Book Five, Chapter 34: On Theme

Workers harming other workers was a core component of the theme of the rescue, and what better way for Carousel to remind us of that than by having one scab be unwilling to save another?

Michael tried to be a hero in the wrong story, and now our hopes of saving the real player he represented were gone—for a time at least.

Underlying Dina’s rescue trope’s promises of safety was the reality that it was extremely difficult to succeed with.

It wasn’t that you would die trying; it was that the logistics of getting a bunch of NPCs to survive was legitimately challenging to do. That was the cost; that was the price of having such a safe run. It was hard to get to The End.

Everyone was deflated after Michael died. We had hoped that we could avoid losing one of our central NPCs for a Second Blood, but we had not earned it.

We had been on a roll of finding solution after solution, but we were too slow. Whatever hope we had built up from our successes felt like it was gone.

But Antoine wouldn’t let us give up.

“Come on, people! We still have two players to rescue here. It’s time to focus up and take it down the home stretch,” he said. Then he kept saying things like that, and I basically ignored him as I weighed our chances. That type of pep only made me nervous.

There was so much distance between the surrogates and the helm, and it was the Finale already.

For all of our successes, I just felt like the pressure was bubbling over.

First, we had to find the next puzzle, then we had to find a way to solve it, and then we had to convince these surrogates to crack the puzzle in a timely manner. No matter what we did, they would bog things down with character drama.

I knew we were supposed to do stuff like that, too, when we were doing storylines. I knew we were supposed to talk about heartaches and suffering, but watching how much On-Screen time it was taking was driving me crazy.

Lila eventually crawled all the way across the platform to where Andrew was, but he was so disgusted he couldn’t look at her. She could say that she was afraid as much as she wanted, but the truth was she could easily have saved Michael.

She had a good grip and was unlikely to be at risk. Andrew’s character surrogate tried to hide his disdain and think analytically, as always, but I could hear a sharpness in his voice—a disappointment, a distrust.

“We don’t have that much further,” he said. “Once we get to the helm, we should be able to make contact with those who will help us. We might even be able to override the system manually.”

They still didn’t know the ship was running out of fuel—not until the red lights started blaring. Bobby had suggested it, but it felt like we had missed an important scene where they were supposed to learn how important it was to get to the helm.

Because of the modular design, the front half of the ship was just as haphazard as the back half. One of the first rooms they came across was the other sleeping bay. This room had a fraction as many people in it, but they were just as infected, if not more, than all of the passengers in the original starting room.

Antoine, Kimberly, and I checked it out. We didn’t find any meaningful plot elements there. I was sure that Andrew would take time to mourn them. That was his nature. Lila barely got past the doorway and didn’t look around.

“I have to imagine that this is where it started,” Andrew said.

“Why do you say that?” Lila asked.

“The infestation is older here, you can tell. There are more insect casings, evidence that they’ve been here longer.”

Lila looked across the room at the infested deep sleep chambers. They continued to exchange dialogue, basically running through their exposition long enough for Bobby to catch up with them.

“Where’s Michael? Is that… Is he what I saw in the phase ballast juncture?” Bobby asked.

Neither of them answered, but that seemed to be enough of an answer for Bobby, who, of course, already knew what had happened.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have gone across without me,” he said. “I told you I would be right back. I had to check on my livestock.”

“It’s too late now,” Andrew said. “We just have to get to the helm.”

Red lights started to flash all over the ship, and Bobby quickly explained, “Just as I feared. We’re running out of fuel. We’re supposed to make a fuel stop soon, but in order to do that, we need to get to the controls.”

Andrew nodded; Lila did not respond.

Yet, they kept talking instead of moving.

Back on the Helio, the rest of us were working nonstop, trying to foresee what puzzles were coming up so that we could find solutions. Luckily, the next puzzle was one that Carousel must have been proud of because it didn’t even try to hide it.

The only way forward was through a room called the Plasma Grid.

Because I thought IBECS’s explanation was a little convoluted, I had to spend extra time figuring out exactly what the puzzle was.

The room was not meant to be traversed by humans. There were floating streams of plasma shooting between coils at various places across the room. It was a laser maze. The conduits that controlled them had to be moved around depending on the power needs of the ship, and since humans couldn’t do that without getting injured, somehow IBECS was doing it, but it wasn’t clear how.

Even he wouldn’t tell me. Yes, IBECS kept some secrets. He had some way of manipulating things inside the ship, some arms or something. We had not seen them because we had not pushed the story in that direction. I had to assume that we did not want to see IBECS as a full-fledged antagonist.

I preferred him as an obstacle. Or at least I thought I did.

So, we had to get a look at the Plasm Grid. It wasn’t a long trip. We passed by Lila and Andrew, who were dealing with the fallout from Michael’s death, and Bobby failed to convince them to move ahead.

As we gazed into the room, we quickly realized how dangerous it was. The plasma was like living lightning, zapping between metal rods in a room with a shallow ceiling.

The only other ways forward were locked for good. This was all that was left.

As we entered the room, it was dark and glowing, and it strangely reminded me of a laser tag arena.

