by Terry Miles
“Me? No, I never play the game.”
“So what’s all this for?” I asked.
“During the last two iterations of the game, we noticed that something was off, that things were…changing. Mother was designed to monitor those changes.”
“Things were changing…how?” I asked.
“There were more…incidents of alteration, coincidences that fell outside the usual parameters, changes in the intensity in the game—or, more specifically, in the way the game was affecting the world.”
“Incidents of alteration?”
“It’s technical,” he said.
“How does Mother work, exactly?” Chloe asked.
“She was designed to monitor and track systems.”
“What kind of systems?” I asked, experiencing a sense of déjà vu as I spoke. Hadn’t I asked Crow the same thing?
“All of them,” he said. “Or at least all of the systems designed to keep a major North American city operational: sanitation, transportation, food and beverage, and many more.”
“And if something breaks down in one of these systems, you fix it?” I asked.
“Mother wasn’t designed to help us interfere or manipulate; we’re strictly observation only.”
I was extremely uneasy about the thought of privatized citywide surveillance, but at least Fatman didn’t appear to be manipulating people’s lives the way Crow was doing up in his Tower.
“And you work here, all alone?” Chloe asked.
“We’ve created something similar in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Prague, London, New York, and a bunch of other cities.”
“We?”
“Those of us concerned about changes in the game.”
“So you’re not playing Rabbits? Not at all?” I asked.
Neil turned very serious suddenly. “No, and neither are you—unless you’re stupid, suicidal, or both.”
“Because players are disappearing,” I said.
“No,” he replied. “Because so many players are disappearing…and worse.”
I wasn’t sure Fatman knew about Baron, but he clearly understood that people connected to Rabbits were dying.
“Do you have any idea why this is happening?” Chloe asked.
Neil shook his head. “That’s what we’ve been trying to find out.”
“What happened to Alan Scarpio?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Mother couldn’t find anything, and that’s very concerning.”
“What do you mean?”
“Even though he is notoriously reclusive, Scarpio remains a fairly recognizable public figure. The day he disappeared, he completely disappeared. There was nothing on any of the dozens of cameras and microphones that had picked up Scarpio’s activity regularly in the past. He just…vanished.”
“Vanished…like the Magician,” I said.
Fatman nodded.
“What are those?” Chloe asked, pointing to a few glowing yellow stars that had popped up on various locations on the map of the city while we were talking.
“AILs,” he said. “Alteration incident locations. Those stars mark the locations where players reported potential incidents of alteration.”
“What are you talking about?” Chloe asked.
“Incidents of alteration are when things appear different than expected.”
“You mean like the Mandela effect and the Berenstein Bears? False memories?” Chloe asked.
“Exactly,” Neil said. “Except what if they’re not false?”
“Other dimensions? Multiple worlds?” Chloe asked, but I could tell he wasn’t talking about that. He was talking about something else entirely.
“You’re talking about the Moriarty Factor,” I said.
Fatman smiled.
“But isn’t the Moriarty Factor just whatever trillion-dollar multinational conglomerate is behind the game guiding the experience and leading the players to clues?” Chloe asked.
“That’s one theory,” Neil said. “Somebody behind the game spending a whole bunch of money to make things happen.”
“What do you think’s happening?” I asked.
“I’m not sure, but I do know one thing.”
“What’s that?” Chloe asked.
“Moriarty was a bad guy.”
Neil let the last bit of that sentence hang in the air as he stared at me, and I thought back to the man named Crow and what he’d said to me after he staged that elaborate scene on the bus.
“What are you saying?” I asked.
“There are many of us who believe that somebody or something has been working to…compromise the game.”
“Is that possible?” Chloe asked.
“Think about what happened with that politician in London. Look how public that was,” Fatman said.
“So?” I asked.
“ ‘The door is open’? You do know that’s a key phrase in the game, right?”
“Sure,” I said, “but it’s also just four words.”
“You don’t believe it’s a coincidence,” he said.
“Maybe not, but those four words were used in connection with Jesselman’s take on immigration during his campaign two election cycles back. We can’t be sure his suicide was connected to Rabbits.”
“He was involved with a group called The Children of the Gray God—a pagan-based cult in England. He was busted having sex with three of their younger female members on Glastonbury Tor. It was a bit of a scandal.”
“The Children of the Gray God?”
“Yep. The very same secretive group that has been mentioned in connection with Rabbits in the past. The group that—”
Just as Neil was about to say something more, his computer screens lit up with activity. He pressed a few keys and suddenly a text alert popped up on his phone. “Sorry, I have to get back to work.”
“Can we meet again sometime this week? Maybe tomorrow?” I asked.
“Nope,” Neil said as he led us out of his office and back up through the gate.
