Rabbits(14)

In the end credits of that movie was a clue that led me to a specific page in an out-of-print edition of a French mystery novel. This in turn led me to a bus stop where I got on a bus and rode it until I discovered a wall covered in graffiti.

There, hidden in the content of that graffiti, I found a message. Or perhaps I imagined I’d found a message. Either way, that message led me on a journey through the city, chasing clue after clue, until I eventually found myself arrested for trespassing in the basement of the Harvard Exit Theatre, waiting for somebody or something that I referred to as The Passenger.

By then, I was a mess. Nothing made any sense.

I actually remember feeling a sense of relief when they finally arrested me.

I was screened and assessed, then given the option of attending a mental health court or going through a normal criminal proceeding—mental health courts, like drug courts, were created to divert defendants with mental illnesses from the overcrowded and overworked criminal justice system.

I opted for the former, and they let me go once I’d agreed to attend weekly counseling sessions.

A few days after my arrest, I was back at home, and a month after that, I started my junior year of college.

I never played the game called Connections again—not only because of what had happened to me in that theater waiting for The Passenger, but because I was about to find something better.

I was about to rediscover the game called Rabbits.





5


    BARON CORDUROY


I was startled awake by a series of aggressive buzzing sounds.

Somebody was downstairs hammering on my apartment’s call button.

I live on the top floor of a four-story older brick building in Capitol Hill. On the plus side, there are crown moldings, hardwood floors, and leaded glass windows. Some of the negatives include an oil heating system that barely works and a shower plagued by bursts of scalding hot water that occur whenever someone flushes the toilet in the apartment directly below mine—the building’s superintendent claims he’s been trying to figure out how to fix it for years, but I’m not sure I believe him.

“Circle K, what the fuck is happening?” Baron brushed past me and headed straight for the kitchen.

“Have you slept?” I asked. “You look like you’ve been up all night.”

“Spent the night working on a hookup app for a couple of grad students,” he said as he scoured my pantry for something to eat.

Baron didn’t actually look that bad, but his eyes had the wild faraway look of a coder, that thick wired glaze that working all night staring at a screen and listening to crazy loud music can produce.

Baron Corduroy was tall and thin, with angular cheekbones he once referred to as his “shoulders of the face.” His eyes had a perpetual sleepy look, which belied a fierce intelligence and sharp wit. He came from the world of high finance, but these days made a living as a freelancer in tech. He spent most of his time working on mobile apps for startups and college kids, but Baron could pretty much code anything. I think he actually did some contract work for the NSA at some point. Before he changed careers and went freelance, Baron worked as a broker at a large firm in downtown Seattle.

One of the keys to Rabbits is an ability to recognize complex patterns, connections, and coincidences. If you were really good at that type of thing, you had a lot of solid employment options, but like I’d discovered while still in high school, none of those options was as immediately exciting and financially rewarding as the stock market.

By the time I’d met him, Baron was starting to burn out, getting tired of the West Edge grind. Microdosing LSD and pounding Adderall had kept him sharp for a while, but when the drugs no longer worked, he needed to find something else.

That’s when he discovered the game.

The mysterious history and deep Web conspiracy links got him started, but the intense pattern-recognition work and puzzle-solving—along with the camaraderie of like-minded weirdos—kept him in.

Way in.

I met Baron for the first time at the Magician’s arcade when I was a senior in college.

Like a lot of us, Baron Corduroy had come to the arcade in search of the Magician. He came to speak with him about a game called Xevious—a vertically scrolling shooter videogame released by Namco in 1983.

He’d come to see Xevious because Baron believed something strange was going on with one particular cabinet version of the game he’d played in a 7-Eleven in Oregon, and he wanted to check out another cabinet in order to use it as a point of comparison. At that time, the closest functioning Xevious machine was located at the Magician’s arcade in Seattle.

Five teenagers, on four different dates, had complained of headaches and dizziness before passing out while playing the Xevious machine in that 7-Eleven. Baron was on the trail, trying to solve that mystery.

He’d interviewed the teenagers who’d passed out, and they all told him the same thing. Just before they lost consciousness, they saw something—a shadow thing that spilled across the screen and beckoned to them with a thin outstretched hand. They’d all described removing their hands from the controls, hearing a high-pitched ringing combined with an impossibly low rumble, and then waking up on the ground, staring up into somebody’s concerned face.

The symptoms sounded eerily familiar to me, if not the cause.

The owner of the game in Oregon claimed that his machine had been functioning perfectly fine and if the Magician’s Xevious machine was different, well, then, the Magician had somehow messed with it himself.