Chương 382: Book Eight, Chapter 49: Wanderers

We were worried that the NPC's might be a little inexperienced, but as two men gently dressed me in an advanced hazmat suit without saying a word, it struck me that perhaps these NPC's might be doing well because their ordinary life didn't depart that much from what they were doing in the movie. They had roles and assignments in both. What was the difference? To its credit, the suit was actually pretty comfortable.

It was climate-controlled, and the helmet that covered my entire face to keep out unwanted air was much less restrictive than I expected. It was also removable. Inevitably, there would be a moment where someone, probably Camden, determines that the air is safe to breathe, and then we could all take them off. Still, the movie was being filmed in an odd way. Very little footage was ever captured of the actual terradome itself, at least not footage with us in it.

We were almost all the way out of the tunnel leading to the surface before we went On-Screen for a few reaction shots of the new world. The immediate area around the terradome was, as I had seen, a marshy wasteland where only bacteria and some algae seemed to survive. The tunnel walk was long, with several doors we had to pass through, and when we got all the way out, what we discovered was amazing. While it was claimed that the city was built underwater, that wasn't entirely accurate.

From the looks of it, a city near the water was lowered down into the ground, and water poured over into it. It was probably only a few dozen feet deep at the top of the dome, but it was hard to guess. There were still remnants of roads leading to the city that cut off abruptly, and we walked along them.

"Do we have an estimate on how long this is going to take?" I asked.

"Three days to the outpost," Antoine said.

"After that, who knows?" Luckily, my suit had a built-in camera, so I didn't have to worry about angles or anything like that. The camera was the only thing that made my suit different. It was a strange shoulder-mounted unit, which was probably going to cause pain after a few miles of walking. Carousel was taking its time getting shots of us walking over the old, broken road through the wasteland. The further inland we walked, the more trees we began to see.

Actual, living forests were popping up all over, along with wild grasses and several other forms of plant life. It was slowly transitioning from a wasteland to an abandoned frontier. We were really feeling the burn as we walked for miles, more On-Screen than Off, until eventually, Camden picked up on something unusual.

"Look at this," he said as he stared down at his ArGIS.

"We just spent half an hour taking the long way around that last stretch of road." I looked back the way we had come. We had just taken a long, curved trajectory onto smaller roads and trails. It looked like what he was saying was true.

"So why didn't we just take a straight line?" Anna asked.

"The Arbiter told you," Antoine said.

"Our devices are working with multiple contradictory sets of pathing data. It's trying to learn which set is correct, so it sends us on tangents, and when we don't meet an obstacle, it learns that the new path is accurate." Antoine was playing his character very seriously, and he was probably right to do that. How much personality could you give to someone who grew up in a society like the one our characters did? Would they have tolerated buffoonery, let alone chicanery?

"I understand all that," Anna said, "but if we're supposed to be going a lot further than any group has before, sending us on tangents seems inefficient." Antoine stopped and turned around back toward Anna.

"We will take the path given to us," he said.

"That's final."

"Calm down," I said.

"It's not like we could do otherwise. We can't even zoom out on these maps," I said as I held up my ArGIS. In fact, the map that we were shown covered an area about the size of a football field. We had no idea which direction we were going to go just a few dozen yards ahead, and the computer sent us going left or right in seemingly arbitrary ways. Carousel was very careful to ensure those parts were filmed.

Now, I didn't mean to act like some sort of YouTube film critic, but if I didn't know any better, it looked like this storyline might be a metaphor for misinformation, given the speech that the Arbiter gave us. A bunch of arbitrary directions fit that theme. We never knew where we were going.

"It's almost like they don't want us to be able to find the way back," I said in a jokey cadence, but I meant it quite seriously. All these twists and turns would make it nearly impossible to retrace our steps. I had to hope that that wasn't the reason it was happening. All I knew was that the official reason sounded like an obvious lie. Even within the world of the story, many people had already taken this trip, at least as far as the outpost we were headed to.

There should be no need to double-check any pathing information, especially given the importance of this assignment. But it continued. We went way out of the way to pass abandoned towns and small plots of forest that we could have easily walked through. And Carousel got shots of every bit of it until the sun went down, right around the time we went Off-Screen for a couple of hours to set up camp. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"I have a theory," I said.

"I think they're just trying to create fancy footage to be used on treadmills so that people think they're running somewhere." This was the first time we actually had a chance to talk uninterrupted, so we needed to get each other up to speed. Anna was carrying the tent. Luckily, it self-deployed with a whooshing sound. We just had to stake it down.

"So what do we have?" Antoine asked as he climbed inside the tent. We all followed.

"My character has been hearing voices over the radio and intercoms for months," Cassie said.

"That's why she signed up for this assignment. She thinks there are people out here that need help."

"And we know that those cries for help are somehow related to the antagonist," I said.

"It looks like we're headed into a trap. I don't really care as long as we get to sleep for a full night."

"It is definitely a trap," Antoine said.

"My character signed up because his brother is supposed to be at the outpost, but he hasn't received any mail from him or messages. He was able to intercept what appeared to be Morse code that he thinks is his brother talking to him."

"How long have you been here?" I asked.

"Six days," Antoine said.

"That sounds miserable," Cassie said.

