloe said. “And if you don’t respect me enough to be honest, then I’m out.”

  And with that, Chloe walked out and left me sitting alone in the diner.

  21

  TENSPEED AND BROWN SHOE

  I needed something to take my mind off the game and the conversation I’d just had with Chloe at the diner, so I went back to my apartment and put on Jean-Michel Jarre’s 1976 masterpiece Oxygène.

  I listen to Oxygène often, not only because it’s a perfect blend of some of my favorite analog synthesizers, but also because Jean-Michel Jarre recorded that album himself at home in a makeshift studio. I love early records by Todd Rundgren, Guided by Voices, and Lenny Kravitz for the same reason. There’s just something about having the freedom to do whatever you want—combined with the reality of limited physical and financial resources—that allows for transcendent works of art.

  But the music wasn’t working.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Chloe or Rabbits.

  There was nothing I could do about Chloe at the moment, so I turned my attention to the game.

  Everything had started with Alan Scarpio in that diner.

  I opened my laptop and dug up the video we’d discovered on his phone.

  What was I missing?

  I ran through everything we’d found on Tabitha Henry and wondered if somewhere else in the city, Swan and her pet twins were doing the same thing.

  After I’d rewatched the video three times, I fell down a social media clickhole that began with my looking into anybody connected to Tabitha, and ended with me checking out a series of photographs on a popular Jeff Goldblum fan page.

  I was scrolling through pictures of Jeff Goldblum from some of my favorite movies, including Nashville, The Fly, The Player, and The Big Chill when I stumbled onto something new.

  Someone had recently uploaded some behind-the-scenes photos from a 1980 TV show starring Goldblum called Tenspeed and Brown Shoe.

  I’d seen clips of Jeff Goldblum in some older movies like Death Wish and California Split, but I’d never heard of Tenspeed and Brown Shoe.

  After that series of photographs ended, I found myself clicking through another recently added group of pictures related to a disaster movie from a couple of years ago. That movie was better than it had any right to be, but it was all due to Jeff Goldblum. He played an eccentric geologist concerned with global warming. He stole every scene he was in.

  I was two or three photos into this new series when I noticed a familiar face.

  It was the blond publicity assistant from the Tabitha Henry video.

  She was standing in the background of a photograph that had been taken on a red carpet somewhere in Italy. I wasn’t surprised to see her—after all, the studio she worked for had made a bunch of films with Jeff Goldblum—but, because she was such a huge part of that disturbing video, I moved over to the studio’s Facebook page and continued clicking through images.

  I started by looking through the publicity photographs from their most recent movies, but I wasn’t able to find the tall blond woman anywhere. Then, I went back and started looking through photographs taken the year after the Tabitha Henry incident.

  I was clicking through the press tour photographs of a blockbuster comedy film that had premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival when I found her.

  She was standing in the background of a few of the pictures featuring the female lead of that movie. I was about to shut down my computer and make something to eat when one of the photographs caught my eye.

  It looked like this particular picture had been taken in some kind of on-set makeup trailer. The female lead of the movie, a well-known A-list actress, was leaning back in her chair. Her eyes were wide and she was clearly laughing about something. The blond assistant was leaning forward, facing the camera, her left arm resting on the actress’s left shoulder, her right hand reaching down and grabbing the arm of the actress’s chair. It was an energetic and beautifully candid moment caught on camera. The composition and the
lighting were perfect; so perfect, in fact, that it took me a second to notice something was off.

  On the blond publicity woman’s right arm, just above the wrist, was a long, thick scar, in the exact place she’d been cut in that Tabitha Henry video.

  I called Chloe, and immediately hung up when I noticed the time.

  It was the middle of the night.

  I went back to searching.

  It took me a few minutes to dig up the blond publicity woman’s name. Some additional photographs led to a few leads on social media, and a comment posted by one of her online friends eventually led me to a LinkedIn profile.

  The scar woman was Silvana Kulig. She no longer worked for the studio, and currently lived in Romania with her husband.

  I sent a message to the email listed on her profile. I lied and told her that I was researching an article on contemporary movie studio publicity and its effect on Hollywood blockbusters.

  About forty-five minutes later, I received a response. It included a phone number.

  I did a quick online search to figure out what time it was in Romania. It was midafternoon, so I opened WhatsApp and called the number.

  “Hello?” It was a woman’s voice.

  “Hi. Is this Silvana?”

  “Yes.”

  “My name is K. I’m sorry to bother you, but I was hoping to ask you a couple of questions. Do you mind if we switch over to video?”

  “Sure,” she said, “just a sec.”

  Silvana’s hair was much shorter, her face a bit fuller, but she was clearly the woman from the photographs.

  “I was wondering if you could take a quick look at something for me?” I asked.

  “Okay,” she said.

  I sent her a copy of the photograph with the scar.

  “I’m sure it was traumatic, and I apologize in advance if I’m being insensitive for asking,” I said, “but I was wondering if you could tell me how you got this scar on your arm?”

  “What the fuck is going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why are you people doing this?”