Chapter 39: Altered Reality

Trees, as far as the satellite camera’s eye could see.

If you tried to return an amulet here, first of all, Canada Post wouldn’t deliver it, and second, if they did it would be littering. Even when Miguel panned the screen up and down, we didn’t see anything but more trees and outlines that might have been hills beneath them.

“Zoom out some,” I said.

He spread his fingers and a new feature appeared on the northwest end of the map, a horseshoe-shaped body of water.

I laughed. “Oh, that son of a bitch.”

Lena and Miguel stared at me.

I raised my eyebrows. “Miguel I expected, but I’m disappointed in you, Lena. You shouldn’t miss a reference like this.”

She gripped Miguel’s phone and tilted it so she could frown at the screen. “It’s a park. Looks pretty far north. Lake...”

Abruptly, she cackled. “Oh, that’s good.”

Miguel looked blank. It was a good look for him. People should try new things!

“‘Visible from space,’” Lena said. “It’s not a lake. It’s a beaver dam you can see in satellite images.”

“The only non-human created object you can see from space,” I said. “One of the Third Eye devs uses a beaver as an icon and the username VisibleFromSpace, which is for sure a reference to this place.”

“It seems we have found a clue.” Miguel nodded. “Any suggestions as to what it means?”

“Well.” My grin froze. I looked to Lena to thaw it out, but she’d stopped mid-laugh, too.

After a silence long enough for Miguel to start looking smug again, Lena said, “Got it!”

We turned to her.

“The devs,” she declared, “are actual beavers. This game is how they announce their presence to humanity.”

“Impossible,” Miguel said.

“Yeah, why?”

He pointed to the miserable Third Eye interface. “Something made by beavers would appear more robust.”

“I can’t argue with that.” Her shoulders slumped. She kicked at the baseboard on the counter. “Maybe there’s something there to dig up?”

I chuckled. “You up for a road trip, Miguel?”

He didn’t instantly say no.

Lena rolled her eyes. “I’m not spending a week in a car. I meant we could post it on the wiki so some Canadian player could get up there.”

“Does the wiki have room for such things?” Miguel asked. “It’s all Materials and the finding thereof.”

“Back off the wiki already,” she snapped.

He shrugged.

“I want to check a thing.” I strode to my computer and thumbed the power button. While it booted up, I sat down and tried to get a head start searching on my phone. I’d just finished pecking out my query when I got access to my desktop. Between the two devices, I found what I wanted. “The dam is way up north. If I remember kilometers to miles right, it’s hours away from the nearest town big enough to plausibly have Third Eye players.”

Lena and Miguel looked over my shoulders. The latter said, “It is also public land.”

I nodded. “A company would probably get in trouble for encouraging people to dig there.”

“Which,” Lena said, “doesn’t mean Third Eye Productions wouldn’t.”

“Point.” We hadn’t told Miguel about the whole thing with invasions and their potential legal problems. Hell. I’d hardly thought of it since the morning. Too much on my plate. Was that something he could help with?

Maybe later. For now, I wanted to crack the case of the amulets. It felt achievable, and right then I really wanted to achieve something. I wouldn’t even mock a clipart scroll if Third Eye sent one. Much. “I don’t buy it, though. Would they really ship amulets all over the world just to draw attention to a return address almost nobody could visit?”

“You know,” Lena said, “we don’t actually know the return addresses are the same for everyone.”

“If they’re different,” I said, “we’re dealing with a bunch of different clues.”

“Or,” Miguel said, “we’ve misunderstood what the point of the address was. What if they simply wish to discourage returns?”

I winced. I’d thought of that, way back when all I knew about the address was that it led to a different country.

Lena tapped on her phone. “Looks like Shake’s online. I’ll ask him if he’s got his.”

I switched to Discord to follow their conversation.

Ashbird: @ShakeProtcol Do you remember the return address on your amulet?

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

ShakeProtocol: It’s not the sort of thing I memorize. I did keep the packaging, though. brb

I gave Lena a thumbs up.

After a few minutes, she flicked back and forth to other tabs on her phone.

Miguel reached into his pocket, started to pull out another cigarette, pushed it back down.

ShakeProtocol’s idea of “be right back” and ours didn’t mesh. Had he thrown the packaging out after all? Or maybe somebody else at his place did and he’d only now discovered it?

While we waited, I scrolled up to check if there’d been any movement on our video editing. Nope. The last word remained that it should be done in the morning. I thought about asking how it was going and then remembered that I at least tried not to be an asshole.

Before my resolve wavered, ShakeProtocol returned.

ShakeProtocol: 13900 Pine Lake Rd., Ontario, Canada.

Ashbird: Same as mine. Cool.

ShakeProtocol: Why do you ask?

Instead of answering through text, Lena posted an 8-bit “It’s a secret to everybody” image.

ShakeProtocol: I guess that means I’ll find out later?

I shook my head. “Somebody needs to brush up on his memes.”

OldCampaigner: We’ll tell you when you’re older.

Lena snorted.

“I’m reminded,” Miguel said, “why I prefer hanging out with you two IRL.”

I offered him a saccharine smile. “Because you get to enjoy all the little reactions we can’t fit into a chat window?”

