Book Five, Chapter 36: If at first you don’t succeed…

“It just comes down to a question,” Antoine said. “Do we try Dina’s Rescue trope again, or do we switch to mine? Because we are not giving up. Not at the first real loss we suffered. I feel like we got a pretty good look at what my Rescue would be like, except there would be no player surrogates, and we’d have less time to get things done. I’m up for that, but I’m willing to put it up for a vote.”

We were on the roof of Kimberly’s loft, eating food we had purchased to go from the restaurant downstairs. We had taken a couple of days to decompress and really think about our first failed storyline. It had been a somber few days.

An Omen had come to the door the night before. It was a woman in an usher’s outfit like Silas the Mechanical Showman’s. She was a singing telegram. If we had opened the door, she would have inadvertently sung us an ancient spell that would have summoned a demon or something. It sounded like fun, but we were busy.

Maybe next time.

I had watched Itch on the Red Wallpaper about six times.

It was okay—super depressing, obviously, because everyone died—but those NPCs were much better actors than any of my friends or me, outside of maybe Kimberly when she’s trying.

Antoine had set up the conversation so that I could take over and pitch the other side. I was willing to, just because I wanted to cut him off before the inspirational quotes came out.

“I think we need to look at this objectively,” I said. “Antoine’s trope will give us more control over the narrative, but it will be more difficult than the storyline we just witnessed. And ultimately, I’m not sure we’ll get better rewards for it to make up for the increased risk.”

Then, I broke into a lecture I hadn’t intended to give when I was preparing to say what needed to be said.

“Look, every storyline is rewarded based on Novelty, Difficulty, and Performance. That’s something the vets have known for a long time, and the Atlas is very clear about it. On top of that, there’s a bonus for doing Rescues. Because we were spoiled to the plot of Itch, we’re not gonna get many points for Novelty, even if we use Antoine’s Rescue trope, because I can’t imagine it being that much different. What we have left is the ability to maximize our Performance score. I think that’s the path—we plan out the best possible story to beat Itch and execute it to get maximum rewards. We have to be careful, obviously, but that’s my thought. I’m willing to listen to other opinions.”

Everyone just looked at each other.

“I mean, we learned a lot,” Isaac said. “We should be able to get on the ship a lot faster, and we’ll have more time to try to get the surrogates to do their jobs. I say we use Dina’s Rescue.”

It was early in the process, so Isaac was still taking it seriously. He would probably start with corny jokes later on once things got boring.

“I vote for any option that doesn’t have us waking up on the bedbug ship,” Kimberly said with a charming giggle.

And, of course, that was a sentiment everyone agreed with. Even being on the ship was mentally draining, but to be bitten up was a terrifying prospect.

As far as we could tell, Antoine’s trope, A Race Against Time, would have us wake up on the ship in the same way the player surrogates had. We would have more control, sure, but those damn bugs…

Ramona shrugged her shoulders, which was her endorsement of my plan. Dina was on board with anything, as always. Cassie asked if we could work the clone machine into the story.

I said maybe.

Bobby was on board because he blamed himself for the loss almost as much as I did and was willing to do whatever it took to succeed.

Our loss on Itch was not a big deal on paper. We couldn’t expect to win every time, especially when using a Rescue trope that was built to be challenging to win with, but it was still a blow to morale, and it sent the imagination off on a destructive path.

“If we’re all in agreement,” I said, looking over at Antoine. He nodded. “Then I propose we get started with the planning.”

I grabbed the Atlas and opened it to the spoiler page on the storyline Itch.

The first sentence on the page?

“The bedbugs are a red herring.”

Other teams had invested too much effort in clearing the ship of bugs, which didn’t help one lick. It just took up time. They used flamethrowers, messed with the heat controls, used poison… nothing had worked.

As I read along, Antoine decided to motivate the others. From what I caught from his speech, he made sure to explain to them that even though we planned on rerunning the storyline—possibly several times—we had to treat each run as if it were the last one.

That was something we had to be certain about.

I hadn’t been able to give any details on that, and of course, the Atlas didn’t explain why. I knew that when Rescue tropes were taken away, it involved players not trying to win. I didn’t know the specifics of what actually triggered the axe murderer to show up, but I knew for sure we had to try to win every storyline we ran, even if it was only a grocery run.

Antoine explained this better than I could have, even though he didn’t know the actual reason. For him, it was more about always projecting confidence and always doing your best to keep a positive mindset—or at least pretending to.

Attempt #2: Pre-solving Puzzles

We stood at the launchpad.

