Rabbits

by Terry Miles

  “I haven’t used a Windows-based machine in a while, but there has to be a way to access library and application file data, right?”

  “Sure is,” Chloe said.

  She performed a series of searches using the file explorer, but wasn’t able to come up with anything. Then she tried a couple of hidden image file searches. One of those searches uncovered some thumbnail image files located inside a hidden library folder at the root level of the Magician’s computer.

  Chloe found Fatman right away. He was smiling back at us from one of the images. Chloe said it was a thumbnail screen capture generated by whatever video chat program the Magician had been using, probably created automatically during a system crash or similar disconnection situation.

  “What the hell are HD video chat images doing on a computer running Windows 95?”

  “Ninety-five is just a skin he’s using for some old software. There’s a proper OS on here as well.”

  Chloe navigated to a hidden subfolder and found a bunch of other thumbnails related to the same video chat program; three of them featured Fatman. Most of those screen captures featured the room Fatman had been standing in when he’d spoken with Chloe in the arcade, but one of the images was slightly different from the rest.

  Fatman must have changed the position of his computer’s camera at some point, because this particular screen cap provided a wider view of the room. Deep in the background of this image was a warm pink glow. The glow was coming from a neon sign that read: YALP.

  “What the hell is yalp?” I said.

  “Look at this,” Chloe said as she changed the view from regular to mirror image horizontal.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  The word “yalp” had now become the word “play.”

  “How many Seattle businesses have the word ‘play’ in the title?”

  “A lot,” Chloe said, and the two of us sat down to look for neon signs.

  We’d spent more than an hour combing through pictures featuring neon signs in Seattle when Chloe finally flipped her laptop around to reveal the website of a strip mall sex shop called Sinplay. The pink neon sign in the window matched the image from the Magician’s computer exactly.

  Chloe stood up. “Get your shit. We’re going.”

  “It’s almost midnight, is it even open?” I said as I stood up and stretched.

  “Don’t know. Hours aren’t listed.”

  Chloe called the number on the website, but there was no answer.

  “Are you sure it’s the right place?” I asked, but Chloe was already putting on her shoes.

  * * *

  —

  We found parking a couple of blocks away and walked over to the address Chloe had dug up online. As we made our way up the street toward the glowing pink neon sign, I thought I heard someone following us. I spun around, but there was nobody there. Chloe said she hadn’t heard anything, but I was positive I’d heard footsteps and shuffling at some point, about half a block behind us.

  Sinplay was located in a low brick building between a bicycle repair shop and a dry cleaner. The building’s bricks had been painted black at some point, but so much of that paint had weathered away that it was almost impossible to come up with a word to describe the building’s color.

  There were no cars parked out front, and apart from the pink neon sign, there were no lights on inside or outside the store.

  Sinplay appeared to be closed.

  We tried calling again, but—just like before—there was no answer.

  As we approached the glass door to knock, Chloe noticed something. “There’s a basement,” she said, pointing toward the bottom of the neon sign.

  The building had an additional section directly below street level that was accessible only by a small staircase located behind a wrought iron gate. The lower section looked like it used to be a retail space, but now it appeared to be some kind of office or storage area. A significant portion of the window had been plastered with posters advertising various adult products.

  “Locked,” Chloe said, rattling the padlock on the gate.

  “We should come back tomorrow,” I said.

  “Sounds good,” Chloe agreed. “Let’s eat. I’m starving.” She turned around and started walking back toward the car.

  Just as I was about to join her, I saw something moving through the basement window. “Wait,” I said.

  Chloe spun back to face me. “What?”

  “There’s somebody there.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, K.”

  “I’m serious.”

  Chloe walked back over to the gate and the two of us stared through the bars into the basement.

  Through gaps in the posters, we were able to make out parts of a black-and-white harlequin-patterned tile floor, and numerous stacks of books and filing boxes. There was light, coming from a source located somewhere in the back of the room, that dimly illuminated the front section of the store.

  Something moved in the far-right-hand corner of the window.

  “It’s a cat, K,” Chloe said.

  “It definitely wasn’t a cat,” I insisted—just as a black-and-white cat jumped up onto one of the stacks of books that lined the other side of the window and began licking its paws.

  Chloe shook her head. “Let’s go.”

  “I swear, it was bigger than a cat,” I said and leaned forward to get a better look into the dimly lit basement.

  “Fine. I’ll hop over and knock,” Chloe said as she started climbing up the iron gate.

  “That’s not a great idea,” said a disembodied voice.

  “Fuck,” Chloe exclaimed, so startled by the sudden sound that she almost fell.

  “What are you doing?” the voice asked.

  I followed the sound to a small speaker located next to the basement door.

  “I know it sounds ridiculous,” I said, “but we’re looking for somebody named Fatman.”

