CARLY: (voiceover) I first heard about the game shortly after my best friend, Yumiko Takata, disappeared. I started this podcast because I want to find out what happened to my friend. From the Public Radio Alliance, and Minnow Beats Whale, you're listening to Rabbits. I'm Carly Parker. Stay with us.
So, I took the photo of Yumiko to the police, convinced I finally had something they would respond to. She'd gotten that tattoo about a month before she disappeared. The police looked into it, but the problem was, Yumiko never told her parents or her brother about the tattoo. The artist who did it was unreachable. Apparently, he'd moved to Thailand to live off the grid. The police asked me if I had any evidence that Yumiko had been working as a prostitute. I told them she wasn't a prostitute, but that she must have been masquerading as one for some reason. I could tell they were getting tired of me. Extremely tired. I needed to try something else.
[Phone ringing.]
CARLY: (voiceover) So that was Jones. I'll get back to him in a bit. But right now, I'm gonna do my best to fill in some more of the background, try and bring you up to speed on where I'm at with my investigation so far.
I told the police about Byron Price, the writer of that real-life treasure hunting book, The Secret, and how I found him connected to Yumiko. They wrote it down, but I could tell that the detective I spoke with, the same woman I talked to about the tattoo, had no interest in that connection either. In fact, she'd told me that they'd already looked into all that stuff, and reminded me I needed to be careful not to interfere with their investigation. I explained that I was just trying to help. She told me, as nicely as she could, that I would just be getting in the way. I could tell she believed two things: one, that I was probably nuts, and two, that Yumiko had taken off of her own volition. The police weren't going to be any help. I was on my own.
In 2015, a boy died from playing a video game for twenty-two days straight. He followed all the rules: ate, slept, took all the requisite breaks, but by sitting still for so long, he'd become susceptible to blood clotting. The same year, two Taiwanese men died in a very similar way. The first was a thirty-eight year old man who was found dead after playing video games for five days straight in an internet cafe in Taipei. The second was a thirty-two year old man who died from cardiac arrest after playing a computer game for three days without stopping. In 2009, in Korea, a young couple got so wrapped up in an online game that they failed to feed their child, who eventually starved to death.
How could such a horrific and unimaginable tragedy happen in today's world? I got all of this stuff from Yumiko. She'd recently become obsessed with the subject of, "death by video game," for lack of a better term. She was deep into researching this subject for her book when she disappeared.
People died in the 1980s playing video games. The most commonly sited examples are attributed to a game called, perhaps fittingly, Berserk. Interestingly, the most infamous deadly video game of them all, the vector-raster graphics combo game called Polybius, might not have even existed. But, if it did exist, Polybius was, allegedly, responsible for some extreme craziness up here in the Pacific Northwest.
Clearly video game weirdness has been happening for a long time, but actually dying from playing a video game, thankfully, remains rare. But virtual and augmented reality are here, and advances are going to be exponential. These types of gaming fatality are, probably, sadly, only going to increase. Are people going to abandon real life for the virtual world? Are people going to step out into traffic chasing virtual creatures? Imagine what's going to be possible. Imagine all the dark, crazy stuff out there now.
What happens if people get strung-out and can't tell the difference between what's happening in front of them in their VR glasses or in real life. There are incredible therapeutic benefits coming with virtual reality but there are also some extremely dangerous implications when it comes to addiction.
Along with all of her research into the strange deaths surrounding video games for her book, Yumiko had been researching an article on online video game addiction. Like I said, she was obsessed.
I was really into video games as a kid, but my older brother, Eric - older by nineteen years - was possessed. He almost lost his thumb from playing too much Intellivision, Auto Racing and Space Spartans in particular.
Space Spartans was a clone of the wildly popular Atari game called Star Raiders. Intellivision, by Mattel, had these strange-looking disc controllers, controllers that, to my knowledge, nobody's used before or since. They were fairly awkward, nowhere near as useful as the joystick that came with the far more successful Atari 2600, released a year earlier. Eric's thumb became so infected from constantly rubbing his nail into his cuticle that my parents had to give his Intellivision console away. It was good news for Eric: this meant our family finally got an Atari. I can't stress enough how addicted my brother was to playing video games, and I mean capital-A addicted. As a teenager he actually took a trip to the famous arcade, Fun Spot, to play Centipede against infamous American video game champion, Billy Mitchell. My brother didn't win. Not even close. He came home, somehow convinced my parents to buy him a stand-up Centipede machine, and started practicing every day. That machine is still in my parents' basement. Yumiko and I played it constantly when we were kids.
By the time I was born in 1989, Eric had amassed an enormous collection of computers, disc drives, and consoles. I grew up surrounded by this kind of stuff. I looked up to my brother, and it wasn't long before I began to share his obsession with video games and video game culture, an obsession that only increased after he died - after he committed suicide.
He never did make it back to Fun Spot for a rematch with Billy Mitchell.
My brother always made me laugh. We played video games constantly. I loved spending time with him. I miss him.
My brother lived in our parents' basement his entire life, after his death, I inherited Eric's bedroom and all the ancient crazy computer and game console stuff that came with it. I'm not sure how to describe my brother's room. It looked similar to the Lone Gunmen's operation in The X-Files, or something out of Battlestar Galactica. Every square inch of space was covered in computing or gaming equipment. Where other people would have DVDs, books, or CDs, he had racks of game cartridges, from ActiVision to Atari, ColecoVision to Sega Genesis. He had them all. His floppy disc and data cassette tape collections were even bigger. If you needed an all-ready way out-of-date 14.4 dial-up modem in 1999, I had seven of them.
Our family had always been what you'd call lower-middle class, and we were always at least four or five years behind the rest of the kids in our neighborhood. By the time I was playing Yoshi's Island on the Nintendo, the GameBoy Color had already come out. I wouldn't get up-to-date when it came to video games until I bought the PlayStation 2 when it came out, just around Halloween, in the year 2000.
Shortly before she disappeared, Yumiko had asked to speak with me about ColecoVision's Donkey Kong, one of our favorite console games from back then. Her thesis being, Donkey Kong was the first console game that actually delivered an experience comparable to that of a stand-up cabinet arcade game. She was writing an article for Wired, tracking certain aspects of console versus arcade. With a culture poised to move into virtual and augmented reality in a big way, Yumiko was interested in how the past might inform the very near future.
Aside from a few years after college, Yumiko and I did our best to make sure we lived as close to each other as possible. I could walk to her place in fifteen minutes. Normally, we spent a great deal of time together, but we'd kept missing each other lately. I was working when Yumiko was available, and vice-versa. I always walked by Miko's place on my way home from work. Once night, after I'd spent all day working on the relaunch of the all-new Public Radio Alliance, which, at that moment, meant painting the studio and recovering some old chairs, I walked by and saw her through the window.
Yumiko lives in a large, street-level apartment in a classic four-floor red brick building, in a friendly, older neighborhood of Seattle. It's almost exactly half-way between the PRA studio and my apartment. People would congregate outside Yumiko's building in the warmer months, musicians, playwrights, novelists, and actors. We spent more that a few late nights drinking wine and talking about everything, from our love of Amy Hempel, to streak-free mascara, to how we wished we had the fortitude to read Proust or Pinchon. It was the beating, creative heart of the neighborhood. All were welcome.
