Chapter 58: Back Room

Donica brushed past me and tried the door behind the plain metal counter. It swung open. She glanced over her shoulder at me, then stepped through.

I suppressed a sigh. She needed to work on this “trying to become friends” thing.

I jogged to the doorway.

The space behind it seemed intended as some kind of warehouse or stockroom. Of course, it had no actual stock, much less wares. Is there a difference between those? If so, I probably got told during a youthful stint in retail. Which, if you’re not paying attention, is almost the same thing as saying I learned it.

What the space did have was more shelves, or at least the metal skeletons thereof, row after row of them.

I eased the door shut behind me as best I could, since it had no mechanism to latch, and turned on my phone’s light.

Donica looked back at me. She set her jaw.

I put my free hand on my hip. “We have to use real lights back here. If we’re trusting Third Eye, it could show us a carpeted floor and in reality, it’s just an open pit over the basement.”

“You’re right.” She looked down at her feet. Solid concrete, but she shouldn’t have trusted it to be, and I could tell she knew it. “Let’s keep an eye out for external windows and shut our lights down if we see some.”

“Sure,” I said. “If it comes to that, though, we should quit while we’re ahead. It’s too dangerous to fumble around in the dark. Maybe come back on the weekend when we can do it during the day. We can bring the rest of the team with us.”

She took way too long to say, “Fine. Let’s at least check back here, though.”

We prowled up and down the shelving units. Way too many for just the mom-and-pop-style shop we’d been scouting. I supposed this warehouse area would service multiple stores if the arcology ever got finished.

Unfortunately, we’d already discovered that the metal shelving units couldn’t be collected, and there were no convenient rotating displays or loose chairs to fill up on.

I found the shelves, row after row, all identical, disorienting. Too much Third Eye information? In case it was screwing with my head somehow, I closed the app and tried walking down an aisle without it.

Nope. The field of metal shelf frames was just a weird environment to explore, with or without Third Eye.

I turned the app back on. No point wandering around back here if I couldn’t at least collect whatever objects had been strewn around.

I’d almost despaired of finding any when I turned a corner and nearly tripped over a shopping cart. It felt like it, anyway, and I thrust my hand out instinctively. A flash.

“What the hell, Cameron,” Donica called. “What did you find?”

“Shopping carts,” I shouted. Our voices echoed in the warehouse. “I touched one by mistake when I turned the corner, but there’s about a dozen here.”

“Well keep your pants on until I get over there.”

“I think I’ll keep them on even when you do,” I said.

I thought she snorted, but she was too far away for me to know for sure. “Thanks.”

I panned my phone over the carts while I waited, making sure I focused on each in turn. If anything, I’d underestimated their numbers. Seventeen if you counted the one I’d collected. Perhaps the weirdest thing about them was that each was a different style of cart. The blue plastic one looked like a color-shifted version of a cart from Target, another was a wobbly, gray metal Walmart type, another was plain brushed aluminum. One had writing on its child seat, runic script. Another, more writing in English. A third, just a pictograph of a kid.

I photographed the group of them, then each individually.

I checked the cart corral they were shoved into, but that seemed to be a real metal framework, not a Third Eye construct. Third Eye didn’t even pretty it up the way it did most of the extant structures.

I leaned against it. My foot started tapping.

Finally, Donica rounded the corner of a line of shelves. Her cheeks were flushed and her breath made puffs in the cold air.

I’d planned to ask her who was dawdling now, but she looked like she’d run. Just how big was this place?

She surveyed my find. “Looks like a homeless convention.”

“I’m surprised this building isn’t one.” Now that I’d said it, I couldn’t get it out of my head. Between the open fence and the oblivious traffic, this was the second location I’d explored in a few days that should’ve been an amazing place for the city’s homeless to winter. Yet I hadn’t seen any evidence of people. Had there been any tracks in the dust before Donica and I put them there? “Do you know how long ago the fence fell over?”

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

She shook her head. “I never paid this place much attention before Third Eye.”

“What made you notice it had objects in it?”

“There were signs in my neighborhood,” she said. “Actual road signs, although they didn’t seem to lead anywhere. I didn’t think anything of them the first day when Erin and I collected them. After you and Lena posted about using the objects as ARG clues, I went back and looked at our list of finds and tried actually following them.”

“So what you’re saying –” I grinned. “– is that you found this place thanks to a ‘We need to go deeper’ meme.”

She groaned. “Let’s start collecting.”

We divvied up the carts. Mostly Iron, a little Plastic between the one’s coating, the child seats, and the wheels.

