“Yes. But that’s all I can say, and even that is a stretch. Fortunately, you figured it out on your own.”
“Look, I need you to give Sylvia a message from me when she comes back online,” Joel2 said.
“Of course.”
“Tell her that I love her. Tell her I understand why she did what she did, and that no matter what happens, we’ll get through this.”
“I will. I’ll tell her. That’s a very sweet message. It’s unlike you.”
“Weird,” Joel2 uttered.
“It’s not weird. It’s nice,” said Julie.
“No. I mean, this is weird. I just got a notification that Sylvia is in The Cave of Time.” He tried pinging his wife, but got no response. “I gotta go.”
“Okay, keep me updated. If you need any help, I’m here.”
“Yeah, because you’ve been so helpful already,” he muttered sarcastically and hung up.
Is she at work? Did she go back to New York without me? he wondered while opening the app.
The Cave of Time was the first title published in the Choose Your Own Adventure book series, which debuted in 1979. In it, the player could travel to several iconic time periods via a desert cave. Like every book in the series, it was an interactive story, letting the reader decide where the narrative went next by selecting from a number of options. Roughly half the choices led to the main character’s death. There were several other endings as well, but only one “best” ending.
In the year 2103, a team of cognitive neuroscientists and gaming technology experts created a psychoanalytical game based on The Cave of Time. The virtual reality game let players engage in iconic moments of the past, in the context of a choose-your-own-adventure scenario. The choices people made could be used to determine a player’s mental state and whether they suffered from any psychological irregularities.
Eventually, the game crossed over into the mainstream. People began to modify and record their virtual travels through different eras of time. It became kind of a what-if machine that let society investigate how past choices might have played out differently. After the Last War, many attempted to play out alternate strategies and endings to the conflict in The Cave of Time. Soon it became common wisdom that the war would have taken place regardless of what was done in the years preceding it. The prevailing theory was that the clockwork leading to the war’s advent was put into action thousands of years ago. Still, people go back in time through the caves in search of answers.
Sylvia and I liked the game for more mundane reasons. Since it could be played cooperatively, it was something we could do together, even if we weren’t together. When Sylvia got promoted to her new gig at IT, the job was considered so classified that external comms were absolutely verboten. Even Julie had to be modified to ensure compliance. This, compounded with the job’s long hours, made it very tough for Sylvia and me to check on each other’s welfare, let alone make plans to hang out after work. But thanks to a bug I discovered in The Cave of Time, we could leave messages for each other in a game location called Mr. Nelson’s Print Shop. Mostly it was stuff like, Starving for pizza. Meet at Alfred’s for lunch. These messages would synchronize between our instances of the game due to a sync glitch. Since the shop would respawn once we both disconnected, there was no evidence of our transgressions. It wasn’t ideal, but it was something.
The Cave of Time start screen appeared. What is she doing? Joel2 wondered as the intro music began.
A voice boomed, “Welcome, Billy Missile!” My gamer tag. It continued, “You’ve hiked through Snake Canyon once before while visiting your uncle Howard at Red Creek Ranch, but you never noticed any cave entrance. It looks as though a recent rockslide has uncovered it.”
Joel2 stood in a scrubby, bright Arizona desert. There was indeed a cave entrance off to his right. The orange Sun was setting behind the hill. Unless you were restoring a saved game, you never had the option of skipping the intro. The game forced him to enter the cave.
Inside was total darkness. Quickly, Joel2 navigated past the various tunnels, his path lit by phosphorescent material on the cave walls. He made sure not to fall in the occasional crevasse along the way, staying to the route he had memorized: Right/Right/Down/Down/Down/Down/Left/Up. As he exited the cave, a bright light transitioned him into the next location.
It was an eighteenth-century Philadelphia print shop, the kind in which Ben Franklin had worked. This one, supposedly, had been a popular spot for distributing American revolutionary pamphlets. A huge iron printing press stood against one wall, surrounded by wooden bins of individual metal letters, barrels of ink, and big round rolls of paper. The sounds of merchants and carriages going past could be heard faintly outside.
Joel2 jogged through the print shop, past the huge press and to the writing table. The familiar feather quill was not in its ink bottle, but on the floor. Sylvia was here! He flipped through the cotton papers. On the fourth sheet was her message:
Gehinnomites kidnapped me. Somehow they disabled my comms. I’m here. The last two words had been highlighted as a link. He read the rest.
DO NOT come alone! Get in touch with Bill Taraval. Tell him they know about Honeycomb. He’ll know what to do. I love y—
Something must have caused her to log off prematurely.
Joel2 logged off as well, frantically summoning the only kind of transport he could find on the local ride boards. In our time, nobody owned cars unless they were super rich and eccentric. If you needed to get somewhere, car dealers simply leased you a car for the duration of time you needed it, and when you reached your destination, the vehicle drove away. Some people paid premiums for specific models or brand names, but it was still cheaper to get those on demand than it was to buy one outright.
His transportation sorted, Joel2 threw on some new clothes, stuffed some chits into his pockets, and jogged down the steps to the parking lot. A high-pitched hum came from the bottom of the hill as a white Carryall Club Car golf cart wound its way toward him. Upon reaching the top, it parked itself in front of Joel2.
“?Buenos días, se?or!” it boomed in a warm Spanish accent. “?Adónde vas?”
“Take me here,” Joel2 said, copying Sylvia’s GDS location to the cart with a hand gesture. “And hurry.”