Rabbits

by Terry Miles

  The way it was slightly backlit, dark and foreboding against the dusty gray sky, reminded me of the monolithic structure from my elevator dream and a sudden ominous dread came over me like a shadow slowly blocking out the sun. Perhaps sensing my discomfort, Chloe grabbed my hand, and the two of us followed Sidney inside.

  * * *

  —

  Like all of the buildings on the WorGames campus, Building A was almost as green inside as it was out. The wide glass entryway was filled with a large collection of small trees and hanging plants.

  As we entered the lobby area, Sidney smiled and waved at the lone receptionist seated behind a long polished wooden counter that ran the length of the entire room. The wall behind the counter was covered in some kind of bluish-green ivy or moss. It reminded me of the check-in counter at a high-end Las Vegas casino.

  Sidney wasn’t able to access The Tower because her security clearance didn’t allow it, but she had a plan.

  We were going to walk right in like we owned the place.

  Sidney led us through the lobby, down a wide staircase and into a long corridor. The sound of our shoes echoed off the smooth walls and polished dark red floor as we walked.

  As we approached the end of the corridor, a security guard waved at us from a nearby bench. He looked to be about sixty-five, bald, with an easy smile.

  “Hey, Albert,” Sidney called out.

  “Hiya, Sid.”

  Visible through a series of floor-to-ceiling windows on our left was an enormous courtyard—a dense world of deep green. As we passed by, I pictured myself employed at WorGames, sitting on a bench out there, eating lunch with my co-workers, breathing in oxygen-rich air and dreaming about the worlds we’d be creating together—worlds pulled directly from Sidney Farrow’s imagination. What would my life have been like working at a place like WorGames? Would that have helped me forget about Rabbits?

  It didn’t help Baron.

  I was snapped out of my reverie as we left the courtyard behind us and entered what Sidney referred to as The Tower atrium.

  The atrium was spacious and circular, with an incredibly high, slightly domed ceiling. The floor appeared to be made of the same dark red polished stone as the hallway, but where the hallway floor was unadorned, the floor of the atrium was covered in a mosaic of intricate, swirling designs. Those designs were centered around a specific point in the middle of the room: a small white circle located directly beneath a giant pendulum. The pendulum hung from the ceiling by a long thin wire, and at first, its slow, hypnotic movement lent the room a sense of peaceful calm, but I could feel it up there, fighting its way through the space, doing its best—against the spinning axis of the planet—to trace a perfect line in the air.

  As I thought about the pendulum, struggling in vain against vast universal forces outside its control, I shivered, and couldn’t help but feel the weight of everything we were up against.

  I actually did a double take to make sure the Earth was spinning in the right direction.

  There were two reception desks on our left as we entered, and a number of long low wooden benches to the right. The lobby appeared to be unoccupied except for a tall black-haired woman with a narrow face standing behind the desk closest to us on the left.

  “Good morning, Ms. Farrow. How can I help you?”

  “We need to go upstairs,” Sidney said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  Sidney pointed. “We’re going up.”

  “I’m afraid you don’t have security clearance to access The Tower.” I could tell by her expression that she clearly didn’t want to say no to Sidney. “I hate to do this, but is there maybe somebody you can call for additional clearance?”

  Sidney ignored her and led us between the two reception desks, down a short hallway, and into a long foyer. On our right was another wall covered in ivy, on our left two sets of tall elevator doors.

  Sidney walked over and pressed the call button.

  Both sets of elevator doors opened, and the three of us stepped into the elevator closest to the reception area. The doors closed behind us.

  Inside there were two rows of twelve buttons set beneath a wider button marked with the letters PH.

  Sidney mashed every single button immediately, but none of them stayed lit.

  A few seconds later, the doors opened.

  We were still on the ground floor, but now the security guard was standing in front of us.

  “Sid,” he said, “what’s going on?”

  “Don’t get in the middle of this, Albert. I need to go upstairs.”

  “Sure,” Albert said. “That’s fine, but you have to wait for clearance.”

  “This is bullshit,” Sidney said, stepping out of the elevator with Chloe behind her.

  “Your clearance is coming,” Albert said.

  Sidney was clearly surprised. “It is?”

  Albert nodded. “Ten minutes.”

  As I stepped out of the elevator behind Sidney and Chloe, something changed. The air was different suddenly, heavier, charged somehow.

  Something was coming.

  The back of the foyer, directly across from the elevators, started filling up with dark swirling shapes, and the familiar thick tingling of the gray feeling began gnawing its way into my skull.

  But something was different.

  I had no idea what this thing was, this gray emptiness that had become such a large part of my life, but I eventually realized what it was that felt different. It was excited.

  It wanted me to step back into the elevator.

  So I did.

  As soon as I started moving backward, the shadows surged forward and slammed me into the back of the elevator.

