Chapter 67: Lost World

I saw a studio apartment, smaller than ours, walls painted in antiseptic white, the same cream carpet as in the hallway, white blinds drawn over an outside window. A white wooden bed crowded into one corner beside an open white nightstand. A white desk stretched out of the far wall. A built-in range and kitchen sink, and the handles of the doors that I assumed led to a closet and a bathroom, were the only things to even show visible metal.

No signs of life. No distinguishing features. An empty apartment, open for rent, with a few pieces of charmless but functional furniture. Less an apartment than the idea of one.

Not my style. Or Lena’s. But not enough to leave her huddling against my chest.

I snaked the arm that held my phone around her back and raised it so I could look through the camera.

My eyes widened. “What the hell?”

The blazing hallway ended at the threshold of the apartment. There was a hard line across the doorway between the outside, where the fire danced across the carpet and curdled it to ash, and the inside, where the carpet looked exactly the same as it did IRL.

In the few places I could see the interior carpet, anyway.

Third Eye didn’t show me anything fanciful. It hardly showed me anything I hadn’t seen before.

I recognized the posters tacked to every inch of white wall. Half of them still decorated Lena’s side of our bedroom or living room. The other half, I’d seen through her webcam. She hadn’t brought the thick black and paisley bedspread, but our later video chats had etched it into my memory. The blanket with its unlicensed Pokemon was the same one she’d gripped so tightly that first night we got Third Eye. A couple of wireframe shelves crowded the tiny apartment even more, and on them thronged action figures and bobbleheads and plushies, some Lena had brought with her, others she hadn’t. Many, especially the plushies, spilled onto the floor.

So did books and magazines and jewel cases for games and DVDs. Two pizza boxes were stacked by the door. The carton sitting on top of them came from a Chinese restaurant I remembered going out of business during lockdown.

The computer on the desk was the same case I saw every day. I knew the mug sitting next to it, a Durarara-branded one the handle had broken off of soon after she moved in with me. A familiar mechanical keyboard; an old mouse she’d upgraded when a string of successful gigs financed a Micro Center pilgrimage.

I didn’t recognize the white plastic hamper shoved near the bathroom door, but I did most of the clothes inside it. Jeans and skirts and leggings and tees and sweatshirts I’d seen Lena wearing. The pair of black jeans that had fallen short of the hamper looked just like the pair she wore today, except holes hadn’t worn through the knees and the cuffs had yet to fray.

“This isn’t possible,” Lena said. She tore the smart glasses from her eyes. “Oh, what the hell? That’s almost weirder.”

She looked up at me, eyes wide. “Am I going crazy?”

I shook my head. “No. Third Eye is showing your room the way it was the first time I ever saw you.”

“No it’s not!”

Was it displaying different things to each of us? That would be weird in a whole new way. And why would it show this to me but not Lena? I frowned down at her.

“I know for a fact I cleaned the place up that evening! I didn’t want you to –” She sighed. “– to get the right impression of me.”

I remembered that first sight I’d had of Lena, a few months after Donica told us to “get a room” instead of spamming memes into her Discord server.

It was a terrible selfie, taken at a dutch angle because Lena had balanced on her computer chair, my first glimpse of her gargoyle stance. The lighting was so bad between the camera flash and the glare off her monitor that I couldn’t have begun to guess the color of anything in the scene. She wore an oversized Hello Kitty sweater, a shapeless skirt, striped stockings, and a huge grin.

I hadn’t looked at that picture in a long time, and back then I’d known a lot less about Lena’s expressions. Only thinking about it now did I realize her grin had been one hundred percent nerves.

At the time, I’d sent back, ‘Am I being catfished? That is clearly a stock photo of a hot girl.’

Now, despite everything, I smiled. “You cleaned the place up nice.”

“Well. Thanks.” She rubbed her arm. “Like you didn’t pick up before I got to see you?”

“Of course not,” I said. “That pic was a surprise, and I sent you one right back.”

“I guess I didn’t pay much attention to your apartment.” She started to smile, then shoved her smart glasses back onto her face and looked at the apartment again. So much for smiles. “We’re stalling.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Happier times. So much happier, compared to whatever this was.

I asked, “Do you have some kind of rational explanation for this, Lena?”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

She shook her head. “I was really hoping you would. You used to be the font of rationalizations. All that ‘eliminate the impossible’ crap.”

I tried.

If the only things I saw in the apartment were Third Eye versions of objects Lena still owned, I could say that the app had populated her Realm with familiar symbols. Our cameras had captured all of those in our current apartment while we ran Third Eye, after all. Though, even then, I had no explanation for how everything seemed to be in exactly the places I remembered. Hell. I recalled the day Lena got her Dark Souls poster. She’d been so excited she rang me up on Discord and had me watch while she tacked it to her wall in exactly the place over her bed I saw it in right now.

If the only things I saw were objects Lena hadn’t brought with her, I could come up with a possible, if much creepier, explanation. Third Eye Productions could have somehow acquired everything she sold off or left behind, and used it to populate this Realm. But that same Dark Souls poster still hung over her bed at our apartment.

“I’m all out,” I said. “With all the permissions the actual app has, I could easily believe they could make a copy of where we live now. But, even if you’d agreed to that at the time, unless you deliberately took a bunch of photos or a video and sent it to the devs as part of the Kickstarter, I don’t see how any of this could be possible.”

“I sure as shit didn’t do that,” Lena said. “If they’d asked me for something that creepy, I’d have canceled my pledge.”

Unstated: that would’ve been a good idea.

“What does this mean?” she whispered.

I panned my phone up and down, looking at the old familiar sights on one half of the room and unfamiliar, but fitting, ones from the half I normally didn’t get to see when my view was dictated by her webcam.

I didn’t understand how this could exist.

I couldn’t guess what purpose it might have.

I said, “I have no goddamn clue.”

“Fat lot of good you are.” Lena gave me a gentle punch on the arm and I closed my hand over hers.

“One good thing, at least,” I said.

“This, I gotta hear.”

“There’s not a whole lot of ambiguity about this place being yours,” I said, “and at least the IRL version seems to be vacant.”

“Heh.” She showed me that wonderful bundle-of-nerves grin I’d fallen so hard for before I knew what it meant. “I guess we really are here to check out the apartment for rent.”

“It’s the perfect alibi.” Perfect enough that it made me uncomfortable. Had Third Eye Productions somehow arranged for this specific apartment to have a vacancy? I couldn’t begin to imagine the logistics of doing so.

I tried to hide my nerves, but Lena knew me too well. “You’re thinking the same thing as me, huh? Real lucky this place is empty. You know. ‘Lucky.’”

“How would they even pull that off?”

“I don’t know how they could do any of this. Even with actual magic!”

“Scrying?” I suggested. “Or remote viewing, if you want to go with the pseudoscience version.”

“I can’t believe a bunch of wizards and/or aliens were perving on my past self.”

“At least I can’t fault their tastes.” I raised an eyebrow, but instead of laughing, Lena hunched in on herself. I supposed it was no laughing matter. “It might not be that.”

“Yeah?”

“It could,” I said, “just be telepathy.”

“So they dredged this up out of my memories?” She scowled. “If it’s that one, they’re real sons of bitches.”

When I’d thought “happier times,” I’d meant it. But I reminded myself that, judging from Lena’s reactions today, she looked back on her life in this apartment with anything but fondness.

She pulled out of my arms. “I didn’t put up with coming here for nothing.”

I nodded. “You take point. I don’t know where Fire would come from in there, or whether you can collect any of this stuff, but all of it belongs to you. I’ll only walk where you already have. Or I can stay out here, if you’re more comfortable with that.”

I watched her consider it. She gave a single, violent shake of her head. “Nope. The last thing I want is to be alone in there again.”

I pressed my phone to my chest. “You won’t be.”

Lena’s breath caught.

She spun on her heel and strode into her old apartment.

Past the kitchenette, past the bathroom door, past the closet door, to pause before the desk. I saw her hand hover over the open air where her mouse would be.

I stepped in after her. Blessed relief, after the heat in the hallway, so Third Eye really was either cranking the temperature somehow, or making me feel like it was.

I raised my phone to see what would happen with her computer. It booted up, displaying a Windows 7 logo.

“Just like I had it back then,” Lena muttered. Abruptly, she bent forward and tried to interpose herself between me and the monitor. “Oh shit. Phone down!”

I did what she asked, but not before I caught a glimpse of her desktop. My eyes widened and I aimed them, like the phone, anywhere but at the computer. My cheeks felt hot, and not from anything to do with the fire. “I’m... flattered, I guess?”

Lena covered her face. I still saw her freckles blazing as she flushed. “Oh my God. When I find those devs, I am going to fucking murder them.”

“I mean,” I said, “it’s not like we haven’t both seen that picture.”

“Shut up, Cam!” Lena’s hand waved in the air where her mouse would be. “There. You can look around or whatever.”

I started to.

Lena folded her arms over her amulet. She nudged the floor. “Did you ever set one of mine?”

“As a desktop?” At the last second, I swallowed a laugh. She wouldn’t appreciate it. “Of course not. Not because they weren’t hot! Because they were just for me. Can you imagine if I’d invited somebody over? If I'd invited Miguel over?”

“I couldn’t until you had to go and say it,” she said. “I guess it was just you and I and the wizards and/or aliens.”

“Speaking of whom,” I said, “you probably shouldn’t threaten either category of being.”

“If they didn’t want to get murdered, they shouldn’t have pulled a version of my computer from the one week I set my internet boyfriend’s naked pic as my desktop.” She groaned and looked away, embarrassed all over again.

Which made two of us. The only thing I could think to do about it was laugh. “Just a week? I guess I’m not that flattered.”

“Two at the most,” Lena snapped.

She stalked over to the bed. IRL, plain white sheets, devoid of personality. In Third Eye, the black and paisley bedspread I remembered so well. She flounced atop it once again, arms still crossed, cheeks still flushed, glaring at everything and nothing.

Then flames erupted from beneath the bed, and from the heart of the inferno scuttled a monster.