The place was almost completely empty. Most of the morning regulars had already passed through on their way to work.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Remember when the Magician handed me those pages with the names of players who’d died or went missing?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I remembered seeing one of those names in a couple of Rabbits forums recently, so I looked her up.”
“And?”
“She was a player from Cameroon who died under mysterious circumstances, bitten by a spider that wasn’t indigenous to the area. Her best friend was raising hell about how something was fishy, and then one day, she just disappeared.”
“That’s weird,” I said, “but it might just be coincidence.”
“It’s not good, K. Girl dies, friend goes missing. Shit like this is happening all over the world.”
I grabbed my coffee and moved over to Chloe’s side of the booth. “You sure?”
Chloe nodded.
“How?”
“A couple of legit Rabbits obsessives I know run a popular darknet forum called TuringLeft.”
“Isn’t that site in Spanish?”
“Yeah, they’re based in Madrid. My friend helps moderate. I asked her if she’d heard anything about people connected to Rabbits going missing and maybe even dying. She told me that players are worried something’s wrong with the game. This morning, when I logged in, there was a message splashed across the front page of that forum in ten languages.”
“What message?”
“This one,” she said as she pulled up a screen capture on her computer. Sprawled across the forum’s home page in a bright red spray paint font was a message that read:
“Shit,” I said.
Chloe closed her computer and took a sip of my coffee （she’d finished hers a while ago）。
“This is it, isn’t it?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“What Scarpio warned me about. He said if we don’t fix the game before it starts, we’re all truly fucked. What if this is just the beginning of us getting well and truly fucked?”
“Maybe,” Chloe said.
She sat there thinking for a moment.
“But…what if this is all part of it?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, false corruption of the game, people disappearing. That doesn’t feel out of line with Rabbits, does it?”
“Maybe not…but this stuff still feels different.”
“Well, didn’t you say different iterations of the game had different…vibes or something?”
“I said that?”
“During one of your sessions, you explained how each version of the game teaches you how to play it as you’re playing, like the novel Gravity’s Rainbow teaches you how to read it as you’re reading. You went on to use Pynchon’s novels to describe some clue from the sixth iteration of the game.”
This was starting to sound familiar. Maybe Chloe really had been paying attention during my information sessions.
“Jesus, I sound pretentious. I haven’t even read Gravity’s Rainbow.”
“For real?”
“I’ve tried a bunch of times. I’m saving it for the old-age home, along with Proust.”
“Sometimes you are so fucking on the nose,” Chloe said.
I smiled. She had me there.
“Still, I’m worried about the Magician,” Chloe said. “I haven’t seen him since he told us not to play the game.”
“Isn’t there anybody you can ask?”
Chloe shook her head.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” I said, doing my best to sound like I believed what I was saying. “He’s probably just out shopping for a new Asteroids cabinet or something.”
“Maybe.” Chloe nodded, but she wasn’t convinced.
I took a sip of coffee and looked out the window. Something had caught my eye—something was off—but I couldn’t figure out what it was.
“Next time I see him, I’m going to tag him with a fucking tracking device.”
“Good idea,” I said, and laughed.
As I was laughing, I noticed the sky darken, and felt a familiar buzzing up through the lower half of my body.
I realized what had been bothering me.
In the distance, visible across the street and towering over a section of Seattle I knew like the back of my hand, was an enormous green glass skyscraper I’d never seen before in my life.
Seattle is in a perpetual state of construction, but even though the skyline is a forest of cranes atop buildings in various stages of completion, there was no way I could have missed this thing. It was huge.