Chapter 53: Tunnel Access

You know what I really wanted to do after learning that my girlfriend and I fit the extremely narrow demographic profile of people who might be abducted by a shadowy figure with supernatural powers?

If you guessed, “slipping out late at night to creep through a dark, dank hole where the only light came from the screens of our phones with their Third Eye filters turned on?”

Then seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?

Nonetheless, that’s exactly what Lena, Miguel, Zhizhi, Bernie, and I were doing.

Our little party hadn’t started off festive, and after Erin’s explanation, none of us felt much like livening it up. I insisted on riding along while she dropped Donica off and returned to her DU dorm, just in case Mask decided to try nabbing her instead of Lena or I. If he’d considered it, if he was even still in town, the size of our group deterred him.

I dropped Benji another message to let him know we remained both okay and busy, then we piled into Miguel’s Prius and made for the tunnel.

The familiar streets looked darker to me, their shadows deeper. Warmer, though, because Lena and I pressed even closer together than usual. Though I couldn’t see her wing wrapped around my shoulders, I sure as hell felt it.

Miguel parked in the shopping center over the greenbelt and we strolled down the ramp. Acting casual, or failing to.

We paused outside the entrance. This outer gate remained open and unmarred by signs telling us to stay out. Almost inviting. Unlike the shadows behind it.

Miguel lingered near the back of our party. He drummed his fingers on the railing.

“You sure you want to go back in, man?” Lena asked. “It’s fine if you two want to run coms for us, like at the construction site.”

“Hey, don’t count me in that,” Zhizhi said. “Now that you’ve almost been in the news, I really want to get some decent footage.”

I’m sure she meant it as a joke, but only Miguel laughed. I thought it sounded forced, but what do I know?

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “If we encounter another wall of magical Water, I’m sure Lena and Cameron will be clawing to get to it first.”

Lena patted my arm. “Nope. I got the last Reactant, so if we find one it’s all Cam’s.”

“As long as it doesn’t attempt to be mine again,” Miguel said.

When we hesitated to go in, he raised his phone, flicked on his Third Eye filter, and took the lead.

“How are you going to see with no lights?” I asked Zhizhi.

She hefted her camera and showed me. Through its viewfinder, I saw Bernie in salamander form and Lena aflame, just like through my phone. “We’ve got the filter cloned to my phone and my camera,” Zhizhi said. “Seems to be just as functional as Miguel’s version. Too bad we can’t snag the powers, too, huh?”

I said, “Yeah,” even though I’d started to wonder how much I wanted them.

That was the last anyone said for quite a while. Once we plunged into the darkness, silence felt like a natural accompaniment.

At least it didn’t smell like a sewer level. The water in the drainage ditch was crisp runoff, not sewage. I’d say “clean,” but I’d seen the stains that snow left after it melted.

In my head, I tried to count our footsteps, if only so I had a sound to pay attention to. I lost track after a few minutes. Too hard to tell what was a step and what was an echo.

I didn’t hear anything splashing in the water, as I’d thought I had the last time.

Zhizhi broke the silence. I felt absurdly grateful. She asked, “Did this really used to go all the way to the old mall?”

“So I’ve been told,” Miguel said. We’d first found out about the tunnel because of a story from one of his old gaming buddies. He’d claimed to have snuck into the arcade below the defunct Cinderella City mall and spent evenings playing for free.

Zhizhi shook her head. “I think your friend was pulling your leg. It just seems like a maintenance tunnel to me.”

“Are you suggesting someone I met while playing a game where we pretended to be people we were not would lie about a cool story?” Miguel clicked his tongue. “Unthinkable.”

Lena frowned. “You sure sounded confident when you told us.”

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“That,” he said, “is because I sure was curious.”

Both women chuckled.

I tried to, but I didn’t think the hollowness in my voice came from the tunnel’s echoes.

We were four tiny lights floating through an inky sea. The darkness pressed in on me. I didn’t consider myself claustrophobic. I never had before, anyway. So why did I find it hard to breathe like this?

Because it wasn’t the close confines that scared me. It wasn’t even the darkness.

It was the person who’d decided to make darkness his calling card.

Maybe it was stupid, but Erin’s theory made Mask seem more frightening than if he’d “just” been a murderer. If he was abducting players, first, how? Second, where was he putting them?

Third, what did he do with them when their XP dropped low enough that they fell out of the beta?

It seemed like murder with extra steps. Extra, terrifying steps. Once you added kidnapping to the mix, killing witnesses suddenly made a hell of a lot more sense.

Worse was that Erin was the person who’d pointed out why he’d want to capture other players. Aside from – as much as I hated to admit it – Matt, she was the person I trusted most when it came to sussing out game design. She’d picked up on the incentive structure Mask seemed to be following, and it seemed to make sense.

Did that mean Mask was doing exactly what Third Eye wanted?

I’d occasionally wondered if the game wasn’t set up to encourage us to commit minor crimes. My group was either trespassing already, or going to be when we reached the locked gate and climbed around it. If we wanted to find whatever Third Eye resources awaited us down here, we had no choice.

Hell, we’d technically broken, if not a law, at least a park rule when we climbed past the summit of the Rueter-Hess Incline and then fell outside the walking trail. How often did Reactants lie outside the bounds of what we were “supposed” to do?

An accident of the generative algorithm?

Or intentional, a subtle way of driving us apart from normal society?

If Mask was abducting people to drain their XP, he’d gone way beyond minor crimes. Had he gone beyond the behavior Third Eye wanted to incentivize?

It reminded me that we had no idea what the devs were or what they wanted from the game. We joked about aliens, because it seemed so ludicrous. We joked about wizards, because if we didn’t laugh we’d have to take the suggestion seriously. Neither category explained what they would get out of gifting – or, well, selling via Kickstarter – working magic to a bunch of gamers.

Or what they would get from eliminating said gamers one by one.

I felt something poke me in the ribs and swung my phone toward it before I realized it was just Lena’s finger.

“What the hell?” I gasped.

“I could tell you were catastrophizing,” she said.

I gave her a sheepish smile. “Maybe a little.”

She shook her head. Her wings, pressed close to her back to fit inside the tunnel, rustled.

A word about our four tiny lights. They all pointed directly at our faces. Until we got deep enough in the tunnel that we couldn’t see even a hint of the glow from the highway somewhere outside, we’d agreed not to turn on our phones’ lights. Instead, we found our way through Third Eye alone, which showed the tunnel bathed in the glow of Lena’s flames.

I was pretty sure we’d done this a few times without thinking about it before we realized the game conferred actual magic. Another thing that should have tipped us off. How did the phone camera know what to layer AR over if there was no light for it to see by?

Another thing I didn’t know about the game, but this was just a cool – and in this case useful – bit of incidental wizardry. If I’d still been rationalizing, I think I could have even managed to convince myself it was technical wizardry. Massively boosting the light gain on the camera settings and then using AR to fill in the proper color balance, or basing a full AR version of the environment on a glimpse from when we’d had our lights on.

I no longer had to scramble for excuses for Third Eye’s weirdness. Whatever rules it followed, they weren’t those of the physical world as I’d understood it two months ago.

The important thing in this case was that everything I saw was what the Third Eye filter showed me. At the construction site, it had included working lights over our heads, even though there shouldn’t have been any electricity running. Here, however, it just displayed the tunnel more or less as it was in reality, which meant the only light came from Lena’s flames.

Which meant it looked even more like a sewer level in a fantasy game than it already had. If I didn’t point my phone in Lena’s direction, I’d think I was looking at a tunnel lit by torchlight.

Maybe because that made the experience more gamelike, it put a smile back on my face.

It stayed there until Miguel slowed in front of me and said, “Hm.”

“You spot something?” Lena asked.

I panned my phone around trying to catch sight of it, but ended up focusing on Miguel and Zhizhi. The two of them looked out of place in their modern clothes. It struck me as especially cruel that we lost our avatars when we got kicked out of the beta; Miguel, at least, should have appeared in an outfit like mine.

He brushed his hand along the railing. “It isn’t what I see that I find strange. It’s what I do not.”

“What’s that?” Zhizhi asked.

“The last time I came to this tunnel, I had to trudge out through freezing water, with cracked ribs and a mild concussion.” He spread his fingers wide to encompass the tunnel. “Does that strike anyone as a recipe for making me remember the distance as smaller than it actually is?”

Zhizhi frowned at his seeming nonanswer.

I, more used to how Miguel liked to communicate, got it right away.

So did Lena. “Oh yeah! We’ve been walking for ages. Where the hell was that locked gate?”

Now, there was a perfectly rational explanation for this. Someone – either a City of Englewood employee who was supposed to be here, or another player who wasn’t – had come in, unlocked/picked/broken the lock, as appropriate, and left the gate open. With our narrow and, let’s be honest, not a hundred percent accurate to reality viewpoints, we’d wandered through it without noticing.

Remember when I said I was done rationalizing Third Eye?

Without hesitation, without fear of being seen by the outside world, I turned and flicked on my phone’s light.

There, in the murk just at the edge of my sight, stood the gate. Closed and locked, just as I remembered it. And about fifty feet behind us.