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the first clue showed up in 1959. It was something in The Washington Post, a letter to the editor, and the lyrics of a song by the Everly Brothers that, when combined, provided the first indication that the game had returned.
The following was allegedly written on the wall in that laundromat in Seattle in 1959, under the hand-scrawled title MANIFESTO, and above a hand-stamped graphic of a rabbit:
You play, you never tell. Find the doors, portals, points, and wells. The Wardens watch and guard us well. You play and pray you never tell.
the next numbered iteration: Eleven, or XI.
“Remember the game, or your world it dies. “Remember to follow the patterns and signs. “We wait in the shadows a-twisting your fate, “While you crawl and you stumble blind into the gate. “It’s all predetermined, no losses no gains, “So play, little human, keep playing the game.”
Normally at least half the crowd sticks around for an informal Q&A, which is when I’d finally share some of the stories I’d heard about Hazel or a number of other infamous Rabbits players, but there was a midnight screening of Donnie Darko at The Grand Illusion Cinema in about twenty minutes. The Venn diagram of people interested in Rabbits and in Richard Kelly’s sci-fi thriller from 2001 is essentially just a circle.
“Jeff Goldblum does not belong in this world.”
It had been ages since I’d heard Emily Connors use the term “Rabbits” in relation to a secret game that somehow involved extinct woodpeckers and orphaned movie credits, since I’d heard that strange voice cutting through the radio static on something Emily called The Night Station—a voice that I would continue to hear in my dreams, always repeating the same thing over and over, the unmistakable phrase I’d heard that night, on that dark winding country road—a phrase I’d later learn was deeply connected to the mysterious game unofficially known as Rabbits. The Door Is Open.
Staring back at me from that screen, in a computer game from 1983, was the main character from a videogame that wouldn’t exist until almost a decade later.
The monster on the screen was Sonic the Hedgehog. —
The light hadn’t changed, and the woman with the greyhound hadn’t actually stepped off the curb. She was the one who’d pulled me back onto the sidewalk and away from the oncoming station wagon.
Where the hell was I? The world in front of my eyes appeared foreign, like a word I’d momentarily forgotten how to spell. I looked up at the closest street sign. I was standing on Nineteenth Avenue, directly across the street from a restaurant called The Kingfish Cafe.
Somehow, I’d lost more than six hours.
“The BGE produces virtual reality that looks, sounds, and feels exactly like real life. All that’s missing is smell. I have no idea how it works, but it’s amazing. Putting somebody’s face on another person’s body and using available online voice samples to create a deepfake version of a scene that never took place is one thing, but what the BGE technology is capable of doing is game-changing, literally. It’s fucking breathtaking. When this goes mainstream, it’s going to require regulations and oversight on par with complex genetic splicing and manipulation. The BGE will force governments to
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“Yeah. Apparently he discovered the key to his new technology while combining quantum field theory with something called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.”
the term ‘frequency illusion’ is probably more accurate. It’s about how something you’ve recently been told, experienced, or noticed suddenly crops up everywhere. What Baader-Meinhof suggests is that you’re seeing this thing constantly because of selective attention in your brain.”
He thought everything was preordained—that certain patterns were everywhere, but we didn’t notice them because we had no idea how to look for them.”
they needed access. I opened the hatch and found myself looking down a set of gun-metal gray stairs that led to part of the school I didn’t recognize. I knew that it was wrong, but I didn’t hesitate for more than a second or two before I climbed down and entered the forbidden world. And I was suddenly somewhere else. It felt like magic.
That demon had the head of a large hare. Printed on the image, beginning directly beneath the bloody mouth of the enormous hare-headed demon, was the opening of the tenth canto of Dante’s Inferno, which began with the three words Alan Scarpio had said to me in the diner: Now onward goes.
Whatever had happened, one thing was perfectly clear: Everything was over, and all that was left was the dying. No matter what we’re doing—sitting still on our couches or lying in our beds—every single one of us is moving through the universe at somewhere around 1.3 million miles per hour. We have no idea just how terrifyingly exposed we are—tiny things on a tiny world stuck inside a relatively small galaxy whipping through deep space at an alarming rate of speed. Anything apocalyptic could happen at any time. And now it finally had.
you explained how each version of the game teaches you how to play it as you’re playing, like the novel Gravity’s Rainbow teaches you how to read it as you’re reading. You went on to use Pynchon’s novels to describe some clue from the sixth iteration of the game.”
“The key to Byzantine is Hawk Worricker’s advanced AI. The characters learn as the players play. The BGE’s voice synthesis engine sounds completely human. It’s uncanny, literally. No two people playing the game will ever have the same experience.”
Depending on who you asked, The Tower was either some kind of high-level experimental (and perhaps illegal) genetics laboratory, a corporate multinational gaming think tank, the U.S. home base for something called alternative astronomy, or a secret society so secret that nobody had ever heard of them.
“I’ve found that people drawn to complex games and game theory often have a highly developed sense of pattern recognition and an innate ability to see connections—or, more importantly, possible future connections.”
