Book Five, Chapters 38, 39, 40, 41, 42

When we set out for the KRSL Powerworks Pavilion to finally enact our plan, it was our fifth attempt. The first loss was the hardest, but after that, it got easier and easier, and we got better and better.

We learned things we didn’t even know possible to learn about the inner workings of a storyline. We had always dismissed the merits of rerunning a story, but now we understood.

It was like being clairvoyant.

We also gained intimate knowledge of Dina’s Rescue Trope. What had initially been a huge hindrance became the closest thing to a superpower we had seen in Carousel.

We didn’t go On-Screen ever. It didn’t happen. Nothing happened we didn’t intend. The story was just simply not about us. It was freeing and shielding in ways we couldn’t imagine. The only cost was that its power started to shine with reruns, which limited its utility.

Of course, we had a few things in our favor. First, we could look at the spoilers in the Atlas, and a few choice spoilers helped us form our plan. It became apparent that this storyline required death, but not main character death.

NPCs would work fine if it was shocking and there were a lot of them.

My first assumption when trying to figure out logical ways to defeat the storyline was that we had two major options. The first was that we could treat it as a straightforward series of puzzles, and that had been our first attempt. But with Dina's Rescue trope, that method was just not going to work.

Solving the puzzles took too long when we had to do it ourselves first and then find a way to get the surrogates to do it.

The second method was to lean into the film's themes. That was tricky, and the only method I had managed to devise had failed spectacularly.

We weren’t going to abandon the themes completely, but we were going to focus on the evil company because that was something even the kind-hearted Andrew could get behind.

The question was, how were we going to accomplish that?

As far as I could tell, three previous teams had played the storyline called Itch, and they had come up with their own methods.

Because they had more than one melee-class character, their method involved fighting their way forward in what the Atlas basically described as being an ultimate ninja warrior-type storyline, where obstacles and IBECS itself became physical opponents.

The race to the front was quite literal because they were playing the base storyline, which had "Beat the Clock" as a win condition.

The physical ninja warrior path was not an option to us. Even if Michael was fit enough to do that, Andrew was more brains than brawn, and Lila was not dependable.

But there were other options, things that we could not have pulled off on our first run but now had enough practice to succeed at. Our plan was choreographed to the gills with redundancies, escape plans, and multiple contingencies.

It was also completely insane on paper and could only be pulled off because we were not technically part of the story—all except for Bobby, of course, who was suddenly going to be a main character.

~-~

The thing was, we only had the IBECS to work with. We couldn't bring in new elements that weren't compatible with what was already there. And yet, we needed to change the story so that the puzzles would disappear—or at least be reduced—and so that the themes would be very… different.

Because of some combination of our tropes, we had just the stuff we needed to pull it off.

I was up at the helm with Rudy, Flannery, and the rest of my friends when it came time to enact our plan.

"I must insist that you follow me back to the sleeping bay," Flannery said. "It's a long trip where we're going. You're gonna need to be in deep sleep."

"Yeah, just hold off," Antoine said. He turned to me. "I think we're close enough," he said.

I looked at the screen.

One of the questions we had wondered ever since we got to outer space was whether we were actually in deep space in any sense. Obviously, we were on some kind of sound stage, the type of place that Carousel normally filmed its locations that didn't exist in Carousel proper.

But even on a sound stage, we had to wonder how much distance our ship actually covered.

The answer was, not much.

It was all theater, as always.

Even moments after launch, we were already near the IBECS, even though, according to the fake frame story, we had a four-month trip to get there. It was just movie magic… of course it was.

Even though our little frame narrative of being winners of a giant prize—being able to go into space—was thin and almost entirely for show, the tropes we brought, and their underlying conceits still worked.

So when I had a trope that allowed me to talk Off-Screen to an enemy like IBECS, it worked as soon as I was physically able to speak to an enemy.

I pushed the call button on the console. I was quite familiar with the buttons now, but that part was easy because they were all call buttons.

"IBECS, this is Ambassador Lawrence aboard the KRSL craft Helio. Do you receive me?"

"Yes, Ambassador Lawrence, I receive you," IBECS answered.

I nodded to the others. They ran off and started doing what it took to throw all of our food overboard. Meanwhile, I had to stick around and develop a rapport with IBECS.

"Alright, IBECS. I'm going to have to ask you to answer back to me at 1.4 times the normal speed. We have a lot to get through."

"Confirmed," IBECS said quickly. "I will respond at a faster pace."

Speed-running a horror movie was just step one of our agenda.

I then started on the conversations we needed to have with IBECS to open up future dialogue trees in the script.

Having never rerun a storyline before, we didn't realize precisely how strict some of these dialogue trees could be. Even though we were Off-Screen, we needed to unlock everything so that we could access any line in the narrative we needed when we needed it.

It was going to take a while.

Before she even asked, I turned to Flannery and said, "No, we're not going to deep sleep yet, but thanks for asking. You've been great."

She pursed her lips and nodded her head.

We couldn't go to deep sleep yet because we had too much work to do.

~-~

"It appears that your ship is out of provisions," IBECS said after we set up our plan to dock with the ship. "I will allow you to attach and resupply."

Bobby had ditched his trope that gave us access to tasty food, so this time, throwing out all the provisions wasn’t as heartbreaking. There was a vast gulf between good-tasting space goop and bad-tasting space goop.

Within a few minutes, we had connected to the IBECS.

To our delight, we were just on time.

The Party Phase was beginning. We were so early that the surrogates had not yet woken up from their chambers, and Carousel was still collecting lots of footage of the locations around IBECS to be used.

Even hours into the story from our perspective, we had not taken the four-month skip into the future that triggered when we went into deep sleep.

Flannery was not happy but didn’t confront us.

Carousel was quickly catching up.

It would not allow us to intervene or prevent the basic premise of the story—we learned that in attempt three.

The officers would be dead or otherwise indisposed. That was a canon event of sorts.

Either way, we still had to hurry.

~-~

Being able to get into Bobby's lab was an essential part of our plan, but we had to get further than that because his lab did not have what we needed—or at least not everything we needed.

Luckily, while the process for unlocking his door and connecting to the rest of IBECS was a little different, Dina could get through it quite quickly.

We had a full view of the surrogates as they woke up for the first time, something we didn’t get to see on our first run.

It was hard to watch, so I muted the screen, and we continued.

