Chapter 40: Intentions

Lena held Bernie, I held her, and Benji watched the video on my phone in silence.

When it finished, he nodded to his car and said, “Get in.”

For maybe the first time in my life, I didn’t have the heart to argue with him. He handed me my phone and opened the back door of his Sonata. I guided Lena inside. After she shuffled to the far seat, I joined her.

By then, Benji was back at the wheel. He pulled into the convenience store parking lot, did a three point turn, and rolled back down Logan toward our apartment.

Neither he nor Lena spoke, which was probably for the best. I had no idea what to say to either of them.

The silence lasted through the light at Hampden and into the parking lot of our building.

When none of us spoke even after we came to a stop, I roused myself and touched Lena’s arm. “We’re home.”

“Yeah?” She dragged her eyes up from Bernie and searched my face. Whatever she hoped to find there, I didn’t seem to be able to provide it, because she looked down again.

Nonetheless, she opened the door and got out, and shuffled up the stairs ahead of Benji and I.

She stopped outside our front door. She stared at the handle, bleak, uncomprehending, like she’d forgotten how keys worked.

I realized she didn’t want to take either hand off of Bernie and pulled my own keys from my pocket. As it turned out, I shouldn’t have bothered. The door swung open as soon as I touched it.

Lena looked up sharply and so did I. A spike of adrenaline cutting through our sorrow.

I was almost certain the figure knew where we lived. Had they slipped around us to lie in wait?

“Shit,” Benji said. “I thought I’d pulled the door shut behind me, but for some reason, I was in kind of a hurry.”

I breathed out. “No worries.”

I pushed the door the rest of the way open. No shadows spilled out.

The shock seemed to have done Lena some good, though. She stretched her neck and strode in, chin held high.

No one had robbed us while we were gone, either because there wasn’t much crime in Englewood or because such burglars as the neighborhood hosted didn’t expect us to have anything worth stealing.

Our computers probably would’ve been, but there they sat, still on, still displaying Omar’s bireme logo. Hard to believe it had been our biggest concern less than an hour ago.

Lena ignored the computers. She knelt by the counter and lay Bernie in the pet bed we’d bought for him the day after we found him. We’d sized the bed for his Third Eye form; as a plushie, he almost disappeared into it.

It had only been a couple of weeks, but I’d grown so used to the sight of him lying there. Incongruous, silly, whimsical – unless you knew what he was, and maybe a bit, even then. Enough to make me smile every time we came home.

Now, the sight of him threatened to make me choke up again.

Lena ran her hand along his plush head.

Benji walked over to the desks and flopped onto my computer chair. He folded his arms and frowned.

The thought of explaining Third Eye to him sounded exhausting. Exhaustion, however, sounded better than any other emotional state I was likely to slip into.

I took out my phone and flicked back to the Third Eye app. I had a vague idea of calling up a Material and using it to demonstrate the game’s reality.

Then I saw my status.

My HP, still rendered in UI disaster lime on gray, read 1839/10. I hadn’t been paying close attention since the construction site, but I knew I’d left it with well over three thousand. Where had I taken damage since? A couple of Lena’s explosions that had gotten too close while we were practicing? When she’d used those against Matt, the most damage he’d ever announced was in the seventies. Maybe some bumps and scrapes I would’ve felt in the morning, but which had translated into a few points of damage instead?

Between my jump from the balcony and the fight with the figure, I’d lost over a thousand HP in just a few minutes.

Even with that, I hadn’t been able to save Bernie. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment and pushed past the thought. I had, at least, gotten there in time to back Lena up. I could do that maybe two more times, after which I’d have burned through the last of Albie’s Potion. Then? Forget getting stronger. I’d be no more use to Lena or anyone else.

I realized I’d left Benji hanging, so I held my finger up to forestall him. “Give me a sec, Ben?”

“More bad news?” he asked.

“Nothing I shouldn’t have expected.” I sighed. “Yeah.”

He gave a little shrug and leaned back in my chair.

I knelt beside Lena. I stared at Bernie, who she’d set down facing the counter so we couldn’t see the jagged tear in him. At the moment, he looked peaceful, asleep.

Well, no, he looked like a plushie, but I could imagine.

Lena glanced up when she felt me beside her.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I have to ask. How much HP do you have?”

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She swallowed. She jerked her phone up and manipulated it with tight, jabbing motions. “Hundred and forty two.”

I put my arm around her shoulder.

At the rate we’d been taking damage, how much longer would she have lasted? On her own, maybe a minute. Longer with me playing defense, but I hadn’t blocked every one of the figure’s attacks. We’d had them on the ropes, but as soon as we’d lost the initiative, they’d struck back, hard.

If Lena had run out of HP, that would’ve left me fighting alone against the figure. Plinking away for double digit damage with each attack, while every time I missed a block, they rippled multiple needle strikes into me.

All I could think of when I rushed to Lena’s side had been protecting her. Afterwards, Bernie’s condition had driven everything else from my mind.

For the first time, I confronted the possibility that we might’ve been about to lose that fight.

With Bernie lying in front of me, the tear in his back just barely visible despite the way Lena had angled him, the thought of losing to the figure felt almost sickening. If I’d taken the stairs, would I have found Lena lying on the sidewalk with a hole through her shoulder? If Benji hadn’t pulled up, would the figure have killed us both?

