by Simon Archer
I chuckled. “I’ll bring you a candy cane with a bow on it.”
“I’ll take it!”
I laughed along with her for a second before pausing as something went through my head.
“Hey,” Anne blinked. “You alright?”
“Yeah,” I said quickly, needing her to stop speaking so I could think. “Shh. Give me one second.”
Tom gave me a confused look. “What’s--?”
“Shh!” I moved like I was going to grab my backpack when I remembered that I hadn’t brought it with me. “Shit! Does anybody have a, uh…?”
I trailed off, still running figures through my head. I wasn’t sure exactly what inspired it, but something over the course of our conversation gave me an idea. I still had no idea how to track where the notorious number sequence came from, but I had a new idea for how to process it. There was a chance it would be just as useless as every other attempt, but either way, I hadn’t had a new idea in days. I contemplated staying and just writing it down, but I didn’t want to risk forgetting anything.
I stood up and grabbed my coffee cup.
“Hey!” Jackie frowned. “Where are you going?”
“I’m sorry, I’ve gotta go. I-I just had an idea I think might work!” I could hardly keep the excitement out of my voice at the prospect of making any progress. I waved at my friends as I rushed for the door. “Thanks for the coffee, J! You’re the best!”
I heard them call back to me, but I didn’t pay any attention. At that moment, I would have given anything for an apartment closer to campus or to have brought my laptop with me. Dammit! Why didn’t I bring my laptop with me?
My apartment didn’t have a parking lot for cars because it was a block away from a parking garage, but there was a chance I could get lucky with street parking. The entire walk to my car, I was reviewing this new idea in my head. The code I’d been studying was usually five hundred and eighty-eight digits. Sometimes there’d be one more or one less. In the standard digits, there’d be about three numbers that were always different, then sometimes another would be changed at random, one would be added, or even missing from the code.
I’d collected the first few iterations of the code from articles. Apparently, this thing had been floating around for a few years, but no one considered it to be serious until it hit the network provider. Then other businesses and individuals shared that it had happened to them too. I’d called the companies it had happened to and every reporter who’d published a story on the event.
One of them had collected a few copies of the codes, but since he didn’t have an explanation for what they meant, he didn’t think to publish them. After a few positive reviews of his articles, he was more than happy to forward the codes to me. I gathered a few more from the anonymous posts and was even able to find a few things on the Wayback Machine.
My new idea felt so obvious, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before. Of course, if it failed, I would realize something so simple could never be the answer. At the moment, I planned to take every iteration of the nearly six hundred digit code and overlay them, highlighting places where they didn’t match up exactly. There were a few different things to try from there, but the first one would be averaging out the various digits. If they followed any kind of pattern, hopefully, I’d be able to recognize it on sight and keep the guesswork to a minimum.
I managed to squeeze into a street parking space and hopped out of my car, leaving my coffee behind and nearly forgetting to even lock the door. I rushed to my apartment on the second floor as fast as I could, immediately sitting down in front of the dark laptop screen. I tapped the mouse to wake it up, then plugged it in. The last thing I wanted was for it to die on me in the middle of this.
I plugged the numbers into a program that would highlight the deviations and went to work. Time seemed to stand still as I worked, writing numbers down on sticky notes to put up on the wall whenever I found an inconsistency in the numbers.
Digit #134, variations: 2, 6, 4, 9, 4, 3…
Mean: 4.6 (5) Mode: 4
Digit #199, variations: 1, 1, 1, 1, 8, 9…
Mean: 3.5 (4) Mode: 1
Digit #352, variations: 7, 0, 3, 9, 0, 5…
Mean: 4 Mode: 0
In total, there were sixteen places where the codes differed. Out of nearly six hundred digits, only sixteen of them were different. Exactly four digits were different every single time while the rest seemed to be random - well, more random than the rest, at least.
I assumed the mean would be my best bet. I highlighted the digits in question before copying them into a new file and changing the numbers. At first glance, nothing seemed to make more sense than it had before, not to me at least. Still, that didn’t mean it was hopeless.
I was just about to drop the file into the program I’d coded to run it through a few different potential algorithms when I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sudden rattling of my desk.
I put my hand over my chest to feel my heart pounding as I realized it was coming from my cell phone. A picture of Jackie holding a tomato from her hometown’s state fair smiled at me while it buzzed on the table. I took a deep breath to steady my nerves and turned the ringer off, flipping the phone over. I could call her back in a few minutes, but I needed to see what this would come up with. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was on the edge of something that I’d been investigating for months.
I dragged the new file with the means into the program and dropped it in. It took a few seconds for the five- hundred and eighty-eight digits to load. I’d left out the random extra numbers completely, but I planned to add them in if this didn’t work.
As soon as the program had the complete sequence, a green laser began moving in a circle to tell me to wait patiently, and I’d have my numbers in a second. Of course, I was just irrational, but it felt as though it was taking ten times longer than usual.
Finally, the green laser faded. The window was black for a second before a new series of numbers popped up. All at once, I felt my hands go limp and start to shake, and my mouth felt dry.
I’d never received anything besides an error message.