  As I hit the wall, I heard Chloe yell my name. The sound of her voice snapped me out of whatever spell the gray things had cast and I lunged for the open door button. But I was too late. The elevator was rising.

  I looked up at the numbers. I hadn’t pressed anything, but the wide PH button was illuminated.

  The elevator ascended at a remarkably high speed. My ears popped after a few seconds and I could feel what was left of the buzzing and tingling sensations leaving my brain.

  And then the doors opened and I stepped out.

  The floor was smooth black marble and the walls were finished with some kind of polished metal. A large abstract painting filled the wall at the end of the wide hallway to my left, and a set of glass double doors were visible at the other end of the hall in the distance.

  Nothing stood out about the shapes and colors of the painting, although part of me thought I’d seen it in an art history textbook during my first year of college.

  I turned away from the painting and walked toward the double doors. The air was cool and clean, the humidity high and refreshing. Somebody had clearly spared no expense to make the atmosphere perfect.

  I pushed through the doors and entered a small lobby. There was a high reception desk to my right and a few chairs and small tables to my left. Behind the reception desk was a set of dark wooden doors. They were a few feet taller than normal, and almost completely covered in intricately carved symbols.

  There was nobody around, no phone to call or bell to ring, so I walked over to the wooden doors and knocked.

  No answer.

  There was a small security panel to the right of the doors, which led me to believe I’d need some kind of access code to get in, but when I turned the handle and pulled, the door opened easily, with a barely audible click.

  I stepped through the door and onto the thick glass floor of a mezzanine of some kind. In front of me and to the right, a floating staircase—with wide steps made of the same thick glass—led down to the main level.

  The room was a bit dark, so it took my eyes a moment to adjust, but once they did, I couldn’t stop looking around.

&
nbsp; I felt like I’d stepped into a library from another world.

  The walls were three or four times the height of a standard office, and the ceiling featured three extremely wide skylights that looked like giant backlit canvas paintings of an overcast gray sky.

  The wall on the left was covered with antique floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Bisecting the bookshelves was a thick glass walkway accessible by two additional floating glass staircases. There were Victorian-era chairs and tables up there where someone could sit and read, and a number of old-style wooden rolling ladders on both the main and mezzanine walkway levels that could easily be used to reach the books on the top shelves of either section. Two huge lighting fixtures hanging from the ornate ceiling reminded me of the midcentury–meets–Native American décor of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. If you’d told me this was the Victorian headquarters of the National Geographic Society, that would have made perfect sense.

  The wall to my right, which ran adjacent to the bookshelves, was covered by the biggest screen I’d ever seen outside of a football stadium, and the wall directly in front of me was nothing but windows covered with what appeared to be electronically adjustable neutral-density filters. I’d seen those filters in Wired recently, and if the skylights featured the same technology, this entire floor could go from bright sunlight to total darkness with the simple press of a button.

  The expansive view of the city visible through the windows grounded me a little. Although I’d clearly entered some kind of bizarre H. G. Wells dreamscape, at least that dreamscape appeared to be located in Seattle. And even though the room was enormous, it didn’t feel empty. An impressive collection of art covered the myriad desks and tables, and everything, from the furniture to the area rugs, had been arranged in a way that made perfect use of the space.

  On the floor, the antique-meets-cool-glass aesthetic turned slightly midcentury modern. Facing the enormous screen were two black-and-brown Eames lounge chairs on a large worn Persian carpet. There was loud music playing from a modern vertical-style turntable mounted on a nearby wall.

  I made my way down the stairs and approached the turntable. The song currently playing was jazzy and busy, with deep strings, shuffling drums, and wild guitar. It was kind of terrifyingly beautiful as it moved from delicate vibraphone sections to insane organ breaks to monumental auditory mountains of strings.

  “Have you heard this recording before?”

  I spun around at the sound of a man’s voice.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “the door was open.”

  “Well, technically, the door was unlocked, but it was closed.” The man was middle-aged or maybe a bit older, Caucasian, with long, wavy gray hair. He wore thick-framed black glasses, a long-sleeve white cotton shirt, and plain blue jeans. He didn’t seem angry that I’d entered without permission. More like…amused.

  “This album is called Song of Innocence by a man named David Axelrod,” he said. “It should have been far more popular than it was.”

  “It’s interesting music,” I said.

  “It certainly is.” The man nodded. His hawkish face was well-lined and clearly life-worn, but his eyes, which were two slightly different shades of blue, held a bright youthful sparkle.

  We stood facing each other for a moment, before something changed in the man’s expression. The smile slowly faded from his lips, and a kind of recognition passed over his face.

  “Hello, K,” he said.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I knew your parents.”

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Well, that’s a complicated question. But everyone just calls me Crow.”

  “Crow?”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “What is this place?”

  “Well, that’s an even more complicated question, I’m afraid, but I’ll do my best to answer it in as satisfactory a manner as possible.”

