The Kill Factor, page 21
“Oh no,” Tiger said, her voice lackluster and hollow.
Emerson looked at Tiger’s name in second-to-last place, and realized that—unless something changed during the video diary—it would be her facing the audience vote because Gamble was at the bottom of the list, but he had lost the game. “You’re going to be fine,” Emerson said, taking Tiger’s hand in hers.
“I don’t know if that’s true,” Tiger said, her voice shaking now. “I don’t want to go to jail and be alone forever. I want to play Catan with my friends. I even want to spend time with my sisters … Emerson, I’m scared.”
“You know the routine,” the Producer said. “Mr. Delaney is once again in the viewer vote after losing the Discipline game. Let’s find out who he will be facing. Diary recording begins in ten minutes.”
“Oh no. Oh no,” Tiger muttered.
“Hey,” Kodi said, crouching down in front of the little Topsider. “Be brave, okay? Be yourself. You’re a good person and people will follow you.”
Tiger nodded and wiped the tears out of her eyes. She went to her bedroom to prepare.
“Do you think she’s going to survive the vote?” Emerson asked.
“I don’t know,” Kodi admitted. “Gamble has survived twice already.”
“She’ll survive,” Alasdair said, stepping alongside Kodi. “I’m going to try one more time to get my followers to stop following me, and start following her.”
“It won’t work,” Emerson said. “The viewers are cruel; you saw it at the first video diary when they refused to unfollow you. I saw it when I was miserable and could barely get out of bed—they followed me by the hundreds.”
Alasdair thought about this, then replied, “I think you’re wrong. There are a lot of cruel viewers out there. They’re anonymous and so they can act on their inner meanness—which, by the way, probably comes from their own pain—but we’ve found an audience now; people are connecting with us as individuals. I like science and nature, and people who like those things too follow me. It’s not a bad thing. And when you were sad and going through the experience of guilt, people weren’t following you out of cruelty. They were following you because they had felt those feelings too and they empathized with you. There are spiteful people in the world, Emerson, but they are outnumbered by the good people. And, in true scientific fashion, I think I’m about to prove it.”
Emerson considered Alasdair’s words. Could it be true? Could it be that the people who followed her when she was at her lowest point did so because they cared? Because they had been through similar experiences and wanted to show their support?
“You realize that if your experiment works, you’ll go to jail for the rest of your life with no contact from anyone?” Emerson asked.
“I do realize that,” Alasdair replied, and then smiled. “I was always kind of a loner anyway.”
Emerson put a hand on his arm. “You’re a good person, Alasdair George William Tremblay-Birchall.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I know.”
Emerson smiled.
The diaries began.
“So, I guess I’m using this diary thing as a kind of therapy now, huh?” Emerson said, still fighting to keep her eyes open as the tiredness got worse.
In the room next to her, Alasdair was speaking candidly to his followers, telling them that he felt like they had grown to understand him and truly know him over the last few days.
The camera drone hovered in front of Emerson, waiting for her to continue.
“I’ve been in a pretty dark place since Kodi and I tried to escape and Delilah died. I got myself so wound up that I thought you guys were following me because you enjoyed seeing me hurt, but I don’t think that’s true. Alasdair explained some things to me, and if he was right, then I suppose a lot of you have felt the way I felt. Perhaps some of you have felt this kind of guilt. A lot of you have experienced worse. Grief is a strange thing. I lost my mother when I was five. Being at her bedside in the hospital is one of my earliest memories. Watching my dad turn off all his emotions so that he didn’t have to feel, watching him change into someone else, someone who wasn’t allowed to love because love only led to pain. I don’t want to be like my dad. I thought I hated him, but the older I get the more I understand him. He’s human and he was hurt and he didn’t know how to deal with it. God, my mind is all over the place. I’m so tired. I want to sleep. I want this to be over. I want to go home. I … I don’t know.”
Emerson stopped talking. The drone stopped recording.
She watched as Alasdair implored his viewers to stop following him and start following Tiger. And when Emerson looked over to the leaderboard, she saw that it was working.
The diary recording finished much quicker than usual. Everyone was tired and wanted this day to be over with.
The Producer stood before them and announced that the prize for first place would be a beauty filter on all their footage. The filter would give them more prominent cheekbones, fuller lips, and bigger eyes.
The Producer then froze the screen.
Alasdair’s followers had come through. He was now in second-to-last place, and Tiger Quinn had jumped up to one place above the viewer vote zone.
“It is time, contestants, to count down to today’s winners and losers.” The Producer held both arms aloft and began to count. “Ten, nine, eight, seven …”
All around him the zombie-like contestants watched with little detectable enthusiasm.
“… three, two, one, zero! Congratulations to today’s Kill Factor leader for the second time in a row, Gwen Perez!”
The fireworks exploded in the sky, startling Emerson back to being fully awake.
The Producer put his hand on Gwen’s shoulder. “Twice in a row, Ms. Perez! You must be very happy.”
“I am,” Gwen said, and Emerson couldn’t tell if it was the tiredness that was taking the energy out of her voice, or if the competition had finally broken her completely.
