Survival Of The Fittest

After what seemed like a minuscule amount of sleep, Henry awoke with a start. Not the kind of morning where one rose slowly, faculties coming back on line one after the other. No, this felt more like waking up from a bad dream, though given the circumstances the process seemed to be running in reverse. Every sensation accosted him at once, as he felt immediately aware of being cold, hungry, tired, and more than a bit sad. Everything felt very real.

Besides, most nightmares didn't have strung-out, emotionally shattered teenage boys singing as the sun rose through dark, errant clouds. At least Henry's nightmares had yet to terrorize him with that particular experience.

He remained prone as the announcements played, closing his eyes again and making an effort to memorize every detail. Danya's tone of voice. The names of the killers, and the dead. The ways they'd died. Particularly attuning himself to what the man said about Nick, a lie of omission that Henry no doubt had to find every opportunity to dispel.

It wasn't easy to imagine having to deal with any of them, if he was being honest with himself. Hopefully some of them could be cowed with reason. Either to see Henry as too much of a problem to deal with, or a potential escape option. As for the others, well...

I'll work on that problem if it arises.

The thought that extinguishing another human life might become just another problem to solve was sickening, but Henry had no intention of just preaching the virtues of pacifism at someone while they disemboweled him. If push came to shove, he'd have to find a way to square it with himself. Remember it wasn't their fault what they were doing. No one here would've had to kill anyone, if not for the terrorists.

I hope Nick realizes that. Hope they both do.

For a moment, he focused on the sound of the waves lapping at the nearby tide pools. Trying to empty his mind of everything except the sounds that met his ears. Plans and contingencies and coping mechanisms assembled themselves in his mind, but he found himself able to relegate them to the background of his thoughts. For a moment, all he needed to do was listen to the waves. Taste the salty air. Accept this one moment when options were still open to him, when he still didn't have a clear estimate on how much time he had left to choose how he had to address all of this.

He knew, from the moment that he woke up what it was he had to do. It pained him to admit it to himself, but Henry could never shy away from the truth.

There was no way to save them all. Not individually, not by trying to hang onto each person that crossed his path. It wasn't just the fact that most were too scared to think past their own individual survival.

Making it personal had hurt him. It nearly broke him, like it had Nick and Michael. If he did something like this again, he might not survive it.

Henry sat up, running his hands across his face and rubbing the sand out of his eyes. Turning to his weapon, he slid open breech to check that it was loaded, which it was. Still completely ridiculous, too. Calling it the BFG was far from just a nerdy joke, it really was the most descriptive name he could come up with for it. It wasn't too far off from one of his telescopes in size, which was to say it was still uncomfortably heavy. At the very least, that seemed to slightly mitigate the intense recoil, which regardless almost spun him like a top when he touched it off.

Standing and collecting his things, Henry motioned to the other two. "Alright. I think it's time for me to go." He looked up the coast, to the direction his compass told him was East. "I'm heading to the yacht. There's something I have to know, something that'll help me decide how I have to proceed here. My gut tells me it isn't going to be easy, or safe. Whatever comes with it is mine, and mine alone."

Henry tapped the walkie-talkie on his belt.

"I'm going to keep in touch with Camila. Nick, I'll get the word out about what really happened. I don't know about the rest of the names, but at least I know you're no murderer."

Turning to Michael, Henry's expression softened. Dark circles hung under the other boy's eyes. Clearly he hadn't slept a wink. Words initially didn't initially come to him, but he eventually found what he wanted to say.

"I hope I see you again. Both of you. Good luck."

Offering little more than a nod before he turned and left, Henry quickly found the background noise in his mind begin to rapidly move to the foreground. It made it easier to not ruminate on how likely it was either of them would survive the next day.

((Henry Sparks continued elsewhere))

As Henry and Nick started to stir, Michael's mind too was starting to wake up.

He wished it wasn't.

Thinking hurt. Thinking about anything hurt.