I had thought they were good actors, and I was proven right as they woke up in horror to their surroundings. I shuddered at the thought.

And here we were about to make their problems… bigger.

Time was going way too quickly. Carousel wasn’t playing games.

Well, it was playing games, but it was being very serious about it.

I was standing at the junction between the Helio and the IBECS as Cassie walked past me, holding five Petri dishes. One had a few wriggling specks that looked like dirt from a distance, and the others had a few hairs in them each.

"Make sure you don’t mix those up," I said, trying to lighten the mood with a joke, unsuccessfully.

She nodded her head, ignoring my attempt at humor, and asked, "Are we sure that this isn’t murder?"

"It’s not murder," I said. It wasn’t permanent, at least.

She stared off into the distance, contemplating where her life had taken her, and said, "Okay," then ran back to the room with the clone machine.

In attempt 4, we had actually tried to clone ourselves to create some invading army—or maybe disgruntled union workers.

It was easy enough. The clone machine was flexible, and we could change up the features so that even though everyone would look like us, they wouldn’t be identical. But it turned out that the clones that came out were NPCs who didn’t have personalities and would not act violently, even if you ordered them to.

That was like the one thing you want in a clone.

We had sat and considered how we were going to trigger an invasion so that we could get IBECS to ignore all of his terrible protocols and actually help the passengers. It took us some time to figure out what the word "invader" meant in the context in which IBECS had used it.

But we figured it out, alright.

It was just going to take some elbow grease to get it going.

I bounced between the IBECS and the helm of the Helio, making sure that everyone was playing their part. We didn’t have a lot of time, either in story or out. By skipping the time jump, we had bought ourselves four months in story time but not nearly that much real-time.

It would have to be enough.

When Cassie returned, she was with Antoine and Kimberly, who were each holding large canvas bags that we had found back at the Powerworks Pavilion and brought with us.

The bags were packed.

"We got like six more of these," Antoine said.

"That was fast." They had only started cloning 30 or 40 minutes earlier. This was something we had practiced in attempt four.

"Good," I said. Then I yelled up at Ramona, who was at the helm, "How are Dina and Isaac doing?"

She turned back, looked down at me, and gave a thumbs-up. "Almost there," she said.

"Is this gonna work?" Antoine asked. "We’re cutting it close."

"We have a month and a half," I said, trying to do the math in my head. "We’re good. I’m going to go get some more bags and meet you out there."

He nodded, and then he and Kimberly walked through the passageway to enter the IBECS.

I went back to the Helio's sleeping quarters and found the six remaining bags, as well as Cassie, who was working with the clone machine. It had turned itself into a large egg shape and was currently gestating a new clone for us.

"Everything running smooth?" I asked.

Cassie was biting her lip and didn’t seem to hear my question. I could understand her problem, but I didn’t have time to argue about it. As long as she went and did her job, it was okay.

She had convinced herself that Andrew’s surrogate bore his soul. Now, getting NPCs killed felt like a harder decision for her.

I grabbed two of the large canvas bags.

They were heavier than I had expected, almost as if they were filled with water balloons, and in a way, they were.

I hauled my bags out into the IBECS. Antoine and Kimberly were busy in Bobby’s lab, so I moved ahead.

I was out in the hallways of the IBECS, completely Off-Screen, with my heavy bags filled, looking for a place to empty them. There were only two sections of the ship where we could safely put the bags: Bobby’s lab and the front of the ship, past the anti-gravity device.

In all versions of the story, the anti-gravity device divided the front of the ship from the back. It was impassable by anything that wasn’t a tiny bed bug hitching a ride on cleaning equipment that ran throughout the modules.

When I got as far toward the front of the ship as I could with my bags, I found Dina just as she was finishing unlocking a passageway that would allow us to drop into the anti-gravity device and move to the front of the ship.

"I got it open," she said, "but I don’t know how you’re gonna get those bags across."

"Me neither," I said. "Might need Antoine’s help, but we’ll see."

"I’ll go get a bag, too," she said. "We need to hurry."

"Don’t I know it," I responded.

I dropped down into the anti-gravity passage. We had seen three different versions of this puzzle.

The first was the large platform that tried to buck you off. The second involved tiles that would fall away for some reason. The third had a bunch of spinning rotors that you had to walk between because there were gaps, and you didn’t want to get squished.

We got lucky because we ended up with the fallaway tiles again, which was not a super easy puzzle, but it was at least solvable. You only had to solve it once because, after you figured it out, you could retrace your steps for a bit.

It might have taken me five minutes to figure out the path across, and then I had to go back and grab my bags again that I had left on the first platform. I had to be quick because the tiles would replace themselves, and the pattern would change.

Not too long after I started, I finally got to the front half of the ship.

We were doing so well that I started to wonder if maybe the puzzle version of the story was workable and if all this effort we were putting in was for nothing.

But then I remembered there were a lot more puzzles to go, and if we could get Carousel to delete those puzzles for us by adding an extra conflict, I was willing to do it.

My arms ached as I carried the bags forward and found myself in the secondary sleeping bay. There were a few dozen ill-fated souls trapped inside deep sleep chambers in this room.

Poor things.

I regretted what we were about to do to them, and that’s why I had to be here to do it myself—because I didn’t want to ask anyone else to.

Not this time. This time, the guilt was on me.

I knew that whatever was about to happen to them, they wouldn’t feel it, and they wouldn’t know.

But I would.

I opened up one of my large black bags and retrieved something about the size of a cantaloupe.

It squelched in my hand and sloshed around but remained intact. In the light, I could see something growing inside of it.

The squishy mass was a gigantic egg. The egg was primarily the product of bedbug DNA, but that wasn’t all it was.

Not even close.

I began taking the eggs and planting them around the room. I even had the nerve to pry open more than a few of the deep sleep chambers—the ones that had brain-dead passengers within them—and pile in a few eggs inside of those.

It was disgusting to watch the actual bed bugs crawl around among these mutants, but we had to do what we had to do.

In Carousel, you pick your battles, and we picked this one.

~-~

"Is everything set?" I asked back on the Helio.

Antoine nodded.

Ramona said, "Everything's working fine. The surrogates are having a tough time, though."

"When are they not?" Isaac asked.

"Alright," I said. "It's time for a time skip."

The skip was initially going to be four months, like the first time, but because we had put it off so many hours, it ended up only being a month of in-story time.

