Redshirts

“I think your definition of what a god is and what my definition is probably differ,” Dahl said. “But I don’t think any of this is the work of God, or of a god of any sort. If this is a television show, then it was made by people. Whatever and however they’re doing this to us, they are just like us. And that means we can stop them. We just have to figure out how. You have to figure it out, Jenkins.”

“Why me?” Jenkins asked.

“Because you know this television show we’re trapped in better than anyone else,” Dahl said. “If there’s a solution or a loophole, you’re the only one who can find it. And soon. Because I don’t want any more of my friends to die because of a hack writer. And that includes you.”

* * *

“We could just blow up the Intrepid,” said Hester.

“It wouldn’t work,” said Hanson.

“Of course it would work,” Hester said. “Ka-plooey, there goes the Intrepid, there goes the show.”

“The show’s not about the Intrepid,” Hanson said. “It’s about the characters on it. Captain Abernathy and his crew.”

“Some of them, anyway,” Duvall said.

“The five main characters,” Hanson amended. “If you blow up the ship, they’ll just get another ship. A better ship. They’ll just call it the Intrepid-A or something like that. It’s happened on other science fiction shows.”

“You’ve been studying?” Hester said, mockingly.

“Yes, I have,” Hanson said, seriously. “After what happened to Finn, I went and learned about every science fiction television show I could find.”

“What did you find out?” Dahl asked. He had already briefed his friends on his latest encounter with Jenkins.

“That I think Jenkins is right,” Hanson said.

“That we’re on a television show?” Duvall asked.

“No, that we’re on a bad one,” Hanson said. “As far as I can tell, the show we’re on is pretty much a blatant rip-off of that show Jenkins told us about.”

“Star Wars,” Hester said.

“Star Trek,” Hanson said. “There was a Star Wars, though. It was different.”

“Whatever,” Hester said. “So not only is this show we’re on bad, it’s plagiarized. And now my life is even more meaningless than it was before.”

“Why would you make a show a knockoff of another show?” Duvall asked.

“Star Trek was very successful in its time,” Hanson said. “So someone else came along and just reused the basic ideas. It worked because it worked before. People would still be entertained by the same stuff, more or less.”

“Did you find our show in your research?” Dahl asked.

“No,” Hanson said. “But I didn’t think I would. When you create a science fiction show, you create a new fictional timeline, which starts just before the production date of that television show. That show’s ‘past’ doesn’t include the television show itself.”

“Because that would be recursive and meta,” Duvall said.

“Yes, but I don’t think they thought about it that hard,” Hanson said. “They just wanted the shows to be realistic in their own context, and you can’t be realistic if there’s a television show version of you in your own past.”

“I hate that we now have conversations like this,” Hester said.

“I don’t think any of us like it,” Dahl said.

“I don’t know. I think it’s interesting,” Duvall said.

“It would be interesting if we were sitting in a dorm room, getting stoned,” Hester said. “Talking about it seriously after our friend has died sort of takes the fun out of it.”

“You’re still angry about Finn,” Hanson said.

“Of course I am,” Hester spat. “Aren’t you?”

“I recall you and him not getting along when you came on the Intrepid,” Dahl said.

“I didn’t say I always liked him,” Hester said. “But we got better with each other while we were here. And he was one of us. I’m angry about what happened to him.”

“I’m still pissed at him for knocking me out with that pill,” Duvall said. “And I feel guilty about it, too. If he hadn’t done that, he might still be alive.”

“And you might be dead,” Dahl pointed out.

“Not if I wasn’t written to die in the episode,” Duvall said.

“But Finn was written into the episode,” Hanson said. “He was always going to be there. He was always going to be in that room when that bomb went off.”

“Remember when I said I hated the conversations we have these days?” Hester said. “Just now? This is exactly the sort of conversation I’m talking about.”

“Sorry,” Duvall said.

“Jimmy, you said that whenever the show started, it created a new timeline,” Dahl said, and ignored Hester throwing up his hands helplessly. “Do we know when that happened?”

“You think that might help us?” Hanson asked.

“I’m just curious,” Dahl said. “We’re an alternate timeline from ‘reality,’ whatever that is. I’d like to know when that branching off happened.”

“I don’t think we can know,” Hanson said. “There’s nothing that would signal where that timeline twist happened because from our perspective there’s never been a break. We don’t have any alternate timelines to compare ourselves to. We can only see our timeline.”

“We could just start looking for when completely ridiculous shit started happening in our universe,” Hester said.

“But define ‘completely ridiculous shit,’” Duvall said. “Does space travel count? Contact with alien races? Does quantum physics count? Because I don’t understand that crap at all. As far as I’m concerned, quantum physics could have been written by a hack.”

“The first science fiction television show I found information about was something called Captain Video, and that was in 1949,” Hanson said. “The first Star Trek show was twenty years after that. So, probably this show was made sometime between the late 1960s and the end of television broadcasting in 2105.”

“That’s a lot of time to cover,” Dahl said.

“Assuming that Star Trek actually exists,” Hester said. “There are all sorts of entertainment programs today that exist only in our timeline. The timeline we exist in could go back before this Star Trek show was actually made, and it exists in this timeline basically to taunt us.”

“Okay, now, that is recursive and meta,” Duvall said.

“I think that’s probably what it is,” Hester said. “We’ve already established whoever is writing us is an asshole. This sounds like just the sort of thing an asshole writer would do.”

“I have to give you that,” Duvall said.

“This timeline sucks,” Hester said.

“Andy,” Hanson said, and motioned away from the table. A cargo cart was rolling up to the table they were sitting at. Inside of it was a note. Dahl took the note; the cargo cart rolled away.

“A note from Jenkins?” Duvall asked.

“Yeah,” Dahl said.

“What does it say?” Duvall asked.

“It says he thinks he’s come up with something that might work,” Dahl said. “He wants to talk to us about it. All of us.”