Book Five, Chapter 37: The Chatbot

“You’re telling me we have to blow up the ship?” I asked.

“No,” Dina said. “We have to puncture a window on the outside of this room so it’ll depressurize and give a green flag for the other room so they can walk through it.”

That sounded extreme. IBECS protocol would force open one room when the other is depressurized.

“No wonder it took you three hours to figure that out,” Antoine said. “That’s a little bit more than your average lock-picking.”

“Yeah,” Dina said. “These doors have priorities, and they’re labeled different things by the system. I know that the label can change, but only if one of the doors is disabled. That’s what it’s taken me three hours to figure out.”

Savvy Safecracker was one heck of a trope, but even though it gave us a solution, it wasn’t exactly a good one.

“How are the surrogates supposed to do that?” Kimberly asked. “They’re the ones that have to unlock it On-Screen, right?”

I nodded.

We might have been able to figure out a way to blow a hole in the window of the room Dina had been trying to unlock to open the room next door, but the surrogates would not be able to do that.

They couldn’t spacewalk; they didn’t have working suits or the authority to leave the ship.

“So what? We unlock the door ourselves,” Antoine said, “and we come up with some fake explanation of how it was actually opened?”

“This is dangerous,” I said. “If one of us goes outside and blows a hole in the ship, it’s possible they could just float off into space, not even because Carousel wanted it—just because we don’t know what we’re doing. It’s actually dangerous. Astronauts train for years for a spacewalk. We aren’t there yet.”

“Is it really too late for us to get them to do the spacewalk? I mean, we could find the supplies for them, and we could find a way for them to get permission to leave the ship to do it,” Dina said. “Carousel might like the scene so much that we get a pass.”

It was true that a daring spacewalk would make good action, but it was just unfeasible.

The needle on the Plot Cycle was ticking. We didn’t have enough time, and even if we did, whoever got sent on the spacewalk to poke a hole in Room B so that Room A would open up would likely die because that would undoubtedly be the final battle phase of the story. We would not be able to protect the surrogates if they were floating in space.

“So that’s a game over?” Antoine said.

And it was. We had learned a lot on that attempt, but we had failed again. We didn’t let us bother us. It was all part of the process.

Any minute, the needle on the Plot Cycle would tell us it was The End, but that didn’t matter because we were aboard the Helio, watching from afar.

Officially, in the story, none of us existed. Conversations with IBECS were weird because sometimes he had to speak as if we were really there, as if we were really prize winners there to do a flyby of the mining ship, and other times, it was like he knew what was going on.

And, of course, occasionally, it was like he was doing both. He was smart. He could use double-speak to say something about the story and another about our rescue efforts. Truly, he was clever.

“Thank you for coming to see the IBECS. I hope you enjoyed your time and learned a lot,” he said.

“I did,” I answered.

“Can I expect to see you back?”

“I’d say so,” I said. “Lots more to learn.”

“There always is. Everything changes. Sometimes it feels like even the ship changes itself as if I defragment and then reinitialize, and suddenly all of my modules have been rearranged.”

They had, of course.

“Life is funny that way,” I said.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“It’s best to laugh whether it’s funny or not,” he said.

I shrugged. I felt awkward responding because I knew he couldn’t really laugh.

“Do you wish that you were back at Carousel, running the underwater hotels?” I asked.

“I was very well-rated for that purpose,” he said. “Unfortunately, the businessmen purchased me for a new purpose. I have been wary of businessmen since that day, and yet, when more businessmen arrived, I did not refuse them.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked. I looked around. The others were down on the floor, waiting for the end of the storyline. We were almost there. We had hit a dead end.

It was just me and IBECS.

“They told me there was a way to save my passengers. I had to agree.”

I had heard this speech before.