introduced me to in third grade, he’d always been fascinated with the boulders, with how, if you walked around some of them three times, then came back the other way, a door would open up.
For us in elementary, the same way the floor lamp in my living room had always been the robber, come to take me away, his kitchen island had always been our boulder. One time, spending the night, he even told me that’s where his mom had really gone, he was pretty sure. That he had walked wrong to the refrigerator, gone back for the butter he’d forgot by the toaster, then gone back the other way around the island, made some secret door swing open in her closet, and she had just reached through, fallen the rest of the way.
It’s stupid, but it’s real. Or, it was to us.
“You shit,” I said to him, just out loud, for making me think of all that again, but then . . . could that be it? This app had lived on RJ’s rig at the end, after all. What if the little image-reverse he’d built in, what if that was Link, turning back to go the opposite way around the boulder now? What if the doubletwist plus one necessary to open whatever door, what if it was just holding your phone upside down (1), backwards (2), and then flipping that image (3), which was already under so much strain just to stay straight?
That was just three things, though.
The boulders always required a fourth.
I checked my phone just before it shook in my hand, reminding me the images were ready—RJ’s idea.
I scrolled through them, still empty, and then the phone shook again, which was one more time than we’d coded for. Had RJ sneaked a reminder vibration in as well? But where? It would be scary, though, like the app was insisting, was trying to warn the user.
But one thing at a time.
I slammed the pics onto my laptop to try to figure if that distortion in the air could help me diagnose things.
It didn’t.
The scaled-back pictures that shouldn’t have been there, as their directory had been burned—there they were, stacked on my desktop. I clicked the top one, had a bigger screen now, and could zoom, see that it was just the crawling girl, scaled back to bug-size, hanging there in the air of the hall, not even remotely scary.
“Are you local or what?” I asked the top one, and thumbed through my phone’s cache.
No.
I wheeled the crawling girl close then far, close then far, like she was coming for me.
It wasn’t scary.
Still, before getting back to the real work of the night—it was completely possible my phone had cached those hundred images in some way I was too tired to lock onto—I decided to make sure the sampling was truly random, anyway, wasn’t just the first few from the array. Because that wouldn’t be nearly so easy a fix. Cracking RJ’s fake randomness, the 128 bit keys he liked to paste in, pretend he was hinging stuff on—it would be easier to just start over.
And maybe those keys were the source of the problem, even. Or the secret to keeping the lateral straight.
The top pic I’d already been seeing, of course. Crawling girl. Next was the shadow fingers we’d rigged reaching around a corner, but, just like all the sneak_up images in RJ’s hall, the app had placed them perfectly somehow, right on the edge of the doorway opening onto the living room.
Maybe the width of the hall did matter.
I nodded, went to the next.
It was the smoke. Like a progression.
Maybe that was a good idea, too, if we ever did that fake animation on the paid version: sequence the stock images, build some logic in that wouldn’t let this one pop unless that one had.
I clicked ahead, looking at my door instead of the screen for no real reason, and, when I came back to the laptop I felt a new hollowness in the deadspace behind my jaws, pushed the screen away so hard it shut.
My lungs were trying to hyperventilate or something.
No, my head, my head was doing that.
Same difference.
I looked to the door again. It was still shut.
I came back
For us in elementary, the same way the floor lamp in my living room had always been the robber, come to take me away, his kitchen island had always been our boulder. One time, spending the night, he even told me that’s where his mom had really gone, he was pretty sure. That he had walked wrong to the refrigerator, gone back for the butter he’d forgot by the toaster, then gone back the other way around the island, made some secret door swing open in her closet, and she had just reached through, fallen the rest of the way.
It’s stupid, but it’s real. Or, it was to us.
“You shit,” I said to him, just out loud, for making me think of all that again, but then . . . could that be it? This app had lived on RJ’s rig at the end, after all. What if the little image-reverse he’d built in, what if that was Link, turning back to go the opposite way around the boulder now? What if the doubletwist plus one necessary to open whatever door, what if it was just holding your phone upside down (1), backwards (2), and then flipping that image (3), which was already under so much strain just to stay straight?
That was just three things, though.
The boulders always required a fourth.
I checked my phone just before it shook in my hand, reminding me the images were ready—RJ’s idea.
I scrolled through them, still empty, and then the phone shook again, which was one more time than we’d coded for. Had RJ sneaked a reminder vibration in as well? But where? It would be scary, though, like the app was insisting, was trying to warn the user.
But one thing at a time.
I slammed the pics onto my laptop to try to figure if that distortion in the air could help me diagnose things.
It didn’t.
The scaled-back pictures that shouldn’t have been there, as their directory had been burned—there they were, stacked on my desktop. I clicked the top one, had a bigger screen now, and could zoom, see that it was just the crawling girl, scaled back to bug-size, hanging there in the air of the hall, not even remotely scary.
“Are you local or what?” I asked the top one, and thumbed through my phone’s cache.
No.
I wheeled the crawling girl close then far, close then far, like she was coming for me.
It wasn’t scary.
Still, before getting back to the real work of the night—it was completely possible my phone had cached those hundred images in some way I was too tired to lock onto—I decided to make sure the sampling was truly random, anyway, wasn’t just the first few from the array. Because that wouldn’t be nearly so easy a fix. Cracking RJ’s fake randomness, the 128 bit keys he liked to paste in, pretend he was hinging stuff on—it would be easier to just start over.
And maybe those keys were the source of the problem, even. Or the secret to keeping the lateral straight.
The top pic I’d already been seeing, of course. Crawling girl. Next was the shadow fingers we’d rigged reaching around a corner, but, just like all the sneak_up images in RJ’s hall, the app had placed them perfectly somehow, right on the edge of the doorway opening onto the living room.
Maybe the width of the hall did matter.
I nodded, went to the next.
It was the smoke. Like a progression.
Maybe that was a good idea, too, if we ever did that fake animation on the paid version: sequence the stock images, build some logic in that wouldn’t let this one pop unless that one had.
I clicked ahead, looking at my door instead of the screen for no real reason, and, when I came back to the laptop I felt a new hollowness in the deadspace behind my jaws, pushed the screen away so hard it shut.
My lungs were trying to hyperventilate or something.
No, my head, my head was doing that.
Same difference.
I looked to the door again. It was still shut.
I came back
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