Chapter 45: Ridgegate

The light rail’s announcer recording said something I’d never heard from her before. “Ridgegate Parkway Station.”

I nudged Lena’s elbow. “End of the line.”

“What? Where?” She blinked and shook her head. “I wasn’t sleeping!”

I didn’t bother to hide my smile.

She puffed her cheeks out. “If, hypothetically, I maybe dozed for a few minutes here and there, would I have missed anything interesting?”

“I saw some things that might have been Third Eye objects.” Odd signs, odd buildings, one metal construction that looked like it might have been a stray cell tower, but with different antennae than any I’d ever seen. It wouldn’t have shocked me if I touched any of them and got a flash and some new Materials, but it also wouldn’t have shocked me if it turned out they were just weird bits of IRL architecture. “Nothing certain, nothing close to a station. Nothing that screamed Reactant, much less Refinement.”

Lena nodded. “Even if this is basically the middle of the wilderness, we know at least one player rode down here since the game started.”

Nobody except us was riding down here this morning, player or otherwise. We sat alone in the light rail car and had for the last two stops, ever since we passed the sensible end of the R Line. It might have been different if we’d been heading north on this E Line; most of our surroundings had been suburban, residential, and some of the suburbanites would take the light rail into the city.

The station the light rail dumped us off at didn’t look suburban, though. Sure as hell didn’t look urban.

I stopped on the platform to take in the full view of it. I fought down an impulse to scramble back onto the train.

Ridgegate Station had to be the weirdest stop in the whole RTD system. In theory, it was going to serve as the heart of the city center for Lone Tree, one of the towns at the southern edge of the Denver metro area. No different from our familiar stations in Englewood or Littleton, right? Whether the surrounding buildings ended up being offices, or strip malls, or quirky local shops, or apartments, or McMansions? Depended on some city planner’s idea of what a city center should be. And on their ability to wrangle developers into obeying.

Also, on whether they managed to entice enough developers to build, you know. An actual city center.

Or even a village square.

Right now, the station faced a single building: a comically oversized parking garage near a slightly less oversized highway. I could see a couple of construction sites in the distance, but they hadn’t gotten as far into the building process as the one we’d explored last month.

Aside from those?

Emptiness.

Dried grass, patches of snow, patches of dirt. I didn’t see a single tree; no one had bothered to plant even a forlorn pine by the light rail station. No fields, nor even any fences except the temporary ones around the construction sites. No bushes or underbrush taller than my ankle. The only thing that registered to me as terrain was the parking garage, at once excessive for its surroundings and dwarfed by the emptiness into which it had been so incongruously planted.

I mean, in actuality, the whole area was wilderness. I supposed there were just as many critters living out there as at Chatfield Reservoir. Prairie dogs and insects and, like, sage grouse or something. I tried, in an abstract sense, to be happy for them that their habitat had not yet been consumed by urban sprawl.

Emotionally, though, it just registered as empty.

Worse than empty. Unfinished.

If you saw this landscape in a video game, you’d think it was out of bounds, an area with no content where players weren’t meant to go.

I tried not to shudder.

Since Lena took this as her turn to nudge me, I probably failed.

“You okay?” she asked.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“This place weirds me out,” I said. “It’s the train to nowhere.”

“It’s not nowhere,” Lena said. “It’s got a parking garage. And if you squint, there’s an incline as you go further south. Practically a hill!”

“Explains why we had so much trouble finding a seat on the light rail.”

“I think it’s mostly for people coming up from Castle Rock to grab a train,” she said.

“Then,” I muttered, “they should stretch it down to Castle Rock.”

She laughed. “Kansas is going to wreck you.”

Well, she wasn’t wrong. I’d spent most of our last trip with my nose pressed to a book or a phone screen. Lena’s hometown of Lawrence was itself a pretty town, every bit as tree-lined as Denver. Most of the Kansas towns were, actually, big or small. It was just the vast expanses between them that made me feel like I was going to fall through the map.

“Hopefully most of the Third Eye playerbase feels like I do,” I said.