I was walking home from work and saw Yumiko. Her blinds were up and her living room was clearly visible from the sidewalk. She was facing away from the window, sitting at her desk, watching something on her computer. I knocked and knocked, but I couldn't get her to turn and look. She had to hear me. I rang her extremely loud and irritating doorbell, which I knew she hated. After a few minutes of non-stop ringing and banging, she slowly stood up and answered the door.
She wasn't herself, at all. She appeared completely dazed, and confused. I told her that I'd been knocking for a long time. She said she didn't hear any knocking, only the doorbell. I made us tea. It took her a few minutes to shake it off, but she eventually seemed to come back down to earth.
I asked her what she was doing that was so important. She told me that she'd been watching a video. It was something she'd discovered while digging into an old computer game from the early 80s, an Apple II game called Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Yumiko told me she'd discovered something in the code of Wizardry while following a lead on some kid's suicide, something that lead her to an old website, the kind of site where there was nothing left, aside from a few broken image links; basically a Wayback Machine relic of the Netscape or Mosaic era. But a link on that site lead her to an outdated, obviously obsolete personality test of some kind. She told me that the questions felt to her like what she imagined Scientology might be like, although she had no basis of comparison, just a feeling. There were only five questions, so she answered them and pressed "submit." She told me she must have done something right, because that quiz or test unlocked a link to a torrent file which resulted in her downloading the video she'd been watching. I asked her what the video was about, but she couldn't really answer. She said it was supposed to have a clue, something that would open the next door, or portal, what the player's called, "rabbit holes."
I thought all of this was a little strange, of course, but Yumiko did have her quirks, a lot of them. She was extremely well-educated and smart, but she went through an astrology phase, a pyramid scheme thing about sound healing, and more than a few other strange scenarios. I would have forgotten all about the video thing if it hadn't happened again, two nights later.
[Advertising break.]
Yumiko was supposed to meet me at the studio; we were gonna have dinner together to celebrate my promotion. I had just been made a capital-P producer at the all-new Public Radio Alliance, which was both exciting and terrifying.
When Miko didn't show up, I called, texted, and emailed, but there was no response. I called Harper and a few other friends but nobody had seen her. Worried, I stopped by her place on my way home, only to find her in the same position she'd been in two nights ago: sitting in a chair, staring at her laptop. I knocked, just like before, and, just like before, Yumiko didn't respond. She just kept... watching. Staring. I tried to make out what she was watching but her body was blocking the screen. This time, even after ringing the bell, she wouldn't answer. I knocked and rang, and knocked and banged, but nothing. She just kept staring at the screen. I was getting really worried at this point and I rang the super. She finally opened Yumiko's door after knocking for a full minute.
I rushed into the living room and found her, sitting there, watching the same video. Her apartment smelled terrible. She smelled terrible. I thanked the super and told her I'd let her know if anything was wrong.
I shut Yumiko's laptop and she looked up at me, dazed again. She asked what I was doing there. I told her we had a date. She thought it was tomorrow. I told her, it was tomorrow.
That's when I noticed that Yumiko had peed herself. And it looked like she'd done it more than once. She slowly tried to get up, but she had a really hard time moving her legs or arms at first. I suddenly realized she'd been sitting in front of that screen for at least twenty-four hours, possibly longer. There was something seriously wrong with Yumiko.
After I helped her into the shower and made her eat some soup and half a sandwich, I asked her about the video. What was it? Why was she watching it for so long? She didn't remember the video being long at all. Just a few minutes, she said. I tried to explain that she'd been sitting in front of her computer for more than a day, that she'd... peed herself, but it didn't seem to register as strange or important to her. She wasn't... all there. I decided Yumiko needed some kind of intervention, and she needed it now.
I called Yumiko's brother, Adam, and he suggested that the two of us should speak with Miko before we called her parents. I agreed, and set up our intervention under the guise of a dinner. The three of us used to eat together all the time, so there was no reason she would suspect anything. Yumiko, however, never made it to that dinner.
She was gone.
After waiting an hour for her to show up, Adam and I drove over to Miko's place. Her front door was wide-open, her laptop and some money were out in the open, sitting on her desk. We called the police, but she seemed to believe she was just another Millennial rebelling against her stern Asian parents. They weren't willing or able to declare Yumiko missing for twenty-four hours.
After explaining that Yumiko was American, not Japanese, I yelled at them to dust for prints, to search for evidence, but they weren't nearly as concerned as I was. Even Adam, who hadn't seen Miko in the state I'd seen her in, believed she'd probably gone our, and accidentally left the door open.
Adam and I couldn't figure out her password, so he gave the police permission to take her laptop, and they agreed to tell us if they were able to dig up anything as soon as they were legally able to do so. We looked everywhere, but we couldn't find her phone.
The next day, when Yumiko didn't show up, both Adam and the police came around to my way of thinking, but by then we'd already lost twenty-four of the first forty-eight hours, the time period law enforcement considers crucial as far as potential rescue and recovery.
Yumiko wasn't rescued or recovered in that time period, but I'm going to find my friend. I'm not giving up.
For the first month after Yumiko's disappearance, Adam and I did nothing but put up posters and field phone calls and messages from a tipline I'd set up. There were a lot of calls, but no solid leads. Right around this time, Adam's partner had a very serious health scare, and Adam spent most of his time after that in Bellingham, with his husband Marco, and I was left to go through all the calls on my own.
Yumiko's parents flew back and forth to Japan; Yumiko's mother had become convinced by Yumiko's allegedly psychic aunt that something terrible had befallen her daughter. Yumiko's mother was currently in Japan to consult a group of mystics her sister had assembled to help find Yumiko in the spirit realm and help guide her back. Yumiko's father went with his wife. She was in no condition to travel alone. They remained in constant communication with Adam who was running point on everything here. Yumiko's mother was willing to try anything, and I can't really blame her, I suppose, although I really wish they'd remained here in Seattle.
I'd put up all the posters I possibly could, and calls on the tipline stopped coming in. I felt like I was wasting time. There had to be something else I could do to find my missing friend. That's when I spoke with producer Terry Miles about creating this podcast for the Public Radio Alliance.
I'd been documenting my search for Yumiko from the beginning, but it was at this point that I decided to focus my energy on this show, as a way of not only continuing to document my search for Yumiko, but perhaps more importantly, as a way of eliciting assistance, engaging the hivemind; a way of asking you, our listeners, for help.
The police didn't appear to have the motivation, or the resources, to dig into every aspect of Yumiko's life, but I did. So I started looking into everything I could, beginning with the mysterious something Yumiko had discovered hidden in the ancient computer game called Wizardry.
Just like Yumiko described, there was one working link that lead to a strange personality test. It was... weird. All kinds of curious moral dilemmas. I quickly answered the five questions and waited. Nothing. I took the test again with slightly different answers. Still nothing. The third time through I read over the questions in detail and did my very best to answer the strange questions as honestly as possible. This third set of answers resulted in my being emailed the torrent file link. I immediately downloaded the file which turned out to be that creepy video that appeared to have put Yumiko into some kind of weird hypnotic state.
