Rabbits

by Terry Miles

  “Okay…can you please just tell me what’s happening? The last time we met you said that had you known I was here, you would have made sure we’d met much sooner. What did you mean?”

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said. “Or at least, that’s what I had been led to believe.”

  I sat there for a moment, staring down at my hand gripping the edge of the sharp plastic seat. Was I dreaming? This couldn’t be real. Why did all of those people get off the bus?

  “What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

  “If you don’t stop playing the game you’re calling Rabbits immediately, everything you know is going to either change or disappear, and everybody you know is going to forget you exist. This includes that girl Chloe from the arcade, I’m afraid.”

  “What…?”

  He smiled. “I’m sorry it has to be like this. I really am.”

  “Why are you doing this? Saying these things?”

  “Like I said, this has nothing to do with you personally, K, but you need to stop playing Rabbits—and that means no looking into anything related to anything else that might be even remotely connected to the game. Do you understand?”

  “I’m not even sure I am playing. Not really.”

  “Well, then,” he said, “what I’m asking shouldn’t be difficult.” He rang the bell, and the bus pulled over and stopped.

  And then the man called Crow stood up and stepped off the bus.

  After a moment, I leapt up to follow him, but the doors had already closed. As the driver guided the bus slowly back out into the traffic, I rang the bell repeatedly.

  “Pull over!” I yelled, but the driver just kept driving.

  He finally pulled the bus over two blocks later, at the next scheduled stop.

  I hurled myself off the bus, pushed past a group of people trying to get on, and rushed out onto the sidewalk.

  I ran the two blocks back to where Crow had exited the bus, but he was gone.

  * * *

  —

  I walked the rest of the way home.

  I’d been inside my apartment for about five minutes when somebody buzzed.

  I pressed the talk button of my intercom. “Hello?”

  “I’m outside. Let me in.”

  I was trying to come up with some way to tell Chloe about the missing Sunday, Crow, and Emily Connors that didn’t make me sound like a lunatic when Chloe burst into my apartment and handed me her phone.

  “This guy,” she said.

  There was a pale, thin man with a skinny black mustache on Chloe’s screen. He was standing in front of a bank of computer monitors.

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s Fatman.”

  “Fatman?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s not fat.”

  “I guess it’s ironic or something.”

  “Must be,” I said.

  “So I’m cashing out around ten thirty last night when I hear a sound coming from the Magician’s office. I rush up there because I think he’s finally back. I’m about to knock and give him shit for making us worry when I hear a voice coming from behind the door.”

  “Fatman?”

  “Let me finish.”

  “Sorry.”

  “At first, I thought the Magician must have come in through the back, so I knock again, and then I open the door. And suddenly I’m on a video call with some guy.”

  “Fatman.”

  “That was the handle listed on the screen. He didn’t give me his real name.”

  “He’s a friend of the Magician?”

  “He says they had a regular weekly call. It wasn’t Skype or FaceTime, though. It looked like homemade software, or maybe something military.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. There was a standard video window, but the rest of the interface was text-based, kind of like DOS. It was either really low-tech or bleeding-edge. It was hard to tell.”

  “So who was this guy?”

  “I have no idea. He asked me if something had happened to the Magician, if he’d been acting strange lately.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I didn’t say anything. I had no idea who this guy was; he was just a face on a screen talking to me through some weird-ass software.”

  “So what happened next?”

  “I asked him how he knew the Magician, but he was kind of cagey. And when I came right out and asked him if he’d ever heard of Rabbits, he disconnected the call.”

  “Shit.”

  “I tried calling back, but the user account called Fatman had been deactivated. I tried again and the computer froze. When I booted it back up, the entire program was gone.”

  “That’s…weird,” I said.

  “No shit,” Chloe said as she pulled one of the Magician’s old Windows laptops out of her backpack.

  “Wait, you stole the Magician’s laptop?”

  “No, I borrowed a computer from my absentee boss, just in case he needed saving from the consequences of playing an ancient and potentially deadly game.”

  “You know it’s called a personal computer for a reason.”

  “Don’t be so dramatic, K.”

  “Holy shit. You think I’m the one being dramatic here?”

  “I do,” she said as she hit enter on the old laptop and the password screen gave way to the familiar launch logo of Windows 95.

  “What happened to not playing the game for a while?” I asked.

  “I wasn’t playing the game. This guy was just…on the screen.”

  Suddenly I thought about Crow’s warning. What if he made Chloe forget I existed? Or what if he did something worse than that? I pictured the look on Baron’s face when we’d climbed through his window and found him sitting in front of his computer. I didn’t think I could handle seeing Chloe like that.

  “Are you sure we should be doing this?” I asked.

  “What else are we gonna do, play Tetris?”