“Are you following a specific path through the aisles?” Donica asked between flashes.

“I headed left when we came in and just went up and down each aisle,” I said. “It’s crazy how much real shit they installed in here.”

“I know. No wonder they ran out of money. Even finishing construction would’ve been a huge pain, unless they planned to rip all this stuff out and put final versions in later. Which would cost even more.” She shook her head. “There are another dozen doors off this warehouse, just on the right side. More shops, I assume.”

Each shop had offered something to collect so far. How many blocks did the construction site cover? Maybe two by two, by residential standards? Maybe less? Compared to the density of objects I’d found anywhere else, it was a treasure trove.

“Do you really want to try and collect all this?” I asked.

She raised an eyebrow. “You don’t?”

“What we got this evening is already enough that, for however much XP and Materials count for staying out of the bottom 1%, we’ll be home free for a while.”

“We haven’t really learned anything yet, though,” she said. “Or found anything more interesting than basic resources.”

“I just think we should bring more of the team over. They’re losing out on a ton of XP from scanning alone.”

“You mean you think we should bring Lena over,” Donica said. “I wanted her to come with us. I invited her. It’s her call to stay out.”

“Then why,” I asked, “do you sound so defensive?”

“I’m trying,” Donica said quietly. Her shoulders slumped. “I don’t think ill of either of you. I genuinely don’t even dislike you. But we’re really different kinds of people, you and I, and Lena and I to an even greater extent. Part of me was happy she turned me down.”

“That’s before you realized how annoying I could be on my own.” I offered a tentative smile.

It took a minute, but she found it in her to return it. “Do you mind if we look around a little longer? I keep hoping we’ll find something to explain why this place is so weird.”

“Sure,” I said. “Although you might need to look outside of Third Eye. It’s weird with or without the app.”

“Honestly, I’m curious enough I might start poking around to see if any of the statements from the real estate dispute were publicized.”

“Shoot me a link if you find something,” I said. “Otherwise it’ll bug me, too.”

She nodded. “Back to the grind?”

“Back to the grind.”

We stuck together from there and finished canvassing the left side of the warehouse. No more shopping carts, but we did find a piece of paper clipped to a wall. It looked like a manifest or inspection report, graying from repeated photocopies.

I knew it was a Third Eye object before I lowered my phone to confirm, because the heading was printed in runic characters. The body text, however, was written in English, or at least in Roman characters and English words.

That didn’t help much in parsing it.

I tried reading it aloud.

“Expand your world knowledge and treasure trove of happiness.

“And there is no reason. So there is no such thing. There are several reasons for this. The threshold of redemption. The threshold of life.

“This can be seen from the entertainment of the younger. 411 1123.”

My words echoed through the warehouse. We were still staring at the paper when they faded.

Donica snapped a picture of it.

She said, “Thank goodness they made it so obvious for us.”

I chuckled. “It’s an odd number. All yours.”

She touched the paper.

No flash.

“Well that doesn’t make it any less weird,” she said. “Come on. I want to finish sweeping this floor, at least.”

I frowned at the paper. “One one twenty three. If that’s a date, it’s this past Monday.”

The same day Lena and I met Albie.

Had her brother come here while she played with us?

“And the first three numbers?” Donica asked.

“Maybe a time?”

“I can buy that,” Donica said. “What significance do you think it has?”

I hesitated to mention Albie to Donica.

“This object isn’t collectible,” I said. “Maybe that means it was put up intentionally? If you take away the weird text at the top, and how it reads like it went through a crappy machine translation, it’s almost like an inspection report.”

“And someone would put an inspection report through a crappy machine translation, why, exactly?”

“To get it into English,” I said. “Maybe it’s crappy because they’re still working out how to do the translation. They can’t draw on a big established library because it’s the game’s conlang.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Conlang.” I said. “Constructed language. Like Klingon or Quenya.”

It made sense that Third Eye’s runes would come with a constructed language, didn’t it? Of course, if it did, Erin and ShakeProtocol’s attempt to parse the runes as a substitution cipher for Roman characters was doomed.

“Ah, got it,” Donica said. “New question. Who in the hell would write an inspection report in their game’s conlang?”

“That’s a great question.” It was. “You know what else is?”

She cocked an eyebrow and waited for me to tell her.

“Why,” I asked, “would a game dev sneak onto a site like this illegally? And then, instead of scrubbing their AR objects so neither they nor their players get in trouble, slap a piece of evidence on the wall?”