Rabbits(4)

“But, if you’d like more information, there’s a brand-new downloadable PDF on my website.”

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.

I said goodbye to each of the participants in turn as they collected their electronics and hurried out into the rain to catch their movie.

After the last of them had exited the arcade, I opened a small green lockbox and counted the donations. Two hundred and two dollars. Not bad. I left the Magician his cut and slid the lockbox under the counter.

“Well, that was all kinds of bullshit.” It was the voice from earlier, the man in the green military-style jacket. Beneath his jacket he wore a thin black hoodie, which hid his face. He was playing Robotron: 2084, the game Baron had been playing throughout my presentation.

At some point while people were leaving, he and Baron must have switched places.

“Where’s Baron?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The guy who was playing this game earlier.”

“I think he went to see Donnie Darko.”

Of course he did. Baron couldn’t be bothered to pay attention while I talked about Rabbits, but he’d be more than happy to pay seven dollars to see a movie he’s seen at least eighty times.

“Not bad,” the man said, nodding toward the screen.

I moved closer and saw the score. It wasn’t bad at all. It was much higher than Baron could have managed, and Baron was the best Robotron player any of us had ever seen.

“I used to play these things all the time.” At this point, the man in the green jacket turned around and slipped off his hoodie.

I recognized him immediately.

There are two things worth noting here. Number one, the man playing Robotron in the Magician’s arcade—the man who’d asked me if I knew Alan Scarpio—was the famous reclusive billionaire philanthropist and alleged winner of the sixth iteration of Rabbits: Alan fucking Scarpio. The second thing worth noting is that although I’d mentioned earlier that I knew Alan Scarpio, I’d never met him before in my life.

“I need your help,” he said.

“What for?” I replied.

“Something is wrong with Rabbits, and I need you to help me fix it.”

And with that, Alan Scarpio went right back to playing his game.





2


    SO WHAT? IT’S A FUCKING WOODPECKER


In case you’re wondering, my name is K. That’s it. Just K. One letter.

Two things I’ll tell you: First, K is short for something. And second, I’ll never tell you what that something is. You’ll just have to find a way to cope with that disappointment.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest: A place that, at the time, I considered the wettest and loneliest corner of the Earth. A place that, many years later, I would romanticize as a kind of dark green gloomy world of ancient secrets and hidden lives, and a place that I now see as a kind of perfectly disturbing amalgamation of all of those things.

I’m old enough to remember cabinet videogames in arcades, but young enough to have trouble recalling a time without the Internet.

As a child, my parents believed I had what’s called an eidetic memory: a remarkable ability to retain images, words, and patterns in extensive detail. Back then they used the term “photographic memory,” which is inaccurate. Photographic memory doesn’t exist, and even if it does, I didn’t have it. I was just able to remember certain things, picture them clearly, and recall them later. I couldn’t remember everything, just stuff connected to patterns I found interesting. It wasn’t a math trick. Although I may have been able to drop a box of toothpicks on the floor and tell you how many there were, you weren’t getting the square root of anything from me.

Because I was the kid who could remember weird shit, I was occasionally able to distract a couple of the angry bullies in my class long enough to make them forget to kick my ass, but that only worked about fifty percent of the time—a percentage that quickly plummeted to zero when I reached high school and the ability to focus on details and pick out complex connections became less of an occasional act of self-preservation and more of an obsession.

It was this obsession with finding patterns and cracking codes (that may or may not have actually been codes at all) that resulted in me being labeled “slightly neurodiverse”—a diagnosis that landed me on a number of different medications and a handful of different therapists’ couches. It was also this obsession that eventually led me into the world of Rabbits.

When asked to pinpoint the precise moment they’d heard about the game, people often can’t remember. Maybe they’d seen something on some obscure online bulletin board, or read a snippet of a conversation about hidden “kill screens” in arcade games from the 1980s. Or perhaps it was a friend of a friend talking about a kid who’d died while playing a strange Atari 2600 game that nobody can remember actually existing.

I remember exactly where I was standing when I first heard the name Rabbits.