It was last year during the fall. I was still in school and things were, you know, normal. I came home from work pretty late one night and when I got to my apartment, someone was waiting for me. A guy in a mask who unleashed some white smoke that knocked me out, and when I woke up next I was on a ship with a weird bracelet attached to my wrist. It was bracelet number five. I was locked in a third-class cabin on one of the lower decks, and when the room started flooding with water I had to figure out a way to escape the room. Solve a puzzle, find the key card, and get out of there alive to reach the hallway. By the time I got there, the hall was full of water. D Deck was flooding fast, but I ran up the stairs and got to B Deck and found out I wasn't alone. There were seven other people there on the staircases, and I don't know if any of us really expected to see each other. Most of us were strangers. But before I could ask...a girl came down the stairs.
It was Akane. [And here he looks a bit contemplative.] We hadn't spoken or even seen each other since the end of elementary school, but here she was on this ship. All nine of us learned that we had the same experience before this. We were kidnapped from our homes, knocked out by a guy in a mask and woke up on this ship locked in a room we had to escape. Once we were all together, a speaker in the corner started playing a broadcast.
[He sounds a little tired.] "Welcome aboard. I welcome you all, from the bottom of my heart, to this, my vessel. I am Zero, the captain of this ship. I am also the person who invited you here. I mean to have you participate in a game. Some of you, I know, are familiar with this game. The Nonary Game. It is a game where you will put your life on the line. The rules of the Nonary Game can be found upon your persons. The purpose of the game is simple. Leave this ship alive. It is hidden, but an exit can be found. Seek a way out. Seek a door that carries a 9. There is one last thing I must tell you. As you have no doubt surmised, this ship has begun to sink. On April 14th, 1912, the famous ocean liner Titanic crashed into an iceberg. After remaining afloat for 2 hours and 40 minutes, it sank beneath the waters of the North Atlantic. I will give you more time. 9 hours. That is the time you will be given to make your escape."
The windows wouldn't open and a lot of the doors were locked. There wasn't any way out of the ship right away, so we split up and started looking around. The entirety of D Deck was underwater, but we found an elevator and rooms and doors to pass through. The game functioned on a system where we had to use our bracelet numbers to get a digital root that equaled the number on each locked door. Each bracelet would be scanned in, and each person who entered the room needed to contribute to solving the puzzle. No less than three and no more than five people could enter the room, and if we broke that rule, or we didn't activate the sensor inside to scan in...a bomb inside of us would explode. That happened to the Ninth Man.
So...we played along. We didn't have a choice but to go through these rooms and risk our lives trusting each other and finding a way out. We lost some people on the way, and we realized there was something bigger that happened.
[He knows he's talking a lot, but he's going to get all of this out as soon as possible.] Nine years before the Nonary Game I played in, the first Nonary Game was run. It was an experiment run by a company called Cradle Pharmaceuticals. Nine people were put on a ship that was starting to sink, and nine others were in the building that looked identical to the inside of the ship. It was nine pairs of siblings, all kids. The purpose of the Nonary Game was to test for telepathy using the Morphogenic Field...the field Carlos and I told you about. You need two factors in order to access the field. The first is epiphany and the second is danger. The game itself was meant to introduce danger and force these kids to access the field to save themselves, to see how easily it could be done to transfer information between pairs. It was life or death, and according to Clover who told me this story, a girl died during the experiment.
[...there's a breath.] Nine years later, we played the same game. Zero kidnapped us and put our lives in danger. The killings started not long after we got there, and that's about the time we realized Zero was among us. It was revenge for what had happened all those years ago. People were killed and punished for their role in the initial game, even if we didn't know it.
The purpose of the game was for me to save her. That girl. Nine years before our game, she saw a timeline where everything went a certain way, but it was a timeline in her future and my present. In the present, that girl existed almost like a paradox and she was able to orchestrate the entire game, recreate everything she saw and altering rules as she needed to enact her revenge and get us to play along, and get me to play the game. This girl was Zero, and she brought all of us to that building to help save herself and make sure she would exist instead of burning alive in an incinerator nine years in the past.
...I saved her. There was something there that connected us in the Morphogenetic Field, so she could guide me to help me save her. Even though she died in that timeline, I was able to help her get out of that room and escape from the ship before it sank. Saving her meant that she could exist in the current timeline. But by the time we figured out how to escape ourselves and we learned we were inside a building instead of a ship...Akane was already gone.
[Haha. He's quiet again.] ...I dropped out and joined my firm to find her. A year in the underground, dealing with religious cults, organ trafficking, all of the dirty jobs and ugly side of humanity and compromising everything just to find her. I didn't hear anything for a year no matter what I did, but when I finally got a lead...it led me to Dcom. I had to do some things to get my name on the list for the mission site, but...I had to see her.
We fought, of course. I realized she wasn't the girl I thought she was back then, and she was angry I changed and wasn't the boy she remembered. But I wanted to get to know her. I had to. I didn't want to lose her again, even though I was so mad at her for leaving in the first place. And then we were kidnapped to the bomb shelter and the Decision Game started. We both made some pretty messed up choices...there's a timeline where I killed Carlos to save Akane, and there's another timeline she erased my memories so I'd forget I ever saw her ever again. The timeline I was going to before I got here was the one we could still be together. [...] So would Akane be mad at me for doing what it took to survive? I don't think so, but there are definitely things she might not be happy with if I don't try to save other people, too.
no subject
It was last year during the fall. I was still in school and things were, you know, normal. I came home from work pretty late one night and when I got to my apartment, someone was waiting for me. A guy in a mask who unleashed some white smoke that knocked me out, and when I woke up next I was on a ship with a weird bracelet attached to my wrist. It was bracelet number five. I was locked in a third-class cabin on one of the lower decks, and when the room started flooding with water I had to figure out a way to escape the room. Solve a puzzle, find the key card, and get out of there alive to reach the hallway. By the time I got there, the hall was full of water. D Deck was flooding fast, but I ran up the stairs and got to B Deck and found out I wasn't alone. There were seven other people there on the staircases, and I don't know if any of us really expected to see each other. Most of us were strangers. But before I could ask...a girl came down the stairs.
It was Akane. [And here he looks a bit contemplative.] We hadn't spoken or even seen each other since the end of elementary school, but here she was on this ship. All nine of us learned that we had the same experience before this. We were kidnapped from our homes, knocked out by a guy in a mask and woke up on this ship locked in a room we had to escape. Once we were all together, a speaker in the corner started playing a broadcast.
[He sounds a little tired.] "Welcome aboard. I welcome you all, from the bottom of my heart, to this, my vessel. I am Zero, the captain of this ship. I am also the person who invited you here. I mean to have you participate in a game. Some of you, I know, are familiar with this game. The Nonary Game. It is a game where you will put your life on the line. The rules of the Nonary Game can be found upon your persons. The purpose of the game is simple. Leave this ship alive. It is hidden, but an exit can be found. Seek a way out. Seek a door that carries a 9. There is one last thing I must tell you. As you have no doubt surmised, this ship has begun to sink. On April 14th, 1912, the famous ocean liner Titanic crashed into an iceberg. After remaining afloat for 2 hours and 40 minutes, it sank beneath the waters of the North Atlantic. I will give you more time. 9 hours. That is the time you will be given to make your escape."
The windows wouldn't open and a lot of the doors were locked. There wasn't any way out of the ship right away, so we split up and started looking around. The entirety of D Deck was underwater, but we found an elevator and rooms and doors to pass through. The game functioned on a system where we had to use our bracelet numbers to get a digital root that equaled the number on each locked door. Each bracelet would be scanned in, and each person who entered the room needed to contribute to solving the puzzle. No less than three and no more than five people could enter the room, and if we broke that rule, or we didn't activate the sensor inside to scan in...a bomb inside of us would explode. That happened to the Ninth Man.
So...we played along. We didn't have a choice but to go through these rooms and risk our lives trusting each other and finding a way out. We lost some people on the way, and we realized there was something bigger that happened.
[He knows he's talking a lot, but he's going to get all of this out as soon as possible.] Nine years before the Nonary Game I played in, the first Nonary Game was run. It was an experiment run by a company called Cradle Pharmaceuticals. Nine people were put on a ship that was starting to sink, and nine others were in the building that looked identical to the inside of the ship. It was nine pairs of siblings, all kids. The purpose of the Nonary Game was to test for telepathy using the Morphogenic Field...the field Carlos and I told you about. You need two factors in order to access the field. The first is epiphany and the second is danger. The game itself was meant to introduce danger and force these kids to access the field to save themselves, to see how easily it could be done to transfer information between pairs. It was life or death, and according to Clover who told me this story, a girl died during the experiment.
[...there's a breath.] Nine years later, we played the same game. Zero kidnapped us and put our lives in danger. The killings started not long after we got there, and that's about the time we realized Zero was among us. It was revenge for what had happened all those years ago. People were killed and punished for their role in the initial game, even if we didn't know it.
The purpose of the game was for me to save her. That girl. Nine years before our game, she saw a timeline where everything went a certain way, but it was a timeline in her future and my present. In the present, that girl existed almost like a paradox and she was able to orchestrate the entire game, recreate everything she saw and altering rules as she needed to enact her revenge and get us to play along, and get me to play the game. This girl was Zero, and she brought all of us to that building to help save herself and make sure she would exist instead of burning alive in an incinerator nine years in the past.
...I saved her. There was something there that connected us in the Morphogenetic Field, so she could guide me to help me save her. Even though she died in that timeline, I was able to help her get out of that room and escape from the ship before it sank. Saving her meant that she could exist in the current timeline. But by the time we figured out how to escape ourselves and we learned we were inside a building instead of a ship...Akane was already gone.
[Haha. He's quiet again.] ...I dropped out and joined my firm to find her. A year in the underground, dealing with religious cults, organ trafficking, all of the dirty jobs and ugly side of humanity and compromising everything just to find her. I didn't hear anything for a year no matter what I did, but when I finally got a lead...it led me to Dcom. I had to do some things to get my name on the list for the mission site, but...I had to see her.
We fought, of course. I realized she wasn't the girl I thought she was back then, and she was angry I changed and wasn't the boy she remembered. But I wanted to get to know her. I had to. I didn't want to lose her again, even though I was so mad at her for leaving in the first place. And then we were kidnapped to the bomb shelter and the Decision Game started. We both made some pretty messed up choices...there's a timeline where I killed Carlos to save Akane, and there's another timeline she erased my memories so I'd forget I ever saw her ever again. The timeline I was going to before I got here was the one we could still be together. [...] So would Akane be mad at me for doing what it took to survive? I don't think so, but there are definitely things she might not be happy with if I don't try to save other people, too.