Chapter 94: The Hole

“I’ve told you before,” Zhizhi said. She gave her camera a shake. “It doesn’t run on tape.”

Then she looked down at it. She raised an eyebrow.

“It’s got internal memory, though, right?” Lena asked.

“It’s got an SD card, at least.” Zhizhi did something with the buttons on the camera. She swallowed. She barked a single, hysterical laugh. “Guess I’m either not crazy, or way crazier than I thought.”

We crowded around and she played back her footage again. It was the same scene I’d looked at as Donica collected her Earth, complete with a living, moving Bernie and all of us dressed as – living as? – our avatars. Dirt at Donica’s feet, until she collected it. Chunks of concrete strewn around.

And the hole.

“What’s the deal with that hole, anyway?” Zhizhi asked. “Can you guys still see it through Third Eye?”

I swept my camera toward it.

Sure enough, it still gaped in the floor. If anything, I saw it more easily without a berm of dirt and concrete built up around it. I tilted my camera, but from where I stood, I couldn’t see the bottom.

I’d expected the hole to exist just to lend verisimilitude to the piles of dirt Donica needed to collect Earth. Instead, both the hole and the chunks of concrete it had displaced from the floor remained. They seemed to fall into whatever class of Third Eye objects the decorations on the construction site did, neither real outside the moments when we collected a Reactant, nor collectible themselves.

“I wonder what would happen if one of us tried climbing down it,” Lena said.

“Absolutely not,” I said.

Maybe it was more of a snap, because she shot me a glare. “I wasn’t saying I was going to do it, Cam. I just said I wondered.”

“Okay, well, me too.” I spread my hands. “That’s a curiosity I can live with.”

“Please don’t go anywhere near it,” Erin said. “I keep thinking of what Mr. Green said about falling out of the world.”

Donica glanced over her shoulder. She seemed to realize for the first time how close she’d been standing to the hole, because she shuddered. “Yeah, I think that’s quite enough interaction with it.”

Still, she shone her light down it.

“Can you see the bottom?” Zhizhi asked.

“I’m not sure. A lot of the dirt is caved in, but it looks like the tunnel goes further.”

“A tunnel we are absolutely not going near,” I said.

Nods all around.

“I’m fairly sure you wouldn’t be able to, in any case,” Erin said. “At least, not now. I have no idea what would’ve happened if one of you had climbed down during the moment when it all seemed to be real.”

“That’s some Philadelphia experiment shit,” Lena said. We all looked at her. “The invisible ship thing? From World War 2?”

“Sorry, I don’t know that one,” I said.

She shook her head. “There was a movie in the ‘80s.”

“None of us were alive in the ‘80s,” Donica said.

“Yeah, well, I guess I’m just a little more interested in our shared cultural heritage,” Lena said. “Especially when it comes to advice for how to avoid getting your hand overlapping the same space as a bulkhead.”

“Again, nothing we’re going to test,” Matt said. “All of you have what you came for, so get out of there already.”

“I’m not stopping anybody,” Lena said. “I just wondered, is all.”

I patted Lena’s shoulder. “You’ll have to show me the movie some time.”

“Eh.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t that great.”

I offered my hand to Zhizhi again. This time, she clasped it and let me pull her to her feet.

Lena pushed the door open and glanced outside. “All clear out here.”

“It’d better be,” Donica muttered. She glanced once more at where the hole would be. “I wonder if one of the developers dug down there for some reason. Or had the content generation algorithm dig down there, or however it works.”

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“Judging from the way the debris was scattered,” Miguel said, “it looks more as though something dug its way in.”

“I really wish you hadn’t said that,” Erin said.

Two of my teammates looked like they agreed, if the way the blood ran from Donica and Zhizhi’s faces was any indication.

Lena, on the other hand, bounced on the balls of her feet. “Oh man. Do you think it’s another Daimon?”

“Maybe?” I said. “We’re not looking for it, whether it is or not.”

“Fine,” Lena said. “Maybe it’ll find us?”

A thought that put a smile on her face and hers alone.

“I don’t even care if I get to tame it, I just want to see another one,” she said. “If it’s Earth, you should see if it will come with you, Donica.”

“No thanks,” Donica said. “You’re welcome to any little beasties we come across. As far as I’m concerned, more of them running around is yet another reason for us to get the hell out of here.”