He was shaking.

Beryl was gone. Beryl was still gone. She was still gone. She was floating on the ocean. She was driftwood. She was a waterlogged corpse. She was being eaten.

She was being eaten.


Michael didn't know if he could still remember how to cry.

Michael knew marine life. He knew everything about marine life. He knew everything about what was destroying anything Beryl had physically been.

He needed to calm down. He imagined her face, smiling. Her eyes.. he'd always liked their colour. He hadn't ever told anyone that.



...He didn't even know if Beryl still had eyes.



She was floating in the ocean. Birds would peck at her skin, her face, her eyes. She would be baked in the sun like a corpse on Mount Everest. Eventually she would sink.

When a whale died and sank to the seafloor, scientists called it a 'whale fall'. This would be a Beryl fall. Michael had seen footage from whale falls. He knew exactly what would happen to Beryl. He wished he didn't, but he did.

Crabs and isopods and other crustaceans would pick away at her soft tissue. Hagfish would bore into her flesh and tear her apart from the inside. Polychaete worms would swim through her eyesockets and eat her brain. Osedax worms would eat her bones.

At least she'd become an ecosystem. A short-lived one, but an ecosystem nonetheless. Maybe a squat lobster or a fish or something would decide to live in her hollowed-out skull. That seemed like something Beryl would have liked. It made Michael feel a bit better.

And at least she got to rot in privacy. At least her corpse would have a pseudo-dignified existence. Nobody had dignity on this island, not as long as there were cameras watching them. All the corpses on the island - everyone, they would just become impromptu forensic anthropology lessons. People would make timelapses of them rotting.

Michael needed to be buried at sea. It was the only thing he had left to hold on to.

The climate here - it would have a horrifying effect on the corpses. Michael had never seen a corpse in real life before.. before Beryl.. but that didn't mean he didn't know what happened to them. Every excruciating detail.

He knew the dirt.

He'd seen the body farm episode of Dirty Jobs. He knew what happened to the corpses there. He saw how a pig's corpse, when put in a recycling bin, would settle - for a lack of a better word - and take the shape of the bin's bottom. He saw how two weeks could turn a formerly living being into a literal cube of rotting flesh.

And that episode had been shot in Indiana. Indiana's climate had nothing on the island. The corpses would be the worst things Michael would ever see in his life. Gasses would build up inside them and they would bloat up like balloons. Maybe some of them would pop, he didn't know.

Their skin would slough off, like the peels of rotten, mushy bananas.

They would liquefy.

All of Michael's peers - Morgan and Clay and Henry and Nick and Bree and everyone - they would melt. They would turn into human sludge.

And people would watch them.

They wouldn't even get dignity in death.


Death rituals - funerary traditions were one of humanity's common grounds. One of the only constants shared by every culture on earth was that they all had some kind of ceremony to say goodbye to the dead, to give them some kind of dignity in death.

And nobody here would get it.

They weren't -

- they weren't people anymore. They weren't human anymore. Nobody here was a person to the rest of the world.


Their deaths were being filmed. People would watch them on Liveleak. People would watch them on 4chan. People would make jokes about them after watching them die. People would make puns about them after watching them die. People would make memes about them after watching them die. Nobody would bother learning their names. Nobody would bother to think of them like people.

Michael remembered how to cry. His face was stoic. They were tears of contempt. Tears of hatred.

Beryl, the coolest person Michael'd ever known, would just end up being 'SOTF crash course in gun safety girl'. She wasn't a person. She wasn't Beryl Mahelona. She was some girl who people would watch die and then feel nothing about.

They all were dying children, and the only people who knew what was happening to them were cracking jokes on goddamned 4chan.

People would watch them die and then laugh.

People were betting on them. People were making money off of their deaths.

People - maybe not many, but chances were there was at least one of them - would masturbate to kids pissing in the woods.

