Rabbits(2)

Once the last phone was inside, I kicked the lid shut with a dramatic bang and pulled out an ancient reel-to-reel tape recorder.

I had a digital copy of the recording, of course. In fact, I’d made the reel-to-reel recording I was about to play from an MP3. But there’s just something romantic about analog tape. Like the cedar chest, the old tape recorder was for show, and these people had come here, to this old arcade in Seattle’s University District, for a show.

They’d come from their parents’ basements, their messy studio apartments, high-rise tower penthouses, and midcentury post-and-beam homes in the woods. They’d come to hear about the game. They’d come to hear The Prescott Competition Manifesto, or PCM.

Just as I was about to press play, I heard a voice from somewhere near the back of the room. “Is it true that you know Alan Scarpio?”

“Yeah, I know Scarpio. I mean, I met him once while I was playing the ninth iteration,” I said, trying to find the person who’d asked the question in the crowd.

There weren’t that many people here, maybe forty or fifty, but the arcade was small and the bodies were three or four deep in some places.

“Most people believe Scarpio won the sixth iteration of the game,” I said.

“Yeah, we know that. Tell us something we don’t know.”

I still couldn’t find the person speaking. It was a man’s voice, but it was hard to tell exactly where it was coming from over the drone of the videogames and pinball machines.

“Alan Scarpio is a gazillionaire playboy who hangs out with Johnny Depp,” said a young man leaning against an old Donkey Kong Jr. cabinet. “He can’t be a player.”

“Maybe he played, but there’s no evidence he won the game,” said a woman in a Titanica T-shirt. “?‘Californiac’ is the name listed in The Circle, not Alan Scarpio.”

“So then how do you explain his overnight wealth?” Sally Berkman replied—a familiar challenge when it came to Scarpio. “He has to be Californiac. It just makes sense. He was born in San Francisco.”

“Oh, well, if he was born in San Francisco, he must be the guy.” Donkey Kong Man was clearly looking to stir up some shit.

“San Francisco is in California,” Sally Berkman replied. “Californiac.”

“Wow, are you serious?” Donkey Kong Man said, shaking his head.

“How about I just play what you’ve come all this way to hear?” I said.

If I let them go on about Alan Scarpio and whether or not he was actually Californiac, the winner of the sixth iteration of the game, we’d be here all night. Again.

I nodded in the direction of a blond curly-haired woman standing near the front door, and she turned out the lights.

Her name was Chloe. She was a good friend of mine. She worked for the Magician.

The arcade was the Magician’s place.

It was an old speakeasy that had been converted into the arcade–slash–pizza joint back in the 1980s. The pizza oven had died more than a decade ago, so now it was just an arcade. Nobody understood how the Magician had been able to keep the place running through the rise of home-based and eventually handheld computer entertainment, but keep it running he did.

Walking into the arcade was like walking into another age.

The brick walls and exposed pipes in the ceiling clashed with the bright video screens and sharp 8-bit sounds of the arcade games, resulting in a strange yet perfectly comfortable blend of anachronisms.

Chloe called it eighties industrial.

The Magician was out of town on some kind of research trip, but he never came down for these things anyway.

He’d started letting a few of us use the place for meetings after the eighth iteration of the game. The Magician’s arcade became a kind of de facto clubhouse, an informal gathering place for those of us who remained obsessed with the game long after most everyone else had checked out.

I pressed play on the reel-to-reel recording, and the voice of Dr. Abigail Prescott filled the room.

    …The level of secrecy surrounding the game is concerning, as are the number of candidates…STATIC…it’s chaos from the trailhead to the first marker, no algorithm can track its logic…CRACKLE…I’ve heard the underlying condition of the game described, metaphorically, as a kind of fluid, like the cytoplasm or protoplasm of a cell…STATIC…It had been dormant for a very long time when 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. A student at Oxford put everything together and brought her professor into the thought matrix at Cambridge…CRACKLE…the name Rabbits was first used in reference to a graphic containing a rabbit on the wall of a laundromat in Seattle. Rabbits wasn’t the name of that specific iteration of the game, just like it’s not the name of this one…as far as any of us can tell, the games themselves—at least the games in this modern variation—don’t actually have names. They’re numbered by the community of players…STATIC…should be warned, we have reason to believe that the reports of both physical and mental jeopardy have been, in fact, underreported, and…STATIC.

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: