Chapter 111: Future Sight
Allen inclined his head at my conclusion.
Jan coughed into her fist. Gerry and Bob nodded. Nadia and Ramon looked away. Matt scowled, but instead of meeting my eyes, he dropped his gaze to the laptop on the table before him.
I got it, obviously. Third Eye had shown Allen a vision of his hometown in ruins. From what he and Jan had said, that probably didn’t exhaust the awful shit they’d experienced as a result of the game. It had scared them, scarred them.
Just a glimpse of that Realm and what it seemed to represent had frightened Gerry into complying with Allen. The other captives might resist Allen’s domination, but they weren’t seriously fighting to escape his little survivalist cabin. If all that was waiting for them was whatever apocalypse had left a city stripped of human habitation, wasn’t it safer to carve out an equitable arrangement here in the wilderness?
The vision scared me, too. If one city could fall into ruins, any could. Maybe they all could.
But it didn’t terrify me the way it clearly did everyone else.
Why? I took a moment to figure it out. This time, I couldn’t afford to sound like a dumbass.
They gave me my moment and then some. Everyone else seemed too upset to speak.
Everyone? I glanced at Lena.
She had a hand on her chin and her eyes were narrowed, but she wasn’t shrinking in on herself with fear. If anything, she looked calmer than she had before I finished laying things out. She flicked a glance my way.
I nodded to her.
Allen’s Realm terrified the others because they had no way to contextualize it.
Which was, in part, my and Lena’s fault.
The last time I’d checked the wiki page for Realms, it had linked to descriptions of eleven separate instances. We’d contributed three of those pages: the ones for hers, for Miguel’s, and for the great tree in the Black Forest. We’d described the two we knew more about as personalized, inspired by the players’ pasts. Under the Speculation header of the main Realms page, we’d helped Erin craft a section theorizing about Third Eye Productions drawing on player input to create custom game environments.
Like a lot of what we’d posted, it was true. It just wasn’t close to complete.
Partly, we’d held back because we didn’t want to tank our credibility or incite a panic by declaring the existence of magic. I felt increasingly uneasy about waiting until the end of the tournament, not least because we now had to worry about Omar taking our magic away.
Partly, though, maybe mostly, we’d hesitated because the Realms felt too personal to share with a wiki audience. Lena’s had reflected the darkest chapter of her life. The reminder had left her crying outside her old door. It had ultimately led to us getting back together, so I couldn’t bring myself to hate the devs for it. Nonetheless, if Lena hadn’t gotten Bernie from her Realm, I thought she might have uninstalled Third Eye that day. I wouldn’t have blamed her in the slightest.
All but one of the other entries had followed our lead. Because we knew how we’d couched our descriptions of Realms, we could read between the lines and guess at least the broad outlines of what other players wrote about.
Only one entry had gone full burn-it-all-down, rant-like-a-conspiracy-theorist openness. The person posting it had done so anonymously – and, according to Erin, with their IP obscured. The details fit what we knew of other Realms, though. A twisted, mirrored version of the player’s former house as it had been on the day they came home early and found their girlfriend in bed with their best friend. The house had seemed to stretch unnaturally, and everything was buffeted by a horrible wind because all of the windows and doors were just gone. The player posted that they walked away with three Air and a demand to know how Third Eye Productions found out about the incident.
Of course, that entry got flamed to hell in the comments section. Erin had forbidden any of the wiki team members from editing the entry, and she pruned the comments when they escalated to the level of personal attacks on the poster. (My understanding was that she deleted almost every one.) Despite her efforts, other users kept trying to remove the entry as an obvious troll, the same as anything else that talked about Third Eye as more than a game.
Lena and I knew better, of course. So did everyone at this table, considering they’d been transported through Allen’s Key.
But, I realized, they didn’t know everything we did.
I turned to Lena.
She looked up at me.
I raised an eyebrow.
She said, “It’s not just me, right?”
“It’s not,” I said.
“Okay, so.” She extricated her wrist from my hand and pushed her chair up against the table. “I think that conclusion is kinda dumb?”
Everyone stared at her, except me. I gave her a reassuring smile, then looked back to the others.
Allen started to rise. “How can you say that?”
“Easy,” Lena said. “Don’t get me wrong. I get how that would be scary as hell. I’m not even saying it’s impossible that you’re right! It is one hell of a leap, though.”
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“How do you explain it, then?” Allen demanded. “I sure as hell never walked around in a version of Philly covered by plants before.”
“And I,” Lena said, “didn’t literally light the hallways of my apartment building on fire.”
“Uh.” Allen sank back into his seat. Though his mask made it hard to tell, I thought he was boggling at Lena.
“It’s not your fault,” I said. “Actually, it’s not any of your faults. This shit isn’t always easy to talk about, and frankly, as far as I can tell, nobody in a position to do so has told everything where you could have heard it. It’s not really my place to start, even now, but it might be important to. Do you mind if I share enough to explain to them, Lena?”
Her streamer’s smile slipped. For a moment. She conjured it back as easily as we pulled objects from our phones with Third Eye. “We’ve gotta. This is more important than me being embarrassed about fucking up my life.”