People would see them on the news, feel sad for a few minutes, and then forget they ever existed.


Everyone who'd ever lived deserved to die with dignity.

But no one on this island would get it.


The dead had names.

Nobody would ever learn their names.

Nobody cared enough to learn their names.


They weren't people anymore.

They used to be people.

They weren't people now.

They would never be people to the rest of the world.





The announcements played.

Every name ripped a tear through Michael's soul. Even Benny's. Especially Benny's.

He would remember every name for as long as he lived. He didn't know how to forget.


"Nice singing, Michael."


Michael glanced over at Nick. "Thanks. I mean it." He lied. He was still shaking.

Michael knew the dirt. Michael knew all the dirt. He had Bree to thank for that.

Michael knew the dirt on Nick, and Michael wanted to hate Nick. He couldn't hate Nick. Nick killed Beryl out of compassion. Nick loved Beryl enough to do that. Nick buried her at sea.

Right now Michael knew Nick was the only person who knew what he was going through. Henry didn't know. He was sad from empathy, not from love.

Michael knew about the magic trick. Michael knew about Tristan. Michael knew about the coffee. Michael knew that Nick was an asshole.

Most of what Michael knew about Beryl was from outside sources and retroactive deduction.

And Michael knew Beryl had showed more of herself to Nick than she ever had Michael.


But Michael didn't know why Beryl had showed more of herself to Nick than she ever had Michael. Michael didn't know why Beryl had showed more of herself to so many people than she ever had Michael.

He didn't know what Beryl had ever thought of him.

And it was one of the only things he didn't know. It was one of the only things he couldn't know.



Most of what Michael knew about the universe was from outside sources and retroactive deduction. It was predictive knowledge. If x = this and y = that, then x + y + all the other variables = the result of putting those variables together, and if it doesn't, you're doing the math wrong. It was cold. It was souless. He had no innocence anymore. He was a computer. He didn't synthesize new information, he just repurposed old information. He needed other people to give him the information that he used for defining the variables, and consequently, for defining the result -- the 'knowledge'. Everything he knew was based on a foundation of things someone else had known before him.

He saw the world as it was.

He was still more accurate than most people. Most people didn't see the world at all. They didn't make the connections between things. They didn't connect the variables and the sums of the variables. They didn't even connect the variables.

To him, things were calculations.


But Beryl -

- Beryl saw the world as it is.

She didn't need the variables to know the result. She just knew the result. She didn't need a knowledge base to understand things. She just knew things. She didn't repurpose old information, she repurposed new information. Her entire existence was in the moment.

To her, things were.


And that was Michael's problem. Michael didn't know who he was because he had nothing to base the variables he needed to answer that question on. He could try to emulate Beryl's thinking all he could, but in the end he'd just be going 'x + Beryl's thought process + all the other variables = this'. He could be robot-Beryl, but not... not actual Beryl.

Beryl didn't need the variables. She knew who he was. She just did.

And nobody else knew.

She was the only way for Michael to know who he was. He knew that.


And Beryl was dead now. The only person who the real Michael existed to was dead.

The real Michael was, in effect, dead.

He knew that.

The only way for him to exist no longer existed.

The only way for him to die as himself was dead.

The only way for him to die with dignity was dead.

The only way for him to die with closure was dead.


The only thing he could do was to try and approximate Beryl.

The only thing he could do was to try and approximate Michael Froese.

The only thing he could do was to try and approximate some kind of closure.
_____


He was putting together a list in his mind. A kill list, sort of, except -

- except it was a mercy kill list. Or a closure list - a list of questions that needed to be... un-questioned, either by answering or erasure. For Michael, closure and mercy were the same thing. Whether it was for Michael, Beryl, the prospective victim, or someone else - they would all be done out for some kind of mercy. They would all be done to end someone's pain. They would all be done to define or obsolesce a variable someone needed to die happy. If he could give the names on the list deaths with dignity, he'd kill them. He had to. They had to die as people, not as things. The world owed them that. He wouldn't kill them if he couldn't give them it.