“If nothing else, any objects out here, we’re going to see them from a long way off.” Lena raised her phone and swept it around. She didn’t pause on anything, so I had to assume the vista looked just as empty with a Third Eye filter over it.

So far, so expected. DU_Goldie had posted a couple of finds from near this station, so we knew we weren’t the first players to approach the very limit of the light rail system.

He hadn’t listed anything much further out, though. Judging from the timestamps on his posts, I suspected he’d ridden one light rail down here, grabbed any Third Eye resources within line of sight, then hopped on the next northbound back to the city.

No one else had posted finds from the surrounding area to the wiki, so either no one had checked it, or they’d kept their discoveries to themselves, or there’d never been anything to find.

Or there was, and we could grab it.

I looked over the terrain again, and again felt that queasy sensation of having slipped through a boundary break in reality. After what happened at the construction site, I’d have been a lot more worried about it, except that I’d felt this way in any kind of plains environment since I was a little kid.

From what we’d seen on the wiki, Third Eye Productions did not consider wilderness areas to be out of bounds.

Lena got out her smart glasses and slid them up her nose. In this nearly empty environment, just about anything she saw was going to be game-relevant, so there was no benefit to contrasting the view through a phone with our regular sight the way we did when we scouted in town.

Since I didn’t have the glasses, though, I had to hold my phone up and pan it back and forth.

Thus equipped, we began to walk.

We planned to follow the sidewalk along Ridgegate Parkway. You didn’t normally get proper sidewalks on roads outside of cities, but this one was apparently the vanguard of attempts to change the area’s status. Along with the parking garage, it represented just about the only legacy of the plans to turn it into a city center.

We headed east, away from even the hints of habitation and the mountains in the background. After an hour and a half walking, we should hit the larger town of Parker. Good place to grab brunch and plan out our return trip.

I had to laugh.

Bernie made a questioning gurgle and Lena raised an eyebrow. “Don’t tell me all this open space has already started to make you crack.”

“No,” I said. “I’m just imagining what we would’ve said two months ago if somebody proposed we start our day with an hour and a half walk.”

Lena eyed my legs, then her own. She started chuckling, too. “Do you think we’re actually getting in shape, or are our HP just keeping us from feeling the fatigue?”

“I’m hoping it’s both,” I said.

“Just in case it’s the HP thing,” Lena said, “you have to promise to carry me back to the light rail station if I run out.”

“Do I?” My eyes widened. “Damn. I missed that clause in the EULA.”

She laughed again, gave me the finger, and quickened her pace.

Despite our newfound stamina, though, our walk barely lasted fifteen minutes.

As she rounded a bend where the ground rose up enough to notice, Lena froze. “Oh shit, check it out!”

I stepped forward and spun my camera in the direction she’d pointed.

To my mark one eyeball, it was more of the same imagery I saw everywhere else. Actual fences here and there, the disturbed dirt of at least theoretical construction, distant buildings, even more distant hills, but close by? Nothingness.

But through Third Eye, a mound rose just a dozen feet from the sidewalk ahead of us.

My pulse quickened. Had we been a fifteen minute walk (and, admittedly, over an hour’s ride on the light rail) away from Earth all along? I’d say no one had ever been so excited by a vision of a pile of dirt that rose maybe four feet off the ground. But in this environment, anything four feet off the ground represented grounds for excitement.

No fences obstructed us from dashing toward it, but as we got closer, I glanced around for a “No Trespassing” sign.

Of course, we were going to check out the mound no matter what a sign told us. I don’t think we would’ve stopped even if it read, “Trespassers will be shot,” first because I didn’t really believe that would happen, second because as far as I could tell, a bullet should cost us a lot less HP than jumping from a balcony.

If there’d been a “No Trespassing” sign in Third Eye, we might have hesitated. That was exactly the kind of signage Donica had ignored when she let it lead her to the construction site.

There was no sign, in or out of Third Eye.

Lena and I exchanged glances, nodded, and sprinted onto the dried grass.