Chapter 38: Wizardry

I pointed to the device connected to Lena’s phone. With all the weird equipment strewn across it, our kitchen counter looked like something out of a heist movie. “What’s the app doing while the phone filter’s on?”

Miguel’s hand drifted toward the phone. I knew the feeling, but seriously, man. After all that business and pleasure shit? I held the phone down until Lena took it from him.

“I’ll put it in selfie mode,” she said, “since you guys can’t keep your eyes off me.”

I didn’t bother denying it. “Also, we can still run tests if you distract yourself.”

“Exactly.” Lena tilted the phone. “God. Sometimes I forget how awesome I look.”

“And so humble!”

“When it comes to humility, I’m number one.”

Miguel chuckled. “Sorry. Now it’s I who must dial in.”

“We were the same way the first night,” I said.

He nodded, stuck his unlit cigarette back in his mouth, and leaned over his device.

Lena raised her eyebrows. “Well?”

“Close the phone app, please.”

“Do I have to?” But she flicked her finger across the screen and Miguel grunted. He asked her to restart it; she did and he grunted again.

“What’s the damage?” I asked.

“Almost nothing,” he said. “It’s cloud-served, of course. I’m not sure my PC could render those graphics in real time, much less a phone. But even the requests it sends are... miniscule.”

“It’s not pumping the camera input to the server?”

He shook his head. “The downloaded data is, as you might expect, considerable. What it uploads is only large enough for a short string of plain text or simple code, though. An image would have to be compressed beyond recognition to fit, much less a video.”

“How would that work?” I asked.

“It shouldn’t.” He fiddled with his cigarette. “I really can’t smoke here?”

Lena shook her head.

“Right.” He took the cigarette out and tossed it in the trash.

I winced. If our landlord found evidence Lena or I had started smoking, he’d raise our rates for sure. Damage to the walls, risk of fire. If he wasn’t going to light up the furnace, we weren’t allowed to light up in our apartments.

Miguel ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m apparently wrong. Understand, my expertise is in security, not AR or cloud-served video. They are performing some wizardry on their end, but I don’t understand how it could possibly work.”

“Does it help to know it will track us even if we leave our devices in the other room?” I asked.

He cocked an eyebrow.

“Watch.” I fired up Third Eye on my phone. Lena shifted hers so it showed me and leaned forward to let Miguel see. His eyes widened, not quite the horndog pant he’d given Lena but not far from it. Seeing him dumbstruck delighted me way more than it should’ve.

I got up, sprinted to the bedroom, dropped the phone on my bed, and returned to the main room.

More staring from Miguel. “Absurd.”

“We think it’s gotta be facial recognition on their end,” I said. “Maybe AI-powered? Does that make sense?”

“Maybe?” He shook his head. “More than anything else I can think of. It grabs an image of you when it first loads and then somehow serves the correct output based on simple codes? Gah, that still shouldn’t work. How would it know where to put the imagery without either sending more details about your video to the server or using more cycles on the client side to direct placement?”

“My theory,” Lena said, “was actual magic.”

She and I laughed.

Miguel didn’t. “I don’t believe that. Not really. What I’m seeing, though? It seems sufficiently advanced.”

I got the reference, of course. ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ That was Arthur C. Clarke, too, wasn’t it? It reminded me I had his book on my nightstand. I hadn’t read any further.

My lack of progress in Childhood’s End wasn’t why I shivered. Nor, despite my bitching earlier, was it because of the apartment’s temperature. Actually, the furnace seemed to have coughed to life.

Little details clawed at the edge of my mind.

I felt an impulse to tell Miguel about the moments I felt like I could see or hear or feel Third Eye phenomena even without the phone. I hadn’t even talked to Lena about any of that. Then there was the giddiness, almost drunkenness, after I drank Albie’s potion. And the times I’d, well, lost time. When I got Air. Before Matt’s invasion.

But all of that was impossible.

The sound design was great. The placebo effect worked wonders. I’d gotten distracted.

