Arc II, Chapter 79: The Cynic

Hours passed in that circle of fog. Days.

“What the hell is going on!” Isaac screamed into the void. “Hello! Riley, Riley, I think they lost the storyline and we’re just stuck forever. Riley… I can’t….”

“Calm down,” I said. “That’s ridiculous. The plot cycle still says it’s the Finale. Why would that not have changed? Think about it.”

“That’s what you said yesterday!” Isaac said. “Was it even yesterday?”

All I could see was light and a patch of grass under my feet. It was just Isaac and me, and there was nothing to do. Unlike previous ghostly waiting parties, time did not pass quickly. Isaac’s theory that we were stuck here for eternity was slowly becoming more plausible.

I had to ignore that possibility. If I was going to be stuck here, I might as well make it productive.

“I can see it,” I said. “I really can. A Hysteric is driven by emotion. They aren’t just scared; that’s just part of what they are.”

“I don’t care,” Isaac said. “Will you stop playing the game for ten seconds? What the hell is wrong with you? Hysteric, not Hysteric, how does that matter now? It’s all part of the same scam. The details don’t matter. I don’t care if they give her an Archetype. I don’t care if she’s a demon or an NPC. It’s all bull. I still don’t trust her. I still think this is all an exercise in misery. I still think the Paragons are bastards and Carousel is the eleventh circle of hell. You sit there just trusting everything in front of you. I can’t believe I followed you. We’re never getting out of here!”

Dying and becoming a ghost had a calming effect on me. Isaac, however, had moved past that stage.

“Trust has nothing to do with it,” I said. “If this is all a lie, and we’re just in hell, that fucking sucks, but the moment you stop believing you can do something about it, the moment you give up, you lose any chance of a happy ending. I’ve seen enough–“

“If you say you saw all of this in a horror movie, I swear to god I will find a way to hurt you,” Isaac said.

“It’s not about movies. It’s not stories. It’s life. Life sucks, but if you don’t believe there’s some way you can scrape out some semblance of happiness, you… you might as well–“

“Be dead?” Isaac said. “We are dead.”

He started to laugh and laugh and laugh. “Were you going to say we might as well be dead? Oh my god. This is hell and you are my personal devil. I knew when you would always tell us that playing the game was the way out, that we were just going to get stuck further in. We are trapped in quicksand and you kept telling us to wiggle a little more, like that would help us. I knew you were wrong! I knew you were just going to get me and Cassie hurt! Why didn’t I stop us. Why didn’t I just tell you that this was all a trap and we weren’t doing anything to go along with it…. Because I am a coward. I’m a coward…”

He looked at me with tears in his eyes. I wasn’t ready for this.

Isaac didn’t say anything more for a while.

Where was this hostility coming from? He had been layabout for most of the Tutorial, making quips about how pointless everything was, for sure, but every time he expressed his doubts, it was in the form of a lame joke. Now he suddenly wanted to make noise and gnash teeth?

“Whatever the case,” I said. “It’s still worth thinking about. You don’t mind me thinking about stuff, do you?”

He didn’t answer at first. I expected some haughty answer, but he thought about it.

“It makes me nervous,” he said gently.

“How does it make you nervous?” I asked.

Isaac shrugged his shoulders. “I just feel like you are putting in more effort than this whole charade deserves. Makes me feel bad. Every instinct I have says that we should just refuse to go along with this whole thing. In the end, the joke is on us, why should we go along with it?”

This wasn’t the first time Isaac had brought this up, though usually when he said it, he was, again, just joking. He believed, as we all sort of did, that this whole exercise—everything related to Carousel—was some kind of trick. When I engaged in solving the Tutorial or pondering the reality of Carousel, he would go out of his way to be disinterested.

“Officially, when we find out this is all just some endless, pointless torture, I will tell whoever is involved that you were never fooled. You saw right through it all. Is that what you were hoping for?” I asked.

He started to laugh. “That works. If you believe it’s all a lie, you can never be fooled. I wasn’t fooled. I never trusted anyone. I just can’t figure out why I went along with it. How could I set myself up for this?”

If I had been alive, I might have been annoyed, but death, as I had learned over and over again, brought clarity (at least in this storyline). As a ghost, I was able to empathize with Isaac—mostly because I wished I was in his position. If Camden had been here to overthink things instead of me, I wondered if I would be able to lay back and crack jokes and act like I was too smart to be optimistic.

But Camden wasn’t here. I was the guy who had to think about everything from every angle and try to make sense of it all. I didn’t have the privilege of being a skeptic.

We sat in the grass, still surrounded by fog.

The Plot Cycle had not moved in days. Weeks? I had no idea. Even as ghosts, we were going insane. I worried that our confinement would have us at each other’s throats for all eternity.

I could feel the tension rising.

“It’s almost over,” I said. “That’s all I can say.”

“Yep,” he said with a chuckle. “The other shoe is about to drop, though. At least we might get an explanation.”

Probably.

I decided to indulge him.

“How about the big reveal? What do you think it will be? Do you really think we’ve been in hell this whole time? You?” I asked.

“I don’t even want to guess,” he said. “Now that I’m thinking clearly, all I know is that the pursuit of understanding is a torture worse than hell. Whatever’s coming, I’m ready.”

“You think there’s no way out?” I asked. “The Tutorial means nothing. The Throughline is a sham? Saving Lillian Geist to get the true ending? It does seem a little inane, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Isaac said. “I mean, if all we had to do was save Lillian Geist at the Centennial so that the timeline was corrected, why hide it like this? Why make us jump through hoops blindfolded? Where was our guy?”

