full_score
in
damned
Day 56: Bus 3
As the day came to a close, Claude's conversation with Tear weighed heavily on his mind. All the implications hadn't quite sunk in yet, but it unsettled him that she'd been able to feel and experience his time in the basement in such a strong way. Was there some kind of significance behind the fact she'd lived the moment he ran toward Guy in a
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"Hey, we have rights, you know!" Leela objected at the buses. She wasn't prepared to put her boot where her mouth was, though, and she guessed the not-DOOP guys knew it. They gave her the old 'we have to search everybody,' and she thought she was meant to understand that if she didn't make any more trouble, they wouldn't give her any.
She didn't make any more trouble. These guys had better clothes than Betty (not today, but usually), but they were kind of in the same spaceboat, just following orders. Leela got on the bus, and looked for a free seat, spotting a striking young woman with cool markings on her cheeks. "Hi. Is this seat taken?"
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Of the feeling, it wasn't as one she could place. That she was coming to recognize certain feels told her she had been here too long, but that was obvious before the query. Renamon glanced at the other, bright eyes watching. "Have you been here long?"
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And some things would probably never stop being weird, like glancing out the window and seeing pine trees that weren't artificial. They probably still used them as Xmas trees in this time. And of course the whole concept of the place, but that was, disturbingly, more background weird by now. Leela guessed that if you came from a time and place where Robot Hell was real, you were more mentally equipped than most to deal with insane asylums that were more insane than their inmates.
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A week. More than Byrne, and far less than Renamon. She had lost her sense of what was long here. Weeks felt like months at times, depending on what was going on. "A month," she gave quietly, watching the other woman. "Long enough," she echoed dryly in addition.
"I'm Renamon." Polite and perfunctorily. She wondered what this one knew so far.
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"A month? Wow." Leela took a more interested look at her seatmate. "I don't know if I should congratulate you or offer my condolences." Probably a bit of both was in order. A week had felt like an eternity here for her, and the mental toughness required to deal with a month had to be pretty amazing.
"Has anything like this military coup happened before?" Leela's own life, back in the thirty-first century, had seemed to operate on a strangely regular schedule of weird things happening every week. Here, it was more nightly, in her experience, and the Landel's of a month ago, for all she knew, might have been an entirely different place from the one they were forced to live in now.
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The woman's question, though, existed as something a little bit simpler. "No, it hasn't," she replied clearly. "This has been run as a mental institute from the beginning. A few weeks before I arrived there was a series of changes done to it, but that seemed more visual changes and monsters than the actual core of the institute." She paused momentarily, thinking. "It's quite possible that it was staged, though Landel did seem upset to be dragged out of here."
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On the other hand, that would kind of mean everything was fake, wouldn't it, and that everyone who wasn't an abductee was just playing a role? The budget for actor overtime alone would be crazy.
"Is there any particular reason you think that? Or it is just good sense not to trust anything at all that happens around here?"
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She tried to think back over the things that had occurred and could not place if any had happened within the last week. "There was a woman, for one. Who took the place of Alec Doyle on the radio. She went by Jill, but another voice on the radio said not to trust her. And now it's rumored that she is Lydia, Landel's head nurse." The suspicion of that was quite simple. "There were other inconsistencies, mainly at night. The usage of I.R.I.S., for one. The zombii, and the return of Doyle...." Though that could be seen as a construct simply skewed. It might not be a possible example. "...A few things," she finally said, falling silent. She had a wish for her notes, to list off the inconsistencies.
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She hadn't been around for the zombies, but she'd heard about them. If this was a reality show, they sure were trying to hit all the genres. Horror was a given, and they'd gone science fiction-y, too, with the doors acting like parallel-universe boxes. Now this whole thing with multiple identities sounded a lot like All My Circuits. Leela wondered if an epidemic of explosive amnesia was due to hit soon.
There was one thing she didn't quite understand. Okay, there were a lot of things, like how all this fit together and what it meant for them, but one main thing out of what Renamon said. "How is I.R.I.S. suspicious? It's just a computer system, right?"
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Like I.R.I.S. for example. Here, at least, Renamon could speak confidently. Give credit where it's due--there were some things that could be more easily understood when one was originally digital. Renamon gave a thin smile. "Just a computer system can encompass many things. Myself and a few others here are from worlds where computers and programs have sentience. I.R.I.S. may not be in that grouping, but there are suspicious aspects."
She thought backwards, trying to remember. "The most obvious and least sense-making point is the binary she was saying. It was a poem or a story--it had little to do with anything that I could analyze. Another thing to consider would be the 'program' that she controlled the first night she was active." The Digimon tilted her head questioningly. "A program to make others experience death? In truth, that seems more like we're in a digital representation of the world, if we can be influenced by the start-up of a backup program." Which was initiated by a dead-man, if rumors were to hold.
"A last point would be only something interesting. I.R.I.S. has a higher authority than Landel's manual input commands. Once she was started up, he couldn't override her function. That places her as suspicious, because what computer program has a higher authority than the man who runs the facility?"
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Renamon's theories were close enough to her own that Leela didn't think she'd be written off as a weirdy if she shared them. "I kind of thought from the beginning that we might be in some virtual reality. I'm from a time way ahead of this one, but some of the things that've happened here would still be impossible then. I think it's only simulating the late Stu-- twentieth century."
Which would mean that Chie's world had been a simulation, too, and that actually made a lot of sense. Leela was still a little freaked-out when she thought about how they hadn't been able to interact with any of the people there. "Wait a minute, they didn't need I.R.I.S. to make us think we'd been sent to another universe. Or maybe they did, and just didn't use her any obvious way. I wasn't around for people thinking they'd died. They only thought so, right?"
But she had experienced something not too far from it, thinking Fry was dead. If one mass hallucination were possible here, who knew how far it really went?
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