While I was waiting for the water to boil, I stared out my windows at the slowly waking city. The arguing couple had been replaced by the first trickle of cars and pedestrians leaving their homes and straight-lining their way to another world. The world of work. The office.
The feeling that I’d somehow woken up in another world was still with me, but the muted sounds of the distant traffic and the slight hum as the compressor in my refrigerator kicked on slowly brought me back to reality. I was probably just dehydrated, or maybe I’d woken up at a weird time during a deep REM cycle. I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and drank the whole thing.
I was halfway up the stairs before I actually realized I was on my way to the roof.
I’d spent a little time up there in the mornings the previous summer, sipping coffee and staring out at the city, but I’d never been there in the dark.
As I stepped out onto the roof and looked up into the night sky, the otherworldly feeling that had been bothering me since I woke up disappeared into the back of my mind. All I could think about was the stars. I’d never seen the sky this cloudless and clear in Seattle.
I’d spent some time up in northern British Columbia, and this reminded me of the wide, bright starlit skies I’d experienced out there in the middle of the forest, far away from the lights of any town or city.
I stood there staring up at the sky for a long time.
Even with the light of the moon and the wild shine emanating from the lights of the city below, I could clearly see the stars.
I was looking up at the Big Dipper when it came to me.
The hidden level from Zompocalypso.
While I was rearranging the placement of everything in my mind, I began to see a pattern. Those seemingly random scribbles of numbers and symbols suddenly weren’t random at all.
I ran back downstairs, turned off the kettle （which had boiled dry）， loaded a map of current constellations onto my laptop, and navigated my way back to the hidden level in Zompocalypso.
It took me about five minutes to find the secret hidden within that mess of scribbles and symbols.
There were yellow numbers on the Zompocalypso screen that corresponded to the specific locations of each star that made up the constellations of the night sky.
I began with Polaris, the brightest star that makes up the Little Dipper, or Ursa Minor, and quickly mapped out the numbers on the hidden screen that matched the locations of each of the seven main stars that comprised that constellation.
When I combined those numbers, I had sixteen digits.
I’d played enough alternate reality games and studied Rabbits for long enough to suspect that these numbers were most likely some kind of code. I tried every alphanumeric, hexadecimal, and binary combination I could think of, but there was nothing. I stared at the screen again. Something was bothering me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. What was I missing?
After going back and forth over every pattern and number combination I could think of, I eventually found it. It wasn’t the numbers that had been bothering me. It was something else entirely.
There was an extra constellation.
I was aware of Ophiuchus, the large constellation represented by a man holding a serpent that people occasionally （and incorrectly） refer to as the thirteenth sign of the zodiac, but this was different.
I couldn’t believe I’d missed it. It was smaller than the others, hidden in a mess of numbers and symbols I’d initially thought were just part of the background.
It was composed of twelve stars in the shape of a triangle and circle—the symbol from my elevator dream.
Once again, I went through every combination of possible clues and patterns I could think of that might connect those stars and numbers, but still couldn’t find anything that looked even remotely like a clue.
But there was no way I was going to give up now.
I made some coffee for real this time, and went back to work.
I combined the numbers and letters associated with the twelve stars that made up the thirteenth constellation in the image on the hidden Zompocalypso screen, and then typed that enormously long string of alphanumeric characters into the address bar of a Web browser, added dot com, and pressed enter.
Nothing.
But when I typed those same characters into the address bar of a Tor Browser and added .onion （a darknet URL suffix）， something happened.
A website loaded, and what appeared to be a video started playing.
But it wasn’t a video. It was the Earth, and the way the camera was zooming closer was familiar. I was looking at some kind of satellite application.
I sat back and watched as the application zoomed forward into North America, up to Washington State, and finally came to a stop, right above a back alley in downtown Seattle.