So. How to describe that video. I suppose the closest thing would be that creepy film-within-the-film they showed in Ringu, or, The Ring. It was a lot of grainy patterns, and video tape tracking-adjusted weirdness. Harper was way too freaked out to watch, but I made her watch me watch it, to make sure I didn't pee myself, or anything weird.
The video wasn't very long; it was actually a loop, but - and this is where things get kind of weird - I could never find where the loop ended and restarted. I feel like it was different every time, and every time I missed it and realized I was seeing something I'd already seen, I felt... strange, as if somebody was... behind my eyes, watching through me. Even with Harper there with me in the room, the whole experience was really... unnerving.
I've been considering posting that video to the notes section of our website, but after what happened to Yumiko, I'm not sure that's the most responsible thing to do. I wouldn't say that I'm a believer or an atheist; I'm kind of somewhere in the middle, closer to agnostic, I suppose, but I'm beginning to wonder about whether or not I believe in something outside of our regular human experience. I'm beginning to wonder about a lot of things.
While I was reexamining Yumiko's most recent emails to me for any clues, I received an instant message via CatChat, the strange application that I'd never actually installed. It was nothing but a question mark. I replied with a question mark of my own. A few minutes later, I received another message: seven digits, what I assumed was a phone number. So I called the number. The voice on the other end was the man who calls himself Concernicus Jones.
[The sound of a dial tone]
CARLY: (voiceover) I called him back a few times, but there was no answer. He sent me a file, an attachment via the CatChat app. It was another PDF. This one featured two scanned pages. One page looked like it might be an early draft of a research paper or something similar. The second page was a series of escort reviews from an online forum.
The document that looked like some kind of research paper appeared to be connected to Rabbits. The language was similar to Dr. Prescott's competition manifesto. The escort reviews were harder to parse. I had no idea if one of them was supposed to be Yumiko. I'll have more on that list of reviews and the other document soon, and, of course, I'm going to upload copies of both PDF files to the notes section of our website.
In the meantime, I took a trip to the Burke Natural History Museum, to follow up on Yumiko borrowing Harper's membership card. I asked the museum's director who and what the police had been interested in talking to and looking at when they'd come around asking questions about Yumiko earlier
CARLY: (voiceover) That's museum director Ron Palahniuk. He's willow thin with gold wire-rimmed glasses and beige corduroy pants.
CARLY: (voiceover) He walked me through the museum, and stopped when we reached the birds section. He gently sat the object of Yumiko's quest down onto the table.
CARLY: (voiceover) The story of the passenger pigeon is horrifying and fascinating. Turns out the reason they went extinct so quickly is the fact that they were easy prey, extremely easy for humans to slaughter in enormous numbers. One technique used was to tie one end of a string to the foot of a captured pigeon and the other end to the leg of a stool. When the terrified pigeon tried to fly away, its fluttering wings indicated to the rest of the flock that it had found food. The flock, which arrived in unimaginably high numbers, was incredibly easy to kill. This is where we get the term, "stool pigeon," which means somebody who betrays another.
[Advertising break]
CARLY: (voiceover) Who was it that Yumiko had been looking for? And what was it with her interest in passenger pigeons? As long as I'd known her, she'd shown no interest in anthropology, outside of its relation to popular or video game culture.
I needed to ask Jones a few questions about the documents he'd sent, so I called the number I'd used to reach him earlier. There was no answer, and no voicemail option.
I went through the escort reviews and tried to find Yumiko. It didn't take me long. There was one post on the forum by an escort calling herself, "Lysandra." I believed that username was most likely a nod to Aphra Behn, one of Yumiko's literary heroes. At the bottom of the post was a broken link to a site called, "lysandraloves.net." The dimensions of the previous photos in the broken links matched the dimensions of those previous photos exactly. "Lysandraloves.net" lead to a site identical to the site I found when I did that reverse image search earlier, the site with the broken photo links. It didn't take me long to find the escort review forum from Jones' PDF online. I couldn't find anything other than the page Jones had sent, only the one post from Lysandra. I signed up on the forum and tried sending messages to a couple of the users who had replied to Lysandra's post. I didn't get any responses, which isn't surprising, I suppose. The world of escorts is probably not a world concerned with user transparency. I wasn't going to get anywhere going directly after the Johns. So I took a different approach.
One of the rwo users who had replied to her post had never posted in the forum before, but the other was a regular. He posted a lot, commenting on all kinds of other escorts, and he left reviews. I noticed a bunch of great reviews for a girl named Melyssa, with a Y, and one terrible review for a girl named Amy X. I figured I'd have better luck with Amy X.
CARLY: (voiceover) I explained what I wanted from Amy. How I wanted her to forward a client's number. She told me to... well, you can imagine what she told me. Until she found out who it was.
CARLY: (voiceover) She gave me his number. I sent him a message from an email account I'd created called, "lysandraloves," and included a photo of Yumiko. I asked to meet for a date. I got a response within an hour.
CARLY: (voiceover) I asked him if she said anything else, if there was anything else he could remember. He told me that she wore a nice black dress, asked him the question, spent a bit of time texting or emailing on her phone, and then split.
Yumiko's phone wasn't in her apartment, and the police said that Yumiko's cell phone company have been unable to find anything connected to her account. I didn't have any hacker friends, so I called the next best thing: the person who had somehow installed the CatChat application onto my laptop. Just like before, there was no answer and no voicemail. Five minutes later, I received a call from an unknown caller. I started recording as soon as I could.
CARLY: (voiceover) I didn't tell Jones about the information I'd received from Gary, about Yumiko asking "How many steps to the lighthouse?" I had a feeling that Jones was on the level, but at this point, I wasn't ready to start trusting cryptic strangers. Especially cryptic strangers who'd hacked into my computer.
CARLY: (voiceover) So, Jones and I were going to be working together. He seemed to know I'd found something at the museum. I wondered if he knew I'd been lying about finding anything in the escort reviews as well. Part of me wanted to call him back and come clean, but I still wasn't sure I could trust him. How can I trust somebody I'm not even sure I can get in touch with? The problem is, I have so many questions, and so far, Jones was the only person I could speak with who might have at least some of the answers.
I still couldn't believe Yumiko was leading a whole other life. We'd always told each other everything. How could she be playing Rabbits and working undercover as some kind of escort without me knowing? It just didn't fit with the Yumiko I knew... or thought I knew.
Later that night, I was sitting cross-legged on my bed, just about to turn on my iPad and dig into the document Jones had sent, the document he referred to as a speech of some kind, when I heard the familiar start-up chime of my laptop. I thought that was weird, and it completely freaked me out. I was alone in my apartment, and with everything that's been happening, well, I haven't been sleeping much. I was on edge. I unplugged my solid brass table lamp, held it as a weapon, and slowly moved over to my desk to shut down my computer. But... it wasn't on.
Now I was even more freaked out. I looked around that part of my room. I couldn't find anything capable of making a similar sound, and I knew that sound. We all know that sound. It's very specific.