2
There was a split second where disbelief racked my entire body, but that was quickly replaced by adrenaline and excitement. I’d been working with this code for months, and aside from successfully gathering the information, this was the first actual victory. This meant something. I didn’t know what just yet, but still.
I focused my eyes to pour over the numbers. It was then that I realized I hadn’t even put my glasses back on in all the excitement. I reached for the spot on the desk where I always left them, but my hand met nothing more than the table. I let my eyes dart away from the numbers for a second, but quickly did a double-take. My glasses weren’t there, but it wasn’t just that.
There was something strange about the table. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the grain on the wood almost seemed to be moving, but that couldn’t be right. Past my hand, I could see the wall and the window. They seemed to be moving too. I stood up quickly, knocking the chair over as I spun around the room. The ceiling, my bed, the bookshelf, even the print of a lantern-lit Tokyo street scene on my wall, everything around me seemed to fizz like the bubbles when you pour a soda.
I turned back to my laptop screen. The numbers in the green and black program were more visible than anything else in the room, but even they were starting to go fuzzy.
I rubbed my eyes furiously. I’d had an eye exam over the summer, and my optometrist said if I wore those glasses that block blue light from computers whenever I worked, I’d be fine. Surely forgetting them for ten, maybe fifteen minutes couldn’t cause me to go completely blind, could it?
When I removed my hands, everything looked worse. There was nothing more than faded blobs, mere suggestions of color around me. I took a step back and felt my ankle catch on the leg of the chair and went tumbling backward. I braced myself for my back to hit the carpet, but it never did.
; I was falling.
I whipped my head around but couldn’t make anything out. Colors seemed to fly past me, but I wasn’t sure if the lack of clarity was due to my eyesight or the speed at which I was falling.
Nothing was making sense. Even if the floor of my apartment had silently given way beneath me, there would be fourteen, maybe fifteen feet to fall before I hit the ground on the first floor, but that fall would take a second at most. I wasn’t exactly counting the seconds, but I could tell there were a lot of them. It was like one of those dreams where everything seems totally normal until you trip, take a massive fall, and wake up hyperventilating.
I closed my eyes, waiting for the moment when I’d feel shortness of breath, a rush of adrenaline, all those things that accompanied waking up from a fall. Maybe I fell asleep at some point and just forgot. If that was the case, I worried about forgetting the advances with the code I’d made. I tried to recall everything I’d done before my eyesight went fuzzy.
Find the mean and mode of the deviations. Out of five hundred eighty-eight digits, sixteen of them weren’t consistent. Sixteen deviations to find the mean and mode for. The first was digit number one hundred thirty-four. The mean was something rounded up to five, the mode was… I couldn’t remember the mode, but that would be easy to find. The second varying digit was number one hundred ninety-eight. Two away from two hundred, and the mode was two. Wait, no. Was it two or one? One hundred ninety-eight or ninety-nine?
Ninety-nine! I was sure this time. The second deviating digit was one hundred ninety-nine, and the mode was one.
Once I settled on a solid answer, I took a deep breath. As I did, I realized I was no longer falling. I hadn’t landed, but I wasn’t falling. My eyes fluttered open, and I was struck by sheer surprise when I saw the sky above me. I sat up quickly and looked back and forth.
“No fucking way.”
My apartment complex was gone. The street, the cars, the trees, everything was gone. Well, there were trees, but they were different trees. The trees on my street were perfectly trimmed and evenly spaced down the sidewalk, but the ones around me now looked like they were from an actual forest. No, not like, they were a forest. I set my hand on the ground and felt the grass. On campus, all the grass was stiff, and they would spray it with that fertilizer that was a gross shade of green, but this was all soft and natural.
As I stood and turned, my breath caught in my throat. The clearing behind me wasn’t just some empty, grassy field; it was a town. A town or a village? Was there a difference? Jackie would know. She always knew that kind of thing. I could ask her as soon as I saw her again.
When would I see her again?
An intense, lightheaded feeling hit me. I brought my hand up to my head and knelt back down on the grass before I could fall. I tried to think of what exactly could be going on, but nothing logical made sense, other than some kind of crazy dream. As idiotic as it felt, I pushed up my right sleeve to pinch my bicep and winced at the sharp pain. Dammit. There was no chance this was a dream.
Aside from that, the only other option was that I was hallucinating, right? The more I looked at the area in front of me, the more convinced I became of that. Just past me, the grass ended and became dirt between two buildings, but the buildings were nothing like they were in Berkeley. Hell, they were nothing like any building I’d ever laid eyes on.
The buildings closest to me, as well as several others across the clearing, were all made of short white walls in wooden frames and topped with tall straw roofs. I was five foot eight, and I think if I was any taller, I wouldn’t fit through the doors. Toward the center of the village, there were a couple of buildings that were larger with a second story. On the other side of the buildings, I could see the dirt impression forming a road up the side of a hill before disappearing behind the edge of a mountain.
I found my bearings and stood again, taking a few steps toward the buildings while I tried to figure out what was causing these hallucinations. The odds that my Advil or coffee had been spiked with something were pretty low, but not impossible. There could’ve been some kind of gas leak in the cafe or in my apartment, but would the hallucination be this rich? I’d only seen places like this in movies or video games, but the world around me wasn’t flat. I could see every inch, every angle of the off-white-walled buildings and lush trees.
As I moved closer to what appeared to be the center of the village, it caught my eye that I wasn’t alone. I rounded the corner of the nearest building, and about eight feet away stood a woman, stock still, staring at me. She had long black hair that was pulled gently by the wind, she was a few inches shorter than me, and wore an emerald green silk tunic with a seafoam green skirt underneath. There was something embroidered in gold, but I couldn’t make it out.
She looked like she worked at one of those museums where they dressed up to teach you about history. Her attire had a stark contrast to my casual college student clothing: slim black jeans, white sneakers, and a light blue t-shirt with Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man over a long-sleeved white shirt.
“Hi,” I waved awkwardly. “Um, I’m sorry to bother you.”
I paused, waiting for some kind of response. An eye roll, a nod, a half-hearted “No worries!” Nothing.
“Uh, my name is Ren. Ren So. I’m not sure where I am?”
The woman before me stayed silent and still. If I hadn’t seen her blink or her fingers twitching ever so slightly, I would have thought she was a statue.
“I’m sorry, the last thing I remember I was on campus at UC Berkeley, then everything sort of… It all sort of went fuzzy, and now I’m here.”
I looked around the village. From within the circle of buildings, it looked bigger than I’d previously thought. There was a large pebbled mosaic in the center of the dirt clearing that looked like it made some kind of flower I didn’t know the name of. I could see more buildings behind the others and small roads that seemed to lead to more private areas. Maybe houses? I couldn’t imagine everyone would live in one big circle, so that made more sense.
“Where am I?” I asked again, looking back at the woman.
She didn’t say a word.
From over her shoulder, I could see a door to one of the short buildings open, and a man who looked about twice my age stepped out. He had loose-fitting, beige cotton pants, reddish-brown shoes, and a maroon silk tunic with a brown sash and embroidery like the green-clad woman. I immediately abandoned the silent statue before me and jogged over to the man, waving an arm.
“Excuse me, sir!”
As soon as he laid eyes on me, the man stopped. He kept his hand on the handle of the door as though he anticipated needing an escape plan.
“Hi, sir, I’m so sorry to bother you. I’m a student at UC Berkeley, and the last thing I remember, I was just a couple blocks away from campus, and then I ended up here. If you could just point me in the right direction, I’ll make my way home and get out of your hair.”
The man watched me like I was insane. I felt my heart start to pound a little bit harder as I waited for a response. After what felt like ages, the man’s eyes seemed to dart over, probably to look at the woman, before he turned and rushed back inside his house.
A slight glare graced my face, and I couldn’t help but feel annoyed. Did they not speak English?
I turned around and saw about half a dozen more people outside now. Each one was staring at me. They all wore similar extravagant silk clothes and had long black or brown hair, even the men. I sighed and decided to give up on asking questions for now. What was I expecting them to say exactly? Oh, you’re actually just a crazy boy who fell through the floor of your apartment complex into the secret ancient village below the campus of UC Berkeley, and if you click your heels together three times, you’ll wake up in your bed again!
I had to be hallucinating. No one in my hallucination was going to speak to me. We were surrounded by nothing but trees and mountains for miles, and these people looked like they were out of place in a historical reenac
tment. How long was this going to last exactly?
A few more people had poked their heads out of their doors. I shifted my weight a bit, hoping they’d get disinterested soon. This was the kind of attention Tom or Jackie might enjoy, but I felt like the lobster being gazed at in a tank moments before it was to be boiled alive. A queasy feeling bubbled up in my stomach. I was starting to get a really bad feeling about all this, not just confused, but bad.
I took a few steps toward the floral mosaic. I had a better view of it now. Most of the tiles were a light beige, but the flower was a few different shades of dark red. Up close, it looked nice, but I could only imagine from far away it had to look ominous.
“Who are you?”
My head snapped up from the mosaic at the sound of another voice. On the other side of the circular stone image stood another man who looked like he was in his forties. Most of the surrounding men had hair that came down to their shoulders or their shoulder blades, but this man had dark brown hair longer than anyone else’s, even the women. It was tied up at the top of his head and still fell to his waist. Everyone here dressed rather ornate, but this man had to be important, because his clothes were all white and red silk with gold embroidery.
“Hi,” I couldn’t help but smile slightly at the wave of relief. “Hi. I’m sorry, I’ve been trying to ask--”
“Who are you?”
I blinked at the harsh tone. His expression finally registered on my face, and I recognized it as something between fear and anger. I swallowed hard before answering.
“Um, Ren. Ren Oliver So. I’m a st--”
“Why are you here?” He glared. I saw his hand move to his waistband, and at that, I noticed that he had a massive sword sheathed at his side. It had to be a prop, right? Some kind of toy? Either way, I took a step back and felt my pulse race.
“I don’t know. I just, I was home, and everything went fuzzy, and then I was here. U-um, I woke up over there.” I pointed at the grass behind two buildings where I’d first found myself. “If you could just point the way to Berkeley, I’ll leave immediately.”
