Eye Opener is a mobile progression fantasy from Joshua Cole, the author of The Fox Who Stole Hong Kong. When Cameron Howard crowdfunded an "immersive Augmented Reality, Altered Reality game," he expected a beautiful disaster. He could never have imagined what he's backed himself into...
Eye Opener
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Introduction
Eye Opener
A Mobile Progression Fantasy
Cameron Howard crowdfunded Third Eye on a whim. He didn't really believe a dev team with no industry experience could deliver on an "immersive Augmented Reality, Altered Reality Game for mobile platforms." If they managed somehow, he'd get a cool game out of it. When they failed, he'd be out the price of a couple hamburgers and have a story to tell.
But Third Eye did deliver.
Now Cam, his ex-girlfriend Lena, and their friends and rivals around the world are about to discover just what they've backed themselves into.
Third Eye is graphically stunning. Technologically mindblowing. Irresistibly addictive.
So why does the interface for the app itself look like it was cobbled together on a spreadsheet? In 1993?
And why does everything it shows feel so real?
A Mobile Progression Fantasy
Cameron Howard crowdfunded Third Eye on a whim. He didn't really believe a dev team with no industry experience could deliver on an "immersive Augmented Reality, Altered Reality Game for mobile platforms." If they managed somehow, he'd get a cool game out of it. When they failed, he'd be out the price of a couple hamburgers and have a story to tell.
But Third Eye did deliver.
Now Cam, his ex-girlfriend Lena, and their friends and rivals around the world are about to discover just what they've backed themselves into.
Third Eye is graphically stunning. Technologically mindblowing. Irresistibly addictive.
So why does the interface for the app itself look like it was cobbled together on a spreadsheet? In 1993?
And why does everything it shows feel so real?
Last edited:
Chapter 1: Third Eye
Chapter 1: Third Eye
Sometimes, you see a crowdfunding campaign that over-promises and under-clarifies and you just know the project is going nowhere. You look at the campaign and you look at your PayPal balance after your last round of selling action figures for a few bucks more than you paid for them in a yard sale, and you think –
What the hell.
By you, I mean me. So maybe I'm the one with the problem.
Regardless, they'd gotten me that way four times, and I didn't expect the next time to be the charm with Third Eye.
At least I wasn't alone. More than 100,000 people saw the description of it as an immersive, Augmented Reality, Altered Reality Game and thought, "That's definitely something a team with zero industry experience is going to successfully complete in a way that makes it feel like I got my money's worth."
For fuck's sake, even the acronym sounded like a stuttering pirate. AR-ARG. How could that be anything but an ill omen for the project?
I only threw thirty bucks at the Kickstarter for a laugh. If functional software ever came of it, I'd gain beta access. If, as seemed overwhelmingly likely, nothing did, I'd gain a story and be out the price of a few hamburgers. The highest backer tier, with its promises of physical and in-game rewards, was $10,000. Canadian, but still. Four poor saps took them up on that. Well, not that poor, I had to hope.
In total, the campaign blew past its goal and brought in more than four million. It unlocked stretch goals for "further dimensions," "helper daimons," and "player generated arts."
Then, as these things do, it went silent.
I, and presumably most people who had invested a few meals worth into the possibility a game might one day emerge, promptly forgot about it. Whether the top-tier backers were as sanguine, I couldn't say.
So it stunned me when, six years later, four after the deadline specified in the Kickstarter campaign, I saw an email entitled Third Eye Beta Access.
"Huh," I said.
"Sup?" Lena asked from her seat on the other side of our living room.
I glanced at her, but she hadn't spun her computer chair to look back. All I saw was a mop of copper curls poking above the black mesh. "Remember Third Eye?"
A pause. Long pause. "Nope."
"Ye don't be remembering the AR-ARG?" I put on an accent like it was Talk Like A Pirate Day. And like people still cared about Talk Like A Pirate Day.
Lena sure didn't. "Nuh-uh."
"I distinctly remember you linking it to me."
"I link a lot of things to you, Cameron."
She used my full name, so I'd somehow annoyed her. Back off? Nah. "You seemed pretty into it."
"I'm into a lot of things."
"Just check your email, already."
"Later," she said. "I'm in the middle of a level."
"What are you playing? What even has levels these days?"
"Lil' thing by the name of Trowel Samurai 2?"
I blinked. "It's out?"
"Since this morning."
Needless to say, for the rest of that afternoon, I forgot about Third Eye all over again.
I didn't think of it again until my third loss to the Cake Daimyo. Lena had blown past this boss hours ago, and I chose to blame my failures on the lavish hi-bit layer cake castle I'd been trying to fight my way up on an empty stomach.
"I'm gonna order food," I said.
"Because you can't beat Cake Daimyo?"
"I'm just hungry. It's almost seven, anyway."
"Shit, seriously? I'm supposed to beat this today so I can get a guide out." Unrelated to the speed at which she had blitzed through the early levels of Trowel Samurai 2, Lena had a freelance gig writing game guides that I'd never been able to crack into.
I got up and lifted one of the blinds. "I don't know how to break it to you, but I think it's officially tonight."
"Welp." She dropped her controller on her desk without even bothering to pause and tabbed to her browser. "Might as well eat then."
"I'm thinking pizza."
"Sophisticated, yet traditional. Gimme pineapple, ham, green peppers, black olives, and one more as a surprise."
Once upon a time, I would've asked if she didn't want the supreme instead, but I'd learned my lesson. I just got pepperoni and slapped that on her side as well because I knew something so vanilla would annoy her without actually making her pizza taste bad.
I'm not a complete monster.
While I was putting our order in, I glanced at the notifications on my phone and saw I'd received a text about the Third Eye beta.
Which was a little weird.
"When did I get my new number?" I asked.
"Couple, three years ago. Why?"
I shook my head. "I guess it was at least six."
"No way," she said. "I know I'd already moved in. I could've only mocked you part-time, otherwise."
I had failed to use two factor authentication everywhere I should have and had gotten quite a few pieces of my identity – including my old phone number – stolen. It had been scary at the time. Then it became inconvenient as I spent months sorting all my shit out. I would've been able to look back on it and laugh by now, if from day one it hadn't been endlessly amusing to Lena.
I knew she was right about the timing, because if she'd treated me that shittily before we started cohabitating, I wouldn't have invited her to share an apartment in the first place.
That was a lie. Had we been dating then? More or less. Were we now? More less than more.
But what the hell. With the rates for apartments in Englewood, I wouldn't have kicked out Hitler and Stalin as long as they paid their shares of the rent.
None of which was germane to my weird text. "If it hasn't been that long, this is just downright strange."
"I love strange things," she said, "as long as you tell me about them after you assure me you've already put the order for our pizzas in."
I checked the order status. "It is in the oven now, and I just got half-and-half."
"I'll order something else later." Someday Lena's diet would catch up with her metabolism. Like karma, it took its sweet time. "For now, weird me out."
"I didn't even have this number when I backed Third Eye," I said. "But they still texted a beta code to it."
"They bothered to search up your new phone number?"
"Like I said, strange, right?"
"Kinda creepy." She pried herself out of her chair with an exaggerated groan. I mean, I hoped it was exaggerated. The way she perched on an office chair like a gargoyle couldn't be good for her back.
It hadn't twisted her so much she couldn't walk across the apartment yet, at least. She joined me by the window.
I held up my phone. "Check it out."
"Holy shit," she whispered. "Third Eye. Never thought we were going to get our money's worth out of that shit."
"Oh, now you remember it."
"Avast, ye lubber! Who could be forgetting the AR-ARG?" She gave me a broad saccharine smile. One of her teeth had a visible cavity, victim of the sweetness of her diet. And our lack of dental insurance.
I gave her the finger. "You're the worst."
"You know it. Hey, I better have an invite too." She pulled her phone out. "Yup."
"At least we can play together," I said. "Or, more likely, mock it together."
"I'm expecting a beautiful disaster."
"Beautiful? I'm expecting the whole damn thing to be text-based."
She snorted. "For somebody who buys into so many terrible Kickstarters, you sure manage to keep your expectations low."
"I think of it as buying a front row seat for the train wreck."
"Ghoulish."
I couldn't call her a liar.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" she asked. "We're not getting anywhere in Trowel Samurai before the food gets here. We may as well sign up."
Can you imagine there was once a time where I would've interpreted that as "We may as well blindly click these links in texts or emails?" Consider my lesson thoroughly, painfully, learned. Most of the pain had come from Lena's mockery. She considered this an example of tough love.
We returned to our computers. I'm sure she did the same thing I did: had my antivirus scan the link itself, while I ran a search on the Third Eye beta to see what people were saying about it.
Few reports of actual gameplay yet, but none of it being a scam. The antivirus scan came back negative, too.
"Sounds like there's not much to it, yet," Lena said.
"'Yet?' Love the optimism."
"At least we live in a big enough city we'll probably see something. That's how AR games usually work."
"Assuming it works at all. Since only like five people on Reddit claim to have gotten anything other than the overlay, I'm not holding my breath."
"To be honest, if the overlay looks enough like a game, I might start wearing my Google Glass again just so it feels like I'm playing something when I have to go outside."
"You are playing something when you go outside," I said. "You have like five idle games running all the time."
"Those are more work than play." Believable. She had another gig reviewing mobile games. That one, I didn't envy her. "Anyway, you know what I mean."
Hell of it was, I did. There was a certain appeal to living life with a heads-up display.
Not enough of an appeal to be caught wearing smart glasses out in public like a douchebag. Or to buy smart glasses in the first place.
But an appeal, nonetheless.
Probably the only appeal of Third Eye, if the Reddit thread was anything to go by. Still, new posts continued to pop up, so if the link was a virus, it was slow-acting enough people hadn't noticed it yet.
"I'm satisfied," I said. "I'm clicking the link."
"Took you long enough," Lena said.
"If I didn't know better, I'd think you actually were looking forward to this."
She didn't respond.
I frowned. "What's up?"
"You want to be serious for a sec?"
"No," I said, "but for you to offer it? Sure."
"If you don't think too hard about it, that almost seems kind of you, Cam."
"Are you going to pour your heart out to me or not?"
"I'm not like you," she said.
I waited to find out what kind of diss this was going to turn into.
"I don't buy into these dumb Kickstarters just to watch the world burn," she said. "I'm usually hella careful about what I back. This is the only one I actually got sucked in by."
I spun my chair around and raised an eyebrow at her. "What, ever?"
At some point, she'd turned to look at me. Instead of perching on her chair, she'd sunk into it. She wore an odd expression. I couldn't tell if she wanted to laugh or to cry. "Yeah."
"I guess you learned your lesson," I said.
"Yeah."
I cocked my head. "You okay?"
"Yeah."
"You going to say anything other than 'yeah?'"
That put some fire back in her. "Screw you. I'm over here having a heart-to-heart and you're being an asshole."
"Lena, I have no idea what the hell is going on." I spread my hands. "Sorry if I'm being an ass. I'm not used to you getting serious about shit."
"It's cool," she said. "What I'm trying to say is, when I say I learned my lesson, it was kind of a harsh one."
I stared.
She fell silent.
"What tier did you back at?" I asked.
"Magus of the Second Circle," she whispered.
"You put in five thousand dollars?"
"Canadian!" She winced. "Yeah."
"Jesus," I said. "I should never let you live this down."
"No," she said. "You shouldn't. Especially after all the shit I gave you for the identity theft thing."
"Wait, is that why you moved in with me? I know you used to have your own place."
"I was okay for a couple of years after," she said. "But it did wipe out my savings, and when I had a couple of bad months – but don't get me wrong, I did like you. Do! And I like living with you! It's cool."
"I really shouldn't ever let you live this down."
"I know!" She covered her head and curled up in a ball on her chair.
I got up and squeezed her shoulder. "I won't bring it up, promise."
She looked up, eyes wide. She hadn't quite teared up, but she'd come closer than I'd ever seen her get.
"Both of us living with the knowledge that I'm the bigger person?" I grinned down at her. "That's worth more to me than any amount of needling you."
Sometimes, you see a crowdfunding campaign that over-promises and under-clarifies and you just know the project is going nowhere. You look at the campaign and you look at your PayPal balance after your last round of selling action figures for a few bucks more than you paid for them in a yard sale, and you think –
What the hell.
By you, I mean me. So maybe I'm the one with the problem.
Regardless, they'd gotten me that way four times, and I didn't expect the next time to be the charm with Third Eye.
At least I wasn't alone. More than 100,000 people saw the description of it as an immersive, Augmented Reality, Altered Reality Game and thought, "That's definitely something a team with zero industry experience is going to successfully complete in a way that makes it feel like I got my money's worth."
For fuck's sake, even the acronym sounded like a stuttering pirate. AR-ARG. How could that be anything but an ill omen for the project?
I only threw thirty bucks at the Kickstarter for a laugh. If functional software ever came of it, I'd gain beta access. If, as seemed overwhelmingly likely, nothing did, I'd gain a story and be out the price of a few hamburgers. The highest backer tier, with its promises of physical and in-game rewards, was $10,000. Canadian, but still. Four poor saps took them up on that. Well, not that poor, I had to hope.
In total, the campaign blew past its goal and brought in more than four million. It unlocked stretch goals for "further dimensions," "helper daimons," and "player generated arts."
Then, as these things do, it went silent.
I, and presumably most people who had invested a few meals worth into the possibility a game might one day emerge, promptly forgot about it. Whether the top-tier backers were as sanguine, I couldn't say.
So it stunned me when, six years later, four after the deadline specified in the Kickstarter campaign, I saw an email entitled Third Eye Beta Access.
"Huh," I said.
"Sup?" Lena asked from her seat on the other side of our living room.
I glanced at her, but she hadn't spun her computer chair to look back. All I saw was a mop of copper curls poking above the black mesh. "Remember Third Eye?"
A pause. Long pause. "Nope."
"Ye don't be remembering the AR-ARG?" I put on an accent like it was Talk Like A Pirate Day. And like people still cared about Talk Like A Pirate Day.
Lena sure didn't. "Nuh-uh."
"I distinctly remember you linking it to me."
"I link a lot of things to you, Cameron."
She used my full name, so I'd somehow annoyed her. Back off? Nah. "You seemed pretty into it."
"I'm into a lot of things."
"Just check your email, already."
"Later," she said. "I'm in the middle of a level."
"What are you playing? What even has levels these days?"
"Lil' thing by the name of Trowel Samurai 2?"
I blinked. "It's out?"
"Since this morning."
Needless to say, for the rest of that afternoon, I forgot about Third Eye all over again.
I didn't think of it again until my third loss to the Cake Daimyo. Lena had blown past this boss hours ago, and I chose to blame my failures on the lavish hi-bit layer cake castle I'd been trying to fight my way up on an empty stomach.
"I'm gonna order food," I said.
"Because you can't beat Cake Daimyo?"
"I'm just hungry. It's almost seven, anyway."
"Shit, seriously? I'm supposed to beat this today so I can get a guide out." Unrelated to the speed at which she had blitzed through the early levels of Trowel Samurai 2, Lena had a freelance gig writing game guides that I'd never been able to crack into.
I got up and lifted one of the blinds. "I don't know how to break it to you, but I think it's officially tonight."
"Welp." She dropped her controller on her desk without even bothering to pause and tabbed to her browser. "Might as well eat then."
"I'm thinking pizza."
"Sophisticated, yet traditional. Gimme pineapple, ham, green peppers, black olives, and one more as a surprise."
Once upon a time, I would've asked if she didn't want the supreme instead, but I'd learned my lesson. I just got pepperoni and slapped that on her side as well because I knew something so vanilla would annoy her without actually making her pizza taste bad.
I'm not a complete monster.
While I was putting our order in, I glanced at the notifications on my phone and saw I'd received a text about the Third Eye beta.
Which was a little weird.
"When did I get my new number?" I asked.
"Couple, three years ago. Why?"
I shook my head. "I guess it was at least six."
"No way," she said. "I know I'd already moved in. I could've only mocked you part-time, otherwise."
I had failed to use two factor authentication everywhere I should have and had gotten quite a few pieces of my identity – including my old phone number – stolen. It had been scary at the time. Then it became inconvenient as I spent months sorting all my shit out. I would've been able to look back on it and laugh by now, if from day one it hadn't been endlessly amusing to Lena.
I knew she was right about the timing, because if she'd treated me that shittily before we started cohabitating, I wouldn't have invited her to share an apartment in the first place.
That was a lie. Had we been dating then? More or less. Were we now? More less than more.
But what the hell. With the rates for apartments in Englewood, I wouldn't have kicked out Hitler and Stalin as long as they paid their shares of the rent.
None of which was germane to my weird text. "If it hasn't been that long, this is just downright strange."
"I love strange things," she said, "as long as you tell me about them after you assure me you've already put the order for our pizzas in."
I checked the order status. "It is in the oven now, and I just got half-and-half."
"I'll order something else later." Someday Lena's diet would catch up with her metabolism. Like karma, it took its sweet time. "For now, weird me out."
"I didn't even have this number when I backed Third Eye," I said. "But they still texted a beta code to it."
"They bothered to search up your new phone number?"
"Like I said, strange, right?"
"Kinda creepy." She pried herself out of her chair with an exaggerated groan. I mean, I hoped it was exaggerated. The way she perched on an office chair like a gargoyle couldn't be good for her back.
It hadn't twisted her so much she couldn't walk across the apartment yet, at least. She joined me by the window.
I held up my phone. "Check it out."
"Holy shit," she whispered. "Third Eye. Never thought we were going to get our money's worth out of that shit."
"Oh, now you remember it."
"Avast, ye lubber! Who could be forgetting the AR-ARG?" She gave me a broad saccharine smile. One of her teeth had a visible cavity, victim of the sweetness of her diet. And our lack of dental insurance.
I gave her the finger. "You're the worst."
"You know it. Hey, I better have an invite too." She pulled her phone out. "Yup."
"At least we can play together," I said. "Or, more likely, mock it together."
"I'm expecting a beautiful disaster."
"Beautiful? I'm expecting the whole damn thing to be text-based."
She snorted. "For somebody who buys into so many terrible Kickstarters, you sure manage to keep your expectations low."
"I think of it as buying a front row seat for the train wreck."
"Ghoulish."
I couldn't call her a liar.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" she asked. "We're not getting anywhere in Trowel Samurai before the food gets here. We may as well sign up."
Can you imagine there was once a time where I would've interpreted that as "We may as well blindly click these links in texts or emails?" Consider my lesson thoroughly, painfully, learned. Most of the pain had come from Lena's mockery. She considered this an example of tough love.
We returned to our computers. I'm sure she did the same thing I did: had my antivirus scan the link itself, while I ran a search on the Third Eye beta to see what people were saying about it.
Few reports of actual gameplay yet, but none of it being a scam. The antivirus scan came back negative, too.
"Sounds like there's not much to it, yet," Lena said.
"'Yet?' Love the optimism."
"At least we live in a big enough city we'll probably see something. That's how AR games usually work."
"Assuming it works at all. Since only like five people on Reddit claim to have gotten anything other than the overlay, I'm not holding my breath."
"To be honest, if the overlay looks enough like a game, I might start wearing my Google Glass again just so it feels like I'm playing something when I have to go outside."
"You are playing something when you go outside," I said. "You have like five idle games running all the time."
