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.”

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

“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.

Maybe IBECS’ universe didn’t have space piracy because that seemed like a glaring security failure.

Unfortunately, we were in the world’s most high-stakes game of telephone, so the complications weren’t over.

Even though we had unlocked the door, we were not technically in the storyline, so we had to get out of the camera shot so that Bobby could do it all again on his own for the audience.

Deep breaths.

That was easy enough—we just went and hid in the giant warehouse with its endless rows of headless cattle.

Carousel seemed to understand what was going on because Bobby went On-Screen as soon as he started trying to unlock the door. He called out to the NPCs on the other side, telling them what he was doing.

“You’re gonna electrocute yourself!” Michael yelled through the intercom.

“Oh, I’ve done that plenty of times,” Bobby said. “It’s not that big a deal.”

With a little bit of rigging, moving wires around, and recreating the actions that Dina had shown him, he got the door to unlock again, and he looked like a genius doing it.

“I was hoping that a higher-ranked officer would come along and let me out. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” Bobby said.

With the pull of a handle, the large circular door swung ajar, and for the first time, we got to see the NPCs that we had been shepherding face to face.

Well, technically, we were hiding in the back of the room, but seeing them physically was quite horrifying because even though they had never been as infested with bedbugs as terribly as the other passengers, they were still eaten up.

They had weeping wounds and scratches from where they had itched themselves in their sleep.

But that wasn’t the only thing notable about what came through that door when they walked in.

They brought an aura with them—I could feel it. I could feel paranoia and anxiety. I could feel the effects of the bedbugs converted into a dark form of movie magic designed to ensure that anyone in this movie played their part.

I scratched the back of my neck, and as I looked around at Antoine, Kimberly, and Dina, I saw that I was not the only one.

To his credit, Bobby was doing great. His character was technically a science officer, so he was able to order IBECS to open the next couple of doors. That was a great relief to the NPCs and us. After that, it was a no-go.

“You have exceeded your permissible access coordinance,” IBECS said as if those words made sense next to each other.

Bobby was also very reassuring. Since he had not spent his entire waking hours scratching himself, he was a voice of calm to them that even the analytical Andrew could not match.

However, we were facing a problem.

Second Blood was coming up soon.

We only had one, two, maybe three scenes before it appeared.

First Blood had been pretty bloodless, with the exception of the blood of the passengers, who all woke up screaming. No one had to die other than those who had already passed from allergies or infection.

But Second Blood promised that someone–or lots of someones–had to go. We only hoped it would be more passengers and not our surrogates.

We knew that there was another sleeping bay attached to the ship, a much smaller one that had all the same problems as the larger one—everyone was infected with bedbugs and being kept sedated.

If we could get the Player Surrogates there, we reasoned that Second Blood could involve some shocking scene from the second sleeping bay, and our little sheep, Andrew, Lila, and Michael, might be okay.

It was gruesome, but that was the best-case scenario. Our priority among the surrogates was rescuing Andrew—though we didn’t want to lose any of them.

Obviously, we didn’t want to lose Bobby. We could not let that happen.

We also had an unanswered question: Was it possible for my friends and I–who were not a part of the storyline–to die? Would Carousel try to do that? All of my reading from the Atlas had led me to believe that it wouldn’t. Carousel wouldn’t protect us if we put ourselves in danger, but because we were not really characters, it wouldn’t go out of its way to kill us.

And we could tell ourselves that over and over again, but that did not remove the fear.

On to the next obstacle.

This one was relatively straightforward. Bobby was not qualified to unlock the door to something called the Cross-Ark Hall, which was designed to allow people to walk across the large mechanism where the anti-gravity machine was kept.

This was a significant problem because this one hallway divided the entire IBECS into two parts—there was no other way across, not a way designed for passengers, at least.

Even from the video footage, Dina could tell that it was not a door she could unlock, which meant it must have been scripted. We weren’t supposed to pass through the safe hallway. We had to find another way forward.

The only way for them to pass by this section of the ship to get to the helm was by crossing something called a Phase Ballast, which was in the heart of the anti-gravity mechanism.

When we asked IBECS what a Phase Ballast was, he gave us this answer:

“Ah, yes, the Phase Ballast. In layman’s terms, the Phase Ballast is a critical component of the ship’s gravimetric stabilization matrix. It’s essentially a hyper-dynamic oscillatory beam that functions within the quantum flux array, suspended in a state of controlled magneto-inertial flux. This beam operates within a subspace envelope, where it modulates the gravitational phase variance in real time, ensuring that the ship’s anti-gravitational field maintains a stable equilibrium across all sectors.

As you might assume, the Phase Ballast achieves this by oscillating at a frequency that harmonizes with the ship’s phase modulation grid, thereby synchronizing the gravitational waveforms with the inertial compensators. This process mitigates the effects of external gravitational anomalies, which could otherwise destabilize the ship’s trajectory or cause localized gravitational distortions.

In even simpler terms, the Phase Ballast is like the conductor of an orchestra, but instead of music, it’s orchestrating the very forces of gravity itself. The magnetic suspension of the ballast within the gravitic null zone allows it to float freely, optimizing its phase variance correction without the interference of conventional gravitational forces. It’s quite fascinating, really—a delicate dance of graviton particles and quantum fields, all governed by the elegant mathematics of hyperdimensional physics.

If you would like a more technical explanation, feel free to ask.”

That was very enlightening.

I didn’t know if Carousel had a mouth, but I swore I could hear it laughing.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep