The Cascadia Prison Experiment

[Spindarene]

Julia Raymond--GAME START

Julia woke up on the living room floor of a small dormitory. A small coffee table stood next to her on her right, with a couch on the other side of it. An armchair sat by her feet, with a lamp next to the left side of her head. Groggily, she sat up, and took in her surroundings.

She seemed to be alone, although she wasn’t sure how long that was going to last. Standing up, she stumbled out of her sleeping bag and, after double checking to make sure that she was really alone, headed to the bathroom, which, it turned out, was actually not in the dormitory but was a little further down the hall

Once she got back from the bathroom, she made a beeline for the duffel bag that was laying next to the sleeping bag that she’d woken up in. That sadistic scientist had said something about giving each of them weapons. She dug through her bag frantically, finding food, a first aid kit, a flashlight…and a large steel bucket full of twenty-sided dice and a woolen wizard’s hat. The instruction manual that came with them included an abbreviated rules set for Dungeons and Dragons. Julia rifled through her bag again, panic bubbling just below the surface, but there was nothing else.

Julia’s hands continued to search through the bag in vain because she couldn’t bring herself to stop as she broke down in tears. There was nothing in there to help her. She was going to die.

Fifteen minutes later, she found herself sitting on the edge of the couch, staring blankly at the wall across from her.

Given her morbid and vivid imagination, she’d imagined her own death plenty of times, but she’d never imagined it like this. Killed either by one of her classmates, or by some kind of science fiction monster. If she hadn’t seen the professors from the ship torn to shreds by that creature, she would not have believed that it existed. Her eyes filled with tears as her mind replayed the grisly footage of that scene against her will. She hadn’t known any of the faculty members well, but she’d liked Professor Donato a lot from the few times they’d met, and Professor Coleman had seemed pretty cool. She’d kind of despised Professor Harrison, but even someone like him didn’t deserve to die like that. They were used as bait, no–as an example. An example of what was going to happen to all of them.

Julia’s tears spilled over her cheeks as she imagined what would happen to Mia when she found out; she would be devastated. Julia couldn’t stand to think about it.

And Tanvir…this whole time Julia had resented him, but now, thinking about what had happened to the other faculty members on the ship, she was very glad that Tanvir had decided not to come on the trip.

As that thought hit her, though, something nasty stirred inside her, some ugly creature that was threatening to swallow the rest of her sanity.

Why had Tanvir decided to not come on this trip? Why had he decided, at the last minute, to abandon the research trip, and to abandon her in the process? Was it really what she’d thought, that their unprofessional friendship had finally gotten too weird for him and he’d bailed? At this point, she was hoping, even begging for that to be the case, because the alternative was so much worse.

Had he known? Did Tanvir know what this trip really was, what was going to happen, and was that why he’d decided not to come? Did he bail on this trip to save his own skin, sacrificing her in the process?

Or worse, had he known all along? Had he lured her into this trip, into the trap that these horrible scientists had set up for them? Did he work for them, was she just another recruit among the dozens of others? All of his talk about her research and his interest in going, had that all been fake? Was he just fattening her up for the slaughter?

For a moment, Julia felt like she was going to be sick, as all of these thoughts came crashing down on her. She felt numb, and for a moment, she had trouble thinking anything at all. Then, slowly, her mind brought her back.

She didn’t think that Tanvir had deliberately lured her here. He didn’t seem like the type to work for these guys, and moreover, whatever kind of operation they were running here was top secret. They weren’t recruited, they were kidnapped. If Tanvir was working for them, why was he working as a lecturer? And who else at the university would be working for them? It didn’t make sense. She couldn’t see Tanvir working for these guys, but she couldn’t completely rule it out. Moreover, she couldn’t rule out the possibility that while he wasn’t working for them, he had known somehow that this trip was going to be a death trap and that was why he’d ghosted her.

Maybe he’d had no choice. Maybe, as a faculty member, they gave him the option to sit out, but student participation was mandatory, so he would have gotten in trouble if he’d tried to get her out. Maybe he’d wanted to get her out of it, though, if he could have.

…except why the hell was she still making excuses for him when he had left her to die?

Julia stood up suddenly, her heart pounding. She stalked over to the large steel bucket full of dice, these stupid, brightly colored balls of plastic that seemed to mock her just by existing. With a grunt, she picked up the bucket, and dumped its contents onto the floor, finishing with a scream as she flung the bucket at the wall once it was empty. It hit the wall with a thud, and lay there among the dozens of small brightly colored dice that were now littering the floor. She picked up the bucket and threw it against the wall again.

“Fuck you, Tanvir!” she screamed as the bucket hit its target, now creating a small dent in the wall.

“Fuck you!” she screamed, pushing the lamp angrily against the same wall. The lampshade fell off, and the bulb cracked. She picked up the lamp and held it by her side for a moment, before swinging it like an ax into the wall, again and again and again. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!”