"Those are more work than play." Believable. She had another gig reviewing mobile games. That one, I didn't envy her. "Anyway, you know what I mean."
Hell of it was, I did. There was a certain appeal to living life with a heads-up display.
Not enough of an appeal to be caught wearing smart glasses out in public like a douchebag. Or to buy smart glasses in the first place.
But an appeal, nonetheless.
Probably the only appeal of Third Eye, if the Reddit thread was anything to go by. Still, new posts continued to pop up, so if the link was a virus, it was slow-acting enough people hadn't noticed it yet.
"I'm satisfied," I said. "I'm clicking the link."
"Took you long enough," Lena said.
"If I didn't know better, I'd think you actually were looking forward to this."
She didn't respond.
I frowned. "What's up?"
"You want to be serious for a sec?"
"No," I said, "but for you to offer it? Sure."
"If you don't think too hard about it, that almost seems kind of you, Cam."
"Are you going to pour your heart out to me or not?"
"I'm not like you," she said.
I waited to find out what kind of diss this was going to turn into.
"I don't buy into these dumb Kickstarters just to watch the world burn," she said. "I'm usually hella careful about what I back. This is the only one I actually got sucked in by."
I spun my chair around and raised an eyebrow at her. "What, ever?"
At some point, she'd turned to look at me. Instead of perching on her chair, she'd sunk into it. She wore an odd expression. I couldn't tell if she wanted to laugh or to cry. "Yeah."
"I guess you learned your lesson," I said.
"Yeah."
I cocked my head. "You okay?"
"Yeah."
"You going to say anything other than 'yeah?'"
That put some fire back in her. "Screw you. I'm over here having a heart-to-heart and you're being an asshole."
"Lena, I have no idea what the hell is going on." I spread my hands. "Sorry if I'm being an ass. I'm not used to you getting serious about shit."
"It's cool," she said. "What I'm trying to say is, when I say I learned my lesson, it was kind of a harsh one."
I stared.
She fell silent.
"What tier did you back at?" I asked.
"Magus of the Second Circle," she whispered.
"You put in five thousand dollars?"
"Canadian!" She winced. "Yeah."
"Jesus," I said. "I should never let you live this down."
"No," she said. "You shouldn't. Especially after all the shit I gave you for the identity theft thing."
"Wait, is that why you moved in with me? I know you used to have your own place."
"I was okay for a couple of years after," she said. "But it did wipe out my savings, and when I had a couple of bad months – but don't get me wrong, I did like you. Do! And I like living with you! It's cool."
"I really shouldn't ever let you live this down."
"I know!" She covered her head and curled up in a ball on her chair.
I got up and squeezed her shoulder. "I won't bring it up, promise."
She looked up, eyes wide. She hadn't quite teared up, but she'd come closer than I'd ever seen her get.
"Both of us living with the knowledge that I'm the bigger person?" I grinned down at her. "That's worth more to me than any amount of needling you."
Chapter 2: Signup Bonus
Chapter 2: Signup Bonus
"And you call me the worst," Lena said. Nonetheless, she hugged my waist.
I let her for a while. When it started to get weird, I mumbled, "You did a hell of a job playing it cool this afternoon."
"I mean, I was legit hyped for a new Trowel Samurai." She untangled her arms from my waist. "I figured the Third Eye thing would end up being a scam, anyway. It only really hit me it might be real when I clicked the signup link."
"On the plus side, if there's any game to it, it's something you're really going to be into, right?"
"You'd think so, right?" She shook her head. "I had this whole idea that if I got into an immersive enough AR game, it would get me out of the house and interacting with people. Now we've been together for years, you drag me out to parties, we've got the Monday game night. I don't, like, actually like a lot of that interaction, but it's not as miserable as I thought it would be."
Lena acted so casual, she made it easy to forget how little she talked about herself. Especially about her life before she moved in with me.
I hadn't realized how bad she'd felt. How desperate she must have been. Her money had run out and she'd had to go from a shut-in who only met people through Doordash to living with her internet kind-of-boyfriend. Who hadn't had a clue.
Which, in retrospect, made me kind of a shitty boyfriend.
No wonder we mostly weren't dating anymore.
Instead of letting myself dwell on it, I asked, "So now that Third Eye is actually here, you don't even want to play?"
"Judging by the thread, it doesn't seem like there's anything to play." She snorted. "I don't know. Maybe it'll still end up being cool. If nothing else, in a way, it did what I hoped, you know?"
"That's a great attitude." I leaned over and kissed the top of her head. "Who are you and what did you do with Lena?"
She kicked me in the shin. Deserved. Then she blinked away any tears that had betrayed her by sneaking out, found her grin. "Let's finish signing in and find out how little I got for my money."
"So little," I said.
She glared, but she laughed, too.
Satisfied, I went back to my computer and paged down the end user license agreement. Third Eye Productions is not liable... Multiplayer experience not rated by the ESRB... Agree to the use of location data... Camera access... The legalese blurred my vision.
I hit "I Accept" and officially became a user of Third Eye. It bumped me to a congratulation screen and directed me to sign in on my phone to "take my first step into a new world."
"They almost nailed the quote," I said.
"And invoke the wrath of the Mouse?" Lena asked. "They wouldn't dare, even if they had actual magic on their side."
"Still, I'm kinda annoyed."
"Over a quote?"
"Of course, what kind of geek do you take me for?" I reached for my phone and tapped the link in my text message. It sent me to the Play store and there was Third Eye. Real as an actual released product, even though it wasn't yet. "But what I meant was, I'm annoyed they don't let me finish sign-up on the PC. At least let me input my username and password on there and give me a QR code so I don't have to type it all out on the phone."
"How are you such a dinosaur you still can't text properly?"
"You know I grew up with a flip phone."
"Depraved because you're deprived," Lena sang.
"She pulls from a musical old when the world was young," I said, "and I'm the dinosaur."
"There was a remake," she said.
I didn't have to look at her to know she'd be wrinkling her nose, same as I was.
I turned my attention back to my phone. Frowned.
A welcome screen glowed up at me. Third Eye, with its three-eyed icon, a UI disaster with a bunch of stats and/or currencies I didn't like the look of, and a stock image of a scroll offering a sign-up gift. Had I actually finished signing up while I shot banter back and forth with Lena?
Half-panicked, I tabbed to Gmail on my PC. Third Eye had sent me an authentication email, including username (OldCampaigner) and password (none of your business). I'd spaced on entering them and scowled at myself for using the same login as I did on a lot of other services. If Third Eye turned out to be a scam I'd have to redo a bunch of my passwords. So much for Lena's tough love. At least I'd entered the information correctly; my touch-texting was as bad as she'd mocked me for.
Her laugh distracted me.
"Sup?" I called.
She waved her phone at me. "Did I only get this for overspending, or do you have the choice, too?"
"What choice --" I looked at my phone screen again, really looked. At the end of the scroll, it gave me two buttons to tap. Did I want my login bonus to be digital? Or physical? "Oh, bullshit."
"Right?" She made a big show of jabbing her finger at the screen. "Beautiful. Disaster."
Sans fanfare, I picked digital. "You didn't really choose physical. You know that's never coming."
"But imagine if it did," Lena said.
"Kickstarters never fulfill physical rewards. It's a law of the universe."
On my phone screen, a new scroll popped up, awkwardly framing a glittering 3D render of an amulet. Unlike the UI, the amulet looked nice. It sported rune-scribed silver fittings around a half-blue, half-green gem I couldn't identify, probably because it didn't exist in the real world. The art was high enough quality, on a project with a low enough budget, I suspected AI generation. The fact the runic characters were text-like but not from an alphabet I recognized, be it Futhark or Roman, made it more likely.
Still, gacha history told me that if Third Eye wanted to sell loot boxes of these .pngs, they needed to swap the jewelry for anime girls wearing not much else.
"They don't even show a preview," Lena said. "That sucks."
"I got one," I said.
"That's because you chose boring."
"Which one of us has a sick amulet?" I held the phone up to show her.
"Which one of us has a .png, you mean?" She hunched her shoulders and had the decency to look away while she groused.
The doorbell cut off any further argument.
We both froze.
Physical bonus...
But that was absurd.
I chuckled as I checked the notifications on my phone, hovering over my unclaimed Third Eye digital bonus. "Pizza's here."
"Thank fuck." Lena exhaled. Because she was hungry, not because she'd believed for a second she'd gotten an amulet delivered. Right? I didn't press her.
In fairness, Lena stayed hungry. "Any longer," she said, "and I might've had to cook something."
"Now that's just crazy talk."
"You're right. I would've had to make you cook something." She waved at the door. "Fetch, boy!"
I jogged over to do so.
Behind me, I heard Lena's chair creak as she got up, as well. Probably to find something to dry her eyes with. It didn't look to me like she'd actually cried, but she wouldn't take the chance. The last thing she'd want was to show weakness in front of a pizza guy.
I recognized Raul, the one standing outside, although only his face was visible between his hat and his parka. Which was a lot more sensible gear for the weather than what I had on, jeans and a flannel. There was no snow outside, not even any clouds, so I hadn't realized how cold it had gotten.
"Here's your pie," Raul said. "Get it while it's hot."
"I'm with that." I shivered while I tapped my phone to pay him. I added a little extra to the tip in acknowledgment of the weather.
He handed me the pizza and watched the payment come through. "You two know you could just get the supreme, right?"
"Don't tell Lena that."
"Something she doesn't like on it?"
"Yeah, convenience."
He laughed. "It's your money, man."
"Believe me, I know," I said.
His phone disappeared into the folds of his parka. "Stay warm."
"You too," I said. I started to shut the door.
"Hold up. Is this your package?" Raul tapped his foot against a box wrapped in brown paper.
I risked sticking my slippered foot into the cold and nudged it inside. Package in, no frostbite. Victory! I glanced at the address. "Nope, Lena's."
"Cool," Raul said. "Hope she enjoys it more than the supreme."
"Thanks. Me too." I shut the door. Blessed warmth! Just not a lot of warmth. Our apartment was surprisingly well insulated, but once cold got in, we were at the mercy of the furnace and our landlord's willingness to either fix it or turn it up. I almost wished I had cooked. On the other hand, pizza.
Before I left the door, I gave the package a once-over. Not slickly boxed enough to be an Amazon order, more like Ebay or Etsy. Well, Lena had money again. Wouldn't be the first weird tchotchke she stacked her side of the apartment with. Our armies of collectible crap waged war over the territory, gaining and losing ground as our finances made us shift from buyer to seller.
I left her reinforcements by the door and delivered the pizza the rest of the way to neutral ground, the linoleum counter of our ensuite kitchen.
Behind me, Lena said, "Holy shit!"
"And you call me the worst," Lena said. Nonetheless, she hugged my waist.
I let her for a while. When it started to get weird, I mumbled, "You did a hell of a job playing it cool this afternoon."
"I mean, I was legit hyped for a new Trowel Samurai." She untangled her arms from my waist. "I figured the Third Eye thing would end up being a scam, anyway. It only really hit me it might be real when I clicked the signup link."
"On the plus side, if there's any game to it, it's something you're really going to be into, right?"
"You'd think so, right?" She shook her head. "I had this whole idea that if I got into an immersive enough AR game, it would get me out of the house and interacting with people. Now we've been together for years, you drag me out to parties, we've got the Monday game night. I don't, like, actually like a lot of that interaction, but it's not as miserable as I thought it would be."
Lena acted so casual, she made it easy to forget how little she talked about herself. Especially about her life before she moved in with me.
I hadn't realized how bad she'd felt. How desperate she must have been. Her money had run out and she'd had to go from a shut-in who only met people through Doordash to living with her internet kind-of-boyfriend. Who hadn't had a clue.
Which, in retrospect, made me kind of a shitty boyfriend.
No wonder we mostly weren't dating anymore.
Instead of letting myself dwell on it, I asked, "So now that Third Eye is actually here, you don't even want to play?"
"Judging by the thread, it doesn't seem like there's anything to play." She snorted. "I don't know. Maybe it'll still end up being cool. If nothing else, in a way, it did what I hoped, you know?"
"That's a great attitude." I leaned over and kissed the top of her head. "Who are you and what did you do with Lena?"
She kicked me in the shin. Deserved. Then she blinked away any tears that had betrayed her by sneaking out, found her grin. "Let's finish signing in and find out how little I got for my money."
"So little," I said.
She glared, but she laughed, too.
Satisfied, I went back to my computer and paged down the end user license agreement. Third Eye Productions is not liable... Multiplayer experience not rated by the ESRB... Agree to the use of location data... Camera access... The legalese blurred my vision.
I hit "I Accept" and officially became a user of Third Eye. It bumped me to a congratulation screen and directed me to sign in on my phone to "take my first step into a new world."
"They almost nailed the quote," I said.
"And invoke the wrath of the Mouse?" Lena asked. "They wouldn't dare, even if they had actual magic on their side."
"Still, I'm kinda annoyed."
"Over a quote?"
"Of course, what kind of geek do you take me for?" I reached for my phone and tapped the link in my text message. It sent me to the Play store and there was Third Eye. Real as an actual released product, even though it wasn't yet. "But what I meant was, I'm annoyed they don't let me finish sign-up on the PC. At least let me input my username and password on there and give me a QR code so I don't have to type it all out on the phone."
"How are you such a dinosaur you still can't text properly?"
"You know I grew up with a flip phone."
"Depraved because you're deprived," Lena sang.
"She pulls from a musical old when the world was young," I said, "and I'm the dinosaur."
"There was a remake," she said.
I didn't have to look at her to know she'd be wrinkling her nose, same as I was.
I turned my attention back to my phone. Frowned.
A welcome screen glowed up at me. Third Eye, with its three-eyed icon, a UI disaster with a bunch of stats and/or currencies I didn't like the look of, and a stock image of a scroll offering a sign-up gift. Had I actually finished signing up while I shot banter back and forth with Lena?
Half-panicked, I tabbed to Gmail on my PC. Third Eye had sent me an authentication email, including username (OldCampaigner) and password (none of your business). I'd spaced on entering them and scowled at myself for using the same login as I did on a lot of other services. If Third Eye turned out to be a scam I'd have to redo a bunch of my passwords. So much for Lena's tough love. At least I'd entered the information correctly; my touch-texting was as bad as she'd mocked me for.
Her laugh distracted me.
"Sup?" I called.
She waved her phone at me. "Did I only get this for overspending, or do you have the choice, too?"
"What choice --" I looked at my phone screen again, really looked. At the end of the scroll, it gave me two buttons to tap. Did I want my login bonus to be digital? Or physical? "Oh, bullshit."
"Right?" She made a big show of jabbing her finger at the screen. "Beautiful. Disaster."
Sans fanfare, I picked digital. "You didn't really choose physical. You know that's never coming."
"But imagine if it did," Lena said.
"Kickstarters never fulfill physical rewards. It's a law of the universe."
On my phone screen, a new scroll popped up, awkwardly framing a glittering 3D render of an amulet. Unlike the UI, the amulet looked nice. It sported rune-scribed silver fittings around a half-blue, half-green gem I couldn't identify, probably because it didn't exist in the real world. The art was high enough quality, on a project with a low enough budget, I suspected AI generation. The fact the runic characters were text-like but not from an alphabet I recognized, be it Futhark or Roman, made it more likely.
Still, gacha history told me that if Third Eye wanted to sell loot boxes of these .pngs, they needed to swap the jewelry for anime girls wearing not much else.
"They don't even show a preview," Lena said. "That sucks."
"I got one," I said.
"That's because you chose boring."
"Which one of us has a sick amulet?" I held the phone up to show her.
"Which one of us has a .png, you mean?" She hunched her shoulders and had the decency to look away while she groused.
The doorbell cut off any further argument.
We both froze.
Physical bonus...
But that was absurd.
I chuckled as I checked the notifications on my phone, hovering over my unclaimed Third Eye digital bonus. "Pizza's here."
"Thank fuck." Lena exhaled. Because she was hungry, not because she'd believed for a second she'd gotten an amulet delivered. Right? I didn't press her.
In fairness, Lena stayed hungry. "Any longer," she said, "and I might've had to cook something."
"Now that's just crazy talk."
"You're right. I would've had to make you cook something." She waved at the door. "Fetch, boy!"
I jogged over to do so.
Behind me, I heard Lena's chair creak as she got up, as well. Probably to find something to dry her eyes with. It didn't look to me like she'd actually cried, but she wouldn't take the chance. The last thing she'd want was to show weakness in front of a pizza guy.
I recognized Raul, the one standing outside, although only his face was visible between his hat and his parka. Which was a lot more sensible gear for the weather than what I had on, jeans and a flannel. There was no snow outside, not even any clouds, so I hadn't realized how cold it had gotten.
"Here's your pie," Raul said. "Get it while it's hot."
"I'm with that." I shivered while I tapped my phone to pay him. I added a little extra to the tip in acknowledgment of the weather.
He handed me the pizza and watched the payment come through. "You two know you could just get the supreme, right?"
"Don't tell Lena that."
"Something she doesn't like on it?"
"Yeah, convenience."
He laughed. "It's your money, man."
"Believe me, I know," I said.
His phone disappeared into the folds of his parka. "Stay warm."
"You too," I said. I started to shut the door.
"Hold up. Is this your package?" Raul tapped his foot against a box wrapped in brown paper.
I risked sticking my slippered foot into the cold and nudged it inside. Package in, no frostbite. Victory! I glanced at the address. "Nope, Lena's."
"Cool," Raul said. "Hope she enjoys it more than the supreme."
"Thanks. Me too." I shut the door. Blessed warmth! Just not a lot of warmth. Our apartment was surprisingly well insulated, but once cold got in, we were at the mercy of the furnace and our landlord's willingness to either fix it or turn it up. I almost wished I had cooked. On the other hand, pizza.
Before I left the door, I gave the package a once-over. Not slickly boxed enough to be an Amazon order, more like Ebay or Etsy. Well, Lena had money again. Wouldn't be the first weird tchotchke she stacked her side of the apartment with. Our armies of collectible crap waged war over the territory, gaining and losing ground as our finances made us shift from buyer to seller.
I left her reinforcements by the door and delivered the pizza the rest of the way to neutral ground, the linoleum counter of our ensuite kitchen.
Behind me, Lena said, "Holy shit!"
Chapter 3: Beautiful Disaster
Chapter 3: Beautiful Disaster
I turned to Lena and swallowed a snort. She had her honest-to-God, look-like-a-douchebag smart glasses on. I guessed she'd fetched them from the bedroom while I got the pizza in.
She stared at me through the smart glasses and looked like she'd seen a ghost.
I brushed my hands on my pants and ran my fingers through my hair. "I got something on me?"
Lena pulled the glasses down and stared over the top of them. She pushed them back up. She ripped them off her face and dropped them on her desk.
I cocked my head. "What's gotten into you, Lena?"
"You looked. Uh. Pretty cool."
"Thanks?"
"Through the app," she said.
"Good thing you clarified." I rolled my eyes and it got me thinking. "By app you mean Third Eye?"
She nodded. "It said it was compatible with Glass, so I figured, what the hell."
"I guess it works, huh?"
"Not gonna lie, the graphics are something else."
"Maybe I'll start saving up for smart glasses."
Lena shot a glance at hers. "Might want to."
"It's weird I didn't get any kind of character creation prompt, though. Are they just randomly assigning -- classes, or avatars, or whatever you're seeing on me?"
"I don't know about you." She shrugged. "I, uh, may have specified things for myself back when I backed the project."
"Oh really." I opened Kickstarter in another tab and searched up the original Third Eye campaign. Sure enough, Magus of the Fourth Circle and above backers -- those who had put at least $500 in -- got the chance to submit "custom personifications."
"Don't look at that," Lena snapped.
"I won't say a word." Why should I? She'd made the decision to wear the appearance of her original-character-do-not-steal in front of an audience of, admittedly, probably not very many people. I couldn't possibly top that in the embarrassment department.
My expression must have betrayed me, because she put her hands on her hips. "Just show me how I look, already."
"Fine, fine." I trained the phone on her and tabbed back to Third Eye.
Heat, welcome after opening the front door, washed over me. It was like someone had just installed a fireplace. Apparently our landlord finally repaired the apartment's heating system.
"About time the furnace came on," I muttered.
Lena cocked her head.
"Don't move," I said. "I want to see what your outfit looks like and you squirming around might screw up the tracking."
"If you're going to admire me, don't mumble about unrelated things."
"Sure. Admire. Let's call it that." I grinned, but when I switched to my camera, the grin slipped from my face.
It's hard to keep grinning when your jaw drops.
Through the lens of Third Eye, Lena looked like -- herself, or maybe like a biopic version of herself played by an actress with an uncanny resemblance. Her Hollywood self wearing a dress and crown made of fire, melding seamlessly into burning wings that licked the roof of the apartment.
Lena turned her nose up. I'd worried about screwing up the tracking? No worries. The graphics followed her movements perfectly.
She mimicked, "'Let's call it that.'"
Her imperious tone would have annoyed me any other time. Coming from the vision I saw through my phone, it seemed only appropriate.
She stretched. The flames danced along her arms. Her wings extended and fluttered.
"Screenshot?" she prompted.
"Right." I blinked. I snapped a couple of photos.
"I'll do some cooler poses once I've seen it," she said. "For now, let me get a pic of you so you can see yours."
I nodded, because I didn't know what else to do.
She walked over to the desk where she'd left her smart glasses.
I shivered. The initial blast of hot air must've been all the furnace could cough up. So much for it being fixed.
The momentary cold snapped me enough out of my haze to remember we had pizza waiting. I glanced one more time at my phone and shook my head at the photos. It really did look like someone had set a big-budget fantasy movie in our shitty apartment. Lena was going to be feasting off those photos -- and my reaction -- for ages.
A sobering enough thought to get me moving. I cracked the pizza box and took a slice of pepperoni. "Don't forget to eat," I called.
"Oh, shit! I completely spaced on it." She joined me by the pizza box and shoved half her own slice in her mouth. Had I really thought "imperious" was an appropriate tone for her a minute ago?
She said something through the pizza that was completely incomprehensible to me.
I finished chewing my bite and swallowed. "You're going to choke if you talk with your mouth full."
She wrinkled her nose but finished chewing. "I said, 'I liked you better looking at me through that phone.'"
"I think you'll get sick of that as soon as you want me to do something other than stare at you."
"I don't know. It looked to me like if I'd asked you to clean the floor, I'd have had to specify I didn't mean with your tongue."
"Come on, I wasn't that bad."
She raised an eyebrow.
I felt my cheeks heat up in ways that had nothing to do with the furnace. "In all seriousness, you do look amazing. If that's how you designed your OC, props; I've got no room to make fun of you for it. And you wear the outfit all kinds of well."
She looked away and took another bite.
Open worship, she could handle. Honest complements? Forget it.
"Hey," I said. "Put your damn glasses on. I want to see if I look just as cool."
"Bitch, please. I wiped out my life savings to look this awesome."
"I think that might be the first time I've ever heard you speak in favor of a pay-to-win mechanic."
"It's cosmetic! I've never had a problem with cosmetic microtransactions."
I wanted so much to say, "Micro?" But I had promised.
She finished devouring her slice of pizza, grabbed a second, and skipped back to her desk to snag her glasses. Much as I rolled my eyes at an expensive pair of smart glasses, I had to wince at the thought of her getting her greasy fingers all over them. She, of course, didn't care. When she turned back around, she'd put them on.
"How do I look, anyway?" I asked.
"Like a wizard," she said, mostly between bites. "Maybe a sorcerer? You don't have a floppy hat."
"Disgusting," I said. "No hat, no purchase. I'm gonna refund."
"After the way you looked seeing me through your phone? Yeah right."
"Apparently, I didn't pay enough to look as impressive." I scowled. "I don't mind coming out of it as a wizard, or a sorcerer, like that makes any difference in this. Actually, it's what I was planning to pick if the game had a class system. But it's pretty shitty that we don't get to choose."
"Well, it is still in beta. Maybe they're just randomly distributing appearances to people now and they'll put in character creation later."
"Here's hoping." I had no room to complain. Apart from the 'customized personifications' for big money backers, a pair of buzzwords that could have meant anything, the Kickstarter hadn't been clear that we'd have avatars of any kind.
"You do look really cool, by the way," Lena said. "I like what they did with your hair."
"What's wrong with my hair normally?"
"Apart from the bangs that make you look like you're a tub of eyeliner away from joining an Emo band's revival tour?"
I batted at my bangs. "It's just too much of a pain to brush them back all the time when we're not going out."
"We'll just have to convince everybody to sign up for Third Eye and get some smart glasses. Then neither of us will ever have to comb our hair again."
"If you never combed your hair again, you'd just disappear into the tangles."
"What a way to go."
Her – everything – had been so overwhelming, I hadn't even thought about what Third Eye had done with her unruly mop of short copper curls. As good an excuse as any to go back to my phone and take another look.
It was hard to tell where her hair ended and where the crown of fire began, but the software had teased the snarls into burning ringlets far more effectively than any job she'd ever done with brush or comb.
I waved the phone at her. "I'll show you yours if you show me mine."
I didn't wait for her to do as I asked – especially since it would be awkward with her smart glasses. I put the first shot I'd taken on our household Discord server.
"Woah," Lena breathed.
"Right?"
She raised her hand in front of her face. She flexed her fingers. I had to assume that through the smart glasses, she was watching the flames dance along her outstretched hand just like I was. "I actually look like that."
"No, your Third Eye avatar looks like that," I said. "You actually look like you always do. Which, don't get me wrong, is fine! I just don't want you to start preening because they gave you a really cool character design."
"First of all, Cam, I'll thank you to remember that I gave me a really cool character design. They just implemented it."
"Fair, fair."
"Second, forget about how awesome I look for a second."
"Doesn't sound like you have," I said, because it was easier than admitting I couldn't.
"Cam." She clenched her fist. Through my phone's camera, I saw sparks fly from between her fingers. "We gotta be serious again for a minute."
"Twice in one night. That might be a new record."
"How the hell," she snapped, "are our phones rendering flames like this in real time?"
Again, I stared. This time in puzzlement rather than awe. Although, since she still looked like her Third Eye self through my phone camera, still in a little bit of awe. Nonetheless, I forced myself to think. "It must be cloud served."
"I guess?" She held out both arms and made a series of passes in the air. Fire dripped off one hand to cup in the palm of the other. "It's going to be murder on anyone with a data cap."
"So did I get any special effects, or what?" I asked. "At least on the server end, it wouldn't be quite so bad if they're only rendering a few big spenders with such flashy details."
The puzzle apparently interested her too much to care that I'd come close to talking about how much she'd backed the Kickstarter for. Or maybe she'd concluded it was a bargain at any price. Maybe she was right.
Regardless, instead of snapping at me, she snapped a photo. "Have a look."
Her screenshot came in. I steeled myself, wrenched the phone away from the sight of her, and flipped to Discord.
"Definitely sorcerer." No hat, no wizard. But I did look pretty damned cool. My Third Eye avatar had peaked and parted hair, the way I did on the rare occasions I bothered to tackle the problem of it. It should have made my eyebrows dominate my face even more than usual, but somehow the arrangement of hair and clothes made them look proportionate. He – I? – wore a short cape and something like a long tunic, deep blue near my knees fading to almost white at the collar, belted at the waist. Seas and skies. Plus the amulet I'd gotten from picking a digital signup bonus. Not as flashy as Lena's astonishing fire dress, but cool all the same.
"What do you think?" she asked.
"I think I'm wondering about the cloth physics of this outfit. Hell. What about the hair physics?"
"Pretend you're at a metal concert."
I cupped a finger to my ear and mimed being deaf.
She rolled her eyes. "Pretend you have good taste in music and start headbanging already."
I laughed, threw the horns, and did as instructed.
"Damn." She pulled her smart glasses down, pushed them back up. "Damn."
I stopped gyrating and rubbed the back of my neck. "So whatever they're doing on the server-side, it looks as good for me as it does for you, just without the special effects?"
"This is crazy. Even if it is on their servers, they must be melting down the whole farm to handle this kind of graphical load in real time."
"I agree, it's pretty wild." I looked at her through the phone again. Purely for research purposes. "I don't get how they're doing our hair at all. My forehead is visible on the screenshot but not in real life."
She fiddled with hers. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her do it in the real world, tugging at one of the stubborn tangles near the bottom. On the phone, it looked like she was playing with a lick of living fire.
"Take your glasses off for a minute," I said.
"I don't know, you look way better through them."
"Come on, Lena. There's something I want to test."
"Ugh, fine." She glanced at me and at her hand one more time, then pulled the glasses off and set them on her desk.
Through my phone camera, she retained her fire-goddess looks.
"Let's go to the other room," I said.
"You get one look at me through that phone and all of a sudden you want to head right to the bedroom?"
"On the one hand, yes."
Her eyes widened a little. Not, presumably, at the suggestion she turned me on. We had slept together back when we first agreed to cohabitate, after all. I imagined she was more surprised at the fact I could admit a compliment without affecting distance.
"And also on that hand," I added, "at some point, I definitely want to find out how this thing is interpreting our clothes by taking at least some of them off."
"That does actually sound pretty interesting," she said. "You know. For science."
See affected distance, exhibit A. We were two peas in a pod in that respect.
"On the other hand," I said, "that's not why I want to go to the other room."
"Okay, okay." She threw her hands up. "But I'm coming back here to finish my pizza before we fool around."
"No fooling," I said.
"Maybe some fooling."
"Okay, maybe some, but we've gotta test something first." Before I could change my mind, I jogged to our bedroom. I made for my bed, the furthest point from the living room. The furthest from Lena's glasses, PC, and phone. I trained my camera on her.
It was hard to stick with the idea of no fooling when I saw her flit into the room. Even though she looked like she might burn me to a cinder if I had the temerity to touch her. Even though that meant the test had turned out the way I'd hoped it wouldn't.
"Come over here," I said.
"Pizza first," she said.
"Please."
Something in my tone made her stop snarking. She padded over and stood over me.
A magnificent vision, her ideal self, or at least how she'd idealized herself six years ago, brought to life and flame so close I just had to reach out and --
I shook my head. I tossed the phone on the bed.
Lena was herself again. She wore her usual uniform: skirt, stockings, shirt with a meme on it. My friend, my ex-girlfriend, pretty when she wanted to be, cute in spite of herself most of the time, familiar in every respect except the worried expression on her face.
She reached out to me. "Cam, what is it? What are you testing?"
"Your glasses are in the other room, Lena. So is your phone."
"Yeah, so?"
I clasped her hands. No flames. Obviously. But there had been through my phone. "So how," I asked, "does Third Eye know to attach your avatar's movements to what you're doing in here?"
I turned to Lena and swallowed a snort. She had her honest-to-God, look-like-a-douchebag smart glasses on. I guessed she'd fetched them from the bedroom while I got the pizza in.
She stared at me through the smart glasses and looked like she'd seen a ghost.
I brushed my hands on my pants and ran my fingers through my hair. "I got something on me?"
Lena pulled the glasses down and stared over the top of them. She pushed them back up. She ripped them off her face and dropped them on her desk.
I cocked my head. "What's gotten into you, Lena?"
"You looked. Uh. Pretty cool."
"Thanks?"
"Through the app," she said.
"Good thing you clarified." I rolled my eyes and it got me thinking. "By app you mean Third Eye?"
She nodded. "It said it was compatible with Glass, so I figured, what the hell."
"I guess it works, huh?"
"Not gonna lie, the graphics are something else."
"Maybe I'll start saving up for smart glasses."
Lena shot a glance at hers. "Might want to."
"It's weird I didn't get any kind of character creation prompt, though. Are they just randomly assigning -- classes, or avatars, or whatever you're seeing on me?"
"I don't know about you." She shrugged. "I, uh, may have specified things for myself back when I backed the project."
"Oh really." I opened Kickstarter in another tab and searched up the original Third Eye campaign. Sure enough, Magus of the Fourth Circle and above backers -- those who had put at least $500 in -- got the chance to submit "custom personifications."
"Don't look at that," Lena snapped.
"I won't say a word." Why should I? She'd made the decision to wear the appearance of her original-character-do-not-steal in front of an audience of, admittedly, probably not very many people. I couldn't possibly top that in the embarrassment department.
My expression must have betrayed me, because she put her hands on her hips. "Just show me how I look, already."
"Fine, fine." I trained the phone on her and tabbed back to Third Eye.
Heat, welcome after opening the front door, washed over me. It was like someone had just installed a fireplace. Apparently our landlord finally repaired the apartment's heating system.
"About time the furnace came on," I muttered.
Lena cocked her head.
"Don't move," I said. "I want to see what your outfit looks like and you squirming around might screw up the tracking."
"If you're going to admire me, don't mumble about unrelated things."
"Sure. Admire. Let's call it that." I grinned, but when I switched to my camera, the grin slipped from my face.
It's hard to keep grinning when your jaw drops.
Through the lens of Third Eye, Lena looked like -- herself, or maybe like a biopic version of herself played by an actress with an uncanny resemblance. Her Hollywood self wearing a dress and crown made of fire, melding seamlessly into burning wings that licked the roof of the apartment.
Lena turned her nose up. I'd worried about screwing up the tracking? No worries. The graphics followed her movements perfectly.
She mimicked, "'Let's call it that.'"
Her imperious tone would have annoyed me any other time. Coming from the vision I saw through my phone, it seemed only appropriate.
She stretched. The flames danced along her arms. Her wings extended and fluttered.
"Screenshot?" she prompted.
"Right." I blinked. I snapped a couple of photos.
"I'll do some cooler poses once I've seen it," she said. "For now, let me get a pic of you so you can see yours."
I nodded, because I didn't know what else to do.
She walked over to the desk where she'd left her smart glasses.
I shivered. The initial blast of hot air must've been all the furnace could cough up. So much for it being fixed.
The momentary cold snapped me enough out of my haze to remember we had pizza waiting. I glanced one more time at my phone and shook my head at the photos. It really did look like someone had set a big-budget fantasy movie in our shitty apartment. Lena was going to be feasting off those photos -- and my reaction -- for ages.
A sobering enough thought to get me moving. I cracked the pizza box and took a slice of pepperoni. "Don't forget to eat," I called.
"Oh, shit! I completely spaced on it." She joined me by the pizza box and shoved half her own slice in her mouth. Had I really thought "imperious" was an appropriate tone for her a minute ago?
She said something through the pizza that was completely incomprehensible to me.
I finished chewing my bite and swallowed. "You're going to choke if you talk with your mouth full."
She wrinkled her nose but finished chewing. "I said, 'I liked you better looking at me through that phone.'"
"I think you'll get sick of that as soon as you want me to do something other than stare at you."
"I don't know. It looked to me like if I'd asked you to clean the floor, I'd have had to specify I didn't mean with your tongue."
"Come on, I wasn't that bad."
She raised an eyebrow.
I felt my cheeks heat up in ways that had nothing to do with the furnace. "In all seriousness, you do look amazing. If that's how you designed your OC, props; I've got no room to make fun of you for it. And you wear the outfit all kinds of well."
She looked away and took another bite.
Open worship, she could handle. Honest complements? Forget it.
"Hey," I said. "Put your damn glasses on. I want to see if I look just as cool."
"Bitch, please. I wiped out my life savings to look this awesome."
"I think that might be the first time I've ever heard you speak in favor of a pay-to-win mechanic."
"It's cosmetic! I've never had a problem with cosmetic microtransactions."
I wanted so much to say, "Micro?" But I had promised.
She finished devouring her slice of pizza, grabbed a second, and skipped back to her desk to snag her glasses. Much as I rolled my eyes at an expensive pair of smart glasses, I had to wince at the thought of her getting her greasy fingers all over them. She, of course, didn't care. When she turned back around, she'd put them on.
"How do I look, anyway?" I asked.
"Like a wizard," she said, mostly between bites. "Maybe a sorcerer? You don't have a floppy hat."
"Disgusting," I said. "No hat, no purchase. I'm gonna refund."
"After the way you looked seeing me through your phone? Yeah right."
"Apparently, I didn't pay enough to look as impressive." I scowled. "I don't mind coming out of it as a wizard, or a sorcerer, like that makes any difference in this. Actually, it's what I was planning to pick if the game had a class system. But it's pretty shitty that we don't get to choose."
"Well, it is still in beta. Maybe they're just randomly distributing appearances to people now and they'll put in character creation later."
"Here's hoping." I had no room to complain. Apart from the 'customized personifications' for big money backers, a pair of buzzwords that could have meant anything, the Kickstarter hadn't been clear that we'd have avatars of any kind.
"You do look really cool, by the way," Lena said. "I like what they did with your hair."
"What's wrong with my hair normally?"
"Apart from the bangs that make you look like you're a tub of eyeliner away from joining an Emo band's revival tour?"
I batted at my bangs. "It's just too much of a pain to brush them back all the time when we're not going out."
"We'll just have to convince everybody to sign up for Third Eye and get some smart glasses. Then neither of us will ever have to comb our hair again."
"If you never combed your hair again, you'd just disappear into the tangles."
"What a way to go."
Her – everything – had been so overwhelming, I hadn't even thought about what Third Eye had done with her unruly mop of short copper curls. As good an excuse as any to go back to my phone and take another look.
It was hard to tell where her hair ended and where the crown of fire began, but the software had teased the snarls into burning ringlets far more effectively than any job she'd ever done with brush or comb.
I waved the phone at her. "I'll show you yours if you show me mine."
I didn't wait for her to do as I asked – especially since it would be awkward with her smart glasses. I put the first shot I'd taken on our household Discord server.
"Woah," Lena breathed.
"Right?"
She raised her hand in front of her face. She flexed her fingers. I had to assume that through the smart glasses, she was watching the flames dance along her outstretched hand just like I was. "I actually look like that."
"No, your Third Eye avatar looks like that," I said. "You actually look like you always do. Which, don't get me wrong, is fine! I just don't want you to start preening because they gave you a really cool character design."
"First of all, Cam, I'll thank you to remember that I gave me a really cool character design. They just implemented it."
"Fair, fair."
"Second, forget about how awesome I look for a second."
"Doesn't sound like you have," I said, because it was easier than admitting I couldn't.
"Cam." She clenched her fist. Through my phone's camera, I saw sparks fly from between her fingers. "We gotta be serious again for a minute."
"Twice in one night. That might be a new record."
"How the hell," she snapped, "are our phones rendering flames like this in real time?"