Or, and I had to remind myself this was more likely, had they struck Bernie down because they thought he was just part of the game, and the most we’d stood to lose had been ten percent of our XP?

Abruptly, I stood up.

I stroked my chin and felt myself frowning. Scowling.

My sorrow over Bernie had subsided to a dull ache; my fear of what the figure might’ve done to Lena and I seemed distant, indistinct.

Now? I was mad.

Weirdly, I wasn’t angry with the figure. Not much, anyway. The way they’d stalked us was fucked up, and if they had known they were hurting a real creature when they struck Bernie, then the hell with them.

In all likelihood, though, looming at the edge of our sight was just to spook us while they scouted our habits. Good invasion tactics. Part and parcel of their edgelord persona, a fine fit for their shadowy cloak and mask and voice changer. Despite everything, I found their whole deal more embarrassing than frightening.

In all likelihood, they thought they were just playing a game.

Which brought me to who I was really pissed at.

I turned to Benji. “This is what Third Eye is.” I started off trying to keep the bitterness from my voice, but my resolve didn’t last and I didn’t want it to. I practically spat the game’s title.

He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“An amazing tool,” I said. “Awesome. Terrifying. Life changing. World changing, maybe. I can tell you’re dubious, but once I finish explaining, I think you’ll believe me.”

“It’s why you could jump off that railing?” he asked.

“I could jump off because I’m an idiot,” I said. “It’s why I could dash into the street afterwards, though, instead of you having to scrape me off the pavement.”

He chuckled.

“It’s all of that,” I said. “But it’s a shit game.”

Lena looked up. “Cam –!”

“It is, Lena. If you have the power to create everything we’ve seen? Our avatars, the objects we collect as Materials, the effects when we get our Reactants, what we can do with them?” My voice caught. “Bernie?”

Lena lowered her eyes.

“If you can do all that,” I said, “and what you use it for is a crap AR Souls game? Sorry, but that’s shit design.”

“It’s not just that,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter what else it is,” I said. “What we can build, what we can discover? We can’t enjoy any of it, because some asshole can come along and take it all from us. And the worst part is, the asshole?”

“He’s the one playing as intended,” Lena whispered. “That’s what you’re saying, right?”

“Am I wrong?”

She shook her head.

From the first day I ran into Third Eye players other than Lena, I’d been torn between two visions of the game.

To Erin, it was a building game. It was about creating things, whether those things were the constructs we formed from our Materials and Reactants, or the communities we gathered into, or our own identities as expressed by our avatars.

To Matt, it was a PVP game. It was about making ourselves stronger, even – perhaps especially – by tearing each other down, until whoever was left had mastered the use of the tools the game gave us.

As we discovered the game’s wonders, Bernie most of all, and as it inspired us to confront our personal problems, it had been so easy to believe in Erin’s vision for what Third Eye could be.

But Matt, the game design teacher, had taken one look at how it was set up – at its open world PVP, at its ever-shrinking beta access – and recognized what it incentivized.

It wasn’t like I hated PVP! Lena and I first met playing Overwatch, a game that was about as PVP as they come. My username, OldCampaigner, came from a childhood attempt to big myself up to the grognards I played online strategy games against. I liked to match wits with another player as much as anyone.

Even Third Eye’s real-world effects didn’t bother me in a PVP context. The game protected us from everything except a finishing strike, gave us a seemingly guaranteed out against one last attack, then dialed the effectiveness of our powers way the hell down against targets with no HP. Whatever I might fear, the things we’d experienced when facing other players were safer than almost any physical sport.

No, the part of the design that infuriated me was what Third Eye Productions had done with Daimons.

Why should I get mad at the figure who’d attacked us tonight?

They were just playing as intended.

The figure wasn’t the one who’d put Bernie in the middle of a game where we were supposed to fight each other, perhaps eventually supposed to fight monsters like the one we’d faced at the construction site.

Who made him such a delight that Lena wouldn’t want to be parted from him, and so brave that if she came under attack, he would leap to her defense.

Who set up a situation where, if not tonight, if not tomorrow, then eventually, he would surely die for her.

I thought of Albie and Marroll, the only other player and Daimon pair I knew. She’d treated him as a pet, the same as Lena had Bernie, yet she’d still taken him into battle with her. Her only concern, as far as I could tell, was that we would be afraid of Marroll if we saw his battle form. Which, in fairness, we might have if we hadn’t first encountered him as a dog, since in combat he’d appeared as a gargantuan alien worm.

When I pictured the two of them, I calmed – not all the way down, but maybe seventy percent. Enough to recognize I’d started to catastrophize again.

I claimed I trusted Albie. Did I really believe she would happily risk Marroll’s life? That she would participate in the development of a game where she had to risk it?

“Lena,” I said.

She hunched her shoulders and didn’t respond.

“I don’t want to ask this, but I have to.” I crouched beside her and held her shoulders. “What does your Third Eye app say about Bernie’s status?”

“I can’t...” She bit her lip. She glanced at me.

“Please,” I said.

Her hands shook as she worked her phone, but she was still faster than I could ever hope to be. She tapped between tabs in the cramped interface and brought up a table that looked straight out of a database program. It resembled the Materials and Reactants windows we shared, but she was the only person I’d met who had access to this page.

The table had only one entry, and beneath it was a single header.

But that was one more than I had.

Bernie was still listed on Lena’s app.