He’d started letting a few of us use the place for meetings after the eighth iteration of the game. The Magician’s arcade became a kind of de facto clubhouse, an informal gathering place for those of us who remained obsessed with the game long after most everyone else had checked out.
I pressed play on the reel-to-reel recording, and the voice of Dr. Abigail Prescott filled the room.
…The level of secrecy surrounding the game is concerning, as are the number of candidates…STATIC…it’s chaos from the trailhead to the first marker, no algorithm can track its logic…CRACKLE…I’ve heard the underlying condition of the game described, metaphorically, as a kind of fluid, like the cytoplasm or protoplasm of a cell…STATIC…It had been dormant for a very long time when the first clue showed up in 1959. It was something in The Washington Post, a letter to the editor, and the lyrics of a song by the Everly Brothers that, when combined, provided the first indication that the game had returned. A student at Oxford put everything together and brought her professor into the thought matrix at Cambridge…CRACKLE…the name Rabbits was first used in reference to a graphic containing a rabbit on the wall of a laundromat in Seattle. Rabbits wasn’t the name of that specific iteration of the game, just like it’s not the name of this one…as far as any of us can tell, the games themselves—at least the games in this modern variation—don’t actually have names. They’re numbered by the community of players…STATIC…should be warned, we have reason to believe that the reports of both physical and mental jeopardy have been, in fact, underreported, and…STATIC.
The following was allegedly written on the wall in that laundromat in Seattle in 1959, under the hand-scrawled title MANIFESTO, and above a hand-stamped graphic of a rabbit:
You play, you never tell.
Find the doors, portals, points, and wells.
The Wardens watch and guard us well.
You play and pray you never tell.
There it was. Rabbits. The reason they were here, looking for some new information, a clue, anything that might lead to evidence about the next numbered iteration: Eleven, or XI.
Had it started?
Was it about to start?
Had the tenth version really ended?
Had anybody seen The Circle?
I let the echo of Dr. Abigail Prescott’s words hang there dramatically for a moment, and then I continued with the Q&A section of my presentation.
“Any questions?”
“What can you tell us about Prescott?” A man wearing a Canadian tuxedo—dark denim shirt and light blue jeans—asked in a booming voice. He was playing a game manufactured by Williams Electronics in the 1980s, Robotron: 2084.
He was a friend of mine named Baron Corduroy: a plant I’d brought along to prompt certain aspects of my presentation.
“Yes, well, we know that Dr. Abigail Prescott allegedly worked under both Stanford’s Robert Wilson—a professor whose main area of interest is game theory as it relates to economics—and quantum physicist Ronald E. Meyers, but nobody has been able to dig up anything else of any real value on her. Some believe Abigail Prescott is a pseudonym, but nobody knows for sure.”
“A pseudonym for who?” asked Dungeon Master Sally.
“No idea,” I replied, which was true. Abigail Prescott was a cipher. It was almost impossible to find anything about her online or anywhere else—and believe me, I’ve tried.
“Where did you get that recording?” It was that voice again, coming from somewhere in the back. I still couldn’t locate the speaker.
“Well, as most of you know, The Prescott Competition Manifesto is extremely rare. The moment it’s posted to a crowd-sharing site, it’s removed faster than the big movie studios pull down their copyrighted works. It’s not much, but this clip is currently our best source of information available on the game.”
Another pause for dramatic effect.
“This particular clip was given to me by a friend of mine who almost won Eight.” This last bit was a lie. I’d bought the recording on the darknet for twenty-six dollars’ worth of Bitcoin.
A hush fell over the room.
They loved it when I mentioned anything related to the numbered iterations of the game, or the winners of those particular iterations, The Circle. And, of course, Hazel, the most infamous Rabbits player of all time.
Hazel wasn’t the only famous participant. There were the two well-known Canadian players, Nightshade and Sadie Palomino; ControlG, the winner of the tenth—and most recent—iteration of the game; the Brazilian anarchist who went by the number 6878; and, of course, Murmur, the deadliest of them all, allegedly sacrificing their spouse to gain an edge during Nine. But all of those players, as accomplished as they were, existed a tier below Hazel.