Chapter 40: We Need To Go Deeper

I don’t know about you, but I loved Inception when it came out. Brain teaser story, stylish direction, great cast.

But after a decade it had boiled down to just this meme for me. One to three panels, vertically aligned. DiCaprio, tan background, seated opposite Murphy, blue background. And that line. Did they ever actually say that specific line in the movie?

Lena and I had sure as hell said it to each other, and to other people, as part of ever more tortured puns and shaggy-dog stories. Before we got kicked from her Discord, DeepingShadows once told me we’d ruined DiCaprio for her. This from a woman who used to own Titanic on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Which is to say, most people are philistines.

Miguel, for example, looked at Lena and I like we’d lost our goddamn minds.

I did a quick search and found a non-artifacted, three-panel version of the meme. I tried to rearrange my browser windows so he could see both images at once, but the Third Eye Productions-made site reacted to resizing like a site designed before the capability to do it was a given. I settled for flipping back and forth between the two. “Look. You can tell this is what the image started as, before all the .jpeg artifacting.”

“I guess I see it.” He peered at my screen. “And this tells you... what, exactly?”

“That somebody at Third Eye Productions has good taste in memes,” I said.

He sighed. “What does it tell you as a clue?”

“Nothing yet.” Last time, his doubt had sapped my enthusiasm, but we’d figured out the beaver dam clue in no time. “What’s your first thought, Lena?”

“That it’s got something to do with dreams. That’s what the movie’s about, so it would make sense.” She tapped her chin. “I don’t see how we could act on that, though.”

I shook my head. “I think it’s more about the meme than the movie. If they did All Your Base it would be trying to get us to look at a military base or the base of a plinth or something, not to play a mid 90’s shmup.”

“Mid as in it came out in the middle of the decade,” Miguel asked, “or as a measure of quality?”

“Yep,” I said.

“I should’ve expected that.”

“Yep,” I repeated.

I knew I was having way too much fun winding him up. I reminded myself that he’d given Lena and I a ride home specifically so he could help us protect our computer network. Free of charge. He did all that after we paid so little attention to the game he ran that he had to cancel it. By most any measure except average smugness by volume, that made him the greatest friend in the state.

“Sorry.” I ran my fingers through my hair. My bangs had fallen back into place; I tried to shove them into the more flattering style Third Eye showed me in. “I’ll quit it. Just hyped to be doing some ARG stuff.”

He smiled. “A good reason to become hyped.”

“For the record,” Lena called, “I don’t volunteer to ‘quit it.’”

“Yeah,” I said, “but you’re adorable. You can get away with it.”

“True,” she said. But she spun her chair back to face her computer and I felt like I’d said something wrong.

I wanted to go over and try to figure out what, but it felt too weird with Miguel there. Even if he frowned and took a step back to give me a clear path.

Lena said, “If it’s the actual words of the meme, we’re back to digging.”

“Go deeper... You’re thinking, dig underground?”

“That’s how they used it for Binding of Isaac’s ARG,” she said. “It was real digging, too, not with the in-game shovel. Once somebody found the token the dev team buried, they pushed a patch to roll out new features.”

“I didn’t follow that one,” I said. “Sounds cool.”

“Meh.” Her keyboard clacked. “It wasn’t for one of the better expansions.”

“The only physical location we’ve got is still on Canadian public land,” I said. “We can’t get there and it would be super illegal to dig if we did.”

“Is that the only location we have?” Miguel asked.

I turned my frown his way. “What else?”

“Your beloved wiki,” he said, “is full of locations.”

The places we’d found Materials.

Of course, we couldn’t legally dig in most of those, or it made no sense to try. To get to something beneath where I’d found Air, for instance, we’d have to jackhammer the apartment’s parking lot. I didn’t think our landlord would understand. Other Materials came from storefronts and private lots.

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The idea made sense to me, though. And... “There’s no guarantee they knew the Isaac ARG.”

“I dunno,” Lena said. “It was one of the first really huge indies.”

“Just saying, we might be taking the meme too literally. Maybe it means we’re searching in the right places but need to look past the obvious.” I called up the Third Eye wiki and went to the Materials page.

Lena and I had been out of this side of the game for a couple days now. The table at the top contained thousands more units of Wood, Stone, Iron, Glass, Plastic. Dozens more of the four elemental Reactants. A second person had added Crystal, or the same person had, truthfully or not, added a second find.

Best of all, there was a new Material. Gold! It was in them thar hills! (No, according to the too-brief summary by the player who’d entered the Gold, it came from somewhere in Florida.)

I’d still rather have Water than Gold. In Third Eye, anyway. And I tried to believe I’d rather Lena find any Reactant than me find Water.

I was letting the AR stuff distract me again.

I expanded the list for finds of Wood. When that exploded to fill my entire screen, I searched for my own username.