He met my gaze and waited for me to crack. Tough luck. On this subject, I was as hard-boiled as any gumshoe.

“Lemme see the paper again?” Lena asked. Miguel handed it to her. She carried it back to her computer and propped it up on her desk with all the other papers she’d left strewn around. Her mechanical keyboard clacked. “Shit.”

I spun my chair for a better look, but all I saw on her screen was a ‘This site can’t be reached’ message. “What did you try?”

“Using the return address as a URL.”

“Ah,” Miguel said, “but that’s the wrong top-level domain.”

“Everything’s .com,” Lena said. “You want me to try ‘em all? We’d be here for hours.”

“If they wanted us to pay attention to a Canadian address,” I said, “it will be .ca.”

On a keyboard, I typed faster than Lena. She was still clacking away when I brought the URL up on my browser. Which would’ve been more of a triumph if it had been a website and not the same failure page Lena had gotten.

I shook my head. ARG clues had to be tricky enough to stump a whole community.

“The actual location has to matter,” I said. “The return address is just the closest a road gets to the dam.”

I started rapid-firing URLs relating to the concept. Most of them came up blank. One belonged to one of those domain-squatting companies, the kind that grab disused URLs and try to ransom them back to their former owners. I curled my lip, clicked away, and made a mental note to come back if I didn’t find anything else. One way to hide information is to stick it somewhere all right-thinking people will find too distasteful to search.

Thankfully, I didn’t have to go back.

The correct URL turned out to be disgustingly simple. The dev’s username, the concept we were supposed to think of, with underscores between the words and a .ca on the end.

As soon as I saw the site, I had no doubt I’d come to the right place.

First, because Third Eye chimed on my phone. I’d gotten a thousand XP and a new achievement scroll. Which was interesting in a couple of ways.

One, it meant the game tracked ARG progress with XP, not just AR stuff like Material collection and PVP wins. Great news for people like Miguel and I who’d started out more interested in this side of the Kickstarter campaign.

Two, and maybe more important, it meant when I’d started signing up on my PC, I’d given Third Eye permission to track my browser activity there. Had that come up before without me realizing it? I felt like it hinted at the answer to a question I'd had in the past.

I didn’t focus on it, though, and I didn’t need the achievement to know I was on the right track. The website told me as much.

Picture the most modern, corporate, professionally-made website you can. Responsive HTML tables, intuitive UI, tasteful multimedia, a place for everything and everything in its place.

Now picture the opposite.

Gray background. A .midi playing, chiptunes from back when that was a technical limitation and not a genre. An animated .gif of a blue-and-red siren to draw your attention, but why? There’s almost nothing else to look at. Beneath the siren, an ancient, odometer-style hit counter.

Its final digit ticked ostentatiously up when I accessed the site. From seven to eight.

A moment later it rolled up to nine as Lena stopped typing and started laughing. She called, “This is awesome.”

“Right?” I couldn’t stop grinning. “It is the best worst thing.”

This was a website brought to you by the same person who designed Third Eye’s interface.

The hit counter fascinated me, not just because it enhanced the web 1.0 antiquity of the site, but because it suggested as many as seven other people beat us to whatever secrets it held. None of them had decided to share.

Two guardians remained to protect those secrets. A gray, no-CSS scrollbar and way too much white space.

“Three,” Lena said.

“What are you doing?” Miguel asked.

He didn’t get it, but I did. “Two,” I said.

Miguel glanced back and forth between us. “One?”

We scrolled.

I couldn’t have said what I expected, but when I saw it, it made perfect sense.

What else should a truly ancient website have? Obnoxious .gif and .midi, hit counter.

And a .jpeg so blurry with compression artifacts you could no longer make out what it had originally depicted.

I could tell, from its structure if not any details, it had originally been a three-panel, vertically-oriented screenshot comic. That sapped my enjoyment for a moment; were people using this format circa 1993, or whenever the site was supposed to look like it had endured from? It seemed inauthentic.

Artifacting had blurred it all the way to blobs of color where gray distortions didn’t obscure those. Panel one, predominantly tan but with deep dark browns, and a splotch of white that probably began as text. Panel two, some tan but mostly blue-gray. Same white mess. Definitely text. Panel three looked like it could’ve begun existence as a duplicate of panel one, although the artifacting had altered it into a different topographical map. The former-text blob was almost clear enough to make out individual word-shapes, though not letters. Five words.

I couldn’t read the words. But then, I didn’t have to.

My grin came back, full force. Did this three-panel comic look out of place on a website meant to look decades old? Damn straight, because that, too, was a clue. The comic depicted something that hadn’t existed when this website would have been authentically state of the art.

Maybe the first seven people who visited the site had no idea what they were looking at. Or maybe they did. The chain of reasoning that led me to the site started with me recognizing the reference in VisibleFromSpace’s name. If others got here the same way, they probably traded in memes and references, too.

I didn’t know what the comic meant yet, but I knew we’d figure it out. Whoever made this site did so to provide context to people who thought like Lena and I.

Fact was, I knew this meme by heart. I’d probably sent a hundred variations. Half of them to Lena.

I spun my chair around.

She matched my motion.

Miguel looked wonderfully lost.

Lena and I chorused, “We need to go deeper!”