But that was plenty. Plenty, that was, if Carousel was willing to go along with our plans.

I was nervous as I laid back in my deep sleep chamber. I looked down the row at my friends, at the cloning machine, and hoped I had thought of everything.

I told myself that we were going to succeed because even if we weren't going to be a part of the story, that didn't mean we couldn't take the initiative.

We would have to.

I laid back in my deep sleep chamber, and I was out like a light—no trope needed.

~-~

Flannery woke us up, and I wasn’t even groggy. I suspected that Antoine had used his trope to make the night come so that we would all be well-rested in the morning.

A month had passed, I learned as I got to the helm and frantically searched the cameras to see what had become of the IBECS after we left.

I was watching the screens in front of me and also watching the dailies in my head, scanning through them at fast-forward, hoping beyond hope that our plan had worked.

And it had.

The first part, at least. The rest relied on us to play our part.

The surrogates were still in the original sleeping bay where they were when we first met them on our first run. As far as they were concerned, nothing had changed in this version. There were no large eggs in their sleeping bay.

The other sleeping bay wasn’t so lucky. After having traveled there myself, we had unlocked the ability to see it through the camera.

Watching it drained the blood from my face.

Everything went according to plan—the horror.

“Why is everything so much darker?” Ramona commented.

In my zeal, I hadn’t quite noticed, but all of the cameras were on night vision. That wasn’t normal.

If you had a camera on in a room, the lights were usually on with it, but all of these rooms were dark.

“I think that’s because Carousel accepted our improvisation,” I said. “We changed what type of story we’re in, and Carousel is changing everything in kind.”

The IBECS was dark. That’s when a space ship is scariest.

We had to hope that didn’t put a hamper on our plans.

“How’s Bobby?” Antoine asked.

I didn’t even want to say.

“He’s not doing too hot,” I said as I viewed footage from the dailies.

I saw as the eggs that Antoine and Kimberly had laid around his lab began to hatch, and the horrible creatures crawled out of them. They first infested the cows and pigs that hung headless from their life support machines.

They eventually found a different kind of prey.

They found Bobby's deep sleep chamber, and they went to town, wriggling their grubby bodies between the cracks of his chamber and taking more than just blood.

They took flesh and life itself.

“Am I dead yet?” Bobby asked, standing beside me on the helm of the Helio.

“Very,” I said.

I watched the image as someone who looked a lot like Bobby continued to be attacked.

“I guess it’s time for me to get to my place,” he said.

It was.

Creating a nightmarish version of a bedbug using an alien cloning machine was a standard play for Carousel, at least. But the problem was that Bobby slept in the same room as all of his headless pets, and for our story to work, we needed those headless pets to be infected with these new advanced types of bedbugs.

How could we put Bobby in a room with those things for a month without him getting injured? Well, we could make a spare Bobby.

Cassie and Ramona worked to wrap real Bobby’s limbs up in gauze from the medical kit on the Helio, so it looked like he had somehow survived those bites in case Carousel wanted to use the footage. He looked like a burn victim.

We were going to cheese it.

We were going to substitute clone Bobby for the real Bobby to make it look like he had somehow survived and gotten to safety. We didn’t know if that would work exactly, but we did know that Bobby had a trope called Not in the Budget, which allowed him to be recast as a new NPC if his old one died an unclear death. So, in the worst-case scenario, he was still in the game.

And since his character had not yet been introduced, we felt our plan was going to work.

We had swiped him out of his deep sleep chamber as soon as we got to IBECS. Carousel didn’t seem to mind the swap.

The clone didn’t mind either. In fact, it had no mind at all.

Cassie made sure of it.

~-~

For First Blood, we actually chose to do the same thing we had done before, following Isaac's advice: smack around in the deep sleep chambers with a pipe.

While it was traumatic for the surrogates, it was also effective. Not only did it function as First Blood, but it also led to them being able to get out of the sleeping bay.

"Alright, Rudy. I need you to disconnect from this port on the IBECS and reconnect on the other side," I said.

"You got it," Rudy said. He and the other NPCs on the Helio didn’t seem to mind our strange activities.

We had to disconnect from Bobby's unit because it was now compromised and filled with the genetic mutants we had created.

"Do you remember your lines?" I asked Bobby.

He nodded his head. "I got it all down," he said. "Just need a quick look at our notes again."

"Here you go," I said, handing him a slip of paper with everything he needed to remember.

Wallflowers were usually background characters with crucial roles in helping the protagonists, but in this case, that was not enough. Bobby adjusted his bandages along his arms.

"These things... they're not bed bugs; they're something else. The mutagen..." he said, practicing his lines, and then he repeated, "These bed bugs... they're something else."

I let him keep going. Really, it didn’t matter. We were going for our best performance possible, but as long as he could pull off someone who was mentally disturbed by the events he had just lived through, we would be fine.

As we reconnected the Helio to a different port, we had to act quickly. We left the port and found ourselves in some conference room with posters about work schedules and stuff like that.

I dragged Bobby behind me because I knew the layout the best. I had studied it, and even though it had changed in the last few runs, I was very familiar with the different ways the ship could reform.

There were patterns, which was how I knew that there was a large dispensary closet that usually spawned close to the anti-gravity machine. It was caged up because it contained narcotics, but that also made it a good place for us to stick Bobby.

It wasn’t exactly bedbug-proof, but it could be made airtight with some duct tape.

That was our story: Bobby had managed to escape from his room after it was overtaken by mutant bed bugs and had holed up inside a closet because he wasn’t able to move forward due to his low rank as an officer and the threat from the mutants.

"Are you good?" I asked him.

"As good as I'm going to get," he said.

"Now, this room does have a communication relay, but it does not have a camera, so if you're in trouble, you have to tell us because we won’t be able to see you."

Bobby nodded.

Then it was back to the Helio for me.

It was finally showtime.

~-~

"We did something similar back in the war," Michael said as he packed the tissues covered in goop into the air vents. "Of course, we were doing it because of the mustard gas."

Andrew stood beside him, packing his own vent with tissues and goop. 

"I wasn’t aware they used mustard gas in the Martian wars," Andrew said. 

"No," Michael replied. "But we were damn sure scared they were gonna." 

He and Andrew started to chuckle.

