Alexander Plansky - Arcadia

There was no doubt about it.

Jake Miller had been murdered.

“All I’m telling you is, they’ve ruled it an accident.” Valerie Richter threw up her hands and leaned back in her chair. “I tend to trust the police with these things, they’ve had more experience with them than I have.”

“But you heard it,” Lewis said, pointing to the phone. It lay on the desk between them, the sunlight from the window reflecting off its black screen and dancing along the wall. “He says he’s stumbled onto something, a conspiracy.”

Richter sighed. “I know this might be hard to accept, I really do, but what we just listened to were the ramblings of a man who may have been on drugs.”

“Jake wasn’t a conspiracy theorist. Maybe he was running from someone.”

“Out in the desert? What’s he running from, Area 51? This isn’t the X-Files , Des.”

“But you can hear the other car, the one that rams him off the road!”

“I didn’t hear that,” she said, leaning in closer as he played it again. They both listened very carefully at the end. To Lewis, it was unmistakable. He could hear the roar of an engine growing louder a split second before the tires screeched as Miller swerved.

Richter sat there for a minute, completely silent. Lewis exited from voicemail and waited for her response. Finally, she nodded.

“I’ll admit it does sound like something else is there, but that could just be our ears playing tricks on us. There was no sign that the car had been rammed off the road.”

“But if Jake swerved to avoid it, and then tumbled off the road…”

Richter shook her head. “Sometimes, when our friends die we want there to be a villain. It’s easier to put the blame on some malevolent force than to accept that in real life, sometimes things just happen without reason. I don’t know why Jake pulled a gun on that clerk, I don’t know why he thought there was a conspiracy after him. It probably has something to do with drugs, which is sad. I hate to see good people turn to substance abuse, but then again I didn’t know much of his personal life outside the office.”

“And what about this voicemail?”

“If you want my advice, delete it. It’ll save you a lot of trouble from the police, and the last thing we need is a scandal. I can guarantee you that they wouldn’t find anything out and this would just slander one of our writers. We’re an up-and-coming digital magazine. We can’t take on Wired if people think our journalists are drug-laden conspiracy theorists. I want this quiet and respectful. It’s what Jake deserved.”

Lewis nodded solemnly.

“A lot of people have left early today. I’m not expecting much work to get done, other than my tribute piece that goes live at noon on our front page. You should take the rest of the day off.”

“Thank you,” he said.

As he passed through the door frame on the way out, he heard her say, “And Des?” He turned around. She forced a grim smile. “Take care of yourself.”

“Thanks, Valerie.”

He packed up his belongings but didn’t leave immediately. Lewis stopped by Miller’s cubicle, just a row away from his, where several flowers lay on the desk. He took one last glance around it, still taking in the fact that he would never see his friend sitting here again.

Papers and file folders were scattered about. He wondered how Miller had been so productive when he never seemed to be organized. They’d even made jokes about it from time to time. While Lewis’s sticky notes were neatly arranged on the wall in front of his desk, Miller’s were stuck all over the place at haphazard angles.

It almost brought a smile to his face, but then his eyes passed over one note posted next to a calendar and his blood ran cold. Making sure no one else was looking, he reached over and grabbed it, turning it over in his hands to be sure it was real.

It was teal blue and bore a single word in red sharpie, which had been circled in the same color:

Arcadia.

He called Jenna on the way back to his and Ricky’s place in Santa Monica, informing her of Miller’s passing, but excluding the part about the voicemail. She told him how sorry she was, that she’d only met him twice but he’d seemed like a good guy, and that he should come over to her place again tonight unless he needed to be alone. He thanked her, said he’d be glad to, and agreed to be there for dinner at six.

Lewis spent the afternoon sitting on the sofa scouring the corners of the Internet. The word “Arcadia” had a number of meanings, from the traditional image of a pastoral utopian society to the Tom Stoppard play to the Duran Duran off-shoot band from the 80s. Nothing gave him a lead.

He put his laptop on the kitchen counter and decided to pace around the apartment, mulling over the possibilities in his mind. Ricky wouldn’t be back until later, so he had plenty of time to himself to think.

Jake Miller had not been a drug abuser. Lewis had known him for only about a year from work, but they’d really hit it off. On more than one occasion when they’d been out drinking, Miller had drunkenly stumbled over to Lewis, grasped him by the shoulders and said, “I just don’t get the druggies, man. Who could need more than booze?”

Having never so much as touched a gram of marijuana in his life, even when offered in college, Lewis had agreed. He realized that if any of his friends were to try out an experimental substance, it would probably be his girlfriend. He knew Jenna occasionally did drugs, and he had spent an evening helping her recover from a bad trip on MDMA she’d gotten from some creep at a party, but she was far from an addict. Jake Miller would’ve been the last person to drop acid out in the desert.

So then what the hell had happened? What explained the paranoid, frantic voice that had spoken to him through the digital void? To Lewis, the sound of the distant, revving engine was key. There had to have been another car. Maybe it was just a near hit and run with a drunk, who fled the scene for fear of getting a DUI.

But that was just too coincidental. Miller was telling him about something he’d uncovered, and he just happened to have an accident at that exact moment? He had said: “I don’t know how much time I have before they find me.” It seemed that whoever they were had found him a lot sooner than he’d hoped.

And then, that final warning.

If anything happens to me, I want you, no matter what you do, to stay away from–

Away from what?

Sighing, Lewis sat down and massaged his temples. Miller hadn’t said anything strange in the past week. It had only been briefly last Friday that he’d mentioned he was taking off to Vegas for the weekend. Lewis hadn’t thought anything of it, but now his mind mulled over every recent interaction he’d had with the dead man.

Miller usually told him about the stories he was working on. What had he been writing lately? Lewis remembered him talking about something to do with virtual reality, but it hadn’t been a singular game or console.

He closed his eyes, thinking back to last Wednesday. The image began to take shape: Him and Miller standing in the coffee lounge. Lewis’s hand holding a glass of water – he hated coffee – and Miller drinking an espresso. Lewis telling him about his upcoming article on Silicon Beach vs. Silicon Valley. Miller talking about research into this new VR place. What term had he used to describe it?

Theme park. A virtual reality theme park. Lewis had only heard of them in passing, so the phrase stuck out in his memory.