Chapter 46: Uncharted Territory
Long before we got close enough to touch the mound, I knew it wasn’t Earth.
For one, I could see rocks piled beneath the thin layer of dirt and dry grass. Third Eye classified any kind of rock formation as Stone. Some objects we collected were complex enough to give multiple Materials, though, so the possibility of a single unit of Earth remained.
Except that for another, nothing changed as we sprinted towards it.
When I first acquired Air, I’d felt a breeze whip at my clothes and looked down to find I was dressed like my avatar. The moment passed so quickly I could dismiss it as my mind playing tricks on me until I learned otherwise, but it sure as hell had stuck with me. That had been the least spectacular thing we’d experienced upon finding a Reactant.
Here? Nothing.
You might think the realization would come as some kind of a disappointment.
Nope.
Because as we sprinted toward that first mound, my phone showed glimpses of three more peppering the flat ground ahead of us. Of an extra fence that wasn’t there IRL. Of a metal structure, sort of a shanty of corrugated aluminum. Of a couple of signs, not potentially threatening road or warning signs, but advertisements in runic script for places I was pretty sure didn’t exist. Even – and these looked the most out of place – a few trees, green and leafy like they wouldn’t have been around here even in the spring.
The generative algorithms for normal AR games clustered their contents around densely packed urban areas, especially around places they expected their playerbases to flock to. As in so many other respects, Third Eye seemed far from normal.
I found it hard to fix in my head how the object density compared to what we’d seen in the city. I thought these might be spaced a bit further apart, but if so, not by much. And we had so much more ground we could cover without the hard right angles of urban intersections and the pressed-close obstructions of walls and fences.
One thing I knew for sure. The density was a lot less than at the construction site. I sure hoped, though, that this environment carried a lot less risk, too.
It occurred to me that we’d never really pressed Albie on why there were so many Materials, and even a Reactant, in an environment players weren’t supposed to enter. We’d never got the chance to ask in person, and as AlephLambda, she always couched her answers in boilerplate video game terms that made them difficult to parse.
Lena, who got to the mound first because she presumably hadn’t gotten lost in her thoughts, paused to take a couple of pictures of it before we moved on to collection. Her fingers flew across her phone screen, probably to upload the find to the wiki.
We’d gotten in the habit of tagging and uploading our discoveries back on the very first day. Certainly, I appreciated how other people’s finds had helped us learn what to look out for as we hunted objects through the city’s complex environments. I even hoped we’d helped other players with our posts. Once we’d started thinking of the objects we found as potential ARG clues, as well as resources, we’d gotten really into the weeds, taking multiple photos and appending extensive notes. It didn’t hurt that we’d found less as we went along, since more and more of the in-town objects had been picked over.
I didn’t want Lena to post about these just yet, so I touched her elbow. “Let’s hold off.”
She glanced at me, one eyebrow raised. “You want to hoard everything out here for just the two of us? Erin’s not going to be happy about your loss of community spirit.”
“My community spirit is ready to do a batch post when I get home, the way I always do,” I said. “I just don’t want to give away our position to everybody on the internet until we’re done scouting for the day.”
Did I want to think about Third Eye more tactically? Honestly? Yeah. My favorite part of PVP was eking out an advantage in information or economy, not a head-to-head contest of skill.
Third Eye PVP might have higher stakes, might be too frightening for me to enjoy in the moment, but this? This I could get into.
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I wasn’t sure Lena could. Her preferred PVP games were the type where you started with theoretically equal resources and smashed your skills together until only one of you remained.
She said, “You’re thinking about Mask?”
“And anybody else who sees us getting a potential advantage and decides to do something about it.”
“I want to say, ‘I’d like to see them try.’” She sighed. “After last night, I guess that’s not actually true.”
We nodded to each other. No posting until we reached at least the illusion of safety our apartment offered.
She lowered her phone and raised her glasses away from her eyes. Smart precautions, since there didn’t seem to be any way to turn off the flash when we collected an object.