Bernie hissed.

Donica pursed her lips. “No offense.”

Lena patted Bernie’s head.

I hated it, but I found myself agreeing with Donica.

Sure, it would be cool to find another friendly Daimon like Bernie. I still wanted to check for one down in the tunnel, once the weather permitted.

Here on the construction site, though, I couldn’t get Matt’s talk of PVE out of my head.

There might be something in here that wasn’t intended content, and a glitched creature sounded even worse than a glitched environment. It could be anything.

That might not even be the worst case scenario, though.

There might be something in here that was part of the game.

Part we weren’t ready for.

Running into a high level zone as a new player is just about the fastest way to get killed in most games. Could I beat Erin or Matt in PVP? I felt pretty sure I could. If the construction site was something we weren’t even supposed to touch until the game left beta, though, until we’d all gathered far more resources and honed our abilities in PVP until we were at least playing the same game as Albie, I didn’t rate my chances of skipping all the way to endgame content.

A speedrunner might get away with it, but only by failing thousands of times first so they could learn exactly what would happen at every turn. Even then, they scrapped the vast majority of their runs.

If we tried that with Third Eye, we wouldn’t get second chances.

I picked up my pace, sweeping through the halls, following the trail of strips of pink tape Lena had left on her way in.

Right up until I came to an intersection and didn’t see any.

“Fuck.” I clenched my fists.

Lena joined me in the intersection. She looked both ways. “I’m guessing I’m not just missing my tape?”

I shook my head.

“I don’t see our prints, either.” She lifted her smart glasses, then slid them back into place.

“You put down an arrow every time we turned, right?” I asked.

She nodded.

“So we go straight and hope for the best, right?”

“Unless somebody’s got a better idea,” she said.

We waited. Donica and Zhizhi caught up to us.

After a minute, Miguel said, “Actually, I think you should turn left.”

“You think,” I said.

“Do you want me to lie to you and claim I know exactly how to get you out?” he asked.

I tried to crack a smile. “I could kinda go for a comforting lie right now.”

“In that case, by all means, turn left, and I’ll have you out of there in no time.”

Maybe the smile turned at least a little real. I couldn’t see mine, only Lena’s.

She taped the intersection and we took a left. She asked, “How come you think we should go this way?”

“The geography of the site, three-dimensionally,” Miguel said. “I don’t pretend to understand how it works in any further dimensions, but you should be closer to the outer wall this way. There’s only so much space.”

“Unless there isn’t only that much space,” Donica said.

“Unless that, yes,” he said.

“This place is obviously not just three-dimensional,” she said. “You’re basically telling us to turn off what should’ve been our natural path on the basis of a guess that doesn’t even make sense in context.”

“It makes sense,” Miguel said, “based on what I’ve seen you experience so far. This environment, as depicted in your footage, attempts to remain plausible, even when it isn’t possible. That’s the best I can offer.”

Donica gritted her teeth.

We passed one intersection, sans tape, and I exchanged glances with Lena. She grimaced and I gave her hand a quick squeeze.

As we approached the next intersection, though, my light flashed off a wonderful, reflective, hot pink strip on the floor.

Donica exhaled angrily. “You’re going to be insufferable about this, aren’t you?”

“If you’d like me to stop trying to help...” Miguel began. “I’m afraid that’s not in the cards. Sorry.”

“Thanks, man,” I said.

Lena nodded. “Seriously.”

We grouped up around the tape and shone our lights down the hall. Strips along the doors on both sides, and since Lena had been putting them on the left side of each one we tried, they even told us which way to go. On top of that, our feet had cut a line in the dust.

In fact, we’d disturbed almost all the dust.

I frowned at the floor. I swept my light in the opposite direction.

“Huh. What are we looking at?” Erin asked.

“Prints,” I said. “Down the hallway it doesn’t look like we’ve ever been in.”

It was a four way intersection. There was the path we’d originally come down, swept almost clean. The path we’d gone from there, with a single line and a few diversions as we marched down it, checking and marking doors. The path we’d just come from, more or less single file, with our recognizable prints.

The final path had prints, too. From my and Donica’s first visit? From whoever else had been back here then?

No, because I was pretty sure I would’ve noticed them.

Just like I was pretty sure they weren’t human.