by Terry Miles
“Doing what?”
“Photoshopping scars on my fucking arm and then calling to talk to me about it.”
“Are you saying something has been altered in the picture?”
“No shit,” she said. “I just took a screen capture by the way. I have your face.”
“What do you mean ‘you people’? Did somebody else ask about your scar?”
“I’m hanging up now.”
“Please.” I pulled out my driver’s license and held it up to the camera. “I promise I’m not trying to scam you or pull some kind of prank. I’m just trying to solve a mystery.”
She stared at me for a moment, and then asked me to hold up my license again while she took a screen cap.
“You have two minutes,” she said.
“Who asked you about this photograph?”
“He didn’t give me his name, said he needed to remain anonymous for security purposes.”
“Did he say anything else? Maybe something about a game?”
“No. What the fuck is going on?”
“I promise I’m not crazy,” I said, “and I’m not doing this to bother you. I really just need to know what happened to your arm. It’s hard to explain, but—like I said—I think it might be really important.”
Silvana stood up and moved into another room. It was a large foyer. She flipped her camera around and pointed it at a huge photograph that covered the entire back wall of the room. It was the image of Silvana leaning over the famous actress. However, in this version of the image, there was no scar on Silvana’s arm.
She turned the camera back around and held up her right arm. Her skin was perfectly smooth and clear. No scar.
“I don’t have a scar. I’ve never had a scar. You need to tell me what the hell is going on.”
I described the event with Jeff Goldblum in detail, but left out the fact that I had a copy of that video. A weird photograph was one thing, but if I sent her a potentially fake and extremely violent video featuring her likeness, I had the feeling she was probably going to hang up and call the police. I certainly would.
Silvana told me she remembered working on the movie, but that no attack like the one I’d described had taken place. She said if I wanted a better look at that particular image, it had been included in a book the photographer had released earlier this year. She gave me the photographer’s information and told me that back then she went by her maiden name, Silvana Mitchell.
Just as she was about to hang up, I thought of something.
“After I sent you that picture, you took a screen capture of my face.”
“You’re damn right.”
“I understand completely. Did you happen to do the same thing with the other person who called about that photograph with the scar?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Would you be willing to send me that image?”
“If I still have it.”
I thanked her for her time and hung up.
It wasn’t hard to find the book of photographs Silvana was talking about. I typed the photographer’s name into Google, and that picture was suddenly everywhere. Silvana didn’t have a scar in any of the images of that photograph that came up.
I saved the highest-resolution image of the photograph to my computer and compared it side by side with the version I’d found online earlier.
They were identical except for the scar.
As I leaned forward to double-check those images, I felt something shift in my living room. It was as if the shape of the room had suddenly changed, and the quality or consistency of the air had been altered somehow—like the cabin of an airliner pressurizing, or that moment of silence in a horror film just before a black cat jumps out from behind a trash can and scares the shit out of the audience.
That’s when a text alert shattered the silence and I almost fell off my chair.
It was from Silvana. She’d forwarded a picture of the man who’d called her asking about that video.
It was the Magician.
I waited until seven a.m. and then called Chloe again. She eventually picked up.
“What?”
“I need to show you something.”
“It had better not have anything to do with Rabbits.”
“Are you coming, or what?”
Nothing from Chloe.
“Hello?”
“I’ll come by tonight after work. We can order food.”
She hung up.
* * *
—
Chloe showed up at five thirty.
“Don’t get mad,” I said, “but I found Silvana, and she told me something about the Magician.”
“Who the hell is Silvana?”
“Promise you won’t be mad.”
“I promise I’m already mad,” she said.
The two of us sat down and I told her about the photograph I’d discovered, and what Silvana had to say about it.
Chloe took a look at the photos with and without the scar.
“Holy shit, this is so weird.”
“The Magician must have found the same pictures I did, and called Silvana about the scar on her arm.”
“I still haven’t heard from him,” Chloe said.
“It looks like he’s out there somewhere following the same clues we are. I’m sure he’ll be in touch soon.”
Chloe nodded, but she looked unconvinced.
“I wanted to say sorry for earlier,” I said. “I hate to see you stressed out, and it’s so much worse when it’s my fault.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s just…everything with Baron and the Magician, and you missing time and stuff…I don’t wanna lose you too.”
I smiled. “Thanks,” I said. “I don’t wanna lose me either.”
The two of us ordered some food and watched a French thriller from 2003 called Swimming Pool. Chloe picked it. I didn’t tell her that I’d seen it already. I was happy to watch it again with her. Anything to take my mind off things for a little while.
“Should we open a bottle of wine?” Chloe asked, after the movie ended.
“Maybe in a bit,” I said.
