Chapter 9: The Cold Light of 8AM
Against my better judgment, I opened my eyes.
Good news: the only light came from the Hello Kitty night light over Lena’s bed, filtered through the paper panels of our unfurled room divider.
Bad news: if I recognized the provenance of a light source, it meant my brain had woken up too much to obey my body’s demand to go back to sleep.
I groaned and rolled out of bed. I kicked at the tangle of blankets I’d thrown off as I fell asleep. I groped for my phone and turned it on as a second light source.
I’d left Third Eye running, so its shitty interface became the first thing I saw when I swiped past my lock screen. A notification caught my attention and my pulse quickened. Had I been kicked out of the beta?
Then I remembered I’d never closed out of the notification from last night.
It matched VisibleFromSpace’s message on the official Discord. Which, among other things, offered pretty damn compelling evidence the Discord was, in fact, official.
‘At the end of each game day, the bottom 1% of users will have their beta access suspended until launch. Thanks for your patience.’
I still had access, for now, so I was allowed to reread the message.
The bottom 1% by what measure? How many people would actually lose their accounts each day? For how long – how long would the beta period last? All good questions, none of which had been answered by the time I gave up last night. VisibleFromSpace had gone offline right after posting, and AlephLambda had offered nothing but smiling platitudes.
Why only cut off the bottom 1% if the issue was resource usage? Surely, whatever measure Third Eye used to separate the top of its leaderboard from the bottom would favor the heaviest-usage players.
For that matter, why only 1% per day? Had they rented servers on a daily basis?
Like so much about Third Eye, it made almost no sense, which made it so much worse than if it made none. The signup gifts would cost a fortune to deliver for no good reason, but they could, technically, be delivered. The incredible graphics would melt servers to produce, but flash enough cash and you could make it happen. The out-of-phone-range tracking to match graphics to users would require another server farm’s worth of AI, but, again, it remained possible.
Speaking of the tracking, it occurred to me that I hadn’t noticed anyone else post about it. Made sense. A hundred thousand people signed up for Third Eye, but out of how many? Six billion? We’d seen people from around the world comment already. What were the chances any two other than Lena and I shared an apartment?
There was a very real chance we were the first pair of Third Eye users to meet IRL.
I flicked to r/thirdeyegame on my phone, tapped the thread for game details, and started to tap out a message.
Then I stopped.
Lena and I knew something about Third Eye no one else did.
Third Eye’s gameplay included PVP.
Every day, the bottom 1% of players would lose access to the app.
Maybe losing access would be a blessing. So much about it freaked me out, pushed just against the edge of plausibility. As cool as I might find a vast, competitive, AR-enhanced scavenger hunt, I also had Trowel Samurai 2 to beat, and that didn’t make me question my reality every time I discovered some new bullshit detail.
Maybe.
I closed out of Reddit, slipped my phone into the pocket of my pajamas and stepped out into the living room.
No Lena, no surprise. The next time she woke up before me would be the next time she decided to skip a night’s sleep. So probably a couple of days.
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Light streamed through the gaps in the blinds, promising a cold, pale morning. I pulled them up and winced. As predicted. Also, too damn bright. When the spots cleared from my eyes I scanned the outside world. Our apartment looked four stories down on Hampden Avenue as it curled toward downtown Englewood. Around the bend lived and worked people with significantly more and more reliable income than Lena and I. A concrete outdoor walkway served as our front porch.
Speaking of, I craned my neck to check for any more surprise packages. None, or none visible without opening the door and letting all that cold in.
If I’d gone to bed in sweats, maybe. Instead, I shivered in my t-shirt and pajama pants. A porch pirate who braved the Colorado morning was welcome to any unseen booty. Instead of opening the door, I closed the blinds.
Then to the kitchen. I took a couple of eggs out of the fridge, started them hard-boiling, and rubbed my hands over the steam vent on my chicken-shaped egg cooker until it grew uncomfortably hot.
When I’d bedded down last night, I’d dared to imagine our landlord had not only fixed the furnace but decided to let it run. If so, he’d changed his mind in the morning.
I took my phone out and returned to the window. I knelt and pulled the blinds up just far enough to stick my phone camera through. I peered through with Third Eye on. Nothing obvious.
I turned off the app, shivered again at the cold sneaking through gaps in the window frame, and tried again. Any differences? None I noticed.
No surprise. I’d have to round the bend to downtown Englewood to find something of interest in most AR games. For the really good stuff, I’d need to hop on the light rail and cruise up to Denver proper.
It sounded exhausting. Also, damn cold.
I thought back to the previous night. After the announcement about the bottom 1%, I’d finally conked out. The possibility of wading through all the Third Eye bullshit just to get cut off from it had tipped me over to exhaustion.
Lena had asked if I was giving up. I’d said I’d sleep on it.
Where did a good night’s sleep – and it had been, from well before midnight to eight in the morning – leave me?
I wondered if I had time to get dressed before the eggs finished boiling.
Time to grab a pair of corduroy slacks and underwear. I might have made it to the bathroom with a full change of clothes if I hadn’t hesitated over an Overwatch sweater. I’d bought it before the game’s reputation went to shit and nowadays I hesitated to wear it out in public. Rarely a problem, but today? I grabbed a plain red sweatshirt instead.
I took too long. The egg cooker whistled.
I sprinted back, dumped my change of clothes on the kitchen counter, popped the top off the egg cooker, and tumbled the eggs into a bowl of cold water. While they cooled, I could get changed –
“Dibs,” Lena called, and shut the bathroom door behind her.
I sighed.
She emerged a couple minutes later. I couldn’t prove she’d taken exactly long enough for me to finish cracking and peeling the eggs, I just believed it.
I looked her over as I handed her one of the eggs on a plate. She’d gone for pants today, heavy black jeans, black socks, and a sweatshirt decorated with cartoon characters I didn’t recognize. Something about the style of the art made me think of a mid-2000s webcomic. You know the type. Starts with two dudes on a couch talking about video games, ends with one or more apocalypses.
“Gonna hit the streets?” I asked.
“We’ll see how cold it actually is out there.” She got out a knife and halved her egg. “But yeah.”
“We don’t want to be in the bottom 1%,” I said.
She nodded. “Whatever that means.”
“If it’s XP,” I said, “at least I’m safer than you. You can’t complain about pay-to-win then.”
“You sure about that? I stayed up later than you.”
My fork clinked against my plate. “Did you figure out how we get XP?”
“Not a clue,” she said. “Did get some more, though. I’m up to a hundred and eight, last I checked.”
“Did you level at a hundred?”
“Nope.”
“Hm. Were you doing something with the app?”
“I had it open, anyway.” She popped half her egg in her mouth. “People are trying all kinds of shit, but you can’t seem to do anything in the app itself right now, and nobody has figured out any clues outside it. At least, they hadn’t when I finally hit the sack.”
“You mean they hadn’t shared any.”
She cocked her head. Slowly, she smiled. “You think that’s the real reason Third Eye did the 1% thing?”
“Not until you said it,” I said. “But it certainly is a way to put some skin in the PVP game.”
“Damn skippy,” Lena said. She wolfed down her other half of egg and pushed back from the counter. “Speaking of skin, and trying not to freeze it off, want me to grab your coat?”
I thought about leaving the house in the morning, before the sun finished warming the thin, dry air. About the weird shit we’d already encountered in Third Eye, and how much more disconcerting it might seem without the false sense of security the apartment offered. About running into the kind of people who went out in the morning by choice instead of necessity.
Plenty of reasons to stay home.
1% of one to go.
I said, “Damn skippy.”