Book Five, Chapter 31: Theme Puzzle

When I first saw the enemy tropes for this story, I thought it was an escape room, a genre of horror film in which a character pits their wits against obstacles to try and escape to freedom.

It was safe to say I was right.

First, it was essential to understand how NPCs worked. We watched and studied them as best we could. The surrogates were not normal NPCs who would follow the script and could be persuaded, convinced, or intimidated. These surrogates followed our suggestions… but Andrew, Michael, and Lila embodied the saying, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

I wanted to jump through the screen and strangle them. Isaac convinced Michael to bang up a sleeping chamber easily because that was something Michael was already inclined to do. Getting them to act against their preset personalities was beyond difficult.

“He acts just like the real Andrew,” Cassie said. “Isaac, look. He cleans his glasses the same way. He’s just like him.”

On the IBECS, Andrew breathed onto his glasses to form condensation and then wiped them clear.

“I’m pretty sure all people with glasses do that,” Isaac said. “If he starts talking about Greenday or rollercoasters or teacup pigs, then maybe I’ll be convinced.”

The Hughes siblings were on duty watching the surrogates. Not that they needed watching. They weren’t going anywhere without our help.

I was examining the design of the IBECS, which we had access to through one of the large 3D cubes like the one I had played with near the launch pad. Finding it was not easy (it was in a storage closet with a sci-fi door that only appeared when Rudy, the captain, walked by), but once we had it, we had to learn how to use it. We could only see as much of the ship as the surrogates had unlocked. That was a limitation placed by Carousel because I couldn’t see an in-story reason for it.

I stared at the hologram for so long that something finally clicked.

“I got it,” I said. “If we can get them to block off the air intakes in hallway 3A, that will trigger the system to open up the door into Reservoir B in order to ventilate the ship. Once they’re in Reservoir B, they can pass directly into hallway 3B.”

Antoine stared at the same diagram I was looking at and nodded his head.

“The module design is driving me crazy,” he said, staring at the little hologram as I showed him the arrows that explained the airflow system. “These rooms are right next to each other, but they don’t share a ventilation system. 3B is connected to the life support system in the back, and 3A is connected to the secondary emergency system in the front. This is absurd.”

It was.

He walked over to the red button that seemed to be a universal “talk to the Player surrogates” button and started to relay my idea Off-Screen.

The player surrogates heard our plan but didn’t act on it because they were Off-Screen, and something like that had to happen On-Screen.

They wouldn’t be On-Screen for a bit because, at that moment, the Wallflower surrogate Lila had taken too many of the sleeping pills she found, and Dr. Andrew Hughes was trying to keep her alive after having pumped her stomach. This was just one of many things going on with the surrogates. They would follow our suggestions, but they also kept adding drama to the story against our will.

“She’ll be fine,” Dr. Hughes said. “You wouldn’t be surprised to find out that one of the few medical events the Med Bay was prepared for was an overdose.”

He stood over her and placed the back of his hand on her clammy forehead.

“Did she say why she did it?” Michael asked cautiously. “Don’t tell me she’s…” He trailed off, not wanting to say the words, not wanting to put those words out into the air.

“No, nothing like that,” Andrew said. “She’s been having difficulty getting to sleep now that her Deep Sleep Chamber has stopped responding to her. Insomnia can skew judgment.”

There was a pause as they both looked down at the pale young woman.

“In that case,” Michael said, “I could sure use some of those sleeping pills. Every time I close my eyes, I feel bugs all over me. If I could find anything flammable around here, I would set myself on fire.”

Michael had a morbid sense of humor, I had learned over our time watching him.

We had sat and watched them as Lila slowly took one sleeping pill at a time throughout the night in an attempt to get some respite from the bugs. It didn’t work. It was possible she didn’t realize she was taking too many—even we didn’t realize what was happening until Andrew sounded the alarm.

They had created a sort of camp in the Med Bay that they had been able to get to. The solitary benefit of that room was that it had four individual beds, which were separated from the ground by a sturdy metal pole. They greased up the metal pole in hopes that the bedbugs would not climb it while they slept.

They had not been entirely successful.