Chloe shifted and stretched, and as she was stretching, she sank into the middle of the couch, into the soft spot between the two cushions. I had to grab her to stop her from falling over. Our faces were suddenly less than an inch apart.
“You seem a little tense,” Chloe said, moving even closer.
“I’m fine,” I said, which wasn’t completely true. I’d started shaking.
And then, we were kissing.
Chloe tasted like summer, her lips full and soft, her skin warm against my face.
The two of us pulled away at exactly the same time.
“Holy shit,” Chloe said.
“Yeah.”
Chloe snatched the remote control from my lap. “Wanna watch another movie?”
“Sounds good,” I said.
22
THE BYZANTINE GAME ENGINE
Chloe and I were startled awake at eight thirty the next morning by my phone vibrating on the coffee table. The two of us had fallen asleep on the couch.
I answered the phone and put it on speaker. It was Sidney Farrow.
“Hey,” I said, doing my best to sound like I’d been up for a while.
“Do you have time to meet later today?”
“Sure, anytime.”
“I’ll be there in an hour. I think I found something.”
“Great.”
“Can you tell Chloe?” Sidney said.
“Um…yeah. No problem.”
I hung up the phone and rolled over to find Chloe staring at me with a concerned look on her face.
“What happened last night can never happen again,” she said, deadly serious.
&
nbsp; I opened my mouth to speak when she burst into laughter.
“Oh my god,” she said. “Your face.” Then she jumped up. “I’m going home to take a shower and change. I’ll be back.”
* * *
—
Sidney Farrow showed up at my place about an hour after she’d called. Chloe walked through the door a few minutes later.
“I did a lot of digging,” Sidney said, “but I wasn’t able to find anything on any of the testing module servers, the design database, or any of the machines running bytes for my new game. But then, yesterday morning, a technician I asked to flag anything connected to Baron’s ID code found some files that had been uploaded by somebody using that code.”
“What files?” Chloe asked.
“It looks like Baron uploaded a few things to the company’s internal general folder on the day the woman who’d had the seizure was taken to the hospital. An encryption protocol is automatically activated whenever someone using a Byzantine ID uploads something, so I needed to get them decrypted.”
“What were they?” I asked.
Sidney handed me her phone.
The first file was a screen capture. It looked like it had been taken from some kind of news show. There were two talking heads: standard anchorwoman and her male counterpart. Running along the bottom third of the screen was a crawl displaying headlines covering the news of the day, most of them related to a hurricane building somewhere off the coast of Florida.
“That’s a scene from my game,” Sidney said.
“No way that’s computer generated,” Chloe said, leaning in for a closer look. “It’s too…real.”
“I told you the Byzantine Game Engine was amazing.”
Chloe was right. The image was photorealistic. But aside from the fact that the game looked exactly like real life, nothing stood out. It was just two news anchors talking and smiling into the camera while the day’s headlines ran along the bottom of the screen. Nothing appeared to be Rabbits-related.
“Do you have another version of this scene anywhere, or a copy of the scripted dialogue?” I asked. “There might be something in there that’s relevant.”
“The BGE doesn’t work like that,” Sidney said. “Those news anchors could be talking about almost anything.”
“But somebody must have written and recorded the dialogue,” Chloe said.
Sidney shook her head. “The key to Byzantine is Hawk Worricker’s advanced AI. The characters learn as the players play. The BGE’s voice synthesis engine sounds completely human. It’s uncanny, literally. No two people playing the game will ever have the same experience.”
“That sounds…impossible,” Chloe said.
“I know. It’s my game, and I have no idea how it works. Byzantine is…truly next level.”
“Is it some kind of random world generator like No Man’s Sky?” I asked.
“No Man’s Sky is a cave painting compared to Worricker’s game engine.”
“How do they make it look so…real?” Chloe asked.
“Outside of the initial world-building and developing my half of the original AI’s programming and learning matrix, I have no idea,” Sidney said. “There are whispers about quantum computers, but I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“I can’t believe they locked you out of your own game,” Chloe said.
Sidney shrugged. “That was part of the deal. I was put in charge of creative, and they got my code. The Byzantine Game Engine—and whatever else they’re doing up in The Tower—is strictly off-limits. How the BGE does that magic shit is a proprietary WorGames secret.”
“What about the other files Baron uploaded?” Chloe asked.
Sidney picked up her phone and opened the next file.
It appeared to be a frame grab from a security camera, taken at night in a modern office building lobby. The time stamp read: 12:34 a.m.
The image was dark, but I could make out two figures moving away from the lobby entrance toward a bank of elevators. The figure farthest from the camera didn’t look familiar, but I recognized the other person immediately.
It was Alan Scarpio.
