Chapter 49: Costs

If the impossible objects on Sycamore meant anything, none of the three of us figured out what. We took our pictures and mourned our inability to get to the house’s fake second floor. I grabbed the flagpole – one Iron for the pole, one Plastic for the flag –, we rock-paper-scissored for the wall – Lena won, ten Stone –, and we walked to the light rail station.

On the ride to Englewood Downtown, Lena and I shared our images of Albie and Marroll. I let Lena explain why we wanted to find Albie, and Erin nodded along with a frown.

“I’ll find her, of course,” she said.

“No crack about what we’re going to do if we manage to?” Lena asked.

“Try to help, I’m sure.” Erin reached across the light rail booth and Lena let her clasp her hand. “I’m sure you’ll find a way.”

Lena looked away. “Well. If you get any ideas, drop us a line.”

“Mmhm!” Erin’s head bobbed.

The light rail’s PA chimed. Englewood Downtown station.

I stood up and braced myself on the handrail. “This is our stop. See you around.”

“Certainly,” Erin said. “This was – fun.”

“For sure,” Lena said.

Erin peeked at her through her phone. “Hey. If I can find Albie, what do you say to telling me how you made your dress?”

“I’ll think about it.” Lena tossed her hair and slipped around me toward the light rail doors.

I hesitated, wanting to see Erin’s reaction, but she just blinked up at me. I didn’t want to get stranded and have to take a different light rail back, so I hurried after Lena.

We’d picked the path between the station and our apartment clean days ago, so we took Englewood’s free Art Moves You shuttle home and rested our legs.

“We gotta get the video posted,” Lena said as she opened the apartment door. “Your channel or mine?”

“Neither of us has posted any videos, much less drawn an audience,” I said. “You play the host. I’m just the lovely assistant. It should be yours.”

She grinned, but her grin slipped. “You sure? You’re the one who did all the actual work.”

“That’s true for now. But we’ll fix it.” I meant we’d get her a Reactant. But I couldn’t resist adding, “For instance, you can get it uploaded.”

“Yeah!” She pumped her fist and dashed over to fire up her computer.

I booted mine as well, but for once it wasn’t to do Third Eye shit. As much as it pained me, I still needed to finish that damn web design job I’d taken before the beta started. Also, to find some other paying work.

I imagined turning in a site like the one we’d unearthed the night before. What would a client even do if they saw that in 2023?

Since I didn’t suspect the answer would include “appreciate its antique charm,” I buckled down and started designing something modern while Lena got the video up.

Bringing it online took about a half hour, which was a lot less than it took for me to finish that website. Nested DIVs and responsive CSS drove all thoughts of Third Eye from my mind.

“Video’s live,” Lena said.

I grunted acknowledgment. “Don’t forget to send a link to the wiki team so they can post it on there.”

“Like I didn’t already do that? How else are we going to jumpstart our subscriber count?”

I smiled thinly and refreshed the page I was working on. Somehow, the titles of the sample posts kept sliding down and overlapping the body text. This wasn’t even the part of the project I was underqualified for!

“You should take a break,” Lena said.

I adjusted an internal margin, refreshed, cursed, set it back and tried the external. Was it the border I had wrong?

“We gotta decide on food,” Lena said.

“Scrounge,” I said.

It wasn’t the border, either. Wasn’t there a third one? Padding. Or was the title inheriting something from somewhere else in the code?

“I think I deleted our video by accident,” Lena said.

I spun my chair around.

She was grinning from her perch atop hers. “Welcome home.”

I expelled a laugh. “I’m home.”

She peeked around me. “I’d offer to help, but I can’t even see the code. I just see blonde, brunette, redhead –”

“The line is ‘I don’t even see the code,’ and you damn well know it.”

“Nope. I totally forgot.” Her grin put the lie to the claim, not that I’d have ever believed it. “Maybe I’ll call Miguel up and make him give us his Netflix password. We can rewatch the original Matrix and then we’ll start on the sequels –”

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“Enough! I’ll take a break.” I dragged myself out of the chair and padded over to her. “Besides. I only need to see redhead.”

“Heh.” She ran her fingers through her hair. She played with a ringlet for a minute.

I waited for her to speak again.

She said, “You really just want to scrounge? I could go for another pizza.”

So she wasn’t ready for a serious conversation, huh?

That probably meant I wasn’t, either.

Which was not the same as saying we shouldn’t have it.

In fact, we should probably have a couple of different ones. About our relationship. About whether Miguel was right regarding Third Eye. About what we’d do if we could find Albie again.

Those, I could procrastinate on. One, however, was unavoidable.

I rubbed my arm. “I can’t afford to get any more pizza this month. I can’t really afford anything else, especially if you interrupt my web work.”

“That bad, huh?” Lena frowned. For a moment. Then she gave me a thumbs up. “It’s fine! I’ll treat you.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You sure?”

“Of course!” She got her phone out and started her order. “You can pay me back. You know. After the video makes us both gazillionaires.”

“I think I can pay you back before the heat death of the universe.”