The scene itself was actually powerful and hefty, with character work and conversations about life and death.

It was frustrating for us, though, because this is what they did instead of going out and looking for ways to move forward with the escape. They were not scouting for us.

I assumed that was by design. The only way they would move forward was if we helped them. Due to Lila’s health problems, they had been On-Screen and Off-Screen and were now getting an Off-Screen break.

Based on what had come before, it was clear that as soon as they came back On-Screen, they would try our plan. First, they would have to set it up on film by pretending they came up with it, and then they would have to enact it by blocking off the air vents in an entire hallway.

Using an officer to try to trick IBECS wasn’t working anymore—that was a one-time thing. It would be a pretty dull story if they could use him as some passport to get around the ship. Now, we had to come up with other ways to get through the labyrinth.

It was one big puzzle.

They went back On-Screen.

“You know, I’ve been thinking about the way the air circulates in this ship,” Andrew said. “It’s all algorithmic. I’m not even sure how much control IBECS has over it consciously.”

“What are you saying?” Michael asked as he sat up on his high-tech gurney.

“I think we can trick it into opening the door to the starboard reservoir.”

“We can trick it?” Michael repeated.

“Yes,” Andrew said. “It’s just a matter of making it think that there’s an airflow problem. It will automatically fix itself, regardless of what the insane machine wants to think.”

“I thought IBECS was designed to fix itself. How long would that trick work?” Michael asked.

“Long enough for us to walk through a door,” Andrew said.

Michael looked back over his shoulder at the sedated but healing Lila.

“Tell me what to do,” he said.

So we watched them as they took rags soaked in some goo that looked almost like vapor cream and started clogging all of the ventilation in hallway 3A.

It was the most frustrating wait possible because I didn’t even know if my plan would work. Unlike us, they didn’t seem to understand they were on a time clock despite us having told them they were. It just went in one ear and out the other. Their characters didn’t know about the fuel situation, or at least they didn’t know how dire it was.

They never acknowledged us talking to them after the conversation ended, so it made sense that they wouldn’t be able to act as if they knew about the fuel problem. There was probably some way to inform them, but we had missed that cutscene.

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They worked, and they spoke of their old lives and old girlfriends when, eventually, Lila found her way to them and asked what had happened.

They were supportive of her, and they had their unit bonding moment with Andrew pledging to keep them all safe until they could one day get home. As he hugged Lila, Michael—being a bit too macho for that—just patted her on the back and said, “Hang in there,” as if he wasn’t sure that the sleeping pills thing was actually an accident.

“Oh dear God, please just clog the damn vents!” Isaac screamed into the abyss from his seat on the upper decks of the flight platform of our ship.

No one argued with him because we all felt the same way. It almost felt like Carousel was teasing us.

Watching them was our only entertainment, and it was getting very frustrating.

“Wait!” Cassie exclaimed. “Bobby’s awake! He just woke up!”

That was good news. Cassie’s Anguish trope allowed her to see the statuses of all of our allies, including whether Bobby was conscious. Since he had been asleep for most of the movie, it was about time he woke up.

“IBECS,” I said, “can you please wave Officer Bobby Gill?”

Luckily, IBECS didn’t put up a fight, and we saw the gigantic room filled with animal bodies connected to tubes that I had seen in the dailies.

I suppressed a grin as the others got a good look at the horrors.

Bobby crawled out of his Deep Sleep Chamber, naked as the day he was born. Literally, no one else had been unclothed in their chambers, but I didn’t have time to ask him about that. He was Off-Screen, so we had the chance to talk to him.

“Bobby!” Antoine screamed.

Bobby’s head perked up, unsure of where the sound came from. He looked around the room. He didn’t seem surprised to see the monstrosities strapped up in their giant vessels, so he must have either had scenes in this room already or just had memories from his character that made them familiar.

He quickly slipped into his space onesie, which all the other passengers were wearing, and continued searching for Antoine’s voice.

“To your left!” Antoine screamed.

Finally, Bobby found it. It would appear that he didn’t actually have a screen showing us; all he had was a little box with a button to communicate with us.

“First Blood has already passed?” Bobby asked.