“Thanks.” I nodded. “Realms aren’t – I was going to say ‘real,’ but that doesn’t quite get at what I mean. They’re maybe the realest things in Third Eye. Lena actually used the right word already. They’re not literal.”
“I have ‘literally’ no idea what you’re talking about,” Allen said. Which might’ve been the first thing I’d ever heard from him that didn’t make me want to punch his mask off. Lena’s laugh told me she felt the same.
It also made my smile widen. “Lena’s Realm was a representation of where she used to live, yeah. The apartment itself was almost exactly like what she remembered. Through Third Eye, the hallways were engulfed in flames, though. That fire was never really there. It was Third Eye’s way of representing how she used to shut out the world.”
“Why Fire?” Lena shrugged. “We’re not sure, tbh. We don’t know how our Reactants get picked. I used to think mine was because I backed the game for too much money to get the objectively best avatar, but a lot of players seem to get something that suits them first. Maybe if I was more into Earth, my Realm would’ve been a pyramid or something. Water, and it would’ve had a moat. Air, I’m not really sure. Cam?”
“Floating castle?”
“That would’ve been super sick.” She closed her eyes. “Oh man. If I’d lived in a floating castle IRL, I think I’d have stayed a shut-in.”
“As all right-thinking people would,” I said.
Her smile widened.
I realized that I’d slipped as much into streamer mode as she had.
It would be a long-ass time before we ever shared this episode of The Magnificent Ashbird. It might just be the most important one we ever made, though.
I pressed on. “Or, take the arcade we found. It’s not just that the mall it was part of got demolished in real life. The Third Eye version didn’t have the same layout as the real thing. It was bigger, darker, more the idea of an arcade than that specific one. Hell, the maintenance hallways had a bunch of kiddified traps and puzzles, like a funhouse version of a role-playing game dungeon.”
“I still really want to explore more of those hallways,” Lena said. “You say RPG, I say game show.”
“Maybe after we get done with our road trip,” I said.
We exchanged thumbs up.
I can’t say the people around the table stared at us less after this exchange.
“The point is,” I said, “the Realms we’ve seen don’t really show the player’s past. They reflect it.”
“Not even that,” Lena said. “The way Realms work is creepy, but not the way you’re all thinking.”
I glanced at her. “Hm?”
“Maybe they reflect how a player felt about something in his past,” she said. “I’m not sure it’s even that simple, though. I think they show the player something Third Eye Productions thinks he should see.”
I found myself straining to hold my confident smile.
Based on Miguel’s realm, I knew the devs could end up disagreeing with a player about what the latter needed. They could, I was pretty sure, make mistakes.
Why would they think Allen should see Philadelphia in ruins in the first place, though? If Realms represented the game’s bespoke content, did that mean Albie or her brother, or some unknown other member of the dev team, had deliberately crafted that horrifying vision?
Matt asked what Lena and I weren’t willing to. “If that’s the case, why would Third Eye Productions think this Realm was an appropriate thing to show a player?”
Lena sank back in her chair.
I ran my fingers through my hair. “I... don’t know.”
At least, I hoped I didn’t.
Matt believed Third Eye had been built to encourage PVP, and whether I liked it or not, I suspected he was right. Spoiler alert, I did not like it.
Neither did a lot of the playerbase.
Maybe if Third Eye had been presented to us from the outset as an AR-enhanced game of Assassin, we’d have jumped in wholeheartedly. We might have jumped the hell out when we started to realize it had real-world effects, but until then, it would’ve sounded cool. That wasn’t the pitch in the Kickstarter, though. The AR-ARG had delivered on Augmented Reality, but it was light on Altered Reality Game and surprisingly heavy on head-to-head competition.
A lot of us had pushed back against the game’s design. As The Magnificent Ashbird, Lena traded dazzling smiles and informative tutorials for the chance to encourage her viewers to avoid invasions and take care with arranged PVP. Erin’s invasion report warned about aggressive players and helped defensive ones work together. Joon Woo encouraged people to speculate and experiment instead of fighting.
A whole lot of people listened.
Third Eye PVP wouldn’t have been abandoned, not entirely. If not for the buzz about Omar’s tournament, however, almost all the top players would have ditched it. Even the tournament hadn’t been enough to entice any of the wiki team members other than Lena. A lot of the top players were people with too much else going on to drop everything and zip down to Florida.
Which was far from what the devs seemed to want.
Had they shaped Allen into Mask because they needed to give strong players a reason to fight?
I couldn’t consider it worse than believing uncritically that an apocalypse was not just in potentia, but inevitable. It was, however, yet another scary thought.
Jan’s eyes flickered wildly between us and Allen. She started to stir, looked at him again, and, when he didn’t move, cleared her throat.
Everyone turned to her.
She stared into the corner of the cabin room. “What if –”
“It’s none of their business,” Allen snapped.
I thought she might clam up and started thinking of ways to get her to speak, maybe when Allen was off hunting his next victim, but she went eye to eyehole with his mask. “Unless they’re right, Allen.”
His voice changer crackled as he sucked down air, but he turned his attention back to his laptop.
I waited for Jan. So did everyone else.
She took a minute, but I had no idea if it was to collect her thoughts, to steel her emotions, or just to get her breathing problems under control.
“What if,” she asked, “the Realm belonged to a player who was already dead?”