Read History
2026 | Score: 6.5
Recommended to me by a friend a while ago. I did not listen to the podcasts, but I did not know they existed until after I read it so the book can be enjoyed without them, but I imagine it would enhance it a lot to listen to them beforehand. The first half was awesome, felt like a modern, adult ready player one and I was super hooked. The back half got very science fiction and strange, which was still good but much less my style. The overall mystery and puzzles remain consistent throughout the story however and I bet a lot of people would love this. I also like books set in Seattle. The audiobook was also really well done.
Format: Audible
Days: 4
Date: 8/6/2026 -> 8/10/2026
Summary (Spoilers)
Rabbits
Terry Miles
Rabbits #1
Rabbits Summary
K is a young woman living alone in Seattle. She occasionally goes to The Magician’s Arcade to tell groups of people about a strange ARG called Rabbits. It is a mind-bending game featuring anachronistic images and things that should not exist, but the winners of each edition become rich, famous, or get whatever their heart desires.
K first heard about the game when eavesdropping on family friends Emily and Annie Conners. While their parents were busy talking to each other Emily showed them a picture of an extinct bird taken after it went extinct, then the three of them drove in a truck in complete darkness listening to a strange radio station. Suddenly they hit an elk and Annie died in the crash. K’s parents would also make her play strange connection games growing up, finding any link between pictures. Her parents died in a ferry accident when she was 17, and she has been living on her own since then, able to make money off the stock market using her pattern recognition skills.
K heard about Rabbits again in college through some friends and it led her to meet the Magician, an eccentric man who owns an arcade in Seattle and helps people with the game. He first showed K “the circle”, the list of past winners. She also met Chloe, an ex-rock star who works part time at the arcade.
Back in the present, K finishes her talk about Rabbits for her group but one guy remains behind. He introduces himself as Alan Scarpio, the man many people believe won the sixth iteration of Rabbits. He tells K that he needs her help to fix the game, something is wrong and if they don’t fix it before version 11 starts, the world will end. The next day Alan Scarpio is declared missing, and K recruits her friends Chloe and Baron Corduroy to help. K goes back to the cafe where she met Scarpio and finds he left his phone, she also meets a scary lady named Swan. Baron is a genius with computers and helps them analyze Scarpio’s phone to find a strange file of a woman named Tabitha Henry attacking Jeff Goldblum, but they find out this never happened. They hit a dead end until the magician helps them trace a call on Alan Scarpio’s phone to the company Worgames.
Hawk Worger was a super genius who made a bunch of the most popular games ever and founded his company Worgames. He never appeared in public and died sometime recently. Another one of the biggest game designers of the times, Sydney Farrow, recently got hired to work at Worgames. Baron talks to a friend and gets a job at Worgames to see what he can learn. K and Chloe keep following some other leads, like trying to contact Hazel, the famous winner of the 8th iteration of Rabbits. They find a video of a prominent UK politician saying “The Door is Open” then killing himself on live TV. They try to find Baron but can’t contact him so break into his apartment and find him watching a super weird video and smelling like he peed himself. He tells them he is fine, just lost some time and that he needs sleep. The next morning they hear he is dead.
K and Chloe spend time grieving but eventually get pulled back into the game. K begins “losing time” and remembering things that aren’t real (Mandela effect type stuff). Chloe is super worried since K has become engrossed in the game before and been arrested and hospitalized for doing crazy stuff. K is freaked out because events in the real world don’t seem to line up with her memory. She remembers a local restaurant closing years ago, but is now open and Chloe says it has always been open, and the same thing with a movie K says they saw together but the internet shows that it does not exist.
Sydney Farrow, the game designer, shows up to talk to them about Baron and the game. They start to become friends and decide to break into “The Tower” , a super secret locked down section of Worgames studio. When they arrive they are stopped by security but K feels a physical pull that shoves her into the elevator and she goes to the top floor, where she meets a man named Crow. Crow says he worked with her parents and tells her that multiple dimensions exist, a multiverse, and some people have the power to move between and manipulate these dimensions. Crow says he did not know K existed but would have loved to work with her. Right before she leaves, K sees Emily Conners, her childhood friend.
When K arrives back down it seems like no time has passed and she goes up with Chloe and Sydney and the entire top floor is different, and Crow is gone. K is pretty freaked out and does not want to tell Chloe because they have kind of started dating and Chloe is worried about her. K and Chloe go back to K’s apartment and K tells her about the multidimensional stuff. The Magician has been missing for a while and they track down someone who knew him, Neil, who goes by Fatman. Neil has a computer system called “Mother” that supervises all of Seattle, but they don’t get anything useful from him. They come back a while later to find him dying and his place ransacked, he gives them a key to a locker. The locker contains some old film that shows the Magician being torn apart by a strange grey entity K sees sometimes.
K goes to talk to Sydney Farrow but Sydney says they have never met. They meet with a group of ex-Rabbits players, including the infamous murmur, and find a clue in a video game. K and Chloe start following a path of clues from the video game and are confronted by Swan and two twin bodyguards. They run and follow the clues to a Steely Dan song that shouldn’t exist then a book. They begin tracing the main character of the book's path through Seattle, but while at a Starbucks bathroom Chloe disappears when she should not have been able to. K runs but gets caught by the gray nothingness and appears in Crow’s penthouse. Emily Conners shows up and warns K that Crow is destabilizing the multiverse by trying to bring his dead daughter back. Crow says it is fine and the system needs to reset. The world begins shaking and tearing itself apart when Swan shows up and kills Crow.
Swan tells them that the world will end very soon, and multiple dimensions with it. K and Emily don’t know what to do. Emily tells K they were married for 4 years in a different reality and Emily is sad K does not remember. They go back to the road where Annie died as kids and do the same dark driving thing before the world shakes and goes black.
K wakes up in a lake house being rented by Alan Scarpio, who makes her breakfast. He shows her a new circle and reveals she won the 11th version of the game and somehow saved the world. Chloe runs in the front door and they reunite and everything is happy. THE END.