“Excellent, excellent,” the Producer continued. “And can you tell us all exactly what you have learned during your time on the island?”
“What I’ve learned?” Gwen said, pushing a clump of matted pink hair out of her eyes. “I’ve learned to appreciate little things, like the sound the waves make, and how beautiful the moon is. When it can all be taken away at any second you … you sort of …” Gwen’s voice drifted away as the exhaustion hit her once again.
“That’s very profound, Ms. Perez. Keep doing what you’re doing. The audience clearly loves you!”
The Producer stepped away from Gwen, and addressed the swarm of camera drones. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is the hardest part of my job: The contestant who will be joining Gamble Delaney in the viewer vote tonight is … Alasdair George William Tremblay-Birchall.”
Gamble and Alasdair were illuminated in cold white light as they made their way to the stage.
The Producer ran one stubby finger under the flap of an envelope he had produced from an inside pocket of his jacket, and read aloud.
“In tonight’s task,” the Producer said, “our two brave competitors must create a viral moment. Our viewers will vote for the moment they deem the best. The viewer vote opens in ten seconds. Good luck.”
The screen flashed, and the countdown started. When it hit zero, Gamble’s face appeared on the screen. Without hesitating, he walked over to the dead, rotting fish that the latecomers had caught six days before, shooed away the seagulls, picked it up, and bit into the stinking flesh.
He chewed the mouthful of rancid meat and swallowed it. Three seconds later he brought it back up again, but he didn’t stop. He bit off the tail and gagged, spitting it out before biting into the head.
Emerson turned away and waited for his three minutes of humiliation to end.
It finally did, and it was Alasdair’s turn to create a viral moment. When his face appeared on the big screen, he carefully stepped off the stage, walked to the bonfire, and picked up a flaming stick.
“Fire,” he said, looking up at the glow, “is a fascinating event. If you think about it, this burning branch is now running in reverse. Once upon a time this branch used photosynthesis to convert heat and light from the sun into chemical bonds, and fire converts that chemical energy into heat and light. It’s amazing. Nature is cyclical in all sorts of ways. The more you look at nature, the more mathematics you see: A snowflake has perfect six-fold radial symmetry; the Fibonacci sequence recurs over and over in the spirals of a pine cone, the form of a hurricane, the helix shape of shells; fractals and repeating patterns in leaves, trees, even mountains. Leonardo da Vinci encouraged everyone to learn how to see that everything connects to everything else.”
Alasdair put the burning branch back into the fire, brushed the bark off his hands, and stood back.
“Be curious. That’s all I’m saying. If you find yourself asking why the sky is blue, or why the mountains change color halfway up, then maybe you have a scientific mind, and maybe you can find real happiness in trying to solve problems. You might even change the world. And for my friends here on this island, I want you to remember one thing: The moon is backward and the stars don’t make sense.”
Alasdair still had a minute left of his time. He walked slowly back to the stage and stood beside Gamble until his time was up.
Those words: The moon is backward and the stars don’t make sense. She had heard those words before … recently. It had been Nick. He said the exact same thing before he threw himself to his death.
“What does he mean?” Emerson whispered to Kodi. “About the moon and the stars?”
“I don’t know,” Kodi replied, looking up at the moon as it hung brightly in the sky.
Emerson was surprised to see that Alasdair’s and Gamble’s scores were pretty close when the screen went blank, but when the minute time delay was over, the Producer announced that once again, Gamble had survived the viewer vote.
Alasdair was given five minutes to say his goodbyes. He was stoic as a tearful Tiger hugged him for almost the entire five minutes.
“What did you mean?” Emerson whispered as she held Alasdair close. “About the moon?”
“I can’t say anything out loud,” he whispered back. He pointed toward one of the many hovering drones. “But Nick was right.”
Emerson pulled away from the embrace and looked into Alasdair’s eyes. He nodded, imploring her to seek answers, and then the drones escorted him into the forest, and to the prison, where a fate awaited him. A fake prison, a maze, and so many unanswered questions.
The nine remaining contestants slept all through the night and into the next afternoon.
Emerson woke first. The burning sun had caused her to sweat through her T-shirt.
She walked into the sea to cool off, and found herself staring at the Calypso.
The moon is backward and the stars don’t make sense. What did it mean? What had Nick been right about?
She made her way back to the beach, where Kodi, Tiger, and Never were awake and picking at the breakfast that had been left by the drones.
Emerson sat with them and ate. She had to tell them about what she had seen in the center of the island, but there was no way to without being recorded.
How do I tell them without the Producer finding out? she thought.
Swarms of camera drones hovered over them, the low buzz a constant reminder of their presence. They couldn’t pull the Nicotine Patch trick again. They would be killed if they tried, and besides, the Producer would have closed that loophole days ago.
Gwen got out of bed and sat down at the table with them. “Hey,” she said, smiling awkwardly.
“Hi, Gwen,” Tiger replied, and silence returned for a while before Tiger spoke again. “I collect board games. Mostly vintage board games.”
“Oh, really?” Gwen replied, sounding genuinely interested. “I love board games.”
