“How did they do it?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” the Magician asked.
“How could somebody create a brand-new LaserDisc for a videogame from 1984?”
“You’ll have to ask Chloe. She knows a lot more about the technical side of it all.”
We stood there for a moment as the game rebooted and the Space Ace intro started playing on the small screen. I wanted to slip a quarter into the machine immediately; I hadn’t played that game for ages.
“This list of players just appeared on that Space Ace machine out of nowhere?” I asked.
“One day, the end credits were exactly the same as any other version of the game. The next day, there was this.”
“Why this particular machine at that particular time?”
“There are many who claim that the game follows the players, that it knows exactly where they are and what they’re doing.”
“That’s kind of hard to believe,” I said.
“It’s good to be skeptical, K, but you’re entering a new world. There are some things that are going to appear, well—”
“Totally unbelievable?” I interrupted.
He laughed. “I was going to say a bit hard to believe, but yeah, maybe totally unbelievable is closer to the truth.”
“You really believe the game might be somehow tracking the people playing it?”
“I didn’t say I believe that; I said some people believe that’s the case.”
“Either way, all of this sounds—”
“Totally unbelievable?” He smiled.
“Okay, so how do you know The Circle is actually part of the game and not just a prank or something?”
“Because I know.”
“What does that mean?”
He stared at me for a moment, and then he spoke slowly, in a tone that sounded almost reverent. “I was playing the game.”
I wanted to ask so much more, but in that moment, all I managed to blurt out was: “Is all of this really…real?”
“Oh, it’s real.” The Magician turned and walked away from the game. “Follow me.”
He led me upstairs to his office where he pulled out a laptop covered in band stickers from the nineties: Urge Overkill, Nirvana, Pavement, and at least a dozen more I didn’t recognize.
He flipped open his computer and booted it up. When his password screen popped up, he just pressed enter.
“You don’t use a password?” I asked.
“Never. Passwords are easy to hack. All you’re doing is giving the world free information about yourself.”
“Not if you use random numbers and letters,” I said.
“Nothing’s random, K.” He navigated to a folder filled with images and showed them to me, one by one.
Each image featured a list of names and Roman numerals. One was a picture of a take-out menu from a pizza place, one a Billboard Hot 100 chart from the sixties, another was a list of box scores from a baseball game in 1979. The earliest image was a photograph taken of a wall in a laundromat in Seattle, featuring the stenciled graphic of a rabbit.
“These are all different versions of The Circle?” I asked, staring at each strange image in turn.
“Yeah, these particular versions were all found in North America, all validated. I’ve assembled them in chronological order. I have other collections from Europe and Asia.”
The first image was the Laundromat, followed by a picture of what appeared to be a modernist painting featuring the name Mickie Mouth, the winner of One, then a few more featuring the winners of Two, Four, and Five, ending with the Space Ace version from the Magician’s arcade and the final image: a screen capture from a GeoCities website for a pet food company named Tiny Morsels.
That website had been hacked and a message splashed across it in a spray-paint font. The message was a question that read:
“Who is Hazel?” I asked.
“Hazel won the eighth iteration of the game then allegedly abdicated their place in The Circle and disappeared.”
I stood there staring at the image on the screen as the Magician continued: “Hazel is, or was, the best Rabbits player who ever lived.”
* * *
—
Back down in the arcade proper, I took a closer look at the Space Ace machine. Once again, I had the urge to put a quarter in and play.
“So, this version of The Circle is from the seventh iteration?”
“Yes, it’s an important artifact. Seven was one of the most highly competitive cycles of the game.”
“So, what’s going on now? The eighth version is already over?” I asked.