“You have something in mind?” Miguel asked.

“Maybe.” I skipped my later finds. “When we found our first impossible object, I made a bunch of notes because I was sure it would be a clue. Then we collected it as a Material and that sort of took over.”

He tsked.

“You’ve seen the graphics,” Lena said. “The stuff with Materials is as crazy as our avatars. It’s super easy to get caught up in.”

“Maybe,” he said, “that’s the point.”

A distraction from the real game? I shook my head. “It’s all going to tie together.”

“You sound very confident.”

“You thought our avatars looked too cool to be part of a scam,” I said. “I think they’re too cool to be part of a distraction. Whoever handled that part of the game obviously gave a shit about it.”

“A pity they didn’t work on the interface,” he said.

Lena laughed. “Unless that’s another clue?”

“What would it even be a clue to?” I asked.

She shrugged. “We should look for stuff that looks shittier, maybe?”

“Huh.” If we saw a 2D sprite or a crude polygonal wireframe imposed on the world, would it signpost the really good stuff? I didn’t think we could’ve missed something so obvious, but I filed it away in my overstuffed mental folder of Third Eye shit to worry about.

I reminded myself that we’d gotten an achievement scroll for finding the website. I usually found achievements annoying. Players should either enjoy games or not, not run panting after extrinsic rewards. One legit good way to use them, though, was to focus players’ attention on unusual challenges.

Where else had I gotten achievements?

For getting Air, but the only way I could think of to “go deeper” was to literally dumpster dive. Even if I’d been willing to try it, the garbage had been picked up this morning. If whatever we were looking for now worked like the objects I manifested, physical force could move it and it was on its way to a metro area landfill.

For getting Wood the first time.

I opened the text file with my notes about that first impossible object.

Miguel leaned down to look. He scrunched his eyes. “What language is this?”

“My shorthand’s not that bad.”

He raised an eyebrow and I looked away.

In truth, I could barely remember what I’d meant by half the abbreviations I’d tapped out. “Look over the photos I took while I get this transcribed.”

I sent the text file to myself and the images to Lena and Miguel, then started refreshing myself on what I’d concluded about that weird, peeling white picket fence.

“Which do you think now?” Lena asked.

“Huh?”

“Was it keeping us in, or out?”

“Oh, that.” I flexed my fingers over my keyboard. “In, if it’s a metaphor. We’re still thinking in limited ways. Some parable of the cave shit. If it’s literal, though, out. They’d have to expect someone to see it from the parking lot, not the greenbelt, so the relevant location would be down there.”

“Where was this taken?” Miguel asked.

“Englewood downtown,” I said. “By Hampden, about a block off Broadway. Why?”

“Near where the mall used to be?”

“Huh?” I flicked a glance at him. “Oh, kind of. I forget you’re an old man.”

“I’m two years older than you!”

“A crucial two years,” I said. “I was still in preschool when that mall closed. You actually got to go.”

“I forget you’re a baby,” Miguel said. “Although in this case, it’s not my own trips to the mall that matter.”

I stopped typing and looked up.

“Remember Little Charlie?” he asked.

“Wiry dude, used to game with us, the reason we call Big Charlie ‘Big.’ Why?”

“He’s quite a bit older than us. Past forty now.”

“Poor bastard,” Lena said.

“Indeed,” Miguel said. “It does mean, however, he got to enjoy Cinderella City Mall in working order. He told me a story about it once. His brother worked in the arcade and they used to sneak in after closing to play Street Fighter free of charge.”

Lena perked up. “Oh shit, that sounds awesome. Almost enough to be worth getting old.”

“Right?” Miguel grinned.

“It does sound cool, but...” I winced when I thought about what I was about to say. “Not trying to be a dick here, honest. I’d like to hear about it. If we’re going to hear about it right now, though, I’d like to think it’s got something to do with Third Eye.”

“Which it does.” His grin turned sheepish. “Well. I should say, ‘which it has a non-zero chance of.’”

“How?” I asked.

“I’ll warn you,” Miguel said, “it involves taking the ‘deeper’ thing somewhat more literally.”

“Even better,” Lena said. She got up and peeked around his shoulder. “That means I was right.”

“I’d rather find out what the clues mean than be right,” I said.

“Oh, same.” She tugged on Miguel’s arm. “Unrelated to me being right, tell us what I was right about already.”

He took his phone out and showed us a much busier Maps screen than the one from the Canadian wilderness. I recognized the parking lot where we’d found the first unit of Wood, Hampden beyond, and that little gap of greenbelt. “This was the place?”

I nodded.

Miguel zoomed in. He rested his finger over the westernmost point of the greenbelt’s triangle. If he laid his finger flat it would overlap the exact spot fenced off by the Wood. “The maintenance tunnel they used to sneak into the mall? It started right here.”