Book Five, Chapter 30

More chapters will come as they are ready.

~

~

~

Time was different between our two ships. This became abundantly clear, and the reason was simple: our ship had conscious players in it.

The other ship, filled with bedbugs and doomed passengers, wasn't exactly speeding up or anything like that. I didn't see them zooming around on the camera. Instead, I could see that all of the NPCs—the conscious ones, at least—were going from mark to mark and shooting footage for Carousel. As they did, the timestamp on the footage would jump forward days at a time.

It was probably a lot easier for Carousel when all of the characters in the movie were scripted. This spelled trouble for me because I really wanted my Dailies trope to activate, which would allow me to see uncut footage from the day before, but because I wasn't experiencing day and night cycles, the dailies didn't come.

Luckily, there was something we could do about that.

"I don't know exactly how this works," Antoine said. "There's not, like, a button in my mind or anything." He cleared his throat and then continued, "Nighttime!" He smacked his hands together. "It is now nighttime."

We waited for a moment.

Sure enough, all of the NPCs on our ship, the Helio, started to shift around as Rudy and Flannery went to sleep, and some of the others took the helm. As they did, the dailies appeared in my mind on the red wallpaper.

Antoine's In Bed By Nine" trope allowed him to trigger a sort of narrative bedtime that made a lot more sense when you were on Earth, or at least whatever Carousel was.

We weren't revolving around the sun, so nighttime didn't make as much sense. His ability didn't just affect us. No, the time fast-forwarding on the other ships stopped immediately, and the player surrogates started getting ready to try and find a place to sleep, which was something we had not yet seen them do, and for good reason.

It was traumatic.

They didn't get much sleep. Their entire ship was infested with bedbugs, and although they had managed to make it out of the sleeping bay, the rest of the ship they had access to (a large hall, some closets, and a poorly stocked kitchenette) was not much more hospitable.

"How are they everywhere?" Lila, the Wallflower surrogate, complained as she itched herself into a raw, pulpy mess.

Michael, who was pretending to be a Soldier archetype, was very angry and losing his self-control. He would bang his fists on doors and scream in frustration as he realized that every single room they went to seemed to be infested.

"Why would they be in here? This is a closet!" he screamed as he knocked down a shelf that held random supplies like flashlights and lanyards.

Andrew, the Doctor surrogate, was much calmer. That's not to say he was relaxed, but compared to the other two, he was taking things in stride.

"I told you time and time again, bedbugs can traverse a house easily in chase of prey. And if I'm not mistaken, the IBECS systems are unintentionally spreading them. There's an attachment that comes out on a large arm that vacuums the floor. I have to wonder if that very attachment is actually spreading them around the ship."

"I'm gonna kill somebody," Michael said.

"If we have to stay in these conditions for much longer, I hope that somebody is me," Andrew said.

~-~

Watching them was like watching animatronics in a way that observing normal NPCs was not. They were front and center, and it seemed clear that Carousel had an idea of what they should be doing at all times for the script. I almost felt as if Carousel was using them to show us what it wanted—repeating the same scene over and over again with a slightly different delivery, giving out bits of personality here and there so that Carousel could construct a character arc.

It left me wondering if there was a lot more flexibility to being On-Screen than I initially believed. Of course, I wasn't ready to experiment with those theories just yet; I had yet to be On-Screen for the entire film.

It wasn't too long after Antoine created a nighttime break for the story that Cassie and Ramona started calling our names. I hadn't seen them since we sent them away hours earlier to prevent Cassie from accidentally activating her Anguish trope. They were in the sleeping bay of our ship, and as we rushed through the door, I saw that Ramona, Cassie, Isaac, and Dina were all at the back of the room near the strange machine called the Foremother.

While it had remained dormant for most of the time we had been there, it was now beeping to life. Some of its eggshell-white parts had moved around and shifted to make the machine larger, while others lit up with light to create a screen.

"What's going on in here?" Antoine asked. "Who touched it?"

"I didn't touch it," Cassie said. "I just thought to it."

"What?" he asked.

"I just thought about it, and it started turning on," Cassie explained.

As we approached, I saw a red light on the screen, along with many symbols I didn't understand and the words "Please enter genetic sample" in bright orange letters.

Cassie had said that she thought to it, as if she could control it with her mind. In some ways, that made sense because there were no buttons to press, so there had to be some way to control it.

The truth became clear moments later.

While we weren't exactly enthusiastic about messing with the machine, it was interesting, and we had to believe that Carousel had put it there for some reason. So we started out with just a quick tap on the screen that did nothing. Oddly, despite the futuristic design, it didn't even have a touch screen.

