Walking around Sweetwater, it felt less like the historical reenactment towns of fourth-grade field trips and more like a Wild West filter for Instagram. There were a variety of settings for selfies: a saloon, a graveyard, a blacksmith’s shop, a room with a secret sliding door that revealed a scientist working on a drone host. I can only imagine how much more quickly Peter Abernathy would have glitched if the newcomers had pulled out their smartphones.

As I stood in line to get brisket and baked beans (“fuel for the human machine,” read the label) at the Coronado Hotel, I heard a shout. Outside, a crowd had formed around two hosts fighting. “You leave her alone, Jack!” one cried. A woman rushed over to him. “Darby, I know you’re only protecting my honor, but don’t! You’re going to get hurt!” “Shoot him, Darby!” cheered a guy in a flannel shirt and jeans. The gun went off, and the crowd peered in, as hosts motioned us back for safety and Jack theatrically staggered around before falling dramatically to his death. A guy clapped Darby on the back and cheered. “You did it, man! It’s our third time to the park and you fuckin’ did it!” An actor-playing-a-guest-playing-a-host? Well played, Westworld.

Matt Lief Anderson/HBO

As we stood dumbly contemplating the metanarrative, a woman in costume spoke into her wrist, and two guys in white coats picked up Mackey’s body. “May you all rise to a new day,” she called out. “Back to one!” Those in costume mechanically walked back to their original positions, as those of us in black hats took their photos.

I walked past the barbershop, where a woman in suspenders was giving free shaves, and the photo studio, where guests were posing with fake guns, into the post office, where guests wrote postcards and the postmaster jovially handed out mail. Each guest got a personalized letter, postmarked from Sweetwater: a warning to watch your back, an invitation to a secret gathering, a series of numbers. “It’s for a women’s suffrage thing,” said one woman, leaving her letter on the table. I opened mine, and found a note signed by Wyatt, instructing me to head to the graveyard and look for something: “It isn’t buried deep, but it will make you realize things that are.”

I walked back to the graveyard, where a morose-looking woman was placing stones in a pattern to spell out 0-4-2-2. I showed her my letter, and asked her what it could mean. “That doesn’t look like anything to me,” she said, turning back to her pebble pile.

This Sweetwater felt less like the historical reenactment towns of fourth-grade field trips and more like a Wild West filter for Instagram. I can only imagine how much more quickly Peter Abernathy would have glitched if the newcomers had pulled out their smartphones.

There was one grave with the dirt freshly turned. I grabbed a shovel, looking around self-consciously as I started to dig up Dolores Abernathy’s grave. Lo and behold, there it was: a maze, encased in a tattered Pigs in Clover game.

I turned to the host, who had moved on from spelling the second season’s premiere date in rocks to tracing it out in the dirt with a stick. “Do you know what I’m supposed to do with this? Is there a labyrinth around here?” I asked her. She glanced up. “That doesn’t look like anything to me.”

Nobody—not the grandstanding pastor, not the stumbling bandit, not the bored-looking ironsmith, not the single mute samurai plodding slowly through town—knew of a labyrinth. But a fellow newcomer overheard me asking, and told me where the labyrinth was; just like my purple-haired bus mate, he too had been here for Halloween.

He and a friend led me to the maze, which we wandered through for a few minutes, before realizing we had strayed off of Westworld property. This wasn’t part of the activation, just something visitors could do during the rest of the year. We headed back to Sweetwater.

“Are you ready to go to the Ready Player One activation?” A guest next to me asked her friend. “I’ll call a Lyft.”

I walked back towards the bus. Even in Westworld, there was no escape from the reality of SXSW—virtual or otherwise.