Again, I stared. This time in puzzlement rather than awe. Although, since she still looked like her Third Eye self through my phone camera, still in a little bit of awe. Nonetheless, I forced myself to think. "It must be cloud served."
"I guess?" She held out both arms and made a series of passes in the air. Fire dripped off one hand to cup in the palm of the other. "It's going to be murder on anyone with a data cap."
"So did I get any special effects, or what?" I asked. "At least on the server end, it wouldn't be quite so bad if they're only rendering a few big spenders with such flashy details."
The puzzle apparently interested her too much to care that I'd come close to talking about how much she'd backed the Kickstarter for. Or maybe she'd concluded it was a bargain at any price. Maybe she was right.
Regardless, instead of snapping at me, she snapped a photo. "Have a look."
Her screenshot came in. I steeled myself, wrenched the phone away from the sight of her, and flipped to Discord.
"Definitely sorcerer." No hat, no wizard. But I did look pretty damned cool. My Third Eye avatar had peaked and parted hair, the way I did on the rare occasions I bothered to tackle the problem of it. It should have made my eyebrows dominate my face even more than usual, but somehow the arrangement of hair and clothes made them look proportionate. He – I? – wore a short cape and something like a long tunic, deep blue near my knees fading to almost white at the collar, belted at the waist. Seas and skies. Plus the amulet I'd gotten from picking a digital signup bonus. Not as flashy as Lena's astonishing fire dress, but cool all the same.
"What do you think?" she asked.
"I think I'm wondering about the cloth physics of this outfit. Hell. What about the hair physics?"
"Pretend you're at a metal concert."
I cupped a finger to my ear and mimed being deaf.
She rolled her eyes. "Pretend you have good taste in music and start headbanging already."
I laughed, threw the horns, and did as instructed.
"Damn." She pulled her smart glasses down, pushed them back up. "Damn."
I stopped gyrating and rubbed the back of my neck. "So whatever they're doing on the server-side, it looks as good for me as it does for you, just without the special effects?"
"This is crazy. Even if it is on their servers, they must be melting down the whole farm to handle this kind of graphical load in real time."
"I agree, it's pretty wild." I looked at her through the phone again. Purely for research purposes. "I don't get how they're doing our hair at all. My forehead is visible on the screenshot but not in real life."
She fiddled with hers. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her do it in the real world, tugging at one of the stubborn tangles near the bottom. On the phone, it looked like she was playing with a lick of living fire.
"Take your glasses off for a minute," I said.
"I don't know, you look way better through them."
"Come on, Lena. There's something I want to test."
"Ugh, fine." She glanced at me and at her hand one more time, then pulled the glasses off and set them on her desk.
Through my phone camera, she retained her fire-goddess looks.
"Let's go to the other room," I said.
"You get one look at me through that phone and all of a sudden you want to head right to the bedroom?"
"On the one hand, yes."
Her eyes widened a little. Not, presumably, at the suggestion she turned me on. We had slept together back when we first agreed to cohabitate, after all. I imagined she was more surprised at the fact I could admit a compliment without affecting distance.
"And also on that hand," I added, "at some point, I definitely want to find out how this thing is interpreting our clothes by taking at least some of them off."
"That does actually sound pretty interesting," she said. "You know. For science."
See affected distance, exhibit A. We were two peas in a pod in that respect.
"On the other hand," I said, "that's not why I want to go to the other room."
"Okay, okay." She threw her hands up. "But I'm coming back here to finish my pizza before we fool around."
"No fooling," I said.
"Maybe some fooling."
"Okay, maybe some, but we've gotta test something first." Before I could change my mind, I jogged to our bedroom. I made for my bed, the furthest point from the living room. The furthest from Lena's glasses, PC, and phone. I trained my camera on her.
It was hard to stick with the idea of no fooling when I saw her flit into the room. Even though she looked like she might burn me to a cinder if I had the temerity to touch her. Even though that meant the test had turned out the way I'd hoped it wouldn't.
"Come over here," I said.
"Pizza first," she said.
"Please."
Something in my tone made her stop snarking. She padded over and stood over me.
A magnificent vision, her ideal self, or at least how she'd idealized herself six years ago, brought to life and flame so close I just had to reach out and --
I shook my head. I tossed the phone on the bed.
Lena was herself again. She wore her usual uniform: skirt, stockings, shirt with a meme on it. My friend, my ex-girlfriend, pretty when she wanted to be, cute in spite of herself most of the time, familiar in every respect except the worried expression on her face.
She reached out to me. "Cam, what is it? What are you testing?"
"Your glasses are in the other room, Lena. So is your phone."
"Yeah, so?"
I clasped her hands. No flames. Obviously. But there had been through my phone. "So how," I asked, "does Third Eye know to attach your avatar's movements to what you're doing in here?"
Chapter 4: The Package
Chapter 4: The Package
Lena backed away and sank onto her unmade bed. She scooped up a fleece decorated with video game mascot creatures that definitely hadn't been licensed to whatever Etsy shop she bought the blanket from. She squeezed the critters to her chest.
I picked up my phone and looked at her. The fleece hid the parts of her avatar it covered. Her flames danced along the edges. How did the app know where her clothes ended and her bedclothes began? How did it make the line between them look so real?
I forced myself to set the phone aside. When my hand fumbled for it again, I set my jaw and closed out of all my apps.
I wanted to find a blanket of my own, or a plushy, or better yet cuddle up with Lena. No more thoughts of fooling around. I was just creeped out. And cold.
Seemed we both were. She huddled and didn't say a word.
"There's got to be an explanation," I said.
"Yeah?" She squeezed her blanket so hard – it would smolder if she was really on fire – that the critters turned to crinkly messes of primary colors. "Yeah."
I nodded. "Like. Um."
"Facial recognition?" she suggested.
"Right." I glanced at my phone. We could run more tests. We'd have to. Not yet. It still felt too weird. "That's got to be AI, then, to pick you up so fast and match your movements so well."
"A lot to run on the same server that handles such crazy graphics."
"They aren't paying for this with four million Kickstarter dollars."
"Canadian!"
"Right?" What had the exchange rate looked like six years ago? Neither extreme enough, nor in the right direction, for Third Eye's Kickstarter campaign to have turned into a AAA game budget. "Have you seen a program that does face and body tracking this well before?"
"It's not something I've messed around with much," Lena said. "This feels super high end, though."
High end enough to leave us both shook. I pushed past and speculated. "So. They must've gotten a publisher."
"I didn't see any other companies in the EULA," she said.
"Are you suggesting you read the EULA?"
"I'm just saying it didn't have any logos besides Third Eye Productions."
That logo, an oval with a triangular arrangement of eyes, was the same thing as their app's icon on my phone. Bad branding practice. What if they launched another game? "Must've been a private investor," I said. "Some techbro, short on sense, long on algorithms and ambition."
"I guess." Lena's grip on the blanket relaxed, a little. "What kind of data you think they're aggregating on us?"
"Oh, all of it. Same as the rest of our apps."
She chuckled. "It feels like we're reaching, Cam."
"I know." I patted my jeans. "What else are we supposed to think? If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, you know?"
"I don't actually know that one."
"I forgot, you're not a Holmesian. 'Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'"
"Oh, that." She shrugged. "I like stories with actual magic, thanks."
"It applies though, right? Or do you have a better explanation?"
"Actual magic." She stuck her tongue out. "Nah, I got nothing."
Abruptly, she tossed her blanket on the bed and sprang up. "Speaking of things we have got, though? Half our pizza each."
Three quarters, in my case. "Well," I said, "we did mention we'd finish eating before we did any fooling around."
She turned her nose up, that imperious gesture that made me want to kneel to her avatar and laugh at her. "I seem to recall somebody said 'no fooling.'"
I chuckled. What else? If I let myself sigh, I'd feel like an asshole.
Knowing that Lena had moved in with me not because she wanted to date IRL, but because she'd run out of money? I felt like I'd accidentally taken advantage of her. How much of the shit she'd given me over the years had been her being herself, and how much her way of confirming to herself she was still allowed to be?
Yeah, no sighing for me if she didn't want to sleep with me, or date me. Better to count myself lucky she could stand to stay friends. "We agreed on the pizza, anyway."
She pumped her fist and skipped back to the kitchen.
If I left her alone with it, she'd devour my half, too. I didn't feel like that much of an asshole.
By the time I got out there, she'd already inhaled most of her next piece. She waved what remained attached to the crust at the floor. Wonder of wonders, she managed not to talk with her mouth full, so I followed her gesture.
To the package. I'd forgotten to mention it while we stared at each others' avatars. "Oh, yeah," I said. "Raul spotted it when he brought the pie."
"Ooh." She gulped down pizza and wiggled her eyebrows. "I'd have answered the door if you told me Raul was delivering."
I plastered a smile on.
Lena giggled. "You're too easy, Cam. Don't worry. Raul could never understand our gift, our curse. Our third eyes."
I rolled my two. "Just eat, already. What did you order from Etsy, anyway?"
"Nuffin." She'd already dug back into her slice. She bit another chunk off as she padded over to the package and knelt over it.
She gagged.
I ran to her side and reached out to – screw up first aid, probably. I remembered just enough from the one course I took to get myself and others in trouble.
Thankfully, by the time I arrived, she'd coughed up pizza and sucked down air.
I knelt next to her anyway, and put an arm over her shoulders. "You okay?"
"This," Lena said, "is not from Etsy."
For the first time, I looked past the address label directing it to Lena and our apartment. To the postage – nonexistent – and the return address label that said it had come from a Canadian sender.
"If you slapped that label on," Lena said, "it's a shitty prank. I almost choked."
"If I'd done it as a joke," I said, "I would've shown it to you before you got your hands on the pizza. Also, I'd have spelled out Third Eye Productions."
Instead, the return address label just said "TEP." Could've been a coincidence. Along with the Canadian address, and the timing, and the lack of postage. Could've been.
Wasn't.
"You backed at a higher tier than me," I said. "Did you get any physical rewards?"
"'Kickstarters never fulfill physical rewards.'"
For some reason, her echoing my words made me flinch. "That's the least we'd be bending a universal law to explain this."
"Yeah." She took the last bite of her pizza. She chewed it more slowly than I'd ever seen her try to. Then she nibbled at the crust like a rabbit working a piece of lettuce.
Only when it had disappeared did she reach for the package. Pizza grease left finger stains on the brown paper wrapping. It didn't even occur to me to suggest she wash her hands first. We needed to see this.
Let's say she opened some random, long-forgotten backer gift. We'd compare it to the stuff she'd been promised in the Kickstarter campaign, laugh at ourselves for imagining she'd find anything else in there, and tip our nonexistent hats to the Third Eye team for breaking the universe's second most depressing rule after entropy – even though my hat was nonexistent because they hadn't equipped my avatar for proper wizardry.
That is not what we did.
Lena did not open some random, long-forgotten backer gift.
She just sat there staring.
I saw my hands reach into the remains of the brown paper. I saw them rise, trembling, with a bronze or copper amulet suspended between them. A red gem – ruby? Fire quartz? I didn't know from gemology. – seemed to glow beneath the apartment's light fixtures.
The amulet felt warm and heavy in my hands. Real metal, not painted resin.
Although the runes engraved or cast on its surface, the gem in its center, and even the color of its metal were different from the silver amulet my avatar wore, neither Lena nor I had any doubt what I'd pulled out of the package.
Her physical signup bonus.
"This is crazy," she said, her voice flat. She didn't move. Deer in the headlights. "Screw crazy; it's impossible."
"I know," I said. "I ordered food before we signed up. Thirty minutes or less or your pizza's free."
"Pizza wasn't free."
I shook my head.
"It's crazy," I said, "but not quite impossible."
She stared at me.
"If they have a fulfillment center in town," I said, "somewhere really close. And if they do drone delivery."
Imagine how much that would cost. How absurd it was. More absurd than the city block-sized server farm they'd have to operate to both render their graphics in real time and run an AI capable of tying them to users' bodies?
Lena pointed out another problem with my theory. "Why would they have a Canadian return address, then?"
I hadn't declared myself the winner of dozens of internet arguments because I let one little problem disprove my theories. I could still be right.
About this, I needed to be right.
"They obviously didn't send it through the mail," I said. "Maybe they don't process returns locally, so if you sent it back it would go to Canada. It could even be deliberate. International shipping's a bitch, maybe enough to discourage returns."
"You don't really believe that." She snatched the amulet from my hands. Her arm sagged under its weight.
Good riddance. I scooted back. "I don't know what the hell I believe!"
She looked down at the amulet. She set her jaw.
I reached out. "Lena, maybe you shouldn't –"
She squeezed her eyes shut and clasped the amulet around her neck.
Lena backed away and sank onto her unmade bed. She scooped up a fleece decorated with video game mascot creatures that definitely hadn't been licensed to whatever Etsy shop she bought the blanket from. She squeezed the critters to her chest.
I picked up my phone and looked at her. The fleece hid the parts of her avatar it covered. Her flames danced along the edges. How did the app know where her clothes ended and her bedclothes began? How did it make the line between them look so real?
I forced myself to set the phone aside. When my hand fumbled for it again, I set my jaw and closed out of all my apps.
I wanted to find a blanket of my own, or a plushy, or better yet cuddle up with Lena. No more thoughts of fooling around. I was just creeped out. And cold.
Seemed we both were. She huddled and didn't say a word.
"There's got to be an explanation," I said.
"Yeah?" She squeezed her blanket so hard – it would smolder if she was really on fire – that the critters turned to crinkly messes of primary colors. "Yeah."
I nodded. "Like. Um."
"Facial recognition?" she suggested.
"Right." I glanced at my phone. We could run more tests. We'd have to. Not yet. It still felt too weird. "That's got to be AI, then, to pick you up so fast and match your movements so well."
"A lot to run on the same server that handles such crazy graphics."
"They aren't paying for this with four million Kickstarter dollars."
"Canadian!"
"Right?" What had the exchange rate looked like six years ago? Neither extreme enough, nor in the right direction, for Third Eye's Kickstarter campaign to have turned into a AAA game budget. "Have you seen a program that does face and body tracking this well before?"
"It's not something I've messed around with much," Lena said. "This feels super high end, though."
High end enough to leave us both shook. I pushed past and speculated. "So. They must've gotten a publisher."
"I didn't see any other companies in the EULA," she said.
"Are you suggesting you read the EULA?"
"I'm just saying it didn't have any logos besides Third Eye Productions."
That logo, an oval with a triangular arrangement of eyes, was the same thing as their app's icon on my phone. Bad branding practice. What if they launched another game? "Must've been a private investor," I said. "Some techbro, short on sense, long on algorithms and ambition."
"I guess." Lena's grip on the blanket relaxed, a little. "What kind of data you think they're aggregating on us?"
"Oh, all of it. Same as the rest of our apps."
She chuckled. "It feels like we're reaching, Cam."
"I know." I patted my jeans. "What else are we supposed to think? If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, you know?"
"I don't actually know that one."
"I forgot, you're not a Holmesian. 'Whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.'"
"Oh, that." She shrugged. "I like stories with actual magic, thanks."
"It applies though, right? Or do you have a better explanation?"
"Actual magic." She stuck her tongue out. "Nah, I got nothing."
Abruptly, she tossed her blanket on the bed and sprang up. "Speaking of things we have got, though? Half our pizza each."
Three quarters, in my case. "Well," I said, "we did mention we'd finish eating before we did any fooling around."
She turned her nose up, that imperious gesture that made me want to kneel to her avatar and laugh at her. "I seem to recall somebody said 'no fooling.'"
I chuckled. What else? If I let myself sigh, I'd feel like an asshole.
Knowing that Lena had moved in with me not because she wanted to date IRL, but because she'd run out of money? I felt like I'd accidentally taken advantage of her. How much of the shit she'd given me over the years had been her being herself, and how much her way of confirming to herself she was still allowed to be?
Yeah, no sighing for me if she didn't want to sleep with me, or date me. Better to count myself lucky she could stand to stay friends. "We agreed on the pizza, anyway."
She pumped her fist and skipped back to the kitchen.
If I left her alone with it, she'd devour my half, too. I didn't feel like that much of an asshole.
By the time I got out there, she'd already inhaled most of her next piece. She waved what remained attached to the crust at the floor. Wonder of wonders, she managed not to talk with her mouth full, so I followed her gesture.
To the package. I'd forgotten to mention it while we stared at each others' avatars. "Oh, yeah," I said. "Raul spotted it when he brought the pie."
"Ooh." She gulped down pizza and wiggled her eyebrows. "I'd have answered the door if you told me Raul was delivering."
I plastered a smile on.
Lena giggled. "You're too easy, Cam. Don't worry. Raul could never understand our gift, our curse. Our third eyes."
I rolled my two. "Just eat, already. What did you order from Etsy, anyway?"
"Nuffin." She'd already dug back into her slice. She bit another chunk off as she padded over to the package and knelt over it.
She gagged.
I ran to her side and reached out to – screw up first aid, probably. I remembered just enough from the one course I took to get myself and others in trouble.
Thankfully, by the time I arrived, she'd coughed up pizza and sucked down air.
I knelt next to her anyway, and put an arm over her shoulders. "You okay?"
"This," Lena said, "is not from Etsy."
For the first time, I looked past the address label directing it to Lena and our apartment. To the postage – nonexistent – and the return address label that said it had come from a Canadian sender.
"If you slapped that label on," Lena said, "it's a shitty prank. I almost choked."
"If I'd done it as a joke," I said, "I would've shown it to you before you got your hands on the pizza. Also, I'd have spelled out Third Eye Productions."
Instead, the return address label just said "TEP." Could've been a coincidence. Along with the Canadian address, and the timing, and the lack of postage. Could've been.
Wasn't.
"You backed at a higher tier than me," I said. "Did you get any physical rewards?"
"'Kickstarters never fulfill physical rewards.'"
For some reason, her echoing my words made me flinch. "That's the least we'd be bending a universal law to explain this."
"Yeah." She took the last bite of her pizza. She chewed it more slowly than I'd ever seen her try to. Then she nibbled at the crust like a rabbit working a piece of lettuce.
Only when it had disappeared did she reach for the package. Pizza grease left finger stains on the brown paper wrapping. It didn't even occur to me to suggest she wash her hands first. We needed to see this.
Let's say she opened some random, long-forgotten backer gift. We'd compare it to the stuff she'd been promised in the Kickstarter campaign, laugh at ourselves for imagining she'd find anything else in there, and tip our nonexistent hats to the Third Eye team for breaking the universe's second most depressing rule after entropy – even though my hat was nonexistent because they hadn't equipped my avatar for proper wizardry.
That is not what we did.
Lena did not open some random, long-forgotten backer gift.
She just sat there staring.
I saw my hands reach into the remains of the brown paper. I saw them rise, trembling, with a bronze or copper amulet suspended between them. A red gem – ruby? Fire quartz? I didn't know from gemology. – seemed to glow beneath the apartment's light fixtures.
The amulet felt warm and heavy in my hands. Real metal, not painted resin.
Although the runes engraved or cast on its surface, the gem in its center, and even the color of its metal were different from the silver amulet my avatar wore, neither Lena nor I had any doubt what I'd pulled out of the package.
Her physical signup bonus.
"This is crazy," she said, her voice flat. She didn't move. Deer in the headlights. "Screw crazy; it's impossible."
