“Neuromancer believed,” the Magician said, “that if you were willing to look hard enough, you’d eventually find direct connections between the game and significant world events: wars, market collapses, assassinations, mass suicides, and many other global occurrences.”
He fell silent again, and this time, I felt like if we didn’t keep the conversation moving, we were going to lose him.
“But couldn’t connections to events on that scale just as easily fall into the world of conspiracy theorists and other nut jobs?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said as he extinguished his cigarette in a small glass jar.
“What happened to Neuromancer?” Chloe asked. She clearly wasn’t ready to let this information session end either.
“One day, just as suddenly as he appeared, he stopped posting.”
“When was this?” I asked.
“Sometime near the end of the eighth iteration of the game.”
“Do you think this Neuromancer could have been Hazel?” I asked.
“I don’t think so…but it’s possible, I suppose.”
We sat there in awkward silence for a moment before we were startled by a loud ringing. The old yellow analog phone on the Magician’s desk rang once and then stopped.
The Magician ignored the phone and walked over to an old wooden filing cabinet that stood beside the door to the bathroom. He opened the bottom drawer and pulled out a gray metal box. He lifted the lid of the box, removed an ancient Motorola flip phone, and dialed a number.
I looked over at Chloe. She shrugged.
The Magician held the phone to his ear and listened. He didn’t say a thing. After a minute or so, he hung up, put the phone back into the box, and slid it back into the drawer.
“The Jesselman suicide has everybody freaked out,” he said, shaking his head.
“Who’s everybody?” Chloe asked.
The Magician ignored her question. “Eleven has started, and something is wrong.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means you have to stop,” he said.
“Stop what?”
“Playing the game.”
“But it just started,” I said.
“A significant number of players are disappearing…and worse,” the Magician said as he pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“Hmmm?” the Magician replied.
“On the phone.”
“A friend,” he said.
The Magician clearly wasn’t going to give us any more details.
“What about Neuromancer? Any idea who he is…or was?” I asked.
The Magician exhaled and pressed his fingers to his temples. “How the fuck do I know? It’s the name of a William Gibson novel. Could be anybody.”
“How does your friend on the phone know that players are disappearing, or whatever?” Chloe asked.
The Magician stood up and started digging through a mess of printed pages on his desk. Eventually he found what he was looking for and handed it to Chloe.
“That is a list of people who were playing the game and then went missing. I recognize most of the names on this list. These are experienced players. Very careful people.”
“Are you sure they’re actually missing?” Chloe asked.
“Are you sure you want to keep asking stupid fucking questions?” he spat, his voice loud and strained.
The Magician wasn’t himself.
He’d always been quick to anger if you came at him with any theory or question that he deemed lazy or half-baked, and he could shut you down easily with a partially raised eyebrow or a well-placed sigh, but in all the years I’d known him, I’d never seen him like this. He’d never once raised his voice with Chloe.
“Here are some more from Germany and Canada,” he said, lifting up another printed page.
“What do you think it means?” I asked.
“The game has become corrupt. These people are gone. And if you two keep playing, the same thing is going to happen to you.”
He grabbed Chloe and me by our shoulders, held us together, and did his best to focus his wild, bloodshot eyes. “From now on, the game is off-limits. You understand?”
We nodded.
“I have to get back to work,” he said, and with that, the Magician kicked us out of his office.
As I was closing his office door behind us, I heard him yell out: “I mean it. No playing the game!”
The Magician’s warning was sobering. His had been by far the most knowledgeable and encouraging voice when it came to the game.