“Yep,” I said. The injured passengers waking up had counted as First Blood, luckily. Death wasn’t required.

He nodded. “My character designed these pods for growing protein in outer space, and KRSL paid me to see if it was a viable program.”

“We figured something like that,” I said.

He nodded, still groggy.

“What’s the Big Bad?” he asked.

“Bed bugs,” I said.

He nodded slowly, then, in confusion, he said, “Wait, what?”

That sure jarred him awake.

We spent the next twenty minutes discussing everything that had happened, trying to catch him up to speed.

There was a reason Carousel had kept him asleep for so long—his character actually knew a lot about the ship. He was a science officer, like in Star Trek. Unfortunately, he didn’t have as much authority with IBECS as other officers did, but at least he had some.

“I was thinking it was gonna be aliens,” Bobby said. “I could not believe it when they took us up in the ship. Where are you guys, anyway?”

“We’re orbiting the IBECS in some kind of alien ship from the year 4021 or so,” I said.

Bobby nodded, taking it in stride. “So what’s the plan? We’re coming up on the halfway mark, aren’t we?”

“We’ve got to get you in contact with the Player surrogates,” I said. “We’ve currently got them trying to get to hallway 3B, which means they’re almost to where you are.”

Bobby nodded. “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get out of here. They were concerned about the animals spreading disease, despite how I told them that was virtually impossible because all of these animals were grown from embryos inside a lab.” He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “The project manager knew the term mad cow disease and kept repeating it… idiot…”

Bobby’s character had strong feelings about KRSL, apparently.

“It’s a pretty wild thing,” he said as he looked back over the large tanks filled with headless cow bodies moving their legs as if they were on a walk while they hung in their containers.

We didn’t know if Bobby’s character was special to the story. He was a Wallflower, and his Recast trope, which allowed him to play as background characters, didn’t necessarily cast him in important spots. It cast him in places where he could make his character meaningful, although up to now, he mainly ignored his character and joined us as if he were part of the gang, which was probably what he would do in this story as well.

“Drifting into space forever doesn’t sound very fun,” he said. “How far off are we from the helm?”

“You’re not even halfway there,” I said. “You guys are going to have to get a move on. That’s the number one problem we’re having—every time we tell them to do something, they add on like three layers of story and character troubles before they do it. The plot cycle is slipping away while they’re talking about their childhood dogs.”

“I’ll whip them into shape,” he said. “I guess the first thing I should do is call out to them and tell them to come to me if they’re already heading in this direction.”

“That should put some pep in their step,” Antoine said. “They haven’t seen another healthy human in weeks.”

We sat back as Bobby broke off the call with us. We could still watch through the camera—IBECS wasn’t giving us any trouble over that. After we had figured out how to make a wave to other characters in the story, it was like we had accomplished that, and it was no longer going to be a problem.

That was a theme for the storyline: once you solved something, it remained solved. You couldn’t use the same trick twice, but you didn’t need to.

That was an important factor to note.

We watched as Bobby talked to the surrogates through his comm and urged them to find him on the other side of the starboard reservoir. As predicted, they started really booking it, clogging up all the vents in hallway 3A.

Bobby switched back over to us with a simple request to IBECS, who facilitated the calls.

“Alright, they’re on it,” he said.

Just talking to Bobby had been a lift to their spirits, and Bobby’s slightly awkward demeanor really fit his character here—a disoriented science officer who was more comfortable working with headless animals than with humans.

“Where are my dogs?” he asked. “When I first got here, I panicked, and I looked through every tank because I was afraid they would be hanging here.”

“They’re not here,” I said. “We have their DNA profile in a cloning machine.”

It took him a moment to take that in.

“Wow,” he said with a tone that didn’t match the circumstances. “It’s like a machine that can clone anything?” he asked. He started laughing. “My character is freaking out on the inside because he’s like a mad scientist,” he continued to laugh aloud.

Bobby didn’t just become a random character; he usually became a character that actually existed within the story. Whether the headless cows existed or not, his character was a real scientist, and he had that character’s memory and basic personality locked away in his head to use.

