Chapter 11: Getting Wood

“This,” Lena said, “sure is not what I expected to see through a third eye.”

We stood on the sidewalk near the base of the tree. The downy woodpecker had vacated, either climbing into the leaves overhead or flying off.

The fence remained –

Provided we looked at it through our phone cameras, and provided we left Third Eye turned on.

I’d exited the app, snapped a picture, signed back in and done the same. Without: open grass right up to the pavement. With: a peeling white picket fence.

The fence only covered a single span, about two meters long. Even if it had really existed, it wouldn’t have stopped anyone from walking around it in either direction. I doubted anyone would want to, though, because it just blocked off a small greenbelt, some gravel, and a hill too steep to comfortably walk down but not steep enough for an interesting climb.

In or out of Third Eye, the fence seemed useless.

I knelt next to it and leaned in closer. No matter how much I zoomed my camera in, the woodgrain texture and peeling paint looked realistic.

Lena tapped my shoulder. “You really think this thing is here on purpose? It’s not just a bug?”

“Absolutely. It must be a clue.”

If I’d encountered it in any other AR game, I’d have assumed it was an error in the generation algorithm the game used to populate the environment with content.

In an ARG, on the other hand, it got my imagination buzzing.

“It’s a fence,” she said.

“So which is it doing?” I asked.

She cocked her head. “Keeping us out... or in?”

I nodded.

“That’s a stretch,” she said.

“It’s got to be important. This is what Third Eye wants us looking for.”

“How can you possibly know that?”

“Because spotting it got me XP.”

“For real?” Lena flicked back and forth on her phone. “Oh, just ten.”

“Huh. I got a hundred.”

“The fuck!?” Lena squatted next to me and poked her phone near where the fence would have been, if it really existed. “Why did you get more than me?”

Through my phone, I saw her dress billow out like a spreading flame, her hand stretch out to bless the fence with a touch. Her nearness didn’t burn the wood, but some of the peeling paint blackened along its edges. If she actually “grabbed” the fence, would it catch fire?

She looked like she could grab it, too. I saw no phone in her hand. I hadn’t noticed last night, but Third Eye seemed to exclude the actual devices we ran it on from its images. Lena’s smart glasses had vanished from her face as well. Would it show her with sunglasses or reading glasses if she wore those? Would it show, or somehow translate into fantasy terms, a phone the Third Eye app hadn’t been installed on?

Stuff to experiment with later. We couldn’t take the fence with us, so we needed to focus on it for now.

I held my own phone right up against it. “Maybe I got more XP because I was the first one to see it?”

“No way, it’s in the picture I took of that downy.” Lena’s hand arced in my direction, a trail of heat distortion in its wake. I realized she wanted me to see something on her phone, so I forced myself to lower mine. Sure enough, the pointed tops of the vertical slats poked up from the bottom of her picture.

“The first to focus my camera on it, then,” I said.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

“I guess.” She scowled. Through my camera, her wings beat in agitation. “Still, I agree with you, if it gives XP it’s got to be important. Kind of interesting how they set it up. It’s worth more to the first person who focuses on it, but worth something to everybody. Fits the whole ‘coop PVP’ thing.”

“Huh. That’s a pretty neat bit of design.”

“You sound surprised.”

“The UI and cash shop didn’t leave me with a lot of confidence,” I said. “I guess they have a real game designer somewhere, not just a good artist and a ton of horsepower to throw at visuals.”

“Speaking of visuals,” Lena said, “this fence is boring, but the details are hella impressive.”

“I wonder. Realistic environmental objects serve an actual purpose in the game. They make it harder to find the clues.” I held my hand over the fence. Third Eye rendered my gloves, actually padded, fraying and from Walmart, as supple dark blue leather. “Maybe they made the tech to render these world objects first, then threw in the avatars for attention-grabbing.”

“Good call if they did, ‘cause I wouldn’t be out here if we didn’t look so damn awesome.”

I tried to hide my smile. “We? Not just you?”

“I said what I said.” She straightened up, turned her back on me, and brushed her hands on her pants. Through Third Eye, she drew her hands through the flames of her dress; trails of fire clung to her fingers and dripped to the ground as she pulled them away. “Let’s see if we can’t find any more clues.”