The bulb broke on the first hit against the wall, shattering glass all around the floor which mingled in with the scattered dice.

She picked the bucket up and once again threw it against the wall. She overturned the coffee table and began to pound on it with her bare hands, until her knuckles were bruised and her palms were red and raw. And all the time she screamed with a primal animal scream that she didn’t know that she was capable of, until she finally collapsed, exhausted, against the foot of the couch.

She wanted to stay there, limp and numb, forever. She wanted to sit there and not feel anything ever again, until someone came up to the apartment and shot her, or that freaky Star Wars monster somehow figured how to climb stairs or use the elevator and ripped her to shreds. The rest of her brain, however, was not so ready to quit. Eventually, her survival instincts kicked in, and she pulled herself up to a sitting position on the couch and started to think of a plan.

They were all in deep shit, that was obvious. These guys were the worst kind of scientists, ones who had gone way off the deep end. Dr. Sycamore was basically what she imagined that Philip Zimbardo would have been if Zimbardo had decided to go rogue instead of staying in academia. She’d thought that the Stanford Prison Experiment had been bad, but this was so much worse. And they knew, they all knew how illegal and wrong this was, or else they wouldn’t be taking such pains to keep it secret.

Julia smiled sardonically at the realization that she was a social psychology student in the depths of what had to be one of the ultimate social psychology experiments. You throw a bunch of people on an island together and tell them that only one of them can survive, then you observe their behavior. You could learn a lot about human nature from an experiment like this, but there was obviously no way in hell you were ever getting this through an IRB. No informed consent, participant harm was a given, and no matter what Dr. Sycamore had said about the imminent collapse of society, she doubted very much if the benefits of this experiment would outweigh the costs. This wasn’t about saving humanity, this was a bunch of sick fucks who wanted to see just how far they could go.

That would explain the crazy sci-fi monsters that they also apparently had to contend with. She had no idea what was up with that, except that maybe one of the scientists had geeked out over Attack of the Clones a little bit too much and had nothing else better to do with their time.

Except…this wasn’t an experiment that was being conducted by a bunch of rogue scientists. Sycamore had mentioned something about Janus-Hayes, and it sounded like they were the ones sponsoring all of this. Julia’s heart sank even further. Rogue scientists were bad enough, but rogue scientists with corporate backing were nearly unstoppable. She felt vaguely betrayed, because even though she’d always regarded Janus-Hayes with the same sort of skepticism that she had for all large corporations, she’d assumed that these guys were one of the less shitty ones. She had obviously been wrong.

At that moment, she thought she’d heard a noise outside her dorm and she startled, staring at the door for a few seconds before concluding that she wasn’t in any immediate danger. That scare, though, brought her back into the present moment. Regardless of how shitty the situation was and how unfair it was that this could have happened, she was here now and she needed to survive for as long as she could. That meant that the first thing she needed to do was find a weapon.

Standing up, Julia surveyed her surroundings. The living room seemed to be pretty well furnished, which meant that other rooms probably were too. She immediately headed towards the kitchen, and after a couple minutes of searching she found what she was looking for. They were old and rusty and might not even be able to cut through a baguette at this point, but she had found a set of kitchen knives. Right now, that was all that mattered. These shitty little knives meant that she at least had a chance of surviving, even if it was slim.

Julia looked around the room, thinking. This dormitory wasn’t very big, but it felt like a relatively safe place. Except, she wasn’t sure how long she could sustainably live up here. There was a little food in her bag, but she’d eventually run out. The fact that the bathrooms were outside of the room was also a problem; she really didn’t want to die being ambushed by someone as she walked down the hallway to pee. There were pros to staying up here, namely that she seemed to be on an upper floor, so it was out of the way. However, it would also be relatively easy for someone with a gun to corner her in here, and she didn’t know anything about the monster’s climbing abilities, or what the other two mystery monsters might be capable of.

It would probably be a good idea to take a look around at the rest of the island. If the rest of it sucked, she could come back here. Hopefully this space wouldn’t be occupied by someone else by that point. She really hoped that she wasn’t making a huge mistake by leaving this place, but it seemed like a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.

Julia took the knives back to the living room, wrapped all but one of them in her wizard hat, and stuffed them into her duffel bag, along with everything else that she’d taken out of it during her search, minus the steel bucket and dice. She picked up the duffel bag and slung it over her shoulder, and then dithered for a moment about where to put the knife that she was keeping out of the bag. She finally decided to just carry it in her hand, at least for now. The sight of it might deter some people (people who didn’t have guns, anyway), and it was probably safer to just hold it rather than trying to carry it in her pocket or in the waistband of her pants.

Then, without looking back, Julia headed out the door and into the unknown.

((Julia Raymond continued in Simple Creature))