Book Five, Chapter 30: The Farm

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 off to the sleeping room, 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 spinning on an axis near a star, 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 the animatronics on a dark ride. They had fully-fledged conversations with each other, and they were some of the most in-depth NPCs I had ever seen. They felt real. Usually, to get that kind of detail, a player had to be involved, activating the dialogue cues to get the proper backstory.

I almost felt as if Carousel was using them to show us what it wanted—repeating the same topics over and over again with a slightly different delivery, giving out bits of personality here and there so that Carousel could pick and choose to 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 about 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 her thoughts had activated 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 (even if the reason was mundane). 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 so it wouldn’t power on,” 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 as I stared at it.

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 listen to 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 colored streaks in her hair. It was like a picture created from memory—a police sketch of a fever dream.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

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 Itch 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, I was almost sure that this ship must literally be an alien craft. Nothing about the Helio required that it be a human vessel.

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

It didn’t necessarily.

Dina’s Rescue trope required us to be separate from the action, so Carousel gave us a ship of our own. Kimberly’s The Penthouse trope guaranteed us desirable lodgings, so we got this alien pleasure vessel instead of some bum cruiser. Bobby’s doggy license allowed the use of his dogs in the story- even if we had to create clones using an alien device. All of these factors combined created this mishmash, resulting in a clone machine on a cool alien ship, and none of it–I assumed–had anything to do with the storyline called Itch.

“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.