Chapter 1: Version 0.2
I swept my camera over a copse of bare deciduous trees beside a walking trail in Chatfield State Park. A few scraggly pines provided splashes of green amidst the brown bark and white snow. Their shadows didn’t look deep enough to hide any animals, much less any monsters.
I hated how glad I felt for that. How important it seemed.
How it didn’t actually offer any real safety. The creature I pictured in my nightmares didn’t need shadows to hide in.
I shook my head and focused on the relevant details of the scene.
In the middle of the copse, a patch of implausibly green bushes poked out of the snow. If they’d been holly or juniper, fine, but these had the kind of broad arrowhead leaves I’d had to rake up from my front yard as a kid. The kind of leaves that absolutely should not still be green and attached in February in Colorado.
I called, “Wood here.”
Lena tramped through the snow. She left a trail of slush and mud behind her, and when she came to a stop, one hand on her hip, the other holding out her phone, the surface of the snow behind her began to crystallize into something like a snow angel.
I tilted my phone in her direction.
She smirked. “Did you really find more Wood, or did you just want an excuse to peek at my avatar?”
“It can be both,” I said.
Some things about Lena’s appearance remained the same whether I looked at her through the phone or not. Her cheeks, rosy and freckled from the cold air. Her green eyes, narrowed in fake suspicion, gleaming merrily in the pale afternoon light. The copper ringlets poking at odd angles from beneath her hat.
Some things didn’t.
To my naked eyes, Lena was dressed in blue snow pants, a blue toque and her familiar – probably fashionable once, years before she bought it at a thrift store – black and pink jacket.
Through my phone camera, she wore a dress of living flame, which rippled up her body to join her hair and her crown and the pair of blazing wings that stretched from her back, arching as high as some of the new-growth trees around her.
This was her avatar in Third Eye, the Augmented Reality, Altered Reality Game we’d both backed the crowdfunding campaign for over half a decade ago. A month ago, it had finally come out, and the sight of this avatar had gone a long way toward convincing both of us to actually play the game.
That had gone some places.
Perhaps most important of which was the fact that those wings, rendered with impossible fidelity by a game running on our phones, were, however slowly, melting the snow behind her.
Third Eye was more than just a game. It was something incredible, either magical or so sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from it.
It had reached into our pasts and dredged up fears and regrets we’d suppressed for years. Lena had been reunited with her childhood stuffed toy, a plush dragon called Bernie, but Bernie had become a real, living creature, a Daimon.
It had given us access to what I could only describe as spells. We could take a Material, like the Wood I’d just focused my phone on, combine it with a Reactant – one of the four classical elements, Air, Earth, Fire or Water –, and manifest an object we could control using our phones and gestures. A real object, which could have real effects, like melting snow, cooking us s’mores, or pushing people around.
It had given us real life Hit Points. We knew they protected us from any harm the game could throw at us, for as long as they lasted, but we’d started to suspect they protected against other things, too. A walk to the store used to tire me out; I’d been tramping through the Chatfield snow for an hour, after a walk to the bus stop and a long ride out here. As near as I could tell, any fatigue I should’ve felt was interpreted as instances of “damage” too small to make me lose HP, much less to affect my actual body. A month ago, just thinking about spending this much time in nature would’ve made my allergies flare up; I didn’t remember so much as sneezing since I started playing Third Eye.
It had forced Lena and I to confront our relationship, which had devolved from lovers to friends to just roommates. We were together again, and without Third Eye forcing us to face head on how stupid we’d been, I didn’t think that would’ve happened.
That alone would have made me so grateful to the game I would’ve put up with almost anything.
Almost.
A week ago, Third Eye had almost killed us.
While exploring an abandoned construction site – yeah, I know, we should’ve known better – Lena and I had come face-to-face with a monster. Not that the monster had had a face, as far as I could tell. It attacked us, injured one of our friends, and seemed hell-bent on killing us.
Third Eye had been our only defense against it. Those weird little spells we could pull off? They let us at least throw something in the path of the creature’s shadowy tendrils.
Even so, we would never have survived on our own.
Another player, who we were pretty sure was actually one of the developers, had come to our rescue. Did I mention she was a little girl? Albie, who we’d first met in Harvard Gulch Park a few weeks before, responded to our call for help and showed us just how far we had to go to get to her level.
If we didn’t get there, fast, the next time we encountered a creature like that might be the last thing we ever did.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
Good reason to stop playing?
Yeah, except that Albie, under her developer handle AlephLambda, had implied the creature, unlike the powers we and she both used to fight it, didn’t come from Third Eye.
Maybe we’d misunderstood. Maybe she’d lied to us.
But when a sweet little girl swoops in and saves your ass, it’s real hard not to trust her.
Lena and I were going to be cautious, we were going to be careful. We were sure as hell not going to go anywhere near a site that seemed, through Third Eye or otherwise, to be warding us away.
But we were going to keep playing.
All of that was a roundabout way of explaining why we were stomping our way through the snow at Chatfield, looking for objects that, to the naked eye, didn’t exist.
Third Eye placed these “impossible objects” in the world, to be found using the game’s AR filter, and collecting them supplied us with the resources we needed to keep playing. Potentially, the resources we needed to keep surviving.
This was our first time seeking them in an almost totally natural environment. Partly because we, and other players in the area, had scooped up most of what was available along the light rail routes in the Denver metro area. Partly because, since Third Eye objects seemed to exist in an eternal late Spring, they were particularly easy to spot in the early February wilderness.
