Chapter 59: Laughing Matter

We froze in our tracks as laughter echoed through the empty halls.

It was crude, distorted, mechanical. For a second, it made me think of Mask’s voice changer, but this had a different quality to it. More primitive. Rhythmic, almost a drumbeat.

Miguel started walking again.

The laughter faded, and just when I thought silence would resume, a voice took its place. “Step right up and take your shot to win fabulous prizes, kids. One token equals one play!”

I happen to know we’ve been recording people’s voices for well over a hundred years. By the time this mall closed, we’d gotten pretty good at it. My point is, there was really no excuse for how choppy and artificial the voice sounded. Nonetheless, I’ve never run into a carnival or arcade that doesn’t have at least one game using this kind of weirdly primitive synthesizer. At some point, it had stopped being a technological limitation and had become an aesthetic.

We could see light, too, spilling around the escalators at the far end of the Cinder Alley concourse. With the flickering, reflected glow came more sounds. Bleeps and bloops and other announcers more crudely synthesized than they should have had to be in the era in which they’d been made.

“I guess this is what those tokens were for.” Lena shook the pile in her hands. “Should we divide them up?”

“Let’s see what we’re dealing with first,” Miguel said. He’d pushed so far ahead of us that his light bobbed halfway between ours and the reflections from the arcade.

I tried to remember if the real Cinder Alley had been laid out this way, with an arcade at one end. No luck. If I’d actually come down here, and not just invented the memories from hearing Benji’s or Miguel’s descriptions, I’d done so as a tiny child.

This layout seemed too convenient for Third Eye’s purposes. The arcade lay almost directly behind the escalators, which meant we had to walk all the way up to them to see anything except hints of light from the machines.

“If this really is Miguel’s Realm,” Lena said, “how come it’s so much bigger than mine?”

I glanced at her. “Do you actually think I could have an answer to that question, or are you just thinking aloud?”

She flashed a smile. “Mostly, I’m just making conversation so we don’t act all nervous.”

Zhizhi chuckled.

I smiled back at Lena. When we’d revisited the construction site, she’d done an amazing job keeping our spirits up until things turned from scary to outright dangerous. I was glad to see she still could, and would.

Miguel reached the escalators. Despite the enticing sounds from the arcade, he stopped and panned his phone up.

The escalators stretched upwards, and if the roof had been any higher, we might not have been able to see where they terminated. As it was, Miguel’s phone light played dimly off a slab of unpainted concrete. The escalator railings extended right up into it.

I’d never doubted that this whole place was a Third Eye construct dredged from the past or from Miguel’s memories. A part of me had clung to the notion that it might not be, though. Maybe Cinder Alley had retained just enough whimsy to inspire me. I’d imagined the gorgeous, oh-so-convenient apartment complex that was probably somewhere over our heads having kept the place open and installed a secret entrance just for the tenants.

This weird concrete blockage put paid to the idea. It looked like the whole building had been dipped into an ocean of cement and then flipped upside down.

Miguel grunted and stepped around the escalators. Thanks to his delay, the rest of us had caught up to him.

As we got our first look at the arcade, the recorded voice cycled back around to its drumbeat laughter.

The arcade’s name was spelled out in bright neon, completely at odds with the fauxstalgic nineteenth century facade over which it was set. Not that it would’ve fit in a modern mall, since it was spelled out in Third Eye runes.

“That’s the character for joy, right?” Zhizhi asked. She pointed to a series of squiggles forming a shape somewhere between a triangle and a circle, with a burst like confetti in their center. Now that she pointed it out, I recognized it from the tile Miguel had pressed back in the hallway.

He glanced over his shoulder and smiled. “Damn. I don’t know why I even use the app.”

Zhizhi brushed her hand through her hair. “Because I only know two runes?”

Lena bumped her shoulder into me. “It is so freaking cool to think we could actually learn this language.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“We’re a long way from that,” Miguel said.

“A lot closer than we thought we were,” I said.

He glanced down at his phone. “Indeed.”

“What’s the name of the arcade?” Zhizhi asked.

Miguel swept his phone over the neon. It beeped a couple of times, indicating matches, including the symbol for joy at the end, but this wasn’t a simple three-rune sign like the one in the maintenance tunnel. He got four hits out of seventeen.

“It’s not a transliteration of the name of the old arcade?” I asked. “I guess you were just a little kid, so you probably wouldn’t remember –”

“No,” he said curtly.