If you talked about magic, you had to laugh afterwards. Even if you laughed nervously.

Right then, I didn’t know if I could force a chuckle. So I clamped my mouth shut.

They both noticed.

“Enough with the ghost stories, Miguel,” Lena said. “You probably don’t know this, but Cam was a total camp geek as a kid. He’s probably all about getting spooked around the fire and dropping his marshmallows.”

The tension fled my shoulders, replaced by annoyance. “Just because I liked scavenger hunts doesn’t mean I liked camp. I went four times because my parents wanted me out of their hair.”

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Lena bit her lip. Strangely, it did little to silence her giggle. “Sure.”

“Let’s run some more tests,” I growled.

“I suppose we’d better,” Miguel said. “It was the amulet I originally wanted to study. Would you try taking it off again, Lena?”

She took her time lifting it over her neck. If she wanted to give Miguel time to study the results, maybe it worked. If she wanted to seem sexy, she spoiled the effect when her hair got tangled in the chain and she had to curse and yank it free. She dumped the amulet on the counter hard enough to make me wonder which would chip first.

I supposed if the amulet did, Miguel could at least take the shard to his office to do material analysis.

He frowned at his equipment. “Make sure it’s out of frame.”

Lena shoved it away and tilted her camera upwards.

Miguel shook his head. “Nothing changes.”

“Do you still think it’s some kind of trojan horse?” I asked.

“I...” He pressed a fist to his mouth. “No. It makes no sense.”

“How come?” Lena asked. “I mean, I’m glad. Obvs. What changed your mind, though?”

“I don’t see how it can be doing anything sinister. But that’s not convincing. I’m not sure how it’s doing anything.” He disconnected her phone from his device and tapped something. Shutting it down, I supposed. “That, in turn, is what really convinces me.”

Lena cocked her head.

“With the resources they must pour into this,” Miguel said, “I don’t see how they could profit even if they stole the entire bank account of every player.”

“They wouldn’t get far with ours,” I said.

“Yeah. Most players will be like you. Like me at most – no offense.”

I waved it off. “I know you make more than we do.”

“And the artistry,” he continued. “Lena is a vision. And in the game!”

He winked and she snorted. I’m sure it got at least a chuckle from me.

“You, too, Cam,” he said. “Your avatar is subtler, but no less impressive. Not only would it be too expensive to run for a scam, there would be no reason to lavish such work on one.”

“Meaning...?” Lena asked.

Miguel leaned back, realized he’d sat on a stool rather than a chair, and gripped the edge of the counter. Otherwise he’d have probably sounded cooler when he said, “I believe we must each find our own meaning.”

I rolled my eyes. “Do we have a clean bill of cybersecurity?”

“Certainly not. Your setup is sloppy, your passwords are printed out on paper that someone could easily spot through a window, you accept strange objects and strange apps.” He slid off his stool. “I don’t think Third Eye is taking advantage of your vulnerabilities, though. Or if it is, it’s not doing so in a way I could help with.”

“Thanks for helping, anyway,” I said.

“Yeah.” Lena hopped down and patted Miguel’s arm. “It was cool watching you work.”

“I should be thanking you.” He took his own phone out and tapped. I didn’t have to see the screen to know he’d called up his Third Eye app. “I think I’ll play, after all, when it leaves beta.”

“I wonder,” Lena said. “You got it turned on?”

“For whatever that’s worth.” He showed us his screen. The message informing him he’d been booted from the beta occupied the same stock-image scroll we got our achievements on.

Lena turned her camera on him. “Dang. I hoped you’d still get an avatar.”

His shoulders sank a half-inch. She, it seemed, wasn’t the only one who’d hoped that. He flicked to his camera and panned to us. “Ah!”

He looked me up and down, then he looked Lena up and down a lot.

I circled around to see his screen. Third Eye’s filter still displayed Lena as her avatar. Hot, literally and figuratively. Magnificent.

Nonsensical.

“Sup?” she asked.

“Supposedly, they’re kicking people to save resources,” I said. “So why can a kicked player still use up their resources?”

