Book Five, Chapter 41: Mutagen 6

We lost track of Bobby and the surrogates as they fled the superbugs, but I knew where Bobby was going. Occasionally, as we followed slowly behind, we would come across one of the mutant bedbugs, and either Dina or I would have to squash it with our feet.

If one came up that was too big to handle, we could always call for Antoine.

Bobby had managed to get the surrogates into his hiding spot at the dispensary.

Dina and I found a communication relay and listened as IBECS fed us their conversation upon request. That kind of convenience was only possible because I had run through all the conversation trees we needed to have to get to that point.

“You tell us what’s going on out here right now,” Michael said in a threatening manner to Bobby.

Bobby took a moment to think through his lines. I wondered if Carousel was giving him lines on the script based on the story we made up or if he had to come up with them wholesale—and if that was the case, what was on the script?

“I didn’t do anything,” Bobby said. “It was you—all you scabs and KRSL. I had a grant from the government, alright? I was sent here to find a way to feed starving people in space. I did not do this. I was promised this would be a contaminant-free ship and that their onboarding methods were 100% foolproof at detecting and eliminating pests. I should have known everything they promised was a lie.”

There was a pause while the surrogates took in what he was saying.

“One of you tracked a bedbug onto the ship,” Bobby said. “They’ve been feeding and multiplying for a year and a half. And about four months ago, the bedbugs finally made it into my lab. At first, they just fed on me, but then they found my livestock. And after they found them, the bugs weren’t so interested in me.”

“Livestock?” Andrew asked. “Are you talking about the protein lab?”

“The same,” Bobby answered. “My livestock are humanely grown from embryo to never suffer and to be the ideal candidates for my experiments.”

“What experiments?” Michael asked incredulously.

“Mutagen 6,” Bobby said. “I’m one of the few who is licensed to experiment with it.”

I was curious to know how they were going to respond. There was no such thing as Mutagen 6 on IBECS—not until Bobby said there was, at least.

“Mutagen 6? Are you kidding me?” Andrew asked.

“It’s a safe variant,” Bobby answered, “designed to grow food faster and more of it on less supply. I can grow a full herd of beef on nothing but algae in a month and a half, just with a little tweak of genetics and chemistry. It’s perfectly legal and safe.”

“Legal?” Andrew said. “It’s legal in that you’re allowed to experiment with it in outer space, but not back in Carousel, where it could get into the ecosystem and start altering living creatures.”

“That’s propaganda,” Bobby said. “All it does is make the creatures grow and make them resilient to any number of diseases. Or at least, that’s all I thought it did.”

There was a pause.

“The bedbugs,” Andrew said.

“The bedbugs,” Bobby answered. “The pure Mutagen 6 ran through the bloodstreams of those animals at levels we had never experimented with back in Carousel. Once they started feeding on the cattle and the goats, they weren’t so interested in humans anymore. They were hooked.”

“What are we talking about here?” Michael asked. “Are they on steroids or something? Because the things I saw… I don’t really understand. One of those things had human teeth.”

“Not human,” Bobby said. “I believe those were from a cow. No matter. Yes, the mutagen created some offspring of the bedbugs with genetic features of the creatures they fed on.”

“I don’t understand,” Andrew said. “Once those things started to spread, why did IBECS not register them and take care of them?”

“I don’t understand it either,” Bobby said. “I do know that these old AIs are usually mishandled and given protocols that make it difficult for them to overcome circumstances their programmers didn’t foresee.”

“Yes, I’ve heard the same,” Andrew said. “Makes you wonder why you’d want an AI if you were going to take away its ability for creative thinking. What do you suppose is preventing it from triggering its defensive protocols?”

“My first thought,” Bobby said, “was that it whitelisted the animals inside my lab. Or, at the very least, it was told to whitelist them. But then, how would the AI confuse these monsters with cows? No, there’s something deeply wrong with its programming. I’ve spoken to IBECS—it doesn’t even seem to register there’s an infestation.”

“It never mentioned anything about it to us,” Andrew said. “If it is somehow unable to even communicate about this particular problem, perhaps it has no protocol for a mutated pest.”

“Whatever the case,” Bobby said, “if we can find a way to initiate its defensive protocols, we may actually be able to get out of this ship before we run out of gas.”

“What do you mean, ‘run out of gas’?” Lila asked, speaking up for the first time.

