Don't be Swallowed by The Abyss

[Fenrir]

She had never imagined that one day she would find herself having an existential crisis because of a t-shirt, but here she was.

MM02: SARAH LILLIAN WHITLOCK – GAME START

Sarah told herself it wasn’t a big deal; it was just a t-shirt and some plastic glittery thing. Just a dumb little joke at her expense to make the people watching at home laugh, that’s all the fan service costumes ever were. But the fact that it was this joke, that this was what they went with was… it was…

It was just kind of hitting on some personal fears she supposed.

To be honest Sarah didn’t know much about SOTF; even when she’d paid attention to it she hadn’t really paid attention to it and in more recent years she’d stopped paying attention entirely. But she did know that each season they made these little profiles for each contestant; kind of like mini biographies for the people who were into that sort of thing. She never was, but once she’d seen her costume she couldn’t help but wonder what hers was like, what it said about her. Because, if she was being honest, she knew she wasn’t the most interesting person; if you distilled her life down into only a couple pages, she knew that the only thing of note would be the alien thing.

It always did come back to that, one way or another.

Anyone who bothered to read her profile would probably focus on that part over anything else. They wouldn’t care about her family history or her grades at school, the fact she had earned a scholarship. They wouldn’t care that she liked hiking and swimming. They wouldn’t care about her being a part of the astronomy club or that she wanted to work at NASA or with SETI one day, or that she had been accepted to an actually really good university. They wouldn’t care about any of the things that made her who she was.

It would just be ‘huh, she believes in aliens, weird’ and then they’d move on to someone more interesting. That was how people would remember her after she died. That was her legacy.

And Sarah just though that it was really, really… unfair. All of this was unfair, but that especially. It wasn’t what she wanted. That wasn’t- that wasn’t her… not all of her at least.

Sarah was sick of being one thing and nothing else in other peoples’ eyes. The past couple years she’d kind of tried to put an end to it, stepping out of the shell she’d put herself in, joining a club, talking to people, starting to tutor students who needed help in some subjects she was good in. She’d done it because she’d wanted to, but she’d also kind of just wanted to, like, redefine herself in peoples’ minds, you know? She wanted to be ‘oh, Sarah, she’s nice’ or ‘astronomy club Sarah’ or ‘Sarah my science tutor’ instead of just ‘weirdo alien conspiracy theorist Sarah’.

So when she opened her bag and found a t-shirt with a quote from some old show about unknown phenomena, which sometimes included aliens, and a fake pair of alien antennas, it just kind of hit her that none of it had worked. Whoever it was that decided these things had taken a look at her profile, slapped a label on her and given her this stupid t-shirt. Nothing else she’d done in her life outweighed that one thing. She was the ‘alien girl’ to the very imminent end.

That shook her. It shook her a lot, to be honest, even more so than the fact that they had given her a knife that made people explode or the fact that there was an audience of millions who expected her to use it on her classmates. Because, let’s be totally honest here, Sarah was going to die on this show. It didn’t matter what weapon they gave her or what team she was on or who her mentor was, so what she got wasn’t important since she wasn’t going to use it anyway. But how she would be remembered was important and might also be something she had some control over, unlike her fate.

That fact was strangely emboldening. What she did her, under the watchful eyes of a TV audience, would likely have more of an impact than anything else she had done in her life. How she would be remembered by the vast, TV-watching portion of Americans was determined by what she did over the next few minutes, hours or days; everything that came before that was irrelevant. If she achieved nothing then she would be remembered only be the contents of her profile and the costume they assigned her with, but if she actually did something notable she would at least be remembered for that instead.

No pressure.

So she put on the t-shirt, pulling it on over her blouse. She threw away the plastic headband. She tied her team bandana around her wrist. She picked up her knife. She picked up her bag.

She set out to do something memorable.

MM02: SARAH LILLIAN WHITLOCK – CONTINUED IN The Boy Who Wasn't Actually a RocketBoat