Wallflowers were extremely overpowered, and their power was only balanced by the fact that they were, well, Wallflowers.

“As for the plan,” I said, “there are two main ways to get through. One, we treat it like a labyrinth of puzzles, which is the most straightforward approach. Getting from room to room is difficult because IBECS isn’t cooperating, and you have to trick it into doing what you want. So far, we’re doing all right, but we’re running out of time, and I’m not exactly sure what the big finishing moment is going to be.”

“What do you mean by that?” Bobby asked. “Like, there’s no fight?”

“Sort of,” I said. “What’s the climax to a story that’s literally just an escape room? Either the climax is that you don’t escape, and it’s a sad ending, or the genre gets bent a little bit and becomes a fight at the end. I don’t know if we’re prepared for that last part.”

Bobby nodded. “There’s not a proper antagonist here, is there? IBECS isn’t evil.”

That was the issue. It was possible that Carousel would be okay with the story just being a series of puzzles until the final one is unlocked and everybody goes home happy, but that did not fit with the pattern of other stories.

There had to be something coming up, but I didn’t know what.

“So what’s the other way you were talking about?” Bobby asked.

“Well,” I said, “this whole storyline seems to be a very poorly disguised metaphor for how corporatism is bad and workers should stick together.”

KRSL was perfect for a story about an evil company turning workers against each other.

“A metaphor story?” he said. “Aren’t those supposed to be hard?”

“Yep.”

I had explained this all to the rest of our team already, and I wasn’t sure if I had done a good job.

In most horror movies, the plot is simple, and the scares are what matter. Almost every scene either advances the plot or delivers scares.

But there are those movies where the plot is incidental, and the movie is actually about a theme. Movies that come to mind would be The Witch, Get Out, or possibly It Follows. Stories like that were called elevated horror as if they were some new thing, but they’ve been around for as long as movies have been; it just hasn’t been as on the nose.

As soon as I realized that this movie cared a lot about its metaphors, I wondered if it was like those others, where getting to the end was more about making a statement than it was about actually solving the plot.

“Doesn’t the Atlas have a section on that?” Bobby asked.

“Kinda,” I said. “It’s not phrased that way, though. They talk about how sometimes you have to play into the themes of a movie.”

“So how do we do that?” Bobby asked.

I thought for a moment. “We get the NPCs to focus on the themes of the story, and we make their escape a metaphor for… worker solidarity or something. But it’s impossible,” I said. “If we were the ones running the story, it would be one thing—we could do it—but I don’t think we’re going to be able to tell the NPCs to do it. They follow our hints, but their backstories and character arcs seem preset. We’re just going to have to try to solve the puzzles.”

I wished I hadn’t even mentioned the metaphor thing. It was hard to explain and harder to enact. We were safer just solving puzzles straight up. No layers. No deep meaning. Just puzzles. Clog a vent. Trick IBECS. Simple. Doable. Explainable.

It was the plan.

“And do you think that’ll work?” Bobby asked. “Just solving the puzzle, ignoring the themes?”

I didn’t answer because I didn’t know. I hated this.

The section on rescues of the Atlas taught an important lesson: Even though a rescue trope is compatible with a storyline, that doesn’t make the storyline it creates beatable, at least not in the way base storylines are. In the same way that ill-fated players once found that rescues could counterintuitively make some storylines more winnable, a rescue could also create a story far more challenging than it was supposed to be.

I had to push those thoughts away.

We had yet to see a story that wore its themes on its sleeves like this one did. If the idea was that all of the passengers aboard the ship were scabs (that are now covered in literal scabs) and that they had betrayed their fellow workers by crossing the picket line, then the only way to move forward with that strategy was to either have our NPCs reinforce the themes and be evil or to redeem themselves in some way.

If we didn’t have complete control over the surrogates, it wasn’t an option.

“It’s just something to keep in mind,” I said.

I really didn’t want to have to think about themes and plot. We stood in silence as we watched the NPCs slowly finish clogging the vents in hallway 3A, and just as I had predicted, the door to the starboard reservoir opened up with a big woosh.

That was one small step for the surrogates, one giant leap for the needle on the Plot Cycle.

We needed to hurry.

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