Chapter 6: Statistical Noise

Somehow, jersey or no, I didn’t think Erin was talking about Denver Nuggets players. She meant the players who contributed to the Third Eye Wiki she administered.

Lena gripped my arm. “Vanished? Like, they’re on missing persons lists?”

“Well. No. I mean, not that I’ve been able to determine. For most of these people I only have an IP address.” Erin wrung her hands. “I mean they’ve stopped contributing.”

I tried to think of an explanation that didn’t involve the candidates for “worst case scenario” churning in my head. “Did they fall into the bottom 1%?”

Erin shook her head. “Not unless it works entirely differently than we thought. Their submitted findings alone would have put them well above thousands of other players in XP and Materials gained.”

“How many we talking here?” Lena asked.

Erin spread her hands. “Not nearly enough to draw conclusions from! I don’t know if I’d have even noticed, if not for, well...”

Lena and I nodded.

If not for running into a dangerous creature in the construction site. Donica’s broken ankle was the worst any of us had suffered on that expedition, but if one of us had wandered in alone? If we hadn’t had backup from Albie?

We wouldn’t have been in any condition to post to a wiki afterwards, that was for damn sure.

“So when you say a lack of contributions,” I said, “you mean they’re not submitting their finds to the wiki anymore?”

“Not submitting finds, not updating pages, not discussing anything on the wiki. For those who used the same usernames as in other Third Eye spaces, not participating at all.” Erin’s fingers pressed together. “It could just be statistical noise. People running out of new Materials to acquire in their areas, then not being able to get free from work or school to roam further.”

She hesitated, then added, “People losing interest in Third Eye.”

Now I knew she was rationalizing. I exchanged a glance with Lena. She looked as incredulous as I felt.

“Okay,” Lena said, “but how many?”

“Understand,” Erin said, “I can’t give you a precise number, because there was already attrition, and I expected it. I track submissions from every IP that posts to the wiki. Originally, I just did it because I thought it might be fun to see what kind of patterns emerged, but lately, it’s seemed. Well. A bit more important.”

I nodded like I understood. I did, some.

“Since the start of the beta,” she said, “the top ten percent of Material finds have been contributed by just four hundred and forty seven players. Obviously, that’s only the reported finds. Lots of people have posted once or twice and then stopped, that doesn’t necessarily mean they dropped out of the game or chose to stop playing. Much less that something happened to them. The ones who’ve contributed regularly, though, I can track the participation of.”

Lena and I were on that list. We’d dutifully reported every Material we found. Except for those from the construction site, since we didn’t want a record of us having, technically, trespassed.

“Again,” Erin said, “I expected some attrition. Some people just don’t seem to enjoy tracking their data.”

“Crazy,” Lena murmured.

I shot her a glance.

“Right?” Erin asked, either oblivious to the sarcasm or doing a damn good job of pretending to be. “Still, every week, about twenty people who were busily contributing at first either slowed or stopped. A similar but slightly smaller number of new top players became active.”

“Until the past week,” I said.

“Yeah.” Erin’s hands wriggled in the air until she clasped them to keep from fidgeting. “I’ve yet to receive a submission from sixty three of the remaining top three hundred and fifty two contributors.”

We stood in silence for a moment.

A burble from Bernie snapped us out of it.

Lena said, “That’s it?”

Erin lowered her eyes. “I said it might not be significant.”

“I know you study shit like this,” I said, “so what kind of drop off did you expect, based on the patterns you’d seen?”

She tilted her head and tapped her chin. “Twenty four point five.”

“What was the half a person going to post?” Lena asked. Before Erin could answer, she gave her a thumbs up. “I get it. It’s an average.”

Erin smiled. “I was actually rounding off. I had a whole sheet with projected rates of drop-off or possible increase, depending on how the playerbase responded. This went beyond my least optimistic projection. That’s why I noticed.”

“What do you think it means?” I asked.

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“Honestly? I have no idea.” Erin sighed. “Hopefully, it just means that people are losing their dedication to reporting to the wiki faster than I expected. Obviously, that’s not something I’m delighted by, but it’s much better than the alternatives.”

“So why,” I asked, “don’t you believe that?”

She lowered her eyes. “I’m not seeing anything like the same rate of dropoff among infrequent contributors. They’ve actually been a little more dedicated than I expected, although still within my optimistic projections.”

“So it’s specifically the people who play the most, and are most involved with the game, that aren’t posting anymore?” Lena asked.

“That’s the conclusion I would draw based on what I’ve seen, yes,” Erin said.

Lena cupped her chin. “So assuming it does mean something, uh... what do you think it means?”

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Erin said. “I’m a lot better at collecting data than at interpreting it.”

I doubted Lena and I were any better. At least in theory, though, our three heads might be better than Erin’s one.

