Chapter Seventy-Three: All in the Family

As soon as my shift ended, I fell into bed. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow. I was just exhausted.

My brain hurt like I’d been doing math problems all night. By all rights I should have been up, terrified of what was to come, afraid that First Blood might happen while I was asleep. Despite this, I slept soundly for nine hours. I was too tired to worry.

I awoke to a phone ringing. Up until that point, I had hardly even noticed that there was a phone in the room. It was hanging up next to the shelving unit near the servers. I stumbled out of bed to find it and then stumbled back to bed with it in my hand.

I was On-Screen.

“Hello surveillance room 2B,” I said.

“Mr. Lawrence!” the voice on the other side answered. “It’s Dr. Mentes. I thought I would call you to find out how you were handling your first shift with KRSL.”

I rubbed a hand through my hair and tried to wake my brain up. “Everything is going smoothly,” I said.

“Wonderful. I trust you haven’t had any incidents beyond, let me see here,” I heard him shuffling through some papers, “Some minor camera malfunctions?”

“…Nothing to report.”

“I am glad to hear it. Remember, if there are any problems with the patients in the night, contact your coworkers for assistance. That’s why they’re there. The patients’ liaison, your sister, is she managing well?”

“Yes. No complaints as far as I know.”

I was cold. With the security door closed this place became an icebox. I searched around for my blanket but realized it had fallen on the floor. I leaned over the side of the bed and fished it up. I wrapped it around my body, finally warming up again.

“How is your office? We keep it pretty cold in there, don’t we?” Dr. Mentes asked. “We believe it is best. Cold keeps the surveillance specialist awake.”

That comment caught me by surprise. Had he just seen me wrap myself in a blanket? Or was it a coincidence? My eyes darted up to the ceiling. There were no visible cameras.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“Wonderful. Remember, if there is anything wrong at all, be sure to document it in your logbook.”

“I will.”

“Delightful. Do not hesitate to contact me with any questions.”

“Okay,” I said.

I hung up the phone.

Off-Screen.

I managed to make it to the mess hall to catch Anna and Camden there. I grabbed some food and joined them.

As I placed my food on the table and started to sit down, we were On-Screen again. That was inconvenient. I couldn’t say much if I had to stay in character.

“This place gives me the creeps at night,” I said.

“Can’t be too bad,” Camden said. “You look like you’ve been sleeping. I’ve been up all night worried that my buzzer would go off and I would have to go remotely monitor brain waves.”

I was lucky that my bed was in my office.

“It’s hard staying awake all night. My rhythm is all off.”

“It should be easy for you; it’s just like when we were kids,” Anna said. “You spent all night watching tv back then too.”

I forced a chuckle.

Anna had been my neighbor growing up. What she said about me spending all night watching movies was true. It was likely the thing I got in trouble for the most back then.

“Except now, I’m getting paid,” I said.

We exchanged idle banter for a bit longer. I focused on eating.

“So, the medical folks have been turning our patients into zombies lately. They can hardly stay awake long enough to complain,” Anna said. She looked at Camden. “You know anything about that?”

“They don’t tell me anything,” he said. “I’m just as qualified as they are and yet they have me doing busy work. It gets frustrating.”

We continued our general job complaints for a few minutes after that.

An NPC entered the mess hall. It was the supervisor I had seen arguing with the custodian who complained about not having enough time to finish her responsibilities.

“Barb,” the supervisor called out. The custodian herself was in the mess hall cleaning a table. “Barb, you better be at that staff meeting. All hands on deck. 8:00 o’clock. Remember.”

“I told you I would,” Barb said as she finished wiping off the table. She didn’t look too happy about it.

Her supervisor considered saying more, but she looked at the clock on the wall and shook her head as she turned to leave the mess hall.

Finally, we went Off-Screen.

“Okay,” Anna said, “This plot is strange. We constantly go Off-Screen for conversations that I think are important. I was talking to some patients about the reasons they got thrown in here. Really interesting stuff. A lot of strange accidents. Most of the patients have a long string of strange incidents going back to their birth. Only ten percent of those conversations might have actually been On-Screen. If that.”

I thought about that for a bit. So the details of the patients’ past were being kept sparse.

