Book Five, Chapters 32 and 33

"IBECS, this is the Helio. Please confirm this transmission. We have no edible provisions on our ship. Mayday, this is an emergency; we are requesting aid on behalf of KRSL," I said.

That line required hours of planning, including taking all the food we had on our ship and throwing it out the airlock.

"This is the IBECS. I'm confirming with the Helio AI. It seems that you are out of food. That is troubling. My protocols allow me to permit temporary coupling to provide the Helio with an emergency supply of provisions."

We all started to cheer aboard the helm of the Helio. It had taken us forever to figure out how to get IBECS to let us connect our ship to theirs so that we could actually go into the IBECS and interact with the story.

It ended up being pretty simple.

IBECS had to help us if we were in trouble and it was able to help. The one thing that we knew for sure was that the IBECS had lots of food. If we needed food, then IBECS should let us attach even if we didn’t have the proper approval since we were a fellow KRSL vessel.

Exhale. Back to the real problem.

We were already halfway through the storyline, and we still had a long way to go to get the Player Surrogates to the helm of the IBECS.

We weren't giving up.

"Captain," I said, "please connect us to that junction on the starboard side of the IBECS labeled 'Protein Lab' on the holo-frame."

"You got it," Rudy said.

He and the other NPCs had been silently rooting for us. I could see their joy when we finally figured out how to move forward.

This was a big step. We couldn't be a part of the story— in fact, our ship wasn't even in the storyline itself—but if we could get on that ship, we could scout things out ahead and figure out solutions for the NPCs before they even found the problems. This was really convenient because the NPCs were slow and drudging, and they were having the worst days of their lives because of bedbugs.

They weren't getting sleep, and they were becoming paranoid. Now, they were lined up outside Bobby's door, trying their best to break through but failing miserably.

"You're telling me that there is fresh meat on the other side of that door, and yet I can't get this overgrown ATM machine just to open it?" Michael said, enraged, at the end of his rope.

"The Protein Lab was supposed to be cordoned off from the rest of this ship," Andrew said. "It makes sense. Just be patient."

Andrew took everything in stride and explored it analytically. I wondered if that was Andrew's real personality or just a generic NPC trait.

For now, we celebrated because our ship was connecting to the outside of the large unit that Bobby was currently trapped in.

We would get to see Bobby, and most importantly, we would start making some real progress.

Within moments, we found ourselves staring at a door in the side of the large room that contained most everything inside our ship. The door was formed from white eggshell material with no seams, yet it easily attached to the outside of the IBECS and created an airtight seal.

We waited as the IBECS door unbolted, and with a hiss, the airlock on the outside of the older ship opened.

There was Bobby, waiting for us. He had a wide grin on his face, happy not to be alone, happy that we were making progress, and ultimately overjoyed that he was no longer technically stuck on a ship rapidly running out of fuel.

As a bonus, behind him were huge tanks filled with decapitated animals, their limbs jogging in thin air to give us emotional support.

"Let's get to work," Antoine said.

Except, of course, the only person who needed to get to work was Dina because she had a trope called Savvy Safecracker, which was based on how movie thieves are so easily able to get through doors and locks.

Stepping into the IBECS was like stepping into another world. We had come from some optimistic future with technology that could aid your every need, and every discomfort was erased before you even knew you had it.

The IBECS was harsh and smelled funny. It didn't smell organic—no, it smelled like we were in some refinery.

That smell permeated everything.

~-~

Dina was quick to start examining the door that would finally let Bobby out of his room so he could assist the NPCs on the other side, who were currently occupied talking about their feelings or something.

Dina ran her hands along the metal, which had been painted yellow in an industrial style.

"It'll take a couple of hours," she said, "but I can do it."

"How?" Bobby asked.

"I have no idea," she answered as she got to work looking for tools or something around Bobby's workspace.

That's how her power worked—she just had to look busy, and then the answer would come to her.

We left Isaac, Cassie, and Ramona aboard the Helio. They couldn't do much over here, and the last thing we needed was to get trapped Off-Screen and unable to get back to our ship. Even standing on the IBECS made me nervous, but it was rapidly becoming necessary as coaching surrogates around the ship from cameras was not going to cut it.

Dina's estimate was correct. She banged on the door with various implements for a while until it suddenly dawned on her what she needed to do.

"All right, what we need to do is wire power directly into the mechanism that unlocks the door," she said. "These doors are designed to be locked by default, and they need power in order to unlock. It makes sense because, technically, this door could have been on the outside of the ship had Bobby's unit not been attached. You want the default to be locked. Right now, we've got these huge tungsten rods acting as pins, and we're not going to move them or cut through them, and we all know how IBECS is."

She usually used her trope to stick a bobby pin into a door lock and move it around until it clicked, but it was cool to see that it would work on something a bit more advanced.

Before long, she and Bobby—who had suddenly become quite handy with technology because of his character's background—had hooked up wires into the door and then connected those to some pump that Bobby's character used on the giant animal tanks.

All Bobby had to do was turn on the pump to supply power to the locks and bypass IBECS, and the door unlocked.

That's not something you really have to try to prevent on a spaceship, but it still seemed like a glaring security failure.

Unfortunately, we were in the world's most high-stakes game of telephone.

Even though we had unlocked the door, we were not technically in the storyline, so we had to get out of the camera shot so that Bobby could do it all again on his own for the audience.

That was easy enough—we just went and hid in the giant warehouse with its endless rows of headless cattle.

Carousel seemed to understand what was going on because Bobby went On-Screen as soon as he started trying to unlock the door. He called out to the NPCs on the other side, telling them what he was doing.

"You're gonna electrocute yourself!" Michael yelled through the intercom.

"Oh, I've done that plenty of times," Bobby said. "It's not that big a deal."

With a little bit of rigging, moving wires around, and recreating the actions that Dina had shown him, he got the door to unlock, and he looked like a genius doing it.

With the pull of a handle, the large circular door swung ajar, and for the first time, we got to see the NPCs that we had been shepherding face to face.

Well, technically, we were hiding in the back of the room, but seeing them physically was quite horrifying because even though they had never been as infested with bedbugs as nasty as the other passengers, they were still eaten up.

They had weeping wounds and scratches from where they had itched themselves in their sleep.

But that wasn't the only thing notable about what came through that door when they walked in.

They brought an aura with them—I could feel it. I could feel paranoia and anxiety. I could feel the effects of the bedbugs converted into a dark form of movie magic designed to ensure that anyone in this movie played their part.

I scratched the back of my neck, and as I looked around at Antoine, Kimberly, and Dina, I saw that I was not the only one.

~-~

To his credit, Bobby was doing great. His character had been a pretty well-ranked science officer, so he was able to order IBECS to open the next couple of doors. That was a great relief to the NPCs and us.

He was also very reassuring. Since he had not spent his entire waking hours scratching himself, he was a voice of calm to them that even the analytical Andrew could not match.

However, we were facing a problem.

Second Blood was coming up soon.

We only had one, two, maybe three scenes before it appeared.

First Blood had been pretty bloodless, with the exception of the blood of the passengers, who all woke up screaming. No one had to die other than those who had already passed from allergies or infection.

But Second Blood promised that someone had to go. We only hoped it would be more passengers and not our surrogates.

We knew that there was another sleeping bay attached to the ship, a much smaller one that had all the same problems as the larger one—everyone was infected with bedbugs and being kept sedated.

If we could get the Player Surrogates there, we reasoned that Second Blood could involve some shocking scene from the second sleeping bay, and our little sheep, Andrew, Lila, and Michael, might be okay.

It was gruesome, but that was the best-case scenario. Our priority was rescuing Andrew—we didn't want to lose any of our surrogates.

Obviously, we didn't want to lose Bobby. We could not let that happen.

We also had an unanswered question: Was it possible for the players who were not a part of the storyline to die? Would Carousel try to do that? All of my reading from the Atlas had led me to believe that it wouldn't. Carousel wouldn't protect us if we put ourselves in danger, but because we were not really characters, it wouldn't go out of its way to kill us.

And we could tell ourselves that over and over again, but that did not remove the fear.

On to the next obstacle.

This one was relatively straightforward. Bobby was not qualified to unlock the door to something called the Cross-Ark Hall, which was designed to allow people to walk across the large mechanism where the anti-gravity machine was kept.

This was a significant problem because this one hallway divided the entire IBECS into two parts—there was no other way across, not a way designed for passengers, at least.

Even from the video footage, Dina could tell that it was not a door she could unlock, which meant it must have been tough luck because her power didn’t work well through video.

The only way for them to pass by this section of the ship to get to the helm was by crossing something called a Phase Ballast, which was in the heart of the anti-gravity mechanism.

When we asked IBECS what a Phase Ballast was, he gave us this answer:

"Ah, yes, the Phase Ballast. In layman’s terms, the Phase Ballast is a critical component of the ship's gravimetric stabilization matrix. It's essentially a hyper-dynamic oscillatory beam that functions within the quantum flux array, suspended in a state of controlled magneto-inertial flux. This beam operates within a subspace envelope, where it modulates the gravitational phase variance in real time, ensuring that the ship's anti-gravitational field maintains a stable equilibrium across all sectors.