“Our guy?” I asked.

“You know, in movies,” he said. “Where was our guy who was supposed to say, ‘This is what’s happening, this is how to solve it. It’ll be really hard. Good luck?’ Our guy. That’s what the Paragons should have done. It’s almost like the whole point was to make us act without knowing what we were doing.”

“Could have used a guy like that,” I said. “I did always think that when the Paragons showed up, one of them would reveal what this whole thing was about. They never did.”

Even though he was a ghost, I could still hear the crackle in his voice. He was afraid. We all go to different places when afraid. I tried to find answers. I threw myself into the Tutorial, into the Throughline, in hopes of getting through it and rescuing Anna and Camden.

Isaac ran from answers because he couldn’t imagine a world where the answers were something he wanted to hear.

Still, it was weird that he waited this long to try to hash it out. Maybe ghost Isaac was bolder. Maybe he just sensed the end coming.

Or maybe… it was something else.

“Whatever the case,” I said. “I’ll be happy just to know what the answer is.”

Isaac chuckled. “Then maybe that’s what you will never learn. There will always be one more storyline. One more mystery. Another and another. I think you want to find a way to make the numbers add up so bad that you might never have just considered that you have the wrong numbers.”

We had avoided this conversation for so long. What if everything was a lie? Wasn’t that Jeanette’s thesis that had gotten her killed? In life, we were too afraid to face the worst possibilities. As spirits, we could finally talk about them freely.

So we did.

“The wrong numbers—you mean lies. We’re being lied to. That’s what you have to say?” I said. “The Throughline, Project Rewind, the Tutorial, all lies?”

“What does it matter what I have to say?” Isaac asked. “We die no matter what. That’s what I figure. The only question is, who’s going to be there laughing when we finally realize how pathetic we were for thinking we stood a chance? How many times have we used the phrase ‘rats in a maze’?”

Was he picking a fight?

Well, if there was ever a time to have this conversation, it was then. The Final Battle of the storyline and Tutorial itself was coming up sometime in the next millennia, and Carousel seemed to have stuck us together, leaving us without anything else to do.

I took a deep breath. I was not some doe-eyed believer. I knew this whole place was some gruesome theater. Was he saying that I didn’t know how foolish it was to believe everything would be okay?

“Don’t confuse my pragmatism with optimism,” I said. “Somebody has to be the one to put our foot forward. The only thing I know to do is hope that I can figure this out. If the truth at the end is that the numbers don’t add up, we don’t lose anything for trying.”

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“What if we do? This place is a nightmare. Now that I’m dead, I finally have time to really think about this place. You know, Cassie and Kimberly and Antoine—they talk about this place like it’s hell because of the gore and the misery. To me, it’s hell because my one defense in life—my cynicism—is useless here. Distrusting everyone doesn’t keep you safe when trusting was never an option. We know we’re being tricked. We just don’t know the punchline.”

“Do you trust me?”

“No!” Isaac said. “How can I trust you? How can I trust anyone? Used to be, the only people I knew were on my side were Cassie and Andrew, but Andrew’s dead and I saw Cassie die too. How do I know the Cassie that came back is actually my sister? Don’t get me wrong, I ignore that question just fine. I decided to go along with you guys because when a person gets scared, they’ve got to cling to the comforting truths. Now I’m dead and I don’t need comfort right now. So I’m back to my old philosophy. It’s all a lie. I just don’t know which lie.”

Cassie and Isaac had it worse in so many ways than the rest of us. They never had one moment of normalcy. Camp Dyer had been our shelter in the storm. The Hughes siblings didn’t have that. They had nothing to anchor themselves to. They had no image of Carousel in their mind that they could hold onto and tell themselves they understood.

I laid back on the ground.

“I’m not naïve,” I said. “I feel like I am being led around. I get sick to my stomach just thinking about all the hours I wasted trying to figure out what secrets about the tutorial or the Throughline might be the ones that we need to know the most, only to find out most of that work was meaningless. The deeper truths feel so arbitrary that I start to wonder if I am just too stupid to figure it out. I kept looking for some fundamental thing to latch onto, something that would inspire people to sacrifice themselves for Project Rewind, but all we learn about are the Geists or Ramona and I just have more questions. Where’s the aha moment?”

He sat down next to me, and we stared into the bright fog that surrounded us. The Plot Cycle was still frozen. It didn’t budge a hair.

“I never said you were naïve,” Isaac said. “I just get mad when you take this obvious bullshit so seriously. I get angry that we don’t have an option to just not care. We can’t just opt out, you know? To wait until we know why we’re doing stuff. I don’t care what you say, the Paragons have been starving us for information. Maybe they’re just puppets anyway. Even when they were pretending to be players, I’m pretty sure everything they said was scripted. Cassie told me not to say that because it might cause a fight, but you guys are just way too trusting.”

I hated when he said that. I had never been a trusting person.

“It’s all a lie,” I said, lying back on the grass.

“Damn right,” Isaac said. “It’s all a lie.”

“I know the Paragons are sketchy, but they’re the friendliest faces I’ve seen around lately,” I said.

“The Paragons are full of it,” Isaac said. “When our heads are on the execution block, and one of those friendly faces is holding an ax, I am saying I told you so.”

I laughed. They weren’t the ones with the axe but he didn’t know that.