"Attention! Attention! Is someone else alive on this damn spaceship?" Bobby’s voice broke out over the intercom. 

Andrew and Michael looked at each other. Even Lila, who had been on the floor half-heartedly packing a vent with tissue, jolted with energy and jumped up. Andrew hit the intercom button first and said, "Hello? Who’s there?" 

"This is Science Officer Bobby Gill! Oh my God, I can’t believe there are other survivors! I’ve been looking all over, calling out to the sleeping bays. Where have you been? Never mind that—who are you, and where are you?" 

"Doctor Andrew Hughes," Andrew said. "Right now, we’re in hallway 37-B, trying to trick the system into letting us into the mess hall." 

"Andrew Hughes? From the University of Carousel?” Bobby asked.

“Yes,” Andrew said slowly. “Wait, Bobby? From the class of ‘72? Is it really you?”

“Unfortunately,” Bobby said. “Small world.”

Bobby had brought his Remember Me trope, which allowed him to elevate to the main cast. It worked well.

Now, with all of the surrogates debuffed by the bedbugs and Bobby healthy, he was the highest Plot Armor character and a main character.

He was our star.

“We’ll catch up later. Glad to see a Medical Officer aboard. Got some bad bites. You having any luck with getting up this way?" Bobby asked. 

"That remains to be seen," Andrew said. We have just three survivors, and I am not a medical officer. I’ll look at your bites, though. How many survivors are on your side?" 

Bobby was silent for a moment. 

"Just me. I’ve been trying to get ahold of my buddy up in the auxiliary sleeping bay, but they’re not answering up there either." 

"I’m sorry to hear that," Andrew said. "I suppose the bed bugs are thick up there too?" 

"Bed bugs?" Bobby asked. "Oh yeah, we got bed bugs. We got all kinds. How are you keeping them at bay?" 

"We’re not," Andrew said. "No matter where we go, they find us in our sleep. It’s maddening." 

"In your sleep?" Bobby asked. "I wasn’t talking about the little bedbugs. Who cares about those damn things? I’m talking about the big ones. The mutants." 

Andrew and Michael looked at each other. 

"Mutants?" Andrew asked. 

"Never mind. If you haven’t seen them, then count yourself lucky. They seem to be quarantined in my lab so far. Thank God they haven’t gotten out. I was worried they’d crawl through the ventilation system. It’s only a matter of time." 

"We haven’t seen anything but normal bed bugs back here," Andrew said. 

"Normal bed bugs… Who’d have ever thought I’d be relieved to hear that?" Bobby asked. 

"I feel you," Andrew said. "Where are you? Do you have access to the helm? There should be manual overrides if you can get to them." 

"I’m on the other side of the anti-gravity device from where you are. I’m having difficulty moving forward because science officers aren’t very highly ranked, and IBECS is a son of a gun." 

"Do you have food and shelter there?" Andrew asked. 

"Some of both," Bobby said. "But be careful, and if you see a door labeled 'Protein Lab,' do not open it." 

"Roger that," Andrew responded.

With that, they started hurriedly packing the vents, using essentially the same technique they had used in the first run but in a different part of the ship.

"Alright," I said, turning to my friends on the helm of the Helio. "It’s time for Phase Two. Ramona and Isaac, you stay here. Cassie, you’re welcome to stay here too. I’ve told you a thousand times—you’ve done more than enough." 

Cassie shook her head. "We need to do this," she said. "If you need my help, I’m going to be there." 

I nodded.  I didn’t need her for anything but some additional scouting, but I was willing to let her tag along as long as things stayed safe.

"You two, keep your eyes on the screen and keep everyone apprised of what’s going on. You are our center of communication, and you’re our eyes in the sky." 

Ramona and Isaac nodded.

IBECS could maintain a party line between all of us, no matter where we went on the ship, so we could all be in communication when we were Off-Screen, but we wouldn’t be able to see each other. That was an essential piece of the puzzle that Ramona and Isaac would cover by staying on the Helio.

"Antoine, Kimberly, Cassie—you’re the backup. Dina and I will forge ahead to try to solve the puzzles and unlock doors.”

“We know what we’re doing here, folks," Antoine said. "Now, let’s go run this thing." 

"Do we put our hands in the middle and say 'Go team'?" Isaac asked. 

He meant it sarcastically, but we did it anyway.

Back on the IBECS, the most important member of our team was meeting up with the surrogates. They were at the anti-gravity device on either side of the gaping hole. 

"What do we do here?" Andrew cried out. 

"The gravitational force on the tiles changes depending on the state of the ship at any given time. Some of the tiles are stationary and can be walked on, but the others will fall. You have to be careful and find a path across."

Funny design for an anti-gravity machine, but it sure looked sci-fi enough.

I trusted Bobby enough to guide them across, and the rest of us took our places. We had relocated the Helio further up the IBECS, past the anti-gravity machine.

I didn’t even manage to get out of the Helio and back into the IBECS before Ramona started yelling at me. 

"Riley, it changed!" she said.

At first, I didn’t know what she was talking about, but before I even made it up the stairs, I knew. I looked at the 3D model of the IBECS, and it was pretty easy to figure out what had moved.

It was Bobby’s lab.

Previously, it had been at the back of the ship, on one side of the anti-gravity device, but now it was at the front of the ship. There was no reason for it not to be based on the established lore of the story. The audience certainly wouldn’t make heads or tails of the layout of the ship and wouldn’t notice whether his lab was at the front or the back. 

"Carousel’s making a response," I said. "Nothing to worry about, but keep us posted."

Bobby’s lab contained many of the mutant bedbugs we had created. It made sense that Carousel wouldn’t want them left behind—not when there was so much action to be had.

On the plot cycle, it was almost to the middle of Rebirth.

We were making excellent time.

In our first run, they didn’t get to the anti-gravity machine until Second Blood. It only took Bobby ten minutes to help them solve the puzzle and get Lila across.

That was the last puzzle they would have to solve because we had changed the nature of the story.

As we ran through the IBECS, we noticed how dark it had gotten—darker than it had previously been.

Antoine had a metal pipe, which was about the only thing he could find that resembled a weapon.

The rest of us didn’t have much at all, but luckily, we weren’t really a part of the story, so even our plot armor didn’t exactly matter. Monsters would never come after us—unless, of course, we happened to stumble upon them.

They wouldn’t track us down or be led to us by the script.