Mother’s a mix of pattern discovery, facial recognition, speech interpretation, traffic monitoring, and fractal modeling software.”
“Aren’t quantum computers still decades away?” Chloe asked. “They’re coming. But like Andersen Cheng from Post-Quantum said—and I’m paraphrasing here—the first working quantum machine will never be announced, because whoever gets it will become the master of the universe.” “That’s a bold claim,” I said.
the Moriarty Factor,”
“There are many of us who believe that somebody or something has been working to…compromise the game.”
The people who remember The Berenstein Bears insist their spelling and pronunciation are correct, and refuse to believe that name had ever been written or pronounced any other way. So, what happened? The most prevalent theory goes like this: At some point in our history, two (or more) dimensions or streams of time diverged. Our world somehow hopped tracks—slipped streams into a parallel reality.
getting it. “Have you noticed anything strange about your life? A terrible feeling comes over you and the world is suddenly…different somehow?” “Like déjà vu?” I asked, but I knew Emily wasn’t talking about déjà vu. She was talking about the gray feeling. “Déjà vu is most likely a brief glimpse into being awake in another dimension. I’m talking about something else.
Have you ever experienced missing time, or an obsession with patterns or coincidences? Or maybe you notice that part of your reality has suddenly changed? Normally it’s nothing huge, like the South won the Civil War or the Beatles never existed. It’s something small, but significant to you in that moment. Maybe a company’s logo looks different from the logo you remember as a kid, a children’s book no longer has the same name, or a farmhouse in a famous painting has a different number of windows.”
The Radiants serve as a kind of universal reset mechanism—a way to release a little steam, so to speak. They exist to help maintain the integrity and health of the individual streams of the multiverse.”
“At first it was simply an evolving artificial intelligence engine—a way to perform certain adjustments at certain times. It would take Worricker a decade to figure out that the framework of a game was the most effective method of manipulating the Radiants worldwide.”
people’s…let’s call them souls, for lack of a better word, exist in a kind of cosmic pool. Each person in every dimension is a unique individual, but they all draw from that particular soul’s multidimensional pool.”
“Only one iteration of a person can exist in each dimension at any given time, and—in the extremely rare case that a person switches dimensional streams—the version of the person that now exists in a new stream merges with or replaces that stream’s original instance. The resultant memory retained from the prior incarnation depends on something we call dimensional drift. It’s the same if an iteration of that person remains behind after the drift or slip.”
The circle atop the triangle.
“A circle atop a pyramid is a familiar sigil in the world of the game. It’s something we refer to as The Moonrise,”
I shook my head and pressed my palms into my eyes. I smelled something familiar in the air, like wet feathers and fur. I was disoriented by the smell, and I could hear blood suddenly pounding in my ears. I tried to shake it off, but my body felt endless, like there were no borders between me and the world, and I was suddenly extremely cold.
There was something about considering an apocalyptic event while standing in the middle of a Starbucks staring at a banana nut muffin that felt sadly unreal.
“What is it exactly?” “Every time someone skips dimensional streams, there’s a high probability that they’ll experience some amount of drift. It’s like deep-sea divers getting the bends when they surface.” “Decompression sickness?” “Yeah, but for your brain. When you skip dimensions you’re displacing all of the other instances of you, shifting everything over.”
I talked you into slipping dimensional streams to try to stop him.”
“For decades, I thought it was nothing but a terrifying dream. I didn’t mention it to you back then, because I didn’t believe for a second that you and I had actually shared the same dream.”
This was the first time they asked me about false memories—dreams that felt so real part of me believed they’d happened in real life.
Crow believed his daughter’s ensuing emotional distress resulted in her inadvertently causing an interdimensional slip, which led to her disappearance. “None of us ever saw her again.”
waves. When you have coherence, there’s no interference, and all the waves are functioning perfectly fine. But when there’s something called constructive interference, waves can blend together to create a wave of greater amplitude than either one individually. Now imagine countless numbers of very powerful waves that used to exist in a coherent state suddenly coming together. The amplitude of that resultant wave would be impossible to measure.” “That’s what’s happening to the multiverse? It’s becoming one giant, super-unstable, decoherent wave?” “Yeah.”
It was familiar, but it took me a moment to place it. It was the scent of Dewberry perfume oil that I’d smelled back in the truck all those years ago. And then I was suddenly adrift in the in-between place, but it was different this time—less chaotic. Once again I felt the cool syrupy darkness, and the seemingly endless currents were rushing by just like before, but this time I felt more in control. If I focused my thoughts, I could see the colors and shapes of the currents, and if I closed my eyes, I could actually feel them and bring them closer.
“You’re saying it’s all the Moriarty Factor? That this Rabbits AI did everything? There are no multiple universes?”
“You’re talking about the Mandela effect? The Berenstain Bears?” “I’m talking about the Fremont Troll holding a Mini Cooper instead of a Volkswagen bug, a movie that used to exist but no longer does, a restaurant that closed permanently six years ago suddenly open again for business, a dead artist miraculously alive, writing and recording amazing new songs.”