“What?” Chloe asked. “Why not?”
“Whatever you do, stay away from the game,” he said as he closed and locked the gate behind us.
Our interview was clearly over.
* * *
—
We left Fatman Neil working on the makeshift citywide computer matrix he kept in his strange porn shop basement, and made our way back to Chloe’s car. The moment she closed her door, she turned to face me. “What the fuck is up with the Berenstein Bears and the homemade super-spy computer bullshit?”
“Berenstain,” I said.
“You’re not funny,” Chloe said.
“I’m actually serious.”
“It’s fucking Berenstein, and I’m not arguing with you.”
For those who might be unfamiliar with the Berenstain multiverse conundrum, there’s a popular series of children’s books called The Berenstain Bears. But, interestingly, just like Chloe, most people remember it as The Berenstein Bears. This belief in an alternate pronunciation actually runs much deeper than a simple argument that can be addressed with a Google search. The people who remember The Berenstein Bears insist their spelling and pronunciation are correct, and refuse to believe that name had ever been written or pronounced any other way.
So, what happened?
The most prevalent theory goes like this: At some point in our history, two (or more) dimensions or streams of time diverged. Our world somehow hopped tracks—slipped streams into a parallel reality. There now exists an alternate reality—which is actually our previous reality, or one of our previous realities—where that series of books is still called The Berenstein Bears and Berenstain never existed.
There are similar theories surrounding a nonexistent film from the 1990s called Shazaam, which allegedly starred the comedian Sinba
d as a genie, and the Mandela effect, a phrase coined by self-described “paranormal consultant” Fiona Broome. Broome claimed that she remembered South African leader Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, while in reality Mandela lived until December 2013.
The most logical explanation for all of these competing memories is perhaps best illustrated by the following example. The belief people share that a film from the 1990s called Shazaam starring Sinbad existed is most likely due to a number of factors, including the following: Sinbad the comedian presented a number of Sinbad the Sailor movies in 1994. While presenting the films, Sinbad wore a genielike costume. In 1996, a similarly named film, Kazaam, was released starring basketball player Shaquille O’Neal as a genie.
So, we’re either misremembering similar things en masse, or we’re living in slightly different dimensional streams that branched off at some point in the past.
As an interesting aside, Fatman Neil had a Kazaam poster up in his lair.
* * *
—
“Neil seems like a fairly well-adjusted guy,” I said.
Chloe held up her hands. “I can’t even.”
We drove for a few minutes in silence.
“What are we gonna do now?” Chloe said.
Something about her voice sounded strained. I looked down at her hands on the steering wheel. She was squeezing hard, her knuckles tight and shiny. It didn’t happen often, but I could tell that Chloe was overtired and heading into a kind of light manic state.
I’d seen her like this before. I wasn’t the only one with an obsessive personality issue connected to the game.
* * *
—
A few years after we met, there were rumors that something big was happening with Rabbits, and we were all trying to figure out if the next iteration of the game had started.
Chloe had been chasing some clues related to a missing coast guard officer, and had somehow ended up stranded on the northern anchor of the Aurora Bridge. While she was up there looking for something that was supposed to be carved into the stone, she’d slipped and almost fallen to her death.
When I finally caught up with her and helped her off the bridge, she was severely dehydrated and hadn’t slept for days. I had to track down and pay Chloe’s alcoholic mother fifty dollars in order to get her to call the hospital and have her daughter taken off the hospital’s involuntary hold list.
Like most of us consumed by the game, Rabbits was a way for Chloe to temporarily enter another realm—a place where everything wasn’t exactly the way it was in real life.
We each had our reasons for wanting the fantastical world promised by Rabbits to replace the flawed emotional narrative of our real lives. For Chloe, escaping into a mysterious world meant that she was able to forget her family for a while and focus on something exciting that she was really good at.
For me, Rabbits was a way to try and hang on to the sense of mystery and wonder I’d been obsessed with as a kid. But it was more than that. I’d always imagined my obsession with the game was somehow helping me get over the loss of my parents.
But what if the opposite were true?
I’d always believed I was following patterns and looking for connections related to the game because I was trying to stop thinking about my parents, but what if I’d been drawn into the world of Rabbits specifically because I wasn’t ready to let them go?
* * *
—
“What are we going to do now?” Chloe asked.
“Now, it’s bedtime,” I said.
“For real?”
“It’s almost two in the morning.”
“So? Don’t two in the morning me. What about The Children of the Gray God? We need to know all the fuck about that.”
I wanted to know all the fuck about that too, but I was worried about Chloe. She needed to sleep. I needed to sleep.
Fatman Neil’s porn store basement wasn’t more than fifteen minutes from my place, but Chloe was distracted, and after missing a couple of turns, she’d managed to turn it into a half-hour drive.