“Maybe Carousel doesn’t want to spoil the reveal to the audience,” I said.

Anna shrugged her shoulders.

I took some time to tell them about last night’s events and my suspicion that my room was under surveillance.

“He said it right after you covered yourself up?” Camden asked. “And this event happened On-Screen?”

“The whole thing.”

“So, is there a monster, or is the company itself the bad guy? They could be messing with the cameras,” Anna suggested.

That was one of my theories as well.

It would kind of fit. Looking at the enemy tropes, A Knock on the Door could fit evil scientists. They had access to every room, after all, and they could clearly see into every room with the cameras and “target” whoever was there.

“We’ll find out soon enough,” I said. “First Blood has to be soon. It can’t keep dragging out.”

“We need to be on the lookout,” Anna agreed. “It’s going to be tonight for sure.”

I then took a moment to consider my words carefully.

“There’s something I need to say,” I said. “I don’t think Antoine is at 100%. He seemed pretty shaken up last night.”

Anna and Camden looked at each other.

“He should be better now,” Anna said. “He asked Kimberly to help activate his nightmare trope a few hours ago… It should help.”

That would help, but it wasn’t a permanent solution at our low level.

“Ok. Then… maybe don’t mention I said anything. Not in the storyline at least.”

They agreed.

A few minutes later, Kimberly and Antoine came into the mess hall in a hurry.

“Come on,” Antoine said. “We found something.”

They looked excited.

They led us back through the maze of hallways and intersections toward the part of the floor that was far away from the patient sector and the entrance.

As they led us down a hallway, I immediately noticed that something was wrong.

“I don’t recognize this place from the security monitors,” I said. I knew that there were some blind spots that weren’t picked up but the idea that there was an entire hallway filled with rooms that I couldn’t see was very concerning.

“Hurry,” Antoine said. “We wanted to do some last-minute exploration before First Blood. Look what we found. We looked through it but I think you all need to see it.”

I wondered if it was difficult to activate Kimberley’s Get A Room trope when your character already has a room in that very building.

He showed us to an office. Most of the things in the room had been cleared out except for a few odds and ends and a box of papers that sat on the desk at the back of the room.

“This looks like my office,” Camden said. “It’s got the same layout and everything.”

He rushed to the box of papers. After staring at meaningless brain scans for days he was probably happy to find actual documents that he could search for clues.

On-Screen.

Camden searched through the papers and pulled out a few that his Eureka ability must have told him were important.

“Check this out,” he said. He held out what looked like a family tree chart, but it was slightly different. All of the individuals on the tree were represented with different colored circles and squares.

“It’s a pedigree diagram,” he said.

“What’s that for?” Kimberly asked.

Camden looked over the chart for a little bit and then answered, “It’s for tracking a genetic trait over generations.”

I looked over his shoulder to take a glance at the chart. At the top was a woman whose name was Eloise Mercer. She died in 1903. Every other person on the chart either descended from her or married into the family.

“All of our patients are on here,” Camden said. “It has both their ID numbers and their real names.”

I only knew one of their real names. The little girl. Her name was Bethany. Or Bethany Mercer, apparently.

“They’re all related?” Anna asked. “But they don’t seem to know each other except for the father and his two kids.”

“They’re distant relations. Cousins. Second cousins. Different last names, but the Mercer bloodline,” Camden said. “Spread out over five generations. Every other blood relation on this pedigree chart is labeled as being deceased.”

No wonder the patients had such limited contact with each other. Eventually, they would get to talking and figure out what they all had in common.

“You said that pedigree charts were for tracking genetic traits,” I said. “What genetic trait?”

KRSL tracked down every living member of that family. But why?

Camden shuffled through the papers. He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

I backed away so that he could keep looking through what remained in the box.

“Whose office was this?” Anna asked.

“Doctor Thornton Thomas,” Kimberly said. She pointed to something mounted to the wall.

It was a glass case. At the bottom, it had an inscription, “A heartfelt token of gratitude to Dr. Thornton Thomas, whose guidance and expertise touched our lives forever.”

Inside the glass case, was a signed wooden baseball bat. Antoine’s baseball bat.

