Rabbits(26)

* * *



—

We immediately sprang into action and tried to figure out what was happening.

Was it possible that this was just a crazy coincidence? We asked everybody we knew with any kind of experience in game design or videogame history, but nobody had an answer.

We called Sega, but they had no idea what we were talking about and no interest in learning more. Everyone with a more than cursory understanding of the computer gaming industry thought what we were showing them was fake. Anyone outside of that industry didn’t care.

But I cared.

This thing felt strange—but strangely familiar. Something about it made me feel the way I’d felt the night of the accident with the Connors sisters, the night I first heard the word “Rabbits” connected to another mysterious game.

Andrew had gone just about as far as his curiosity would allow. He loved the idea of uncovering something cool, but actually taking the time to figure out what it might mean? That was way too much effort. He quickly moved on to solving another puzzle—some kind of marketing game related to Reebok—and I was left to dig into this weird Sonic anachronism on my own.

Andrew was out, but I was just getting started.



* * *



—

“What does it mean?” I asked the rail-thin brunette with the cat-eye glasses whose legs were currently draped over the back of a worn black leather sofa in a messy one-bedroom apartment. This was Beverly. She was lying on her back reading the photocopied instruction manual for Wizard’s Quest Four that I’d downloaded online and printed out.

“I’m not sure,” Beverly replied, and turned her head toward a good-looking young Black man wearing a Baltimore Orioles baseball cap and a T-shirt featuring the graphic of an old radio, with text below it that read: TURN UP THE EAGLES, THE NEIGHBORS ARE LISTENING. “What do you think, Travis?”

“It could be the game,” Travis said. He was carefully analyzing something on his computer screen.

“What game?” I asked. “The secret CIA thing?”

“It’s more than that, K,” Beverly said as she hopped off the sofa and made her way over to where Travis was working at his desk. “It’s something else, something much bigger.” She grabbed a chair and sat down next to Travis.

“What do you mean, ‘bigger’?” I said, but they completely ignored me, whispering to each other as they examined the image of Sonic the Hedgehog and the accompanying text on Travis’s monitor.

After a minute or so, Travis stood up, took a photograph of the pixelated image, then turned to me and smiled. “We’re going to see the Magician.”

Half an hour later, I walked into the Magician’s arcade for the first time.



* * *



—

The Magician took a couple of minutes to examine the image, then turned his attention to the photocopied instruction manual.

When he’d apparently seen enough, he stood up from behind his desk, walked across the room, and shut the door to his office.

When he sat back down, he carefully rested his elbows on his desk and slowly put his fingers together in a kind of steeple. “How much do you know about the game?”

Travis and Beverly burst into their favorite theories—how you had to follow any and all patterns you were able to find in real life to see where they led; how nobody was completely sure if it was real or not; how the CIA was probably using it to recruit agents (or maybe it was the NSA); and how some people were players and others were just observers.

The Magician just sat there, listening, until Travis and Beverly stopped talking.

“Anything else?” the Magician asked.

“It’s supposed to be incredibly dangerous. And”—Travis lowered his voice—“some people have died while playing it.”

Travis’s words brought me right back to the night of the accident, right back into that truck with Annie and Emily Connors. I felt my face flush with emotion as I tried to ignore the images skip-framing through my mind like an action movie.

I looked over and saw the Magician looking back at me, his face expressionless.

“Like Travis said, nobody knows if it’s real,” Beverly said. “I mean, at least, not for sure.”

“Well,” said the Magician, turning his attention away from me and back to Beverly and Travis, “the players certainly know.”

He let that possibility hang there in the air for a moment.

Could a game like this really exist? Were there actually players? What if this was the same thing Emily Connors had been talking about way back when?

Something in the Magician’s eyes reminded me of the look on Emily’s face the night of the accident.

“Is it Rabbits?” I asked.

The Magician turned to face me. He appeared surprised.

“Where did you hear that name?” The look of surprise on his face had changed into something else—a kind of half smile that I found very difficult to gauge.

“I don’t remember,” I lied.

I wasn’t ready to share that information with a conspiracy-obsessed stranger I’d just met in an arcade.

The Magician took a moment to process this information, then nodded to Travis and Beverly. “What do you two know about Rabbits?”

“What’s Rabbits?” Travis asked.