"I know," I said. "I ordered food before we signed up. Thirty minutes or less or your pizza's free."
"Pizza wasn't free."
I shook my head.
"It's crazy," I said, "but not quite impossible."
She stared at me.
"If they have a fulfillment center in town," I said, "somewhere really close. And if they do drone delivery."
Imagine how much that would cost. How absurd it was. More absurd than the city block-sized server farm they'd have to operate to both render their graphics in real time and run an AI capable of tying them to users' bodies?
Lena pointed out another problem with my theory. "Why would they have a Canadian return address, then?"
I hadn't declared myself the winner of dozens of internet arguments because I let one little problem disprove my theories. I could still be right.
About this, I needed to be right.
"They obviously didn't send it through the mail," I said. "Maybe they don't process returns locally, so if you sent it back it would go to Canada. It could even be deliberate. International shipping's a bitch, maybe enough to discourage returns."
"You don't really believe that." She snatched the amulet from my hands. Her arm sagged under its weight.
Good riddance. I scooted back. "I don't know what the hell I believe!"
She looked down at the amulet. She set her jaw.
I reached out. "Lena, maybe you shouldn't –"
She squeezed her eyes shut and clasped the amulet around her neck.
Chapter 5: Threads
Chapter 5: Threads
What did I expect to happen?
Burning wings to erupt from Lena's back? A dress of fire, ringlets of flame for hair? Her avatar enfleshed, imperious, awesome, beautiful beyond sanity?
Or for her to catch fire for real, suffer spontaneous human combustion?
What actually happened?
The amulet hung down from her skinny neck, rested on her chest. The only thing burning on her was the meme on her shirt, a dog at a bar on fire, proclaiming it fine.
We both exhaled. Relieved.
Disappointed?
Well, maybe.
"So." Lena ran her finger around the gem. She kept doing it, silently, until whatever point she'd been about to make faded.
I didn't know how to break the silence either.
It came as another relief when the corners of her mouth quirked up. She tapped the amulet. "If you ignore – everything –, it's a cool signup bonus. Do you wish you'd gotten physical?"
"Not really," I said. "If it ends up being useful in game, you'll be stuck with heavy costume jewelry just to equal my functionality."
Her expression turned venomous. Thankfully, she fixed her glare on the amulet, not me. She gave it another tap, speculative. "I bet I could Ebay this for some serious cash."
"Ah, resale value." I shook my head. "The last argument of physical media enjoyers."
"It's either that or violence."
"No, that's kings."
"Just sayin'." She hefted the amulet. "It'd hurt like a bitch if you walloped somebody upside the head with this thing."
"True." I scratched the back of my head. "It's heavy as hell. Honestly, it doesn't feel like costume jewelry."
"It being real jewelry is the least crazy thing about it," Lena said, "which is saying something."
"We need..." I waved my hands. What the fuck did we need?
"We need to check the subreddit," Lena said.
Which is the sort of thing addicts say, not people who genuinely need something.
I said, "Yeah."
We left the brown paper packaging on the floor and returned to our PCs. I still had r/thirdeyegame up from when I'd wondered if the app was a virus. I scanned the top threads.
I didn't have to scan long.
Four down, below the pinned thread about the beta launch, one for Screenshots – which would be interesting in its own right, but for now I needed to focus –, and one for login problems, someone had posted 'Physical Bonus LOL'.
The first post showed a pic of someone's phone screen, displaying the choice between physical and digital bonuses. It had twelve upvotes, which seemed like a lot for a subreddit that had been abandoned years ago when it became obvious the game would be vaporware.
The top comment, with two hundred and seven upvotes, was a selfie. The poster, ShakeProtocol, must have had Third Eye turned off, because there was no costume, no special effects, just a smiling guy in a gray wife-beater and skinny jeans, looking like a KPop star or at least one's stunt double, way too trim and muscular for somebody who invested in the AR-ARG's Kickstarter –
"There's a guy doesn't need any help," Lena said, so she'd clearly visited the same thread.
– and, hanging from the corded muscles of his neck, an amulet like Lena's. Brown paper wrapping like hers lay crumpled on the coffee table beside him, the return address visible.
Comments in his thread started with a chorus of 'wtf's and some 'nice Photoshop's, including from the thread starter.
Those had been downvoted after ShakeProtocol posted more.
Shots of the amulet, on and off his body, from more angles than he could have practically doctored since the beta went live. One of himself wearing it with Third Eye turned on, proving it wasn't part of an unusually understated avatar. With the app active, his outfit resembled mine, but colored brown and gold, sleeveless and low-cut in a way he wore a lot better than I would have. In street clothes he made me jealous; in this he made me question my sexuality. He finished with a text post explaining how he'd found the amulet on his doorstep.
Now the top comments under his were five other people who'd clicked 'Physical' for the lulz and were no longer laughing.
I posted, 'What tier did you all back at?'
I couldn't expect an immediate answer – it was a subreddit, not a chat room, the thread had gotten pretty damn busy, and most people who spent more than the minimum on the Third Eye Kickstarter probably still didn't want to admit it – so I checked some of the screenshots.
Most of the users who posted wore tunic and short-cape combos like ShakeProtocol and I. The basics of the outfit stayed the same, but each looked unique. I saw fringes, ponchos, robes. Long sleeves, short sleeves, no sleeves. Hoods, hats. I glared at the lucky pair who'd snagged big floppy wizard hats.
Everyone looked amazing. Not necessarily gorgeous. Some people didn't have that in them, and Third Eye didn't overwrite their faces and bodies. But amazing. Their best. We'd talked about hair and cloth physics, but I thought the app might be doing some kind of filters to stand in for makeup, too. Like I'd thought about Lena, these redditors looked like the Hollywood versions of themselves.
Nobody else wore anything like she had, though. The big money backers either hadn't submitted such ambitious designs, or had decided to keep their status secret.
Just when I thought I might grow numb to how good the graphics were, I caught a link to a TikTok from a poster named LikeItsNinetyNine. She must've given her phone to someone else in her house so she could dance on camera. If I'd seen her on the street I'd have thought, kinda cute, kinda plump, little old for me. Through Third Eye, of course, she looked like a nature goddess. Her dance went long on enthusiasm, but holy shit did the graphics keep up with it. Her cape, green with complex textures like overlapping vines, whirled as she spun. Tassels on her shirt bounced as she jumped.
From the number of upvotes I saw, dozens of people were posting on the subreddit and at least three hundred were reading it. More would've signed up with their beta codes without checking into the community, though probably not as many as if it weren't an ARG.
Third Eye's graphics still showed no sign of slowdown.
I tabbed back to the 'Physical Bonus LOL' thread.
ShakeProtocol had answered me. 'Apprentice'
Same tier as me. 'So it's not a backer reward? That's nuts.'
It hadn't made sense for the physical signup bonus to have been tied to Lena's $5,000 splurge. If Kickstarters never delivered the physical rewards they promised, what were the chances of them tacking extras on beyond what they were supposed to be obligated to hand out?
Nothing about Third Eye made sense, though, so I hadn't been willing to rule it out.
Now, I had confirmation to go with my suspicion.
When I refreshed the page, I found two other people had answered the same. ShakeProtocol added, 'Whole thing is wack'
'Anybody see their amulet delivered?' Ashbird asked. I recognized Lena's username. I upvoted her.
"Good question," I said, and posted.
"Gotta be drones, right?" she said.
"But all over the country?" Actually, that made me wonder. 'Are you all in NA?'
No response when I refreshed the page, so I tabbed back to screenshots to admire the graphics and wait. ShakeProtocol posted a TikTok. He'd propped his phone on a table and taken his amulet on and off, once with Third Eye active and once without.
No way he'd faked it, and people were starting to realize it. Comments flooded in, but the back-and-forth was a mess.
We really needed to get a Discord server running. I tabbed back to 'Physical Bonus LOL,' but while I waited for new messages to appear, I searched Third Eye on the messenger app.
"Huh," I said. "There's an official Discord server now."
"They didn't used to have one?"
"I'd swear I didn't see it this afternoon. Wonder if it's really official." It claimed to be, but, because it was fake or because it was new or because Third Eye Productions had produced all of zilch before the beta launch today, it hadn't yet received the imprimatur of a green checkmark from Discord.
Abruptly, Lena snorted. "Oh, this has got to be fake."
"Why? They've obviously spent millions and you don't think they'd spring for an official Discord?"
"Forget the server for a minute. Refresh the thread."
I switched windows and did so. Immediately, I saw what had set her off.
Nobody who responded had seen their deliveries, but one poster, Nisshoku, had answered my question about being in NA. 'No, I am in Osaka.' They'd attached a picture of their amulet.
"If that's true," I said, "Third Eye would have to have distribution centers all over the world. Every major city. Maybe more."
"This dude is probably just a huge weeb."
"You're suggesting someone would lie on the internet? Madness." I chewed my lip. "But Osaka, not Tokyo? That's a weird detail."
"Gotta be something set there," Lena said. "A huge weeb who plays a lot of Yakuza games, maybe?"
Her scenario made more sense than Third Eye shipping all over the world. Except: "Refresh again," I said.
A user called TakeThePen had posted a photo, their amulet on a windowsill. The London Eye loomed over the background.
Photos weren't proof of anything, not anymore. A great digital artist could probably have Photoshopped the amulet there in the five minutes since I asked where they'd posted from. Especially with a window to act as a dividing line between the images.
I didn't believe the photo was fake.
I spun my chair and faced Lena.
She took a long time turning. Her hand hovered over her amulet, fingers trembling, like she thought she'd get burned if she touched it.
She grabbed it and forced out a smile. "Where are we on the scale now?"
I considered. They'd have known where all the backers lived. They'd had six years to prepare. They had, somehow, seemingly infinite money to burn.
"Technically?" I said. "Still crazy."
I wondered how much more I could accept without settling on "Impossible."
What did I expect to happen?
Burning wings to erupt from Lena's back? A dress of fire, ringlets of flame for hair? Her avatar enfleshed, imperious, awesome, beautiful beyond sanity?
Or for her to catch fire for real, suffer spontaneous human combustion?
What actually happened?
The amulet hung down from her skinny neck, rested on her chest. The only thing burning on her was the meme on her shirt, a dog at a bar on fire, proclaiming it fine.
We both exhaled. Relieved.
Disappointed?
Well, maybe.
"So." Lena ran her finger around the gem. She kept doing it, silently, until whatever point she'd been about to make faded.
I didn't know how to break the silence either.
It came as another relief when the corners of her mouth quirked up. She tapped the amulet. "If you ignore – everything –, it's a cool signup bonus. Do you wish you'd gotten physical?"
"Not really," I said. "If it ends up being useful in game, you'll be stuck with heavy costume jewelry just to equal my functionality."
Her expression turned venomous. Thankfully, she fixed her glare on the amulet, not me. She gave it another tap, speculative. "I bet I could Ebay this for some serious cash."
"Ah, resale value." I shook my head. "The last argument of physical media enjoyers."
"It's either that or violence."
"No, that's kings."
"Just sayin'." She hefted the amulet. "It'd hurt like a bitch if you walloped somebody upside the head with this thing."
"True." I scratched the back of my head. "It's heavy as hell. Honestly, it doesn't feel like costume jewelry."
"It being real jewelry is the least crazy thing about it," Lena said, "which is saying something."
"We need..." I waved my hands. What the fuck did we need?
"We need to check the subreddit," Lena said.
Which is the sort of thing addicts say, not people who genuinely need something.
I said, "Yeah."
We left the brown paper packaging on the floor and returned to our PCs. I still had r/thirdeyegame up from when I'd wondered if the app was a virus. I scanned the top threads.
I didn't have to scan long.
Four down, below the pinned thread about the beta launch, one for Screenshots – which would be interesting in its own right, but for now I needed to focus –, and one for login problems, someone had posted 'Physical Bonus LOL'.
The first post showed a pic of someone's phone screen, displaying the choice between physical and digital bonuses. It had twelve upvotes, which seemed like a lot for a subreddit that had been abandoned years ago when it became obvious the game would be vaporware.
The top comment, with two hundred and seven upvotes, was a selfie. The poster, ShakeProtocol, must have had Third Eye turned off, because there was no costume, no special effects, just a smiling guy in a gray wife-beater and skinny jeans, looking like a KPop star or at least one's stunt double, way too trim and muscular for somebody who invested in the AR-ARG's Kickstarter –
"There's a guy doesn't need any help," Lena said, so she'd clearly visited the same thread.
– and, hanging from the corded muscles of his neck, an amulet like Lena's. Brown paper wrapping like hers lay crumpled on the coffee table beside him, the return address visible.
Comments in his thread started with a chorus of 'wtf's and some 'nice Photoshop's, including from the thread starter.
Those had been downvoted after ShakeProtocol posted more.
Shots of the amulet, on and off his body, from more angles than he could have practically doctored since the beta went live. One of himself wearing it with Third Eye turned on, proving it wasn't part of an unusually understated avatar. With the app active, his outfit resembled mine, but colored brown and gold, sleeveless and low-cut in a way he wore a lot better than I would have. In street clothes he made me jealous; in this he made me question my sexuality. He finished with a text post explaining how he'd found the amulet on his doorstep.
Now the top comments under his were five other people who'd clicked 'Physical' for the lulz and were no longer laughing.
I posted, 'What tier did you all back at?'
I couldn't expect an immediate answer – it was a subreddit, not a chat room, the thread had gotten pretty damn busy, and most people who spent more than the minimum on the Third Eye Kickstarter probably still didn't want to admit it – so I checked some of the screenshots.
Most of the users who posted wore tunic and short-cape combos like ShakeProtocol and I. The basics of the outfit stayed the same, but each looked unique. I saw fringes, ponchos, robes. Long sleeves, short sleeves, no sleeves. Hoods, hats. I glared at the lucky pair who'd snagged big floppy wizard hats.
Everyone looked amazing. Not necessarily gorgeous. Some people didn't have that in them, and Third Eye didn't overwrite their faces and bodies. But amazing. Their best. We'd talked about hair and cloth physics, but I thought the app might be doing some kind of filters to stand in for makeup, too. Like I'd thought about Lena, these redditors looked like the Hollywood versions of themselves.
Nobody else wore anything like she had, though. The big money backers either hadn't submitted such ambitious designs, or had decided to keep their status secret.
Just when I thought I might grow numb to how good the graphics were, I caught a link to a TikTok from a poster named LikeItsNinetyNine. She must've given her phone to someone else in her house so she could dance on camera. If I'd seen her on the street I'd have thought, kinda cute, kinda plump, little old for me. Through Third Eye, of course, she looked like a nature goddess. Her dance went long on enthusiasm, but holy shit did the graphics keep up with it. Her cape, green with complex textures like overlapping vines, whirled as she spun. Tassels on her shirt bounced as she jumped.
From the number of upvotes I saw, dozens of people were posting on the subreddit and at least three hundred were reading it. More would've signed up with their beta codes without checking into the community, though probably not as many as if it weren't an ARG.
Third Eye's graphics still showed no sign of slowdown.
I tabbed back to the 'Physical Bonus LOL' thread.
ShakeProtocol had answered me. 'Apprentice'
Same tier as me. 'So it's not a backer reward? That's nuts.'
It hadn't made sense for the physical signup bonus to have been tied to Lena's $5,000 splurge. If Kickstarters never delivered the physical rewards they promised, what were the chances of them tacking extras on beyond what they were supposed to be obligated to hand out?
Nothing about Third Eye made sense, though, so I hadn't been willing to rule it out.
Now, I had confirmation to go with my suspicion.
When I refreshed the page, I found two other people had answered the same. ShakeProtocol added, 'Whole thing is wack'
'Anybody see their amulet delivered?' Ashbird asked. I recognized Lena's username. I upvoted her.
"Good question," I said, and posted.
"Gotta be drones, right?" she said.
"But all over the country?" Actually, that made me wonder. 'Are you all in NA?'
No response when I refreshed the page, so I tabbed back to screenshots to admire the graphics and wait. ShakeProtocol posted a TikTok. He'd propped his phone on a table and taken his amulet on and off, once with Third Eye active and once without.
No way he'd faked it, and people were starting to realize it. Comments flooded in, but the back-and-forth was a mess.
We really needed to get a Discord server running. I tabbed back to 'Physical Bonus LOL,' but while I waited for new messages to appear, I searched Third Eye on the messenger app.
"Huh," I said. "There's an official Discord server now."
"They didn't used to have one?"
"I'd swear I didn't see it this afternoon. Wonder if it's really official." It claimed to be, but, because it was fake or because it was new or because Third Eye Productions had produced all of zilch before the beta launch today, it hadn't yet received the imprimatur of a green checkmark from Discord.
Abruptly, Lena snorted. "Oh, this has got to be fake."
"Why? They've obviously spent millions and you don't think they'd spring for an official Discord?"
"Forget the server for a minute. Refresh the thread."
I switched windows and did so. Immediately, I saw what had set her off.
Nobody who responded had seen their deliveries, but one poster, Nisshoku, had answered my question about being in NA. 'No, I am in Osaka.' They'd attached a picture of their amulet.
"If that's true," I said, "Third Eye would have to have distribution centers all over the world. Every major city. Maybe more."
"This dude is probably just a huge weeb."
"You're suggesting someone would lie on the internet? Madness." I chewed my lip. "But Osaka, not Tokyo? That's a weird detail."
"Gotta be something set there," Lena said. "A huge weeb who plays a lot of Yakuza games, maybe?"
Her scenario made more sense than Third Eye shipping all over the world. Except: "Refresh again," I said.
A user called TakeThePen had posted a photo, their amulet on a windowsill. The London Eye loomed over the background.
Photos weren't proof of anything, not anymore. A great digital artist could probably have Photoshopped the amulet there in the five minutes since I asked where they'd posted from. Especially with a window to act as a dividing line between the images.
I didn't believe the photo was fake.
I spun my chair and faced Lena.
She took a long time turning. Her hand hovered over her amulet, fingers trembling, like she thought she'd get burned if she touched it.
She grabbed it and forced out a smile. "Where are we on the scale now?"
I considered. They'd have known where all the backers lived. They'd had six years to prepare. They had, somehow, seemingly infinite money to burn.
"Technically?" I said. "Still crazy."
I wondered how much more I could accept without settling on "Impossible."
Chapter 6: The Actual Game
Chapter 6: The Actual Game
Lena flopped back into her chair. "I don't know what we're trying to figure out anymore, or what we'd do about it if we did. Break for the night?"
I'd run this long on adrenaline, incredulity, and the two slices of pizza I'd grabbed between mindfucks. Now that she'd reminded me of it, I sagged. I saw the subreddit and the supposedly official Discord out of the corner of my eye. Opening them meant moving my hand and that suddenly felt daunting. Thinking about them? Overwhelming.
"Break for the night," I agreed.
Lena stretched her arm behind her back. Her fingers scrabbled on the desk until they found her phone. She pulled it forward and held it up in front of her face. "You know what we haven't done?"
"I don't know much of anything right now."
"Played Third Eye."
I blurted out a laugh.
"Where is the lie, though?" she asked.
We'd signed up. Activated the app. Stared at each other through its camera filter. Collected our signup gifts, one in considerably more dramatic fashion. Posted about it.