And so this was his list thus far:

Darlene Silva
Justin Greene
Tony Acardi
Morgan Dragosavich (and in extension Lizzie Lebowski)
Clayton Barber
Bree Jones
Kelly Nguyen
Michael Froese
maybe Nick Ogilvie
Tristan O'Hara
Myles Roux
Ivy Langley
Sierra Cook



He had another list. It was a list of people he knew could survive with dignity. People who would survive with closure. People who could be like he hoped Beryl would've been. At least one of the names on this list needed to live.


And so this was that list thus far:

Bert Wren
The girl from the art exhibition. Her name was Aliya, he remembered now.
Nathan Coleman, maybe

no
y'know what

fuck this
fuck The List
The Lists were stupid
he didnt know what he was doing
he was grasping at straws
_____

He didn't go with Henry. Henry would live or die trying. Michael knew he wouldn't get any closure if he went with Henry.

"Bye Henry. Don't, uh, die.. I believe in you!"

Michael wasn't sure if that was a lie.

He could get closer to closure if he went with Nick. Nick knew what Michael was going through.

Nick knew Beryl, but in a different way than Michael. Michael decoded Beryl. Nick... felt Beryl.

He was an information source.


Michael would have been good for Beryl. Nick had said that. Nick, who had loved Beryl enough to kill her, said that. Nick, who felt Beryl, not decoded her, knew that.

Those were variables. Definitions for variables.

He was still shaking.

Logical? + Good for Beryl + Knows the dirt? + loved Beryl? + good memory + empath? + willing to kill people if it means them dying happy? + oscillation + marine biology + cares about dignity? + seeks out emotional pain? + sexually represses self? + cares about remembering the dead and not letting people become statistics? + Willing to kill for love? + Is kinda like Beryl + Is not Beryl? + UNKNOWN VARIABLES = Michael?



He hoped this whole self-discovery thing wasn't just a delusion to deal with the fact that he had the hots for Beryl and she seemed to put out for everyone except him and he let her die before he could ask why. He hoped the list wasn't just a way to justify killing people because they hurt Beryl, or would end up hurting Michael if he didn't kill them, or would end up becoming like Michael. He hoped the list wasn't just him murdering his problems away.

Because if that was what he was doing, he already knew who he was. That hypothetical Michael was a legitimately bad person. That Michael was willing to watch himself be a self-deluded asshole, be aware of it, and not change his ways; kind of like how he functioned in his dreams.

That last thought scared him.


He didn't know what he was doing. He didn't know his own motivations. He didn't know if it was love or lust. He hoped it was love, but -

he didn't know and he couldn't think -

what if it was neither
what if it was both

at the aquarium she had invited him to a party and she had used the word orgiastic and michael asked her did you just invite me to an orgy and she gave a verbal shrug in response and he chose to interpret it as a no and it was his fault and he said YEAH SO HOW ABOUT THOSE CTENOPHORES THEN, HUH like a fucking idiot and that was the only reason he didnt know who beryl thought he was and it was one of the dumbest ways a person had ever ruined their own life and maybe if he had done something different maybe him and beryl wouldnt have even gone on the trip and they would be alive and balancing out each other's flaws or at least maybe he would've kept beryl from falling into the spiral that led to the Rebound Thing but he'd fucked everything up because he was afraid and the thoughts he used to think about beryl were so mean and disrespectful and oh god he had been such a piece of shit inside his own head and he wanted to travel back into the past and kill himself but not like literally suicide but more like figuratively kill himself and he wanted to tell himself how much he really needed her but now it was just too late and

- it just hurt.
this happened whenever he tried to think
Thinking hurt.

It would never stop hurting. He hoped it would never stop hurting. He was afraid of what it meant for him if it stopped hurting.

