Chapter 66: Benefits Package

I don’t know why Benji’s words hit me so hard. I sank into the back seat. Sank? Shrank. I tried to wrap my head around the question, which hadn’t even been phrased as a question. Found I couldn’t.

Benji frowned at me. “Cam?”

I held up a hand. What was the gesture even supposed to mean?

He took it as “give me a minute” and concentrated on his driving. Good enough? Better than nothing.

I stared out the window. Strip malls and suburbs rolled past. Most of the smaller shops weren’t open yet, but people were already zipping up and down the streets, heading out for breakfast or to big-box stores. The same scene I could have watched a year ago, two months ago.

Well, not quite. Two months ago, people would’ve been doing last-minute Christmas shopping. The streets would’ve been a mess of cars and we’d have spent the next hour in traffic.

The thought made me chuckle.

Third Eye hadn’t changed the world for these people. Maybe it would in the future, but for now, the differences between December and February dwarfed it. Could I envision a time when the hot holiday item was something made real by magic? Yes. How hot an item would a virtual pet be if it was as real and lovable as Bernie?

It would still be subject to a holiday rush.

So what had Third Eye changed?

“You didn’t actually ask,” I said, “but if you want, I’ll tell you. All of it.”

“Hit me,” Benji said. “I’ve got a sense of the margins of the game, but not the details. I don’t really get what it means to you.”

“You don’t mind, do you, Lena?” I asked.

“No way,” she said. “When are we going to get the chance to sit back and really talk it through?”

Third Eye had been a maelstrom. Confusion, then realization, then the realization that we were more confused than ever. Exhaustion, then immunity to exhaustion, but that immunity didn’t extend to our minds. Terror. Euphoria. There was always a crisis to manage or an opportunity to seize, a defeat to mourn or a triumph to celebrate.

Yesterday – God, had it just been yesterday? It felt like weeks ago. – we’d resolved to focus entirely on the game, even at the risk of our tenuous financial safety. All it seemed to have done was leave us with even more to worry about.

Right now, though, all we could do was sit in Benji’s Sonata and wait until he drove us out of town.

Neither Lena nor I had proposed a destination. I wondered if Benji had anywhere specific in mind. Then I allowed myself to stop wondering. We’d get there when we got there.

In the meantime, we went back to the beginning.

“It started with my amulet, right?” Lena said.

“The one you wore to the park?” Benji asked.

“Mmhm!” She wasn’t wearing it today, generally didn’t except for videos. We still didn’t know what, if anything, it did. “When we signed up, they gave us a choice between physical or digital, and for the lulz, I chose physical. It showed up on our doorstep that same night, about as quick as it took for us to get pizza delivered.”

“At the time, we thought it had to be drone delivery,” I said. “Now? I don’t know if the devs created it right outside our door, or if they made all the amulets in advance and teleported them to anyone who signed up for them.”

“Is that a thing you can do?” Benji asked. “Teleport? That’d be a hell of an incentive to keep playing.”

“We don’t have proof that it’s possible,” I said. “Albie, the little girl who seems to be on the dev team? We have evidence that she’s traveled all over the world, and it’s fast enough to be weird, but I’m not sure if it’s outright teleportation.”

“Same with Mask,” Lena said. “The guy we fought the other night. The guy who hurt Bernie.”

“There’s also the question of how Mask got away,” I said. “We were distracted when you pulled up, Benji, but it sure seemed like the guy outright vanished.”

Benji tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “And the alternative. Creation on-site. The amulet looked pretty swanky.”

“As near as we can tell,” Lena said, “it’s real jewelry, not costume. Real metal, real gem. I’m not gonna sell it, but I almost want to get it appraised.”

“And they’d have to be able to make these for thousands of people, on demand, at a distance?” Benji asked.

“Seems like it,” I said. “We’re not sure how big the dev team is. We’ve only had contact with two, and the one we know only ever mentions one other. If the amulets were created in the moment, I think it would have to be by some kind of prepared... process, spell, ritual, whatever you want to think of it as.”

“Industrial magic,” he muttered.

“Just be careful you don’t get any light in there,” Lena said. “Then I don’t care if you’re a wizard or an alien or what, you’re getting your ass sued.”

It took me a minute, then I snorted and started to laugh.

Benji rubbed his nose. “Oh. Ohhh. Heh.”

Lena wiggled her eyebrows.

Inexplicably, he didn’t start laughing. He looked off in the distance and shook his head.

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“Seriously, though. If you can make real shit, valuable shit, that just anybody can interact with?” He whistled. “I don’t know if that’s as good as teleportation, but it’s pretty crazy.”

“For sure,” Lena said. “If we get to a point where the stuff we make is fully real –”

“Fully aligned,” I said.

Normally, the interruption might’ve annoyed her, but in this case it didn’t even break her flow. Probably because I was reminding her of something Albie had told us. “– fully aligned, and permanent, and we get good at shaping it? We’ll never have to buy clothes or furniture ever again.”

Benji opened his mouth, but an SUV took the opportunity to overtake us and he had to concentrate on the road. He didn’t drive with the kind of relentless precision Miguel did, but he still knew his shit. He slipped back half a car length and I doubted the SUV driver ever realized anyone had shown the temerity to clog up their lane with a smaller vehicle.

If Benji had been a worse driver, or that SUV had been a little more aggressive, we might have spent Saturday on the side of the road waiting for cops and insurance. A lot more aggressive, or somebody as crappy as me at the wheel, and we might have spent Saturday at a hospital.

Only for Benji, though, or the SUV’s driver.

It reminded me of maybe the biggest way Third Eye changed the world.