My heart was pounding. My hands, shaking. I finally found the source of that sound in the bottom drawer of my desk. It was Yumiko's computer. It was humming. I opened it up, and saw the familiar start-up screen, Yumiko's smiling face in her icon. The cursor was flashing, waiting for her password. I set the computer down on my bed, and moved through my entire apartment, turning lights on and off, brass lamp held high above my head, ready to swing at the first thing that moved. But I was alone.
Convinced my apartment was secure, I sat back down on my bed, typed the word "Rabbits" into the password field, and pressed enter.
It's Rabbits. I'm Carly Parker. We'll be back again in two weeks. Until next time, stay safe.
So, I took the photo of Yumiko to the police, convinced I finally had something they would respond to. She'd gotten that tattoo about a month before she disappeared. The police looked into it, but the problem was, Yumiko never told her parents or her brother about the tattoo. The artist who did it was unreachable. Apparently, he'd moved to Thailand to live off the grid. The police asked me if I had any evidence that Yumiko had been working as a prostitute. I told them she wasn't a prostitute, but that she must have been masquerading as one for some reason. I could tell they were getting tired of me. Extremely tired. I needed to try something else.
[Phone ringing.]
JONES: Hello?
CARLY: Hi. Are you the person who sent me that picture of Yumiko?
JONES: [A pause] Yes.
CARLY: Concernicus Jones?
JONES: [Laughing] It doesn't sound quite as cool hearing it said aloud.
CARLY: How did you get that application on my computer?
JONES: That's your question?
CARLY: Answer it. ...Please?
JONES: I'm trying to help.
CARLY: Okay, help me understand how you broke into my computer. Are you a hacker?
JONES: No. But I have a few friends in the business.
CARLY: What do you want?
JONES: [sighing] Like I said, I wanna help.
CARLY: What do I call you? Conernicus?
JONES: That's... not great.
CARLY: How about I call you CJ?
JONES: How 'bout Jones.
CARLY: That works.
CARLY: (voiceover) So that was Jones. I'll get back to him in a bit. But right now, I'm gonna do my best to fill in some more of the background, try and bring you up to speed on where I'm at with my investigation so far.
I told the police about Byron Price, the writer of that real-life treasure hunting book, The Secret, and how I found him connected to Yumiko. They wrote it down, but I could tell that the detective I spoke with, the same woman I talked to about the tattoo, had no interest in that connection either. In fact, she'd told me that they'd already looked into all that stuff, and reminded me I needed to be careful not to interfere with their investigation. I explained that I was just trying to help. She told me, as nicely as she could, that I would just be getting in the way. I could tell she believed two things: one, that I was probably nuts, and two, that Yumiko had taken off of her own volition. The police weren't going to be any help. I was on my own.
In 2015, a boy died from playing a video game for twenty-two days straight. He followed all the rules: ate, slept, took all the requisite breaks, but by sitting still for so long, he'd become susceptible to blood clotting. The same year, two Taiwanese men died in a very similar way. The first was a thirty-eight year old man who was found dead after playing video games for five days straight in an internet cafe in Taipei. The second was a thirty-two year old man who died from cardiac arrest after playing a computer game for three days without stopping. In 2009, in Korea, a young couple got so wrapped up in an online game that they failed to feed their child, who eventually starved to death.
How could such a horrific and unimaginable tragedy happen in today's world? I got all of this stuff from Yumiko. She'd recently become obsessed with the subject of, "death by video game," for lack of a better term. She was deep into researching this subject for her book when she disappeared.
People died in the 1980s playing video games. The most commonly sited examples are attributed to a game called, perhaps fittingly, Berserk. Interestingly, the most infamous deadly video game of them all, the vector-raster graphics combo game called Polybius, might not have even existed. But, if it did exist, Polybius was, allegedly, responsible for some extreme craziness up here in the Pacific Northwest.
Clearly video game weirdness has been happening for a long time, but actually dying from playing a video game, thankfully, remains rare. But virtual and augmented reality are here, and advances are going to be exponential. These types of gaming fatality are, probably, sadly, only going to increase. Are people going to abandon real life for the virtual world? Are people going to step out into traffic chasing virtual creatures? Imagine what's going to be possible. Imagine all the dark, crazy stuff out there now.
What happens if people get strung-out and can't tell the difference between what's happening in front of them in their VR glasses or in real life. There are incredible therapeutic benefits coming with virtual reality but there are also some extremely dangerous implications when it comes to addiction.
Along with all of her research into the strange deaths surrounding video games for her book, Yumiko had been researching an article on online video game addiction. Like I said, she was obsessed.
I was really into video games as a kid, but my older brother, Eric - older by nineteen years - was possessed. He almost lost his thumb from playing too much Intellivision, Auto Racing and Space Spartans in particular.
Space Spartans was a clone of the wildly popular Atari game called Star Raiders. Intellivision, by Mattel, had these strange-looking disc controllers, controllers that, to my knowledge, nobody's used before or since. They were fairly awkward, nowhere near as useful as the joystick that came with the far more successful Atari 2600, released a year earlier. Eric's thumb became so infected from constantly rubbing his nail into his cuticle that my parents had to give his Intellivision console away. It was good news for Eric: this meant our family finally got an Atari. I can't stress enough how addicted my brother was to playing video games, and I mean capital-A addicted. As a teenager he actually took a trip to the famous arcade, Fun Spot, to play Centipede against infamous American video game champion, Billy Mitchell. My brother didn't win. Not even close. He came home, somehow convinced my parents to buy him a stand-up Centipede machine, and started practicing every day. That machine is still in my parents' basement. Yumiko and I played it constantly when we were kids.
By the time I was born in 1989, Eric had amassed an enormous collection of computers, disc drives, and consoles. I grew up surrounded by this kind of stuff. I looked up to my brother, and it wasn't long before I began to share his obsession with video games and video game culture, an obsession that only increased after he died - after he committed suicide.
He never did make it back to Fun Spot for a rematch with Billy Mitchell.
My brother always made me laugh. We played video games constantly. I loved spending time with him. I miss him.
My brother lived in our parents' basement his entire life, after his death, I inherited Eric's bedroom and all the ancient crazy computer and game console stuff that came with it. I'm not sure how to describe my brother's room. It looked similar to the Lone Gunmen's operation in The X-Files, or something out of Battlestar Galactica. Every square inch of space was covered in computing or gaming equipment. Where other people would have DVDs, books, or CDs, he had racks of game cartridges, from ActiVision to Atari, ColecoVision to Sega Genesis. He had them all. His floppy disc and data cassette tape collections were even bigger. If you needed an all-ready way out-of-date 14.4 dial-up modem in 1999, I had seven of them.
Our family had always been what you'd call lower-middle class, and we were always at least four or five years behind the rest of the kids in our neighborhood. By the time I was playing Yoshi's Island on the Nintendo, the GameBoy Color had already come out. I wouldn't get up-to-date when it came to video games until I bought the PlayStation 2 when it came out, just around Halloween, in the year 2000.