Above the video’s time stamp was a date. That security camera footage had been recorded the night Alan Scarpio met me at the arcade.
“Any idea what Scarpio was doing at WorGames?” I asked.
Sidney shook her head. “No, but the bigger question might be: What was Scarpio doing in The Tower?”
“Wait,” I said. “That footage was taken in The Tower?”
Sidney nodded.
This was starting to feel like some kind of crazy dream.
Sidney Farrow.
Alan Scarpio.
What the fuck was happening?
“Can we get up there and check it out?” Chloe asked.
“My deal gives me access to everything but The Tower. They were extremely clear about that. In retrospect, kind of terrifyingly clear.”
“And that’s what they’re doing up there?” Chloe asked. “Working on their super-high-tech game engine?”
“That’s what I was told.”
“What about the other files Baron uploaded to the WorGames folder?” I asked.
“Four more pictures,” Sidney said and handed me her phone.
They were all screen caps of that news program. The talking heads were the same two generic male and female news anchors, but the story running along the ticker at the bottom of the screen was different.
In three of the screen captures, the text was related to the hurricane story we’d seen in the first image, but the text in the fourth screen capture was different.
I zoomed in.
“Holy shit,” Chloe said. She was looking over my shoulder. “I still can’t believe this resolution.”
“What are you looking at?” Sidney asked.
“The story scroll along the bottom of the screen.”
“Looks like they’re complaining about immigration. It makes sense. This show is supposed to be a right-wing broadcast.”
“Notice the headline above that news ticker?”
“What about it?”
“Holy shit,” Chloe said, leaning forward as I zoomed in until the headline filled the screen. The headline was four words: The Door Is Open.
“What does it mean?” Sidney asked.
“It’s a key phrase in the game,” Chloe said.
“It looks like somebody at WorGames was either playing or looking into Rabbits,” I said.
“Okay.” Sidney stood up. “Fuck it. Come on.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“We’re going to visit The Tower.”
NOTES ON THE GAME:
MISSIVE BY HAZEL
(AUTHENTICATED BY BLOCKCHAIN)
The metaphor of the house.
The key to playing the game is to avoid thinking too big.
Just take a look at what’s in front of you and start to build. Eventually, you’ll discover that you’ve created a foundation you can stand on. Once you have your foundation, you’ll be able to build faster, eventually adding scaffolding, then framing, and finally, if you’ve done the work—if you’ve followed the clues in the proper order—you’ll step back and see that you’ve built an entire house.
At that point, once you’ve built your house, you’ll see so much more. At that point, you’ll discover a secret.
At that point, you’ll learn you’re actually going to have to build an entire city.
—HAZEL 8
23
THE MEECHUM RADIANTS
In 2005, decades after Hawk Worricker had disappeared completely from public life, WorGames began construction on the building that would eventually become known as The Tower.
Sidney told us there were countless rumors whispered among WorGames employe
es about what was “really” going on up there. Depending on who you asked, The Tower was either some kind of high-level experimental (and perhaps illegal) genetics laboratory, a corporate multinational gaming think tank, the U.S. home base for something called alternative astronomy, or a secret society so secret that nobody had ever heard of them.
The fact that there were no interior photos of The Tower available anywhere online, and Google Earth revealed nothing but a bunch of blurry rectangles, only deepened the mystery. Sidney told us she’d heard whispers that the top floor of The Tower had been sold as residential space in order to help finance the structure: Madonna, Leonardo DiCaprio, and William Shatner were just some of the names she’d heard connected to it.
* * *
—
We parked in the employee parking structure—which was relatively deserted on a Saturday—and made our way onto the campus proper.
Everything was top-of-the-line, from the irrigation system that took care of the exotic trees and plants, to the high-speed glass elevators gliding silently up some of the taller buildings. If it was new and exciting—and expensive—they had it at WorGames.
As we walked along the wide, polished micro-cobblestone path known colloquially among WorGames employees as Main Street, we passed a few workers—hoods and umbrellas up against the rain, headphones in against the world—but other than that, the campus was fairly quiet. We walked for a few more minutes before we rounded a corner and entered a small park. At that point, we got our first full glimpse of The Tower.
Rising up and out of the back corner of a low red-brick structure called Building A, The Tower loomed over the WorGames campus like some kind of brutalist glass-eyed sentinel. It was tall, at least twenty stories, but it was hard to tell exactly how many floors there were due to the heavily tinted windows.
As we moved closer, we could see that most of the visible bricks of both Building A and The Tower were vertical rather than horizontal, giving both structures a unique look and feel—like contemporary science fiction crossed with Antonioni-esque Italian noir.
We slowed as we approached the entrance to Building A, and I looked up at The Tower.