I guessed he would, in fact, remember. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.

“This is very little like the arcade that existed then,” he said. “That was more of a family fun center, with a few machines on one side.”

“Why would Third Eye go through all this effort to re-create the mall,” Lena asked, “then put in a different kind of arcade than the one you remember?”

“Why would Third Eye go through all this effort for someone it did not extend even twenty four hours of beta access to?” Miguel gave an exaggerated shrug. “Seeking a method in this madness is the maddest thing of all.”

“It always makes sense eventually.” When we all glanced at Lena, she bit her lip. “Well. Usually.”

“There must be something we’re supposed to find in there,” I said. “Something you’re supposed to find, Miguel.”

He regarded us for a moment, then lit another cigarette and stalked toward the arcade.

We followed.

Third Eye might not have planted an authentic arcade in Cinder Alley, but it had certainly captured the feel of one. The only lights came from the machines. If there were any other sounds, those drowned them out. Every surface had been infused with the smell of cheap paint, cigarette smoke, stale pop, staler sweat, and the occasional hint of weed. Just beneath all that, the hot electric buzz of components pushed to the limits of their technology, a sound and a smell and even a vibration unique unto itself.

Because I was bringing up the rear, I got to see the difference in Lena’s and Zhizhi’s reactions.

Lena straightened up like one of those buzzing wires had gone straight into her nervous system. The tokens shifted and clinked in her fingers as a wiggle worked its way from her head to her feet and back up.

Zhizhi, on the other hand, sagged against her camera, not sighing but swallowing a sigh.

For my part, I felt a little buzz of anticipation, being surrounded by so many electronic games, but it was muted by the fact I doubted I’d actually like them. The archetypical arcade game was pitched to a level of difficulty where you had to memorize it to progress, and the process of memorization meant pumping in far more tokens then we had.

If they hadn’t largely gone out of business in the English-speaking world, our modern Internet would’ve ripped arcades to shreds for being pay-to-win. Because they were rooted in the past, nostalgia papered over their sins.

I’m not saying the Internet would be right. Just that I found the prospect of playing the actual games here much less interesting than figuring out how to play Third Eye here.

What was the game? Did we need to beat certain cabinets? Play one of the physical games, chuck basketballs at a hoop or smack plastic moles with a rubber mallet?

Or was it just about Miguel confronting something from his past, like Lena had in her Realm?

“We must have to do something with the games themselves,” I said. “Otherwise, it would just be a copy from your memories.”

“If anything about this makes sense,” Miguel said, “that does.”

“Any idea where we should start?” I asked.

“We should play something, duh,” Lena said. She spilled her tokens onto the glass counter and walked around with one pinched between her thumb and forefinger. She stopped at a Street Fighter 2 cabinet and slid one into the slot. “Who wants to try my Dee Jay?”

“Nobody,” I said, “because that’s a World Warrior cabinet. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t introduced until Super.”

“Ugh, just like at The Tabletop Tap. There’s retro and then there’s plain old old. Whatever, I’ll just play Ken.” She mashed through the intro screen.

She almost mashed all the way through selecting a character and starting a match before any of us noticed something wrong.

Up until now, the Street Fighter 2 cabinet had looked and behaved exactly like the one at the retro arcade near our apartment. I recognized it all too well, if for no other reason than Lena’s familiar annoyance at having to play the World Warrior version, rather than one of its many revisions.

The original release of Street Fighter 2 featured, famously – or infamously, to hear Lena complain about it –, eight playable characters.

All of them were present here. So far, so normal.

But splitting them down the middle was a ninth, blank character selection box.

Lena and I exchanged glances.

“Miguel,” she called. “I think maybe you should play this round .”

“I’ve never been much for fighting games.” Nonetheless, he swept over to stand in front of the cabinet. He frowned at the screen. When Lena backed away, he took her place and gripped the stick.

With short, jerky motions, he tapped to the center of the character select screen and highlighted the blank box.

There was no character portrait, no name. Strings of intermingled Roman and Third Eye characters, all in a harsh, overly bright yellow, filled the space where both should have gone.

“Absolutely bizarre,” Zhizhi said. “You’d better select it.”

“I had, had I?” Miguel hesitated, puffing on his cigarette. “I suppose we might as well find out how pointless this is.”

His finger flicked to the light punch button.

The screen went haywire, and in place of any sound Capcom ever put into Street Fighter, familiar mechanical laughter poured like a drumbeat from the cabinet.