“Don’t you know?” Bobby replied. “These things—they’re notoriously fuel inefficient. We’re supposed to fuel up soon, and if there’s no one at the helm to override and make sure it happens manually, well… we’re going to be spending the rest of our lives together.”

I grouped back up with Antoine, Kimberly, and Cassie.

“It sounds like Bobby’s doing a good job of getting them motivated to get to the helm,” I said.

“Are we sure there aren’t gonna be any more puzzles?” Kimberly asked.

I shrugged. “There might be puzzles,” I said, “but the real focus will be on the monsters.”

That was one way to solve the puzzle: replace it with a giant mutated bedbug. There was always going to be conflict in a story, but through improvisation, you can choose the conflict—and we chose a fight with mutant pests. That was the magic of reruns. You could learn enough about a story to learn how it ticked and then change things up a bit. Sure, we would be docked points for sidestepping the themes, but hey, at least we were getting somewhere.

Now, when the surrogates had to move forward in the ship, their struggle wouldn’t be against a mind-numbing puzzle that we had to explain to them. It would simply be a fight—one we could help them with without appearing On-Screen.

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We just had to make sure they didn’t end up as bedbug food—well, more than they already were.

Our plan was working flawlessly. Instead of throwing a bunch of random puzzles at us to solve, Carousel was sending waves of monsters to be run from or fought by Bobby and the surrogates—with help from some Off-Screen characters whose names would not appear in the credits.

It was a strange feeling, being happy when a corridor was filled with giant bugs instead of space lasers we had to rearrange.

Slowly, they moved their way forward in the ship, with us dancing around them in the shadows, staying Off-Screen and helping where we could.

Just as we planned, they arrived at the secondary sleeping bay just in time for Second Blood. We had anticipated all the drama that the surrogates would bring to fill out the movie and timed everything just right.

I had no idea what Carousel would do with our little mutant bedbug plan. I got the sense that it was having a little fun.

In the story we were telling, the bedbugs had been created when ordinary insects consumed something called Mutagen 6, but in real life, they were modified clones.

We had no control over mutation—just a fancy alien computer.

Carousel, however, had no such limitations.

“This is it,” Bobby said. “I wasn’t able to get here on my own when I first got out of my lab, I was running for my life. My friend is supposed to be in here.”

Bobby’s nameless friend was an important character in our version of the story.

Now, all he had to do was pick a deep sleep chamber—any deep sleep chamber.

They opened the door to the secondary sleeping bay.

“This room is having the same problem with the lights,” Michael noted.

Those darn lights just wouldn’t stay on.

Bobby had a flashlight he had picked up from his workshop, and he was shining it around at the mounds of normal bedbugs as well as a bunch of hatched eggs—way more eggs than I had put in there.

Strangely, there were tons of dead mutant bedbugs—dozens of them, killed through some form of physical damage that was too desiccated for me to recognize from the distance I was watching.

Maybe they killed each other. Maybe IBECS got off the couch. I could only see a little bit through the open door.

Andrew was nervous.

Lila hadn’t even been willing to enter the room but had instead sought out the room with all the belongings of the passengers, just as she had in the first run.

“With those things in here, I don’t think your friend is alive,” Andrew said. “We need to leave.”

“No,” Bobby said as he walked deeper into the room. “The mutated bedbugs are larger. I’m not sure they can fit into the deep sleep chambers. Ironically, the mutation might have been helpful to humans.”

There was a pause as the silence grew distressing.

“Something killed all of these mutants,” Bobby added. “That might mean there are passengers alive in here.” He stared around at the dead mutant bodies.

Andrew looked incredulous, even though all I could see was the back of his head from across the hallway where we were hiding.

Bobby stopped at one of the deep sleep chambers and said, “Here we go.” He looked down at the medical display and dropped to his knees.

“He passed,” Andrew said, looking at the readouts.

“A month ago, if this reading is correct,” Bobby said. Bobby cursed and slammed his fist against the deep sleep chamber, perhaps a bit too loudly.

I suggested he do something like that because that was the exact type of behavior that could trigger an action sequence.

A scuttling could be heard in the back of the room.

“We need to go now,” Andrew said. Bobby didn’t need convincing.

They both picked up and started to run out of the room, followed by the most grotesque inversions of the bedbugs we had seen yet. Andrew even did a nice pause-and-stare at the monster in horror for the camera.

We knew that Carousel was going along with our plans. What we didn’t know was that it had made plans of its own.

The creature we were looking at did not look like it was part bedbug and part farm animal.

