Chapter 4: The Package

Lena backed away and sank onto her unmade bed. She scooped up a fleece decorated with video game mascot creatures that definitely hadn’t been licensed to whatever Etsy shop she bought the blanket from. She squeezed the critters to her chest.

I picked up my phone and looked at her. The fleece hid the parts of her avatar it covered. Her flames danced along the edges. How did the app know where her clothes ended and her bedclothes began? How did it make the line between them look so real?

I forced myself to set the phone aside. When my hand fumbled for it again, I set my jaw and closed out of all my apps.

I wanted to find a blanket of my own, or a plushy, or better yet cuddle up with Lena. No more thoughts of fooling around. I was just creeped out. And cold.

Seemed we both were. She huddled and didn’t say a word.

“There’s got to be an explanation,” I said.

“Yeah?” She squeezed her blanket so hard – it would smolder if she was really on fire – that the critters turned to crinkly messes of primary colors. “Yeah.”

I nodded. “Like. Um.”

“Facial recognition?” she suggested.

“Right.” I glanced at my phone. We could run more tests. We’d have to. Not yet. It still felt too weird. “That’s got to be AI, then, to pick you up so fast and match your movements so well.”

“A lot to run on the same server that handles such crazy graphics.”

“They aren’t paying for this with four million Kickstarter dollars.”

“Canadian!”

“Right?” What had the exchange rate looked like six years ago? Neither extreme enough, nor in the right direction, for Third Eye’s Kickstarter campaign to have turned into a AAA game budget. “Have you seen a program that does face and body tracking this well before?”

“It’s not something I’ve messed around with much,” Lena said. “This feels super high end, though.”

High end enough to leave us both shook. I pushed past and speculated. “So. They must’ve gotten a publisher.”

“I didn’t see any other companies in the EULA,” she said.

“Are you suggesting you read the EULA?”

“I’m just saying it didn’t have any logos besides Third Eye Productions.”

That logo, an oval with a triangular arrangement of eyes, was the same thing as their app’s icon on my phone. Bad branding practice. What if they launched another game? “Must’ve been a private investor,” I said. “Some techbro, short on sense, long on algorithms and ambition.”

“I guess.” Lena’s grip on the blanket relaxed, a little. “What kind of data you think they’re aggregating on us?”

“Oh, all of it. Same as the rest of our apps.”

She chuckled. “It feels like we’re reaching, Cam.”

“I know.” I patted my jeans. “What else are we supposed to think? If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, you know?”

“I don’t actually know that one.”

“I forgot, you’re not a Holmesian. ‘Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’”

“Oh, that.” She shrugged. “I like stories with actual magic, thanks.”

“It applies though, right? Or do you have a better explanation?”

“Actual magic.” She stuck her tongue out. “Nah, I got nothing.”

Abruptly, she tossed her blanket on the bed and sprang up. “Speaking of things we have got, though? Half our pizza each.”

Three quarters, in my case. “Well,” I said, “we did mention we’d finish eating before we did any fooling around.”

She turned her nose up, that imperious gesture that made me want to kneel to her avatar and laugh at her. “I seem to recall somebody said ‘no fooling.’”

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I chuckled. What else? If I let myself sigh, I’d feel like an asshole.

Knowing that Lena had moved in with me not because she wanted to date IRL, but because she’d run out of money? I felt like I’d accidentally taken advantage of her. How much of the shit she’d given me over the years had been her being herself, and how much her way of confirming to herself she was still allowed to be?

Yeah, no sighing for me if she didn’t want to sleep with me, or date me. Better to count myself lucky she could stand to stay friends. “We agreed on the pizza, anyway.”

She pumped her fist and skipped back to the kitchen.

If I left her alone with it, she’d devour my half, too. I didn’t feel like that much of an asshole.

By the time I got out there, she’d already inhaled most of her next piece. She waved what remained attached to the crust at the floor. Wonder of wonders, she managed not to talk with her mouth full, so I followed her gesture.

To the package. I’d forgotten to mention it while we stared at each others’ avatars. “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Raul spotted it when he brought the pie.”

“Ooh.” She gulped down pizza and wiggled her eyebrows. “I’d have answered the door if you told me Raul was delivering.”