Shortly before she disappeared, Yumiko had asked to speak with me about ColecoVision's Donkey Kong, one of our favorite console games from back then. Her thesis being, Donkey Kong was the first console game that actually delivered an experience comparable to that of a stand-up cabinet arcade game. She was writing an article for Wired, tracking certain aspects of console versus arcade. With a culture poised to move into virtual and augmented reality in a big way, Yumiko was interested in how the past might inform the very near future.
Aside from a few years after college, Yumiko and I did our best to make sure we lived as close to each other as possible. I could walk to her place in fifteen minutes. Normally, we spent a great deal of time together, but we'd kept missing each other lately. I was working when Yumiko was available, and vice-versa. I always walked by Miko's place on my way home from work. Once night, after I'd spent all day working on the relaunch of the all-new Public Radio Alliance, which, at that moment, meant painting the studio and recovering some old chairs, I walked by and saw her through the window.
Yumiko lives in a large, street-level apartment in a classic four-floor red brick building, in a friendly, older neighborhood of Seattle. It's almost exactly half-way between the PRA studio and my apartment. People would congregate outside Yumiko's building in the warmer months, musicians, playwrights, novelists, and actors. We spent more that a few late nights drinking wine and talking about everything, from our love of Amy Hempel, to streak-free mascara, to how we wished we had the fortitude to read Proust or Pinchon. It was the beating, creative heart of the neighborhood. All were welcome.
I was walking home from work and saw Yumiko. Her blinds were up and her living room was clearly visible from the sidewalk. She was facing away from the window, sitting at her desk, watching something on her computer. I knocked and knocked, but I couldn't get her to turn and look. She had to hear me. I rang her extremely loud and irritating doorbell, which I knew she hated. After a few minutes of non-stop ringing and banging, she slowly stood up and answered the door.
She wasn't herself, at all. She appeared completely dazed, and confused. I told her that I'd been knocking for a long time. She said she didn't hear any knocking, only the doorbell. I made us tea. It took her a few minutes to shake it off, but she eventually seemed to come back down to earth.
I asked her what she was doing that was so important. She told me that she'd been watching a video. It was something she'd discovered while digging into an old computer game from the early 80s, an Apple II game called Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord. Yumiko told me she'd discovered something in the code of Wizardry while following a lead on some kid's suicide, something that lead her to an old website, the kind of site where there was nothing left, aside from a few broken image links; basically a Wayback Machine relic of the Netscape or Mosaic era. But a link on that site lead her to an outdated, obviously obsolete personality test of some kind. She told me that the questions felt to her like what she imagined Scientology might be like, although she had no basis of comparison, just a feeling. There were only five questions, so she answered them and pressed "submit." She told me she must have done something right, because that quiz or test unlocked a link to a torrent file which resulted in her downloading the video she'd been watching. I asked her what the video was about, but she couldn't really answer. She said it was supposed to have a clue, something that would open the next door, or portal, what the player's called, "rabbit holes."
I thought all of this was a little strange, of course, but Yumiko did have her quirks, a lot of them. She was extremely well-educated and smart, but she went through an astrology phase, a pyramid scheme thing about sound healing, and more than a few other strange scenarios. I would have forgotten all about the video thing if it hadn't happened again, two nights later.
[Advertising break.]
Yumiko was supposed to meet me at the studio; we were gonna have dinner together to celebrate my promotion. I had just been made a capital-P producer at the all-new Public Radio Alliance, which was both exciting and terrifying.
When Miko didn't show up, I called, texted, and emailed, but there was no response. I called Harper and a few other friends but nobody had seen her. Worried, I stopped by her place on my way home, only to find her in the same position she'd been in two nights ago: sitting in a chair, staring at her laptop. I knocked, just like before, and, just like before, Yumiko didn't respond. She just kept... watching. Staring. I tried to make out what she was watching but her body was blocking the screen. This time, even after ringing the bell, she wouldn't answer. I knocked and rang, and knocked and banged, but nothing. She just kept staring at the screen. I was getting really worried at this point and I rang the super. She finally opened Yumiko's door after knocking for a full minute.
I rushed into the living room and found her, sitting there, watching the same video. Her apartment smelled terrible. She smelled terrible. I thanked the super and told her I'd let her know if anything was wrong.
I shut Yumiko's laptop and she looked up at me, dazed again. She asked what I was doing there. I told her we had a date. She thought it was tomorrow. I told her, it was tomorrow.
That's when I noticed that Yumiko had peed herself. And it looked like she'd done it more than once. She slowly tried to get up, but she had a really hard time moving her legs or arms at first. I suddenly realized she'd been sitting in front of that screen for at least twenty-four hours, possibly longer. There was something seriously wrong with Yumiko.
After I helped her into the shower and made her eat some soup and half a sandwich, I asked her about the video. What was it? Why was she watching it for so long? She didn't remember the video being long at all. Just a few minutes, she said. I tried to explain that she'd been sitting in front of her computer for more than a day, that she'd... peed herself, but it didn't seem to register as strange or important to her. She wasn't... all there. I decided Yumiko needed some kind of intervention, and she needed it now.
I called Yumiko's brother, Adam, and he suggested that the two of us should speak with Miko before we called her parents. I agreed, and set up our intervention under the guise of a dinner. The three of us used to eat together all the time, so there was no reason she would suspect anything. Yumiko, however, never made it to that dinner.
She was gone.
After waiting an hour for her to show up, Adam and I drove over to Miko's place. Her front door was wide-open, her laptop and some money were out in the open, sitting on her desk. We called the police, but she seemed to believe she was just another Millennial rebelling against her stern Asian parents. They weren't willing or able to declare Yumiko missing for twenty-four hours.
After explaining that Yumiko was American, not Japanese, I yelled at them to dust for prints, to search for evidence, but they weren't nearly as concerned as I was. Even Adam, who hadn't seen Miko in the state I'd seen her in, believed she'd probably gone our, and accidentally left the door open.
Adam and I couldn't figure out her password, so he gave the police permission to take her laptop, and they agreed to tell us if they were able to dig up anything as soon as they were legally able to do so. We looked everywhere, but we couldn't find her phone.
The next day, when Yumiko didn't show up, both Adam and the police came around to my way of thinking, but by then we'd already lost twenty-four of the first forty-eight hours, the time period law enforcement considers crucial as far as potential rescue and recovery.
Yumiko wasn't rescued or recovered in that time period, but I'm going to find my friend. I'm not giving up.
For the first month after Yumiko's disappearance, Adam and I did nothing but put up posters and field phone calls and messages from a tipline I'd set up. There were a lot of calls, but no solid leads. Right around this time, Adam's partner had a very serious health scare, and Adam spent most of his time after that in Bellingham, with his husband Marco, and I was left to go through all the calls on my own.
Yumiko's parents flew back and forth to Japan; Yumiko's mother had become convinced by Yumiko's allegedly psychic aunt that something terrible had befallen her daughter. Yumiko's mother was currently in Japan to consult a group of mystics her sister had assembled to help find Yumiko in the spirit realm and help guide her back. Yumiko's father went with his wife. She was in no condition to travel alone. They remained in constant communication with Adam who was running point on everything here. Yumiko's mother was willing to try anything, and I can't really blame her, I suppose, although I really wish they'd remained here in Seattle.