I let her take the first mound. When I raised my phone again, I found the pile of rocks gone, of course, leaving a clump of disturbed dirt and grass, like uncut sod laid haphazardly in a blanket.
Over the rest of that morning, we saw an awful lot of sod.
If most AR games’ generative algorithms tried to put content where players might conceivably come across it, Third Eye’s put content wherever it considered appropriate. Extra fences or piles of bricks along the edge of construction sites. Hedge mazes in front yards. Odd road signs with no intersections to explain them. Extensions to buildings.
In Chatfield, that had mostly meant clusters of foliage, and if you’d pressed me to say what I expected to find out here – if I’d expected to find anything – it would’ve been more Wood. Illusory scrub oaks, perhaps, or even scrubbier bushes.
We found a little bit of everything, maybe because we were along the road, but these mounds of Stone were the main thing Third Eye thought the area should be dotted with.
A lot of them, and plenty of other objects as well, resided too far from the sidewalk. Real fences kept us away from them, and one time, we even saw somebody – I thought he was a construction worker, but maybe he was some kind of ranch hand – pacing along the edge of one.
If we’d seen something that looked like a Reactant, we would’ve jumped a fence for it. For the same kind of Materials we were getting along the sidewalk? Why risk it?
The mounds only dried up when the grass abruptly turned moist.
It takes an absurd amount of water and fertilizer to get green lawns at any time of the year in Colorado. In February? Take “absurd” and substitute “obscene.” Nonetheless, that’s what we found as we continued to follow the road, and it didn’t come from Third Eye. Whoever obsessively maintained the greenbelt along the highway cared far less than Third Eye Productions about making their alterations to the world fit in with their surroundings.
The subdivision we’d wandered into went hard on the McMansions, but we could only see their upper stories. A stone wall kept them sequestered from both road sounds and pedestrians like Lena and I.
Even so, I started to feel like someone would call the cops on us for wearing ratty clothes. Since I didn’t feel the cold too badly as long as I stuck close to Lena, I took off my threadbare gloves and shoved them into my pockets.
No one actually accosted us, even when Lena scrambled onto the grass to collect something that looked like a birdhouse, one of those fancy ones people put up to try and fail to attract Purple Martins. We did get a couple of glares from the passenger seats of the SUVs that cruised past, though.
I tried to ignore them and concentrate on the shift in the Third Eye objects.
How did the game know when to stop placing things it thought belonged in nature? When had the objects been generated? If we traveled to a brand-new suburb, would we find weird birdhouses, or weird mounds? What if no one collected anything for a few months, and an area got rezoned? Would the game update, or leave the objects it had placed there in the first place, even though they now stuck out like sore thumbs?
Pleasant, if pointless, distractions. Still, I was glad when we reached Parker proper and the McMansions shrank to homes more like Miguel’s. Here, we didn’t stick out. Too much.
On the other hand, the greenbelt also shrank to a single, foot wide strip of natural, brown, dry grass, and the fences crowded right up to the sidewalk. We’d gone from a massive windfall of materials outside of town, to intermittent finds in the upscale suburbs, to nothing here. I had no doubt there were Third Eye objects to collect. We just couldn’t reach them without traipsing through people’s yards.
What we collected instead, after several more intersections, was a chance to grab some food. The first strip mall we came to sported a pair of restaurants.
Instinctively, Lena and I drifted toward the Little Caesar’s, beloved of people with low income everywhere. We could split a hot and ready pepperoni with just the change in our wallets.
Lena hesitated outside the door.
“Not in the mood for pizza?” I asked.
“They don’t have anywhere to sit,” she said. “Weren’t we going to stop here and plan our next move?”
“You want to go to a sitdown place?” I eyed the other restaurant. A Japanese place called Kurosawa.
“I wonder if they named it after the director,” Lena said, so I knew she was looking in the same direction.
“It’s probably a common name,” I said.
“If we ate there,” she said, “we could ask somebody.”
“You know,” I said, “when I proposed we live the rest of this month on credit, I figured we’d try to spend less.”
She laughed like I’d made a joke.