I plastered a smile on.

Lena giggled. “You’re too easy, Cam. Don’t worry. Raul could never understand our gift, our curse. Our third eyes.”

I rolled my two. “Just eat, already. What did you order from Etsy, anyway?”

“Nuffin.” She’d already dug back into her slice. She bit another chunk off as she padded over to the package and knelt over it.

She gagged.

I ran to her side and reached out to – screw up first aid, probably. I remembered just enough from the one course I took to get myself and others in trouble.

Thankfully, by the time I arrived, she’d coughed up pizza and sucked down air.

I knelt next to her anyway, and put an arm over her shoulders. “You okay?”

“This,” Lena said, “is not from Etsy.”

For the first time, I looked past the address label directing it to Lena and our apartment. To the postage – nonexistent – and the return address label that said it had come from a Canadian sender.

“If you slapped that label on,” Lena said, “it’s a shitty prank. I almost choked.”

“If I’d done it as a joke,” I said, “I would’ve shown it to you before you got your hands on the pizza. Also, I’d have spelled out Third Eye Productions.”

Instead, the return address label just said “TEP.” Could’ve been a coincidence. Along with the Canadian address, and the timing, and the lack of postage. Could’ve been.

Wasn’t.

“You backed at a higher tier than me,” I said. “Did you get any physical rewards?”

“‘Kickstarters never fulfill physical rewards.’”

For some reason, her echoing my words made me flinch. “That’s the least we’d be bending a universal law to explain this.”

“Yeah.” She took the last bite of her pizza. She chewed it more slowly than I’d ever seen her try to. Then she nibbled at the crust like a rabbit working a piece of lettuce.

Only when it had disappeared did she reach for the package. Pizza grease left finger stains on the brown paper wrapping. It didn’t even occur to me to suggest she wash her hands first. We needed to see this.

Let’s say she opened some random, long-forgotten backer gift. We’d compare it to the stuff she’d been promised in the Kickstarter campaign, laugh at ourselves for imagining she’d find anything else in there, and tip our nonexistent hats to the Third Eye team for breaking the universe’s second most depressing rule after entropy – even though my hat was nonexistent because they hadn’t equipped my avatar for proper wizardry.

That is not what we did.

Lena did not open some random, long-forgotten backer gift.

She just sat there staring.

I saw my hands reach into the remains of the brown paper. I saw them rise, trembling, with a bronze or copper amulet suspended between them. A red gem – ruby? Fire quartz? I didn’t know from gemology. – seemed to glow beneath the apartment’s light fixtures.

The amulet felt warm and heavy in my hands. Real metal, not painted resin.

Although the runes engraved or cast on its surface, the gem in its center, and even the color of its metal were different from the silver amulet my avatar wore, neither Lena nor I had any doubt what I’d pulled out of the package.

Her physical signup bonus.

“This is crazy,” she said, her voice flat. She didn’t move. Deer in the headlights. “Screw crazy; it’s impossible.”

“I know,” I said. “I ordered food before we signed up. Thirty minutes or less or your pizza’s free.”

“Pizza wasn’t free.”

I shook my head.

“It’s crazy,” I said, “but not quite impossible.”

She stared at me.

“If they have a fulfillment center in town,” I said, “somewhere really close. And if they do drone delivery.”

Imagine how much that would cost. How absurd it was. More absurd than the city block-sized server farm they’d have to operate to both render their graphics in real time and run an AI capable of tying them to users’ bodies?

Lena pointed out another problem with my theory. “Why would they have a Canadian return address, then?”

I hadn’t declared myself the winner of dozens of internet arguments because I let one little problem disprove my theories. I could still be right.

About this, I needed to be right.

“They obviously didn’t send it through the mail,” I said. “Maybe they don’t process returns locally, so if you sent it back it would go to Canada. It could even be deliberate. International shipping’s a bitch, maybe enough to discourage returns.”

“You don’t really believe that.” She snatched the amulet from my hands. Her arm sagged under its weight.

Good riddance. I scooted back. “I don’t know what the hell I believe!”

She looked down at the amulet. She set her jaw.

I reached out. “Lena, maybe you shouldn’t –”

She squeezed her eyes shut and clasped the amulet around her neck.