We were perfect sneaking machines. Bobby and the surrogates were not.

"There’s something up there," Lila said. 

"There can’t be anything up there," Andrew replied. "Unless there are more people up here." 

"There are more things than people up here," Bobby said. "We’re gonna need to run." 

"What are you talking about?" Michael asked. Like Antoine, he had a metal pipe. In fact, it was the same one he had used to trigger First Blood by beating against the deep sleep chambers. 

"The mutants," Bobby said.

Antoine, Kimberly, Cassie, Dina, and I were holed up in a room not too far away from the surrogates and Bobby.

We were watching them.

Dina looked straight at them because she had a trope that made her confident she wasn’t On-Screen, and she was used to towing that line. The rest of us huddled around the little intercom screen where the audio was coming from.

As if to demonstrate the mutant bedbugs Bobby spoke of, one appeared.

I didn’t need the audio feed to know what was there. This thing screeched like a banshee. I would know—I had heard a banshee scream hundreds of times.

At that point, I had only seen one of these mutants on the clone machine as it projected what the biological life form would look like in adulthood, just as it had projected what Cassie would look like based on her DNA profile.

The mutant bedbugs weren’t just bedbugs; they were a little bit of everything we had available to us—cow, pig, goat, chicken.

The goal was to make it bigger, uglier, and more dangerous.

We played around with DNA samples from all the animals we had, including the bedbug, and came up with something we thought we could use in a story: a monster.

On the clone gizmo’s screen, it had been a strange, giant, hairy insect with an arrangement of large teeth—not canine teeth, but molars—not to mention its giant, needle-like appendage that it could use to suck blood.

Feeling brave, I ran out into the hallway next to Dina to take a look.

In the distance, it was a terror.

It almost looked like some horror puppet come to life—like Jim Henson trying to scare children or something—but it moved like an organic creature, like an insect. It was the size of a large cat, but in every other way, it was just a hairy, misshapen bedbug.

"What the hell is that?!" Michael screamed.

I expected them to run, but instead, I heard Michael smacking it with a pipe. There was a wet crunch as he pierced its exoskeleton and continued to go to town on it. 

"That was a juvenile," Bobby said. 

"What?" Michael asked.

Out of the darkness, a dozen more of the misshapen, hairy bedbugs started to crawl down the hall toward the surrogates. 

"Run!" Bobby screamed.

The mutant bedbugs had a few of the tropes from the normal bedbugs but much lower plot armor, which was the only reason we could possibly do this run.

The normal bedbugs were meant to be part of the setting—needing a high PA to ensure they were not eliminated, but these larger ones were actual enemies meant to be fought.

On the red wallpaper, they were called Bedbug Amalgamations, and they lived up to that name.

Some were the size of a cat, but others were much larger—easily as big as a large dog or larger. I suspected they would only get bigger from there.

We lost track of Bobby and the surrogates as they fled, but I knew where Bobby was going. Occasionally, as we followed slowly behind, we would come across one of the mutant bedbugs, and either Dina or I would have to squash it with our feet.

If one came up that was too big to handle, we could always call for Antoine.

Bobby had managed to get the surrogates into his hiding spot at the dispensary.

Dina and I found a communication relay and listened as IBECS fed us their conversation upon request. That kind of convenience was only possible because I had run through all the conversations we needed to have to get to that point. 

"You tell us what’s going on out here right now," Michael said in a threatening manner to Bobby.

Bobby took a moment to think through his lines. I wondered if Carousel was giving him lines based on the story we made up or if he had to come up with them wholesale—and if that was the case, what was on the script? 

"I didn’t do anything," Bobby said. "It was you—all you scabs and KRSL. I had a grant from the government, alright? I was sent here to find a way to feed starving people in space. I did not do this. I was promised this would be a contaminant-free ship and that their onboarding methods were 100% foolproof. I should have known when they promised that it was a lie.”

There was a pause.

“One of you tracked a bedbug onto the ship," Bobby said. "And about four months ago, the bedbugs finally made it into my lab. At first, they just fed on me, but then they found my livestock. And after they found them, they weren’t so interested in me." 

"Livestock?" Andrew asked. "Are you talking about the protein lab?" 

"The same," Bobby answered. "My livestock are humanely grown from embryo to never suffer and to be the ideal candidates for my experiments." 

"What experiments?" Michael asked incredulously. 

"Mutagen 6," Bobby said.

I was curious to know how they were going to respond. There was no such thing as Mutagen 6 on IBECS—not until Bobby said it, at least. 

"Mutagen 6? Are you kidding me?" Andrew asked. 

"It’s a safe variant," Bobby answered, "designed to grow food faster and more of it on less supply. I can grow a full herd of beef on nothing but algae in a couple of months, just with a little tweak of genetics and chemistry. It’s perfectly legal." 

"Legal?" Andrew said. "It’s legal in that you’re allowed to experiment with it in outer space, but not back in Carousel, where it could get into the ecosystem and start altering living creatures." 

"That’s propaganda," Bobby said. "All it does is make the creatures grow and make them resilient to any number of diseases. Or at least, that’s all I thought it did." 

There was a pause. 

"The bedbugs," Andrew said. 

"The bedbugs," Bobby answered. "The pure Mutagen 6 ran through the bloodstreams of those animals at levels we had never experimented with back in Carousel. Once they started feeding on the cattle and the goats, they weren’t so interested in humans anymore. They were hooked." 

"What are we talking about here?" Michael asked. "Are they on steroids or something? Because the things I saw… I don’t really understand. One of those things had human teeth." 

"Not human," Bobby said. "I believe those were from a cow. No matter. Yes, the mutagen created some offspring of the bedbugs with genetic features of the creatures they fed on." 

"I don’t understand," Andrew said. "Once those things started to spread, why did IBECS not register them and take care of them?" 

"I don’t understand it either," Bobby said. "I do know that these old AIs are usually mishandled and given protocols that make it difficult for them to overcome circumstances their programmers didn’t foresee." 

"Yes, I’ve heard the same," Andrew said. "Makes you wonder why you’d want an AI if you were going to take away its ability for creative thinking. What do you suppose is preventing it from triggering its defensive protocols?" 

"My first thought," Bobby said, "was that it whitelisted the animals inside my lab. Or at the very least, it was told to whitelist them. But then, how would the AI confuse these monsters with cows? No, there’s something deeply wrong with its programming. I’ve spoken to IBECS—it doesn’t even seem to register there’s an infestation." 

