Following the arrow on my arm device did not lead me directly to the next scene. Instead, it split me away from Cassie and Anna and led me to my character’s living quarters, or should I say living eighths, because the room was just tall enough for me to stand up in and just wide enough for me to lie down in either direction.

In truth, I didn’t mind that at all. There was something very comforting to me about a nice, secure door and a little den I could curl up in.

Cassie was totally right about the communist thing, though, because my character must have had maybe ten items of personal property, and most of those were made of paper. Mostly magazines and books, which were kept in little plastic bags as if to protect them.

Since I was Off-Screen, I knew I was supposed to flip through all of those materials to learn about my character.

There was not much to know. He had a notebook, which, to the best of my understanding, was some kind of dream journal with hundreds of entries. I would have to examine it later, because at least one of the entries would be prophetic in some way.

Other than that, I found something called a directive, which was almost like a resume, except my character had not written it. Some bureaucrat had listed all the jobs I was qualified to perform, from trash collector to documentarian, which was the highest value application of my skills.

I had to assume that was why I was being buzzed in for a briefing, unless the storyline just happened to be about picking up refuse. Each task I was qualified to perform had a preset payment structure.

Unlike in the real world, trash collectors did not make much money here. As a documentarian, though, I was worth approximately five and a half trash collectors. That profession was where the real meal credits were.

I found the communal showers and got cleaned off before stepping into one of the only sets of clothing I owned, other than the gray workout clothes, which was a very simplistic gray jumpsuit that looked like it denoted rank.

After I had a solid idea of who my character was, or at least the tasks he could perform and the dreams he thought were worth writing down, I made my way out toward the elevator, where I found Anna and Cassie waiting, wearing very similar jumpsuits to the one I was.

“What was your most profitable job?” I asked. I was just making polite conversation, maybe getting a little competitive.

“Birther,” Anna answered, with a look of disgust on her face. I was not expecting that.

“Same here,” Cassie said. “Communications expert was a distant second place.”

I had not been prepared for that answer, and while it made sense that a society like this would value a woman’s ability to procreate, the ick was strong.

We got on the next elevator car, and it began to rise toward the skyscraper’s highest level.

When the elevator doors opened again, it was to a lively, futuristic command center. Dystopian, sure, but futuristic. Like all proper dark visions of the future, the lighting situation was inadequate. The computers were advanced, and yet the graphics were minimalist.

The little arrow on my arm device guided me through the chaos of bureaucrats with readouts, having technical conversations.

Eventually, we arrived at a big door worthy of a commune’s overseer.

Except I quickly learned that they didn’t call him an overseer. They called him the Arbiter, which was a much gentler substitute for dictator.

When the doors opened, we found Camden and Antoine standing at attention in much more impressive jumpsuits than ours. Where ours were gray, Camden’s was blue and Antoine’s was a copper color. They were the real hot shots.

We quickly lined up beside them.

“You guys get behind us,” Antoine said. “We outrank you.”

We quickly followed suit.

“The way you said that sounded like you think you earned it,” Anna said.

“I’ll earn it later,” he said.

“I’m sure you will,” she said.

“We’ve got ninety seconds till On-Screen,” I chimed in.

We stood nervously at attention. I used the time to glance around at the Arbiter’s suite, which was far and away the most beautiful room I had seen in the entire apocalyptic city. The furniture in there was actually made of wood, and there were ornate brass fixtures around the room.

None of that compared to the grandeur of the view. I had not seen a window since I had entered the skyscraper. They must have existed, but the way that the building had been divided up for efficiency had hidden them from me.

This view was quite good, showing the entire city and various farming operations in the distance. Most of the land was devoted to agriculture. From this high up, I could see the dome we were under just a little bit better.

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I couldn’t quite understand what I was looking at. It must have been very thick glass, but at this height, I could tell there were intricate support systems within it. I couldn’t imagine what it would take to build or what laws of physics would allow it to exist.

We waited and waited as the ninety seconds elapsed, and we went On-Screen.

And then he entered.

He was not as tall as I would normally assume a dictator to be, but he did have an intensity and a permanent scowl that made everyone in the room nervous to make eye contact with him.

The room was so silent I could hear generators somewhere in the distance and radio consoles from the outer office area.

He was bald, heavily jowled, and his eyes bore an intensity that I associated with high school principals who took their roles as disciplinarians way too seriously.

He stood in front of us, with several of his lackeys flanking him. He didn’t have to wear a jumpsuit. He wore a more military-style outfit, with a large green blazer and boots that reached his knees.

“You all know why you’re here,” he said, as he looked each of us in the eye.

I didn’t actually know why we were there, but he was looking at Antoine mostly when he said that, so I figured that’s who he was really talking to.

