“Valentine got me a job at WorGames.”
“Doing what?”
“Testing a new bleeding-edge title that runs on some high-tech augmented reality game engine.”
“I’m jealous,” I said as I started making myself a cup of heart-stoppingly strong coffee.
Jealous was an understatement. Sidney Farrow’s games meant everything to me when I was growing up. While other kids had pictures of boy bands and motorcycles on their walls, I was all about Shigeru Miyamoto and Sidney Farrow.
* * *
—
Sidney Farrow’s story was remarkably similar to Hawk Worricker’s.
Sidney had entered the world of videogame design a month before she was set to graduate from Stanford, but unlike most people hired directly out of college, Sidney Farrow had already achieved significant real-world success.
While still in school, she’d created one of the most popular online games in the world. It was something called Targetta—a MMORPG. Sidney’s game was one of the first MMORPGs created outside of a corporate environment. She’d financed her entire vision by licensing her original platform to two large gaming companies.
Sidney’s work in artificial intelligence and self-generating world-building was groundbreaking, and a number of her initial open-source engine and narrative design concepts are still being used today.
“You know, Sidney Farrow was raised in a cult,” Baron said.
“It was a communal EST group, not a cult.”
“What the fuck is EST?”
“Erhard Seminars Training. It was big in the seventies and early eighties. Transform yourself by realizing you’re responsible for everything in your life.”
“So, pretty much exactly a cult.”
I shrugged. I didn’t have the energy to argue—especially considering the fact that he wasn’t wrong. I was only taking the other side of the argument because it was Sidney Farrow.
“How do you know that shit?” Baron asked, as he moved from the kitchen into the living room.
“I read books.”
“Those mind cults practice thought control, NLP 2.0 shit; some even brand each other,” Baron said as he went through a stack of magazines and papers on my coffee table, looking for something to amuse him as he ate his chia pudding.
“There’s no evidence any of that happened with Sidney Farrow’s group.”
Baron picked up an old copy of Games and Gamers magazine from the coffee table—an issue from sometime in the late nineties.
“She’s cool,” Baron said.
Sidney Farrow was on the cover, and he was right; she was super cool.
She had wavy red hair, bright green eyes, and a knowing smirk that slightly turned up one side of her mouth. She was wearing Super Mario coveralls over a worn white vintage Atari T-shirt. There was a black anarchy symbol pinned onto one side of the coverall’s straps and a yellow X-Men logo button on the other.
Sidney Farrow was the one person in the world I most wanted to meet—although a certain reclusive billionaire with whom I’d recently had coffee ran a pretty close second.
* * *
—
Chloe came over to my place an hour or so after Baron showed up, and the three of us spent the rest of the day trying to dig up information on Alan Scarpio. Unsurprisingly, we were unable to find anyone connected to Scarpio who was willing to speak with us.
“What the hell do we do now?” Chloe asked.
“Dinner?” I suggested. We hadn’t eaten much of anything all day.
“I don’t know about you guys,” Baron said, “but I haven’t slept, and I’ve gotta get up early for Sidney Farrow tomorrow.”
“Lucky bastard,” Chloe said. She was a huge Farrow fan too.
“Why don’t the three of us touch base sometime tomorrow?” I said as I followed Baron to the door.
“Sounds good,” Baron said.
I shut the door and walked back into the living room, closed my eyes, and sank into the couch beside Chloe.
The lack of sleep was starting to catch up with me as well.
I jumped a little when Chloe gently placed her hands on my shoulders, but my reaction didn’t scare her away. She just squeezed harder.
“It’s gonna be okay, tiger,” she said. “Hang in there.”
Chloe and I often sent each other two memes. One was the infamous photograph of the little “hang in there” kitten dangling from a rope, and the other was a picture of a single white towel hanging on a rack. Towel was our panic signal—a nod to Douglas Adams.
In case of emergency, if one of us really needed to speak to the other, we sent the towel. The kitten was reserved for situations that warranted some light absurd commentary. It was a kind of visual tone poem to general fucked-uppery. “Hang in there” never actually required a response. Towel was another story.