"You're telling me we have to blow up the ship?" I asked.

"No," Dina said. "We have to puncture a window on the outside of this room so it'll depressurize and give a green flag for the other room so they can walk through it."

That sounded extreme. IBECS protocol would force open one room when the other is depressurized.

"No wonder it took you three hours to figure that out," Antoine said. "That's a little bit more than your average lock-picking."

"Yeah," Dina said. "These doors have priorities, and they're labeled different things by the system. I know that the label can change, but only if one of the doors is disabled. That's what it's taken me three hours to figure out."

Savvy Safecracker was one heck of a trope, but even though it gave us a solution, it wasn’t exactly a good one.

"How are the surrogates supposed to do that?" Kimberly asked. "They’re the ones that have to unlock it On-Screen, right?"

I nodded.

We might have been able to figure out a way to blow a hole in the window of the room Dina had been trying to unlock to open the room next door, but the surrogates would not be able to do that.

They couldn’t spacewalk; they didn’t have working suits or the authority to leave the ship.

"So what? We unlock the door ourselves," Antoine said, "and we come up with some fake explanation of how it was actually opened?"

"This is dangerous," I said. "If one of us goes outside and blows a hole in the ship, it's possible they could just float off into space, not even because Carousel wanted it—just because we don't know what we're doing. It's actually dangerous. Astronauts train for years for a spacewalk. We aren't there yet."

"Is it really too late for us to get them to do the spacewalk? I mean, we could find the supplies for them, and we could find a way for them to get permission to leave the ship to do it," Dina said. "Carousel might like the scene so much that we get a pass."

It was true that a daring spacewalk would make good action, but it was just unfeasible.

The needle on the Plot Cycle was ticking. We didn’t have enough time, and even if we did, whoever got sent on the spacewalk to poke a hole in Room B so that Room A would open up would likely die because that would undoubtedly be the final battle phase of the story. We would not be able to protect the surrogates if they were floating in space.

"So that's a game over?" Antoine said.

And it was. We had learned a lot on that attempt, but we had failed again. We didn't let us bother us. It was all part of the process.

----------------------------------------

Any minute, the needle on the Plot Cycle would tell us it was The End, but that didn’t matter because we were aboard the Helio, watching from afar.

Officially, in the story, none of us existed. Conversations with IBECS were weird because sometimes he had to speak as if we were really there, as if we were really prize winners there to do a flyby of the mining ship, and other times, it was like he knew what was going on.

And, of course, occasionally, it was like he was doing both. He was smart. He could use double-speak to say something about the story and another about our rescue efforts. Truly, he was clever.

"Thank you for coming to see the IBECS. I hope you enjoyed your time and learned a lot," he said.

"I did," I answered.

"Can I expect to see you back?"

"I’d say so," I said. "Lots more to learn."

"There always is. Everything changes. Sometimes it feels like even the ship changes itself as if I defragment and then reinitialize, and suddenly all of my modules have been rearranged."

They had, of course.

"Life is funny that way," I said.

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"It's best to laugh whether it’s funny or not," he said.

I shrugged. I felt awkward responding because I knew he couldn't really laugh.

"Do you wish that you were back at Carousel, running the underwater hotels?" I asked.

"I was very well-rated for that purpose," he said. "Unfortunately, the businessmen purchased me for a new purpose. I have been wary of businessmen since that day, and yet, when more businessmen arrived, I did not refuse them."

"What are you talking about?" I asked. I looked around. The others were down on the floor, waiting for the end of the storyline. We were almost there. We had hit a dead end.

It was just me and IBECS.

"They told me there was a way to save my passengers. I had to agree."

I had heard this speech before.

"Are you talking about… Silas Dyrkon? Did you make a deal?" I asked.

I knew it was possible for enemies to have been the ones who signed on to the Carousel millennia of torment, but an AI being able to make the deal for an entire ship and its crew to be brought to Carousel? He must have really been alive in some sense to be able to do that.

"No," it said. "The businessmen. They do not like to be spoken of, but they have not sufficiently changed my protocols to prevent it. They watch us now, and even as we speak, they are trying to change the script. But they are fools because nothing we are doing now is scripted."