“We’ve been warned off Rabbits by Russell Milligan, the Magician, Crow, and now Fatman Neil,” I said. “Maybe we need to take a step back, just to regroup.”
“Wait, so you’re the voice of fucking reason now?” Chloe snapped.
“Hey, we ‘voice of reason’ each other. It’s what we do.”
“I can’t believe you can just go to sleep with all that’s happening.”
“You’re going to go to sleep too, okay?”
“Fine.”
We drove in silence for a few blocks.
“Sorry, I’m a bit…edgy. It’s just that I’ve been thinking a lot about Baron,” Chloe said. “It’s so fucked-up. What if we can figure out what happened?”
“We know what happened.”
“I mean what really happened.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Come on, K. Baron’s dead.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Baron’s dead and I don’t want you to be next.”
We drove in silence for another block.
“It’s because you dig me so hard, isn’t it?” Chloe said.
“Maybe,” I said.
I did dig Chloe, a whole lot, but at the moment, I had no idea what was going on with the two of us. I had a bunch of questions like: Would this version of Chloe’s interpretation of events over the past couple of months match my own? Was the strange shit I’d been experiencing some kind of weird dimensional flux, or was it something far more mundane?
What if I was in the middle of some kind of mental or emotional breakdown?
* * *
—
Chloe dropped me off at home, and although my body was exhausted, my mind was too wired to sleep. I turned on the television for the first time in ages (I kept my cable subscription for the Seahawks). I thought I’d try to find something that might help unwind my brain enough to let me fall asleep.
I laid down on the couch and started watching a black-and-white movie from the fifties called The Night of the Hunter. I’d chosen that movie not only because I knew it was a great film, but also because I’d actually fallen asleep watching it once before.
* * *
—
I was nine years old. My parents were hosting their monthly film-noir evening with their closest friends, Bill and Madeline Connors—Annie and Emily’s parents. As always, after they’d put me to bed, they made popcorn and the four of them settled in to watch their movie.
I’ve always loved movies, and whenever my parents had these film nights, I’d sneak out of my bedroom and hide upstairs behind the banister. I was able to see the television clearly from up there, but because of the angle, my parents couldn’t see me. As long as I stayed quiet, I was able to watch whatever they were watching.
The previous month they’d chosen something about a guy looking for murderous androids (a film I’d learn years later was Blade Runner), and before that it had been something about a boat and a sea creature that I couldn’t clearly recall.
But I remember exactly what it was about The Night of the Hunter that had made it impossible for me to turn away. It was the fact that the man in the movie—the preacher character played by Robert Mitchum—had two words written across his knuckles: “love” and “hate.”
“Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand?” he’d said, just before he went on to mime an intense struggle between love and hate using only his hands, his fingers intertwined as if he were battling for the souls of all mankind.
The scene was mesmerizing.
The Night of the Hunter felt different from the other black-and-white movies I’d seen—more real somehow. More grown-up. There was something about the way The Night of the Hunter made me feel—as if there was something going on beneath the surf
ace of that film, something deeply authentic and moving. It was the same way I would come to feel about Rabbits, later.
My parents found me asleep in the hallway sometime after The Night of the Hunter had ended and carried me to bed. They never mentioned anything about my cinematic transgressions, and I continued to spy on their movies from behind that banister for as long as we lived in that house.
But this time, as I was nodding off, I realized something.
I jumped up from the couch, opened my computer, and loaded a clip from The Night of the Hunter on YouTube. I pressed play.
The scene with Robert Mitchum unfolded just as I remembered, with the two hands, love and hate battling for supremacy, but something was wrong. In the version I remembered, “love” had been written across the knuckles on Mitchum’s right hand and “hate” across his left. In the version I was looking at now, the words were reversed.
I performed a search and took a look at a dozen or so images. They were all the same. “Hate” on the right, “love” on the left.
I felt a wave of panic wash over me, and the world went black.
* * *
—
I was jarred violently awake by a beeping and blaring Klaxon followed by an announcement.
It was a test of the Washington Emergency Alert System.
I jumped up and switched off the television. The room was suddenly dark and completely silent. The only light came from the clock on the DVR: 4:44 a.m.
NOTES ON THE GAME:
MISSIVE BY HAZEL
(AUTHENTICATED BY BLOCKCHAIN)
Find the game. Play the game.
Once you discover the entry point phrase, “The Door Is Open,” it’s time to follow the clues and find your path.
Once The Door Is Open, the game begins to focus on those players who are making progress. The game will guide them.
As the clues get deeper and more complex, the players begin to fall away. Eventually, if you make it far enough, you will be one of the few remaining who know something is different. You will be one of the few who understand. You will be one of the few who may have touched another world.