Book Eight, Chapter 59: The Final Gambit

Familiar Grounds, as a film, had a lot of long, artful shots of the remaining trio of players as they crossed the wasteland in the direction their ArGIS instructed them. For a movie like this, Carousel would have to get creative. It was mostly walking, interspersed with paranoid raving from scared travelers.

But the focus of the movie, it turned out, wasn’t just on us. The audience also got to see snippets of the daily lives of people back at the Culver’s Bay Terradome. I hadn’t actually gotten to see most of the movie, so I didn’t really know what narratives were being told about these characters, but I had a feeling that little snippets of their lives had been spread through the movie like breadcrumbs.

There were clips of a pair of construction workers and of some sort of traffic controller in front of a big monitor. The camera also followed the life of a woman raising a handful of children, one of whom she was very concerned about, but I didn’t know why. I must have missed that part.

The movie flashed forward to Antoine, Anna, and Cassie setting up the tent again as the night grew dark. In the distance, all that could be heard was the wind, and in the wind, a voice.

My voice.

It called to them, but it wasn’t clear what was being said. The wind distorted it.

“Come on, get inside,” Antoine said. “We can’t run through the night, not without directions.”

They quickly jumped into the tent and zipped it up. As they did, the screen went black, and suddenly I heard a beeping sound.

–

The next shot was of the command center back at Culver’s Bay.

“Report,” the Arbiter said sternly. “Have they continued down the path set for them?”

“Yes, sir,” one of his assistants said. “They seem to have ended their detour.”

The shot was framed so that both speakers’ faces were obscured in shadow.

“Good,” the Arbiter said. “I was afraid they had gone mad like the others. Or perhaps they deserted. Have we picked up any footage from the documentarian?”

“No, sir,” the aide said. “Our current theory is that his suit was damaged or compromised in some way that caused his camera to go into safe mode to protect its data.”

That made sense. I was dragged into water by a giant disembodied arm.

“So we’ll need to send the next crew to retrieve it. Will they be able to relay the data remotely, or will they have to find his body?” the Arbiter asked.

“We’ll only have to position them close to him; we can have them camp near the area where his suit went offline,” the aide said. “That is, if we don’t want the next crew to interact with his body.”

“We can’t have that,” the Arbiter said. “The less information we’ve given our scouting teams, the further they’ve been able to get. It’s best they focus on the journey. Once we have a reliable pathing to the other terradome, we can reevaluate, but until then we take the decision making out of their hands. Are those files I requested?”

“Yes, sir,” the aide said, as she handed him a big stack of Manila envelopes.

He began leafing through them, and it was clear he was looking at new applicants for the next squad to be sent out after us. The cycle continued.

As he considered them, his aide left, and he stood from his chair and walked to a nearby counter where a collection of alcohol was kept. He poured himself a glass of something brown and walked back to his desk, staring back down at the files, dejected.

He took a deep breath as he turned his head toward a small radio in the corner of the room, which played a staticky signal that must have been the one they were receiving from the other terradome.

He looked tired.

–

Darkness once again covered the screen, and as it did, I took a moment to look around the theater. Everyone was still staring at me. It looked like they weren’t going to stop anytime soon. Of course, they tried to hide it, but if I stared at any of the moviegoers for too long, eventually their eyes would find mine, and they would look shocked and embarrassed.

In the darkness, my voice sounded out.

“You left me behind,” the thing with my voice said. “Why didn’t you go in after me? We were a team. We were on a squad, but you left me behind.”

My voice, but not my words.

The thing speaking for me could only be seen as a blurry shape in the foreground as the light adjusted and the tent became visible in the distance. Then the thing moved, and whatever it was was no longer visible.

If you come across this story on Amazon, it’s taken without permission from the author. Report it.

Inside the tent, Antoine lay down, looking up at the ceiling with a stony look on his face, doing his best to ignore my voice, to let it blend in with the wind. Maybe his character couldn’t hear it. Maybe he couldn’t hear it, but I doubted it.

Cassie covered up her ears. She wouldn’t have to pretend; she was a psychic, and the voice of a fallen companion would be something she would be able to hear no matter what.

Anna, however, slept on her side, her head on her travel pillow, staring at the ground, lost in a memory.

–

“Now remember this, Anna,” a kindly woman said, her grandmother, perhaps. “Your parents loved you more than anything. If they could come back and get you, they would, I promise. But if you’re going to see them again, you’re just going to have to get out on your own.”

“Why don’t we go?” a much younger Anna asked.

They were sitting in a dull apartment similar to the one my character had been assigned, but larger because it was for a family.

Sunlight was coming in through the window, and Anna was playing with blocks with letters on them on the floor. The kindly woman sat in a rocking chair, telling her stories and rocking.

It didn’t look anything like Anna’s real grandmother, or at least the one I had met many years ago. It was a generic older woman with white hair, wearing a beautiful crocheted blanket as a scarf, as she sat in the chair and relaxed.