Chapter 55: Communication Gap

The sense of invitation put a spring in my step and Lena’s. This might look like a sewer level, but it looked like a level. We were playing Third Eye as a game, a game we could agree on liking, and that we were playing as intended.

It felt... clean.

Which was ironic, considering that, even though we hadn’t initially, intentionally climbed around the locked gate, I was pretty sure we were still trespassing. Also, the walls further out seemed to have been cleaned more recently than those in these deeper recesses of the tunnel. Old, undefinable grime clung to the floors, and the gray concrete walls had stained. Is there a color grayer than gray? If there wasn’t already, we’d discovered one.

Our environment was, legally and literally, dirtier than before. But fuck it. This felt the most like what we were supposed to be doing of anything since our visit to Lena’s Realm.

Our mood got to Bernie, or else something about the environment did – maybe he liked it more humid than the Denver area usually offered? – because as we walked, he started to chirp in tune to our steps.

I think he affected Zhizhi more than Lena or I, because soon after, I caught her grinning along with us.

Only Miguel continued to frown and puff at his cigarette. I supposed I couldn’t blame him. Hell. I remained surprised that he’d wanted to return to the tunnel at all.

The only thing that threatened to spoil my mood was the fact we hadn’t seen any golden flashes at the edge of our light. I couldn’t imagine that whatever was down here would look less obvious through the Third Eye filter.

Maybe another player had come in and collected it? I shrugged at the thought. If they had, we could see what the area looked like after it had been scouted and treat that as a learning experience.

Because it became increasingly clear that this was, scouted or not, a Third Eye environment. We came to a doorway set into the tunnel’s curving wall. Metal door, all very bland and official looking, except that the words on the sign above it were in Third Eye’s runic script. Not just through the filter; when I turned my light on, I saw the same door, the same sign.

“Been a while since we ran into this,” Lena said.

I nodded.

Third Eye had overlapped with the real world at the construction site, at Lena’s old apartment, and in the moments like this morning when we’d collected Reactants.

I looked up at the sign. “Too bad we can’t read this.”

“This one looks pretty simple,” Zhizhi said.

Just three characters, sort of orphaned on a sign big enough to accommodate an officious-looking English word. Way less complex than some of the iconography we’d seen.

I didn’t see how it mattered, though. One rune or a hundred, we couldn’t parse their meaning.

I glanced over my shoulder in time to see Zhizhi nudge Miguel’s arm.

“At least scan them into your phone,” she said. “I thought you and Joon Woo needed more data points.”

Miguel exhaled. “You’re right, of course.”

He raised his phone and panned it back and forth over the sign.

“What’s she talking about?” Lena asked.

“A little side project,” Miguel said.

“Is it not going well or something?” Zhizhi frowned at him. “You seemed so excited about it the other day.”

He chuckled. “Any of my bosses will tell you, or the players in my games. I’m always excited about the start of a project. Afterwards, I’m reminded that it’s a matter of discipline.”

On the one hand, I thought he sold his game mastering short. If he’d had to force himself to come up with the ideas we’d encountered late in his campaigns, then it was a testament to his performance under pressure as well as his creativity. As for his computer security work, I couldn’t speak directly to it, but I knew he’d gotten raises and a promotion during times when not many people could say as much.

On the other hand, he left out a category of people who might describe him in exactly the terms he’d just outlined: the eleven previous girlfriends he’d had in the time I’d known him. I’d seen a lot more of how those relationships began than how they ended. Most of the girls remained friends with him, so I had to assume they didn’t tend to end badly.

But they always ended quickly.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

It didn’t seem like my place to call him on it. Besides, from the way Zhizhi’s frown deepened, I suspected she could figure it out.

His phone beeped as he scanned the characters on the sign. Zhizhi’s expression brightened, but, oddly, Miguel’s face only grew more unreadable. Which I read as “unhappy.”

“I don’t have a clue what the third rune is,” he said, “and the first is extremely speculative. It may simply mean ‘location,’ but I wouldn’t begin to trust it.”

“Hold up.” Lena looked back and forth between the sign and Miguel. “Are you saying you and Joon Woo can actually read some of this shit?”

“Would you describe it as reading if you recognized the letter ‘d,’ but nothing else?” Miguel asked.

Zhizhi elbowed him. “Why are you being like this? You told me the runes are pictograms as well as letters. Knowing the letter ‘d’ might not help you, but knowing the pictogram for, I don’t know, ‘danger’ would be pretty handy.”

“Perhaps that’s the third one,” he said.

Her frown came back in full force.

“Dude, no, that’s incredible,” I said. “How are you figuring this out? Do you just have a huge database or something?”

“I have done very little on the project, frankly.” He showed me his screen. He had another app open, cleaner and more modern looking than Third Eye’s, with a picture of the rune in the middle of the sign. Three curving, parallel, diagonal lines, almost like a wave turned partly on its side. It was captioned with “person/people.”

Lena and Zhizhi peeked at the screen as well. The former said, “That’s people, huh?”

“It’s one of the most common, and perhaps the one we’re most certain of,” Miguel said. “As to how this is done, Joon Woo has put together what he describes to me as a simple learning AI to analyze and find patterns in all the examples of the script uploaded to the wiki.”

“How much do you have decoded?” I asked.

“With certainty? Two characters. This one, and another we’re fairly certain is ‘road’ or ‘path.’ Then a handful of words made of compound characters, but which have appeared so frequently, and alongside examples in real languages, that we feel confident in at least the approximate meaning.”

“Holy shit,” I breathed. “This is incredibly cool.”

“It’s an interesting project,” he said. “I hope something useful comes of it. Really, it’s Joon Woo you should ask. I’ve done little more than offer a suggestion here and there.”

Lena glared at him. “Phony humility doesn’t look good on you.”

Miguel shrugged grandly. “I’ll have to live with looking less than my best for once.”

I was sort of aware of the conversation continuing around me, but most of my attention stayed on that rune. If the one on Miguel’s screen didn’t match the one on the sign, they differed in too subtle a way for me to notice.

Three curving lines. Why this, for people? Something about it felt familiar to me. I supposed I’d seen it on other examples of Third Eye script. Made sense if it was one of the most common characters, right?

Unless the sign read, “no people or animals beyond this point,” or some similar warning – and I didn’t believe it did, or else we would’ve seen other cautionary signs along the way, including some in English – it gave me no reason not to press on.

I tried the door latch to check for a lock.

No lock. It clicked and swung open.

What did I expect to see on the other side? Maybe something more fantastical. Rough-hewn walls carved from the living rock, gargoyles and tapestries. That was just the torchlight effect of Lena’s flames talking. Third Eye didn’t really go for full-on fantasy environments. It just showed us a world slightly askew from our own.

In this case, a world of building maintenance corridors. The walls were whitewashed drywall, the inner doors were the same kind of metal as the one I’d just opened, and the floors looked like linoleum. Fluorescent light spilled out from the fixtures overhead, which put an end to most of the impression of a dungeon in a video game, but did give us a clearer view of the halls in Third Eye. Someone had left a mop and one of those rolling buckets propped against a wall.

I looked around my phone and saw pretty much the same thing, except that the lights were turned off and the cleaning materials were gone. Which meant they were probably collectible Materials.

“Ooh,” Lena said. “Think bleach counts as Water, or would it be its own thing?”

I shook my head. “I think if we were standing this close to a Reactant, we’d feel much weirder.”

“Bummer. Still, a good source of Plastic.”

I stepped forward to claim it.

Which is why I had my phone in front of my face and was looking through the filter. Which is why I saw the hallway bathed in queasy fluorescent light.

And which is why, when Bernie’s hiss made me snap my phone up, I had enough light to see something shiny and golden zip through the intersection at the far end of the hall.

If you think I forgot all about the mop and bucket, you’re right. I dashed into the hallway, phone waving, and I heard Lena’s boots slapping on the linoleum behind me.

One of us must’ve run into the mop, because my phone screen flashed and I had to look away. For maybe the first time ever, collecting a Material annoyed me. Not now! While I shook my head and waited for my eyes to clear, though, I realized it wasn’t all bad – not just because we’d gotten some Plastic, which was the rarest of the core Materials, but because no player would leave something like that sitting around uncollected. Despite my previous concerns, we had to be the first people with Third Eye access to get into these hallways.

While I processed my thoughts and let my vision recover, Lena just charged forward blindly. She passed one intersection, slowed, spun her camera in both directions, then started running again toward the one at the end where we’d seen something moving.

“Be careful,” Miguel shouted.

“Always,” Lena called back. “Come on, guys! That looked like another Daimon!”

Miguel had a way of not making a sound, just pausing in his speech, that perfectly conveyed a sigh.

Zhizhi, on the other hand, said, “I think she’s right. Look at this footage.”

“Screw the footage,” Lena said. “I want to see the real thing.”

I think Miguel and Zhizhi must’ve stopped to examine something on her camera, but I surged forward after Lena. Partly because I didn’t want her going alone into what might be a dangerous situation.

Mostly because I, too, wanted to see the real thing.

As such, I’d almost caught up to her when Bernie hissed a warning, and the floor responded with a hiss of its own, and the linoleum tiles split open beneath Lena’s feet.