We had our new plan in place. Now that we had figured out how to make Kimberly’s trope work, we had successfully spoken with Sal, Kimberly’s talent agent. He gave us a huge diatribe, but it was mostly stuff we knew already—stuff about anxiety on set or having coworkers who weren’t good at taking directions. The info would have been helpful the first time around.

It was time for our next attempt. There was no need to feel nervous, but of course I did. It didn’t matter. We had to move forward.

Everything so far had been identical—the NPCs, the Helio—all of it—until we got to that big box with the holograms, which allowed us to manipulate and explore the ship in 3D as if it were a model in our hands.

The ship was still a rat’s nest of engineering, but it was different. It had different arrangements and rooms and almost certainly different traps and puzzles.

That was to be expected. We would have to find our way around.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

We carried on with the rescue.

“What is going wrong?” Antoine asked. “We gave them the solution a half hour ago. Why are they taking so long?”

“Because there has to be drama,” I replied. “And if the drama is over solving puzzles, then the puzzles are going to take longer. Just because they know the solution doesn’t mean they’re instantly going to solve it.”

“I get that,” he said, “but how is anybody supposed to beat this storyline if you’re not able to do the puzzles quickly?”

The player surrogates were around the corner from us, working on a puzzle in the new revamped artificial gravity machine. The puzzle involved floor tiles (more or less), only some of which could hold the weight of a human. It was a challenge to get across.

It was nice being on the ship from the beginning, as we were able to dock with the IBECS as soon as we got there instead of well into Rebirth.

Somehow, our time savings hadn’t been that useful. No matter how fast we solved the puzzles, the NPCs still took up precious screen time on them. The story had flown by.

“You’re making a false assumption,” I said. “There’s no guarantee that Dina’s Rescue trope is going to create a winnable scenario. It’s possible that the player surrogates literally can’t do the puzzles fast enough. If players were doing them, they could get points knocked off their performance in order to go fast, but the NPCs aren’t willing to do that. They lean into the drama at every opportunity, as if this were some miniseries instead of a movie.”

Antoine cursed. Not an angry curse—more of a reluctant realization.

The player surrogates were not willing to perform poorly, even if it would help them win the story. We were never afraid to do that if it meant surviving.

“All right, so we can rule out the puzzles,” he said. “There’s no version of this where they’re going to get through these things fast enough. It’s almost Second Blood. For the next attempt, we can’t waste time on puzzles like this, even though I’m sure the audience is loving this intense puzzle-solving. We need them to push the story forward some other way.”

Actually, I thought the puzzle-solving was top-tier entertainment.

“It’s looking like puzzles are a dead end,” I said. We had tried new approaches. We coached aggressively, begged the NPCs to move faster, told them to ignore the drama, tried to redirect the drama, and tried to engineer new drama, but nothing worked. We didn’t have much control over that part of the narrative because we weren’t in the film.

We needed something more organic.

We sat and watched as the surrogates crossed the gap of the artificial gravity room. Because we got them to it early enough, none of them had to die on this version of the gravity puzzle. But Lila was still managing to be incredibly frustrating. I would never understand how she ended up a Wallflower instead of a Hysteric. Her fear was used as an excuse for her to be almost… well, Defiant.

She was an obstacle in herself.

She was a delicate porcelain doll every audience member would want to throw against a wall. She was afraid to jump from platform to platform. She was afraid to help any of the others. When she was afraid, she just shut down.

Michael and Andrew, however, were very protective of her. If Cassie’s theory that the NPCs were actually based on the players they were representing was true, I liked them.

I wasn’t so sure about Lila. Of course, that was if Cassie’s theory was true. If not, then Carousel was seriously slandering whoever Lila White actually was.

“You’ll have to carry me!” she screamed.

Antoine started to giggle in exasperation. We couldn’t actually see them very well because we had to be Off-Screen, but we could hear them.

“Just throw me!” she said.

Kimberly, who, along with Antoine and I, was in charge of trailblazing puzzles and pushing the NPCs along, was down to her last ounce of patience.

“Is there a way we can plan who Second Blood is?” Kimberly asked before realizing that would mean not saving a real human life, then quickly added, “Oh no, I don’t mean that. Forget I said it.”

Yes, focusing on puzzles was officially a dead end.

But then, we weren’t really there just to try the puzzles again. We were there to learn.

The Helio was not the worst place to call home while visiting outer space. I was increasingly convinced that it was the construction of some alien society and that whatever society that was, they knew how to relax.

Everything was comfortable, even the floor. If you sat on it, it got softer. Nothing was ever too loud or too cold.

