It sounds weird, I know. Maybe even a little insane. But as strange and morbid as it might be, I’m beginning to suspect the biggest reason people are afraid of dying is because they don’t know what happens afterward.
Zila, Finian, Nari, and I all know what happens. To us, at least. And it’s somehow getting harder to be afraid when you know what’s coming.
Black light.
White noise.
A moment of vertigo.
And then I’m standing in front of Finian again, back aboard our shuttle, with Lieutenant Nari Kim’s fighter waiting just outside in the dark.
The fear didn’t disappear right away. And at first, the strangeness of it all was so heavy that I wondered for a little while if I wouldn’t rather just stay dead. There was something wrong about it. Unnatural, even. But like I say, I’ve always been a glass-half-full kind of girl. And once the fear disappears, I gotta tell you … this immortality thing is almost amazing.
So here we are, on another attempt to access Dr. Pinkerton’s office. Attempt #37, to be precise, to discover the secret of what the hells is going on inside this facility. Lemme take you through it all real quick.
First, we’ve discovered we have to access the admin levels through the elevator shafts, not the emergency stairs like Lieutenant Kim first told us. Stairwell A leads to the unshielded part of the structure, and we’ve already seen what happens when that quantum pulse hits the station and we’re all just standing there looking gorgeous.
ZAAAAPPPP.
You might be wondering why we don’t wait till the pulse hits and head up afterward. Excellent question. Sadly, we tried that already, and discovered when we loitered too long on the lower level, security found us, not once, not twice, but three times straight.
BLAM.
BLAM.
BLAM.
Turns out even with the damage to the station, some of the camera feeds are still operational. Who would’ve guessed the SecBoys in a covert black-ops military installation would take the presence of saboteurs so seriously? I thought getting punched in the ta-tas hurt. Let me assure you getting shot in them is a lot worse.
BLAMBLAM.
We decided to try our luck with Stairwell B next, and on our maiden voyage, an entirely new piece of strangeness was added to the mix. You see, on the way to meet us, good Lieutenant Kim decided to take a different route to shave a few minutes off her trip. She entered Corridor 16B, Level 6, at the precise moment a bulkhead failed and vented the corridor’s atmo into space.
HISSSSHHHHHH.
THUMP.
And even though Zila, Fin, and I were still crawling through waste disposal at the time, suddenly—black light, white noise, vertigo—I’m standing back aboard our shuttle, looking into Fin’s big, pretty eyes again.
That was the final confirmation of my theory. Somehow, the four of us are locked in this thing together. Doesn’t matter how, doesn’t matter who—if even one of us gets taken out of the loop, the whole thing resets.
Again.
And again.
Like it or not, we’re all in this together.
So next we busied ourselves with Stairwell B. We gave it three attempts, but even moving fast as we could, we only ever got halfway up before the life-support system decided to play kissy-kissy with a shorting circuit somewhere in the superstructure, and the whole stairwell caught fire.
FWOOOOOSH.
YARRRGGG.
So. Elevator shafts it is. Good news, the damage to the station has knocked out security cams over here. Bad news, it’s also weakened the cable and disabled the safety systems. We figured that out the first time we crawled into Shaft A, and an elevator full of engineers got ordered down to the core levels at the precise moment we were trying to crawl up it.
TWANGGG.
SQUISH.
Luckily, Shaft B suffers no such shortfalls, and after another attempt, in which Finian discovered the structural integrity of rung 372 of the access ladder had been compromised （SNAP, “OH FFFFFUUUUUUAAAAAGGGGG”）， we managed to reach the hab section, where Dr. Pinkerton’s office can be found.
Buuuut don’t start celebrating just yet, folks.
The elevator doors up here are sealed as a precaution against atmo breaches, and it takes three minutes and forty-nine seconds for Fin’s cutting torch to slice the locks.
Sadly, opening the doors sets off a silent alarm. We found this out the hard way exactly one minute and twenty-three seconds after our first successful attempt, while cutting our way into Pinkerton’s office.
“FREEZE!”
“Please don’t shoot! My name is Scarlett Isobel Jones, I’m—”
BLAMBLAMBLAM.