“I need your help,” he said.
“What for?” I replied.
“Something is wrong with Rabbits, and I need you to help me fix it.”
And with that, Alan Scarpio went right back to playing his game.
2
SO WHAT? IT’S A FUCKING WOODPECKER
In case you’re wondering, my name is K. That’s it. Just K. One letter.
Two things I’ll tell you: First, K is short for something. And second, I’ll never tell you what that something is. You’ll just have to find a way to cope with that disappointment.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest: A place that, at the time, I considered the wettest and loneliest corner of the Earth. A place that, many years later, I would romanticize as a kind of dark green gloomy world of ancient secrets and hidden lives, and a place that I now see as a kind of perfectly disturbing amalgamation of all of those things.
I’m old enough to remember cabinet videogames in arcades, but young enough to have trouble recalling a time without the Internet.
As a child, my parents believed I had what’s called an eidetic memory: a remarkable ability to retain images, words, and patterns in extensive detail. Back then they used the term “photographic memory,” which is inaccurate. Photographic memory doesn’t exist, and even if it does, I didn’t have it. I was just able to remember certain things, picture them clearly, and recall them later. I couldn’t remember everything, just stuff connected to patterns I found interesting. It wasn’t a math trick. Although I may have been able to drop a box of toothpicks on the floor and tell you how many there were, you weren’t getting the square root of anything from me.
Because I was the kid who could remember weird shit, I was occasionally able to distract a couple of the angry bullies in my class long enough to make them forget to kick my ass, but that only worked about fifty percent of the time—a percentage that quickly plummeted to zero when I reached high school and the ability to focus on details and pick out complex connections became less of an occasional act of self-preservation and more of an obsession.
It was this obsession with finding patterns and cracking codes （that may or may not have actually been codes at all） that resulted in me being labeled “slightly neurodiverse”—a diagnosis that landed me on a number of different medications and a handful of different therapists’ couches. It was also this obsession that eventually led me into the world of Rabbits.
When asked to pinpoint the precise moment they’d heard about the game, people often can’t remember. Maybe they’d seen something on some obscure online bulletin board, or read a snippet of a conversation about hidden “kill screens” in arcade games from the 1980s. Or perhaps it was a friend of a friend talking about a kid who’d died while playing a strange Atari 2600 game that nobody can remember actually existing.
I remember exactly where I was standing when I first heard the name Rabbits.
It was at a party in Lakewood, Washington.
* * *
—
Growing up in Olympia, Washington, just about an hour south of Seattle, I’d heard the stories about Polybius: the video arcade game that allegedly killed some kids in Oregon. But this mysterious game was different, more enigmatic, and perhaps even more sinister. Like Polybius, this game had whispers surrounding it that included men in gray suits and potential mind-altering consequences for participation. But unlike Polybius, nobody was actually talking about this game—at least not until I attended that party.
Bill and Madeline Connors were close family friends who hosted a Fourth of July celebration every year. They had two daughters, Annie and Emily—one and three years older than me respectively.
The Connors sisters had the best taste in music, and they always wore the coolest clothes—a lot of belts, and a lot of hats. At this particular party, they were both wearing tall, striped Dr. Seuss–looking hats that they’d bought at what they assured me was the hippest store on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. I took their word for it. At the time, I’d never been farther south than Oakland, to attend sailing camp.
While our parents were in the backyard playing a drunken game of lawn darts, I entered the house to get a Coke （something I was never allowed to drink at home） and overheard Annie and Emily talking.
They were huddled in front of the family computer staring at something on the screen.
“Did you figure out how to load EverQuest, or what?” Annie asked.
“I have something better,” Emily replied, bringing up a screen I recognized. I had a pretty clear view from where I was hiding, just inside the kitchen doorway. They were looking at a Usenet newsgroup.