Then, we tried more academic measures, such as whacking the side of the machine in hopes that it would do something.

"I'm not sure this is a good idea. I thought I asked you to take away the fuse or whatever it was," I said to Dina.

"I did. The NPCs replaced it," she responded.

Cassie had developed a very strong interest in it, and to be frank, so did I. It didn’t take long for me to realize the machine was whispering to us. I didn't even notice it was happening until I tried to hear the others talking and realized I could barely hear them over the strange static the machine was putting out.

Cassie and I were the only ones to hear it.

When I covered my ears and asked people to stop talking, they were confused.

"It wants me to put my hand in it," Cassie said.

She was right. The whispers, whatever they were, definitely wanted us to interact with it—not in a strange compulsive way, but more in an instruction manual type of way. It was telling us how to operate it.

I was so curious that I didn't even stop Cassie when she stuck her hand inside a small opening in the machine. She jerked her hand back out.

"It poked me," she said.

As soon as she had withdrawn her hand, the opening in the machine closed up seamlessly. It was once again the white eggshell of all the other machines on the ship, other than the deep sleep pods.

The machine hummed and whirred, and warm air seemed to exude from it, though I couldn't see any vents. Moments later, a picture of Cassie appeared on the screen—except this Cassie didn't have pierced ears or tattoos, and she certainly didn't have blue streaks in her hair. It was like a picture created from memory—a police sketch made by AI.

The readout stated:

“Subject analysis complete. Neurocognitive augmentation markers detected and verified. Genetic profile indicates advanced neural capabilities exceeding standard parameters. Proceed with further augmentation or psychic testing protocols as required.”

"Where's the copy button?" Isaac asked.

"What? What is it saying?" Kimberly asked, ignoring Isaac.

I started to laugh because I finally figured out one of the crucial questions we had been asking: Why was it that Cassie's Psychic trope did not work on the base storyline, but it did work whenever Dina's Rescue trope was brought into the mix?

This was the reason. This funny machine from the future told us everything we needed to know.

"There are psychics in the world of the story where this ship is from," I said, "but there are no psychics in the world of the story where that ship is from. The IBECS doesn't have psychics. This ship does not exist in the base story because it's from somewhere else."

Carousel had used pieces of one story to help create the rescue conditions for another. The reason that Cassie and I could hear something coming from the machine was because we had psychic powers (from her Archetype and my background trope), and it was clear that whatever happened in the storyline the Helio was from, psychic powers were common enough that they operated machines.

In fact, for all we knew, this ship could literally be an alien craft. Nothing about it required that it be a human vessel.

"Alright, so how does that help us?" Antoine asked.

"I have no idea," I said.

That wasn't quite true. I had a million ideas, but I needed to wait until I found a good one.

~-~

We didn't want to make the machine do anything. In fact, we weren't even sure it was supposed to be used. The only thing we discovered while messing around with it was that it had profiles for each of Bobby's five dogs.

The NPC had implied that they were the entire reason the machine was on the ship—so that Bobby could have the dogs that he was licensed to take into the story. Seeing as we didn't need any dogs running around the spaceship, we didn't go anywhere from there.

However, as we messed around with it, I started to doubt the cover story that the NPC had given for it as being some Noah's Ark survival machine in case someone was stranded on a planet.

The machine was sending instructions to us, and while those instructions were not in English, I never got the impression that it was an emergency device. I had difficulty finding any genetic profiles other than Cassie's and the five dogs.

If you can't trust a random NPC giving you lore, who could you trust?

I decided to take a nap inside one of the deep sleep chambers, if only so that I could look through the dailies and see what footage Carousel had collected for me.

As usual, my first impression was boredom. Scene after scene showing characters moving from one room to another, showing characters breathing, showing bedbugs crawling over everything. Oh my God, I hated it. I mentally begged it to stop showing me those damn bugs!

Except, of course, it didn't stop because they were literally everywhere, and watching them crawl around was one of the film's primary scare tactics.

And they were everywhere.

Andrew's surrogate had guessed correctly. The bugs were mainly spread around by machinery designed to clean things. The fact was, there were too many, and they were too tenacious for the housekeeping robots to keep up with. They would hitch rides all over the ship and then go into some strange hibernation phase, waiting for someone to show up.

After watching the footage, I would ask IBECS about bedbugs because I figured it would have lots of information—and it did. It had an encyclopedic knowledge of most things.

Bedbugs could survive for months without feeding. Bedbugs could track you down by carbon dioxide, body heat, and smell. That explained why the three player surrogates had been spared; they were underneath some air conditioning unit that prevented the bedbugs from finding them as easily while they were in deep sleep.