The Phase Ballast achieves this by oscillating at a frequency that harmonizes with the ship's phase modulation grid, thereby synchronizing the gravitational waveforms with the inertial compensators. This process mitigates the effects of external gravitational anomalies, which could otherwise destabilize the ship's trajectory or cause localized gravitational distortions.

In simpler terms, the Phase Ballast is like the conductor of an orchestra, but instead of music, it's orchestrating the very forces of gravity itself. The magnetic suspension of the ballast within the gravitic null zone allows it to float freely, optimizing its phase variance correction without the interference of conventional gravitational forces. It's quite fascinating, really—a delicate dance of graviton particles and quantum fields, all governed by the elegant mathematics of hyperdimensional physics.

If you would like a more technical explanation, feel free to ask."

I didn't know if Carousel had a mouth, but I swore I could hear it laughing.

~-~

"I'll test it out," Antoine said. We had left Bobby's room and had gone up ahead of the NPCs to scout and see if there was anything tricky about the Phase Ballast.

I didn't know if IBECS would have a problem with us walking through its halls, but it didn't seem to. All of our tropes designed to help us with stealth seemed wasted—we weren't part of the movie; we were just around.

When we reached the part of the ship where everything bottlenecked and a giant locked door prevented us from using the Cross-Ark Hall, we found a human-sized ventilation shaft that would allow a person to enter the Phase Ballast matrix.

"I could get that thing off of there," Antoine said, staring at the cover of the ventilation shaft. At first, it appeared to be an obstacle in and of itself.

"Yes, but then it wouldn't make sense why the ventilation shaft was already broken open," I said.

The solution was far more straightforward. We had brought a screwdriver from Bobby's workshop.

It wasn't difficult to get into the ventilation shaft—in movies, it never is.

"I'll go first," Antoine said.

He was eager to help. So far, all we had done was guide people around and come up with ideas. He didn't feel like he was really contributing as much as he could. But testing out a potentially suicidal jungle gym?

He felt that he could do that.

He dropped down into the room, and I followed right after him.

It definitely was an obstacle out of a sci-fi movie. The Phase Ballast was basically a giant boardwalk about the length of a football field that connected two platforms on the ends of a large tube, which was the room we were in. I couldn't see the walls because everything was dark, but there were sci-fi lights attached to the platform and ambient light that allowed us to see in front of us.

The ballast itself did not touch either of the platforms or connect to anything else, as far as I could see—it was floating free.

Therein lay the challenge.

As soon as Antoine stepped foot onto the Phase Ballast, it started to move, and he was instantly down on all fours, finding handholds where the lights emanated from or where wires stuck out.

The thing moved, tilted, and spun around with him right on it, but ultimately, there were places to put his hands all along it.

It was just a test of strength and dexterity.

For some reason, it reminded me of a rodeo, as the ballast moved and turned and bucked but ultimately submitted once Antoine had shown he was not giving up easily.

Antoine made it to the other side with a sheen of sweat on his forehead, and then he waved me forward.

"No, I'm good," I said. "Time to come back—we need to instruct the NPCs."

He rolled his eyes. "What? Coward!" he yelled.

I wasn't afraid to cross the ballast; I was concerned about time. Second Blood would be here soon, and I wanted the NPCs to be far past this room when it got here. I was also a little afraid to cross the ballast.

Once we got Bobby alone, we explained everything that we saw to him. Of course, his character had every reason to understand how the ship worked, so he explained it to the NPCs quickly.

Everything was going according to plan.

Until it wasn't.

As the NPCs approached the Phase Ballast, we watched from the shadows, itching ourselves but excited. Getting past this obstacle was a colossal checkpoint—the helm was only a few more puzzles away.

Just as they were about to climb into the Phase Ballast, a scream sounded from toward the back of the ship.

Then another.

Then another.

"They're waking back up," Andrew said angrily. "We have to go sedate them again. Goddammit, I'm going to make sure that everyone knows what they did to us here."

He and Michael immediately ran back toward the sleeping bay against Bobby's protests. Lila instead ducked her head down into the Phase Ballast matrix to take a look, and then she sat waiting.

She wanted no part in the screaming passengers. Her ivory skin covered in blood was an image that could have been on the movie poster—the blank look in her eyes as if the lights had gone out.

The issue was that re-sedating all of the passengers took time—not just actual time but screen time, moving the story forward.

"Bobby, get them back here and get them across this Phase Ballast now," I said, but we both knew my words were wasted.

We had set in motion everything that would happen, and it was too late to change it. Second Blood was upon us.

Antoine, Kimberly, Dina, and I couldn't risk being on the ship during Second Blood, so we found ourselves running back to the Helio.