“For centuries, we believed we were alone. A single terradome. A single answer to the end of the world,” he said. His voice was deep, and his words lingered in the air. He gestured out the window toward the city below. He totally fit the strong man politician stereotype.

He looked us in the eye, each one of us, one at a time, as if looking for weakness, but he found none. We were at the beginning of the party phase. The time to show weakness was later.

“But we were wrong,” he said. “The world is bigger than we knew. We may have allies yet.”

He was looking for reactions. Maybe our characters should’ve been relieved to find that out.

I decided to play it as if I was hanging on his every word, which I was, because he spoke so slowly, so full of character. He didn’t have a name. He was just called Arbiter, and he was an NPC. Nothing about him was unusual.

“The old world built many answers to the fated crisis,” he said. “Titans of industry, military commanders, and world leaders all had their different ideas about how to survive when the bombs fell. They dreamed of cities carved into mountains, of tunnels under forests, and spires that could reach so high into the air that they’d be safe from the fallout of the advanced and formidable bio-weaponry our ancestors developed. Our answer to the problem was, of course, the sunken city, Culver’s Bay.”

As I looked out the window, I realized what was so unusual about the dome. It wasn’t a force field. The reason it might have looked like that was the inconsistent lighting. The actual reason was that the dome and the city were underwater. No wonder so little light got through.

It also made sense why this storyline was on the river.

“Now we may have proof that another one of those answers to the end of the world might have also been correct.”

He looked behind us and nodded, and one of his various minions started playing audio that indeed sounded like a woman calling for help. The voice was garbled, and the details weren’t clear, but the cadence was easily recognizable.

I glanced over at Cassie, and I began to theorize that this was the very voice she’d heard when using her I’m Blocked trope.

“These signals,” the Arbiter continued, “aren’t constant, nor clear, but they’re deliberate. They’re being sent out on our frequencies by someone who knows we’re here. We believe they originate from another terradome, perhaps built into a mountain or atop one. It isn’t clear. Pre-war misinformation has poisoned our knowledge pool. Even the geography and history we were all taught could very well be wrong. We have conflicting information and inconsistent records, but be assured, this isn’t a flaw. This was the ultimate defense, to ensure that proprietary information never got leaked, and if it did, it never got believed. It was this misinformation campaign that likely saved us from being overrun by scared citizens when the bombs fell. Unfortunately, it isn’t clear which geographic information is correct. Our outposts have given us some insight, but their reach isn’t far. Your mission is to follow these radio signals and find whatever terradome might still be operational.”

He nodded again, and some other jumpsuit-wearing bureaucrat came around and fiddled with the devices on our arms. I assumed that they were just uploading coordinates or mission parameters.

Once they were done, the Arbiter continued.

“If the dome still stands, you are to establish contact, stabilize a relay, and share frequencies. We will rebuild civilization one wire at a time.” He paused for a moment, clearly making eye contact with Camden. “If it doesn’t still stand…”

“We study the remains and extract any technological or historical data,” Camden said.

“Very good,” the Arbiter said. “When the council chose me as the leader of this civilization, they were choosing this classified mission. My predecessors believed that our interests were best served by focusing inward, but this was a folly. I argue that the only way for us to succeed is to learn from the success of others and to find the truth in the chaos. For that reason, you’ve been assigned a documentarian.”

He glanced back at me. I felt important. If it turned out there was also some trash to pick up, I might get double pay.

“Once you pass our outpost, we have very little useful information about the terrain or obstacles you may face, but your ArGIS has been updated to slowly exclude false geographic information until we figure out which of our many maps of the wasteland might be accurate.”

Stories like this always needed a reason for why these secluded survivors didn’t know about the pre-war society. Usually, there’s some riot where the records are burned, or a corrupt leadership that doesn’t want people to know the truth. I found it a bit amusing that the reason this colony of survivors didn’t know about the surrounding world was that they had so many falsified records that they no longer knew what was true.

Where did Carousel find a world like that?

“We stand at the precipice of a second beginning. While our terradome solved many problems of long-term survival cut off from civilization, it didn’t solve all of them. Maybe some of these other terradomes had solutions we could implement to fix our most vexing inadequacies. We would be fools not to follow the signals, and I am no fool.”

That last part was delivered with a bit of extra intensity, almost like he was trying to convince himself.

His speech went on for a little while longer, but seemed to hit the same talking points over and over again. I couldn’t find a reason why Carousel was doing this. It could have easily been scripted tightly, but then I realized there was a chance this storyline had never been run before. Perhaps Carousel hadn’t yet refined the script.

When the Arbiter was finished, finally, he bid us farewell.

“Go carefully,” he said. “The world beyond is calling.”

When he said this, his voice broke for only a moment, as if he were exasperated or even desperate. I didn’t know if that was because the NPC had never performed it before or if it was some sort of character clue.

What was clear was that he had a lot riding on this mission.

Not as much as us, though.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep