Chapter 54: Facing Facts

“That’s not fair, Lena,” I said.

“Lots of things aren’t.” But she stopped mid-stalk and sort of sagged on the sidewalk.

“I did a shit job keeping my promise.” I caught her up, touched her arm, and when she didn’t brush me off, turned her gently to face Erin and I. “If you’re pissed at me, fine. But all Erin did was try to get us past this.”

Lena bit her lip. She hesitated, then leaned around me and raised her voice. “Sorry, Erin. That was shit of me.”

“I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be if you don’t have a Reactant yet,” Erin said. “Especially with the video doing well.”

“Yeah, it really sucks,” Lena said. “But Cam’s right. First time for everything, yeah? Honestly, I don’t have much reason to be mad at either of you. I’m just jealous, I guess.”

“If I can find a Reactant for you,” Erin said, “especially Fire, I’ll try to preserve it.”

Lena shook her head. “I don’t want your pity, and I don’t want your charity. I don’t... I mean, I want to keep playing, but a part of me doesn’t want to. It’s so cool, but it’s getting kinda stressful, too. Maybe I’d be better off like Miguel, just watching.”

“I think you’re just worried about Albie,” I said.

“Lil’ bit.” She sighed. She spread her arms and waved for both of us to come forward. “Hug it out?”

I glanced at Erin. She squirmed for a moment. Then she conjured her usual smile, braces bright in the pale light, and stepped forward with her arms outstretched.

Lena tugged both of us into a loose embrace; I hugged her back, and Erin leaned forward and put her arms around our shoulders without allowing herself to be pulled closer.

Abruptly, she laughed. “I feel like we’re in a huddle.”

Lena groaned. “Typical sports fan. Total one track mind.”

But I felt the tension in her back ease, and after a moment, she started laughing, too.

When we disentangled ourselves and stepped back, both Lena and Erin wore pensive expressions. I couldn’t really parse either of them. Better than Lena being angry and Erin being upset, at least.

“Is it cool if we still stop here?” Lena asked. “I’m not mad anymore. Worried and frustrated ain’t how I do my best work, though.”

“That’s more than fine,” Erin said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll hit you up on Discord later to talk about the script. I think we’ve done all the practical preparations we need for you to make an amazing video.”

“Of course,” Lena said. “The Magnificent Ashbird would never let down her adoring public.”

I expected her to strike a pose, but she didn’t seem to have the energy.

Erin clapped anyway. “I expect nothing less.”

“Want us to walk you back to your dorm before we head home?” I asked.

She shook her head. “If I’m worried about invasion, I’ll just turn off Third Eye until I get back.”

Which wasn’t the same thing as saying she was worried about invasion.

I wondered what extra gear she had that made her so confident.

Asking about it did not strike me as a way to boost Lena’s confidence, though. Something to do in DMs someday, if we continued to get closer with Erin.

We left the park in opposite directions. The walk home felt barren. Lena didn’t talk. I couldn’t tell if she wanted me to rescue her from her thoughts or if she needed time to process them. The blocks rolled past with no impossible objects. Picked clean, either by she and I or by the DU set. We tried to take a different set of streets every time, but I doubted there was anything left to find in this part of town.

After a few blocks, Lena glanced at her phone and turned off Third Eye entirely.

“I’ll let you know if I see anything,” I said.

She grunted. We were almost to the end of the block before she said, “I mean, thanks.”

“You don’t have to be polite if you don’t want to.”

She looked at me out of the corner of her eye.

“I don’t,” I said, “want you to strain yourself.”

She gave me the finger, but her chuckle gave mine permission.

Turned out she’d had the right idea. Though I kept sweeping the streets we walked down, I didn’t see a single impossible object. Just block after block of older houses, neighborhoods I normally wouldn’t have bothered to visit or noticed if I did, dry grass, bare trees, clouded skies, freezing air.

The world as it had been before Third Eye.

We’d only been playing a little over a week, so it probably shouldn’t have felt so desolate. Then again, without Third Eye, I wouldn’t have bothered going out in the first place unless I had a specific destination in mind. I would’ve gotten wherever that was as fast as possible and paid my surroundings as little mind as I could. A grocery store or restaurant or friend’s house, or MicroCenter if my bank account was feeling extra full that week.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I nudged Lena’s shoulder. “What do you want to do this afternoon?”

“Some actual work,” she said.

“Makes sense,” I said.

Our positions were reversed from a couple of days ago, when she’d been bouncing on her heels for Third Eye stuff and I’d stuck to that web design job.

The success of our video had left me hoping we had another option. Maybe we would, but our YouTube careers were still ticking up to the level where we could get delivery guilt-free a few more times a month. Actual success was a long way off, and so far from assured it would be insane to bank on it.

We could fail to find Lena her Fire before it was time to do a video on it. We could fail to find Earth for either of us, and we’d need that to do the very next video.

In theory, we could deal with all that. We could convince Erin to guest star and handle Fire and Earth, with Lena just acting as the presenter. Erin had seemed viscerally opposed to playing lovely assistant, though, and I knew how much it would suck for Lena to have to prance around acting peppy while everyone else got to do cool shit.

Nor were there any guarantees even if we could keep making the videos.

We could run out of material after three more uploads. One or both of us could fall into the bottom 1%. People could lose interest in watching us, either as our shtick got old or they got their own Reactants and started focusing on those. Third Eye’s playerbase could all tune in, every last one of them, active and not, and it still turn out to not be enough to amount to serious money.

Third Eye could get canceled.

Forget the creepy moments where it seemed like it was more than a game. Forget the absurd design decisions like real-world invasion PVP. Even when they did everything right and had no complications at all, video games failed all the time.

Although deep down, I didn’t really believe that could happen anymore.

So add another possibility to the list:

I could get so scared of Third Eye I wanted nothing more to do with it.

I thought about that as we tromped up the stairs to our apartment. I kept thinking about it as we hung our coats up and turned our computers on. I kept thinking about it while I peeked over Lena’s shoulder and saw she really had opened Upwork to browse for gigs.

I tried hard not to think about it while I returned to my own PC. I went to Fiverr instead. No need for us to compete where our skill sets overlapped.

When I realized I hadn’t scrolled in five minutes, I pushed my chair back and rubbed my eyes.

I got up, ran myself a glass of tap water, seasoned it with some ice cubes. The height of luxury. I leaned against the kitchen counter while I drank.

What actual evidence did I have for my fears?

The weirdness surrounding Third Eye’s launch, its graphical chops, its tracking, the amulets. Crazy, but not impossible, just as I’d thought the first night.

The sense of physicality when one of us interacted with an object someone else had manifested. That could be down to the absurd fidelity of the graphics, sound, and physics model. The objects reacted realistically to our exertion and our minds filled in the sense we were pushing against something.

Miguel’s belief that he’d been physically pushed by the Water before I absorbed it. The impressions of a guy who’d gotten a concussion from his fall, just about the least reliable source I could imagine.

Those moments when I got a Reactant, and it felt like I was experiencing everything as my avatar, without the need for my phone as a medium.

I didn’t have an explanation for those. Not a good one. I could say they were just my memory backfilling what I expected because of the sound design. So where did my time go the morning I got Air? Why were those memories so vivid? Some of the most vivid I had?

And Erin’s reaction.

That was what really scared me. Maybe I was reading her wrong, but I couldn’t convince myself of it. When the subject of Third Eye phenomena feeling real came up, she went into actress mode. And she was the only other person I knew IRL who’d experienced gaining a Reactant.

So was that it? I believed in magic now? Or at least sufficiently advanced technology?

I downed a gulp of ice water and got a brain freeze out of it.

Actual magic, like Lena had joked from the start? Well, maybe. Just the fact I wasn’t dismissing it out of hand made my stomach clench. It couldn’t get any scarier.

Right?

I believed Third Eye was doing something much weirder than even the weird shit we’d agreed it was. That didn’t have to mean it was real. Some kind of subliminal pattern in the graphics and sound, screwing with my mind? That would explain everything except Miguel’s fall, and he could’ve just believed it was happening for the same reason I believed I could see an amulet on my chest sometimes.

Awesome.

At least if Third Eye was magic, I was getting magic out of it. Terrifying, but also incredibly cool. Now I’d managed to cook up an explanation that was even scarier, and it didn’t even come with superpowers.

It didn’t feel right. But then, it wouldn’t, would it?

I finished off the glass of water – more carefully –, refilled it around the remaining ice, and carried it back to my computer.

I still had Fiverr open. A whole page of web design jobs. I’d gotten a four and a half star rating for the last one I turned in, so I would seem qualified for almost any of these. With my added experience, I might even deserve to. I started clicking through them between sips.

Long before I got to the point of firing off proposals, though, I found myself with my phone in my hand, staring at the Third Eye interface.

I pressed Water and Wood, pointed my camera toward the corner of our living room, propped my phone on the desk, and started making myself a houseplant with both hands.

I didn’t have a plan, either for the plant or for why I’d started working on it. I didn’t know what I wanted to learn from it. I just wanted to touch base with the part of Third Eye that was cool and, at least seemingly, harmless.

I heard Lena’s chair creak.

I reached for my phone.

“Don’t stop,” she said.

“It doesn’t bug you? Me working with Water?”

“That’s not the one I want,” she said. “Besides, we could use a plant to liven up this dump.”

I glanced at her and smiled.

She looked so tired. Shoulders drooping, hair limp, dark circles under her eyes. But she smiled back and managed to make me believe she meant it.

I finished changing the plant. Starting with a vertical configuration, I’d kept its footprint small enough that it wouldn’t take up too much of our room in Third Eye. I’d grown it into something like a fern, although I couldn’t have begun to guess what kind.

“Well?” I asked.

“Love it,” she said. “It totally brings the room together.”

“If the world’s first bobblehead-based interior decorator thinks so, who am I to argue?”

I managed to coax an actual grin from her.

My phone and both our PCs chimed. A Discord message. I switched to it on my computer.

It was a DM rather than a notification, which didn’t really surprise me. Erin had mentioned hitting us up to discuss the script.

What did surprise me was that this DM came from Donica.