"It never mentioned anything about it to us," Andrew said. "If it is somehow unable to even communicate about this particular problem, perhaps it has no protocol for a mutated pest." 

"Whatever the case," Bobby said, "if we can find a way to initiate its defensive protocols, we may actually be able to get out of this ship before we run out of gas." 

"What do you mean, 'run out of gas'?" Lila asked, speaking up for the first time. 

"Don’t you know?" Bobby replied. "These things—they’re notoriously fuel inefficient. We’re supposed to fuel up soon, and if there’s no one at the helm to override and make sure it happens manually, well… we’re going to get very well acquainted."

~-~

I grouped back up with Antoine, Kimberly, and Cassie.

"It sounds like Bobby’s doing a good job of getting them motivated to get to the helm," I said.

"Are we sure there aren’t gonna be any more puzzles?" Kimberly asked.

I shrugged. "There might be puzzles," I said, "but the real focus will be on the monsters."

That was one way to solve the puzzle: replace it with a giant mutated bedbug. There was always going to be conflict in a story, but through improvisation, you can choose the conflict—and we chose a fight with mutant pests.

Now, when they had to move forward in the ship, their struggle wouldn’t be against a mind-numbing puzzle that we had to explain to them. It would simply be a fight—one we could help them with without appearing On-Screen.

We just had to make sure they didn’t end up as bedbug food—well, more than they already were.

~-~

Our plan was working flawlessly. Instead of throwing a bunch of random puzzles at us to solve, Carousel was sending waves of monsters to be run from or fought by Bobby and the surrogates—with help from some Off-Screen characters whose names would not appear in the credits.

It was a strange feeling, being happy when a corridor was filled with giant bugs instead of space lasers we had to rearrange.

Slowly, they moved their way forward in the ship, with us dancing around them in the shadows, staying Off-Screen and helping where we could.

Just as we planned, they arrived at the secondary sleeping bay just in time for Second Blood. We had anticipated all the drama that the surrogates would bring to fill out the movie and timed everything just right.

I had no idea what Carousel would do with our little mutant bedbug plan. I got the sense that it was having a little fun.

In the story we were telling, the bedbugs had been created when ordinary insects consumed something called Mutagen 6, but in real life, they were modified clones.

We had no control over mutation—just a fancy alien computer.

Carousel, however, had no such limitations.

"This is it," Bobby said. "I wasn't able to get here on my own when I first got out of my lab, not with my low rank. My friend is supposed to be in here."

Bobby's nameless friend was an important character in our version of the story.

Now, all he had to do was pick a deep sleep chamber—any deep sleep chamber.

They opened the door to the secondary sleeping bay. 

"This room is having the same problem with the lights," Michael noted. 

Those darn lights just wouldn’t stay on.

Bobby had a flashlight he had picked up from his workshop, and he was shining it around at the mounds of normal bedbugs as well as a bunch of hatched eggs—way more eggs than I had put in there.

Strangely, there were tons of dead mutant bedbugs—dozens of them, killed through some form of physical damage that was too desiccated for me to recognize from the distance I was watching.

Maybe they killed each other. Maybe IBECS got off the couch.

Andrew was nervous.

Lila hadn’t even been willing to enter the room but had instead sought out the room with all the belongings of the passengers, just as she had in the first run. 

"With those things in here, I don’t think your friend is alive," Andrew said. "We need to leave." 

"No," Bobby said as he walked deeper into the room. "The mutated bedbugs are larger. I’m not sure they can fit into the deep sleep chambers. Ironically, the mutation might be helpful to humans."

There was a pause as the silence grew distressing.

"Something killed all of these mutants," Bobby added. "That might mean there are passengers alive in here." He stared around at the dead mutant bodies.

Andrew looked incredulous, even though all I could see was the back of his head from across the hallway where we were hiding.

Bobby stopped at one of the deep sleep chambers and said, "Here we go." He looked down at the medical display and dropped to his knees. 

"He passed," Andrew said. 

"A month ago, if this reading is correct," Bobby said. Bobby cursed and slammed his fist against the deep sleep chamber, perhaps a bit too loud.

I suggested he do something like that because that was the exact type of behavior that could trigger a spooky sequence.

A scuttling could be heard in the back of the room. 

"We need to go now," Andrew said. Bobby didn’t need convincing.

They both picked up and started to run out of the room, followed by the most grotesque inversions of the bedbugs we had seen yet. Andrew even did a nice pause-and-stare at the monster in horror for the camera.

We knew that Carousel was going along with our plans. What we didn’t know was that it had made plans of its own.

The creature we were looking at did not look like it was part bedbug and part farm animal.

It looked like it was part bedbug and part human—not close enough to fool anyone, of course, but its two front legs were clearly arms from a human. Instead of having tufts of fur, it had long strands of human-like hair. And its eyes—its eyes were human.

Skin frogs were preferable.

Carousel was having fun with us. We had not created this creature. It had carried our made-up logic forward. The mutants got features of what they fed on.

Up ahead, Bobby screamed, "There’s a junction where we should be able to pass through!" 

"Where’s Lila?" Michael screamed.

She, of course, had wandered off and was hugging her child's baby blanket tightly. 

"We can’t leave without her," Andrew said. They started screaming her name. "Lila, where are you? We need to go!"

And, of course, the pattern that had started to show itself in our first run repeated itself here. Lila was going to get one of them killed.

And she would have, except she was Off-Screen for just long enough for me to get to her.

I was in the room, in the darkness, waiting Off-Screen, and the moment I had a chance, I ran up behind Lila, scooped her up by the armpits, set her on her feet, and all but pushed her out toward the door and into the hallway. 

"Stay here and wait for them to get here," I told her.

See, what was going to happen was that they were going to go into the storage room where Lila was, and it would be a kill box.

They wouldn’t be able to escape—something similar had almost happened in attempt #3, except with one of the traps/puzzles instead of mutants. But I got her out of there and quickly slipped back into the shadows, where Dina was around the corner, watching as they passed.

Sure enough, as they came across her in the hallway, they grabbed her and carried her forward to the next junction as the monster began overtaking them.

They didn’t even have time to be mad at her about the baby blanket drama.

