TO994M | day 4 | morning | audio

[cactusy]

[There's the sound of footsteps on sand; she's walking as she talks, heading away from the beach and up towards the scrubby jungle.]

So I got got by what I think was a crossbow bolt. Kinda hard to tell for sure; it all came at me pretty fast. Got an arrow to the leg not long before that, but the one that came for my head seemed bigger in the point-two seconds of reaction time I had before it hit. And it did hit. Should've been difficult-to-impossible to survive, but here I am. Which tells me some things.

[She relays the news of her almost-certain death matter-of-factly, in the same flat-ish tone as her previous radio contributions. If anything, she sounds a little more upbeat here: it's not by much, but having (what she thinks are) answers is a relief. At least now she (thinks she!!) knows what she's dealing with.]

Look, guys; this isn't real. Fifty-fifty odds whether you're a part of it or not - maybe you're all artificial constructs and I'm the only real sentient person here, or maybe we're all hooked up to machines in a lab and we've been tossed into this simulated... thing together. Gonna be nice and assume the latter, for now. Point is, signs have been pointing to this for a while, and this proves it. But this is good news, kind of. It means that whatever happens here doesn't really matter. We die, we screw up, we do something our monitor overlord doesn't like - we just reset. I fired off three bullets, and they're back now, because the gun and the bullets are just lines of computer code that can be rewritten in whatever way the people running this want.

Priority number one shouldn't be escaping the island or long-term survival or whatever. It should be figuring out how to get out of the simulation. Then the party can really get started.

Comments

[meadqueen]

Right. What do you do in here to give them the victory? Tell them something? Kill us?

[cactusy]

-- I don't know. It's too... different for me to figure it out this early. Could be either; could be both. Could be something different.

[meadqueen]

Then that would be a valuable avenue for intelligence gathering at this time.

Throwing ourselves against the bars of a cage we don't understand yet carries a level of risk that I don't like, and I don't think you do either.

I don't think I understand enough about this to help you, but if there's anything I can do...

[cactusy]

What kind of Viking do you think you are? Warrior or civilian?

[Even civilian Vikings had kind of been warriors, hadn't they?]

[meadqueen]

[That's kind of a thorny question at this point]

I'm not a warrior anymore. But I can fight, if that's what you mean.

[cactusy]

What are you now, retired? Injured?

[meadqueen]

Married.

[cactusy]

Okay.

I'll tell you if there's anything you can do.

[meadqueen]

[At this point, some kind of evil nightmare prison actually seems a bit more plausible than the supposed ʼairplanesʼ that people keep insisting are real but somehow are mysteriously never where anyone says they're going to be]

All right. Watch your back out there.

[cactusy]

You, too.