“Way to sell us short.” She tapped something else on her phone. “Maybe I’ll just get me a pizza.”

In the end, though, she ordered it with three meats and green peppers, a combination we both liked.

I was hoping Raul would deliver it. I wanted to ask him if he remembered seeing anything weird as he was climbing to our place the last time. If he’d spotted a delivery drone as it buzzed away, it would clear up at least one mystery. When I got the door, though, the person delivering the pizza was a girl I’d never met. She handed over the box, collected her tip, and jogged to the stairs.

I looked around the walkway. No packages. Not that there should’ve been, but after last time I had to check, you know?

We ate in silence – I guess Lena learned her lesson after she almost choked. I put my two leftover pieces in the fridge and tried not to notice how little else remained in there.

I wasn’t the only one who had been picking Third Eye over paying work for the last week.

I closed the fridge. “You actually can cover that pizza, right?”

“Of course. When would I ever make a rash financial decision?” She sighed. “I can cover it, honest. But I really do hope the video does some numbers. It would be nice to not have to ask for a while.”

“Yeah.” I walked over and rubbed her shoulders. “Erin and Miguel seemed pretty hype. So did the wiki team. Maybe we can save the soul of Third Eye and make a buck doing it.”

“Hell yeah.” She sprang up and ran to her computer. “I’m gonna check the numbers!”

They weren’t great that afternoon, but they weren’t nothing, either. I figured we’d need roughly twice the entire Third Eye playerbase to watch if we wanted to cover the cost of pizza, but just knowing that somebody had clicked through from the wiki left both of us grinning.

I was so energized I even fixed my web design problem. I got it sent off to the client before I crashed for the night.

That should have opened up the next day to hunting for new gigs.

So naturally, Lena and I were out of the house before nine, scouting Materials.

It was slower going now. We’d grabbed most of the objects in our neighborhood, and the obvious place to roam next was near DU, which I knew was picked even cleaner than Englewood. Anywhere we wanted to scout, we’d have to get there first. It would cut into our time, and the longer the beta stretched on, the further we’d have to travel. For the moment, we ended up grabbing a bus back to Littleton.

We’d hoped to stop by and check on Miguel, but when we passed his house, his car was gone. He must’ve decided to go into work, concussion be damned. Lots more to find in his neighborhood, though.

It was also slower going because we tried to photograph and document each find. Parsing a clue seemed like our best chance at finding a Reactant for Lena.

A couple of times, I thought we’d successfully gone deeper, chasing an odd thread or something that looked like more than just a supply of Materials. None of them led to anything as spectacular as the tunnel. By the time we staggered home that evening, loaded with Materials, we were still on two Reactants and both of them were mine.

Lena brightened as soon as we got home and she checked her computer. “8,000 views now!”

She showed me the page.

I asked, “Does that pay for a pizza?”

“I’m not sure it pays for a tip,” she said. “But it’s growing. People are listening. Right?”

“What are they saying?”

She scratched the back of her neck. “Don’t they say to never read the YouTube comments?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but I don’t think we can get away with that if we’re trying to become content creators. Especially if we’re actually trying to change people’s minds about something.”

“Plus,” Lena said, “Albie promised to comment.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and scrolled down.

I started reading off the top comment. “That looks so badass! You’ve got to tell us where to get our own.”

We wouldn’t. Not unless the devs listened to Erin and cut the invasion PVP from the game. Oh, and not unless we figured out how to find more Reactants.

But at least if people found them on their own, the ones who thought we were doing cool things might try to follow our example.

“Hey, that ain’t bad,” Lena said. She risked peeking. “Ugh.”

I wondered what she was reacting to.

The second comment read “lol so cringe.” I wondered if DU_Goldie had decided to rip the bandaid off by posting it himself, or if he’d just correctly predicted some of the reactions. Still, it had a lot fewer thumbs up than I expected.

The third comment purported to be from AlephLambda. Coming from a dev was, I suspected, the only way it could’ve been voted up, because it was as vaguely positive as their Discord posts. “You’ve made some really interesting advancements! Looking forward to what you do next. :)”

The fourth comment just read “fire video.” I was pretty sure that was just another compliment. But it could also have been a request.

One we couldn’t fulfill.

“Tomorrow,” Lena said.

“Yeah,” I said.

But we were both wrong. The next day played out on repeat. We rode the bus further south, we collected the Materials we found, we tried to follow clues. We tried following ShakeProtocol’s predictive algorithm, too. Add another miss to his tally. His attempt to triangulate where Reactants would appear relative to clusters of Materials either didn’t work at all, or only worked in whatever environment he was trying to use it.

The video crossed 20,000 views that evening. The comments were only about 10% “lol so cringe” by volume.

On the plus side, I was starting to believe that if we kept this up, it might cover a pizza after all.

On the minus side, we couldn’t identify any of the comments as coming from Albie.

And further on that side, more and more came from people who weren’t going to be able to follow our example any time soon. Half complaining, half glad they could at least still watch while they waited for full release.

All unable to play.

A week after the start of the beta, the bottom 1% had begun to claim active players.