“No way!” Tiger said, her blue eyes almost comically wide behind the lenses of her glasses.
“Yeah! I love Monopoly, Scrabble, Boggle, Pictionary …”
“Catan?” Tiger asked.
“I love Catan!”
“Oh my days!” Tiger said, standing up and dancing from foot to foot. “We should make a board game! It would give us something to do.”
“Sure,” Gwen said, smiling as she bit into a hunk of bread.
“I’m going to get started right now!”
Tiger ran away and began collecting pebbles from the sand.
“I wish I had that sort of enthusiasm,” Never said, smiling as she watched her friend.
Emerson looked toward the prison in the center of the island and felt a tugging at her heart. Alasdair had been taken there. If there was no prison behind the facade, where had they taken him? And was he even still alive?
Emerson lay in her bed for most of the day, thinking through endless plans to escape the island, to free Kodi and the others, to overthrow the Producer without the poison being released into their veins, but every plan she came up with was flawed and easily thwarted.
As the sun began to go down, Tiger sat on the end of her bed.
“It isn’t going to work,” she muttered, dumping about thirty little stones onto the floor.
“What isn’t going to work?” Emerson asked.
“The stupid board game. I was trying to make Scrabble—I found all these stones and started scratching letters into them. I drew a big grid in the sand, but it just won’t work. The grid gets all messed up when you step on it, and it’s going to take too long to find a hundred stones that are the right size.”
“I’m sorry, Tiger,” Emerson said, looking down at the stones with the letters scratched into them. “Maybe if we all helped?”
“There’s no point. The next game is going to start soon. Who knows, maybe I’ll die or get voted off.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Emerson replied.
“Why not? It’s the truth. This is happening, Emerson; this is real. There are nine of us left. We started with fifty!”
“But you have to stay positive. You’ve got a chance of winning and getting out of here.”
“Not really,” Tiger said, shaking her head so that her blond braids whipped around. “Not really.”
The little Topsider got up and walked away while Emerson stared at the stones on the floor.
Three loud, high-pitched beeps sounded from the speakers, followed by the Producer’s voice. “Contestants of The Kill Factor, the penultimate game is about to begin. Please make your way to the other side of the island.”
Emerson stood up and waited for the island to rotate. She didn’t feel scared or nervous. She felt ready and defiant. She would not lose. She would not die. She had work to do.
The island spun slowly, and the contestants joined the Producer, who stood before nine clear plastic tubes that were protruding from the sand. The tubes were fifteen to twenty feet tall, by Emerson’s estimation, and big enough to fit a human inside them. Suspended above each tube was a cylindrical block of concrete that looked to weigh several tons.
“Remaining contestants of The Kill Factor,” the Producer said, that sly and hateful smile engraved into his face. “Welcome to the Respect game. Behind me you see nine chambers, one for each of you. Suspended above each chamber is a pressing stone. During trials in a more primitive time, if a defendant refused to speak, they were crushed beneath a pressing stone until they either confessed or died. This game is not about confession, though; it is about respect. You have reached the stage of your rehabilitation where you must learn that all lives are valuable, that everyone has the right to life, and that all people deserve respect.”
“That’s rich, coming from you,” Gamble Delaney muttered.
The Producer looked at Gamble with such demonic fury that the boy took a few steps back.
“It seems we have a contestant who is not ready to learn respect,” the Producer said, pointing a finger at Gamble. “Such a shame. I thought we had made such progress with you.”
“I’m sorry,” Gamble said, his fingers automatically going to the number burned into his wrist, and the poisoned capsule beneath. “I didn’t mean it … I’m sorry!”
“Too late,” the Producer said. “Goodbye.”
“No, please,” Gamble said. “It can’t end like this. I can’t go through all of that just to … just to …”
He burst into tears, falling to his knees and begging the Producer not to kill him.
“Final chance, Mr. Delaney,” the Producer said, looking at Gamble with disgust in his eyes. “You may enter your chambers now.”
Gamble got to his feet, shaking with fear and relief.
The contestants walked over to the great plastic tubes.
Emerson saw that there was a door built into the back of each tube, and she stepped inside the one on the far left. Kodi entered the one beside her. The doors shut and locked behind them. There was nothing inside the tube except a blank screen built into the curvature of the wall.
“The game is simple,” the Producer said. “You must rank each remaining contestant in order of how much you respect them. There are nine of you left in The Kill Factor, and you cannot vote for yourself, so if every person chooses you as the person they respect the most, you will get a score of sixty-four. This is a very unlikely scenario. However, for every point below sixty-four, the pressing stone will begin to lower. Those of you with less than half of the overall votes will be crushed to death.”
“This game isn’t teaching us respect,” Decker Shimada said, and then covered his mouth quickly.
The Producer looked at Decker for a long time before replying. “You’re quite right, Mr. Shimada. This game is merely highlighting what you should have already known: Act in a respectful manner and treat people with dignity, and they will look upon you favorably.”
“So, it’s just a popularity contest where the least popular dies,” Emerson muttered. The Producer turned his wicked eyes on her this time.