But I hadn't done anything more than glance at what looked like a disastrous UI. I remembered wincing at the currencies or stats I'd seen crammed into the top bar, back before I had bigger concerns.
"You're not wrong," I said.
"Go get your phone," Lena said. "Let's at least see if this shit's gonna be fun."
I dragged myself from the chair and into the bedroom. I could grab my phone, sure. Or I could fall into bed and bury my head in my pillow.
Would I disappoint Lena? Would I wake up way too early? Would I turn my unanswered questions into nightmares?
I suspected yes to all.
Ultimately, though, I grabbed the phone and turned back for pizza's sake. If I left my two remaining slices out there, I gave Lena fifty-fifty odds of eating them or forgetting them on the counter. The only way they'd get to the fridge was if I went back and made the save.
I put it away first, in case Third Eye proved distracting again, so my first real experience of the game came let's play style. Specifically, the kind of let's play where you like the player but don't give a shit about the game, so you turn off your monitor and fall asleep to it. Just me?
"Uggggh." Lena pitched her voice performatively loud.
I closed the fridge and ambled over to her desk. "That good, huh?"
She held her phone up. She'd progressed further into Third Eye's interface than I'd dared. Specifically, to the in-game store.
Every option remained inactive, grayed out. Literally grayed, with a chonky, 90's-ass pixelation effect I'd never seen a phone game use and could have gone the rest of my life without. Not only did it look like I imagined Windows 3.1 must have, in the before times, it clashed horribly with the over-saturated color palette of the rest of the UI.
That was the good news.
Because if Lena could have tapped those options, she could have bought any of the following:
Tickets, Gold, Gems, Crystals, Keys, Scrolls –
She scrolled down.
– Grimoires, Treats, Maps –
Kept scrolling.
– Rations, Potions, Flasks –
And more.
– Wood, Stone, Iron –
The scrollbar extended further.
"How much more is there?" I asked.
"Check out the bottom," she said. She flicked her finger across the screen. It zipped past until it showed me the penultimate entries:
Hit Points, Mind Points. If you've played any games I shouldn't have to tell you why being able to buy those with real money sucks the life out.
They paled in comparison to the final purchase, though: Experience Points. XP.
Once this store went live, either further in the beta or after full release, a player could input a credit card number and Third Eye would output permanent power boosts. The textbook definition of pay-to-win.
"Give it to me straight, doc," I said. "As a professional mobage reviewer, how bad is it?"
"Mobage? You want to know how this compares to the kind of pay-to-win you get from Asia's finest mobile cash extractors?" Lena snorted, but it must have seemed too much like a laugh to her because her expression curdled into seriousness. She shook her head. "Fuck. Cam, this would be bad for a Facebook game."
I winced. "It's not that bad, surely? I didn't see stamina on the list."
"I poked around a little while you spent a suspiciously long time in the bedroom with that phone and those pictures of me in Third Eye."
"If that amount of time was suspicious, I'd need to pay for stamina."
"Hey, you said it, not me."
I gave her the finger. "Seriously, though, you think it's Facebook bad?"
"Stamina's one of the very few things you can't buy, for some reason, but I read some item descriptions. Rations replenish it."
So we'd be locked out of playing after a certain amount of actions, forced to either wait a day or pay to keep going. A generous person might say that's the same as pumping quarters into an arcade machine; I'd say most arcades closed before I turned ten and I'd been waiting for this business model to follow them.
What I actually said was, "Shit."
"In my professional opinion," Lena said, "exactly."
I slunk back to my computer chair and cradled my phone in my lap. I glanced at the PC; I hadn't put it to sleep. Reddit and Discord almost looked appealing, compared to waking up my phone and confronting Third Eye's gameplay.
"Shit," I repeated, under my breath.
Why did this hit so hard?
This morning, I'd never expected to hear about Third Eye again. This afternoon, Lena'd said she expected a beautiful disaster and I'd laughed at the idea it would be beautiful.
But it had been.
Its graphics, its tracking. Its insane, drone-in-every-city physical signup bonuses. Hell. Even its art design ruled, something you couldn't achieve just by throwing money at the problem. You needed talent, real talent, to make some of us beautiful.
I'd let myself forget the 'disaster' part.
I sighed and fired up the Third Eye app. It took a few seconds to load, even though I spent a decent chunk of my disposable income keeping my phone only a couple generations out of date. The screen showed the Third Eye logo and a rotating circle, no graphics or hints or tips to distract me.
I flushed, annoyed, hot, ready to curse.
They make revolutionary tracking software, melt server farms to show users off in a server-side photo filter, pull stunts like the amulets. But their damn game doesn't even load properly on a Note 10?
Before I made myself look more ridiculous, the loading screen resolved into the UI disaster I'd glanced at in the afternoon.
I gave the store – with its generic shopping cart icon – a glare, but ignored it for now. With no stock-image scroll to fill it up, the main screen was blank white with those Win 3.1-ass menu bars. Text at the top displayed HP, MP, XP and Tickets, so either those were the main currencies or the UI was worse than I expected. Bad enough they weren't full-justified. They crowded on the left of the menu bar like a line from the world's dorkiest haiku.
I had 10 HP and MP, 0 Tickets. They couldn't even spring for free Tickets to get me sucked into... whatever Tickets did? XP, on the other hand, I'd been comped to the tune of 33. Out of a hundred, or a hundred thousand? The interface gave no indication.
"How much experience do you have, Lena?" I called.
"Twenty-six."
Apparently, Magi of the Second Circle didn't start with extra. Weirdly fair, in light of the awful promise of the cash shop. "I wonder why I got more than you."
"Glass ceiling." She stuck her tongue out.
"Heh." What had we done differently, though? I tried tapping the XP tab and it expanded into a full window with way too much white space for the exact same information I'd seen on the main screen. No further details.
I pointed my phone at her and flipped to the camera.
"More tests?" she asked.
"Yeah, actually."
She raised her eyebrow. Why not? I stared at her and she looked down on me. When I looked at her avatar I never wanted to stop.
I forced myself to.
Back to the app. I shook my head at the contrast. From the sublime to the archaic.
"You trying to grind on me, Cam?" Lena asked. I must have flushed, because she grinned. "Did it work?"
"I'd like to think you'd notice." I checked the app and shook my head. I hadn't gotten more XP for looking at her. Too bad. I might never get bored of that kind of grinding. Too bad, also, because the amount of time I'd spent staring at her had been my best guess for where my extra XP had come from.
Why did every part of Third Eye have to turn into a headache?
"What about HP?" I asked. "MP?"
"A thousand and a hundred," she said.
"Ah. Found the pay to win."
"They hid it?" She sounded flippant, but she crouched lower in her chair. "Where are you at?"
"Ten and ten."
"Oh, bullshit!" She clenched her fist around her phone. (Through mine, with a surreptitious flick, I saw flames surge up around her grip.) "I didn't spend five grand to cheat."
"Tell that to Third Eye Productions." I shrugged.
Lena didn't. "You're damn right I will."
She spun her chair around and opened Discord.
Lena flopped back into her chair. "I don't know what we're trying to figure out anymore, or what we'd do about it if we did. Break for the night?"
I'd run this long on adrenaline, incredulity, and the two slices of pizza I'd grabbed between mindfucks. Now that she'd reminded me of it, I sagged. I saw the subreddit and the supposedly official Discord out of the corner of my eye. Opening them meant moving my hand and that suddenly felt daunting. Thinking about them? Overwhelming.
"Break for the night," I agreed.
Lena stretched her arm behind her back. Her fingers scrabbled on the desk until they found her phone. She pulled it forward and held it up in front of her face. "You know what we haven't done?"
"I don't know much of anything right now."
"Played Third Eye."
I blurted out a laugh.
"Where is the lie, though?" she asked.
We'd signed up. Activated the app. Stared at each other through its camera filter. Collected our signup gifts, one in considerably more dramatic fashion. Posted about it.
But I hadn't done anything more than glance at what looked like a disastrous UI. I remembered wincing at the currencies or stats I'd seen crammed into the top bar, back before I had bigger concerns.
"You're not wrong," I said.
"Go get your phone," Lena said. "Let's at least see if this shit's gonna be fun."
I dragged myself from the chair and into the bedroom. I could grab my phone, sure. Or I could fall into bed and bury my head in my pillow.
Would I disappoint Lena? Would I wake up way too early? Would I turn my unanswered questions into nightmares?
I suspected yes to all.
Ultimately, though, I grabbed the phone and turned back for pizza's sake. If I left my two remaining slices out there, I gave Lena fifty-fifty odds of eating them or forgetting them on the counter. The only way they'd get to the fridge was if I went back and made the save.
I put it away first, in case Third Eye proved distracting again, so my first real experience of the game came let's play style. Specifically, the kind of let's play where you like the player but don't give a shit about the game, so you turn off your monitor and fall asleep to it. Just me?
"Uggggh." Lena pitched her voice performatively loud.
I closed the fridge and ambled over to her desk. "That good, huh?"
She held her phone up. She'd progressed further into Third Eye's interface than I'd dared. Specifically, to the in-game store.
Every option remained inactive, grayed out. Literally grayed, with a chonky, 90's-ass pixelation effect I'd never seen a phone game use and could have gone the rest of my life without. Not only did it look like I imagined Windows 3.1 must have, in the before times, it clashed horribly with the over-saturated color palette of the rest of the UI.
That was the good news.
Because if Lena could have tapped those options, she could have bought any of the following:
Tickets, Gold, Gems, Crystals, Keys, Scrolls –
She scrolled down.
– Grimoires, Treats, Maps –
Kept scrolling.
– Rations, Potions, Flasks –
And more.
– Wood, Stone, Iron –
The scrollbar extended further.
"How much more is there?" I asked.
"Check out the bottom," she said. She flicked her finger across the screen. It zipped past until it showed me the penultimate entries:
Hit Points, Mind Points. If you've played any games I shouldn't have to tell you why being able to buy those with real money sucks the life out.
They paled in comparison to the final purchase, though: Experience Points. XP.
Once this store went live, either further in the beta or after full release, a player could input a credit card number and Third Eye would output permanent power boosts. The textbook definition of pay-to-win.
"Give it to me straight, doc," I said. "As a professional mobage reviewer, how bad is it?"
"Mobage? You want to know how this compares to the kind of pay-to-win you get from Asia's finest mobile cash extractors?" Lena snorted, but it must have seemed too much like a laugh to her because her expression curdled into seriousness. She shook her head. "Fuck. Cam, this would be bad for a Facebook game."
I winced. "It's not that bad, surely? I didn't see stamina on the list."
"I poked around a little while you spent a suspiciously long time in the bedroom with that phone and those pictures of me in Third Eye."
"If that amount of time was suspicious, I'd need to pay for stamina."
"Hey, you said it, not me."
I gave her the finger. "Seriously, though, you think it's Facebook bad?"
"Stamina's one of the very few things you can't buy, for some reason, but I read some item descriptions. Rations replenish it."
So we'd be locked out of playing after a certain amount of actions, forced to either wait a day or pay to keep going. A generous person might say that's the same as pumping quarters into an arcade machine; I'd say most arcades closed before I turned ten and I'd been waiting for this business model to follow them.
What I actually said was, "Shit."
"In my professional opinion," Lena said, "exactly."
I slunk back to my computer chair and cradled my phone in my lap. I glanced at the PC; I hadn't put it to sleep. Reddit and Discord almost looked appealing, compared to waking up my phone and confronting Third Eye's gameplay.
"Shit," I repeated, under my breath.
Why did this hit so hard?
This morning, I'd never expected to hear about Third Eye again. This afternoon, Lena'd said she expected a beautiful disaster and I'd laughed at the idea it would be beautiful.
But it had been.
Its graphics, its tracking. Its insane, drone-in-every-city physical signup bonuses. Hell. Even its art design ruled, something you couldn't achieve just by throwing money at the problem. You needed talent, real talent, to make some of us beautiful.
I'd let myself forget the 'disaster' part.
I sighed and fired up the Third Eye app. It took a few seconds to load, even though I spent a decent chunk of my disposable income keeping my phone only a couple generations out of date. The screen showed the Third Eye logo and a rotating circle, no graphics or hints or tips to distract me.
I flushed, annoyed, hot, ready to curse.
They make revolutionary tracking software, melt server farms to show users off in a server-side photo filter, pull stunts like the amulets. But their damn game doesn't even load properly on a Note 10?
Before I made myself look more ridiculous, the loading screen resolved into the UI disaster I'd glanced at in the afternoon.
I gave the store – with its generic shopping cart icon – a glare, but ignored it for now. With no stock-image scroll to fill it up, the main screen was blank white with those Win 3.1-ass menu bars. Text at the top displayed HP, MP, XP and Tickets, so either those were the main currencies or the UI was worse than I expected. Bad enough they weren't full-justified. They crowded on the left of the menu bar like a line from the world's dorkiest haiku.
I had 10 HP and MP, 0 Tickets. They couldn't even spring for free Tickets to get me sucked into... whatever Tickets did? XP, on the other hand, I'd been comped to the tune of 33. Out of a hundred, or a hundred thousand? The interface gave no indication.
"How much experience do you have, Lena?" I called.
"Twenty-six."
Apparently, Magi of the Second Circle didn't start with extra. Weirdly fair, in light of the awful promise of the cash shop. "I wonder why I got more than you."
"Glass ceiling." She stuck her tongue out.
"Heh." What had we done differently, though? I tried tapping the XP tab and it expanded into a full window with way too much white space for the exact same information I'd seen on the main screen. No further details.
I pointed my phone at her and flipped to the camera.
"More tests?" she asked.
"Yeah, actually."
She raised her eyebrow. Why not? I stared at her and she looked down on me. When I looked at her avatar I never wanted to stop.
I forced myself to.
Back to the app. I shook my head at the contrast. From the sublime to the archaic.
"You trying to grind on me, Cam?" Lena asked. I must have flushed, because she grinned. "Did it work?"
"I'd like to think you'd notice." I checked the app and shook my head. I hadn't gotten more XP for looking at her. Too bad. I might never get bored of that kind of grinding. Too bad, also, because the amount of time I'd spent staring at her had been my best guess for where my extra XP had come from.
Why did every part of Third Eye have to turn into a headache?
"What about HP?" I asked. "MP?"
"A thousand and a hundred," she said.
"Ah. Found the pay to win."
"They hid it?" She sounded flippant, but she crouched lower in her chair. "Where are you at?"
"Ten and ten."
"Oh, bullshit!" She clenched her fist around her phone. (Through mine, with a surreptitious flick, I saw flames surge up around her grip.) "I didn't spend five grand to cheat."
"Tell that to Third Eye Productions." I shrugged.
Lena didn't. "You're damn right I will."
She spun her chair around and opened Discord.
Chapter 7: Not The Imps
Chapter 7: Not The Imps
I followed Lena to the (supposedly) Official Third Eye server on Discord.
Ten minutes ago I couldn't stand the thought of touching it, but that was when it meant an attempt to wrap my brain around Third Eye's mysteries.
Now it meant rescuing Third Eye's chat admin from my roommate.
Amazing what anger could do for her, and worry for me.
The server started me off in Preview mode, which I only remembered from official ones. Could just anyone set things up this way? I didn't remember doing it with our household server. Regardless, I clicked to join and got a boilerplate set of server rules to agree to. No promotion, no pornography, no hate speech, treat the staff and each other with respect.
"Be careful," I said to Lena. Not about following the rules. She'd never met one she wanted to abide by. I'd need tactics to sway her. "You don't want to let the whole server know what tier you backed at, do you?"
"All I gotta do is find out who the admin is and DM 'em."
"Who they are," I said, "is some poor bastard low enough on the totem pole to have to interact with the playerbase."
I got a shudder out of her. We'd both worked our share of customer service jobs. I'd even adminned an official Skype for a game once, back when enough gamers used Skype to bother with one. Never again, but it gave me a certain sympathy for whoever got stuck with the job at Third Eye.
"Low," Lena said, "but they're still gonna be on the totem pole. Game hasn't been out long enough to get volunteers."
"Unless," I said, "this isn't a real official server."
Wrong thing to say. I could feel her wicked grin from across the room.
"I find that out," Lena said, "and some cheeky little shit's gonna be very sorry."
"If it's really not official," I said, "you have my blessing."
Wrong again. "Since when do you think I need that?"
"Fine!" I raised my hands in case she glared my way. "Just, try not to savage a poor intern. For your own sake, too. Save your rockets for the cyberdemons, not the imps."
"Cyberdemons in Doom Eternal ain't shit," Lena said, "and rockets are for crowd control."
"You can argue Doom strategy with me when you win a deathmatch," I said.
The oldest kind of games, pre-digital, started out competitive. Player Versus Player. Plenty still used that gameplay model. Lena and I both liked competition. I because it forced me to engage more intensely. Her, in part, because she lapped me in like ninety percent of the games we played against each other.
She wouldn't try me in strategy titles unless she'd drunk enough to use as an excuse. So, First-Person Shooters like Doom represented my only bright spots in intra-apartment PVP.
Thing about Lena, though, thing I admired even though I didn't really understand it: she loved to win, but not as much as she respected winning. In that moment, it didn't matter if she kicked my ass in every other game. It didn't matter who'd picked the metaphor. From the moment she chose to fire back on the same wavelength, she'd accepted it mattered who won more FPS matches.
She didn't respond. I thought I could hear her jaw clamp shut. I could definitely hear her fingers stab at her mechanical keyboard.
At the bottom of the Third Eye Official Discord, a message from Ashbird read, '@Admin Can I ask customer service questions here?' By including the @ symbol she'd pinged anyone with an account tagged as administrator.
Instantly – I mean it, blink and I missed the notification someone was typing – an answer appeared.
AlephLambda: I'll help out if I can, but you should use the form on our website.
"Not the imps," Lena muttered. Her keyboard clacked but I didn't see what she typed. She must have sent a direct message to AlephLambda.
While I waited to see if her metaphorical shotgun work had developed – or if, due to reasonable philosophical differences over how much threat an imp represented to Doomguy, she scaled all the way down to the text version of pistol and fist – I scanned the server.
AlephLambda and another poster, VisibleFromSpace, were listed on the sidebar as Developers. If the server really had the backing of Third Eye Productions, we'd found proper Imps! Interns, in my opinion, counted as Lost Souls. (Source: personal experience.)
The second handle, with a profile picture of a beaver in an astronaut's helmet, made me grin. Taken together, they worked as a reference to the beaver dam in Canada that showed up in satellite images.
Lots of posts from players about the crazy graphics. A few about the signup bonuses. Even fewer about the store. Almost none about the game.
AlephLambda handled all the responses, which I considered a shame on two levels.
First, the deep cut reference in VisibleFromSpace's profile made me want to interact with them. Let's be honest. Made me want to challenge them. Which of us would first invoke something esoteric enough the other had to look it up? May the best meme win!
Second, AlephLambda answered like a goddamn chatbot, and not one of those new, impressive ones. They offered to help everybody and couldn't help anybody, and their non-service always came with a smile. I saw so many colon close parentheses, offered to so many dissatisfied customers, I started to entertain the notion AlephLambda might not actually be smiling when they used the emoticon.
"Fuck this guy. I really wanna use the rockets," Lena said. "He's listed as a dev, he deserves it."
