Rabbits(30)

NOTES ON THE GAME:

MISSIVE BY HAZEL


     (AUTHENTICATED BY BLOCKCHAIN)


It’s commonly accepted by those interested in Rabbits lore that The Phrase and The Circle can appear anywhere in the world at any time. Before and after each iteration of the game, players from all over the globe flood underground Rabbits chat rooms with pictures and reports about finding the phrase “The Door Is Open” or what they believe is an official representation of The Circle.

There have been rumors of The Circle showing up spray-painted on the side of a building in Red Square, replacing the track listing on side two of a Wilco vinyl record in 2002, and more than one player reported seeing The Phrase listed in the end credits of an independent Canadian film that screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2010—although, so far, no video or screen capture evidence has surfaced to support these alleged appearances.

No organization has ever officially addressed how or why The Phrase or The Circle appears, which isn’t all that surprising, considering the fact that no organization has ever officially acknowledged the existence of the game itself.

—HAZEL 8





10


    WORGAMES


A few days after we’d brought Alan Scarpio’s phone over to the arcade, Chloe called to tell me that the Magician wanted to take another look.

When I got there, Chloe and Baron were waiting. The Magician stuck a Back in Fifteen Minutes sign on the window, locked the door, and led us up to his office.

“You said Scarpio received a call while you were sitting with him in the diner?” The Magician motioned with his fingers, and once again, I handed over Scarpio’s phone.

“Yeah,” I said, “but we checked, there’s nothing on the phone. No call log, no records of anything.”

“Right,” the Magician said, “but call logs are stored in a few places, both on the device and in the cloud.”

“We checked the cloud,” Baron said. “There’s nothing there.”

“Did you find something?” Chloe asked as the three of us watched the Magician plug Scarpio’s phone into the same laptop he’d hooked it up to before.

“The last time you were here, I checked if this phone’s data had been updated with the call he’d received while you were in the diner, but the cloud connection had been completely wiped.”

“Exactly,” Baron said. “There’s nothing there.”

“So what are you doing now?” I asked.

“Rooting the phone.”

“That’s definitely going to void the warranty,” Chloe joked.

“Apparently, this particular phone backs up call and messaging information in a database file, and that file is accessible only by rooting the phone and using a file manager application.”

“Shit,” Baron said. “That’s a great idea.”

Rooting a phone—or, more accurately, hacking it to gain root access—isn’t uncommon among people who want less “restrictive” experiences with their mobile devices. Chloe was right, however; rooting would immediately void the warranty.

It took the Magician two minutes to locate the database, and another two minutes to crack it open. Eventually, he spun the laptop around and showed us the contents of the file he’d discovered. There was one entry: the call Scarpio had received while he’d been sitting with me in the diner. That entry contained three pieces of information: the time of the call, its length, and the incoming number.

“Well?” Baron asked.

“Well what?” Chloe replied.

“We’re calling the number, right?”

The three of them turned to look at me.

“K?” the Magician asked.

I nodded and dialed.

Somebody picked up on the second ring.

“Hello, and thank you for calling WorGames Seattle. How may I direct your call?”

I hung up.

The call that had clearly upset Alan Scarpio shortly before he disappeared had come from WorGames.



* * *



—

WorGames was the brainchild of a man named Hawk Worricker. The following is an excerpt from an article written by Yumiko Takada for Wired magazine in 2016:

    Not much is known about Hawk Worricker’s early life, although it’s generally accepted that he grew up in Washington State and moved to Southern California with his family sometime after high school.

A decade later, while at Stanford, Worricker created a computer programming language similar to COBOL that he called LEMON. Rather than sell LEMON to one of his many suitors, however, Worricker decided to give it away for free, and as a result, it’s still in use today in some smaller countries’ telecommunication devices.

In 1983, after a brief stint at Apple, Worricker, then forty-nine, founded his flagship company, WorGames. Less than a year later, after WorGames’ first titles—Warz and Tankz—had shipped, the company was profitable, and investors were clamoring to buy in. Worricker turned everyone down.

He took an enormous risk by circumventing existing distributors and selling directly to buyers, but his gamble paid off. Big time. By preserving ownership, he was able to both maximize his profits and maintain complete creative control over his games.