Rabbits(102)

“Can we see it?” I said.

“I don’t see why not,” said Easton, “if the entire group is in agreement.”

There were whispers around the table.

“We could step outside for a moment, if that would be better,” I offered.

“That might be for the best,” Easton said. “We’ll call you back in.”

Chloe and I stepped outside, onto the front porch.

“You wanna take off?” she asked, once the door had closed behind us.

“What? Why would we do that?”

“We can just play Zompocalypso ourselves. We can easily find that secret level,” Chloe said.

I’d been thinking the same thing. We would almost certainly be able to find that hidden level on our own, especially now that we knew it existed.

“Come on,” Chloe said as she started walking down the steps. “There’s no way any of those people are Murmur.”

But I wasn’t so sure. “I don’t feel like Easton’s being completely honest,” I said.

“You think she’s playing the game,” Chloe said.

“I do,” I said as the door behind us opened with a slow wooden creak.

“You guys can come back in now,” Darla said.

Chloe came back up the stairs, and the two of us reentered the house.

We were guided to a couple of seats that had been set up for us at the far end of the dining room table. There, visible on a laptop, was the hidden screen from Zompocalypso.

It was exactly as Easton had described it: light-colored numbers and symbols atop a dark blue background.

Everything was arranged around one symbol that was much larger than the rest. That symbol sat in what appeared to be the geometric center of the screen.

It was a triangle with a small circle on top—the symbol from my elevator dream and the front door of the Gatewick Institute.

What were the odds that a symbol from a recurring dream I’d been having since childhood was just randomly part of this thing? I’d never played Zompocalypso in my life.

“What do you think?” Easton said.

I leaned forward and touched the screen, checking out the tiny symbols and numbers. “It’s kind of beautiful,” I said, which was true. The graphics were extremely sophisticated and detailed—completely different from the cheap patchwork graphic design of Zompocalypso.

“What can you tell us about these?” I asked, pointing to the tiny symbols.

“We think the little ones are meaningless, just creepy for creepy’s sake. The same arcane background art is available online for ninety-nine cents.”

I nodded. “What about that?” I asked, pointing to the middle of the screen. “Any significance to that symbol, the circle and the triangle?” I asked.

“Not that we know about,” Jenny said, but I thought I may have seen a brief flash of something pass across Easton’s face.

“How did you find the hidden screen?” Chloe asked; there was no point in us spending time solving the game-within-the-game ourselves if these people had already figured it out.

There were rumblings from the table.

“Should we step outside again?” I asked.

“You have to bring the golden war hammer to the blacksmith’s shed in the lower quadrant, and then you can walk through the back wall into a hidden room,” Darla said. Jenny and Hugh gasped, clearly upset Darla was sharing this information with us.

“What?” Darla said. Jenny and Hugh shook their heads.

Easton smiled a tiny, bemused smile. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’re a group of like-minded people, all interested in learning more. And if we can help one another in some small way”—Easton looked over at me—“well then, where’s the harm in that?”

“We found this screen of symbols on the back wall of that room.” Darla zoomed out and revealed that what we’d been looking at was indeed the back wall of a hidden room.

“Cool,” I said.

“What do you make of it?” Easton asked.

“No idea,” I said. “Do you guys have any theories?”

“We do have some thoughts,” Darla said.

“Thoughts that we’re not prepared to share,” the Colonel added, the tone of his voice suggesting that perhaps Darla should stop talking.

Alberto nodded in agreement with the Colonel. He also appeared to have had just about enough of the sharing.

Maybe Alberto or the Colonel was Murmur?

I looked over at Chloe and she nodded. It was time to ask.

“Have any of you heard of the Rabbits player known as Murmur?”

As I asked the question, Chloe and I scanned the faces of everybody at the table. We were looking for any kind of reaction.

But there was nothing.

They’d all heard of Murmur of course, but—according to them—they didn’t know any more than we did.



* * *



—

We stayed there for about an hour and a half, swapping anecdotes about the game. We told stories about the puzzles we’d encountered and compared notes on The Prescott Competition Manifesto. I offered to share the version of the PCM that I played during the informal Rabbits information sessions I ran in the arcade, but they’d all heard that version already.