Redshirts

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Tell me how to stop this,” Dahl said to Jenkins.

Jenkins, who of course knew Dahl was coming to his secret lair, looked him over. “You look healed,” he said. “Good. Sorry about your friend Finn.”

“Did you know what was going to happen to him?” Dahl asked.

“No,” Jenkins said. “It not like whoever is writing this crap sends me the scripts in advance. And this one was particularly badly written. Jer Weston walking around for years with a biological bomb in his head, waiting for an encounter with Captain Abernathy, who he blamed for the death of his own father on an away team twenty years ago, and taking advantage of an unrelated diplomatic incident to do so? That’s just hackwork.”

“So tell me how to stop it,” Dahl said.

“You can’t stop it,” Jenkins said. “There’s no stopping it. There’s only hiding from it.”

“Hiding isn’t an option,” Dahl said.

“Sure it is,” Jenkins said, and opened his arms as if to say, See?

“This is not an option for anyone else but you,” Dahl said. “We can’t all sneak around in the bowels of a spaceship.”

“There are other ways to hide,” Jenkins said. “Ask your former boss Collins.”

“She’s only safe as long as you’re around,” Dahl said. “And not using the toilet.”

“Find a way off this ship, then,” Jenkins said. “You and your friends.”

“That won’t help either,” Dahl said. “Jer Weston killed eighteen members of the Nantes crew with his armed cargo carts. They weren’t safe against what happens here on the Intrepid, were they? An entire planet suffered a plague so that we could create a last-minute vaccine for Kerensky. They weren’t safe, either. Even you’re not safe, Jenkins.”

“I’m pretty safe,” Jenkins said.

“You’re pretty safe because your wife was the one who died, and all you were was part of her backstory,” Dahl said. “But what happens to you when one of the writers on whatever television show this is thinks about you?”

“They’re not going to,” Jenkins said.

“Are you sure?” Dahl said. “On the Nantes, Jer Weston was using your trick of hiding in the cargo tunnels. That’s where we found him. That’s where we caught him. Whatever hack thought up that last episode now has it in his brain that the cargo tunnels can be used as hiding spaces. How long until he starts thinking about you?”

Jenkins didn’t say anything to this, although Dahl couldn’t tell if it was because he was considering the idea of being in a writer’s crosshairs or because he mentioned Jenkins’ wife.

“None of us are safe from this thing,” Dahl said. “You lost your wife to it. I just lost a friend. You say I and all my friends are going to end up dying for dramatic purposes. I say whatever happens to us is going to happen to you, too. All your hiding doesn’t change that, Jenkins. It’s just delaying it. And meanwhile, you live your life like a rat in the walls.”

Jenkins looked around. “I wouldn’t say a rat,” he said.

“Are you happy living this way?” Dahl asked.

“I haven’t been happy since my wife died,” Jenkins said. “It was her death that got me on to all of this anyway. Looking at the statistics of deaths on this ship, seeing how events on this ship played themselves out. Figuring that the most logical explanation was that we were part of a television show. Realizing my wife died simply to be a dramatic moment before a commercial. That in this television show, she was a bit player. An extra. She probably had about ten seconds of airtime. No one watching that episode probably has any memory of her now. Don’t know her first name was Margaret. Or that she liked white wines more than red. Or that I proposed to her in her parents’ front yard during a family reunion. Or that we were married for seven years before some hack decided to kill her. But I remember her.”

“Do you think she’d be happy with how you’re living?” Dahl asked.

“I think she’d understand why I do it,” Jenkins said. “What I do on this ship keeps people alive.”

“Keeps some people alive,” Dahl said. “It’s a zero-sum game. Someone is always going to have to die. Your alert system keeps the old hands here alive, but makes it more likely the new crew get killed.”

“It’s a risk, yes,” Jenkins said.

“Jenkins, how long were you and your wife stationed on the Intrepid before she died?” Dahl asked.

Jenkins opened his mouth to respond and then shut it like a trap.

“It wasn’t very long, was it?” Dahl asked.

Jenkins shook his head to say no, and then looked away.

“People on this ship figured it out before you came on it,” Dahl said. “Maybe they didn’t come to the same conclusions you did, but they saw what was happening and guessed their odds of survival. Now you’re giving them better tech to do the same thing to new crew that they did to your wife.”

“I think you should leave now,” Jenkins said, still turned away from Dahl.

“Jenkins, listen to me,” Dahl said, leaning in. “There’s no way to hide from this. There’s no way to run from it. There’s no way to avoid fate. If the Narrative exists—and you and I know it does—then in the end we don’t have free will. Sooner or later the Narrative will come for each of us. It’ll use us however it wants to use us. And then we’ll die from it. Like Finn did. Like Margaret did. Unless we stop it.”

Jenkins looked back over at Dahl, eyes wet. “You’re a man of faith, aren’t you, Dahl?” he said.

“You know my history,” Dahl said. “You know I am.”

“How can you still be?” Jenkins said.

“What do you mean?” Dahl asked.

“I mean that you and I know that in this universe, God is a hack,” he said. “He’s a writer on an awful science fiction television show, and He can’t plot His way out of a box. How do you have faith when you know that?”

“Because I don’t think that’s actually God,” Dahl said.

“You think it’s the show’s producer, then,” Jenkins said. “Or maybe the president of the network.”

“I think your definition of what a god is and what my definition is probably differ,” Dahl said. “But I don’t think any of this is the work of God, or of a god of any sort. If this is a television show, then it was made by people. Whatever and however they’re doing this to us, they are just like us. And that means we can stop them. We just have to figure out how. You have to figure it out, Jenkins.”

