Book Eight, Chapter 49: Wanderers

We were worried that the NPC’s might be a little inexperienced, but as two men gently dressed me in an advanced hazmat suit without saying a word, it struck me that perhaps these NPC’s might be doing well because their ordinary life didn’t depart that much from what they were doing in the movie. They had roles and assignments in both. What was the difference?

To its credit, the suit was actually pretty comfortable. It was climate-controlled, and the helmet that covered my entire face to keep out unwanted air was much less restrictive than I expected. It was also removable. Inevitably, there would be a moment where someone, probably Camden, determines that the air is safe to breathe, and then we could all take them off.

Still, the movie was being filmed in an odd way. Very little footage was ever captured of the actual terradome itself, at least not footage with us in it. We were almost all the way out of the tunnel leading to the surface before we went On-Screen for a few reaction shots of the new world.

The immediate area around the terradome was, as I had seen, a marshy wasteland where only bacteria and some algae seemed to survive.

The tunnel walk was long, with several doors we had to pass through, and when we got all the way out, what we discovered was amazing. While it was claimed that the city was built underwater, that wasn’t entirely accurate. From the looks of it, a city near the water was lowered down into the ground, and water poured over into it. It was probably only a few dozen feet deep at the top of the dome, but it was hard to guess.

There were still remnants of roads leading to the city that cut off abruptly, and we walked along them.

“Do we have an estimate on how long this is going to take?” I asked.

“Three days to the outpost,” Antoine said. “After that, who knows?”

Luckily, my suit had a built-in camera, so I didn’t have to worry about angles or anything like that. The camera was the only thing that made my suit different. It was a strange shoulder-mounted unit, which was probably going to cause pain after a few miles of walking.

Carousel was taking its time getting shots of us walking over the old, broken road through the wasteland. The further inland we walked, the more trees we began to see. Actual, living forests were popping up all over, along with wild grasses and several other forms of plant life.

It was slowly transitioning from a wasteland to an abandoned frontier.

We were really feeling the burn as we walked for miles, more On-Screen than Off, until eventually, Camden picked up on something unusual.

“Look at this,” he said as he stared down at his ArGIS. “We just spent half an hour taking the long way around that last stretch of road.”

I looked back the way we had come. We had just taken a long, curved trajectory onto smaller roads and trails. It looked like what he was saying was true.

“So why didn’t we just take a straight line?” Anna asked.

“The Arbiter told you,” Antoine said. “Our devices are working with multiple contradictory sets of pathing data. It’s trying to learn which set is correct, so it sends us on tangents, and when we don’t meet an obstacle, it learns that the new path is accurate.”

Antoine was playing his character very seriously, and he was probably right to do that. How much personality could you give to someone who grew up in a society like the one our characters did? Would they have tolerated buffoonery, let alone chicanery?

“I understand all that,” Anna said, “but if we’re supposed to be going a lot further than any group has before, sending us on tangents seems inefficient.”

Antoine stopped and turned around back toward Anna.

“We will take the path given to us,” he said. “That’s final.”

“Calm down,” I said. “It’s not like we could do otherwise. We can’t even zoom out on these maps,” I said as I held up my ArGIS.

In fact, the map that we were shown covered an area about the size of a football field. We had no idea which direction we were going to go just a few dozen yards ahead, and the computer sent us going left or right in seemingly arbitrary ways.

Carousel was very careful to ensure those parts were filmed.

Now, I didn’t mean to act like some sort of YouTube film critic, but if I didn’t know any better, it looked like this storyline might be a metaphor for misinformation, given the speech that the Arbiter gave us. A bunch of arbitrary directions fit that theme. We never knew where we were going.

“It’s almost like they don’t want us to be able to find the way back,” I said in a jokey cadence, but I meant it quite seriously. All these twists and turns would make it nearly impossible to retrace our steps.

I had to hope that that wasn’t the reason it was happening. All I knew was that the official reason sounded like an obvious lie. Even within the world of the story, many people had already taken this trip, at least as far as the outpost we were headed to. There should be no need to double-check any pathing information, especially given the importance of this assignment.

But it continued. We went way out of the way to pass abandoned towns and small plots of forest that we could have easily walked through.

And Carousel got shots of every bit of it until the sun went down, right around the time we went Off-Screen for a couple of hours to set up camp.

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“I have a theory,” I said. “I think they’re just trying to create fancy footage to be used on treadmills so that people think they’re running somewhere.”

This was the first time we actually had a chance to talk uninterrupted, so we needed to get each other up to speed.

Anna was carrying the tent. Luckily, it self-deployed with a whooshing sound. We just had to stake it down.

“So what do we have?” Antoine asked as he climbed inside the tent. We all followed.

“My character has been hearing voices over the radio and intercoms for months,” Cassie said. “That’s why she signed up for this assignment. She thinks there are people out here that need help.”

“And we know that those cries for help are somehow related to the antagonist,” I said. “It looks like we’re headed into a trap. I don’t really care as long as we get to sleep for a full night.”

“It is definitely a trap,” Antoine said. “My character signed up because his brother is supposed to be at the outpost, but he hasn’t received any mail from him or messages. He was able to intercept what appeared to be Morse code that he thinks is his brother talking to him.”

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Six days,” Antoine said.

“That sounds miserable,” Cassie said. “If I had to stay in that boring gray bunker for one more minute, I was going to scream.”

“I spent most of my time sneaking around,” Antoine said. “Camden got there not long after me. Speaking of, did you ever find what you were looking for?”

“Nope,” Camden said as he let himself collapse onto the floor of the tent, which was shaped like a very large burrito. “I thought it was information I was supposed to find, but now I’m thinking it’s information my character is supposed to obsess over. You guys can go ahead and take off your helmets. The air has been breathable for one hundred years or more, and the tent is sealed anyway. It has its own air filtration unit.”

I knew it.

“What information are you looking for?” I asked as I did my best to take the helmet off. It was a little tricky because of my shoulder-mounted camera.