It looked like it was part bedbug and part human—not close enough to fool anyone, of course, but its two front legs were clearly arms from a human. Instead of having tufts of fur, it had long strands of human-like hair. And its eyes—its eyes were human.

It was the skin frogs’ uglier cousin.

From the Atlas and our experience, we knew that mass death—or the revelation of it—could be First or Second Blood. We had figured out that if we sacrificed the unconscious NPCs in the secondary sleeping bay for Second Blood, we could potentially spare the surrogates. It would have been a better story to lose an important character there, but that would defeat the purpose of doing the run.

Carousel was having fun with us. We had not created this creature. It had carried our made-up logic forward. The mutants got features of what they fed on.

Up ahead, Bobby screamed, “There’s a junction where we should be able to pass through!”

“Where’s Lila?” Michael screamed.

She, of course, had wandered off and was hugging her child’s baby blanket tightly.

“We can’t leave without her,” Andrew said. They started screaming her name. “Lila, where are you? We need to go!”

And, of course, the pattern that had started to show itself in our first run repeated itself here. Lila was going to get one of them killed.

And she would have, except she was Off-Screen for just long enough for me to get to her.

I was in the room, in the darkness, waiting Off-Screen, and the moment I had a chance, I ran up behind Lila, scooped her up by the armpits, set her on her feet, and all but pushed her out toward the door and into the hallway.

“Stay here and wait for them to get here,” I told her.

See, what was going to happen was that they were going to go into the storage room where Lila was, and it would be a kill box.

They wouldn’t be able to escape—something similar had almost happened in attempt #3, except with one of the traps/puzzles instead of mutants. But I got her out of there and quickly slipped back into the shadows, where Dina was around the corner, watching as they passed.

Sure enough, as they came across her in the hallway, they grabbed her and carried her forward to the next junction as the monster began overtaking them.

They didn’t even have time to be mad at her about the baby blanket drama.

The junction was the same type of place where the original plasma grid had been, the one they had to solve to get across, but because the battle, in this case, was with the human-looking bedbug, the plasma grid was gone and replaced with a few simple plasma turrets that functioned in the same way.

The four of them ran into the junction, and Bobby guided them to the far right corner instead of running toward the exit.

We had scoped this puzzle out.

“You have to be careful in here!” Bobby screamed. “These things turn on their own when the power fluctuates. It’s not meant for humans to enter!”

The large, humanoid bedbugs followed them in, and that’s where their fate was sealed—the bedbugs’ fate, that is—because far on the right side of the ship, Antoine was waiting to start turning on generators and every single device he could find.

He was using his Playbook ability, which allowed him to know the exact timing of his part in a plan. As he turned on the power over there, the plasma beams would move around in the relay room.

The exact time was when the bedbugs stepped into the plasma chamber. While Bobby and the surrogates hid in the one safe area of the room, the plasma chamber came to life as the circuit started to move around, slicing through bedbugs as they tried to make it across the room.

It smelled like burnt hair, almonds, and fresh lobster.

“Alright, wait,” Bobby said. “On my mark, we race to the exit.”

Andrew looked at him in amazement that he would know how this plasma grid substitute worked.

“What?” Bobby said. “I’m a science officer. I know things like this. Getting sufficient power to my lab was a pain in the rear. I know these designs like the back of my hand.”

A few moments later, Bobby had them running across the back of the room toward the exit.

Now, after the understated Second Blood, all that remained was the Finale, and it was just a straight-up fight.

We followed along, encountering more mutants, making our way toward the helm and the final battle, and being informed of what was going on by Isaac and Ramona.

We were in the final stretch.

“Looks like IBECS is taking his time to step in,” Antoine said.

I nodded. “We were hoping for too much. Unfortunately, a deus ex machina doesn’t come in until the end. Things have to get worse before they can get better.”

It was true that IBECS had told me that if there were invaders, it could step in and help. But at the end of the day, that could never happen at the beginning of the story.

We had to earn it.

It wasn’t our only plan. We had backups, but we were hoping to see it.

As time marched forward, and we were all covered in whatever blood the bedbugs had within them, we eventually found the battle we had been looking for.

There was a reason that Carousel had relocated Bobby’s lab to the front of the ship, connecting it to the network of halls along the spacefaring labyrinth—because it needed to be plausible for what happened next.

“I wasn’t able to go past this point,” Bobby said. “That was a month ago. Who knows how infested things are now?”

He must have realized his lab had been relocated because he saw the door to the protein lab.

It was torn open.

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