“It’s mad,” Miguel muttered. “All of this.”

I sighed. “I know.”

“You should quit,” he said. “I know you won’t. I wouldn’t. God. I even still intend to sign up! But you should.”

I knew.

I didn’t say it, though.

He wrenched his phone down and stabbed his finger at it. Closing Third Eye, I supposed.

“It’s not that crazy,” Lena said.

We looked at her.

She shrugged. “I mean, it all is, sure. But the resources thing.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Our avatars,” she said, “must not be what takes up most of their resources.”

“I think that is crazier still,” Miguel said.

“It’s true, though, right, Cam? Think about the shit we break down for Materials, and the shit you can do with Reactions.”

“She’s right,” I said.

“Mad,” Miguel repeated. He stared into space. “To make it all worse, we’ve learned nothing at all about the amulet!”

“Maybe we’re thinking of it wrong,” I said. “If it’s not a trojan horse, and if we don’t need it for the AR part of the game – my digital one seems to be basically a pure plus, convenience-wise, but even if doesn’t actually do anything yet – then what’s it for?”

They turned to me.

Lena frowned, but Miguel began to grin.

“You get me?” I asked.

He gave a slow nod.

“Wanna share with the class?” Lena asked.

“If it’s not part of a scam,” I said, “and it’s not for AR, what’s left is ARG.”

Lena scratched her chin. “You think it’s a clue?”

“That would be a very expensive clue,” Miguel said.

“What part of this wouldn’t be expensive?” I asked.

“Where is the lie?” He nodded. “If you accept that Third Eye Productions has effectively limitless funds, it tracks. I don’t suppose you’ve solved it?”

I exhaled. “Not even close. I just started thinking about it as something to solve.”

“Well, what do we know about it?” Lena picked hers up and turned it over. “It’s got these runes on the edge. Maybe they mean something?”

“We should try to decode them,” I said, “but where would we start?”

“Begin with a simple substitution cipher,” Miguel said. “Check them against every letter and see if you can find a version that makes sense in English. Or French? The dev team is Canadian.”

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t do that, but I don’t think it’s gonna turn into much of a clue.” Lena tapped on her phone and held it up beside her amulet. She’d loaded the screenshots thread from r/thirdeyegame. “Mine doesn’t even look the same as Shake’s or that British guy’s. Or Cam’s digital one. What’s written on them sure isn’t identical.”

“Larger sample size,” Miguel said.

I studied the runes, but they were just nonsense fantasy characters to me. “Personalized clues?”

“I guess?” Lena shook her head. “If they tie into a bigger ARG we’d need everybody to read theirs, though. I guess we could make a page on the wiki. Did you get a digital amulet before they kicked you, Miguel?”

“I did not.”

“So we’d be missing pieces.” Lena frowned. “More every day.”

“If the clue is in the writing.” I flicked a glance to the bedroom. “Brb.”

I ran back and returned with two objects. In one hand, my phone, with the image of my amulet open in Third Eye –

In the other, the paper Lena’s had come wrapped in.

“Ah!” Miguel reached for the paper and I let him have it. He got a grin almost as silly as the one he’d worn when he first saw Lena’s avatar. He waved the paper over our apartment. “Bless this mess.”

“We’ve just been busy,” I muttered. “Anyway, I saved this intentionally. I meant to look up the return address.”

“No time like the present.” Miguel snapped a picture of it with his phone and flicked to his search engine. He used one of those alternative browsers that supposedly didn’t sell your data, Qwant, but he went to Google Maps anyway. Seemed to defeat the purpose, but I wasn’t the expert.

We all leaned in as he searched the address.

For a moment, I thought the Maps result hadn’t loaded properly on his browser. The scale and zoom functions appeared, but the map itself showed a single gray line in a mass of white.

Then Miguel switched from street map to satellite.

“What the actual fuck.” Lena spoke for all of us.

Because we were looking at a two-lane road, almost invisible as it wound its way through the middle of a forest.