  There was a long silence before a door opened behind the gate and a thin middle-aged man wearing a pink-and-blue faded Beverly Hills, 90210 T-shirt and gray sweatpants—not the kind that one might acceptably wear out in the world—stepped outside. He was holding a large medieval-looking crossbow, which was locked and loaded and pointed directly at my chest.

  “It’s not ridiculous, it’s ironic,” he said, looking up at Chloe dangling precariously from the top of the metal gate.

  “Is that a fucking crossbow?” Chloe asked.

  “We come in peace,” I added as Fatman lowered his crossbow and unlocked the gate, which swung open with a slow comedic creak, Chloe still attached.

  I helped Chloe down and the two of us followed Fatman inside.

  * * *

  —

  Fatman’s office wasn’t exactly messy, but it was definitely filled to capacity. Narrow makeshift paths had been fashioned between countless rows of bookshelves, cabinets, and desks. A closer look at the shelves, however, revealed order beneath the chaos. Although each shelf had been crammed full of books and printed materials of all kinds, everything appeared to be arranged in alphabetical order.

  The ceiling was low, and the fluorescent lights gave the place the vibe of an old newsroom from the seventies. Movie posters covered a couple of the walls: The Usual Suspects, Pulp Fiction, and The Rescuers Down Under, to name just a few.

  Enormous tattered blood-red curtains, which looked like they’d been taken from the set of a late-night talk show from the sixties, covered the entire back wall.

  Whatever the hell this guy was doing down here, it looked like he’d been doing it for a very long time.

  “You’re the girl from the Magician’s office,” Fatman said as he closed and locked the door behind us.

  “That sounds like a Lisbeth Salander vehicle,” Chloe said, smiling.

  Fatman ignored her j
oke. “How did you find me?”

  Either he wasn’t familiar with Stieg Larsson or he didn’t think Chloe was all that funny. I thought her line was actually pretty good.

  “The sign,” I said.

  He looked over at the bottom of the neon sign visible in the window and smiled. “Smart,” he said. “That’s smart.”

  He led us deeper into the large office, and as he maneuvered around a couple of narrow bookshelves, I noticed he limped a little.

  “Fell off a camel,” he said, as if that was the most mundane way in the world to injure your leg.

  “Really?” I asked.

  Fatman ignored my question and sat down in an old wooden rolling chair across from an unfortunate brownish-green couch. With the crossbow on his lap, he motioned for the two of us to sit. Then he looked at us over his thick black-framed glasses. “So, who are you people?”

  “I’m K,” I said, sinking deeper into the old sofa with a long creak.

  He slowly nodded and turned to Chloe.

  “Chloe,” she said.

  “You’re the one Alan Scarpio came to see,” he said as he turned back to face me. I noticed it wasn’t a question.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Wild guess,” he said, with a faint half smile.

  “Did the Magician tell you that?”

  He ignored my question and posed one of his own. “Have you heard from the Magician?”

  “No,” Chloe said. “Have you?”

  He shook his head. “You”—he pointed at Chloe—“asked me about something before.”

  “Rabbits,” Chloe said.

  He carefully set his crossbow down onto a side table, angled it away from us, and leaned forward in his chair. “What do you two know about the game?”

  “We know you’re not supposed to talk about it, for one thing.” I said. I wasn’t sure if we should trust this guy. We had no idea who he was.

  “For people concerned about not talking about something, you sure have a shitload of questions.” He stood up and walked over to a nearby table where he plugged in an electric kettle. “Tea?” he asked.

  Chloe and I nodded.

  As he boiled the water and prepared the tea, he told us that his real name was Neil. And then he just started talking. And talking. His initially cool and distant demeanor was quickly displaced by a torrent of words and fragmented sentences. I got the feeling Fatman Neil didn’t get a lot of visitors.

  * * *

  —

  “Okay, so John Lennon from the Beatles, right?”

  “Yeah?” I said, looking over at Chloe, who appeared just as confused as I was.

  “He was supposed to be in the film WarGames, but he was assassinated before that could happen. And I don’t mean he was killed roughly around that time, I mean they took him out immediately before that shit was about to go down.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.

  “Everything has to do with everything,” he said. “That’s the thing you can never forget. That’s the thing behind the thing.”

  Chloe looked over at me, and I could tell she was thinking this guy might just be a little bit out of his fucking mind.

  “The last thing the Magician and I spoke about was you,” Neil said, finally, nodding in my direction.

  “Me?”

  “Yes. He said Alan Scarpio came to see you and told you something was wrong with the game, that something needed to be fixed before the next iteration began. Does that sound about right?”

  I nodded.

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “Just that we’d be well and truly fucked if the next iteration began before the game was fixed.”

  “Well,” Neil said, leaning forward in his chair, “that doesn’t sound good, does it.”

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

  “Why do you think Scarpio came to see you that night?”

  “That’s exactly what we’re trying to figure out.”