  26

  IS THAT A FUCKING CROSSBOW?

  Along with the outer space elevator scenario, there’s another dream I’ve been having for as long as I can remember.

  It begins with me staring at a sheet of ice, what appears to be the surface of a frozen lake. It takes me a moment to realize that my body is freezing, but then I’m shivering as I examine the cracks, colors, and shapes in the ice. The cold is intense, but the mosaic of the ice is so beautiful that I’m able to momentarily forget about the pain and just trace the artistic perfection in the surface of the lake with my eyes.

  It’s at this point that I suddenly realize I’m not above the ice but beneath it.

  And I can no longer breathe.

  This is when I understand that I’m about to die. Panic sets in, and I begin to thrash wildly beneath the freezing blue water, clawing, kicking, and screaming at the surface. But every action does nothing but push me farther down into the icy darkness.

  While I’m stuck there beneath the ice, thrashing and dying, I can see everyone up on the surface skating and walking hand in hand, laughing and having fun, and beyond that the blur of families on the grass, laughing at their barbecues and playing Frisbee.

  And behind all of that, I can see the sun shining beautifully, way high up in the sky.

  Then, just as I’m about to succumb to some weird Leonardo DiCaprio–esque Titanic trip to the unforgiving bottom of that cold wet world, the ice becomes something else.

  It becomes glass.

  A windshield, to be more specific.

  And then I’m speeding along that dark country road in the truck with Annie and Emily Connors. I can hear the sharp crackle of static on the radio, and I can smell the Body Shop Dewberry perfume oil that Annie had been wearing.

  The snowy static from the radio feels e
lectric as it fills my ears, my head starts to shake, and a loud screaming pain slowly begins to tear my mind apart.

  Then, as the world around me blurs and begins to fade away and the pain from the static in my head becomes too much to bear, I sense the dark thing coming toward me from somewhere outside my reality.

  I realize the world is about to end.

  And that’s when I wake up.

  * * *

  —

  “Are you okay?”

  I was looking into Chloe’s face, my kitchen ceiling visible behind her in the distance.

  I was lying on the floor.

  I sat up and the world slowly slipped into focus. “What happened?”

  “You had another…episode,” Chloe said.

  “What time is it?” I asked, as I did my best to remember what had happened, how I’d ended up on the floor of my kitchen looking up at Chloe.

  “It’s seven forty-five,” she said, helping me up. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “You stole the Magician’s laptop,” I said, “we looked over a few things, and then I was here.”

  “I borrowed his computer. We’ve been through that bit. That was two hours ago.”

  “It was?”

  “I’m taking you to urgent care.”

  “I’m fine,” I said as I scrambled to stand.

  “Oh, well then,” she said, “as long as you say you’re fine.”

  I gave her the finger—along with what I hoped looked like a carefree smirk—and sank into one of the white plastic chairs at the dining room table.

  What the hell was happening to me?

  The last thing I remembered was worrying about Chloe for some reason. And then it came flooding back—not the missing two hours, but the reason I’d been so concerned.

  Crow.

  I’d been thinking about his warning, the fact that he’d mentioned Chloe specifically. That must have been when I passed out.

  Did my concern for Chloe have something to do with my losing time? I’ve heard that stress can do crazy things to our minds and bodies. Could it be that simple? Did I just need to download a meditation app and book an hour of hot yoga?

  Chloe sat down across from me and folded her arms.

  I was just about to try to explain away my losing time, again, but there was something in the way Chloe was looking at me.

  This was it.

  If I didn’t come completely clean, Chloe was going to know it, and I was going to lose her. Whatever happened, whether she believed me or not, I needed to be honest.

  But more than that, I wanted to be honest.

  Chloe was scared, probably picturing me in an MRI machine with wide-eyed technicians staring at a brain tumor the size of a small grapefruit.

  I was pretty sure I didn’t have a tumor—although when I started running over the wild story I was about to tell Chloe, I began to suspect I might be a bit overconfident about the tumor-free nature of my brain.

  I told her everything.

  I started with the mysterious man named Crow, how I’d originally met him in The Tower and how he’d gone on to pull a serious Moriarty move on a city bus filled with people he must have paid off. Then I explained how I’d been feeling recently—how the sensation I called the gray feeling had flared up again after being dormant for most of my adult life. Chloe sat there expressionless. Her eyes didn’t offer shock, worry, scorn, or support. She just nodded and listened.

  Okay, so technically I didn’t actually tell Chloe everything.

  I left out the fact that I’d seen my childhood friend Emily Connors. I did this because what had happened with Crow was crazy, but adding a childhood friend showing up out of nowhere just felt a little…unhinged.