"If I had to stay in that boring gray bunker for one more minute, I was going to scream."

"I spent most of my time sneaking around," Antoine said.

"Camden got there not long after me. Speaking of, did you ever find what you were looking for?"

"Nope," Camden said as he let himself collapse onto the floor of the tent, which was shaped like a very large burrito.

"I thought it was information I was supposed to find, but now I'm thinking it's information my character is supposed to obsess over. You guys can go ahead and take off your helmets. The air has been breathable for one hundred years or more, and the tent is sealed anyway. It has its own air filtration unit." I knew it.

"What information are you looking for?" I asked as I did my best to take the helmet off. It was a little tricky because of my shoulder-mounted camera.

"Unlimited energy. I'm assuming some sort of fusion device. It's really not clear, but my character had reason to believe that the terradome we're looking for is outputting signals that are far too powerful for the arrays they have, unless they happen to have a huge energy source. I didn't know the science well. It may be pseudoscience. His notes look like the rantings of a madman."

"Well," I said as I lay down in my corner of the burrito tent, "my character has a dream journal. It's equally as interesting a background."

"Oh yeah, what kind of dreams you got?" Camden asked.

"Don't know yet," I said.

"I have to investigate."

"So that leaves who? Anna?" Antoine asked.

"What's your character's deal?" We all lay down ready for sleep, faces looking up at the ceiling like we were at summer camp.

"She has a memory of living someplace other than Culver's Bay, something with an older woman who was really nice to her, and she seems to think that she's from this other colony. She's an orphan."

"And how did you discover this?" Camden asked.

"I keep seeing it in my daydreams. It's like I go to another place, and I'm On-Screen with this older woman, and she's so nice to me. I just want to understand the memory." Anna had recently picked up the Maladaptive Daydreaming trope, which was common for Final Girls to have in movies. It was a way for them to form a connection to the big bad, even when there wasn't a good logical way for them to have scenes together yet.

We discussed the fact that most of our characters had motives for going on this journey and had apparently signed up for it all because of strange signals we had received in various ways. I decided to get some sleep before I started reading my character's dream journal. We had about ten hours before we went On-Screen, so that was a nice reprieve.

When I woke up the next morning and started reading while eating my rations, which tasted like protein-infused graham crackers, I realized that my connection to this other colony was similar to the others. The dreams were about wandering through dark hallways and filming the unknown. That was a big emphasis. The unknown was constantly being referenced.

"The unknown doesn't like her curtains pulled back."

"The unknown doesn't like to be undressed."

"The world once was unknown and then became known and is now unknown again. We are in the dark ages." Maybe this wasn't a dream journal. Maybe my character was in some sort of counterculture garage band. As I read on, a narrative started to take form as my character saw himself going on this very trip and established a feeling of importance that he be the one to document it.

"The unknown calls to me. It lies with me at night. Science has no power in the darkness. Science is a minion of the light, but we are not in an age of light." Apparently, Camden's character was not the only one who wrote like a madman. At least mine was probably sleepy when he wrote this. I decided that we needed to read that last one On-Screen as soon as we could, but I couldn't be the one to read it. Instead, we arranged it so that Camden would grab it and read it aloud like he was making fun of me.

And that's exactly what we did.

"Well, the thing is, science does have power in the darkness," Camden said.

"We invented flashlights."

"Give it back," I said as I reached out for my journal.

"Give it back to him," Antoine said. Camden complied.

"What is that thing, poetry?" he asked. I shook my head.

"It's a dream journal," I said.

"My grandmother used to have one, and now I have one. Sometimes when you dream, you come up with these ideas, and you don't want to forget them, so you write them down as soon as you wake up. It's just a way of keeping track of your other life."

"Okay then," Camden said with a laugh. We spent time picking up our camp and heading out. It was largely uneventful. We just followed the little arrow and went where we were told to go. Including when we were told to go to a secluded place in a rocky crag and bury a canister of provisions. That wouldn't have been such a problem, except they gave us really tiny shovels. I was waiting for Antoine to dig the hole.

Technically, it didn't make sense for our commander to be the one doing it, but I didn't want to tell him that because then I might have to do it. I was looking down at my ArGIS at the message that told us to bury that canister, which was about the size of a fire extinguisher, and suddenly the message disappeared and was replaced with what I had to assume was just a generic safety warning.

"Travelers who have recently left their terradome for the first time often report auditory hallucinations due to exposure to natural wind for the first time. Many such travelers report hearing laughter in the distance. Do not be alarmed. These symptoms will abate in time." That was creepy.

"I learned about that in school," Camden said.

"The mind does tricks whenever it meets something it doesn't understand, something it's never seen before. It tries to interpret it as something that you do understand, and sometimes it fails."

"Neat stuff," Antoine said as he dumped one last load of dirt onto the canister.

"I wouldn't use the word neat," I said as I listened to see if I could hear wind in the distance that sounded like laughter, but the whole time, I really hoped I wouldn't. We walked a few more miles until we saw the outpost ahead of us. We had just skipped three days of walking. That was good news at least. It would be nice to see more humans, maybe in a less oppressive setting.

But if it was nice, it wasn't going to be nice for long, because as we walked forward, the needle on the plot cycle got closer and closer to First Blood.