“Option one,” I said. “People are discovering something that makes them decide they don’t want to share anymore.”

“Like how Reactions have real-world effects?” Lena suggested.

We’d continued to contribute to the wiki, but it wouldn’t surprise me if other people stopped.

“It’s enough to give somebody pause, right?” I said. “Whether because you realize you’ve got an inside line on real magic and want to keep it for yourself, or because it’s freaking you out and you want to step away from the game.”

“Or,” Lena said, “because you don’t want to get flamed as a crazy person, like the people who’ve tried to bring it up.”

A few threads on the subreddit had referenced Third Eye’s real-world effects, but their posters had a lot of disadvantages compared to us.

Most people weren’t playing in teams, much less teams comprised mostly of active players like Erin had recruited. Without another person to verify your effects, you only had your own impressions to go by, and that made it a lot easier to convince yourself it was just amazing graphics and sound design. I had, for way too long after the hints started dropping.

As far as I knew, nobody was teaming up with non-players to run tests. Until Zhizhi, who’d never so much as signed up for Third Eye, confirmed that she’d seen objects move and temperatures change, I hadn’t truly believed the effects were real rather than in our heads.

To this point, the few posters who’d claimed Third Eye conferred real magic had been laughed off the subreddit.

I wondered how long that would last.

“Alternately,” I said, “the people who stopped posting may have discovered something that none of us know about yet. Something that recontextualizes their participation in a way that they don’t feel comfortable sharing. Could be good, could be bad. We really have no idea.”

We knew there were resources no one on the wiki team had acquired. Or at least admitted to. If Matt, who believed Third Eye was built to encourage competition, got his hands on “Refinements” like Crystal or Gold, would he really share? With us? With people outside the team?

We suspected, based on the inactive cash shop in the Third Eye app, many resources remained as yet undiscovered. Or at least, as yet unreported to the wiki.

And we’d seen what Albie could do. How many more layers of discoveries separated us from her?

Erin exhaled as she nodded. “All of that makes sense. My projections hadn’t really accounted for how different the process might be for a game that turns out to offer real magic.”

“It is kind of a game changer,” Lena said.

“In the interests of thoroughness,” I said, and also because I’d never get it out of my head if I didn’t voice it, “it’s also possible that the top contributors are more likely to encounter something dangerous, and they’ve gotten... hurt.”

Erin winced. “Yeah.”

“If a bunch of people are going missing,” Lena said, “wouldn’t it make the news?”

I started to nod. Was it a bunch, though? Compared to Erin’s projections, we’d lost maybe forty players, out of more than seventy thousand. Unless someone was already investigating Third Eye, how likely were they to make the connection between a few dozen people scattered around the world?

I nodded anyway.

Acknowledging the potential danger was one thing. Shooting down hope was another. Especially in front of Erin. I knew enough about how she thought to guess she would be blaming herself for not trying to expose Third Eye’s dangers.

Thankfully, I also knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t notice the instant I hesitated to nod along with what Lena had said.

Sure enough, Erin offered up a hesitant smile. “I suppose you’re right.”

“Always!” Lena grinned. I caught the fragility of her expression out of the corner of my eye. I wasn’t the only one trying to spin this more positively. On the other hand, I believed a hundred percent that she meant it when she asked, “You still want to grab some food while we talk?”

“Oh,” Erin said, “sure!”

Lena slung Bernie behind her. We followed Erin up the steps to Chop Shop SoBo. She chatted with the hostess, arranging a table for us. From the sounds of it, I gathered she was a regular.

I glanced back at Lena.

She tilted her phone toward me. She’d called up a note and tapped out, “reveal???”

I shook my head.

Lena blew air out through her teeth.

I got it. A week ago, we all agreed to hold off on revealing what we’d discovered at the construction site. Compared to the people who’d posted speculation on the subreddit, we would probably fare better. Between the wiki and our channel, we had a bigger audience. We had tests we could replicate to prove our claims – not that they would be believable in video form.

Maybe people would trust us. Or maybe people would call it a stunt and stop listening to us.

If other people were stumbling into danger, though? if the danger was widespread enough that more would if we didn’t warn them?

That changed our obligations.

But I didn’t want to decide that over dinner, right after hearing something that made me think we might need to. I wanted to go over every possibility, prepare for every eventuality.

Well. What I wanted was to run the fuck away.

I didn’t think we had that option anymore.

Once we made the reveal, though, there was no going back. And no guessing the consequences.

If our audience didn’t believe us, we could kiss our YouTube dreams goodbye. A bummer, but the least of our worries.

If they did believe us?

A lot more unpredictable. A lot scarier.

We might get the government’s attention.

We might get the devs’ attention.

Or, depending on what the creature at the construction site had been, whether there were more of them, why it attacked us, what they wanted, we might get their attention.

I just hoped none of those explained the “vanishings.”