“Why me?” Jenkins asked.

“Because you know this television show we’re trapped in better than anyone else,” Dahl said. “If there’s a solution or a loophole, you’re the only one who can find it. And soon. Because I don’t want any more of my friends to die because of a hack writer. And that includes you.”

“We could just blow up the Intrepid,” said Hester.

“It wouldn’t work,” said Hanson.

“Of course it would work,” Hester said. “Ka-plooey, there goes the Intrepid, there goes the show.”

“The show’s not about the Intrepid,” Hanson said. “It’s about the characters on it. Captain Abernathy and his crew.”

“Some of them, anyway,” Duvall said.

“The five main characters,” Hanson amended. “If you blow up the ship, they’ll just get another ship. A better ship. They’ll just call it the Intrepid-A or something like that. It’s happened on other science fiction shows.”

“You’ve been studying?” Hester said, mockingly.

“Yes, I have,” Hanson said, seriously. “After what happened to Finn, I went and learned about every science fiction television show I could find.”

“What did you find out?” Dahl asked. He had already briefed his friends on his latest encounter with Jenkins.

“That I think Jenkins is right,” Hanson said.

“That we’re on a television show?” Duvall asked.

“No, that we’re on a bad one,” Hanson said. “As far as I can tell, the show we’re on is pretty much a blatant rip-off of that show Jenkins told us about.”

“Star Wars,” Hester said.

“Star Trek,” Hanson said. “There was a Star Wars, though. It was different.”

“Whatever,” Hester said. “So not only is this show we’re on bad, it’s plagiarized. And now my life is even more meaningless than it was before.”

“Why would you make a show a knockoff of another show?” Duvall asked.

“Star Trek was very successful in its time,” Hanson said. “So someone else came along and just reused the basic ideas. It worked because it worked before. People would still be entertained by the same stuff, more or less.”

“Did you find our show in your research?” Dahl asked.

“No,” Hanson said. “But I didn’t think I would. When you create a science fiction show, you create a new fictional timeline, which starts just before the production date of that television show. That show’s ‘past’ doesn’t include the television show itself.”

“Because that would be recursive and meta,” Duvall said.

“Yes, but I don’t think they thought about it that hard,” Hanson said. “They just wanted the shows to be realistic in their own context, and you can’t be realistic if there’s a television show version of you in your own past.”

“I hate that we now have conversations like this,” Hester said.

“I don’t think any of us like it,” Dahl said.

“I don’t know. I think it’s interesting,” Duvall said.

“It would be interesting if we were sitting in a dorm room, getting stoned,” Hester said. “Talking about it seriously after our friend has died sort of takes the fun out of it.”

“You’re still angry about Finn,” Hanson said.

“Of course I am,” Hester spat. “Aren’t you?”

“I recall you and him not getting along when you came on the Intrepid,” Dahl said.

“I didn’t say I always liked him,” Hester said. “But we got better with each other while we were here. And he was one of us. I’m angry about what happened to him.”

“I’m still pissed at him for knocking me out with that pill,” Duvall said. “And I feel guilty about it, too. If he hadn’t done that, he might still be alive.”

“And you might be dead,” Dahl pointed out.

“Not if I wasn’t written to die in the episode,” Duvall said.

“But Finn was written into the episode,” Hanson said. “He was always going to be there. He was always going to be in that room when that bomb went off.”

“Remember when I said I hated the conversations we have these days?” Hester said. “Just now? This is exactly the sort of conversation I’m talking about.”

“Sorry,” Duvall said.

“Jimmy, you said that whenever the show started, it created a new timeline,” Dahl said, and ignored Hester throwing up his hands helplessly. “Do we know when that happened?”

“You think that might help us?” Hanson asked.

“I’m just curious,” Dahl said. “We’re an alternate timeline from ‘reality,’ whatever that is. I’d like to know when that branching off happened.”

“I don’t think we can know,” Hanson said. “There’s nothing that would signal where that timeline twist happened because from our perspective there’s never been a break. We don’t have any alternate timelines to compare ourselves to. We can only see our timeline.”

“We could just start looking for when completely ridiculous shit started happening in our universe,” Hester said.

“But define ‘completely ridiculous shit,’” Duvall said. “Does space travel count? Contact with alien races? Does quantum physics count? Because I don’t understand that crap at all. As far as I’m concerned, quantum physics could have been written by a hack.”

“The first science fiction television show I found information about was something called Captain Video, and that was in 1949,” Hanson said. “The first Star Trek show was twenty years after that. So, probably this show was made sometime between the late 1960s and the end of television broadcasting in 2105.”

“That’s a lot of time to cover,” Dahl said.

“Assuming that Star Trek actually exists,” Hester said. “There are all sorts of entertainment programs today that exist only in our timeline. The timeline we exist in could go back before this Star Trek show was actually made, and it exists in this timeline basically to taunt us.”

“Okay, now, that is recursive and meta,” Duvall said.

“I think that’s probably what it is,” Hester said. “We’ve already established whoever is writing us is an asshole. This sounds like just the sort of thing an asshole writer would do.”

“I have to give you that,” Duvall said.

“This timeline sucks,” Hester said.

“Andy,” Hanson said, and motioned away from the table. A cargo cart was rolling up to the table they were sitting at. Inside of it was a note. Dahl took the note; the cargo cart rolled away.

“A note from Jenkins?” Duvall asked.

“Yeah,” Dahl said.

“What does it say?” Duvall asked.

“It says he thinks he’s come up with something that might work,” Dahl said. “He wants to talk to us about it. All of us.”