“Sure.” I paced around the sidewalk side of the fence, checking for unusual whorls or patterns in how the paint peeled. Nothing leapt out at me. “The fence may just be a breadcrumb we’re supposed to follow, not a proper clue. Maybe you should look around for the next one. If we trade off focusing on what we find, we can both crank our XP up.”

“I’ve been looking the whole time,” Lena said. “It’s a real pain when we’re just looking for mundane objects.”

“I’m not finding anything on the fence itself.” I flicked to Notepad Plus and started tapping in shorthand about its location and physical features. Considering my skill with the phone keyboard, it took an obnoxiously long time. I really should’ve asked Lena to handle this or found a speech to text app.

Still, I pressed on.

Location: Edge of parking lot greenbelt overlooking the park-like Hampden green way. Nearest business a Denny’s. Between highway 285/big Hampden, which around the bend housed my and Lena’s apartment, and Old/little Hampden, which had been a main street once but got depreciated before our time. Liminal? Relevant?

Traits: A two meter span, with seven vertical slats and two horizontal ones holding them together. Maybe sixty centimeters out of the ground, assuming Third Eye’s Canadian dev team used metric, otherwise around two feet. I didn’t know enough about wood to identify the specific species, or about paint to know how “old” it was supposed to be. Residential? Suggestive of old-fashioned domesticity?

I checked around the base. The grass looked like it had grown up and around the fence posts, avoiding the regular mowing the rest of the greenbelt got. Just like it would have if the fence were real.

I reached down to touch the grass. What would happen to the lawn in Third Eye when my physical hand moved the shorter real grass?

My fingers brushed the fence and my screen flashed so bright I dropped the phone and stumbled back. Too late. I was on my ass, blinking spots from my eyes.

I felt warm hands on my shoulder and looked up to see Lena kneeling behind me. She leaned closer. “You okay?”

“Whoops,” I mumbled.

“That’s not an answer!”

“I’m good, I’m good.” I spread my hands in front of me. “Holding up ten fingers.”

“You gotta let somebody else do that and ask you.” Lena did. “How many fingers?”

“One.” I chuckled and she lowered it.

“What the hell did you do, anyway? Where’s the fence?”

“Huh?” I craned my neck to look through Lena’s phone. Sure enough, her Third Eye no longer showed any fence. The view wasn’t identical – the grass remained longer in Third Eye, and there were seven holes where the slats had been driven into the ground. “Bizarre. I was going to mess with the grass to see how it responded in Third Eye.”

“I always knew it was a bad idea to touch grass.” Considering how online, and abrasive, Lena was, I had no doubt she got that advice more often than I did.

“In this case, I think I touched the fence itself by accident.” For a second, it had felt like my fingers had been stopped by actual wood, but I knew that had to be my brain backfilling my memories with what it expected to find. “I don’t know what I did to it, though.”

“Check your app?”

I nodded and scooped my phone up. Good thing I’d dropped it in the grass. I couldn’t have afforded to replace it if it got smashed on the pavement.

I surveyed the greenbelt. I’d thought I might have “claimed” the fence clue for myself, hiding it from others but leaving it active in my version of the app. Nope. I had the same view as through Lena’s phone.

I saw I had a message on the Third Eye app itself, so I switched.

It was another scroll like the ones we picked our signup bonuses from. This one seemed more like an achievement or trophy. “First Find,” I read off. I didn’t speak the XP award aloud in the hopes of avoiding Lena’s ire. I’d already pulled ahead of her from – focusing my camera on the fence, I guessed – and now I had a thousand from the First Find ‘chieve.

When I tapped the clipart scroll, I saw a new window floating awkwardly in the empty gray space in the UI. This one fit the Win 3.1 aesthetic, a simple white box with a title, ‘Materials,’ and a list like a spreadsheet. It contained a bunch of resources and it had only one column besides their names, called ‘No.’ I figured it meant the number I had access to, because almost all of the Materials were at zero.

Just one exception: by touching the fence, with its seven vertical and two horizontal slats, I’d gotten nine units of Wood.