  He smiled again, wider this time, as if he’d just remembered something amusing.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that you remind me of your mother.”

  “How did you know my parents?”

  “We did some work together, a long time ago.”

  I took another look around the place. This was some serious Bruce Wayne–level shit. What the hell was this guy doing working with my parents?

  “What is this place? Do you…live here?”

  “My living quarters are located on the floor below us,” he said. “This is where I spend most of my time, however. We call it The Terminal.” He pulled out his phone, hit a few virtual buttons, and the giant video screen lit up.

  After a few seconds, the screen became a giant map of the world.

  The man called Crow made a series of short waving motions with his hands, and that movement caused the image to zoom in closer to North America. He was manipulating the screen using some kind of advanced kinetic control system. It was extremely cool, but it felt like something out of a near-future sci-fi movie, not technology that was currently available.

  “There are facts, lines, patterns, and laws beneath the world you recognize, K.”

  That sounded more like the beginning of a speech than a statement requiring some kind of response, so I waited for him to continue.

  “Numbers are significant,” Crow continued. “For example, there is a number representing all of the women in the entire world who have given birth within the past hour.”

  The camera’s slow zoom continued into the United States.

  “There is an exact number of people who were married this week, and a number who have dropped out of high school over that same period. These are specific numbers, precise numbers. Do you understand?”

  “I’m not sure that I do.”

  He smiled, motioned again, and the camera continued its zoom into the West Coast of the United States.

  “There’s one number representing the amount of people who currently hold a winning national lottery ticket, and another for the number of unfortunate folks currently locked in the trunk of a car while being transported to another location.”

  “Jesus,” I said. That took a bit of a dark turn.

  Whatever app was manipulating the images on Crow’s giant screen zoomed toward the city of Seattle, as he turned away from the screen to face me.

  “All of these numbers exist. They are exact, and they are knowable.”

  “That’s obvious—logically speaking,” I said. “But the fact that those numbers are knowable in theory doesn’t mean they’re at all knowable in practice.”

  “Ah, but with respect, K, that is exactly what it means.”

  “Again, conceptually, I understand everything you’re saying,” I said, “but it still feels a lot more like a thought experiment than an actual possibility.”

  “Why?”

  “Although I’m willing to concede those numbers exist, they would be essentially impossible to know, and certainly impossible to check for accuracy.”

  “Maybe not,” he said.

  I watched as Crow’s satellite or whatever it was completed its task. It turns out it hadn’t been zooming into Seattle, but rather Olympia. We were looking directly down at the house I’d grown up in. I had no idea where this conversation was going. Why the hell was he showing me my childhood home?

  Suddenly, a numbing buzz started moving through my stomach and up into my chest. I could feel my lungs tightening and my throat constricting. I did my best to concentrate, to try to slow my breathing, as Crow continued speaking.

  “What if there were equations and computations connected to these numbers—effective ways to figure out not only how to calculate these things, but also influence and perhaps even change the outcomes of certain events?”

  “Sorry, but that sounds unlikely.”

/>   “The world is run on systems, K—traffic, sanitation, electricity, the Internet…even children’s elementary school admissions. Influencing and adjusting these systems for the better is one of the things we’re working on here.”

  This guy was clear and confident as he spoke, but what he was saying was crazy. Kidnapped people in a trunk being taken to another location? Elementary school admissions? What the fuck?

  “Okay, so how are you…influencing and adjusting these events, exactly?” I asked.

  Crow did something on his phone and the room grew darker still (definitely the high-tech neutral density filters).

  Suddenly the gigantic screen was split into dozens of smaller squares, each displaying something completely different.

  “That’s the Nikkei, the Toronto Stock Exchange, and the Dow Jones Industrial,” he said, pointing to distinct sections of the screen. “Over there: Sports Scores and Salaries; that’s Social Structures and Education Systems; those two screens are Rare Earth Elements and Industrial Minerals. And down in the bottom-right corner: Music, Art, and Weather.”

  “What’s all of this for?”

  “For doing what we do here.”

  “Which is?”

  “Making adjustments, in order to change the things that need to be changed. Cause and effect.”

  He performed another motion with his hand and suddenly the screen was filled with hundreds of people’s faces. Another wave and those hundreds became thousands. A series of brief movements and there was audio—thousands of voices talking at once.

  “What are they doing?”

  “They’re working.”

  “What kind of work?”

  He didn’t answer my question, just zoomed in to one section of the screen. “This person is the head of international development for a Beijing-based company that’s working on a very promising clean energy alternative.”

  The screen was suddenly filled with an image of an older Chinese man walking down a hallway. “He’s going to be late for work today, and that’s going to set off a series of events culminating in his being arrested for solicitation.”

  He waved his hand again, and we were looking at an attractive Japanese woman in her midthirties. She appeared to be running some kind of meeting in a large boardroom somewhere.