"How bad is his explanation?" Absent evidence to the contrary, I chose to roll with Lena's calling AlephLambda a dude.
"It's pretty good, tbh. He says they're trying different totals during beta."
"Interesting," I said. "He hasn't given a straight answer to anybody in general chat."
"Probably another perk I didn't ask for."
"Or he answers questions better in DM where he can concentrate on them. He'll probably compile a FAQ later."
"Or he's bullshitting me," Lena said.
"The explanation fits, though. Why are you pissed about it?"
"Because he can't say a line without that damn smiley. It makes him come across like a smug prick. Fine, whatever. Problem is, it makes me think he's lying, too."
"He's probably just trying to put you at ease."
"How's that working out for him?"
I chuckled. Not like I disagreed with her. "In case you are getting unasked-for perks, maybe you should ask about the weird shit."
"The only perks I want are the ones I paid for," Lena snapped.
"Fine. Actually, this makes for a good test. Let's see what I get out of them." I shot AlephLambda a DM.
OldCampaigner: Can you explain some of the game stats to me?
AlephLambda: Sure, which would you like to know about?
I tried to edit their (his?) emoticons out of my perception. Just couldn't deal with them anymore. They kept coming, though. So did the responses, damn fast.
What did I want, indeed?
A question bubbled up. I hadn't meant to ask it but as soon as it occurred to me, I felt like nothing would make sense without squaring it away.
OldCampaigner: Back up a step. Why do we have stats in the first place?
AlephLambda: Gosh, that's a deep question!
AlephLambda: Do you want the historical explanation, or the design one? I'm not a lead dev, so I'm afraid there's only so much I can tell you. :')
A new emoticon! Smile with a tear. Sad smile.
OldCampaigner: I guess I don't quite get what the gameplay of Third Eye is going to be.
OldCampaigner: I was expecting an ARG, something where we work together to find clues online, and in this case, in AR overlaid on the outside world.
AlephLambda: That will be a huge part of your Third Eye experience.
OldCampaigner: Okay, cool, but, none of that fits with us having avatars. I guess to identify us in the world, and just to be a fun feature? I like it but it's weird. But none of it has anything to do with this laundry list of role-playing game stats and an inventory full of resources and a huge cash shop.
AlephLambda: Oh.
Without even a smile! An actual pause, then another line came through.
AlephLambda: Please understand. I'm not allowed to give you a detailed breakdown because we want testers to provide feedback on our onboarding process.
I provided some.
OldCampaigner: No offense, but it hasn't been the best so far. If the game systems aren't part of the whole mystery box setup, you may need to rework tutorialization from the ground up.
AlephLambda: No offense taken! We appreciate all beta participation and feedback so, so much. Yours is very well formatted.
At least the smiley fit.
OldCampaigner: Thanks. I've done the beta cycle before.
AlephLambda: I don't think you need to worry, though.
Despite their omnipresent smile, I worried.
Rightly, as their next line proved.
AlephLambda: You'll learn what all your resources are for as you begin exploring features and engaging in PVP.
I followed Lena to the (supposedly) Official Third Eye server on Discord.
Ten minutes ago I couldn't stand the thought of touching it, but that was when it meant an attempt to wrap my brain around Third Eye's mysteries.
Now it meant rescuing Third Eye's chat admin from my roommate.
Amazing what anger could do for her, and worry for me.
The server started me off in Preview mode, which I only remembered from official ones. Could just anyone set things up this way? I didn't remember doing it with our household server. Regardless, I clicked to join and got a boilerplate set of server rules to agree to. No promotion, no pornography, no hate speech, treat the staff and each other with respect.
"Be careful," I said to Lena. Not about following the rules. She'd never met one she wanted to abide by. I'd need tactics to sway her. "You don't want to let the whole server know what tier you backed at, do you?"
"All I gotta do is find out who the admin is and DM 'em."
"Who they are," I said, "is some poor bastard low enough on the totem pole to have to interact with the playerbase."
I got a shudder out of her. We'd both worked our share of customer service jobs. I'd even adminned an official Skype for a game once, back when enough gamers used Skype to bother with one. Never again, but it gave me a certain sympathy for whoever got stuck with the job at Third Eye.
"Low," Lena said, "but they're still gonna be on the totem pole. Game hasn't been out long enough to get volunteers."
"Unless," I said, "this isn't a real official server."
Wrong thing to say. I could feel her wicked grin from across the room.
"I find that out," Lena said, "and some cheeky little shit's gonna be very sorry."
"If it's really not official," I said, "you have my blessing."
Wrong again. "Since when do you think I need that?"
"Fine!" I raised my hands in case she glared my way. "Just, try not to savage a poor intern. For your own sake, too. Save your rockets for the cyberdemons, not the imps."
"Cyberdemons in Doom Eternal ain't shit," Lena said, "and rockets are for crowd control."
"You can argue Doom strategy with me when you win a deathmatch," I said.
The oldest kind of games, pre-digital, started out competitive. Player Versus Player. Plenty still used that gameplay model. Lena and I both liked competition. I because it forced me to engage more intensely. Her, in part, because she lapped me in like ninety percent of the games we played against each other.
She wouldn't try me in strategy titles unless she'd drunk enough to use as an excuse. So, First-Person Shooters like Doom represented my only bright spots in intra-apartment PVP.
Thing about Lena, though, thing I admired even though I didn't really understand it: she loved to win, but not as much as she respected winning. In that moment, it didn't matter if she kicked my ass in every other game. It didn't matter who'd picked the metaphor. From the moment she chose to fire back on the same wavelength, she'd accepted it mattered who won more FPS matches.
She didn't respond. I thought I could hear her jaw clamp shut. I could definitely hear her fingers stab at her mechanical keyboard.
At the bottom of the Third Eye Official Discord, a message from Ashbird read, '@Admin Can I ask customer service questions here?' By including the @ symbol she'd pinged anyone with an account tagged as administrator.
Instantly – I mean it, blink and I missed the notification someone was typing – an answer appeared.
AlephLambda: I'll help out if I can, but you should use the form on our website.
"Not the imps," Lena muttered. Her keyboard clacked but I didn't see what she typed. She must have sent a direct message to AlephLambda.
While I waited to see if her metaphorical shotgun work had developed – or if, due to reasonable philosophical differences over how much threat an imp represented to Doomguy, she scaled all the way down to the text version of pistol and fist – I scanned the server.
AlephLambda and another poster, VisibleFromSpace, were listed on the sidebar as Developers. If the server really had the backing of Third Eye Productions, we'd found proper Imps! Interns, in my opinion, counted as Lost Souls. (Source: personal experience.)
The second handle, with a profile picture of a beaver in an astronaut's helmet, made me grin. Taken together, they worked as a reference to the beaver dam in Canada that showed up in satellite images.
Lots of posts from players about the crazy graphics. A few about the signup bonuses. Even fewer about the store. Almost none about the game.
AlephLambda handled all the responses, which I considered a shame on two levels.
First, the deep cut reference in VisibleFromSpace's profile made me want to interact with them. Let's be honest. Made me want to challenge them. Which of us would first invoke something esoteric enough the other had to look it up? May the best meme win!
Second, AlephLambda answered like a goddamn chatbot, and not one of those new, impressive ones. They offered to help everybody and couldn't help anybody, and their non-service always came with a smile. I saw so many colon close parentheses, offered to so many dissatisfied customers, I started to entertain the notion AlephLambda might not actually be smiling when they used the emoticon.
"Fuck this guy. I really wanna use the rockets," Lena said. "He's listed as a dev, he deserves it."
"How bad is his explanation?" Absent evidence to the contrary, I chose to roll with Lena's calling AlephLambda a dude.
"It's pretty good, tbh. He says they're trying different totals during beta."
"Interesting," I said. "He hasn't given a straight answer to anybody in general chat."
"Probably another perk I didn't ask for."
"Or he answers questions better in DM where he can concentrate on them. He'll probably compile a FAQ later."
"Or he's bullshitting me," Lena said.
"The explanation fits, though. Why are you pissed about it?"
"Because he can't say a line without that damn smiley. It makes him come across like a smug prick. Fine, whatever. Problem is, it makes me think he's lying, too."
"He's probably just trying to put you at ease."
"How's that working out for him?"
I chuckled. Not like I disagreed with her. "In case you are getting unasked-for perks, maybe you should ask about the weird shit."
"The only perks I want are the ones I paid for," Lena snapped.
"Fine. Actually, this makes for a good test. Let's see what I get out of them." I shot AlephLambda a DM.
OldCampaigner: Can you explain some of the game stats to me?
AlephLambda: Sure, which would you like to know about?
I tried to edit their (his?) emoticons out of my perception. Just couldn't deal with them anymore. They kept coming, though. So did the responses, damn fast.
What did I want, indeed?
A question bubbled up. I hadn't meant to ask it but as soon as it occurred to me, I felt like nothing would make sense without squaring it away.
OldCampaigner: Back up a step. Why do we have stats in the first place?
AlephLambda: Gosh, that's a deep question!
AlephLambda: Do you want the historical explanation, or the design one? I'm not a lead dev, so I'm afraid there's only so much I can tell you. :')
A new emoticon! Smile with a tear. Sad smile.
OldCampaigner: I guess I don't quite get what the gameplay of Third Eye is going to be.
OldCampaigner: I was expecting an ARG, something where we work together to find clues online, and in this case, in AR overlaid on the outside world.
AlephLambda: That will be a huge part of your Third Eye experience.
OldCampaigner: Okay, cool, but, none of that fits with us having avatars. I guess to identify us in the world, and just to be a fun feature? I like it but it's weird. But none of it has anything to do with this laundry list of role-playing game stats and an inventory full of resources and a huge cash shop.
AlephLambda: Oh.
Without even a smile! An actual pause, then another line came through.
AlephLambda: Please understand. I'm not allowed to give you a detailed breakdown because we want testers to provide feedback on our onboarding process.
I provided some.
OldCampaigner: No offense, but it hasn't been the best so far. If the game systems aren't part of the whole mystery box setup, you may need to rework tutorialization from the ground up.
AlephLambda: No offense taken! We appreciate all beta participation and feedback so, so much. Yours is very well formatted.
At least the smiley fit.
OldCampaigner: Thanks. I've done the beta cycle before.
AlephLambda: I don't think you need to worry, though.
Despite their omnipresent smile, I worried.
Rightly, as their next line proved.
AlephLambda: You'll learn what all your resources are for as you begin exploring features and engaging in PVP.
Chapter 8: The Bottom 1%
Chapter 8: The Bottom 1%
"PVP," I said, and 'PVP?' I posted.
"What, in Third Eye?" Lena asked.
AlephLambda: Yes, you'll have many exciting opportunities to engage with other players as we roll out new features during the beta period.
"That wasn't in the Kickstarter," Lena said. She must have pulled up the page on her computer to check, because she added, "Yeah, not a peep. Dammit, this makes the pay-to-win shit so much worse."
No argument from me. I cared less than her how much whales could pay to get ahead of minnows like me in an essentially single player game. A competitive game, on the other hand, felt like absolute garbage if you could buy your way around game balance.
OldCampaigner: What if I'm not interested in PVP?
AlephLambda: Aren't you?
I understood now why Lena found AlephLambda's emoticons mocking.
OldCampaigner: Not in an ARG.
Forget the business model, how was the gameplay model supposed to work?
OldCampaigner: I want to cooperate to figure out the puzzle.
AlephLambda: Oh, cooperation will be vital to your success!
OldCampaigner: How am I supposed to cooperate and compete at the same time?
I hit enter and sent the line, but when I read it back, I started typing another without waiting for a response.
OldCampaigner: Wait.
AlephLambda waited.
OldCampaigner: It's going to be like a team scavenger hunt?
AlephLambda: I'm not allowed to tell you that.
It was going to be like a team scavenger hunt.
My fingers flexed over my keyboard. Hovered over my phone, where Third Eye waited. I felt hot, the heat radiating from the nape of my neck, down my back, up my head, brain deep, and I was pretty sure it didn't come from the on-again off-again furnace in the apartment.
Possibilities spooled out in my mind.
What does an ARG need? First, it needs a mystery, a hook, something to make you want to poke at it. Second, it needs clues clear enough that you can meaningfully poke. Third, in a seeming paradox, it needs clues obscure enough that you have to poke.
Therein lies the problem.
You haven't really made a game, by most definitions. You've made a puzzle and crowdsourced the solution.
In the human brain, correlation does equal causality, no matter how much we logic ourselves into saying otherwise. People will believe coincidences aren't, every time. So when something genuinely isn't a coincidence, they'll guess it right even if it's absurd.
Now multiply that by however many players the ARG successfully hooks. Individually, they believe everything is connected. Collectively, they put together a wiki to prove it. Then they winnow down all the clues and red herrings and solve your ARG in a month, instead of the year it was supposed to last to tie in to the release of some shitty movie that's way less interesting than the ARG itself.
But what if they didn't make a wiki? Not a public wiki, anyway. What if they found clues and shared them with only a select few teammates, while actively trying to obscure them from every other player?
Now you've taken a puzzle and turned it into a goddamn tournament.
I'd never played an ARG like that, but as a kid, I'd played the analog equivalent.
Summer camp had not delighted me. I'll swipe left on kayaking, hiking, rock climbing, orienteering, and, yeah, call me a shithead but also on being volunteered to clean up campsites after tourists trash them. All of which I'd been dragooned into four summers in a row.
Scavenger hunts, though?
If you bury some biodegradable tokens in the middle of a forest and tell me the team that finds the most wins? If you put me on a team with the other kids in my lodge, including one girl who's my first really brutal crush, all of whom have spent the last week and a half learning to regard me as a surly, nerdy, socially cancerous little shit?
I will kayak, hike, rock climb, orienteer, sleep under every star, make every fire, and sweep your whole freaking campground to lead that team to victory.
In case you're wondering, I led, we won, and for my efforts I was rewarded with being ignored by the rest of my lodge the second the counselors handed us our trophies. How much did I love team scavenger hunts? I threw myself into them the next three years anyway.
I said, "Shit."
"Now what?" Lena asked, from right over my shoulder.
"Shit!" I jumped in my chair and shot her a glare. "Don't sneak up on me."
She laughed like I'd made a joke, then leaned over me and peeked at my screen. "What's got you jumping, anyway?"
You, I thought. But I nodded to the screen. "This is starting to sound really cool."
She cocked her head. "And that's bad?"
"If we're trying to stay mad at Third Eye."
"No worries. I can stay mad at anything." She scanned the last exchange of messages. "Team scavenger hunts sound fun?"
"You ever try one?" I asked.
"Oh, sure. I used to go out with a squad of my schoolmates every weekend. We called ourselves the 'teenage Lena sure loves tromping through the poison ivy with a bunch of assholes' club. Weirdly specific, in retrospect."
"Right. Stupid question." I shook my head. "I always liked them. I think you would, too, if you let yourself. Maybe not the wilderness parts. Or the teamwork, especially the teamwork where you have to rely on somebody else. The competitive puzzle solving, though, you'd dig."
"I will solve the shit out of a good puzzle," she said. "Also, get super frustrated if anybody else on my team fails to."
"I'd be prepared to suffer your wrath, but for that to happen, I'd have to fail." I held a straight face longer than anyone should have to. Whole seconds! Eventually, though, Lena stopped glaring and started giggling. Worth.
She hugged my shoulders and rested her chin on the top of my head. She felt so warm and I was burning up. Were we both running fevers? Where would we have caught something? Or were we just loopy from all the crazy Third Eye shit we'd dealt with?
I knew my cheeks and chest would be flushed bright red, so I craned my neck forward to hide them without dislodging her.
I felt warm, maybe too warm, but this was nice. I closed my eyes and let myself relax.
So of course, a Discord chime snapped us both alert.
I was still on my DM with AlephLambda, but they hadn't sent me any more messages. I put most of my servers on mute. With Lena hugging me, I knew she hadn't sent me anything. My brother Benji had a server set up for our extended family but almost nobody used it – oh, who was I kidding, if I had super mute I'd use it on that one.
Which just left the Official Third Eye server.
Either somebody there had @'ed me – why? – or one of the people tagged Developer had posted a notification to the whole server.
I cracked an eye open and peeked up at Lena.
"Let's get the bad news." She groaned, stretched, let go of me. She bopped my shoulder. "Just remember."
"What?"
"You're the one who made me save my rockets."
"Since when can I make you do anything?" I clicked over to the server.
It was a notification. As expected.
VisibleFromSpace had posted it. From what I'd seen, scrolling through the server backlog, it and the two lines before represented their first words on the server. I almost smiled at their handle and avatar combo again, but then I read their messages.
VisibleFromSpace: I'd like to personally thank all of our backers who've made the first day of the Third Eye beta such a success. Your enthusiasm and curiosity bowled us over.
VisibleFromSpace: Unfortunately, they've also bowled our resources over! We're working hard to expand our capacity in preparation for launch, but in the meantime, we'll need to gauge how much we need. With that in mind:
Those lines weren't marked as notifications. Not everybody needed to see them. They just contextualized the final line.
VisibleFromSpace: At the end of each game day, the bottom 1% of users will have their beta access suspended until launch. Thanks for your patience.
Then they went offline, and the server went haywire.
"PVP," I said, and 'PVP?' I posted.
"What, in Third Eye?" Lena asked.
AlephLambda: Yes, you'll have many exciting opportunities to engage with other players as we roll out new features during the beta period.
"That wasn't in the Kickstarter," Lena said. She must have pulled up the page on her computer to check, because she added, "Yeah, not a peep. Dammit, this makes the pay-to-win shit so much worse."
No argument from me. I cared less than her how much whales could pay to get ahead of minnows like me in an essentially single player game. A competitive game, on the other hand, felt like absolute garbage if you could buy your way around game balance.
OldCampaigner: What if I'm not interested in PVP?
AlephLambda: Aren't you?
I understood now why Lena found AlephLambda's emoticons mocking.
OldCampaigner: Not in an ARG.
Forget the business model, how was the gameplay model supposed to work?
OldCampaigner: I want to cooperate to figure out the puzzle.
AlephLambda: Oh, cooperation will be vital to your success!
OldCampaigner: How am I supposed to cooperate and compete at the same time?
I hit enter and sent the line, but when I read it back, I started typing another without waiting for a response.
OldCampaigner: Wait.
AlephLambda waited.
OldCampaigner: It's going to be like a team scavenger hunt?
AlephLambda: I'm not allowed to tell you that.
It was going to be like a team scavenger hunt.
My fingers flexed over my keyboard. Hovered over my phone, where Third Eye waited. I felt hot, the heat radiating from the nape of my neck, down my back, up my head, brain deep, and I was pretty sure it didn't come from the on-again off-again furnace in the apartment.
Possibilities spooled out in my mind.
What does an ARG need? First, it needs a mystery, a hook, something to make you want to poke at it. Second, it needs clues clear enough that you can meaningfully poke. Third, in a seeming paradox, it needs clues obscure enough that you have to poke.
Therein lies the problem.
You haven't really made a game, by most definitions. You've made a puzzle and crowdsourced the solution.
In the human brain, correlation does equal causality, no matter how much we logic ourselves into saying otherwise. People will believe coincidences aren't, every time. So when something genuinely isn't a coincidence, they'll guess it right even if it's absurd.