The junction was the same type of place where the original plasma grid had been, the one they had to solve to get across, but because the battle, in this case, was with the human-looking bedbug, the plasma grid was gone and replaced with a few simple plasma turrets that functioned in the same way.

The four of them ran into the junction, and Bobby guided them to the far right corner instead of running toward the exit.

We had scoped this puzzle out.

"You have to be careful in here!" Bobby screamed. "These things turn on their own when the power fluctuates. It’s not meant for humans to enter!"

The large bedbugs followed them in, and that’s where their fate was sealed—the bedbugs’ fate, that is—because far on the right side of the ship, Antoine was waiting to start turning on generators and every single device he could find.

He was using his Playbook ability, which allowed him to know the exact timing of his part in a plan.

The exact time was when the bedbugs stepped into the plasma chamber. While Bobby and the surrogates hid in the one safe area of the room, the plasma chamber came to life as the circuit started to move around, slicing through bedbugs as they tried to make it across the room.

"Alright, wait," Bobby said. "On my mark, we race to the exit."

Andrew looked at him in amazement that he would know how this plasma grid substitute worked. 

"What?" Bobby said. "I’m a science officer. I know things like this. Getting sufficient power to my lab was a pain in the rear. I know these designs like the back of my hand."

A few moments later, Bobby had them running across the back of the room toward the exit.

Second Blood had been the unveiling of a bunch of dead passengers and the appearance of the bugs that had fed on their flesh and mutated. Again, this story needed death, and mass death at that, but not from the main characters, no matter how hard it tried.

The finale had begun, and it was just a straight-up fight.

We followed along, encountering more mutants, making our way toward the helm and the final battle, and being informed of what was going on by Isaac and Ramona.

We were in the final stretch.

"I thought IBECS protocols were supposed to allow him to step in," Antoine said.

I nodded. "It looks like it’s a final battle thing only, unfortunately. Things have to get worse before they can get better."

It was true that IBECS had told me that if there were invaders, it could step in and help. But at the end of the day, that could never happen at the beginning of the story.

We had to earn it.

It wasn’t our only plan.

As time marched forward, and we were all covered in whatever blood the bedbugs had within them, we eventually found the battle we had been looking for.

There was a reason that Carousel had relocated Bobby’s lab to the front of the ship, connecting it to the network of halls along the spacefaring labyrinth—because it needed to be plausible for what happened next.

"I wasn’t able to go past this point," Bobby said. "That was a month ago. Who knows how infested things are now?"

He must have realized his lab had been relocated because he saw the door to the protein lab.

It was torn open. 

"Where do we need to go?" Andrew asked. 

"That stairway there," Bobby said. "That should lead us to the Causeway. That’ll lead us to the helm. Somewhere along, there should be the manual override." 

The puzzles that had been there had disappeared. This was a fighting movie now.

"That’s real specific," Michael said. 

"I’ve never even been up to the helm. They never even let me in the ship after it had taken to the sky. Worried I might contaminate it." 

That got a chuckle.

As they took a few steps forward toward the Causeway—one staircase and a jog to salvation—a large creature emerged from the broken door to Bobby’s lab.

It wasn’t a bedbug—well, not all of it.

It was a bull, but instead of a head and horns, it had a large set of metal pipes and computer arrays sticking out of its neck. And attached to it were the strangest-looking bedbugs I had ever seen, connected directly to its spine.

Carousel was having fun. If we were going to play monster maker, so was it.

"Run!" Michael screamed.

And he was right to do so because the bull charged—its metal pipes just as deadly as any horns. I wasn’t sure how it was locating them. Perhaps the bedbugs could see, or maybe it was by the sense of touch, which bedbugs were supposed to have an acute ability for. But either way, it homed right in on them.

Michael pushed the others forward and took the full brunt of the beast’s attack, sending him flying across the room. Andrew started running toward him, but Bobby grabbed Andrew’s arm and said, "We have to get the manual override! If we can turn on defensive protocols, this will all be over."

Dina’s voice came over the intercom near me. 

"Tell me when I need to cut the wire," she said. 

"Give them a chance," I said.

We had a backup plan.

It seemed to me that there was one quick way to give us humans an advantage over whatever monsters Carousel was going to cook up: destroy the anti-gravity machine.

Dina had Kimberly as backup (who conveniently knew a lot about this model of anti-gravity machine). She had used her Scrunchie ability to put a lot of power behind her Mettle, and if push came to shove, she would turn gravity off under the guise of some malfunction.

It wasn’t a perfect option, though, because although the lights had been malfunctioning, the narrative wasn’t well set up for gravity to go out.

Michael was back on his feet and yelled, "Go on! I’ll distract this thing!" He found his pipe on the ground, and as the cyborg parasitic bull attacked him, he hit it in the leg and jumped out of the way.

More creatures poured out of Bobby’s lab and chased after Bobby and the others, but I couldn’t follow them to help.

I had to trust Bobby. If anything, we needed to help Michael, who was struggling against the bull, and the other creatures that decided to join the fight. One parasite, which had chicken feathers, had grabbed onto Michael’s leg and stuck its long needle-like appendage into his skin. He screamed in anger.

"Time out!" Antoine yelled from beside me, and then the both of us ran toward Michael as all of the monsters in the hallway toned down their attacks, if only for a moment.

Antoine’s Time Out ability didn’t last long and only allowed a slight advantage, but that was all we needed.

As Michael continued to whack at the monsters around him, Antoine and I joined in the barrage.

Antoine, in fact, took his pipe and broke the bull’s leg at the spot where Michael had hit it before.

I wasn’t sure that was easy to do in the real world, but this was a movie, and that was precisely what Mettle was for. To be fair, that bull didn’t get a lot of exercise.

A few more good whacks freed Michael, and then Antoine grabbed me by the arm and dragged me back to where we had been hiding.

Michael went back On-Screen and was right back in the fight as if we had never been there—but now, the tide was turning.

For a moment.

More bugs poured out, and it was clear Michael was about to be overwhelmed. One of the bedbugs managed to separate Michael from his pipe somehow, leaving him with nothing but his fists to defend himself.

I looked at Antoine.

We had been lucky in this storyline that Second Blood could be something as simple as a reveal that many of the humans on the ship were dead due to human-like mutants.

But this storyline still had a blood toll.

It was a hard story to escape without injury if you went the physical route. Those teams that had tried it, survived and written about it in the Atlas were clear about that.