Beryl didn't think. Beryl just was.
he was sinking again
he couldnt
he couldnt
he needed to stop
he needed to have that psychosis he had the night before
he needed to stop thinking
he couldnt let himself think anymore and this always happened when he tried to think now and
he would go insane if he was grounded and he needed
he needed to be
sine wave
He needed to approximate Beryl again.
it had been almost six hours it would probably be okay and if it wasn't and he died from a heart attack he would be okay and if he slipped into a psychosis he would be more than okay
he needed
he needed to


a question that does not exist does not need an answer


oscillate

sine wave
with no alterations the y value of every point on an infinitely repeating sine graph when averaged together equaled zero
oscillate
in a closed system with no energy lost a pendulum's average position is at its lowest point in the middle of its swing
balance
He popped another six dexedrine spansule pills into his mouth, and made sure his hair looked good.
dissociate
he stopped shaking

A crab scuttled out of a nearby tidal pool and poked at Michael's hand. "'Scuse me.." he said. He felt an emotional connection with the crab now.

That was.. good? He hoped.

He stuck with Nick.

((Michael continued At the End of Days, at the End of Time))




the names of the dead kept repeating in his mind

Nick could tell Henry was preparing to leave before he said he was. There was something about the way he carried himself, something about the way that he stood and looked around and turned, that made it clear that he was going to leave. He wasn't going to sit around here and mope with Nick and Michael. No, Henry had plans. He was gathering his things, scooping up his weapon, with a clarity of purpose and sense of direction that Nick would never have.

Henry sounded like a man with a plan. A selfless plan, one that saw the big picture, one that was conscious of his place in history. They would all say, of any tragedy, that 'we can't let it be in vain' or some other solemn yet futile vow to try and make the loss of their young lives mean something, represent something, do something. Henry seemed to actually have the wit and the intellect to give some impact to that commitment. He talked of the yacht. About things that could be done from the yacht. Nick's first thought was some way of fixing the collars and then sailing away. That obviously wasn't what Henry had in mind. 'Fix the collars' was a pretty critical step to leave ambiguous, after all, and the terrorists wouldn't have left a functioning vessel within reach. Nick couldn't think of what other reason there was for going to the yacht, but that was why Henry was an ideas man and Nick was just...brute force.

Which was not to say there was nothing cerebral Nick could contribute. There was. But his skills were in more...shallow areas. His was a superficial and frivolous intellect, prone to specious proclamations and inane distractions. That was all he could do. Distract. Make noise. Misdirection and subterfuge were technically types of cunning, but not the way Nick did them. He thought about offering his skills in distraction to Henry, but he didn't have access to the internet to conduct research and crowdfund inspiration, didn't have access to local stores to buy supplies and equipment, didn't know how to perform for an audience that, in the case of the terrorists, had cameras everywhere or, in the case of his classmates, already wanted him dead.

But maybe he'd end up being a diversion for whatever plan Henry had anyway. Or an accidental cause for its failure. They were both distinct possibilities.

Henry was going to help Nick out. Help clear his name. Help put the truth out there. Nick was grateful, though he was certain he didn't deserve that act of generosity. It was effort that was wasted on him, quite frankly. But whatever. "Thanks" was all Nick could offer up, unable to think of the words needed to stop Henry from this crusade to spread the truth. "Good luck," he repeated, as Henry went. He thought about calling out behind Henry, with an open-ended offer to help, but the words needed for that escaped him. So he just watched as Henry left.

Nick got up not long after. "I'm gonna...head back. To where I started. Before I came here." He was being self-destructive and he knew it. He was seeking out confrontation - not for the sake of setting the record straight or making amends, but because he needed to feel something. Needed to incur some sort of punishment. He didn't say any of that out loud, but it was obvious.

Michael stayed with him. That was good, from a selfish standpoint. Maybe he'd sing again. Nick could do with a song.

((Nick Ogilvie continued in At the End of Days, at the End of Time.))