I'd put up all the posters I possibly could, and calls on the tipline stopped coming in. I felt like I was wasting time. There had to be something else I could do to find my missing friend. That's when I spoke with producer Terry Miles about creating this podcast for the Public Radio Alliance.
I'd been documenting my search for Yumiko from the beginning, but it was at this point that I decided to focus my energy on this show, as a way of not only continuing to document my search for Yumiko, but perhaps more importantly, as a way of eliciting assistance, engaging the hivemind; a way of asking you, our listeners, for help.
The police didn't appear to have the motivation, or the resources, to dig into every aspect of Yumiko's life, but I did. So I started looking into everything I could, beginning with the mysterious something Yumiko had discovered hidden in the ancient computer game called Wizardry.
Just like Yumiko described, there was one working link that lead to a strange personality test. It was... weird. All kinds of curious moral dilemmas. I quickly answered the five questions and waited. Nothing. I took the test again with slightly different answers. Still nothing. The third time through I read over the questions in detail and did my very best to answer the strange questions as honestly as possible. This third set of answers resulted in my being emailed the torrent file link. I immediately downloaded the file which turned out to be that creepy video that appeared to have put Yumiko into some kind of weird hypnotic state.
So. How to describe that video. I suppose the closest thing would be that creepy film-within-the-film they showed in Ringu, or, The Ring. It was a lot of grainy patterns, and video tape tracking-adjusted weirdness. Harper was way too freaked out to watch, but I made her watch me watch it, to make sure I didn't pee myself, or anything weird.
The video wasn't very long; it was actually a loop, but - and this is where things get kind of weird - I could never find where the loop ended and restarted. I feel like it was different every time, and every time I missed it and realized I was seeing something I'd already seen, I felt... strange, as if somebody was... behind my eyes, watching through me. Even with Harper there with me in the room, the whole experience was really... unnerving.
I've been considering posting that video to the notes section of our website, but after what happened to Yumiko, I'm not sure that's the most responsible thing to do. I wouldn't say that I'm a believer or an atheist; I'm kind of somewhere in the middle, closer to agnostic, I suppose, but I'm beginning to wonder about whether or not I believe in something outside of our regular human experience. I'm beginning to wonder about a lot of things.
While I was reexamining Yumiko's most recent emails to me for any clues, I received an instant message via CatChat, the strange application that I'd never actually installed. It was nothing but a question mark. I replied with a question mark of my own. A few minutes later, I received another message: seven digits, what I assumed was a phone number. So I called the number. The voice on the other end was the man who calls himself Concernicus Jones.
CARLY: I need you to tell me everything you know about Yumiko. Who are you? Why are you doing this? What do you know?
JONES: Just diving right in, are we?
CARLY: Where did you get those photographs of Miko?
JONES: ...I only sent you one photo.
CARLY: I found some more.
JONES: How?
CARLY: I did a reverse image search. I found what appeared to be an abandoned website with a few more photos of the same person.
JONES: Your friend.
CARLY: Looks like it.
JONES: Well done. Do you have a tattoo of a dragon somewhere?
CARLY: Hah. Back to the photos of Yumiko.
JONES: I found them because she kind of... stepped in front of someone else.
CARLY: Literally?
JONES: Metaphorically.
CARLY: What someone else?
JONES: Somebody I've been following.
CARLY: Why were you following somebody?
JONES: Because they were... part of something.
CARLY: Okay, you're starting to sound more than a little conspiracy nut-esque.
JONES: It gets better. We're just getting started.
CARLY: What do you mean, 'part of something?'"
JONES: I mean, she's playing a part in a game.
CARLY: She's playing a game.
JONES: Maybe.
CARLY: What do you mean?
JONES: It's kind of complicated.
CARLY: Try me.
JONES: Okay, well, the number of people who are actual players is very small.
CARLY: ...Okay. So?
JONES: So it's more likely that your friend was playing a part in the game.
CARLY: What's the difference?
JONES: She may have been simply playing a role she was unaware she was playing.
CARLY: Okay. Well, that certainly doesn't make any sense.
JONES: Like I said, it's complicated. The number of actual players in this particular game is quite small.
CARLY: This particular game. IX.
JONES: That's right. IX.
CARLY: Rabbits.
JONES: [A pause] You're better informed than... than I had imagined you'd be at this stage.
CARLY: At what stage?
JONES: At the beginning.
CARLY: [A sigh] So what's this... Rabbits all about?
JONES: That's a tough one, I'm afraid, and I don't have much time at the moment.
CARLY: Okay, so, why'd you send that photo of Yumiko to me, and how did you know it was her?
JONES: I sent you that picture because I didn't - don't - wanna see your friend lost.
CARLY: Did you... use her services?
JONES: What do you mean?
CARLY: As an escort.
JONES: What? No!
CARLY: Are you sure?
JONES: Yes, I'm sure!
CARLY: Okay.
JONES: I sent you something else.
CARLY: Does it explain why you were following my friend?
JONES: It's a start.
CARLY: Thanks. I guess.
JONES: You're welcome.
CARLY: Now, tell me how you knew that it was -
[The sound of a dial tone]
CARLY: (voiceover) I called him back a few times, but there was no answer. He sent me a file, an attachment via the CatChat app. It was another PDF. This one featured two scanned pages. One page looked like it might be an early draft of a research paper or something similar. The second page was a series of escort reviews from an online forum.
The document that looked like some kind of research paper appeared to be connected to Rabbits. The language was similar to Dr. Prescott's competition manifesto. The escort reviews were harder to parse. I had no idea if one of them was supposed to be Yumiko. I'll have more on that list of reviews and the other document soon, and, of course, I'm going to upload copies of both PDF files to the notes section of our website.
In the meantime, I took a trip to the Burke Natural History Museum, to follow up on Yumiko borrowing Harper's membership card. I asked the museum's director who and what the police had been interested in talking to and looking at when they'd come around asking questions about Yumiko earlier
PALAHNIUK: Uh, well, sure, uh, it was just one detective. She... wanted to talk to anyone who was working that day. Anyone who had seen or had spoken to the missing girl. Y-your friend.
CARLY: (voiceover) That's museum director Ron Palahniuk. He's willow thin with gold wire-rimmed glasses and beige corduroy pants.
CARLY: The woman at the front desk told me that the detective spent most of her time here speaking with you.
PALAHNIUK: That's correct, yes.
CARLY: And why is that?
PALAHNIUK: Uh, because I'm the only one who spoke with her, uh, y-your friend.
CARLY: I'm just gonna show you a picture, if you don't mind confirming if it was Yumiko?
PALANIUK: Okay. [A pause] Uh, yeah, yeah, that's her. Although, her hair was different, uh, part of it was braided around the back.
CARLY: And what did you two talk about?
PALAHNIUK: Well, she did the talking mostly, she wanted to know how long a certain exhibit had been in place.
CARLY: Do you mind showing me that exhibit?
PALAHNIUK: No problem.
CARLY: Thanks.