The goal was absurd. In order to change where the plasma beams were, you had to change where the power on the ship was being allocated at any given time. When that occurred, IBECS would change where the conduits were, possibly giving a safe path for a human to walk across.

Essentially, you turned off some lights and turned others on to make a pathway across the room.

It was frustrating because this wasn’t a test of Savvy; it was a test of actual intelligence. There might have been a way to use Savvy here, but I was missing it. IBECS would explain things but not help us.

Still, we had to try.

“How in the world are we supposed to explain this to the NPCs?” Antoine asked as we both looked around the death trap, which was the Plasma Grid.

“We just tell Bobby how to do it and do our best not to rely on those surrogates,” I said. “Andrew is smart. He may be able to understand it, but it’s a gamble.”

I couldn’t help but feel that the puzzle we were facing was more of a punishment for refusing to engage with the storytelling aspect of the game and trying to solve the problems as if this were some high-priced Rubik’s Cube.

We wanted this story to be about the puzzles, and Carousel listened. This was the grandaddy of all puzzles.

“We can do this,” Antoine said. “You can figure this out, right? I mean, this reminds me of the type of games that you’d play on your phone. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah, arbitrary nonsense but without second chances,” I said. I may have been more wooden than I intended.

He got close to me.

“What’s going on? Are you giving up?” he asked.

I looked out over the plasma arrays. Even if we showed them the perfect solution, could we trust that they would actually follow our plans without the drama? Or would they end up dying to increase tension?

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“I think we made the wrong play,” I said. “We focused on solving the puzzle aspect. We should have focused on the themes. I don’t even think this room would be here if we had done that.”

“Well, it is here,” Antoine said, “and it’s the only way we’re getting across, so we have to solve the problem in front of us.”

“Pep talks don’t work for complex logic puzzles,” I said, staring down at the control panel, which only served as a rudimentary map of where the power was going. “We need to lower power to the starboard quarter, the room with all of the sleeping passengers.”

Antoine looked over the map. “I’m not following,” he said. “It looks more like we have to disengage anti-gravity to forge a path to the middle, then do… something to shut down this part… lowering power to the sleeping bays will kill some passengers.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “The theme is about workers hurting workers. Lowering the power in the sleeping bay doesn’t solve the problem as it’s presented to us. In fact, the only way to solve the problem is to go all over the ship, switching on lights here, switching off lights there, turning on some machines, turning off others, and disconnecting entire modules. It would take hours, and even then, if IBECS fought us, it would be impossible.”

He thought about what I was saying.

“So, we have them play into the theme,” I said. “If we get Andrew in here or Bobby to look down at this panel and say that the only way across is to turn off power to all of those deep sleep chambers with the passengers and then bicker over the consequences of that, I think it’ll work.”

The alternative was that we put the NPCs inside this plasma room, and with one wrong move, they would get cut in half—and there would undoubtedly be wrong moves.

“Andrew is not going to sacrifice passengers for himself,” Antoine said. “He’s too nice. If he was a player, we could use that strategy, and it would work easily, but surrogate Andrew would never do that.”

He was right. A player would be able to give up their claims of compassion and do the evil thing if it meant survival. The surrogates, however, would never. They were immovable when it came to character.

“I have no idea what Carousel wants or if it’s trying to do one thing or another. I know that we are not realistically going to be able to solve this Plasma Grid with the time we have left on the story trying to puppet those surrogates around.”

Antoine didn’t like it; I could tell from his face. Getting to the front of the ship was a concrete goal, and even though the puzzles were tricky to figure out and solve, it was easy to conceptualize.

What I was suggesting would subvert everything.

“I wish it could be Andrew,” I said. “He’s the one that’s been worried about harm to the passengers. He gets the choice to either save himself and cause suffering to a bunch of other people or to spare them and die with them. It makes sense; he’s been talking about his regret over losing his medical license. He’s got to lean into it, be the bad guy. That would be a fitting end for the story. Workers hurting workers. He won’t do it, so Lila’s our best choice. We give her a chance; she’ll push the button to save herself. Andrew will finally abandon her to her fate, but he’ll have that much more motivation to make it to the helm.”

“You think that’ll work?” Antoine asked. “We haven’t been able to predict what these surrogates will do when push comes to shove.”

“At this point, I don’t know, but it will use the themes to solve the puzzle instead of logic. It is a real pivotal final moment; everything comes down to one horrible decision.”

“And what if they don’t make that decision?” Antoine asked. “What if she isn’t willing to sacrifice all of the passengers?”

“We lose,” I said. “We don’t have enough time left in the movie to come up with a Plan C.”

Every tick of the plot cycle was like an earthquake. If we tried to solve puzzles, it would take too long, and after this, there would be more puzzles. As far as I could tell, there were at least two other potential obstacles between where we were and the helm.

If we made the story about puzzles, we would have to beat those, too.

But this story wasn’t about the challenge of solving IBECS’s strange engineering; it was a story about scabs.

And Lila was a scab. She took someone’s job who was trying to advocate for the very safety measures that might have saved the passengers aboard the IBECS. The irony was thick.