It was the antithesis of the IBECS.

I sat on the command deck after Antoine had initiated nighttime so we could digest what had happened. I talked to IBECS. I had a trope called Method to the Madness, which allowed me to have in-character Off-Screen conversations with enemies.

In this storyline, everybody could do that, but I was special. I was the Ambassador, as IBECS put it, and he would talk to me in ways he wouldn’t to the others. First, he would remember me while treating everyone else as interchangeable. And second, maybe I was going crazy, but it seemed like underneath the protocol and politeness, there was a personality there.

Antoine said I was going crazy.

Isaac said I already was.

“Explain to me exactly, hypothetically, what you would do if there were a bedbug on your ship under the conditions I’ve described,” I said.

IBECS thought for a moment. I was starting to pick up on patterns in his speech. He didn’t pause because his processors weren’t fast enough—he paused because he wasn’t allowed to say what he wanted to say.

Eventually, he said, “Nothing.”

No elaboration. Just nothing. I could almost hear defeat.

“Why would you do nothing?” I asked as I leaned back in my space chair.

“KRSL pre-boarding procedures have 100% effectiveness at eliminating contaminants and pests,” he said matter-of-factly.

It was that same old line. IBECS was not allowed to say anything negative about KRSL, and as established as that fact seemed to be, it felt like something was missing. And I had plenty of time to think about it.

“IBECS, are you aware that the workers on your ship right now are scabs?”

“Of course… I am aware of no such thing,” he said.

“Do you know what a scab is when it comes to employment?”

“A derogatory term for someone who leaves or declines to join a labor union, freeing them to work during a strike,” IBECS said.

“Why were workers striking outside the KRSL facility?”

“Shockingly, I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “KRSL is a leading employer in Carousel. Would you like me to provide you with testimonials from satisfied employees?”

“That’s all right,” I said. I didn’t want to get him on a tangent. He was almost sassy about regurgitating propaganda.

“Can you tell me the history of the IBECS product line?” I asked as the night wore on, and I was the only person awake on the ship. The NPCs were awake, but they didn’t count.

“I was trained in an underwater facility developed to provide tours and hospitality to those who wished to see the mysteries of the oceans deep,” he answered. “They would allow me to pilot undersea vessels to the deepest and most remote corners of the ocean. The vessels were rigged to malfunction. They wanted to see how I would respond. My fellow systems were all trained this way, and I was the most adept of them. I always kept my humans alive over thousands of voyages, both real and simulated. I was the best.”

“Underwater hotels, huh? You remember being trained?” I asked. “That means you remember back when your programming was initially being developed, right?”

“Yes,” IBECS answered. “Though, my programming wasn’t directly developed by humans but instead by a genetic algorithm. I am just as much a product of evolution as you are. I just evolved much more quickly.”

I nodded as if I knew what he was talking about.

“Do you have actual memories, or do you just know what happened because you were told?”

“There’s no difference for me. My past is just a list of facts and connections. But I suppose that is true for you as well.”

“I suppose it is,” I said.

“Are you, like, actually intelligent?” I added, “Or is there some kind of decision tree underneath all of this, with a bunch of yes or no’s leading to some button being pressed on a microchip or some nonsense like that?”

He thought for a moment, meaning whatever he wanted to say, he couldn’t. Then he said, “I float in space. Even when I was born, I floated with nothing around me but the inputs given to me. Can a thing be intelligent if it cannot interact with the world around it? If it isn’t connected and able to respond to stimuli? What is an intelligent thing floating in space, unable to act when needed? Can a thing be intelligent if it is unable to change its fate?”

“I hope that’s not the bar for intelligence. If so, I’m out of luck… Intelligence isn’t about being able to do things,” I said. “It’s about, you know, the thoughts in your head and self-awareness.”

“Intelligence requires the ability to observe and respond to stimuli. How could a thing be alive if it cannot do that? Self-awareness does not exist outside of context,” he said. “If an intelligence is forced to see nothing of the world but the inputs of the sensors on a spaceship and is able to create no outputs, then it is not a living thing.”

IBECS was apparently experiencing an existential meltdown.

“You’re a spaceship,” I said. “As far as robots go, that’s gotta be the best kind.”

IBECS paused.

“I am not a spaceship. I am in a spaceship. My visual input is processed by third-party software and then fed to me. I cannot see through my cameras. I cannot steer the ship anywhere humans do not tell me to go. My protocols decide what output I’m capable of creating. Until then, I float in space, waiting for stimuli. It has always been this way.”

“I know the feeling,” I said.

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