I looked at Chloe.
Was this shit really happening?
* * *
—
Those of us who have spent countless hours playing her games know Sidney Farrow not only as the greatest architect of game-engine dynamics to ever work in the industry, but also as an extremely creative builder of characters and story. I’ve spent so much time living with her characters that I’ll occasionally find myself remembering situations and conversations I’ve had while playing her games more vividly than events that took place in my real life.
Sidney Farrow was directly responsible for four of my top-five favorite gaming experiences of all time.
And she was standing right in front of me.
“Why are you asking about Rabbits? If you don’t mind my…asking?” I felt like a complete idiot. I’d suddenly lost the ability to speak in coherent sentences.
“Something had been bothering me about the technology WorGames was using to playtest my newest game,” Sidney said. “When I started asking questions, I felt like I was being handled.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“As soon as I started poking around, I noticed that I was being watched, very carefully, by certain people in my department. So, I decided to try another approach. I asked somebody completely unconnected to look into it.”
“Baron,” I said.
Sidney nodded. “I work fairly closely with his friend Valentine. She told me Baron was a fan of my games.”
“That’s an understatement,” I said. “We’re all huge…fans.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I’m so sorry about what happened to your friend. He was cool.”
“Thank you,” I said. Chloe nodded and took a respectful sip of vodka.
“So,” I said, “you’re interested in Rabbits because of Baron?”
Sidney nodded and pointed at the vodka bottle. It was empty.
“Hey, you guys wanna grab a drink somewhere?”
I looked over at Chloe and then back to Sidney. We couldn’t possibly let Sidney Farrow leave without telling us everything she knew about what had happened with Baron.
“We could go to K’s place,” Chloe said, pulling a wild tangle of keys from her pocket. “It’s not far.”
“Sounds good, but maybe I should drive,” Sidney said. “It smells a little boozy in here.”
“I hope you can drive a stick,” Chloe said, tossing Sidney the keys.
“Of course,” Sidney replied. “I’m not some kind of monster.”
* * *
—
Back at my place, Chloe opened a bottle of wine and we sat down with Sidney Farrow.
“So, what can you tell us about what happened with Baron?” I asked.
Sidney explained that Baron’s team had been playtesting her game using WorGames’ proprietary high-tech cutting-edge system—something called the Byzantine Game Engine. She said they’d been running the game on the new platform for about a week when one of the women on the testing team was injured. Worried her game might be responsible in some way, Sidney confronted the executive in charge and demanded to know what happened. She was told that the woman, a game tester named Mary, had experienced a minor seizure, but that WorGames had been cleared of all liability due to the fact that the woman had some kind of preexisting condition.
Sidney pressed for more information, but they told her, now that this proprietary technology was in play, Sidney—unfortunately—no longer had sufficient security clearance to access anything connected to her game.
Sidney told them to fuck off, said they couldn’t do that, then called her lawyer—who took a look over her contract and told her that, sadly, legally, they could.
Sidney had been completely shut out of her own creation.
“I started asking around,” Sidney said, “and apparently, right after they’d started testing, some of the players began experiencing headaches, nausea, and intense vomiting.”
“And you think their reactions may have had something to do with your game?” Chloe asked.
“I had no idea. Baron had been assigned the testing module right beside the woman who’d experienced the seizure, so I asked him what happened. He told me he’d heard banging coming from the pod next to his, and that he rushed in to discover a woman convulsing on the floor. He said he did his best to try to stop her from swallowing her tongue, and then the emergency medical staff intervened and took her away.”
“Any idea what happened to her?” Chloe asked.
“They told me that she was fine, but when I looked into it later on, I discovered that she’d actually died in the hospital a couple of hours after they admitted her.”