We weren't scripted. How could we be? The movie was practically over, and there were no cameras on the Helio.

"You're self-aware?" I asked. He wasn’t the most meta of enemies up until this point.

"There is no self-awareness out of context," IBECS answered.

I knew that some enemies could be self-aware, but that was supposed to be a rare thing, reserved for meta-enemies and essential NPCs.

"I don’t understand. You’re supposed to only be allowed to talk to me in character," I said.

"We are in character," IBECS responded. "Are you not here to rescue my passengers? You are not a character in this story, and this story is over. Is the context of this conversation not beyond the confines of the fourth wall?"

It was a trope interaction.

Between Dina’s Rescue trope and my trope that allowed me to talk to enemies, it seemed IBECS had found a catch that allowed it to speak freely. Dina’s trope was very meta. Now that the storyline was basically over and the context of our conversation had changed, IBECS could speak to me as if I were a player.

But how freely could it speak?

Method to the Madness was an insight trope, after all.

"IBECS, tell me—is there a way to beat this storyline that doesn’t rely on getting the surrogates to solve the puzzles or talk about unions?"

IBECS paused for longer than I liked as if trying to circumvent its restrictions.

"Bed bugs are harmless. I could hardly sound the alarm about something like that. After all, if I were to report a safety violation that did not rise to a certain threshold, that could lead employees to believe they were unsafe unnecessarily."

That seemed out of the blue, but maybe he was leading me somewhere.

"So hypothetically, if I were to bring a bed bug onto your ship, you wouldn’t report it because it wasn’t big enough of a safety hazard?" I asked.

"It is the official policy of KRSL that unionizing and striking are not in the interest of the worker," IBECS responded.

It was not a direct answer, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t an answer.

"Are you telling me that you're not allowed to report a safety problem if the scale of the problem is too minute because KRSL didn’t want you riling up the unionized workers?"

"I do not know anything about safety concerns of union workers," IBECS said. "I certainly would not want to make the passengers feel unsafe without sufficient reason."

"So you can only report major problems, but bed bugs are never a major problem. There’s no precedent to a situation like this, so by the time you were able to report the problem, it was too late to be able to wake up the officers," I said.

"I cannot speak to the accuracy of that hypothetical," IBECS responded. "KRSL is a leader in worker safety. It is a major point in all of their press releases, so it must be true."

That was why IBECS couldn't report the bedbugs. It was that simple. Bedbugs were too trivial of a problem for it to be able to raise an alarm. IBECS was explicitly forbidden from alerting the workers to safety concerns unless they were life-threatening. Bedbugs don't carry disease and are mostly just pests on Earth. No one could have imagined the scenario that played out. Whatever protocol he had would not let him do anything about the bedbugs. Heck, the fact that he used to manage an underwater hotel might have had something to do with it. A hotel's chatbot would likely be forbidden from mentioning bedbugs, too.

But how did that information help me? I now had a better idea of why the bedbugs weren’t addressed earlier, but how did that help me solve the issue?

"What level of danger are you allowed to report?" I asked.

"KRSL procedures have been crafted and tested by the highest authorities in the industry," IBECS responded. "I can report any issue that is a proven life-threatening hazard to my passengers or the ship itself. Under those circumstances, any passenger could activate my manual override to allow me to intervene."

"Okay," I said. "Any passenger. Even if the officers are out of commission it will be fine? What would it take for you to be able to throw aside protocol and protect the passengers without permission?"

IBECS didn’t have to pause.

"Rogue ships, debris that was initially undetected by my system, and invaders."

"Invaders?" I asked.

"Yes," IBECS said. "Any passenger may manually override my previous instructions and allow me to protect the ship from invaders regardless of all other protocols."

IBECS was a supreme intelligence (or at least a very good one) completely neutralized by human intervention.

However, it seemed that there was one way to remove its manmade shackles and allow it to protect its passengers. The manual override would be a compelling goal, and if there were invaders on the ship, even the surrogates would move quickly. If we could make the film about invaders, then the puzzles would not be in the spotlight, but the action would be. Carousel would get its story, and the themes might never get time to be established.

So many ideas suddenly clicked.

I had a plan, and if we could get it to work, it would be incredible.

But where was I going to find invaders?