I couldn’t say anything because we were still On-Screen, but it was interesting how Carousel managed to work Antoine’s baseball bat into the story. We would probably need it later. The security guards on this floor level had batons and pepper spray. This was quite the upgrade.

“You guys,” Camden said. “You know how we have a father and two kids as patients out there right? Well, guess who the mother is.”

He waited for a beat.

“Dina Mercer (née Cano). Remember, the woman we met on our first day who didn’t make it to orientation?”

“Dina?” Anna asked. “I remember her. Her family is in here…”

She threw a glance at me. Dina was related to the Mercer line by marriage. She was obviously here to get her kids back. We had thrown around theories about what had happened to Dina. One of those theories was that there was a hard limit to how many players could join this storyline and she had been the odd one out. Apparently, that wasn’t the case.

She had to be in the building. All of the filming locations were in the building.

We searched the remainder of the office for more clues. We didn’t find much.

“You know, this guy only left three weeks ago,” Camden said.

“If you ask the patients, it sounds like there’s a high turnover rate for employees,” Anna said. I had observed the same thing.

“If he quit, why wouldn’t he take his bat?” Kimberly asked.

We looked back at the signed souvenir. Was the bat there just as a way to get Antoine his weapon of choice into the storyline? Or was the presence of a sentimental object left inside of his office supposed to be evidence that Dr. Thomas might not have left of his own free will?

Off-Screen.

We left the room. We checked every other door in the hallway. They were all locked.

“Be ready for a fight tonight,” Anna said. She sounded more nervous than usual. “Something is about to happen.”

We all agreed. The needle was slowly moving forward. We didn’t have that much longer until First Blood. It looked like I wouldn’t be the only person who would be awake all night.

It was nearly 8:00. My shift would start soon. I was back in my office getting ready for the night. As I prepared, I ran through the pre-shift checks for audio and video. It was then that I noticed the custodian.

It was Barb, the same woman who had complained about having too much work to get done in her shift both previous nights. She had disobeyed her supervisor and had stayed behind for an extra 15 minutes. She was emptying trash cans and wiping down surfaces.

She was in the back part of the floor, far from the elevator and the patient sector. She kept looking up at the clock on the wall, apparently considering whether or not she could sneak in a few extra minutes to get her day’s work done before the doors closed and locked.

I continued doing my checks and then ran to the mess hall to purchase a snack for the night. The needle on the plot cycle was close to First Blood. It was going to be an eventful night.

As I went back to my station, I passed by the custodian on her way out.

I closed and locked the door to my room and sat back down in front of the monitors.

Whoever was in charge of the medicine for the patients really must have upped their dose of sleep medication because several of them were already in bed. I looked over to the camera that showed the elevator. The custodian was waiting there, tapping her foot. She was cutting it close.

And then I saw it: the distortion.

It was out early that night. It jumped from monitor to monitor faster than I had ever seen it. It was headed straight for the custodian. There were no doors between it and her that I could close remotely.

I fumbled my fingers to the monitor and clicked on the audio.

“Ma’am, can you hear me?” I said loudly.

She looked up at the camera and nodded her head. She didn’t appear pleased to hear my voice.

“You have to run right now,” I said with as much urgency as possible.

The NPC turned to the camera and said, “I was just finishing up my shift. It’s just an extra 20 minutes. I’m leaving, see?”

“Look to your left!” I screamed into the microphone.

She stared up at the camera in confusion and then slowly looked down the hallway to her left.

“Why?” she asked. She didn’t appear to be frightened or startled in any way, despite the fact that the distortion was at the end of that hallway. Whatever it was, it wasn’t just invisible on camera. She didn’t seem to be able to see anything.

The elevator dinged. The custodian looked at the elevator and then back at the camera.

“I’m leaving, see?” she repeated.

She walked over to the elevator and stepped inside.

The distortion started to move even faster from one monitor to the next. Before the elevator doors closed, it had made it onto the same monitor as the elevator and the woman inside it.

The woman still didn’t notice.

The elevator doors closed. The distortion disappeared.

I didn’t see it again the rest of the night. A few minutes after the elevator left, the needle on the plot cycle hit First Blood.

It didn’t move forward to Rebirth like it usually would, not at first.

It stayed there, fixed on First Blood, for thirty-five minutes.

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