“He’s not here. This time you have to survive on your own. It’s only fair.”
“How the fuck is that fair?”
“You didn’t survive on your own. The audience thinks you don’t deserve to survive. They want to see if you can make it here by yourself, chaos bringer. Now. Go outside.”
“What?”
“Go. Outside.”
I do what it tells me. There’s an urgency and an insistence to its tone which suggests my survival might be limited to the next couple of seconds if I don’t do as it says.
I go and stand in the compound which once felt like home, and now feels more like a hollow model of home. All the superficial stuff, none of the things that make a home real. Turns out I don’t have to worry about that for very long.
KABOOM!
Out of completely clear sky, a thunderbolt hits Rex’s tower, reducing it to rubble and burning all the plants in an instant. Everything he made, everything that might have saved me is gone. Except Tyche. She’s still here with me, chewing her cud and seeming fairly unconcerned by the destruction.
“Well, that’s not fucking fair! It’s not even a little realistic! You can’t even make some rain to go with that?” I yell at the sky, knowing full well that there are a lot of alien people who could hear me.
And then it starts absolutely pissing down. Monsoon style.
“You pack of absolute fucking assholes,” I curse accurately.
Naked and shivering, I take refuge underneath Tyche and hope that she’s not going to crush me, though if she did it wouldn’t be the worst thing that’s happened today. They blew up my shelter, and they presumably crushed the exposition chest along with it. So I’m completely alone and also under intense scrutiny from billions of eyes I can’t see.
I could just wait for Rex to come and save me, but it’s possible if I do nothing, they’ll kill me before he can. I’m going to have to work some shit out — starting with sifting through the wreckage of Rex’s labors and seeing what I can salvage.
“You fuckers are not going to get me,” I tell them, knowing there are probably drones disguised as ants, or birds, or whatever the fuck. They will be enjoying my naked humiliation, and my fear. So I resolve to show them neither. They can look at my bare ass all they want, but they won’t see me cry.
After what seems like a very long time, I manage to salvage some buried rations, some cloth from the bedding which I make a poncho out of, securing it with a strip of fabric around my waist. And now I’m dressed. That’s how this works.
I pull some of the smaller rocks from the pile and start rebuilding. Rex built a great tower, but I don’t need a tower. I just need a hovel.
Time passes quickly when you’re working for your survival. I work through the fake night, fairly certain that they’ve turned the lights out quicker than usual in order to frighten me and make my job harder. I don’t care. They left me alive, and that’s all that matters. I’m here. I’m still here.
I use a few shattered beams from the fortress, pushing them up and across the top of the roof so the thatching has something to sit on. I’ve gotten a lot stronger here in the Dinodome. The environment might be fake, but my response to it is real.
By the time I collapse on the bedding I yanked from underneath the rubble, I’ve been working for an entire day and an entire night. Me sleeping is not going to be riveting viewing, but it’ll give them a chance to re-run the highlights, probably focusing on my nudity a hundred times over and interspersing it with ads for poisoned cereals. What a fucking world.
Eleven
Rex
Obviously, I’m going to kill Eschaton.
I haven’t yet decided precisely how I’m going to kill him, but his death is one hundred percent on my agenda. I have imagined it in a great many ways. I have thought about cutting his head off, and displaying it on a pike. That is an old fashioned approach, but a good one. Then, I thought about cutting him open and removing his entrails and using them as the decorations at his own execution, which would make for an excellent spectacle all of its own. I’m sure the ratings would be absolutely through the roof if I was to do that.
SHE’S BACK! THE FIRST SURVIVOR! AND THIS TIME, SHE’S ON HER OWN! CAN SHE SURVIVE THE DINODOME ON HER OWN?
It wasn’t hard to determine where Kristine had gone. Every screen in the facility has been displaying her return to the Dinodome nonstop. I cannot get the expression of horror on her face at discovering she's alone out of my mind. Largely because it is being played every ten minutes.