Book Five, Chapter 32: Dark Aura

“IBECS, this is the Helio. Please confirm this transmission. We have no edible provisions on our ship. Mayday, this is an emergency; we are requesting aid on behalf of KRSL,” I said.

That line required hours of planning, including removing all the food from our ship and throwing it out the airlock.

“This is the IBECS. I’m confirming with the Helio AI. It seems that you are out of food. That is troubling. My protocols allow me to permit temporary coupling to provide the Helio with an emergency supply of provisions.”

We all started to cheer aboard the helm of the Helio. It had taken us forever to figure out how to get IBECS to let us connect our ship to theirs so that we could actually go into the IBECS and interact with the story. Everything was a puzzle, even things that weren’t happening On-Screen.

It ended up being pretty simple.

It was Ramona who figured it out. IBECS would allow us to dock if there were an emergency. It wouldn’t acknowledge its own emergency, at least not in so many words. So, Ramona figured, what if the Helio was the ship with the emergency?

IBECS had to help us if we were in trouble, and it was able to help. The one thing that we knew for sure was that the IBECS had lots of food. If we needed food, then IBECS should let us attach even if we didn’t have the proper approval since we were a fellow KRSL vessel.

Exhale. Back to the real problem.

We were already halfway through the storyline, and we still had a long way to go to get the Player Surrogates to the helm of the IBECS.

We weren’t giving up, but reality was setting in. This wasn’t easy.

“Captain,” I said, “please connect us to that junction on the starboard side of the IBECS labeled ‘Protein Lab’ on the holo-frame.”

“You got it,” Rudy said.

He and the other NPCs had been silently rooting for us. I could see their joy when we finally figured out how to move forward. Now, if only they could have just told us what to do, we’d be on our way home already.

This was a big step. We couldn’t be a part of the story— in fact, our ship wasn’t even in the storyline itself—but if we could get on that ship, we could scout things out ahead and figure out solutions for the NPCs before they even found the problems. This was really convenient because the NPCs were slow and trudging, and they were having the worst days of their lives because of bedbugs.

They weren’t getting sleep, and they were becoming paranoid. Now, they were lined up outside Bobby’s door, trying their best to break through but failing miserably. They desperately wanted in because Bobby told them there were no bugs in there.

“You’re telling me that there is fresh meat on the other side of that door, and yet I can’t get this overgrown ATM machine just to open it?” Michael said, enraged, at the end of his rope. Michael was also planning to butcher one of Bobby’s headless cows. He talked about it a lot after Bobby told him what he did for a living.

“The Protein Lab was supposed to be cordoned off from the rest of this ship,” Andrew said. “It makes sense. Just be patient.”

Andrew took everything in stride and explored it analytically. I wondered if that was Andrew’s real personality or just a generic NPC trait.

For now, we celebrated because our ship was connecting to the outside of the large unit that Bobby was currently trapped in.

We would get to see Bobby, and most importantly, we would start making some real progress.

Within moments, we found ourselves staring at a door in the side of the large room that contained most everything inside our ship. The door was formed from white eggshell material with no seams, yet it easily attached to the outside of the IBECS and created an airtight seal.

We waited as the IBECS door unbolted, and with a hiss, the airlock on the outside of the older ship opened.

There was Bobby, waiting for us. He had a wide grin on his face, happy not to be alone, happy that we were making progress, and ultimately overjoyed that he was no longer technically stuck on a ship rapidly running out of fuel.

As a bonus, behind him were huge tanks filled with decapitated animals, their limbs jogging in thin air to give us emotional support.

“Let’s get to work,” Antoine said.

Except, of course, the only person who needed to get to work was Dina because she had a trope called Savvy Safecracker, which was based on how movie thieves are so easily able to get through doors and locks. There was a big door between us and the rest of the ship.

Stepping into the IBECS was like stepping into another world. We had come from some optimistic future with technology that could aid our every need, and every discomfort was erased before we even knew we had it.

The IBECS was harsh and smelled funny. It didn’t smell organic—no, it smelled like we were in a refinery.

That smell permeated everything.

Dina was quick to start examining the door that would finally let Bobby out of his room so he could assist the NPCs on the other side, who were currently occupied talking about their feelings or something.

Dina ran her hands along the metal, which had been painted yellow in an industrial style.

“It’ll take a couple of hours,” she said, “but I can do it.”

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“How?” Bobby asked.

“I have no idea,” she answered as she got to work looking for tools or something around Bobby’s workspace.

That’s how her power worked—she just had to look busy and focused, and then the answer would come to her.

We left Isaac, Cassie, and Ramona aboard the Helio. They couldn’t do much over here, and the last thing we needed was for them to get trapped Off-Screen and unable to get back to our ship. Even standing on the IBECS made me nervous, but it was rapidly becoming necessary as coaching surrogates around the vessel from cameras was not going to cut it.

Dina’s estimate was correct. She banged on the door with various implements for a while until it suddenly dawned on her what she needed to do.

“All right, what we do is wire power directly into the mechanism that unlocks the door,” she said. “These doors are designed to be locked by default, and they need power in order to unlock. It makes sense because, technically, this door could have been on the outside of the ship had Bobby’s unit not been attached. You want the default to be locked. Right now, we’ve got these huge tungsten rods acting as pins, and we’re not going to move them or cut through them, and we all know how IBECS is.”

She usually used her trope to stick a bobby pin into a door lock and move it around until it clicked, but it was cool to see that it would work on something a bit more advanced.

Before long, she and Bobby—who had suddenly become quite handy with technology because of his character’s background—had hooked up wires into the door and then connected those to some pump that Bobby’s character used on the giant animal tanks.

All Bobby had to do was turn on the pump to supply power to the locks and bypass IBECS, and the door unlocked.