  When I’d finished, I leaned back in my chair and waited. A few seconds later, Chloe exhaled and ran her hands through her hair.

  “Crow?” she asked, clearly still trying to come to terms with everything I’d told her.

  “That’s what he told me,” I said.

  “You and I met Sidney Farrow?”

  I nodded.

  “And we drank wine with her late into the morning?”

  “Yeah.”

  Chloe sighed. “That would have been amazing,” she said.

  “It was.”

  Gradually, I began building a picture. Chloe remembered Swan and the twins, but she had no memory of anything involving Sidney Farrow—including our visit to WorGames and the three of us examining the files Baron had uploaded. I didn’t have the guts to ask if she remembered our kiss. I couldn’t bear to lose that as well—though I’m sure we’d have to confront the issue eventually.

  “K…?”

  “Yes?”

  “Promise you won’t get mad?”

  “I know it’s…impossible to believe. I just wanted to be completely honest.”

  “And I appreciate that,” she said. “But you have to understand how all of this sounds to me.”

  I nodded. “I do.”

  The two of us sat there in silence for a moment, then I remembered something. I pulled out my phone. “I got the plate number of the car that was following me.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Do you think we might be able to find the owner?”

  “Um…you’re a part-time day trader and I’m living off royalties from a song I wrote more than a decade ago. Who the hell do we know who can run a plate?”

  “Fair point,” I said, staring at a blank screen on my phone. “It’s dead.”

  I dug up a charger and plugged my phone into the wall. A few seconds later, the phone booted up and I opened the voice recorder application.

  “What is it?” Chloe asked.

  “I couldn’t open my camera, so I recorded the plate number using my voice recorder.” I showed her my phone.

  Something didn’t make sense. The most recent file was thirty-five minutes long.

  “That’s a pretty big file for a license plate.”

  “My fingers were wet. I probably didn’t turn it off properly.”

  “Wait,” Chloe said, excited. “When did you start recording?”

  “Just before I met Crow on that bus.”

  Chloe jumped up, her eyes were huge. “Fuck, K, play it!”

  I positioned the cursor near the end of the file and pressed play. The sound of Crow’s voice warning me not to play the game spilled from my phone’s tiny speakers.

  I pressed stop and looked up at Chloe.

  “Play the whole thing,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Once we’d finished listening to the recording, Chloe sat back down across from me at the table. “That’s insane,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Really, though…I mean, do you have any idea how much money and planning something like that stunt on the bus would take?”

  I nodded. It was true—although I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms. There was something about the man called Crow, however, that made me feel like pulling that kind of stunt wouldn’t actually be difficult for him.

  “You asked him about somebody named Emily. Who’s that?”

  “A friend of my parents,” I said, which wasn’t exactly a lie.

  “What if this guy is really dangerous, K?”

  “I think he definitely falls into the dangerous category,” I said.

  “He warned you not to play the game.”

  “Or look into anything even remotely connected to Rabbits,” I added.

  “So what the fuck are we doing?”

  Ever since I’d met Crow, I couldn’t stop thinking about my parents. Was my entire childhood a lie? What were they really doing when they told me they were working on balance sheets and ledgers? Mapping fucking Meechum Radiants with Crow?
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  “I need to know what this guy knows about my parents, and I’d like to know if any of this stuff is connected to the game, but I’m not sure I want you…mixed up in this stuff anymore.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re in this shit together, I’m afraid. I’m not going anywhere.” She jumped up, grabbed the Magician’s laptop, and brought it over to the dining room table. “Let’s start with everything on this computer.” Then she pulled her chair close to mine and gave me a huge kiss.

  “What was that for?” I asked.

  “Felt like it.”

  So, whatever was going on in this reality, Chloe and I were still involved in some kind of romantic relationship. I was relieved, but felt kind of unsteady. Were we at the same point emotionally? What about sex? Had we slept together in this reality?

  “What are you thinking about?” Chloe asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re looking at me like a fucking weirdo.”

  “You’re a fucking weirdo,” I said, and smiled.

  “That’s better,” she said, and then the two of us sat down and went over everything we’d found in the Magician’s bookmarks and browser history.

  * * *

  —

  So, against the dire warnings of pretty much everybody, Chloe and I were back digging into the world of Rabbits.

  We found a lot of really cool stuff in the Magician’s bookmarks—including some code-breaking application links, veiled historical references to an ancient game, and interesting examples of alternate reality game puzzles—but we didn’t find anything that pointed toward anybody called Fatman who matched the description of the guy Chloe had spoken with earlier.

  After we’d finished, Chloe grabbed the Magician’s computer and started to close it.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “What?”

  “If we’re going to invade the Magician’s private digital world, we should probably go all the way.”

  “I’m listening,” Chloe said.