“You want this patch,” Lena asked, “or should I take it?”
“You need Wood more than me,” I said.
She wiggled her eyebrows and I snorted.
Then she stepped past me to touch the bushes.
There was a flash of light, excessively bright. By now, we both knew to avert our eyes when we collected something. The flashbang effect when we grabbed a Material ranked low among Third Eye’s many mysteries, but it remained a mystery. It just seemed annoying.
“There’s fifteen more for the woodpile,” Lena said. Experimenting with her Fire Reactant used up a lot of her supply of basic Materials, since Fire seemed to invariably consume whatever she used it with. Wood was both the easiest Material to measure Fire’s effects on, and the one we’d found the most of.
If we could empty our in-game inventories into the field, she would’ve had a whole log cabin’s worth of wood stocked up. We could, eventually, but each object we manifested cost us Mind Points or Magic Points or whatever Third Eye meant by MP. Lena had a hundred. I had more, but only the last ten would come back every morning; the rest came from a Potion Albie had given me back at the park.
Of course, between the two of us, we probably had a small mansion’s worth of Stone, Iron, Glass, and Plastic, which seemed to round out the five basic Materials. I took a disproportionate amount of the other four and left most of the Wood to Lena to help her practice.
Of course, since we’d gotten to Chatfield, we hadn’t found much other than Wood. The game seemed to classify every plant under that heading, and it seemed to try to fit the “impossible objects” we found at least somewhat into the environment around them. Out here, that meant Wood from plants – trivial to spot since they were the only non-evergreens with foliage at this time of year – and a handful of signs along the trail. I’d grabbed Iron and Plastic from those.
“No knock on what we’re getting out here,” I said, “and nothing against being out in nature, but this hasn’t exactly been lucrative.”
“They don’t call it an experiment because you know it’s going to work beforehand.” Lena shrugged. “Besides, you know I’m always down for some birdwatching.”
I smiled. “I do.”
The first Material we ever found was a wooden fence we only spotted because Lena had been pointing her phone’s camera at a nearby woodpecker.
Something about my smile drew a matching one from her. I wondered if she was reminiscing about the same incident as me.
Either way, she padded over and hugged my waist. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and felt a rush of warmth. The air stirred around us as her wings beat. I leaned forward and kissed the top of her head.
I could forgive Third Eye a whole hell of a lot in exchange for moments like this. Especially if these moments lasted for more than a moment.
So naturally, our phones beeped.
Since the sounds came through at the same time, I knew they had to be telling us about Discord messages. I don’t think Lena and I shared any other updates. Nor did we leave most of the Discord servers we participated in unmuted.
If our phones had beeped in unison, it was because we’d been pinged by a message in the Third Eye Wiki server.
“We don’t have to get that,” Lena mumbled against my chest.
“What if Erin pinged us to call for help?” I asked.
Erin was the administrator of the wiki, a genuine Big Name Fan within the Third Eye community. We’d been lucky enough to meet in person and found out she was a genuinely good friend, too.
“Then she’s fucked,” Lena said. “We’re not getting back to town until the next bus comes out here.”
“Point,” I said. “What if she pinged us to warn that we were walking into a monster den?”
“Ugh.” Lena poked her finger into my ribs. “Don’t start being right. I don’t want to get used to it.”
I laughed, but I disentangled my arms from her and she did the same.
We raised our phones, getting, for an instant, glimpses of each other’s avatars. Mine, for reference, is nowhere near as spectacular as Lena’s, but from the number of times I’d caught her glancing at me through her phone, she seemed to like the looks of it.
Then, more reluctantly than we should have if either of us believed there was even the slightest chance we were in danger – which, frankly, we probably should have – we tapped to Discord.
The message, it turned out, hadn’t come from Erin, but from another person we’d introduced to the wiki team. Zhizhi Wong wasn’t a Third Eye player herself, but a reporter we’d struck a deal with.
She’d agreed to sit on the information that Third Eye could give players real magic. If only because, as an intern at 9News, she was extremely unlikely to convince her bosses to run such a crazy story – and guaranteed not to be allowed to present it on air if they did agree to run it.
In exchange, we’d given her first crack at the story and the chance to film our expeditions. When that had put her in the path of the creature that attacked us, with no HP to protect her, I wouldn’t have blamed her if she called the deal off.
Instead, she’d remained on board with the wiki team’s plan to slow play the reveal.
For now, we were trying to teach players how to play safely, and once they realized that their real safety was at stake, not just their in-game success, they’d have already built the right habits to stay alive. The alternative – coming clean right away – might’ve shocked more people into listening. Or it might have gotten us written off as lunatics and ignored.
I don’t know if that was a self-serving plan for us, since at the very least, Lena, Erin and I all had reasons we were desperate to stay in Third Eye.
I knew it was the best plan we had.
The message beside Zhizhi’s handle, CubSoda, didn’t seem to be about either revealing or hiding Third Eye’s real-world applications, though.
CubSoda: @Important Have you guys heard about this?
She attached a link.
CubSoda: I know most of you are down on PVP, but I’ve got to say, from what I’ve seen, this looks like a pretty safe way to go about it.
Lena and I tapped the links on our screens.
I frowned.
Not least because Lena pumped her fist and said, “Oh, hell yes.”