Now multiply that by however many players the ARG successfully hooks. Individually, they believe everything is connected. Collectively, they put together a wiki to prove it. Then they winnow down all the clues and red herrings and solve your ARG in a month, instead of the year it was supposed to last to tie in to the release of some shitty movie that's way less interesting than the ARG itself.
But what if they didn't make a wiki? Not a public wiki, anyway. What if they found clues and shared them with only a select few teammates, while actively trying to obscure them from every other player?
Now you've taken a puzzle and turned it into a goddamn tournament.
I'd never played an ARG like that, but as a kid, I'd played the analog equivalent.
Summer camp had not delighted me. I'll swipe left on kayaking, hiking, rock climbing, orienteering, and, yeah, call me a shithead but also on being volunteered to clean up campsites after tourists trash them. All of which I'd been dragooned into four summers in a row.
Scavenger hunts, though?
If you bury some biodegradable tokens in the middle of a forest and tell me the team that finds the most wins? If you put me on a team with the other kids in my lodge, including one girl who's my first really brutal crush, all of whom have spent the last week and a half learning to regard me as a surly, nerdy, socially cancerous little shit?
I will kayak, hike, rock climb, orienteer, sleep under every star, make every fire, and sweep your whole freaking campground to lead that team to victory.
In case you're wondering, I led, we won, and for my efforts I was rewarded with being ignored by the rest of my lodge the second the counselors handed us our trophies. How much did I love team scavenger hunts? I threw myself into them the next three years anyway.
I said, "Shit."
"Now what?" Lena asked, from right over my shoulder.
"Shit!" I jumped in my chair and shot her a glare. "Don't sneak up on me."
She laughed like I'd made a joke, then leaned over me and peeked at my screen. "What's got you jumping, anyway?"
You, I thought. But I nodded to the screen. "This is starting to sound really cool."
She cocked her head. "And that's bad?"
"If we're trying to stay mad at Third Eye."
"No worries. I can stay mad at anything." She scanned the last exchange of messages. "Team scavenger hunts sound fun?"
"You ever try one?" I asked.
"Oh, sure. I used to go out with a squad of my schoolmates every weekend. We called ourselves the 'teenage Lena sure loves tromping through the poison ivy with a bunch of assholes' club. Weirdly specific, in retrospect."
"Right. Stupid question." I shook my head. "I always liked them. I think you would, too, if you let yourself. Maybe not the wilderness parts. Or the teamwork, especially the teamwork where you have to rely on somebody else. The competitive puzzle solving, though, you'd dig."
"I will solve the shit out of a good puzzle," she said. "Also, get super frustrated if anybody else on my team fails to."
"I'd be prepared to suffer your wrath, but for that to happen, I'd have to fail." I held a straight face longer than anyone should have to. Whole seconds! Eventually, though, Lena stopped glaring and started giggling. Worth.
She hugged my shoulders and rested her chin on the top of my head. She felt so warm and I was burning up. Were we both running fevers? Where would we have caught something? Or were we just loopy from all the crazy Third Eye shit we'd dealt with?
I knew my cheeks and chest would be flushed bright red, so I craned my neck forward to hide them without dislodging her.
I felt warm, maybe too warm, but this was nice. I closed my eyes and let myself relax.
So of course, a Discord chime snapped us both alert.
I was still on my DM with AlephLambda, but they hadn't sent me any more messages. I put most of my servers on mute. With Lena hugging me, I knew she hadn't sent me anything. My brother Benji had a server set up for our extended family but almost nobody used it – oh, who was I kidding, if I had super mute I'd use it on that one.
Which just left the Official Third Eye server.
Either somebody there had @'ed me – why? – or one of the people tagged Developer had posted a notification to the whole server.
I cracked an eye open and peeked up at Lena.
"Let's get the bad news." She groaned, stretched, let go of me. She bopped my shoulder. "Just remember."
"What?"
"You're the one who made me save my rockets."
"Since when can I make you do anything?" I clicked over to the server.
It was a notification. As expected.
VisibleFromSpace had posted it. From what I'd seen, scrolling through the server backlog, it and the two lines before represented their first words on the server. I almost smiled at their handle and avatar combo again, but then I read their messages.
VisibleFromSpace: I'd like to personally thank all of our backers who've made the first day of the Third Eye beta such a success. Your enthusiasm and curiosity bowled us over.
VisibleFromSpace: Unfortunately, they've also bowled our resources over! We're working hard to expand our capacity in preparation for launch, but in the meantime, we'll need to gauge how much we need. With that in mind:
Those lines weren't marked as notifications. Not everybody needed to see them. They just contextualized the final line.
VisibleFromSpace: At the end of each game day, the bottom 1% of users will have their beta access suspended until launch. Thanks for your patience.
Then they went offline, and the server went haywire.
Chapter 9: The Cold Light of 8AM
Chapter 9: The Cold Light of 8AM
Against my better judgment, I opened my eyes.
Good news: the only light came from the Hello Kitty night light over Lena's bed, filtered through the paper panels of our unfurled room divider.
Bad news: if I recognized the provenance of a light source, it meant my brain had woken up too much to obey my body's demand to go back to sleep.
I groaned and rolled out of bed. I kicked at the tangle of blankets I'd thrown off as I fell asleep. I groped for my phone and turned it on as a second light source.
I'd left Third Eye running, so its shitty interface became the first thing I saw when I swiped past my lock screen. A notification caught my attention and my pulse quickened. Had I been kicked out of the beta?
Then I remembered I'd never closed out of the notification from last night.
It matched VisibleFromSpace's message on the official Discord. Which, among other things, offered pretty damn compelling evidence the Discord was, in fact, official.
'At the end of each game day, the bottom 1% of users will have their beta access suspended until launch. Thanks for your patience.'
I still had access, for now, so I was allowed to reread the message.
The bottom 1% by what measure? How many people would actually lose their accounts each day? For how long – how long would the beta period last? All good questions, none of which had been answered by the time I gave up last night. VisibleFromSpace had gone offline right after posting, and AlephLambda had offered nothing but smiling platitudes.
Why only cut off the bottom 1% if the issue was resource usage? Surely, whatever measure Third Eye used to separate the top of its leaderboard from the bottom would favor the heaviest-usage players.
For that matter, why only 1% per day? Had they rented servers on a daily basis?
Like so much about Third Eye, it made almost no sense, which made it so much worse than if it made none. The signup gifts would cost a fortune to deliver for no good reason, but they could, technically, be delivered. The incredible graphics would melt servers to produce, but flash enough cash and you could make it happen. The out-of-phone-range tracking to match graphics to users would require another server farm's worth of AI, but, again, it remained possible.
Speaking of the tracking, it occurred to me that I hadn't noticed anyone else post about it. Made sense. A hundred thousand people signed up for Third Eye, but out of how many? Six billion? We'd seen people from around the world comment already. What were the chances any two other than Lena and I shared an apartment?
There was a very real chance we were the first pair of Third Eye users to meet IRL.
I flicked to r/thirdeyegame on my phone, tapped the thread for game details, and started to tap out a message.
Then I stopped.
Lena and I knew something about Third Eye no one else did.
Third Eye's gameplay included PVP.
Every day, the bottom 1% of players would lose access to the app.
Maybe losing access would be a blessing. So much about it freaked me out, pushed just against the edge of plausibility. As cool as I might find a vast, competitive, AR-enhanced scavenger hunt, I also had Trowel Samurai 2 to beat, and that didn't make me question my reality every time I discovered some new bullshit detail.
Maybe.
I closed out of Reddit, slipped my phone into the pocket of my pajamas and stepped out into the living room.
No Lena, no surprise. The next time she woke up before me would be the next time she decided to skip a night's sleep. So probably a couple of days.
Light streamed through the gaps in the blinds, promising a cold, pale morning. I pulled them up and winced. As predicted. Also, too damn bright. When the spots cleared from my eyes I scanned the outside world. Our apartment looked four stories down on Hampden Avenue as it curled toward downtown Englewood. Around the bend lived and worked people with significantly more and more reliable income than Lena and I. A concrete outdoor walkway served as our front porch.
Speaking of, I craned my neck to check for any more surprise packages. None, or none visible without opening the door and letting all that cold in.
If I'd gone to bed in sweats, maybe. Instead, I shivered in my t-shirt and pajama pants. A porch pirate who braved the Colorado morning was welcome to any unseen booty. Instead of opening the door, I closed the blinds.
Then to the kitchen. I took a couple of eggs out of the fridge, started them hard-boiling, and rubbed my hands over the steam vent on my chicken-shaped egg cooker until it grew uncomfortably hot.
When I'd bedded down last night, I'd dared to imagine our landlord had not only fixed the furnace but decided to let it run. If so, he'd changed his mind in the morning.
I took my phone out and returned to the window. I knelt and pulled the blinds up just far enough to stick my phone camera through. I peered through with Third Eye on. Nothing obvious.
I turned off the app, shivered again at the cold sneaking through gaps in the window frame, and tried again. Any differences? None I noticed.
No surprise. I'd have to round the bend to downtown Englewood to find something of interest in most AR games. For the really good stuff, I'd need to hop on the light rail and cruise up to Denver proper.
It sounded exhausting. Also, damn cold.
I thought back to the previous night. After the announcement about the bottom 1%, I'd finally conked out. The possibility of wading through all the Third Eye bullshit just to get cut off from it had tipped me over to exhaustion.
Lena had asked if I was giving up. I'd said I'd sleep on it.
Where did a good night's sleep – and it had been, from well before midnight to eight in the morning – leave me?
I wondered if I had time to get dressed before the eggs finished boiling.
Time to grab a pair of corduroy slacks and underwear. I might have made it to the bathroom with a full change of clothes if I hadn't hesitated over an Overwatch sweater. I'd bought it before the game's reputation went to shit and nowadays I hesitated to wear it out in public. Rarely a problem, but today? I grabbed a plain red sweatshirt instead.
I took too long. The egg cooker whistled.
I sprinted back, dumped my change of clothes on the kitchen counter, popped the top off the egg cooker, and tumbled the eggs into a bowl of cold water. While they cooled, I could get changed –
"Dibs," Lena called, and shut the bathroom door behind her.
I sighed.
She emerged a couple minutes later. I couldn't prove she'd taken exactly long enough for me to finish cracking and peeling the eggs, I just believed it.
I looked her over as I handed her one of the eggs on a plate. She'd gone for pants today, heavy black jeans, black socks, and a sweatshirt decorated with cartoon characters I didn't recognize. Something about the style of the art made me think of a mid-2000s webcomic. You know the type. Starts with two dudes on a couch talking about video games, ends with one or more apocalypses.
"Gonna hit the streets?" I asked.
"We'll see how cold it actually is out there." She got out a knife and halved her egg. "But yeah."
"We don't want to be in the bottom 1%," I said.
She nodded. "Whatever that means."
"If it's XP," I said, "at least I'm safer than you. You can't complain about pay-to-win then."
"You sure about that? I stayed up later than you."
My fork clinked against my plate. "Did you figure out how we get XP?"
"Not a clue," she said. "Did get some more, though. I'm up to a hundred and eight, last I checked."
"Did you level at a hundred?"
"Nope."
"Hm. Were you doing something with the app?"
"I had it open, anyway." She popped half her egg in her mouth. "People are trying all kinds of shit, but you can't seem to do anything in the app itself right now, and nobody has figured out any clues outside it. At least, they hadn't when I finally hit the sack."
"You mean they hadn't shared any."
She cocked her head. Slowly, she smiled. "You think that's the real reason Third Eye did the 1% thing?"
"Not until you said it," I said. "But it certainly is a way to put some skin in the PVP game."
"Damn skippy," Lena said. She wolfed down her other half of egg and pushed back from the counter. "Speaking of skin, and trying not to freeze it off, want me to grab your coat?"
I thought about leaving the house in the morning, before the sun finished warming the thin, dry air. About the weird shit we'd already encountered in Third Eye, and how much more disconcerting it might seem without the false sense of security the apartment offered. About running into the kind of people who went out in the morning by choice instead of necessity.
Plenty of reasons to stay home.
1% of one to go.
I said, "Damn skippy."
Against my better judgment, I opened my eyes.
Good news: the only light came from the Hello Kitty night light over Lena's bed, filtered through the paper panels of our unfurled room divider.
Bad news: if I recognized the provenance of a light source, it meant my brain had woken up too much to obey my body's demand to go back to sleep.
I groaned and rolled out of bed. I kicked at the tangle of blankets I'd thrown off as I fell asleep. I groped for my phone and turned it on as a second light source.
I'd left Third Eye running, so its shitty interface became the first thing I saw when I swiped past my lock screen. A notification caught my attention and my pulse quickened. Had I been kicked out of the beta?
Then I remembered I'd never closed out of the notification from last night.
It matched VisibleFromSpace's message on the official Discord. Which, among other things, offered pretty damn compelling evidence the Discord was, in fact, official.
'At the end of each game day, the bottom 1% of users will have their beta access suspended until launch. Thanks for your patience.'
I still had access, for now, so I was allowed to reread the message.
The bottom 1% by what measure? How many people would actually lose their accounts each day? For how long – how long would the beta period last? All good questions, none of which had been answered by the time I gave up last night. VisibleFromSpace had gone offline right after posting, and AlephLambda had offered nothing but smiling platitudes.
Why only cut off the bottom 1% if the issue was resource usage? Surely, whatever measure Third Eye used to separate the top of its leaderboard from the bottom would favor the heaviest-usage players.
For that matter, why only 1% per day? Had they rented servers on a daily basis?
Like so much about Third Eye, it made almost no sense, which made it so much worse than if it made none. The signup gifts would cost a fortune to deliver for no good reason, but they could, technically, be delivered. The incredible graphics would melt servers to produce, but flash enough cash and you could make it happen. The out-of-phone-range tracking to match graphics to users would require another server farm's worth of AI, but, again, it remained possible.
Speaking of the tracking, it occurred to me that I hadn't noticed anyone else post about it. Made sense. A hundred thousand people signed up for Third Eye, but out of how many? Six billion? We'd seen people from around the world comment already. What were the chances any two other than Lena and I shared an apartment?
There was a very real chance we were the first pair of Third Eye users to meet IRL.
I flicked to r/thirdeyegame on my phone, tapped the thread for game details, and started to tap out a message.
Then I stopped.
Lena and I knew something about Third Eye no one else did.
Third Eye's gameplay included PVP.
Every day, the bottom 1% of players would lose access to the app.
Maybe losing access would be a blessing. So much about it freaked me out, pushed just against the edge of plausibility. As cool as I might find a vast, competitive, AR-enhanced scavenger hunt, I also had Trowel Samurai 2 to beat, and that didn't make me question my reality every time I discovered some new bullshit detail.
Maybe.
I closed out of Reddit, slipped my phone into the pocket of my pajamas and stepped out into the living room.
No Lena, no surprise. The next time she woke up before me would be the next time she decided to skip a night's sleep. So probably a couple of days.
Light streamed through the gaps in the blinds, promising a cold, pale morning. I pulled them up and winced. As predicted. Also, too damn bright. When the spots cleared from my eyes I scanned the outside world. Our apartment looked four stories down on Hampden Avenue as it curled toward downtown Englewood. Around the bend lived and worked people with significantly more and more reliable income than Lena and I. A concrete outdoor walkway served as our front porch.
Speaking of, I craned my neck to check for any more surprise packages. None, or none visible without opening the door and letting all that cold in.
If I'd gone to bed in sweats, maybe. Instead, I shivered in my t-shirt and pajama pants. A porch pirate who braved the Colorado morning was welcome to any unseen booty. Instead of opening the door, I closed the blinds.
Then to the kitchen. I took a couple of eggs out of the fridge, started them hard-boiling, and rubbed my hands over the steam vent on my chicken-shaped egg cooker until it grew uncomfortably hot.
When I'd bedded down last night, I'd dared to imagine our landlord had not only fixed the furnace but decided to let it run. If so, he'd changed his mind in the morning.
I took my phone out and returned to the window. I knelt and pulled the blinds up just far enough to stick my phone camera through. I peered through with Third Eye on. Nothing obvious.
I turned off the app, shivered again at the cold sneaking through gaps in the window frame, and tried again. Any differences? None I noticed.
No surprise. I'd have to round the bend to downtown Englewood to find something of interest in most AR games. For the really good stuff, I'd need to hop on the light rail and cruise up to Denver proper.
It sounded exhausting. Also, damn cold.
I thought back to the previous night. After the announcement about the bottom 1%, I'd finally conked out. The possibility of wading through all the Third Eye bullshit just to get cut off from it had tipped me over to exhaustion.
Lena had asked if I was giving up. I'd said I'd sleep on it.
Where did a good night's sleep – and it had been, from well before midnight to eight in the morning – leave me?
I wondered if I had time to get dressed before the eggs finished boiling.
Time to grab a pair of corduroy slacks and underwear. I might have made it to the bathroom with a full change of clothes if I hadn't hesitated over an Overwatch sweater. I'd bought it before the game's reputation went to shit and nowadays I hesitated to wear it out in public. Rarely a problem, but today? I grabbed a plain red sweatshirt instead.
I took too long. The egg cooker whistled.
I sprinted back, dumped my change of clothes on the kitchen counter, popped the top off the egg cooker, and tumbled the eggs into a bowl of cold water. While they cooled, I could get changed –
"Dibs," Lena called, and shut the bathroom door behind her.
I sighed.
She emerged a couple minutes later. I couldn't prove she'd taken exactly long enough for me to finish cracking and peeling the eggs, I just believed it.
I looked her over as I handed her one of the eggs on a plate. She'd gone for pants today, heavy black jeans, black socks, and a sweatshirt decorated with cartoon characters I didn't recognize. Something about the style of the art made me think of a mid-2000s webcomic. You know the type. Starts with two dudes on a couch talking about video games, ends with one or more apocalypses.
"Gonna hit the streets?" I asked.
"We'll see how cold it actually is out there." She got out a knife and halved her egg. "But yeah."
"We don't want to be in the bottom 1%," I said.
She nodded. "Whatever that means."
"If it's XP," I said, "at least I'm safer than you. You can't complain about pay-to-win then."
"You sure about that? I stayed up later than you."
My fork clinked against my plate. "Did you figure out how we get XP?"
"Not a clue," she said. "Did get some more, though. I'm up to a hundred and eight, last I checked."
"Did you level at a hundred?"
"Nope."
"Hm. Were you doing something with the app?"
"I had it open, anyway." She popped half her egg in her mouth. "People are trying all kinds of shit, but you can't seem to do anything in the app itself right now, and nobody has figured out any clues outside it. At least, they hadn't when I finally hit the sack."
"You mean they hadn't shared any."
She cocked her head. Slowly, she smiled. "You think that's the real reason Third Eye did the 1% thing?"
"Not until you said it," I said. "But it certainly is a way to put some skin in the PVP game."
"Damn skippy," Lena said. She wolfed down her other half of egg and pushed back from the counter. "Speaking of skin, and trying not to freeze it off, want me to grab your coat?"
I thought about leaving the house in the morning, before the sun finished warming the thin, dry air. About the weird shit we'd already encountered in Third Eye, and how much more disconcerting it might seem without the false sense of security the apartment offered. About running into the kind of people who went out in the morning by choice instead of necessity.
Plenty of reasons to stay home.
1% of one to go.
I said, "Damn skippy."