CARLY: (voiceover) He walked me through the museum, and stopped when we reached the birds section. He gently sat the object of Yumiko's quest down onto the table.
PALAHNIUK: It's a passenger pigeon.
CARLY: I'm afraid I don't know much about them. Except that they're extinct, right?
PALAHNIUK: Right, right. The passenger pigeon was, at one time, the most abundant bird in North America. There were billions of them. One flock that passed through Ontario in 1866 was estimated at three and a half million pigeons. They completely blocked out the sun,and took fourteen hours to pass.
CARLY: ...Wow.
PALAHNIUK: Yeah. And they went from billion to extinct in under fifty years. The last survivors of the species, George and Martha, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1910 and 1914 respectively.
CARLY: That's so sad.
PALANIUK: It certainly is. This particular bird is one of just about fifteen hundred specimens left on earth.
CARLY: Can I touch its feathers?
PALAHNIUK: Ah, I'm sorry, the, uh, oil on your fin - oil on your hands...
CARLY: Of course. I understand. Um, what's that tag?
PALAHNIUK: Oh, it's informational. It's a description of the state of the specimen and a catalog number.
CARLY: Catalog number's... 6878.
PALAHNIUK: Right.
CARLY: Did Yumiko ask about anything else?
PALAHNIUK: Mm, nope, like I told the detective, she only looked at the birds, the passenger pigeon display specifically.
CARLY: Okay. Did the detective seem... overly concerned about finding my friend?
PALAHNIUK: Sure. I mean, she seemed competent, if that's what you're asking.
CARLY: I'm wondering if there was a sense of... urgency.
PALAHNIUK: Well, when I asked about the circumstances surrounding the young woman's disappearance, the detective did mention that your friend was an adult, and quite easily could have taken off on her own accord.
CARLY: She used those words? "Quite easily?"
PALAHNIUK: Yes, I think she did.
CARLY: Okay. Thank you.
PALAHNIUK: You're welcome.
CARLY: (voiceover) The story of the passenger pigeon is horrifying and fascinating. Turns out the reason they went extinct so quickly is the fact that they were easy prey, extremely easy for humans to slaughter in enormous numbers. One technique used was to tie one end of a string to the foot of a captured pigeon and the other end to the leg of a stool. When the terrified pigeon tried to fly away, its fluttering wings indicated to the rest of the flock that it had found food. The flock, which arrived in unimaginably high numbers, was incredibly easy to kill. This is where we get the term, "stool pigeon," which means somebody who betrays another.
[Advertising break]
CARLY: (voiceover) Who was it that Yumiko had been looking for? And what was it with her interest in passenger pigeons? As long as I'd known her, she'd shown no interest in anthropology, outside of its relation to popular or video game culture.
I needed to ask Jones a few questions about the documents he'd sent, so I called the number I'd used to reach him earlier. There was no answer, and no voicemail option.
I went through the escort reviews and tried to find Yumiko. It didn't take me long. There was one post on the forum by an escort calling herself, "Lysandra." I believed that username was most likely a nod to Aphra Behn, one of Yumiko's literary heroes. At the bottom of the post was a broken link to a site called, "lysandraloves.net." The dimensions of the previous photos in the broken links matched the dimensions of those previous photos exactly. "Lysandraloves.net" lead to a site identical to the site I found when I did that reverse image search earlier, the site with the broken photo links. It didn't take me long to find the escort review forum from Jones' PDF online. I couldn't find anything other than the page Jones had sent, only the one post from Lysandra. I signed up on the forum and tried sending messages to a couple of the users who had replied to Lysandra's post. I didn't get any responses, which isn't surprising, I suppose. The world of escorts is probably not a world concerned with user transparency. I wasn't going to get anywhere going directly after the Johns. So I took a different approach.
One of the rwo users who had replied to her post had never posted in the forum before, but the other was a regular. He posted a lot, commenting on all kinds of other escorts, and he left reviews. I noticed a bunch of great reviews for a girl named Melyssa, with a Y, and one terrible review for a girl named Amy X. I figured I'd have better luck with Amy X.
CARLY: Hello, Amy?
AMY: Who is this?
CARLY: My name is Carly Parker. I'm producing a podcast.
AMY: What's that?
CARLY: Uh, it's kind of, radio on demand.
AMY: Like, on the internet?
CARLY: Yeah, pretty much exactly like that.
AMY: That's cool. So, you're looking for a date?
CARLY: Not exactly.
CARLY: (voiceover) I explained what I wanted from Amy. How I wanted her to forward a client's number. She told me to... well, you can imagine what she told me. Until she found out who it was.
AMY: That fucker?
CARLY: You recognize the name?
AMY: He left me bad reviews all over the internet, because I wouldn't give him a Welshman's Tiara.
CARLY: ...What's a Welshman's Tiara?
AMY: It's when you take his **** **** *** ***.
CARLY: ...Oh.
AMY: Yeah. Do you have a pen?
CARLY: (voiceover) She gave me his number. I sent him a message from an email account I'd created called, "lysandraloves," and included a photo of Yumiko. I asked to meet for a date. I got a response within an hour.
CARLY: Hi, Gary?
GARY: Uh, hi.
CARLY: Hi. I'm Carly. Clearly not the girl from the pictures.
GARY: Hey, that's okay.
CARLY: Well, um, I wasn't exactly honest on the phone.
GARY: You're a cop.
CARLY: No. Not at all. I'm a journalist.
GARY: Are you recording this?
CARLY: I won't use your real name.
GARY: So... you're like, undercover, experiencing the escort thing?
CARLY: Uh, no, not exactly.
GARY: Okay?
CARLY: I'm looking for my missing friend.
GARY: The Japanese girl?
CARLY: Yeah.
GARY: Are we still gonna have sex?
CARLY: ...I'm afraid not.
GARY: What is it with that girl and now you with her picture?
CARLY: I -
GARY: Doesn't anybody wanna have sex anymore?
CARLY: Wait, so you didn't have sex with Yumiko? With Lysandra, you and she didn't...
GARY: No. She asked me some weird question and I guess she didn't get the answer she wanted so she split. Gave me a kiss on the cheek.
CARLY: What did she ask you?
GARY: Um, she asked me, "How many steps to the lighthouse?"
CARLY: What?
GARY: Are you sure about the no sex thing?
CARLY: Uh, yeah. Pretty sure. Sorry.
CARLY: (voiceover) I asked him if she said anything else, if there was anything else he could remember. He told me that she wore a nice black dress, asked him the question, spent a bit of time texting or emailing on her phone, and then split.
Yumiko's phone wasn't in her apartment, and the police said that Yumiko's cell phone company have been unable to find anything connected to her account. I didn't have any hacker friends, so I called the next best thing: the person who had somehow installed the CatChat application onto my laptop. Just like before, there was no answer and no voicemail. Five minutes later, I received a call from an unknown caller. I started recording as soon as I could.
CARLY: Why didn't you answer when I called earlier?
JONES: That phone is no longer in use.
CARLY: Is there a number I can reach you at, if I have additional questions?
JONES: What's this for, exactly?
CARLY: What do you mean?
JONES: Well, I understand you're looking for your friend, but why record it?
