Chapter 10: IRL

My parka was the most expensive thing I owned, after my PC. As Lena and I trudged down the sidewalk in the freezing shadows of Swedish Medical Center, I hugged the coat close and thanked past Cam for his foresight.

Lena’s coat looked a lot more stylish than mine, black and glossy with hot pink stripes down the arms, and in the kind of weather she’d normally consider walking to a store in, it served just as well. Maybe if it had been real leather, or if its lining had been real down, she wouldn’t have shivered inside it.

Then again, the cold offered her a reason to complain about being outside.

“I changed my mind,” she said. “Let’s go home and wait for it to warm up.”

“And fall behind the curve? You want to risk it, that’s on you. I’m going to head downtown and see if Third Eye generated some weird shit along Broadway.”

Her teeth chattered. Did cold even make that happen in real life, or was it just a behavior people picked up from cartoons and affected to make a point? “You say we’re at risk of falling behind, but we don’t even know if there’s anything to look for. Besides, do you really think there’s somebody else poking around downtown Englewood?”

“You never know.”

“You sure can guess.” She tugged at my arm, but my hands remained in my pockets, rendering me an immovable object. At least for a force as resistable as Lena.

Physically, at least. She leaned closer and whispered, “Wouldn’t you rather finish Trowel Samurai?”

“When you put it that way...” I glanced at her. Cold had turned her nose almost as red as her hair. “Wait, don’t you need to wrap it up for your guide?”

“Oh, I did that last night.” She shrugged. “Nothing else to do after you bailed on me. I just left Third Eye running on the side to see if something would happen with it.”

Just how late had she stayed up? I didn’t ask, figuring I wouldn’t like the answer. “You submitted the guide without letting me read it over?”

“It’s fine,” she said. “I know it’s all accurate, and they won’t give a shit if I screwed up the grammar. What do you want me to do? Wait for you to beat Cake Daimyo? I wouldn’t get it in for a week.”

“Hmph. I just needed to eat something.”

“You’ve had two meals since then!”

“And something else on my mind.”

“Right. Sounds like somebody would rather freeze his ass off out here than confront his failures as a human being.”

“I don’t judge my worth as a human being on whether or not I can beat Cake Daimyo.”

“Seriously? You got a pretty fucked up ethical framework, Cam.”

I chuckled. I risked extracting my hand from my pocket and laid it over hers on my arm. “Listen, Lena. I know it’s probably a wild goose chase, but I just want to get a sense of what Third Eye’s doing. How rare any sort of interaction is going to end up being. If we’re really lucky, we’ll figure out what makes XP go up.”

“If we’re really lucky, we’ll find a way to grind XP without having to go out.”

I searched her face for some sign she was kidding. “I’m starting to see why you thought Kickstarting an AR game would help you out of your rut.”

She let go of my arm so she could punch me in it.

Once we got out of the shadows of the hospital, the sun started to warm our backs and Lena picked up her pace. She pushed her jaw forward and scrunched her shoulders as she pulled ahead of me. I knew from her body language she felt better and hated to admit it.

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I wondered what drove her forward. Curiosity? Fear of falling behind – especially behind me? Fear of losing access to Third Eye after she’d paid so much to get in, and looked so cool with it active?

Whatever it was, it drove her past even the potentially welcome refuges of a pizza joint and a used bookstore. She didn’t slow until she reached the stoplight at Broadway. Although it was green, she pulled her phone out and panned it around.

I extracted mine and risked taking my glove off to get it active, then tried the same.

“Just like I thought,” Lena said. “This was a waste of time. There’s just as many people on Hampden, anyway.”

I checked storefronts, and the empty outdoor seating of a café across the street, and the grocery store parking lot.

I double checked the barcade a few doors down, because it was the kind of place a lot of AR games would make into a hub. Lots of people in and out, a guaranteed interest in games, a clientele that skewed younger than a full-on retro arcade. It was closed, but I could still see board games on its shelves, bottles of beer behind the bar, and arcade machines along the wall.

All in real life. In Third Eye, it offered a whole lot of nothing.

If I’d been looking to pocket some monsters on the go, this intersection would’ve offered multiple opportunities. Most AR games I’d played, I would’ve seen at least something.

I tilted my phone so the camera got a glimpse of Lena’s Third Eye avatar. Just to make sure the app was working.

Sure was. It had translated her winter gear, turning her fiery dress into something with a high collar, her toque into a gold rimmed hat of burning feathers. Her flames reflected off window panes and seemed to light the pavement under her booted feet.

I saw her eyes shift in my direction and redirected my phone, but not before she smirked at me.

“Enjoying the view?” She asked.

“Lil’ bit,” I said.

Her smirk faded. She squared her shoulders. “There’s nothing out here.”

“We’re still not downtown proper,” I said. “It’s a more walkable area, the library’s there, more kids, people getting off the light rail, the local shuttle. It’s still worth a shot.”

“The light’s already red. Now we have to stand here and freeze.” Lena jammed her hands into her pockets. “Just as I always suspected. The outside world sucks.”

“Come on. It’s not even that cold now.”

Which surprised me. I expected the temperature to swing over the course of a day, but not for it to feel almost temperate before noon.

She tapped her phone against her chin. “Not as bad as it was, anyway.”

“Exactly. We’ve come this far. We might as well check downtown. If we don’t find anything there, we’ll hop the shuttle back to Hampden and call it a day, and I won’t bug you about it again. Promise.”

“You know,” she said, “we don’t even know what we’re looking for.”

“But imagine,” I said, “if we’re the first ones to find out.”

I leaned forward so I could watch the grin spread across her face. She didn’t need Third Eye to light up.

The walk signal turned green and we sprinted across the crosswalk.

By the time we escaped the shadows sandwiched between more trees and the new growth arcology on the south side of the street, Lena’s grin had slipped and so had my confidence.

I kept sweeping my phone back and forth. Whenever I saw movement, my pulse quickened. Whenever I realized I’d just noticed the wind or a squirrel or somebody walking to the store, my shoulders drooped.

We reached the open space of the downtown shopping center. Parking lots promised more sunlight but also no shelter from the wind. Plus or minus? I hardly noticed, half because I no longer felt uncomfortably cold, half because my failure to find anything in Third Eye dominated my mind.

What a waste of time.

We should’ve haunted the Discord and the subreddit instead. Somebody must’ve discovered gameplay by now, if there was any to find. Lena and I were falling behind because I’d convinced myself we could get ahead of the curve.

She grabbed my arm. “Check it out!”

My gaze snapped up. “What did you find?”

“A downy!” Lena angled her camera up and pointed at a tiny woodpecker clinging to one of the trees the city had planted to mitigate the noise from Hampden.

I smiled and shook my head. “If you want to see woodpeckers, you could just hang suet from the railing outside our apartment.”

“Yeah, but suet’s gross and I can’t get you to handle it for me.” She snapped a couple of photos and leaned in to whisper. “This is like the one thing I enjoy about going out, okay, Cam? It’s going to be the only good thing about the whole expedition.”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t really register her words.

Slowly, I panned my phone camera over the tree with the downy on it.

The little bird perched on the bark just above a single span of run-down wooden fence that might once have been a white picket. Like the tree and the bird, the fence looked like a residential remnant, untouched by the commercialization of the downtown.

Two problems with that.

First, this area had been more commercial in the past, a shopping mall instead of a town hall and nicer apartments than mine. If anybody had lived here, it had been before my parents’ time.

Second, unlike the tree and the bird, the fence only existed in Third Eye.