We actually crossed paths with the surrogates, but they didn't make eye contact or acknowledge us. They weren't On-Screen at that moment, but they would be soon. They were headed back up toward the Phase Ballast.

I was looking down a long hallway, watching them run toward it.

At the end of it, I saw Bobby poking his head back, wondering if he, too, should be seeking shelter somewhere else. It didn't make sense for his character not to be in this scene, but I could not risk Bobby dying.

Bobby had less Plot Armor than the NPCs—twenty-four to their twenty-five. I couldn't risk him being there—I couldn't risk him being On-Screen during Second Blood, even if it hurt the final film.

I could tell he was nervous about it, too. I waved for him to come back to us, and he did. As he passed the NPCs in the hall, he begged them not to go forward with their plan, but his words were wasted. He then gave them some excuse about why he wasn't going to be there, and then all of us ran into his warehouse-sized unit and boarded the Helio.

We closed the door behind us but did not disconnect the ship. Bobby couldn't die for Second Blood if he was on the Helio because the Helio didn't exist in the movie.

He looked around with amazement as we walked up to the helm of our ship, where the viewing monitors were, so we could see what the NPCs were doing.

"Sure would be easy if we could just tell the Player Surrogates to come over here, huh?" Isaac said as he saw us coming.

No kidding

We watched as the three Player Surrogates lowered themselves down into the room with the Phase Ballast.

"I'll go first," Andrew said. "You keep her safe."

Michael nodded.

Andrew crawled out onto the Phase Ballast, not taking any chances, not trying to be too brave. He hugged tight to the surface, not moving forward unless he had something to hold on to. Gravity might have been on his side at that moment, but he seemed to understand what this machine did, so when it first started to jerk and turn, he was not taken by surprise.

His crossing was more dramatic than Antoine's because it was On-Screen. There were staged pauses as the Phase Ballast shook and twisted and then came to balance again, and Andrew put one hand over another, finding a grip and crawling forward—forward, forward, the length of a football field.

Eventually, he reached the other side and was able to make it onto the platform. He stood up and gave a thumbs-up to the other side.

Next up was Lila. She moved slowly, afraid of every tremor. She made one movement after another until she reached the center of the Phase Ballast, and suddenly, there was turbulence. She screamed, and Michael called out, "Lila!"

She was frozen with fear.

"Come on, Lila! You have to crawl the rest of the way. You'll be fine. Just make sure you have a handhold," Andrew said.

"I'm afraid," she said, crying.

True to her word, she didn't move.

And because she didn't move, Carousel got cranky. The whole platform turned over 180  degrees, and she was left hanging from handholds and screaming at the top of her lungs.

"I'm coming!" Michael called out to her. "Just hold on a little bit longer."

This was an entirely different task. Walking on top of the Phase Ballast was hard enough, but trying to monkey-bar along the bottom with the feeble handholds available was another task entirely.

The underside of the Phase Ballast, which was now on top, did not have the friendly handholds that the top did.

He looked it over but wasn't willing to risk trying to walk to her without anything to hold on to. He quickly found himself with one leg wrapped around the side of the ballast and both of his hands gripping onto handholds on the underside where Lila was. He pulled himself along, sticking to the side of the platform, showing off the strength that he had gained in the military.

It was incredible to watch—a feat of strength and coordination.

And just as he was almost to Lila, within arm's reach where he could reach out and almost get to her, the platform flipped back over.

Lila was able to hang on, and she was now back on top of the platform, but Michael was not so lucky. He had one hand on a meager handhold, but the entire rest of his body was pulled out sideways as if gravity wasn't behaving. The extreme forces of the Phase Ballast were pulling him as the entire platform began to shake and rotate.

Lila managed to grab hold with her hands and move her feet up under two wedges, which allowed her to establish a good foundation and hang on.

"Grab my hand!" Michael screamed. "Grab on to it! I'm slipping!"

He reached out toward Lila.

She refused to look at him.

"Lila!" he screamed. "Give me your hand!"

But she just froze, shook, and looked in the other direction, either too afraid to understand what was going on or too afraid to let loose of one of her secure handholds and risk being pulled off the platform with Michael.

"Grab him!" Andrew screamed. "He's right there—just grab him! Pull him out of that gravitational stream! Hurry!"

But Lila did nothing.

Moments later, the platform started to gyrate back and forth. Michael was beaten up against the side of the wall, first with a scream and then with a crunch. And it went on for a while as Carousel got its footage of the carnage. It was like he was inside of a clothes dryer.

Even with our poor vantage point from the security camera in the room, we could see that there were parts of him—mostly blood—floating in the anti-gravity field around the platform.

And with that, Second Blood passed.

The rescue poster for Michael Brooks disappeared from the red wallpaper.