CARLY: It's kind of my job.
JONES: You're a journalist.
CARLY: Yes, but it's not just that.
JONES: No?
CARLY: No. It's also a way of collecting and organizing my thoughts. Using different parts of my brain, and inviting my listeners to help me. To take part in the investigation.
JONES: That makes sense. I suppose.
CARLY: It's also... Well, my former boss recommended my investigation take place in a public forum as a kind of... insurance policy.
JONES: You're hoping they won't come after you because they don't want to risk exposure?
CARLY: ...They? You make it sound like there's some kind of sinister organization out there that might come after me. [A pause] Jones.
JONES: What do you know about Rabbits?
CARLY: Well, I don't know much, but from what I've been able to dig up, it's precursor is old, like, been around forever, old. But the modern game began around 1959, what the modern players or participants call I. When the next iteration began, they called it II. Every version since has simply gone by a number.
JONES: Okay.
CARLY: The version of the game currently taking place, if you believe this is actually the real thing, is IX. At some point right around 1959, people began calling this modern version of the thing previously known only as "the game" by another name. Rabbits.
JONES: Yes, although to avoid confusion, it's all the same game.
CARLY: Rabbits.
JONES: Yes. Between World War II and 1959 there is no evidence that any games were played, but that doesn't mean they didn't happen. In fact, they almost certainly did, but we just... we don't have any proof. People started numbering the games in 1959, and that's also when the term "Rabbits" was born.
CARLY: Why Rabbits?
JONES: A stamp often appeared in some of the clues, a graphic of a rabbit. It kind of look like a John Tenniel illustration. It first appeared with a list of rules on the wall of laundromat in Seattle, at the beginning of I. And also, there's the term "rabbit hole."
CARLY: Right.
JONES: Do you believe this stuff? That Rabbits is real?
CARLY: I'm getting there.
JONES: Anything else about the game?
CARLY: You can never reveal contact with the game masters or puppet masters, what some people call "The Wardens." The game can start anywhere, any time, and they say it sometimes starts years before anyone even knows that it's running. Also, a doctor named Abigail Prescott connected to some well-known game theorists and theoretical physicists recorded some kind of rambling yet extremely interesting information dump-slash-manifesto about Rabbits. It somehow remains almost impossible to find online, or anywhere else.
JONES: That thing they call the Prescott Competition Manifesto? The recording that's been past around dark net bulletin boards and broadcast on pop-up pirate radio stations is incomplete.
CARLY: Okay...
JONES: It's spliced together bits and soundbites from Abigail Prescott's original series of quantum game theory symposium speeches.
CARLY: Does anybody have a copy of the original speeches?
JONES: No.
CARLY: So... no idea what's missing from the manifesto?
JONES: Nobody knows for sure.
CARLY: Why don't I believe you?
JONES: Is that everything you know about the game?
CARLY: Well, okay... There are rumors that the game was originally designed to recruit secret agents by the CIA or British intelligence, that you can win millions of dollars, that the game is dangerous, that people come to real-world harm. And that the mysterious figures known only as "The Wardens" appear as some kind of in-game security agents, for lack of a better term.
JONES: Anything else?
CARLY: Um... Well, there's something called, "The Circle," a kind of Rabbits Hall of Fame, listing the winners of the last eight games.
JONES: Seven.
CARLY: I thought this new version was IX?
JONES: [sighing] It is.
CARLY: What happened with VIII?
JONES: There was no winner of VIII.
CARLY: Why not?
JONES: It's complicated.
CARLY: I have time.
JONES: Maybe later.
CARLY: For sure later.
JONES: And you're pursuing this avenue of investigation because you believe your friend Yumiko was playing Rabbits?
CARLY: All I know is that she was obsessed with death and video games. She was weirdly hypnotized by some online video, and shortly after that, she disappeared. Everything I've been digging up seems to lead to this... game, and then you sent me that photo.
JONES: And now you're thinking it might be something else.
CARLY: Maybe. I dunno. If she really was an escort...
JONES: Did you get a chance to look at the documents I sent you?
CARLY: (voiceover) I didn't tell Jones about the information I'd received from Gary, about Yumiko asking "How many steps to the lighthouse?" I had a feeling that Jones was on the level, but at this point, I wasn't ready to start trusting cryptic strangers. Especially cryptic strangers who'd hacked into my computer.
CARLY: I glanced over the escort reviews.
JONES: And?
CARLY: Nothing yet.
JONES: And the other one?
CARLY: The research paper?
JONES: It's not a research paper. It's a speech. Look closer.
CARLY: Is there anything specific I should be looking for?
JONES: You really should take another look.
CARLY: Why not just tell me?
JONES: It doesn't work like that.
CARLY: Okay, but if I have questions, can I get in touch with you?
JONES: What did you find at the museum?
CARLY: How did you know I went to the museum?
JONES: If we're going to be working together, the information has to flow both ways.
CARLY: Are we going to be working together?
JONES: That depends.
CARLY: On what?
JONES: On whether or not you tell me what your friend was doing at the museum. [A pause] I won't contact you again.
CARLY: She was looking at the birds.
JONES: ...The birds?
CARLY: Passenger pigeons, or, well, pigeon, singular.
JONES: Thank you.
CARLY: You're... welcome.
CARLY: (voiceover) So, Jones and I were going to be working together. He seemed to know I'd found something at the museum. I wondered if he knew I'd been lying about finding anything in the escort reviews as well. Part of me wanted to call him back and come clean, but I still wasn't sure I could trust him. How can I trust somebody I'm not even sure I can get in touch with? The problem is, I have so many questions, and so far, Jones was the only person I could speak with who might have at least some of the answers.
I still couldn't believe Yumiko was leading a whole other life. We'd always told each other everything. How could she be playing Rabbits and working undercover as some kind of escort without me knowing? It just didn't fit with the Yumiko I knew... or thought I knew.
Later that night, I was sitting cross-legged on my bed, just about to turn on my iPad and dig into the document Jones had sent, the document he referred to as a speech of some kind, when I heard the familiar start-up chime of my laptop. I thought that was weird, and it completely freaked me out. I was alone in my apartment, and with everything that's been happening, well, I haven't been sleeping much. I was on edge. I unplugged my solid brass table lamp, held it as a weapon, and slowly moved over to my desk to shut down my computer. But... it wasn't on.
Now I was even more freaked out. I looked around that part of my room. I couldn't find anything capable of making a similar sound, and I knew that sound. We all know that sound. It's very specific.
My heart was pounding. My hands, shaking. I finally found the source of that sound in the bottom drawer of my desk. It was Yumiko's computer. It was humming. I opened it up, and saw the familiar start-up screen, Yumiko's smiling face in her icon. The cursor was flashing, waiting for her password. I set the computer down on my bed, and moved through my entire apartment, turning lights on and off, brass lamp held high above my head, ready to swing at the first thing that moved. But I was alone.
Convinced my apartment was secure, I sat back down on my bed, typed the word "Rabbits" into the password field, and pressed enter.
It's Rabbits. I'm Carly Parker. We'll be back again in two weeks. Until next time, stay safe.
Comments
Post a Comment