“You saw the jump I made,” I said. “The way it didn’t hurt me. Everything else sort of pales in comparison to that. As long as we have HP, nothing can hurt us. It’s not just attacks within the game. It’s not just genuinely dangerous stuff, either. We don’t seem to get physically tired. Hell. I haven’t had to deal with allergies since we started playing.”

Benji exhaled. “That’s... wow.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t forget about the best part of Third Eye,” Lena said. She showed Ryu’s smiling emoji on her phone screen, then reached back to scratch Bernie’s head.

“I agree,” I said, “the Daimons are amazing. An absolute delight. I’m afraid it’s not going to be as obvious to everybody.”

Bernie grumbled and Lena narrowed her eyes.

To my surprise, though, it was Benji who corrected me. “A pet that can’t get sick, doesn’t need to eat, and if it gets hurt, it’s fine in the morning? A pet with magical powers, no less? I think the appeal of that is pretty fucking obvious, Cam.”

I leaned back. “Huh.”

Bernie chuffed.

“It’s funny,” Lena said. “The stuff we can do with Reactants is a lot of fun, and it’s really interesting because every time we practice we learn something new, but it almost doesn’t rate compared to some of the rest of what we’ve seen.”

“Still, it is fun,” I said. When we didn’t have to use it in life or death situations, anyway. “I was out there playing catch with Albie. Normally not the highlight of somebody’s day, catch. Using Air for it made it astonishing.”

“Gotta admit, just the little taste I’ve gotten of Air, I can see why you enjoy it so much.” Lena’s fingers danced through one of the Air control moves Albie had taught me, and I’d taught Lena. She didn’t call anything up with her phone, so nothing happened. It occurred to me that we’d never tried conjuring an object while we were in a moving car. Another test to run at some point.

At this point, Lena kept talking. “Fire is still the best, though!”

“It seems like it’s the most useful,” I said. “Cooking. Electricity.”

Benji flicked a glance at Lena. “That’s real electricity you generate?”

“Sorta,” Lena said. “I need more Fire to make it real enough – to align it enough – to do anything useful, but I can turn on a light bulb if it’s low enough wattage.”

“But you could get more Fire,” Benji said.

“It’s on my shopping list!”

He nodded. The conversation tapered off as we passed beyond the suburbs. A golf course and a park on our right looked promising. I panned my phone over them.

“Looks like somebody picked over this area,” I said.

Lena rapped her knuckles on the window. “Probably ‘cause of Red Rocks.”

Red Rocks, in case you’re not from around here, is a huge, open-air amphitheater. It’s one of the few places outside town that attracts a lot of people in the demographic likely to back the Kickstarter for an AR-ARG.

“Was that where you wanted to go?” Benji asked.

“No,” I said, “we’re just exploring. Someplace more off the beaten path is better. A park, maybe.”

“Someplace you normally wouldn’t go, right?”

To me, that sounded like a shot at my indoor lifestyle. I forced myself to believe otherwise. Or at least to ignore the bait, if bait it was.

Besides, he wasn’t wrong.

I said, “That’s a good rule of thumb.”

I thought he might explain where he planned to go, but he just kept driving. After a few more miles, he said, “Is that everything?”

“Everything Third Eye changes for us?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“No,” Lena said quietly. “There’s my Realm.”

Benji flicked a glance at her. “What’s that?”

She looked out the window. “A place I didn’t want to go back to, but maybe needed to. Or maybe a copy of a place.”

“A copy? How?”

“We don’t know,” I said. “It could’ve been from Lena’s memories, or it could’ve been from the actual past.”

“Mind reading or remote viewing,” she said. “Or scrying, if you want to put it in magical terms.”

“Not sure that sounds like a plus,” Benji said.

“We weren’t, either, at the time.” Lena smiled back at me. She stretched her hand out and I clasped it. “It was.”

I rubbed my thumb on her palm and enjoyed the way her eyelids drooped.

I noticed the tension in Benji’s shoulders, though, and forced myself to let go.

Whatever had gotten to him, it didn’t seem to be my and Lena’s relationship. He drove in silence for several more miles, concentrating as 285, the highway Hampden turned into, zipped underneath an overpass and cut into the foothills. The few times I’d come this far, the people I’d ridden with had always turned north to Red Rocks, but Benji stayed on course.

Lena and I watched through our phones. Third Eye objects began to appear along the roadside, but there was no good place to pull over and none of them looked like possible Reactants.

Still, scouting for them distracted us enough that I almost jumped when Benji spoke again.

“Transportation,” he said.

I cocked my head.

I didn’t have to wait long for him to continue.

“Manufacturing. Medicine. Entertainment. Energy. Pets!” He laughed. “Freaking relationship counseling.”

Ah. I said, “Every way Third Eye changes the world.”

I saw his raised eyebrow in the rearview mirror. “Anything else?”

“Not of the good stuff,” Lena said.

“Cam’s already told me most of the bad,” he said.

“Guilty as charged,” I said. “So.”

I lowered my phone, even at the risk of missing a resource.

“Would I quit?” he asked.

I nodded.

He didn’t hesitate. “No.”

I started to nod again, but just then he turned onto a smaller road and pulled up at an empty rest stop. I raised my phone to look it over.

Benji reached back and pushed it down. “That’s not really why I asked. I’m not in the beta, so it doesn’t do me any good to know what I could’ve gotten out of it.”

“Why, then? I’d get you an invite if they were on offer, but –”

“Cam.”

I stopped talking. Lena and I both stared at Benji.

“I wanted to know,” he said, “what Omar Jefferies ripped off our family to chase.”