  “Are you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean: How hard have you been trying to figure out why Alan Scarpio asked you—and I mean you specifically—to help him?”

  I blinked. “I don’t know. I mean, that part definitely doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What if it did?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what if Rabbits isn’t what you think? What if it isn’t just a game?”

  “If it’s not a game, then what is it?” Chloe asked.

  “Oh, it’s definitely a game,” Fatman Neil said. “But what if it was more than that?”

  I looked at Chloe. She just shrugged, and Fatman continued.

  “Would you notice thirty dollars less in your bank account? What if the bookmark you were using was suddenly stuck between different pages than it had been when you left for work that morning? What if you woke up one day and some of the pictures in an old family photo album were different than you remembered?”

  Chloe shook her head. “What are you talking about?”

  Chloe was clearly confused, but I knew exactly what Fatman Neil was talking about. He was describing pretty much everything I’d been experiencing (minus the gray feeling and the freaky swirling things hovering just outside the edges of reality).

  He ignored Chloe’s question, stood up, and grabbed his phone. “I think it’s time I introduced you to Mother.”

  “You want to introduce us to…your mother?” I asked.

  “Not my mother—just Mother.” Neil opened some kind of application on his phone and pressed a button. The enormous red curtains that covered the back wall of the room slowly parted to reveal a huge bank of video monitors of various sizes, shapes, and resolutions. There were more than a hundred screens covering the wall. It was beautiful in a “desert junk collector building an entire house out of old compact discs or soda bottles” kind of way.

  Below the giant bank of monitors was a comfortable-looking, well-worn brown leather easy chair, and a long table covered in a variety of different colored computer keyboards. Hanging above the monitors was a banner that read: WE WANT THE FUTURE WE WERE PROMISED, NOT THE FUTURE WE DESERVE.

  “This is Mother,” Neil said, and took a seat in the chair.

  “Holy shit,” Chloe said, staring up at the wall of screens.

  “How many monitors do you have hooked up here?” I asked, coming over to stand beside Neil.

  “A lot,” he said.

  “What is all of this?” Chloe asked as she joined us.

  “Mother is an elaborate citywide network of battery-operated and solar-powered cameras, portable microphones, and switch relays. If the other side is watching and listening to us—and you’d better believe they are,” he continued, “then we need to be watching and listening right back.”

  “This is incredible,” Chloe said.

  “They have grocery store cards collecting our data, smart speakers tracking every word, drug store and transit loyalty points cards, gym memberships, key fobs, and black strips on the back of your driver’s license. They have GPS-capable computers in our hands and pockets at all times. They know who we are and what we’re doing. We needed something to fight back.”

  “To fight back? Who are you fighting?”

  “The system,” he said, as he pressed a few buttons on a keyboard—what appeared to be some kind of boot sequence. “The bad guys.”

  “These cameras are citywide?” Chloe asked.

  “Yes, although in order to achieve full coverage, a portion of our network is audio only.”

  “So you watch and listen to the entire city of Seattle?”

  “Pretty much, yes.”

  “That has to be an enormous amount of data,” I said.

  “It is.”

  �
�How can you possibly parse it all?”

  “I can’t. That’s Mother’s job.”

  “Your computer?”

  “Not exactly. Mother’s an algorithm.”

  “What does it do, exactly?”

  “She does this,” he said, then reached over and pressed a few buttons on one of the keyboards positioned along the long table.

  The images on the wall of screens suddenly shifted, morphing into a single, very large map of the city covered with a variety of small color-coded numbers and symbols—the latter reminded me of something you’d find in an ancient alchemy textbook. The map appeared to be centered around a section of downtown Seattle. I wanted to pull out my phone and take a picture, but something told me Fatman Neil wasn’t going to be cool with that.

  “What does all this mean?” Chloe said, leaning forward—as if getting slightly closer might help her make sense of the visual chaos contained in those multiple screens.

  “She notifies us when something out of the ordinary happens. Mother’s a mix of pattern discovery, facial recognition, speech interpretation, traffic monitoring, and fractal modeling software.”

  “Holy shit.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Just wait until quantum computers hit the mainstream. The possibilities are endless.”

  “Aren’t quantum computers still decades away?” Chloe asked.

  “They’re coming. But like Andersen Cheng from Post-Quantum said—and I’m paraphrasing here—the first working quantum machine will never be announced, because whoever gets it will become the master of the universe.”

  “That’s a bold claim,” I said.

  “It’s a fact. They’ll be able to crack Bitcoin and intercept any global communication setup in existence. They’ll become a superpower overnight.”

  “Quantum or not, this setup is impressive,” I said, and I meant it, although I couldn’t help thinking Mother felt like the indie version of whatever the hell Crow had built up in The Tower at WorGames. Was Fatman using Mother to mess with people’s lives in a similar way?

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “And you’re using all of this to play Rabbits?” Chloe asked.