I had to watch footage of the bedbugs slowly devouring all of the passengers and the medical implements in the deep sleep chambers being so inadequate to combat what was happening.

They only seemed to be able to treat the results of what was occurring, and one after another, the machines would blare up, asking for a physical attendant for help. But, of course, since everyone was affected, no one was there to help.

One of the cooler things I saw, which had nothing to do with the bedbugs, was the scene where a project manager from KRSL was building the ship. There was no talking, but it was clear what was going on—he was requisitioning assets from another part of the company, using one of the same machines that I had used to look at a 3D model. He was clicking together holographic modules and building a ship.

All I could see of him was the top of his head as the camera stared down at the holographic ship he was assembling. I could see numbers on the side where the cost of the build he was designing was going up too high, and he would detach modules that cost too much, like extra life support or extra fuel tankers.

In the end, he built the IBECS ship as I recognized it—assembled by someone who was not qualified for the lowest possible price.

How could anything bad happen on that ship?

After a long time of watching random footage from around the ship where nothing happened, I finally saw something I had been hoping to see.

I saw Bobby. Or should I say, Officer Bobby Gill?

He was asleep inside one of the deep sleep chambers, but his chamber was not in the sleeping bay. His was an entirely separate warehouse-sized unit that only seemed to have one sleeping chamber.

The camera hovered over the glass of his sleeping chamber, and I could barely make out his face, but I knew it was him.

The camera then backed away and moved up over the warehouse so that I could see what was going on around him.

And it was horrifying.

I saw hundreds of large, multiple-refrigerator-sized tanks standing upright at an angle. Each tank had a green glass cover, so I could see what was inside. While I expected them to be filled with water, they were not. Instead, they contained animal carcasses.

Cows, pigs, chickens, lambs, goats—all kinds of things I could identify just by looking at their bodies because they had no heads.

None of them did.

Where their neck ended, a bunch of tubes and wires sprouted up into the machine part of their tank.

Worse than that, the bodies of these animals were moving. Their limbs were walking; their lungs were inflating and deflating. Of course, without heads, none of them were making sounds.

It was a room of silent horror.

A separate part of the room was devoted to what looked like algae tanks, but that was less interesting.

My mind was so shocked and overcome by what I was seeing that I couldn't even figure out what this room was for. Why did they have a bunch of headless animals hooked up to wires and tubes inside this warehouse?

As the camera panned around, I saw that many of the animal bodies were not full-size. They were still developing. They were growing these animals from a few cells until they were full-grown.

And then the camera moved over the title plate for the room: Protein Lab.

After reading that, I realized why Bobby was in there. His background trope made his character a veterinarian, and Carousel put him in charge of the lab-grown meat on the ship.

I wasn't sure if these animals were part of the original script or if they were just brought in so that Bobby would have a reason to be a veterinarian. The machines were identical in style to the rest of the ship, but they did work with the dark sci-fi aesthetic overall.

One thing I did notice was that neither Bobby nor any of the animals seemed to have bedbugs, which lay in direct contradiction to the rest of the ship. If there were any place that should have bedbugs, it would be this one—but it didn't.

As if Carousel was listening to my thoughts and wanting to answer my question, the camera angle changed, and I saw that on the door, there was a light that read Biohazard Quarantine.

It was really odd that this would be the only room quarantined against bedbugs. But then I realized that wasn't the truth—it was more likely that the room was designed to be cut off from the rest of the ship so that hazardous material from the animals themselves wouldn't get to the passengers.

Talk about irony.

I noticed that Bobby's chamber had some sort of timer going on. I assumed that meant he would be waking up soon, and we would finally be able to talk to him.

After a bit more of watching the headless animals frolic in their brainless dreams, the camera left and showed me other parts of the ship. I tried to memorize them, but the truth was it wasn't that useful of information because I couldn't tell where the cameras were, and the ship was designed in such a nonsensical way that I couldn't make heads or tails of it.

That being said, I did get a good look at the helm.

And a good look at the control terminal where the pilot should sit.

An emergency light was lit.

The light read “FUEL LOW.” Another readout read, “ The estimated remainder of the fuel was three weeks. Coordinate to refuel at the nearest KRSL station.”

Three weeks until the ship ran out of fuel. That sounded like a long time, except days could pass between scenes in this film.

We didn't have that long.

I knew that the original story had a ticking time clock.

This must have been it.

Get to the helm and find a fuel station, or float in space as a human bedbug farm forever.