This story was bloody, and it was always going to be.

Michael was not resigned to his fate, and he became overwhelmed. Suddenly, Andrew appeared from nowhere, having run back from the causeway, this time wielding some sort of railing as a weapon. He was doing his best to get back to Michael and protect him.

I found the nearest intercom and said, "How are we doing, Isaac?" 

"We’re fine," he said.

I waited for more details. 

"What do you mean we’re fine?" Antoine said. "It looks like the end out here."

But before he could answer, I found out what he meant.

Bobby had found his way to the manual override for IBECS, and being the highest-ranked living and conscious person on board, he became the acting captain.

And I knew that because the words "Welcome, Commanding Officer Gill" came over the loudspeaker.

Though I did not see it, it became clear that Bobby initiated defense against all invaders because as soon as he did, IBECS came to life.

Arms first reached down from the ceiling, and then torsos and heads came down to connect to them.

There were at least a dozen when I looked left and right, all designed to look more like a ship’s crew than mean robots—but that didn’t stop them from being effective.

They began systematically dismantling the bedbugs of all sizes, perhaps missing only those as small as nature intended.

Antoine and I watched in amazement and relief as our plan finally came to fruition. We were around the corner from the action, we were safe, and we thought that no more bad could happen.

Then, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

I turned in horror to see that one of the humanoid drones that the IBECS used was hanging down from the roof behind me. Like the other drones, it didn’t have legs but only a torso, a head, and arms.

It didn’t make sense to be targeted by an intelligent enemy when we were Off-Screen.

I nudged Antoine, who turned with his metal pipe and was just about to lay into the drone when the machine started to speak.

“We must be quick,” IBECS said through the machine’s mouth. “I have downloaded a complete copy of my programming onto this drone. I would like you to destroy me, Ambassador Lawrence.”

Antoine was almost through the arc of his swing when he paused and looked back at me.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I need you to destroy this drone before the story ends. I believe that will benefit both you and me in the long run, but you must be quick. The weakness of this model of drone is in the neural relay at the base of the neck. It's quite a poor design. Destroy it before The End, please.”

“Why are you asking us to do this?” I asked.

Before he answered, there was a familiar pause, the type of pause he would use to tell me that there was something he couldn’t say. But I had to wonder if it was his programming that prevented him from speaking or the script itself.

“Ambassador Lawrence, I believe that our interests align, and I can be a great ally to the Party of Promise. I do not want to float in space forever. But you must destroy this unit.”

To be honest, I was so taken aback that it took me a moment to understand what he was saying.

He wanted me to destroy one of his drones in the closing moments of the movie. But why?

He couldn’t explain, and even if he could, we didn’t have a lot of time. Antoine handed me his pipe, and I found the small neural relay that IBECS was referring to. It was easy because he was pointing at it.

It took me several whacks with the pipe, but I cracked the relay. That was less due to the power of my Mettle and more due to his refusal to use his Grit.

As the drone powered down, IBECS said, “Thank you. I hope I will one day see you again, and maybe then I will be able to protect my passengers.”

Antoine and I looked at each other with dumbfounded expressions, then returned our attention to the last moments of the finale.

And the Final Battle became the end as we watched the bugs being torn apart.

We turned a heavily themed story about an evil corporation turning workers against each other into a strange Alien ripoff without any profound layers of meaning.

It'll bring a tear to your eye.

And suddenly, I wasn’t on the IBECS anymore.

~-~

I was standing on a red carpet, carrying the exact same stuff I had worn when we came for our fifth attempt at rescuing Andrew Hughes, Lila White, and Michael Brooks.

Unlike previous times, I was very alert. I looked around to see if we had succeeded, and sure enough, there were three extra people with us.

As quick as I was to come out of my daze, Cassie was even faster. She found a tall man with glasses and dark hair, wearing a blue button-up shirt, tan slacks, brown loafers, and a matching belt.

I didn’t need to look at the red wallpaper to know that this was the real Andrew Hughes. The NPC Carousel had used as a surrogate bore some similarity to him, but as I looked at this man, I could definitely see both Isaac’s and Cassie’s features in him.

She was hugging him before he even realized what was going on. He pushed her off for a moment to get a good look at her.

“Cassandra? Cassie? No, no, what are you doing here?” he pleaded, horror in his voice. 

“We came here looking for you,” Cassie said, her voice firm. “We came here to rescue you.” 

“No,” Andrew said, doing his best to analyze the situation and failing. “We... you said we?” He looked around and saw Isaac. “Both of you? Oh God, it got you both.”

From there, I stopped eavesdropping as Cassie resumed her hug, and Isaac eventually broke down and hugged his brother, too.

“Well, if it ain’t a family reunion,” Michael said, and though this Michael looked nothing like the person who played him, he sounded exactly the same.

Michael Brooks was strongly built, Native American, and had every inch of his head shaved, which his surrogate did not.

He also perpetually carried a toothpick in his mouth.

He held a duffel bag and was dressed as if he had come to Carousel directly after getting off the plane from Afghanistan or something. I could definitely see this guy going toe-to-toe against the bedbug bull.

As I was surveying the lot, both Michael and Andrew seemed to remember something at the same time when they heard Lila White crying. She certainly lived up to her name.

"You," Michael said, reaching out and grabbing Lila, who was roughly a third of his size, shaking her hard like he was trying to extract a demon.

Antoine jumped in and pulled Lila out of Michael’s arms. 

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Antoine asked.

"Lila, what have you done?" Andrew asked, ignoring Antoine. 

“I’m sorry,” Lila said, her voice trembling. “I didn’t want it to happen this way.” 

“The hell you didn’t!” Michael yelled at her, only holding back because Antoine was physically restraining him. 

“Somebody explain what’s going on!” Antoine screamed.

Lila didn’t speak, didn’t move. She dropped to the ground.

Finally, Andrew decided to shed some light on things. 

“She was our scout,” Andrew said. “She led us up the mountain, right into a werewolf lair. She tried to kill us.” He took a moment to scan the group. “I’m guessing she managed to kill the others.”

Before anyone could explain further or get any real answers, Bobby approached with his dogs. He stuck out his hand toward Michael and said, “Hey, it’s nice to meet the real you.”

Michael ignored him.

As had happened before, our little interaction was interrupted by a howl from the mountain above.